The AmWritingFantasy Podcast: Episode 13 – Are Facebook Ads a WASTE of money?

Should you use Facebook ads to sell more books or are you just going to waste your time and money?

Bill and I discuss this very topic while we also give some good tips and tricks on things like ad images, audience selection and split testing.

Lots of good stuff that should be helpful for all authors who has either never run any Facebook ads or tried for awhile before giving up.

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Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).

Jesper (12s):
Welcome to amwritingfantasy. I'm Jesper and to together with Autumn. I run this channel and we try to share writing, publishing and marketing tips every single Monday for you. But today I actually had one of our patron supporters on here too and we're going to talk some, some very important stuff about the Facebook marketing, which is a very, very relevant if you want to S to sell some books. Uh, and of course I should also mention that if you want to check out patron, then you can go there and check out the stuff that we offer.

Jesper (46s):
There is a ton of rewards that you can get for just a $1. For example, you're going to get a bookmark, you're going to get early access to the videos. There is actually a cost that you're going to get access to for, for, for a reduced price. So all that is possible by a patriarch who would check out the link below if you're interested in that. But I want to say hello to build and thank you bill for joining at a very late hour on the other side of the Atlantic.

Jesper (1m 16s):
But we want to say, uh, say hi to everybody

Bill (1m 19s):
are there. So, um, yeah, uh, thanks for the introduction. Yes. Um, yeah, I've, uh, I just started fiction writing myself. Uh, but, uh, my experience has mostly my day job, if you want to call it that as a, mostly with the Facebook marketing and a few other types of marketing that go along with that. So, um, I figured that I could, uh, maybe help some people out to our new to Facebook marketing or perhaps don't have the, um, sort of the background that I do with it.

Bill (1m 55s):
Um, I lost count somewhere, um, after 10,000 Facebook ads run for me and, uh, for clients as well. Uh, so there's, we've done a lot of ads over the last few years and we've seen the platform evolved. Um, uh, a long time ago. I don't think I was on it the maybe the first year. Um, but, uh, I've seen it evolve from something that's sort of barely function to, uh, uh, uh, uh, terrifying machine now.

Jesper (2m 29s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when you sort of talked about the idea of, of us discussing Facebook outside, I thought it was a good idea because especially with Facebook, it's if they are so incredibly good at taking your money, it's, it's crazy. You know, some marketing platforms like Amazon asks, for example, they, it's very hard to, to get them to take your many activity, but whatever you do with Facebook, they will take all of your budget, no problem. So, uh, knowing how to, what to think about in how to go it, they see important at Easter when you're autumn from a testing perspective so you don't end up spending all your money.

Jesper (3m 6s):
So I was looking forward to this conversation here. Bill

Bill (3m 10s):
okay. Uh, well I can give you a few tips based on that idea. First you mentioned testing and uh, that's something I think sometimes we're lucky. Sometimes we make assumptions about what the audience likes and get it right. Um, but in my experience, even knowing a lot about a particular market, that usually happens at best one in five, you're going to have to run many ads or do many posts.

Bill (3m 41s):
If you're working purely on your Facebook page, uh, before you'll find one that hits. And of course, uh, we all want the first thing that we do to work, but it doesn't usually work out that way. So that's the first thing that I run into with clients when I'm talking to them is a, they want the first, they make an assumption about their audience and that when we do some proper testing, it just isn't true. We, we want our audience to be certain people, but it turns out there's different people who are interested in our product and that's OK.

Bill (4m 16s):
um, the, the job from a marketing perspective is to figure out who those people are, what they like, and to give them more of what they like in a way that gets them to give something back to us. Right. Um, I guess one way that I like to look at it is very similar to plotting a book. Uh, even a short story, you want that hook, the catch their attention and get guide them to an idea, a concept, whatever. Um, whatever it is that your post or your ad is trying to do.

Bill (4m 48s):
And then you give them no option but to move on to the next thing, whatever that might be. And most often, um, we want them, uh, you know, the bottom line is important. We want them to buy. And, uh, so I also have clients who if they don't have something ready to sell right now, they, well, I'll do Facebook later. I don't have anything to sell. So why would I want to put anything up there? Um, but you can start testing before you have, uh, uh, a book that's a on sale on Amazon or, or another platform.

