Episode 122: Running Your First Ad? Don't Make These Mistakes! With Ads Expert Kwadwo Sampany
In today's episode of Small Business PR, I'm venturing into a territory I've been famously skeptical about: Facebook ads. I've invited my good friend and my personal guide in the Facebook ads universe, Kwadwo, the brilliant mind behind The Art of Online Business, to shed light on this complex topic. Despite my usual reservations about ads and agencies, this conversation opens up a new perspective on using ads as a strategic tool for growth.
Key Insights:
Timing for Ads: I've always wondered about the perfect moment to introduce ads into our marketing mix. Kwadwo shares insights on recognizing when your business is truly ready to amplify its reach through advertising.
Busting Ads Myths: There's a lot of intimidation surrounding the costs and complexity of running ads. Kwadwo demystifies these aspects, making the ad world more accessible for us all.
Avoiding Beginner Mistakes: Jumping into Facebook ads can be daunting. We discuss common errors to avoid and how to set yourself up for success from the get-go.
Crafting Effective Ads: The secret sauce of any successful ad? Its components. We dive into what makes an ad resonate, focusing on the critical role of messaging and creative.
Smart Targeting and Budgeting: Figuring out whom to target and how much to spend can make or break your ad campaign. Kwadwo offers his expertise on navigating these decisions for maximum impact.
The Importance of Personal Connection: In a world tilting towards automation, we discuss why keeping a personal touch in your digital marketing efforts is more crucial than ever.
Choosing the Right Ads Manager: With a sea of options out there, we talk about red flags to watch for and tips on selecting an ads manager who genuinely aligns with your business values.
Embracing AI with a Human Touch: AI is revolutionizing how we approach ads, but Kwadwo reminds us why the human element in crafting our messages remains indispensable.
This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge for anyone curious about or currently navigating the world of Facebook ads. Kwadwo's wisdom has certainly made me reconsider my stance on ads, emphasizing strategic use over blanket skepticism. Whether you're weighing your first ad spend or refining your existing strategy, this discussion is packed with actionable advice to boost your online presence and sales.
As we explore the nuances of digital advertising together, I'm reminded that it's all about learning, experimenting, and adapting. Stepping into the realm of Facebook ads doesn't have to be daunting—with the right approach and mindset, it can be a powerful tool for growth.
For more empowering insights and to join our community of small business champions, follow me on social media @GloriaChouPR. Let's continue to navigate the exciting world of PR and marketing together.
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Transcript
[00:00:00] What's up, small business heroes. Welcome back to another episode of small business PR, where we make PR and marketing accessible to the everyday business owner. Today, we have a very special guest, my personal friend and my previous Facebook ads coach Quajo. He is the host of the art of online business, and he's an incredible kind human being, just a wonderful soul.
We're going to get into it. And I have to give you a disclaimer. If you know anything about me, then you know that I love to hate on ads. I love to hate on agencies. And so you might be wondering, Gloria, why are you doing an episode about ads? Well, I am making an exception because I believe that there is a time and space for ads, and this episode will go into all of the mistakes that you should not make when you're just beginning ads.
So welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. I feel like, I feel like I might be being thrown under a bus, but ultimately if your business, you, the listener, like just, I want to speak to you from the heart, but if your business is at the point when you need to run ads. Then I want to make sure this episode really does help you avoid some common mistakes that I see with my Facebook ads clients.
Yeah. And as a disclaimer, I'm not against that. I also [00:01:00] run ads. I just don't think they're feasible. Maybe in the very beginning, I'm ignorant to the fact that ads do help. They help you reach an audience. There's a bucket for ads and there's a space for PR and they all can compliment each other. So I guess my question for you, the first one is when do you know, if you're ready to start doing ads for your business?
Well, I simply, I would say, do you have something that sells if you're able to sell a product and you've already succeeded at selling it, let's call it organically or a mix of just organic plus your email list and it's selling profitably, then that's where for sure ads should be able to come in and increase that profit or keep the same amount of percentage of profit, but just give you a much broader reach and thus increase the number of sales.
