424 – My mistakes will save you a ton of money: Tom talks Paid Traffic Tips

Episode 424 – Paid Traffic Tips
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode four hundred twenty four of Screw the Commute podcast. We're going to talk about paid traffic tips today. Now, this is by no means a deep diving course on paid ads. Several times I've spent over a thousand bucks for 30 hour courses. On all the details of just one of the ad platforms you can advertise on. This episode is going to give you the big picture, things to keep in mind if you advertise anywhere. And I'm also going to give you what I feel are the three best bargains when it comes to advertising online with sometimes as little as one cent clicks for good quality targeted traffic. I hope you didn't miss Episode 423. That was Dan Pilla. He's a tax litigation specialist. He actually testified to Congress several times and was a consultant to the National Commission on Restructuring the IRS. He was 18 years old and he sued the IRS and won. And I never thought this is going to be an interesting interview. I thought, oh, well, we need to know about it. But it was more, this guy was a blast. It's a must listen to you episode 423. Now, did you know you could get shoutouts on this podcast? Well, listen to other podcast episodes of this podcast to learn how, but let's hear what Andrew Poletto from TopFitnessStrategies.com had to say about the show.

[00:02:00] Hi, folks, Andrew here TomFitnessStrategies.com, and one of the things that I wanted to put a shout out here for Tom and his podcast, The Screw the commute podcast is not so much one particular podcast that I've heard because with four hundred and some podcasts at the time of this recording that Tom has, it's hard to pinpoint just one particular skill or technique because I like to listen to them and utilize quite a bit. But one of the things that that gets me hooked is the way Tom interacts with his guests when he does the interview podcast for me just recently started podcast as well. That is the type of thing I'm trying to emulate from Tom is just the interactions with the guest. In other words, Tom doesn't have a set of questions that he says, OK, I have to ask question one, two, three and four. In this order, he talks to them, talk to his guests like they were next to him sitting at a at a restaurant or a coffee shop, just having a casual cup of coffee, talking about business. And that's how the the the good ones, which are, in my opinion, very few actually do this type of interview. And that's one of the the the main things the main takeaways I'm getting from from this and of course, the the Internet marketing portions of things. The simplicity of the way Tom makes is teachings. And that's that's another great aspect of all the podcasts. So Tom, I appreciate it. Keep it up. And thanks a lot for all your hard work and everything you do and we will talk to you soon. Thanks.

[00:03:44] Thanks for those kind words, Andrew. Now make sure, folks, you visit topfitnessstrategies.com for great fit over 40 stuff and of course, it'll be in the show notes. Now, grab a copy of our automation ebook. It's saved me seven and a half million keystrokes. That's not made up numbers. We actually estimated one time. And that was just one of the tips in the book. You can grab it for free. We charge 27 bucks on the website for it, but you get it for free for listening to the show by going to screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're over there, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. You can take us with you on the road now. I would love for you to check out my school. It's the only license dedicated Internet marketing school in the country, probably the world. Digital marketing too is a, you know, is the fad name for it. But it's been Internet marketing for since I started. Oh, geez, 1994. That's 27 years ago. So I formalized the training in the form of a school. It took me three years to get the license. The school was certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to live in Virginia because it's good quality distance learning, unlike what these colleges are trying to throw at you, you know, after the pandemic hit and tell you, oh, yeah, it's distance learning now so we can rip you off this at a distance rather than locally.

[00:05:20] So check it out. And you know, this skill that I teach in the school, like I teach in my mentor program are in high demand everywhere. Every business on Earth needs these hard core skills. And so we've got people making money before they even graduate from the school. So that's what I went to check out at IMTCVA.org. And a little later I'll tell you how you can get a full scholarship that you can either use yourself or gift to somebody if you're in my mentor program.

[00:05:50] Let's get to the main event. Paid traffic. Now if there's one thing for sure that you must do, especially if you are new or relatively inexperienced in paid traffic is you must obsess. On pay per click stuff, when I say obsess, I mean obsess. How do I know? Well, in the early days, I made a horrendous mistake. I put an ad in on Friday. I didn't put in safeguards. I'm not even sure that they existed on the ad platforms in the early days. Anyway, I got too busy over the weekend to check the ads. By Monday, I owed Google eight thousand dollars and I had to pay it. Oh my God. It hurts me to even mention that again. But know if it saves you, then I'm doing my job.