Bill (5m 25s):
Um, you can start building your audience, building your platform and especially getting those key people from Facebook, uh, who like the style of your writing. Uh, maybe because they've seen little snippets, you can post a short story or a chapter or even a paragraph sometimes and get a reaction. Um, Facebook is very visual, so it also helps if you have something like a, it can be an illustration, but especially with first time authors paying for illustrations, you're not doing them yourself.

Bill (5m 58s):
That gets kind of expensive. Uh, but everybody needs a cover. And, uh, so you can do, uh, the full cover. You can do, um, parts of the cover. Uh, if it's a complex image, maybe you can work with your designer, your artist, um, so that the cover is interesting in different ways and you can crop it several ways to post on Facebook and all of those things can be done over and over. Um, so that's another misconception that I run into quite a lot with clients who haven't used Facebook quite as hard as I have.

Bill (6m 33s):
And that is that, uh, you'll have some people in your audience who will see the same things a couple of times, but they don't normally complain. Um, so it pays to post many times not spamming your page or other people's page or group or whatever. Um, but if you post something Monday morning and, uh, the people who you're trying to reach, only some of them are paying attention Monday morning, by the time you're, you've posted a few more things and Thursday or Friday rolls around, it's fine to post a similar thing.

Bill (7m 10s):
Again, introduce it in a slightly different way if you want to test that because it's another different, but batch of people will see it and the bigger your audience grows, the more, uh, the, the more sort of spread out their attention will be, right. So you might be lucky and you'll have, uh, this core audience who just, uh, weights and, and continually refreshes Facebook on your page. But that's unrealistic for the Mo. Most of us are not there yet.

Bill (7m 40s):
Um, so don't feel bad about reposting the same thing. Obviously, if it's, you know, I don't know, a Christmas or Halloween posts or something like that, then that, that's, that dictates when you can post it. Um, the other thing that audiences tend to like is if, uh, you, uh, I think in most of the markets that I work with it or S or you do something at least once a week, uh, that is themed somehow. So for example, I have a client who has a, some dog products and that kind of thing.

Bill (8m 14s):
And, uh, you know, the cute cat and cute dog pictures really work on Facebook. Um, so we have, uh, you know, dogs with their tongues hanging out. Then we get users, we invite users to contribute their pictures on tongue, tongue out Tuesday night. So Tuesday is the day for this. And, uh, we don't make a big deal about it then even so we get a lot of engagement and, uh, that's, that's kind of a silly thing, but Facebook is full of that. Uh, and uh, it may not be appropriate for, you know, high fantasy or, uh, some kind of grim dark literature or whatever.

Bill (8m 49s):
Uh, but you can always find something that appeals to your audience that way and, uh, invite them to respond and the responses. Yeah. Like, you know how this works, especially I guess I, I know you're good with Twitter, right? Desperate. The responses that you can bring teach you about your audience, but it also on Facebook teaches Facebook about your audience. And, uh, the better your interaction with your audience, the better.

Bill (9m 20s):
Um, Facebook will understand who likes your stuff and it'll show more to their friends and their friends' friends.

Jesper (9m 28s):
Yeah. So I, so I wanted to ask, so if, if we're, when we're talking about organic reach with sort of what are we into here rather than paid apps, but I think also, well of course users could, if they wanted to, they could go in and they could say, okay, from a post from this page, I always want to see them, for example, and then Facebook which show it to them. But I think 99% of people either don't know how to do that or don't do it at all, which means that from an organic reach point of view with Facebook, it is very, very limited who actually sees your posts.

Jesper (10m 4s):
So from that perspective, of course it makes sense that you can post a several times because they won't see it anyway. But, but I was more thinking, do you have any thoughts around how, how, if any way, can you increase your organic wheat wheat without paying for it? Because at least the way I see Facebook and maybe maybe you could educate me here, but at least the way I see it, unless you put some money into the pot, forget about it.

Bill (10m 29s):
Generally, that's true. There are some pretty nifty ways, but most of the ways that I used to do exactly that, people like to call it free organic traffic, but it's not really free if you, you're basically swapping, um, many for, for effort and a little bit of time. Um, so posting a little bit more frequently than you figure is, is one method. Uh, but if nobody notices you at first, then that does, you can post as much as you want and it's just a roll of the dice whether Facebook detects that and decides to share it in the right spot.