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of complexity to what we think as ads. There's a lot of jargon and acronyms. And I think for the everyday business owner, it sounds like really intimidating or very expensive. So maybe we can get into the conversation about what are the mistakes, but maybe we can first debunk some myths around running [00:02:00] ads or working with agencies or the cost of ads.
Can you just debunk some of those right off the bat for us? Well, sure. How about I give you a little quick behind the scene of some reasonable agency fees. So the thing about working with an ad agency is it's great if your business has already achieved, like I said, scale, so to speak, and you're selling a lot of your product.
But before we go there, I want to say a mistake that I've seen is because I have a course on Facebook ads, right? And I have a survey that goes out when somebody signs up for the course, you know, asking them what they're excited about, what they're planning on doing. And I keep seeing this one thing, which is I have a launch coming up or maybe a new product that you're developing and you want to test the product with ads as in run the ads to try to get your first 10 founding members for your launch or run the ads to try to get your first sales for the product.
And that's what you would want to avoid is use your organic following, use your email list. To test out a product, but don't use [00:03:00] ads at that stage. And here's why. Usually when you're starting out a new course or you're launching a new product, your messaging isn't dialed. And where I come from, the messaging as in the words in your ads actually do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to sales.
In addition to your opt in page, your landing page, where somebody would give you their email and address in exchange for some free value or your sales page, where they would exchange money for your offer. The messaging is so important. And at an early stage, when that messaging isn't honed, spending money on ads would just be a complete waste of time, except for one scenario, which we will come back to later in this episode.
Yeah, it's definitely, you've given us a lot to think about launches. I don't care what industry you're in. I think a lot of people, when they think of launches, they think of digital product or a course. And no, you can have a new product launch. You can have a beauty product. You can have a new. gift guide bundle.
You can have a holiday series. So launches for every season and every reason. And I think it's a great compliment if you are [00:04:00] trying to especially get your product in front of more customers. I do it with my gift guide approach, right? To get a feature in a gift guide. But if you can also have a successful ad running in conjunction, then that's kind of like double the power.
Is there anything else that people should know when they're thinking about running ads, but they have all these stories made up in their head about how it wouldn't work for them or it shouldn't? Just more ad spend does not equal more sales. So the basic components of an ad do matter. And if you don't have those in place, you can't take something that's broken and just put more money behind it.
It's kind of like if your car has an engine problem, we're not just going to fix that engine problem by going and filling up with. Premium gas instead of unleaded or just more gas in general, the car still won't run. And that's how you need to view your ads. I think if you start there, make sure your messaging is actually dialed and then put that messaging behind a product that's already selling, not in an attempt to run ads to a product that's just beginning or a course that has yet to be proven.
You'll go far. You'll go really far. Do you want to talk and touch about one tactical thing in an [00:05:00] ad that I've seen many people do wrong? Yeah, would love that. Okay. It goes hand in hand with messaging. Short ad copy is generally something that I avoid just because no matter what your skill level is with the written word, the more words in general, the better.
And so I want to give you something concrete. If you write an ad that say fewer than 50 words, that's really short. If you write an ad that's between 150 words to 175 words, that's a good length. So if you're just starting out with ads, Aim for like 150 to 175 words combined with your good messaging, and that would be a good way to start out.
Yeah, and for those of you who let's just do a one on one vocabulary. So ads have copy and creative. So the creative is really the visual piece, right? It could be graphic could be video. It could be a carousel images. And the copy is really the words on it. Is there anything else people need to know in terms of the different components of an ad?
I think you hit it. So one other thing I will add is the headline. So when you look at an ad, you'll [00:06:00] see the image or the video, and then you'll see two to three lines of text above that. That's not the headline. That's just the top of your ad copy. So if you go down below an ad, usually to the left of the blue button that says learn more or sign up to the left of that would be text that is bold.
And it's usually two lines max and usually shorter than say 15 words, and that is the headline. And so an ad is like kind of like a good symphony. Right. There's components. There's the top three lines of text that show up above the picture or the video. There's the picture of the video. Then there's that button that says sign up or learn more.