[00:06:48] So when I say obsess, I mean obsess. Check them every 15 to 30 minutes, no matter how busy you are. And if you're too busy to check them, don't run them until you have the opportunity to obsess over them. Are you getting the point that I mentioned obsessing over that? I don't want to get a phone call bitching at me because an ad ran away with you. All right, safeguards. Let me talk about that. Here's what you do now. And as I said, I'm not sure safeguards existed when I first started. You can usually set a budget per day so that if you can't check on a particular day. Wait a minute, wait a minute, didn't I just tell you to obsess over him every 15 to 30 minutes? All right. Well, if you have to go a day without checking, you won't eat up more than your daily budget. And this can be very small in some cases, a dollar a day. I think the most I start with is a five dollars a day. Now, if you're trying to place ads in the regular Google search, your clicks could cost you more than five dollars each. And you won't get the ad approved because your budget is too low. But I'm talking about other bargain places that I'm going to tell you about later to advertise when I say about five dollars a day. Now, many places have other safeguards. You can put in a budget for your total campaign.

[00:08:17] And when that budget is used up, the campaign stops automatically. Another safeguard is to put an end date on the campaign. So let's say you have a budget of five dollars a day and you tell the ad platform, no matter what end, the campaign seven days from now or three days from now or whatever you want. That way, the campaign can't run away with you showing ads that maybe aren't working. Now, since I've just said the word campaign several times, I should tell you about the structure of most places where you can place ads, the campaign is the highest level. Then under that are sets, then under that are the actual ads you've created, so the campaign would be your objective. Let's say maybe you have a campaign and you want to drive traffic to a particular Web page. That's your campaign. Well, under the campaign, you can have as many ad sets as you want. Now, this is important, so you aren't just running general ads to everyone on Earth and you won't know which ads are working and which ones aren't in the ads set, you tell who you're trying to target, what age they are, male or female. Are they on iPhone or Android and many things like that. You're targeting people. Well, why would you do this? Well, let's say you have a male oriented product best suited for ages 25 to 34. Let's say you wouldn't want to waste your ad money advertising this product to 18 year olds or 65 year olds.

[00:10:02] And you wouldn't want to waste ad money advertising to females. So that would be one ad said. Then you start thinking, hmm, your product might be a good fit, be a good gift item for women to buy for their men. In that case, you make an ad set targeting women in the same age range. Each asset would have different ads, it would be stupid to advertise your gift idea to man, so the ad targeting the men would use the product. It would just just tell them the benefits of the product and say nothing about gifts. The people you're targeting would be using the product themselves. That would be the men in that ad said. Now, in the you make a different ad set of ads. For women, and that's where you would talk about how great a gift your product would be for their man. After these ads run for a while, you can track them to see which ones are working and which ones aren't. Now, this is another major point when paying for ads, you don't just run one ad to each ad set or group that you're targeting, you might make 10 ads targeting the women and 10 ads targeting the man and run them at the same time. This is this is called concurrently. Then you go back to what I said, obsessing and watching the numbers in your ad manager and other tracking programs like we have in Kick Cart and you have in Google Analytics to see which ads are getting you the traffic you want.

[00:11:48] You turn off the ads. That aren't working and leave the ads running that are working. Which brings up the next point that's critical to your success with pay, that this seems like a no brainer, I don't turn off the best ads. Well, but it's not as simple as it might sound. This is where you got to be like smarter than the average bear. See, virtually all the ad platforms rewards you for making ads that get clicks when you create an ad that gets lots of clicks, you generally get cheaper clicks. In other words, you are being rewarded for getting lots of clicks on your ads. Oh, this is great. And we love cheaper prices. But but hold on a second. Maybe, just maybe the ad bringing in the most clicks and saving you some of your advertising budget is not bringing in actual customers. Maybe the ad is just sucking in people that click through but never spend any money. That's why you have to be careful not to keep that ad just because the clicks are cheaper and turn off the ads that are more expensive, but actually bringing in customers see an ad that brings in maybe a quarter of the people. Might be bringing in people that are buying 10 times what the people from the other ad or buy.