Bill (11m 6s):
So one way is to, uh, share, um, join and share, uh, in groups. So find the related groups. Uh, and you can, as long as the Indian, depending on the rules of the group, be very careful with that. And I've heard this of course right, but, uh, it's perfectly fine to share related content in the group and uh, as long as it's not buy my book all the time, uh, then that, that's, that's perfectly fine.

Bill (11m 37s):
And there's lots of groups out there for just about every genre. Um, so that, that is one method that does work to begin kindling your, your audience. Um, but we should move on to Facebook ads because you're right, you do, if you, if you want it to go fast, um, you do want to spend a little bit on Facebook ads, but you don't want to spend too much. Um, so taking that concept, all the two concepts that I mentioned earlier about making your, each ad, sorry, each post on your page, sort of like, um, a story hook.

Bill (12m 13s):
The same thing applies with ads because their core on Facebook all an ad is, is you're chipping in some money to make sure that they show it to perhaps the best you hope of the target audience that you pick. So you target the audience that you think would be interested in your topic. And, uh, then you, hopefully we'll get enough eyes on it and, and, uh, have, have good enough content.

Bill (12m 45s):
Um, now I've mentioned I'm hedging a little bit, right? I'm saying hopefully and maybe and that kind of thing. And that's because just like with the posts, you don't necessarily know exactly what's going to trigger your audience to do the things that you want. And if that's coming over to your website to see your website or join your email list, there's, there's lots of things in play. But just keep in mind that even a tiny Facebook ad that is a low budget Facebook ad, we'll get in front of some people.

Bill (13m 16s):
So if you're running the ad and uh, you just walk out your budget knowing that you're going to spend it at the beginning and, and realizing that not most ads are not failures. Even if you, you, uh, uh, don't get the result that you want, don't delete your ad. Don't edit the ad ever. So my rule is, and that's the reason that my ad accounts, I've had to go to Facebook. I've had so many ads build up and so many ad campaigns build up that I've had to go to Facebook and tell him, I'm sorry I hit a limit in my account. Please allow me to create some more campaigns.

Bill (13m 49s):
And that's because all of the money that you're spending on these little ads to test different ideas and different posts and different links, that kind of thing. Those are data. If that data says don't do this, your audience doesn't like it, you need to keep that because there's, there's no simple way to note all that down. So my policy is I never edit an ad up, create an ad and I'll let it run. And if I don't like the performance, then I'll terminate it.

Bill (14m 19s):
Um, I might let Facebook terminated because you can set rules that's, we're not going to go into too much detail on that today, but if the ad doesn't work, it's still data and that data could be as simple as I spent five or $10 to learn not to do that thing again. Right. So always go into it with this positive attitude of yes, I, uh, you know, I have to spend a few dollars and uh, I've set a budget limit, but at the end of the day, you're going to at least get the data out of it and, uh, hopefully also good results.

Bill (14m 52s):
Right?

Jesper (14m 52s):
Yeah. Yeah. I think that the testing part is really important. You know, when, when, if you want to try some Facebook ads, uh, you know, I would also say the same thing as you were saying, start several different tests on a very low budget and then start learning what it is that, that actually triggers with your audience. Because a lot of times also from, from let's say the pictures that you use for the ad or whatever, sometimes the picture that you think will perform the best is probably the worst one. And sometimes the, the one that you think, this doesn't look very good at, all people just pick up on it for whatever strange reason.

Jesper (15m 26s):
But I think personally, uh, I've also run a lot of Facebook over the last few Facebook apps over the last few years and at least I think my big to to take away from it is that if at least, well, right now in this context we're talking about, uh, advertising for book sales. Um, and, and at least my experience with it is that, um, the audience selection is probably the biggest factor as to whether or not the Facebook ad performance because you can tweak with new pictures a bit of different ad texts and all of that.

Jesper (16m 2s):
But if the audience selection is not

Bill (16m 5s):
right, then

Jesper (16m 7s):
dos small tweaks over there, we'll only move the needle so little. Whereas if you change the audience and try a different audience than that's where you can really make a job. So, so that's where you should focus first in my experience it if, if the ad is not performing for you. And then the other thing I would say, and I don't know, uh, you're, you're well with all your 10,000 match, you probably have more, let's say one of your math data to, to, to know if what I'm to is true or not. But at least from the, from the advertising that I've run, it seems very much to me that it also depends, eh, blog on the book itself.

