This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Why don't I talk a lot about advertising? Why do I not talk about online advertising, Facebook ads? Well, I do from time to time. But overall, I think Facebook ads, especially when you don't know what you're doing, and even people who think they know what they're doing, they don't always know. It's kind of like investing in the stock market.
Like there's a lot of really smart people who don't achieve the same return that the average index fund does. There are a lot of professional money managers who don't do as well as just putting your money in all of the stock market. So when it comes to online advertising, it can be a great way to waste your money. And just in case it's not clear, that's not what I want you to do. Nevertheless, there are some smart ways to spend money on ads, especially once you have a proven offer that converts, which is key.
If you're just getting started and you don't have that proven offer, work on that first. Now, people often think of social media ads as just going out blindly to all sorts of potential website visitors, but there's something called retargeting that allows you to be much more specific and reach people who have already expressed an interest in what you have to sell, or at least are kind of barking up the right tree, so to speak. So how does it work? Why would you want to advertise to people who already know who you are? That's what we'll talk about in this episode, the concept of retargeting, right after this message from our sponsor.
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Hey, Chris, this is Derek from Houston, and I recently found your show after a friend recommended it to me. I really appreciate the helpful content. Can you explain retargeting? This came up as a conversation the other day, and I understood the general concept, but I'm not sure if it's only something for big companies or if side hustlers can do it too. I'm starting a podcast and blog for aviation lovers, and I'd like to get more traffic to my website.
Can retargeting help with that? Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you. [Music]
Hey, Derek, what's up? Thank you so much for listening. Shout out to you and everybody else in Houston.
So let's see here. Can retargeting help side hustlers? Absolutely. It's definitely not something that is only for big companies. But first, for anybody out there who's like, "What is retargeting?" Well, retargeting is a form of online advertising targeted to customers, consumers, let's say, based on their previous internet actions.
So if you went to a particular website later, when you're going around to other websites, you see ads for that original site or the product sold on that website or perhaps something related. And I'm pretty sure most people out there have encountered this themselves many times over. You're like, "Hey, why was I shopping at target.com earlier? And now for the rest of the week, I'm seeing ads for target everywhere." That is retargeting, essentially. And anybody can access this when you go through the tools of advertising at Google and Facebook, which they're very good at taking your money, as mentioned.
There are options to do this. And basically what you do is you put a certain pixel on your website, they gave you some code, you added this on your website, and it will begin keeping up with all the visitors. And you can show ads to those visitors, that specific group of visitors, the ones who have been to your website, you can show ads to them later when they're going around to other websites. Now, you might think, "Well, why would I spend money on those people? They have already been to my site.
Shouldn't I spend my money on reaching new people?" The thing is, online selling is all about conversion. Like if you wanna try to reach everybody, that's called spray and pray. It's like, "I'm gonna spend a whole lot of money. I'm gonna kind of put things out there and just pray a lot." So it's not very effective, not very effective marketing. In a lot of markets, the people who are most likely to convert, to become your customers, are ones who have already been to your website or they have heard of you, but they need reminders.
And they need to hear about you more than once. And that's what retargeting can do. So this has proven to be very effective. If you're thinking about ramping up in some way, I would say especially, not just when you're getting started, but if you've been around for a little bit, if you've had your offer for a while, in Derek's case, the podcast and blog for aviation lovers, I don't know if this is something you do right on the front end, but after it's been up for a few months, and you have some decent traffic going to the website, for example, that's when retargeting could be interesting. So if you're thinking about spending money on ads, I'd recommend you start with this approach because the conversion will almost always be better than just trying to reach random groups of people.
So again, thanks, Derek. I hope that's helpful to somebody else out there as well. Listeners, if you have a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We're featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. Thank you so much for listening.
Be sure you're subscribed. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Sidehouse Wholeschool. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