[00:13:19] This is really important. Don't turn off the best ads. All right, I want to get back to safeguards for a second, I want to get back to that topic again to tell you about another massive mistake I made a long time ago. So you don't have to blow a lot of money for the second time like I did. All right, so here's the deal, so I paused an ad that wasn't working. And then I breathed a sigh of relief and patted myself on the back, telling myself, oh, yeah, I learned my lesson from that eight thousand dollar fiasco from before. All right. Then I got my Amex bill. And there was another huge charge from Google. Well, I immediately called up to complain and I told the Adrup that I had clearly paused this ad a couple of weeks ago. So so he went to check and he came back and this is what he said. Now, you didn't you just paused one and set the rest of the campaign was running. Oh, my God, you're kidding me. See, there's pause buttons all over the place, I thought I paused the entire campaign, but I only paused one ad set in the campaign. So you can just pause one ad or any number of things. You can pause, but if you want to pause everything underneath, you must pause the campaign. When you do that, everything in that campaign is paused and make sure you pause every campaign that you want to pause, because pausing one campaign has nothing to do with any other campaigns you're running.

[00:15:06] In other words, you must know what you're pausing. And I'll say right here. You're welcome. Because my screw up just saved you a lot of money. All right. Because everybody's going to do it if they don't know what they're doing. All right, next thing is, don't click the boost or promote buttons, you see these all over the place. These are designed to take your money. Nobody who knows better clicks these buttons. If you do, you may as well order one of those big cheerleader megaphones and scream, I'm a newbie. I don't know what I'm doing. Please take my money. Those boost don't promote buttons, don't have hardly any of the important things you'll want to control when you place an ad, it's just a cash cow from the billions of suckers on these platforms. Virtually nobody profits from using these, but. All right, here's another thing, don't jack your bid up. So another thing that newbies do that screams that you don't know what you're doing and it allows the ad platforms to simply steal your money and they don't mind doing this because they know they have tons of other people that they can do it to. So if you screw up and give them free money, they really don't care. But let's say you start with a budget of five dollars a day and you identify some ads that are working.

[00:16:38] So you jack the budget up to 20 dollars a day thinking, oh, I'm going to clean up. Well, guess what? The ads probably start failing. You just screamed to the ad platform that you don't know what you're doing. So they will go into grabbing your money mode as fast as they can because they know you're going to fail anyway. So they may as well grab as much money from you before you disappear. And of course, the ad platforms won't admit to this, but it's pretty much the way it works. I don't know of any ad professionals that would increase the bid more than, let's say, 20 percent every couple of days for five dollars start. That would be go to six dollars after a couple of days. Say this shows the ad platform, you know what you're doing and they want to keep you around for a long time. You're acting like a professional and you might have access to millions of dollars a day to spend on ads from whomever you're working for. So they treat you more fairly and help you get success. All right, here's another thing, no automatic placements. This is where you allow the ad platform to place your ads where they think will get the most success. At least that's what they tell you. Again, most professionals choose where their ads run carefully, I can't prove it, but using automatic placements could have the ad platform showing your ads in places where they couldn't sell the ad inventory because the professionals they deal with know a certain placement never pays off.

[00:18:22] I mean, sure, every once in a while you could let them do it on a small basis, maybe you could identify some new sources of customers, but as a general rule, learn how to place your ads and do it manually. OK, before I tell you what to think about are the three best bargains in online advertising. Let me tell you about my mentor program and how it could help you do this. And, of course, the hundreds of other things you need to know to be successful online. So my greatInternetmarketingtraining.com program is the longest running, most successful, most unique Internet and digital marketing mentor program ever. I triple dog dare people to put their program up against mine and nobody will do it because this is so I mean, I'm a fanatic. I work evenings, weekends, I get to quit years ago, but I just love this. I love to see the success of the small business people I work with and I'm crazy about it. So I'll do things that nobody will do. I talk to people on evenings, weekends, holidays. I threw a I accidentally threw a telecast on Thanksgiving. One time I didn't notice it was Thanksgiving and 60 people showed up for I made thirty eight hundred dollars on Thanksgiving. That helps your stuffing go down a lot easier.