Jesper (16m 44s):
There, there's, for some reason some books are just easier sales, whereas other books are much harder to find the right audience for one and two to get the sales going. For some reason, I, I don't know why that is, but it just seems to me like the group itself just matters a lot.

Bill (17m 0s):
Yes. Um, especially on the Facebook side. So unless you're, uh, there are some complex setups I've seen people try where they can sell right inside a tab of their Facebook page, but we're not gonna cover anything like that. That's, I don't even recommend that for book sales. But, um, if, if the goal of your ad is to build your page up or I build engagement build likes, then you'll still need an image and you're still right regardless of the book.

Bill (17m 30s):
Um, building that page up will rely a great deal on the title and the image. Um, but just the same as you were saying, uh, the, the low likelihood of getting people to, um, engage with an ad to bring them over to a website, um, and then buy your book. I did depends on how your marketing funnel works. But, um, in my experience, the best way to, to tackle that Facebook attention span is like, uh, people have the attention span of a mosquito on Facebook.

Bill (18m 3s):
So I want to get them off Facebook even if they're on their phone, get them off Facebook and over to a site that I control. Um, at least onto a webpage that I control, and then I can slow the pace down in an acceptable way. Um, I don't want them to bounce away, so I want to give them something to anticipate on the Facebook ad, on the post or whatever that I'm advertising. And then I get them over that to click the link and over to the website. And at that point I'll slow things down a little bit and give them more information.

Bill (18m 35s):
So you're giving them a little bit more each time. And again, it's very similar to writing a story. You can't tell them the whole detail of the first chapter in that first sentence. The first sentence has to tease them, bring them into the chapter. That is like bringing them over to the, the, the, the website. And at that point you can start giving them a little bit more information about the book. Um, that page, that landing page. Um, I consider that a, a nice filter. Now we're kind of getting away a little bit from the Facebook ad itself because once they're onto your website, that is a different set of things that Facebook you could say, right.

Bill (19m 16s):
The key with the Facebook ads is to get them over to your, your website in the first place. Um, so there are some other kinds of ads and again, we won't go into the technical details right now. We can touch on that another time if you really want. But, um, if you, uh, if you do have your own website, your author website, and you have a nice clear, clean description of the book, uh, and made sure that it's, you know, it's ready to sell at that point. Um, or if you're trying to get them to do something else on your website, like sign up to a mailing list, that's okay too, but recognize what your goal is and make sure that that's ready to go run your ad and get the people over there.

Bill (19m 53s):
And that landing page is much like a filter. Um, you want to get as many people to buy your book as possible. You want as many people to sign up to your list as possible, but not if those people are going to hate the book enough to try and return it or leave a bad review or not. If people are going to sign up to your email list and get confused and then angry, uh, and, and then you've maybe paid some fees that you didn't have to. So that pay debt landing page is a positive. It's the open part of the funnel, but it's also a bit of a, a negative, a filter to maybe weed out the people who probably shouldn't be there and you can maybe find something else to give them.

Bill (20m 33s):
Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I think another thing that might be good to touch upon it in the context of what we're talking about here is because in general, or at least a lot of the time

Jesper (20m 49s):
I hear authors say, well, I don't really do Facebook ads because one, they are way too expensive and too, I never get anything in return. So return on investment of the money that I'm spending there. So it's useless and I don't want to do it. Uh, and, and that's fine, but, but I think at least then maybe you can sort of the pick this ball up and run with it if you're one. But, but my thinking is that a lot of the time what it comes down to is that because Facebook well as you, as you were just explaining a bill, so you have people on Facebook and you need to take them off of Facebook to do something else in the middle of day.

Jesper (21m 27s):
They're sitting there going through their feet, looking at cat pictures of all of that good stuff. I'll pick this up. Their family, they're not quite in their frame of mind that I'm, I'm here to buy a book. Like they would be if they were an Amazon. So you need to first of all disrupt them and you need to make them go somewhere else and then they need to take another action over dancer. It's quite a journey. And because of that, it just requires a lot of testing to find the right both ad copies and landing page copy and uh, the right audience selections and all that.