And then there's the headline that's right there. And what I like to say is you don't want conflicting components as in, you don't want repetitive components. Like if you say free in the image, then why waste space on your headline saying free also why put free in the text that shows above the image, but yeah, focus on those areas of the ad.[00:07:00]
Yeah, I love that. Now you got my mind spinning. So can you give us an example of a good ad that's probably going to give you better ROI and an ad that's probably not going to land well with audiences? Well, since I already talked about messaging, think of the ad creative as a way to stop a scroll, but then your ad copy is what's going to get somebody off of Facebook and onto your email list or to your website.
So a bad ad is one that focuses on all the features. Of something you're selling. So if we take the example of Bath and Body products, a bad ad would be chock full of features. Meaning this cream is exfoliating and it has this scent and it will keep your skin moist. For three days, like these things are important.
They're features, but they should not be the only part of your ad. What would be better is talking about in course speak. We talked about the outcome or the transformation that a course delivers. I guess [00:08:00] in product speak, like why is somebody buying that lotion that cream? Are they single? Are they married?
If they're single, are they planning on going out? Like, do they want to smell good or is it just because I don't know, they go into work in like a dry AC climate, their skin is cracking. But like, what is, what are they really trying to get from acquiring that product? And you want to speak to that in your ad copy.
That's more important than the features. Maybe you have a little bit of the features, but really it's, why do they want the thing and what better lifestyle is going to happen? I talk a lot about tension, like between where we're at in the here and now, and where we want to be after we buy the thing that we're seeing in the ad.
And you kind of have to paint that tension. Here's where you are. Here's where you could be. Here's what life could be like. Here's also what could happen if you don't get the thing. And that's kind of the anatomy or that's the pathway towards a better ad. Yeah, I do love that. It's about the transformation, not the features, because it's always about the why, right?
Why are people buying it? It doesn't matter if it's for a sales page, for a course, for a SaaS software, for [00:09:00] a lawnmower or a baby product. And so that's one thing we always want to nail down is what is your message? You can have the best creative in the world. You have the coolest effects. And by the way, those videos that are super polished, I think don't even work as well as like a regular photo, by the way.
You are right, you are right. Yep, it's about your message. And I think a lot of times we make up stories in our head of, Oh, my ad has to be perfect. And I have to get this camera and this microphone and I have to get, you know, a whole lighting thing. And are you seeing that that's true? Or is it just kind of like open your phone and just snap a photo and put it on Facebook?
So interestingly enough, I just finished a launch with a client and her best performing ad Creative was a simple video of her. We didn't edit captions onto the actually we did put captions onto the video because you always test when you're running ads But the video that had captions in the video that had a graphic overlay when I say graphic overlay I mean we took a rectangle shape and put that at the bottom and then we put some text over it, you know So like we could communicate with written word a little bit over her video Those didn't perform as well as just [00:10:00] her talking.
And when I look at ads for the majority of my clients and just, here's a tip. If you want to know what ads are working, then when you're scrolling Instagram and you see an ad that you like, screenshot that ad, expand the text and screenshot that text, because if you liked an ad and it kind of stopped your scroll, then later on, after you have.
Five of those in a folder on your computer or just in an album on your phone, you can look at those commonalities and begin to craft your ad model, your ad after those. So what I'm seeing though is a lot of content is just being less polished. This has always been the case, but we're swinging back in that direction again, where ads that work for Instagram and Facebook are not the super highly produced ads.
They're less polished. They're more raw. And that's because, you know, well, I believe personally coming into the pandemic and then exiting that pandemic, so many people have gone into the online space. So many people have come out with courses and started selling things [00:11:00] online that the average Instagram surfer or Facebook scroller, if you will, it's just used to seeing ads and they kind of just want to have a connection.
Just like we were talking about Gloria before we hit record, like I'm going to start maybe a segment on my podcast that's just connecting with other online business owners. And I don't think I'm the only one who craves that human connection again. So yeah, keep the ads simple. Don't overproduce them. And that should also make you feel a lot more at ease, right?
