This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Organic search results are the slow cooker of marketing. When you start getting organic search traffic from people typing in search terms and phrases that lead to your website on Google or other search engines, that is just fantastic. It's inexpensive. I mean, it's free, right? Unless you've spent some money to get to that point, but still, usually very inexpensive or free.
It's reliable, but it's rarely explosive. Like it doesn't just take off. It takes a long time to seed that process and then to see it actually happen. So if that is the slow cooker, paid social ads are the microwave. Like with paid ads, you get fast results.
Your results are almost immediate. Usually the same day or within a couple of days, you've got some real data to look at and it also costs money, right? Because that's why it's paid. So it's easy to burn cash. Like it's easy to get those results and it's easy to spend a lot of money.
So how do you test Facebook traffic or other paid ads versus free traffic? Can you do a little test without spending a ton of money? That's what we're gonna talk about today. Our listener, Andrew, he's got a list with I think 3,000 subscribers. He's getting results from organic search traffic, which as I said, is fantastic.
But he likes the idea of accelerating this process. So let's build him a lean experiment. Short, cheap, data-driven. Gonna recommend about $200. I'll talk about the details of it in my answer.
Question from Andrew and that answer coming right up. [Music]
Hey Chris, it's Andrew, checking in from outside Chicago. I've built an email list of 3,000 using nothing but organic SEO posts. Zero ad spend so far. Part of me thinks, great, why should I ever pay for ads?
The other part of me wonders if I'm leaving money on the table by not testing Facebook or TikTok ads. What's a smart small budget experiment to prove that ads accelerate growth or are a waste of money? And which numbers should decide the verdict? [Music]
Andrew, first of all, well done. I'm building an email list of 3,000 people from direct organic traffic, zero ad spend.
That's fantastic. And now your question, should you ever pay for ads? Well, there's one way to find out, okay? And the way to find out is to do a test and see if you're gonna be cash positive or at least you have an ROI that exceeds what you spend. If you spend $1 on ads, you're gonna make at least $1.05 or something, let's say.
Okay, so the point is you're reaching break-even and going a bit beyond. I think it's good to spend $100 or $200 on this kind of test. So it's not nothing, but it's not a huge amount of money. I would narrow this down, narrow down the scope, pick one platform and one goal. So choose Facebook or Instagram first.
They have a process where you can generate leads. That's what you're looking for, is lead subscribers to your email list. You can choose that goal as you set up an ad. You can choose your cost per confirmed email subscriber, or at least you can set a budget and set a target. And then whether that actually works is gonna depend on your ad variance.
So that's the next step is create at least two ad variants, variant A, variant B, maybe one is video, maybe one is more of a static image. Don't go crazy with this at first. We just wanna have a couple of ad variations and then track the quality, track the quality, not just the signups. So you wanna look at, okay, if people are signing up, that's great, but are they then opening emails? Are they then making purchases within 30 days or so?
And I think that month long period is basically what you need to see. Not only do ads work in terms of generating leads, that's the first sign of success, but then are those leads actually becoming customers? So if you're able to do that and you are seeing that it is cash positive, as I said, then that might be a good sign to double down or spend more money. If not, then you can always test again, you can change the variables, but it could also be a sign that paid ads won't work for this particular market at least as it's set up right now. That's how you can figure out the answer to that question.
And I think you should do that before you spend a lot of money. I hear from people all the time who've spent thousands and thousands of dollars because they think, oh, I'm just doing it wrong. I just need to keep spending money. And no, if it doesn't work in a very short period of time, you need to change something pretty major or else you'll just continue to waste money. And I don't want you to do that.
So I hope that is helpful, Andrew. Listeners, I hope it's helpful to you as well. Be careful with spending money and do a lot for free. If you've got a question or comment, sidehustleschool.com. You can also access notes pages for 3,230 episodes.
Download those episodes, stream those episodes, all completely free. You can also subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes that come out every day. Thanks so much for being out there. You're awesome. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