Jesper (21m 58s):
That stuff takes a lot of testing. And the problem I think is that

Bill (22m 2s):
people usually

Jesper (22m 3s):
abandoned the Facebook ass way before they get enough data to actually figure out what works. So, so you sort of had to stick with it and keep testing.

Bill (22m 14s):
Yeah. I I'll give you some really quick tips to make this all sort of come together a little bit because, uh, the first thing is you can rent, you can spend as much as you want on a Facebook ad, but you can wreck it if you give them too much. Right? So if they see the ad, um, a perfect thing to do, avoid, do your very best to avoid asking a question in a Facebook ad because it's Facebook and like you say, people are on there commenting on stuff all the time and it's so easy. Their system is very good at this.

Bill (22m 46s):
If you ask someone a question, even imply a question on Facebook, they're going to answer. That will be the action that you get. So if you're running an engagement ad, the engagement that you're going to get by asking or implying a question is an answer. And so Facebook will say, ah, very good. I will give, I'll show your ad to these people who are very likely to respond. And I noticed a lot of these people are commenting, here's my list of top commenters from your selected audience and that's who will see your ad.

Bill (23m 16s):
And it will get progressively more like that. The longer that ad runs, Facebook's AI will learn that your engagement from that post drives comments. So don't ask a question, give them a reason to go over to your site, but also avoid anything that will prevent them from going to the site. So don't answer everything. Keep some curiosity in their mind, right? But don't ask them a question or try and get them to too many things. I've seen am failed ads that, uh, amounted to.

Bill (23m 50s):
Well, I'm, I'm spending $5 a day on my ads so I have to get them to do as much as possible. And so I'll ask them to like the page and I'll ask them to comment and I'll ask them to go over to the website. They're only gonna do one thing, right? In great. Ads they will go over to your website and they might come back and like, and share and all of that stuff. But if you ask them to do many things, they will probably do nothing, right? So that, or, or if they do something, it will be the easiest. And people on Facebook don't see clicking through to some other website is easy.

Bill (24m 22s):
They see clicking like, or share is easy, right? So, uh, that, that's the way to make the ad great. Even if you're targeting is so, so even if you're not spending a lot, make sure that the ad tells them to do one thing. And don't be afraid to tell them, either command them almost to do the thing you want them to do. Um, and make it super clear because those cat videos will, you know, kept them busy at some point as far as, as far as budgeting.

Bill (24m 54s):
And back to what you were saying about testing a lot. Um, I would say 90% of those 10,000 ads are $5 a day and they run for two to three days on the new ad account. That hasn't run a lot. Facebook AI takes a little bit of time to get up to speed and uh, dial in. Um, if you've run multi-day ads, so the same ad untouched, running several days, you'll often see that it's performance is sort of waivers the first day or so, and then it stabilizes and might stabilize exactly where you want it or it might stabilize less than that and then you'll kill it.

Bill (25m 32s):
But you have to give it a little bit of time on. The biggest accounts that I've worked on that time is really narrowed down to about six hours. So I can run a $5 ad, $5 a day ad, uh, for about six hours. And in generally, it depends on the hand in the audience, but generally we'll have Facebook understanding what we want within six or so hours more. More typically you want to let it run for at least two full days before you kill it because you don't know if it's wavering on that first day.

Bill (26m 3s):
Especially if you launch it late in the calendar day. Facebook does this funny thing at midnight in your ad accounts, local time where they just sort of Chuck out some of the data and then they relearn to see if they didn't maybe get it right the day before. And so you run the ad after several days and you don't like the results coming in, you know, in the beginning of the next morning and you kill the ad. You could be killing it too early. So go into it knowing that. But I even after I have a great ad, I'm very reluctant unless the audience is absolutely enormous, like over 5 million people potentially in the audience.

Bill (26m 40s):
I usually like to leave the ad at five a day and if I want to scale it, if it's doing really what I want and make another ad exactly the same, Facebook has really easy tools to just duplicate the ad actually the ad campaign. Right. And so I will run to $5 a day ads and they could be exactly the same and they may perform almost the same. Usually they do. That's the measure of a good ad that will last a long time with good performance is the duplicate of it will, uh, perform very similar to the first one.

Bill (27m 14s):
It'll have that initial a day or so that it feels like a little bit of a waste of money letting it learn. But having those stable ads means that it's very easy to scale. You just pause one of the ads if you want to stop spending money.