Because you don't have to spend 10 hours editing a 60 second video. My gosh. Yeah, same thing with my podcast too. Even the ones on Instagram, the ones that have the transitions and the texts and the sound effects, those don't ever do well. But if it's kind of like a day in the lifestyle, come along with me, those actually do well.
So we're actually changing our entire podcast strategy based on that. People don't want overly edited things. They don't want text overlays. And so that's great. It's like more for us, like more time for us to do other things. The barrier to entry is getting less and less and less. So every small business owner can start to run their first ad without feeling like there's all this barrier with costs and resources.
What is something else that they should [00:12:00] know if they're thinking about running their ad? What about like timing or audiences? I mean, there's just so many parts of an ad, but what do small businesses get wrong when they first run their first ad targeting would matter most. So without getting super technical, when you run your first ad, like who are you going to show it to?
If you're a brick and mortar business, then probably pick a radius around your address. And target people who are interested in the thing that you understand. You know, if you're downtown, then show your ad to people within 2 3 miles. Well, you should know, if you have a brick and mortar store, where are your customers coming from?
If they're driving all from like 3 hours away, then show ads 3 hours away. But if they all generally live in your city and don't commute more than 45 minutes, have that be the radius, so to speak, that you first choose to show your ads. And then show it to the interest. That I guess align with people's interests who buy your stuff.
If you have a product though, that you're selling, and it's not tied to a physical location, you can look at interest too, but the [00:13:00] easiest way is if you already have a product that's selling, then you probably already have a customer list. Or at the very minimum, you have an email list. Instagram following.
Why did I say customer list? Email list, Instagram following, because those three in that order are good audiences that you can tell Facebook to build a lookalike from and then target those people. All the lookalike word means is that if you have an email list of around 600, that's people who have exchanged their name and email for something.
Basically, they've trusted you to market to them, right? Would you like to market to more of those people? Because Facebook is going to take that list if you give it to them and then show you another million people. You could show an ad to that share similar attributes to that custom audience. So that's the whole concept of building a lookalike and you can build a lookalike audience based off of your email list or something more valuable, your customer email list, because people have already bought from you are more valuable to your business and people who are just currently receiving your marketing emails.
Keep in mind that [00:14:00] customer list would want to be, you would want to have that be around 600 people at least before you could make a lookalike of it and get some decent results. But test, test, test. Don't just take my word for it. Test, please. And then also your Instagram followers, especially if you are selling a product via your Instagram account, then you probably have followers that are at least interested in the product, in which case just tell Facebook to show your ads to more people who are like your followers start there.
Yeah, I think that's another I mean, you hit on so many things, but there's so many ways that we can target because we are now omnipresent on all of these platforms and they're owned by these one or two companies. So let's just have the data circulate so that we can have more effective targeting. You also touched upon something I think I cannot drill in enough is email list, email list, email list.
You said we needed at least 600 people on our email list to even begin to have that retargeting. And so that is another one of a thousand reasons why we should all focus on building our list. I don't care if you're a dog trainer. Or if you make stationary products, you all need first party data, especially with the privacy policies [00:15:00] of today.
If you don't have that first party data, you're just going to have less and less options to choose from. So have this episode right here and now be your reminder to build your email. I mean, we could go on just another. entire episode on just that, but I want to keep this focus on ads. So you've given us so much to think about.
We already talked about copy and creative. You talked about longer versus shorter ads and longer copy is usually better. You talked about not having something polished and looking like an ad and you want it to look more natural, kind of like an IG story. Those tend to do well. Uh, you also talked about retargeting and how that could be really effective, but you need to have an audience size.
What are some of the other things that people should know when they're running their ads? Don't be married to an ad that just is not working. As in, when you start running ads, choose your budget, run the ad. If it's not working for you, it's not the end of the world. We test a lot of different images and ad copy for our clients.
Just take on the mindset of a tester. It's nothing personal if the ad bombs. That just means you have another iteration that you're going to try. And that's [00:16:00] okay. Go ahead and just move quickly. Don't just hope and pray. Um, though I do believe in hope and prayer. Don't hope and pray on your ads that they will work magically in a week from now if they're not working right now.
