Is running Facebook ads to your blog worth it?

We just had a casual conversation and she had asked me this and I thought this is something I need to share with you . Just my thoughts on this . I'm not going to say it's bad , I'm going to say consider what I will share before you just run Facebook ads , she asked me . She said I'm curious , I want to run an ad to a blog post .

What's the best kind of ad to run ? And so I responded well , the question is really , what do you want to happen when that ads traffic gets to your blog post ? And she said well , I want them to read the post and then click from the blog post over to the new program and learn about the new program . It's a founding member program , you know , for $497 .

So I wrote a post about it that I will eventually use as my webinar topic , but the post is just less detailed . So this point I'm like , okay , you want to run traffic to your blog post , but why ? Let's see if we can unpack that strategy or what you really want to happen so that we can get you a better strategy .

And so then I asked her okay , so what's your plan ? Because if that traffic goes and reads that blog post , great , but what's your plan if they don't click to read more about your program ? And she said well , right now , as in , at that point she didn't really have a plan . She's just trying to get 10 founding members .

And so I'm thinking all right , if we just send paid traffic to the blog post , how do we get that traffic more involved in our business ? They're not opting in for anything , so we can't continue to nurture them toward , you know , joining a program . So let's keep exploring what we could do in this situation . And so I asked well , did you have a lead magnet ?

And I looked on her site and she does . But I asked her that anyway . And she said I do . And she said she did , but she said it wasn't really working how she wanted it to . And so she said the amount of people signing up for her wait list didn't outweigh the cost of the leads . No-transcript .

If you have people signing up for a lead magnet , you do want to know approximately what those people are worth to your business . You could calculate this off the initial purchase , ie in that lead magnet follow-up sales email sequence if there's an offer that you're selling , in that sell sequence , like what percentage of the people are buying the offer .

So , out of 100 leads , what number of them purchase the offer ? And then what is that total purchase revenue amount worth to your business you can take .

If you had 100 leads and then out of the 100 leads , let's say five people purchase an offer in that follow-up email sequence but it generated $500 in revenue , then you would just take that $500 and divide it by 100 leads and you would know that each of those leads was worth $5 to you .

Then , hopefully , when you were running Facebook ads , you paid less than $5 to acquire those leads . Okay , if you pay to acquire leads , though , for your business , because leads in your business is the fuel of your business . Quick disclaimer I do not do consulting in my DMs . Sometimes I'm just curious , so I ask some questions .

If you would like to book a strategy call with me , you can go to the show notes below . There's a link theartofonlinebusinesscom . You can go there and book a strategy call with me . It's just sometimes I'm curious in my DMs and I ask questions .

I do welcome you to DM me , though I always want to see and learn about the kinds of businesses that your business , that you're listening to the podcast or watching the YouTube channel . Back to the episode . Back to this lady . I was talking to cool lady . She said the amount of people signing up for her wait list didn't outweigh the cost of the leads .

I asked her to help me understand better , please . She said , of course , and that she has a $97 offer which she plans to sell on Evergreen in 2024 using that same lead magnet .

And she has this $497 offer for aspiring wedding photographers and she has a few lead magnets that help wedding photographers , but once they opt in , she doesn't feel like she was getting enough people from those lead magnets to sign up for her wait list for the founding members program .

She wants 10 people to become a founding member so that she can go ahead and have it validated and then start creating that program and then proceed with a webinar launch the next time around once she finishes up the program with the founding members . And so that was her goal is to lock in 10 founding members , and so I responded to her .

The issue then was converting folks from the email list to the program wait list , correct , and she was like , exactly , and she said she thought this might be a less expensive way to get eyeballs on the blog post to see if she gets any bites that way , as in using paid traffic , facebook ads traffic and sending it to the blog post .

To which I asked but how do you know how effective your blog post is at converting eyeballs into people on the wait list , joining the wait list for this $497 program or becoming a founding member , sorry , of the $497 program ? Ie , how are we tracking this , the effectiveness of the ads ?

She said , well , she'll be able to see how many views and clicks , which does kind of make sense . And I was like , well , rather than measure the number of people that view the page and then click through to the sales page , which I'm not even sure , unless you're doing some fancy tracking , you can actually track page views .

Well , you could , my data guy does it , but for her to track page views to that blog post and then of that traffic , who actually went and purchased a $497 program which , by the way , it's a big , pretty big ask to go from blog post traffic to purchasing a $497 program .

My suggestion was that maybe she send her email list to the blog post , as in send an email out to the email list with a link to the blog post , or since the email list , by the way , is warmer traffic than just paid ad traffic .

Or she could make the blog post into an email and the call to action could be to go to the sales page to become a founding member . She said she's also doing that with her list of 3000 people , which that's a good , healthy , sized email list .

And then I responded the point is that she will own the traffic , as in , she'll be able to nurture the traffic , because if she just runs ads to the blog post , there's no real way to capture that traffic and nurture them , and she's like okay .

And then , of course , I responded to her initial question , which was and if you're considering this too , running ads to a blog post , then you want to use the traffic ad objective . Why ? Because there's no real conversion . Necessarily that's going to happen on a blog post . Usually the blog post sits on your website and the header is there .

Website header navigation menu is there with a bunch of other options that they can navigate around your website , and the footer menu is there and the blog post is just there . So I like to use a traffic campaign just to send traffic to your blog post , and that way it's a lot cheaper than a conversion or a lead campaign objective .

So I said traffic ads would be the way to go . If she was to pursue her original goal of sending traffic to the blog post , I personally just would not recommend it . But actually traffic campaigns are super cheap , so maybe it would cost her two to four dollars a day to test her theory .

So my takeaway what I would recommend is that running ads is usually a good strategy for your business , but first you just want to think through what you actually want those ads to accomplish . In her case , if she just turned on the ads and points them to her blog post , she might not ever get a chance to follow up with those blog post visitors again .

And I was also thinking that some of the paid traffic sent to her blog post might not even click through to the founding member program page because they got distracted by her website's header or footer . This happens more than we'd like when we have blog posts and we try to send traffic there and the blog posts are just on our website .

So , yeah , the blog article traffic would be cheap , but if no one signed up to be a founding member then how would she ever begin to troubleshoot what went wrong and why ?

So that's why I encourage her try something like making the blog article into an email , because one the email would have just one call to action in the email , as in a link to click through to the program founding member sales page .

Since there's only one call to action in that email , we can more clearly troubleshoot what's going on in that email . You know percentage of people opening it ie how on point is a subject line and then percentage of people clicking through to go to the sales page .

You know it could be a specific sales page that's unique to like email , so then we could track what the sales page is converting at . It gives us clearer , more easy to track variables in a funnel , a clearly defined funnel .

And also then the people reading that email are warmer than cold traffic and thus they are more likely to click Right , and so removing cold ads traffic and the blog article from the equation means that there is fewer variables to troubleshoot . So these are my thoughts .

I hope that this kind of helps you look at your Facebook ads or your marketing strategy a little more holistically . Thanks for leaving a review . If you really enjoyed this episode on Apple podcast , there's a link in the show notes that will send you right over to where you can leave a genuine review . And until the next episode , be blessed Bye .