Jesper (27m 27s):
Yeah. Yeah. And because this is about the patient, the thing again, because I usually just say, you know, when, when you create an ad, literally at least run for 48 hours before you even look at the stats on anything. Because people do also tend to like two hours after they created that, then they'll go in and have a look at the stats and say, I know this is terrible and refresh. Refresh. Yeah, yeah. Well, I even think that the apps manager now actually, they have added this label where it says something about that the ad is still learning or something, which didn't used to butt heads a bit.

Jesper (28m 0s):
Of course. To to sort of indicate that. Just let it, let it be alone. I'll let leave it alone what I was about to Che. But so, so that's, that's one of the patients thing. And then the other side of it, which you just talked a bit on there, was when you have the positive results, so let's say you're not weird to 48 hours and Whoa, this is good, you know, and then some people will jump in and then they will just triple or quadruple the am the budget on the ad and then that pretty much destroyed as well.

Jesper (28m 32s):
I can explain. Exactly. Yeah,

Bill (28m 34s):
that is, and I've had this confirmed in talks with the Facebook, uh, staff, uh, sort of mid, mid level staff is as far as I've ever got to speak with, uh, no matter how much you spend there, you probably don't get much above that. But their system is fairly clever. You tell it the parameters of the audience that you want to show. To do you want people who are, you know, maybe women between the age of let's say 18 and above because you know that they have a credit card or something like that, but over 36, you probably don't want them in your market.

Bill (29m 9s):
You've dialed all of this in through a little bit of testing. So you have 18 to 36 women in the United States who like these things. And so you have your, your what you think is your perfect audience. And uh, then you tell Facebook, here's my audience, here's my ad. Give me all the people in this audience who are most likely to engage with my ad who are going to click on my ad and to do whatever it is. So if it's a, if it's a page post engagement or whatever they're calling them these days, um, Dick to click through to my website, then I want the people who are most likely to do that.

Bill (29m 46s):
Now Facebook organizes that. And it's a dynamic thing because people are logging on and off all the time. People are seeing different ads so they're ads fill up ahead of yours. And it's a big auction system and it's what's important is Facebook is constantly prioritizing that list of all of those people who might potentially fit your audience parameters. And if you take $5 and spend down through the cream of the crop, the top people who are most likely to engage in the way that you want, you'll still be in that top tiny margin.

Bill (30m 22s):
If you spend $100 on the same ad, it's going to go through those top people and it's gonna keep on going and going and going until the results get worse. And so that's why often you'll see ads with big budgets run poorer. The longer they run through the day and early in the morning, they may look like they're doing fine. So that that is the logic behind doing lots of very similar, perhaps you can test, but uh, but small ads so if I wanted to run $100 a day, I can tell you it would be on 20 ads not on one ad with $100.

Jesper (30m 58s):
Yeah. I think you can scale up to two higher budget, but need to be careful you ended or small incremental step up in the budget because then the, the AI sort of, well, you work with the AI and the cats off every time you increase rather than a big job all of the sudden. I think that's how it works. Absolutely. An expert entity Facebook AI, but I think that's how it works.

Bill (31m 22s):
Yes. And the bigger your audience, the we'll, we'll maybe leave the audience size and so on. Really to another time that there's a lot of detail in that. But the bigger your audience, the more tolerant it will be. The system will be of, uh, you're changing the budget. So if I have a 10 or 11 million audience, something like that, um, I can probably boost that up to 10 or $20 a day and it won't really affect performance very much if it's a good ad.

Bill (31m 51s):
Um, but if my audience is more like 500,000 or less, uh, maybe in the tens of thousands am $5 is the most, I will be able to successfully spend anything more than that and it will, it will just start costing me more.

Jesper (32m 8s):
Mm Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, we also sort of coming a bit up on time here, but, um, but, uh, and I, I'm thinking that, well at least we talked a bit about if you're just getting into Facebook apps that, that you should try to run many tests that you should be patient and you should use a low budget and, and, and sort of learn from, from what you see in the data that comes from that. So we talked to some of that about, uh, for the beginner. Um, but I also think that probably the majority of the stuff, we talked about this a bit more for people who already slightly experienced because otherwise there would be a lot of the stuff we talked about that they won't even know what that means.