Turn that ad off and put another one on and see if that works. And you know, you might have to test five, six, but it's totally worth it. Once you get to the ad that hits and brings in names and leads and revenue for your business. In fact, not only is it worth it, but here's the mindset shift. All the ads that failed before that were actually paying you to discover the ad that paid you.
Look at it that way. Ooh, I love, I love a mindset reframe. You know that. So you talked about testing ads. My next natural question that comes to mind is how much money am I going to spend as a bootstrapping small business for me to get some ROI? I think there's a lot of talk about how you need to have thousands of dollars.
How can I best budget the ads, especially if I'm. You said you need a test often. So can you just give me kind of a breakdown of how much per day or per month or per week? [00:17:00] Oh, everybody asks this question. First, nothing is guaranteed in Facebook ads world. So don't go spending ad money that you can't afford to lose.
And that sounds harsh. But it's very true. Please don't go and say, okay, I'm just going to put this ad spend on a credit card, but I can't afford to pay like that credit card. So I'm going to hope that this all works. Like that's not the place where you should come from for ads. So now that's out of the way, I can say for my clients, we start with at least 30 a day.
If that's really high for you to test, then one rethink, if it's the right time for you to start ads. And then two, I'm going to give you a very cheap ad strategy. Well, cheap, low cost as strategy that is effective that you can use, especially if you have like a product based business. And this ad is just called a billboard ad, if you will.
And it works really simply. All you're doing is taking either ad creative that you've made, or you can [00:18:00] go from inside of Facebook ads manager and just look at your Instagram reels. Which of them are performing the best organically? You pick one and then put, let's say, a dollar, two dollars a day behind it.
And who do you show it to? You show it to, remember we talked about lookalikes earlier on, so you show it to a lookalike of one of your custom audiences. If you have a blog and you get significant website traffic, build a lookalike off of your website traffic. If you already have, let's say, 800, 2000 people on Instagram, you know, a medium sized account, build a lookalike of that.
Show the ad to that audience. Then what happened is more people will start to follow your account and more people will engage with that ad. So what do you do from there? You get tactical when you have new followers that follow your account, you DM them and you say, hi, you know, you don't spam them with a link, please don't send a link, but you say, hi, you look in their bio and type their name, thank them for following you.
And then once they actually respond to you, just [00:19:00] ask them either like a more direct. question, like if you sell lotion, it's like, Hey, are you here? Like just kind of learn about skincare or are you actually looking to get something, you know, start the conversation like that, but that would be a very low cost way to run ads.
And it also is very effective because you quickly will find out what kind of messaging works because you're DMing people and yeah, you'll be off to the races, so to speak. Now when you think about DMs, there's so much technology now. There's the chatbots, there's many chat. What is your advice on that?
Just kind of automating it. Automation is good. Like if you're wondering whether or not you can afford ads though, and let's say 10 a day is a significant, you know, ad decision for you. I almost would say before you start automating with mini chat or one of the other tools out there, DM yourself. Actually get in the DMs yourself.
Why? Because people can tell, we're very used to, you know, comment lotion on this post if you want this exfoliating cream, like we're used to that, right? But when you get into the DMs [00:20:00] yourself and you start to build that human to human connection, it's basically you're exploring messaging. You're seeing like where people are truly at, whereas like the automation is just, they're going to exchange, they're going to comment something on a post.
They're going to give their name and email, and then they might not actually DM you after that. So I feel like, especially at the more beginning stages, you're missing out on a really big opportunity by not hopping into the DMs yourself and forming that connection, but also paying attention to what is working.
And when I say that, what I mean is, is, uh, way back in the day, I used to teach Chinese. I used to live in China and I taught Chinese to people who lived in China, expats, if you will. And what I was doing. When I was deeming them about my program, my followers, I was deeming them about my program to find people who wanted to join my program.