[00:19:42] So anyway, it's one on one. We don't lump in with other people. You have a unique immersion visit to the retreat center in Virginia Beach, which, of course, when the pandemic is over, we have a TV studio here where we shoot videos for you, marketing videos we edit and put the graphics on, do the whole thing for you. Let me some places charge seven hundred bucks for one of those and nobody gets out of here with less than ten and some one one couple ended up with fifty three of them. So very powerful. And then I kind of turned to the marketing world on its head in that people were charging 50 or 100 grand up front to teach you this stuff. So I thought, oh, that's you know, I know a lot of these people, they're rip offs and they they don't even know what they're doing. They're just grabbing money from you. So I said, I'm going to charge a percent, a small percentage of that as an entry fee and then tie my success to your success. So for me to get my 50 grand, you have to net 200 grand. Well, people love this. And 7500 plus students later in 23 years. That program still going strong. So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And if you're in that program, you get a scholarship to my school, which you can either gift to somebody or use yourself for extra training. So check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:21:03] Well, let's get back to the best bargains, I think, and these are in no particular order, but one of my favorites is YouTube, YouTube in stream ads. These are the ads where you can click the skip button. What most people don't know is that if someone clicks the skip button before 30 seconds, you don't pay for the ad. Actually, if they watch to the end of the ad, you do have to pay. So there's no reason for you to make an ad less than 30 seconds, put it longer than 30 seconds. And if they skip before 30 seconds, you don't pay. Now, sometimes I tell them to click the skip button in the ad, well, why do I do this? Well, this brings up another important point. When doing paid ads, do everything you can to get the person not to click. If you can't, then the person clicking is probably a good prospect. At least they're very interested in what you have to offer. They give you an example. Our school has a deal with the Department of Defense for a military spouse, scholarships, so many military spouses. Do you know, I call it crappy network marketing. And and so I might do an ad that says, hey, if you're a military spouse and you're happy making your friends mad at Starbucks, when you try to force your multilevel marketing thing down their throat, kick that skip button and get back to the video you really wanted to watch because you probably don't want to hear what I have to say or something like that.

[00:22:39] Or I might say, but if you want a portable skill that you can take with you anywhere you deploy to, then you might want to listen to me. So if they're happy with their multi-level marketing thing and there's great Skip, don't I don't want to pay for you to listen to something you don't care about or you don't want to say. So that's one of the tips, is try to disqualify people, get them to get them to click the skip button or try to to not get them to click your other paper. Quick thing. All right, another benefit that YouTube in stream ads have is you get a banner ad near the top of the screen that stays there for a while, even if they click the skip on the video. This gives you another chance to get them interested in your offer. So explore YouTube and stream ads. And of course, we'll teach you every little nuance of it if you're in my program. Next is Amazon sponsored ads. These are super cheap and one of the easiest ad platforms. So if you have a product on Amazon and most people listening to this, you know, in my Master Mind eBook masterminds and then other people are listeners would most likely have a Kindle ebook. You can be right at the top in front of all the best sellers and everybody with very, very cheap sponsored ads.

[00:24:00] So that's Amazon sponsored ads. And last but not least is a very specific ad, Instagram video stories pointing towards your profile. Now, this is yet another important concept you should know about all the ad platforms that you stay, you know, like you to stay on their platform. So if you run an ad that keeps people on their platform, you're usually rewarded with cheaper ads. So with Instagram video story ads driving people to your profile on Instagram, I've seen as little as one cent video views and I've heard of someone getting one third of a cent video. All right. So so this is very, very powerful, cheap way to build your Instagram up. And then you can link out of your profile, which if you check Antion and Andy Associates Instagram profile, you'll see that the link in my profile leads to a whole bunch of stuff. So check check that out over on Instagram.

[00:25:09] OK, so that's it. Paid ads, some of the best bargains in some of the things that'll keep you out of trouble if you do this. But I highly suggest you get a deeper study on any of this to make it successful for you. And certainly I'd be glad to give it to you as part of my mentor program Check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com, and I'll catch you on the next episode. See ya later.

Join my distance learning school: https://www.IMTCVA.org
Or join the mentor program PLUS get a FREE Scholarship to the School: https://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com