What I did was in the DM threads or conversations that converted into sales of my program, I dumped in all the words that we type. So like what I said in one cell [00:21:00] and then what they were. Spreadsheet cell. And so once I had 10 or 12 columns of these conversations, you know, represented that converted into cells, then I started highlighting what was common in those conversations.
What I was doing was honing my messaging at the time. I was just trying to figure out. What I could say that would convert to sales in the DM. But actually I was honing my messaging and this is something that you're just not going to do if you jump straight into automation. And that was a goldmine for me.
What I mean is once I figured out what I was saying consistently that converted to sales, I milked it for everything it was worth and my sales increase as a result. So that was the long answer to say, please get into your DMs yourself. It's time consuming, but it's worth it for the messaging nuggets that you're going to find, and um, the human connections that you make.
By the way, I love how when you dropped all those nuggets of wisdom, you just kind of threw in there that you lived in China and you speak fluent Chinese. And by the way, he's fluent now. He's probably better Chinese than me. [00:22:00] It is wild. It is wild to see him get the tones, the accents. I mean, it is on point.
So, I mean, definitely check him out. Very impressed. Just, just no biggie. Fluent in Chinese. It's not, I'm not fluent, but I do still speak to my son 95 percent of the time in Mandarin. I just, I love language. And so, yeah, it's, yeah, he does speak Mandarin too. Um, he shocked some people on vacation as did my daughter just last week, because there were Chinese people at the resort in Cancun and they don't expect.
These mixed kids, let alone the six foot one black dude to be speaking to them in Mandarin. And when we do, it's fun.
There's a little Chinese dialogue there. I just said, you're very impressive. Okay. Wow. So now that we talked about the ads, we talked to like the structure of an ad do's and don'ts. Let's talk about if somebody is at the point where they do have the budget and they're getting all sorts of emails from ads managers, telling them to work with them, what are some big red flags and people you definitely should [00:23:00] not work with?
Because let's be honest, there's a lot of not so great as managers out there willing to take your money. So how can we prevent somebody from losing their money on someone who is not the best as manager? Sure. Well, read your contract, read your contract, and read your contract. Because I've worked with clients who had very bad contracts with their ads managers, and they didn't read.
If they had read, then they wouldn't have been caught in some of the situations. So, don't cut costs. Ads management is not something that's super cheap. And what I mean by that is, If you find an ads manager that is going to charge, I don't know, 300 a month, beware, because it's just like, if you expect a normal price for something, and then you see somebody that's way under that price, or you see a product that comes in for way less than that price, you start to wonder where is the quality being sacrificed.
It's the same thing with ads management as a service. Also, if you have somebody run your ads, make sure that you own the rights. To your creative. I have seen several times clients that came to me and their previous ads management agency actually either [00:24:00] set up the account for them. And so the account wasn't even their own account.
Their ads were being run from the ad agencies account, which means that they had no rights to the creative or graphics or anything. So don't do that. Please don't do that. And also I saw another situation where a client came to me, but then they had no creative because the ad copy and all of the pictures and images and videos were owned contractually by the ad agency that was running their ads.
And so if I were you, I would never accept something like that. And then just look for references. If you're not sure, you know, ask around just like right now. Flooded like downstairs, four inches of water and the doorbell just rang. You can't hear it because of my wonderful mic, but there's an architect or at least that's what they call the architect in Spanish.
But the person who's going to look and see how much it costs to replace all the wood and what kind, you know, and we're going to get three different quotes. So shop around for your ad manager, read that contract and make sure that, you know, they're using your ad account and that you own the assets. If you will, those are [00:25:00] some big red flags that can save you a lot of heartache later on.
I'll end with this. Having somebody manage your ads is absolutely worth it, but it's not free. So then make sure that you're doing the calculation of your cost per lead. Like how much are your product sales actually costing you? How much are your leads costing your business with their ads management fee?
Factored in basically look at your numbers. Is it worth it? I'm an ads manager, so I'm going to say it's absolutely worth it if it makes sense within the profit of your business to work with an ads manager. How was that for an answer, Gloria? I think that's beautiful, but I think we got to always expose kind of the reality, which is that, you know, if you want to do work with a good ads manager around 1500 to 3000 a month for a good one, that's a good range.
Yeah, it's a good range and that's not including the cost of the ads. So again, it's not for everyone, but if you do feel like you are at a point where you're ready to scale, at least we've given you something to think about. And of course, Quajo is a master at this. He's incredible. So if he is taking on new clients, he's usually always booked up.
Definitely consult with him. You've given us so [00:26:00] much to think about. One more thing that I want to know is AI. Everyone's talking about AI, AI images, AI ads, chat GPT. How much can we outsource the whole ads process to AI and how much should we just be wary of this whole thing? I love AI. We use AI in the business, but AI, right.
Now cannot replace a human. And here's what I mean. I know that, you know, when you surf Instagram and you look at captions that you can tell which of these captions were kind of written by AI, right? Because AI, it uses sometimes obscure words or just very bland writing. And so yes, you can use AI to help you generate.
ad copy, but then still you need to go through that ad copy and put your human element back into it. Please don't write ad copy only like with AI, and please do look at that ad copy and make sure that it's speaking to the person who you're trying to help. Because selling is serving and you're serving real people and better serve them.
You want to do a good job [00:27:00] of attracting them, which means you still need to be using their words to describe their situations and their hopes and dreams and desires. And so that's my thought on AI. It's great. It saves you time. You still need to be a AI system. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Perfect answer again.
Yay. I'm not going to be thrown under the bus. It's very shocking. I think for my audience to have an episode on ads, I feel like when this comes out, they're going to be like, no, she didn't. But I'm hoping that throughout the arc of the story and value that you've given, they would understand that and appreciate why we do have this episode.
And I'm so grateful that you are the exception and that we had you on the show as a first person and probably one of the only ones to talk about ads. Because I think you give such a realistic view on it. And you're not pushing ads for everybody. You're not like, yeah, you should run ads. And you're very like, Hey, there is a place for ads and you can get scammed and here's how to avoid it.
So thank you so much for advocating for the small business. Thank you for championing that, you know, people's bootstrapping budgets [00:28:00] and how can people find you and take the next step if they want to explore more, or maybe they've gotten to a point in their business or know someone whose business could really use the help of someone who is an ads expert, who truly cares about small businesses.
I think the next logical step would be to head to my website, uh, the art of online business forward slash call. Why that? Because I do strategy calls and that is probably a good step before just looking for ads management. Especially if you are not ready to have someone run your ads and if your business is not at that point, but you've already maybe you've invested in a course or you've gone on to YouTube and kind of patchworked together an ad strategy and you know enough to be dangerous hopping on a.
Call with me for an hour where I can look at your ad manager set up and just take all my years of experience and just be like, change this, change that, change this, change that, change that. Boom. Now you have an optimal ad setup, or if you want to have me explain like funnels to you and look at your funnel to help you crunch the right numbers, that's the kind [00:29:00] of call that would really help you.
So the art of online business. com forward slash C A L L call. Boom. I'm sold. I want to get on that call too. I'm tweaking my ads. Thank you so much for everything. And what is your one piece of advice for business owners? I know you've done many different pivots. You've lived in China. You live in Mexico.
You've taught Chinese. So you've had many different businesses. What is one piece of wisdom or motivation as we start the new year that you can impart us with? You know, I have to say, this is all work. The success is work, the failure is work. So, what you're doing is either going to work for you, or it's going to work on you.
So, when you slip up, when you make mistakes, if you have to pivot, when things don't go your right way, Let that work do work on you so that you change and the next thing that you're doing has a higher percentage or like a better chance of working for you because it's all work. It's either working for you or on you and this is how we keep going forward.
Thank you so much. And with [00:30:00] that, thank you everyone. If you know anyone who would benefit from this podcast, please share it with them. We're all about championing the small business owner and please reach out to Kwejo. If you have anything related to ads, questions about funnels, he's your guy. And until next time, see you later.
All right. Thanks for having me, Gloria. Bye. Hey, small business hero, did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, the New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more, even if you're not yet launched or if you don't have any connection? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR secrets masterclass, where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible.
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