Jesper (32m 46s):
But I don't know if, if, would there be any final sort of good inputs to, if somebody is just completely like, I, I've never run any Facebook ads and this find that you're telling me that I should be patient and I should use a low budget and do testing. But where do I start? Is there anything we could say to those people?

Bill (33m 5s):
Um, Facebook training, their own instructions are pretty good these days. So that used to not be the case. They're training used to be the last thing that I would direct you to, but now it's not too bad to get onto their system and get started. But keep in mind they have this idea that everyone who uses Facebook ads is Coca-Cola with a massive marketing budget and they're only going to be interested in branding. Branding is interesting for an author, but for indie authors, stick with the idea of picking one goal.

Bill (33m 40s):
And normally there's only two that I pay attention to on Facebook. For this kind of business, one is getting more people, more fans, right? People to like your page. But I don't even worry too much about that. So very quickly I would stop, stop with the like ads after I have say a few hundred people and I would let that build organically, naturally by posting. And then the second type of ad that you'll be running from, as soon as you're successful, you'll want to run them all the time. And that's the engagement style ad where you create a post on your page or in the ad, it'll look just like a, a page post.

Bill (34m 14s):
And that is designed to get people over to your website. And so those are the, those are the takeaways to, to extract from the Facebook training. And uh, what else, make sure the image is striking the, the process of an ad or a post. But an ad really is people notice the image first. Almost always very few people read the headline and then see the image. It's normally the image interrupts them. Just like as per said. Then they might read the title or they might read the intro.

Bill (34m 47s):
So don't skip those things, make them interesting and don't let them, don't give people any excuse to not click the image, interested them. Now give them a reason to go over to your website. So that that is probably the, those, those are probably the quick tips that will make things most successful for new people and hopefully for those people who tried Facebook ads and got discouraged and went away to bring them back because it's a great tool.

Jesper (35m 14s):
Yeah, I mean at least from a, let's say audience targeting perspective, you do not get any marketing tool in the world right now at the time of recording this that can target. So specifically as Facebook candidate. It's amazing will in doing that. And then, but again, it, it it and Gatz manager is not that easy either. So it's, it's a bit complicated. You need to sort of get used to it and understand what is the different terms that I'm selecting here and there. And then I guess, yeah, you can use those, uh, Facebook tutorial videos at least to get you a bit acquainted with what's going on there.

Jesper (35m 49s):
But, but it's not that easy and it takes a bit of patience and time, but, but, but it can work and you can get there if you want to.

Bill (35m 57s):
Um, we probably, if we're going to ramp it up when we cover additional topics, but, uh, keep in mind that once you get them off that platform, remember the work and the effort that it took to get them there and treat them with respect. Don't get them onto an email list that you never send an email to, right? Yes, for yes was all about this, right? Once you have them on the email list, use the email list to communicate with them and get feedback from them and then generate sales. It's not just a, a quick, uh, now your mind on the email list and, and uh, you know, you sell them something and it doesn't work, so you never send them an email again.

Bill (36m 35s):
It's a process. Right.

Jesper (36m 36s):
And did indeed. Yeah. And if, if you want to learn a lot more about emails and email marketing and happening over the last three weeks or something like that, what I'm an I really several videos about email marketing and how to do it, how to get a set up, what you should be emailing people about and how to get them onto the email or we talked about all of that. So just go back to some of the past episodes, you from the last three weeks and, and, and you can check that, all of that out and, and learn much more so, but I wanted to thank you.

Jesper (37m 7s):
Thank you. Bill for coming on and talking about Facebook apps. I think it is an, well, I wouldn't say under utilized because there are people who spend a lot of money on Facebook apps in general, but at least in the author community, I think more people give up on them, them then actually leverage the power that they could be. Um, but is it easy? I would say no. Uh, it requires both, some time testing and it also request some money but, but it can be made to work. But at least as I also explained to this video, to me, at least from my personal experience, it also depends on the type of book that I'm advertised.

Jesper (37m 42s):
There are some of my books I just don't advertise because I tested it a million different ways and I cannot get it to work on Facebook. So maybe Facebook is just the wrong medium for that particular book. And then I advertise them elsewhere and then there are other books that actually works quite well with the Facebook app. So yeah, test, that's all I can say.

Bill (38m 3s):
Absolutely.

Jesper (38m 4s):
Alright. Is there anything you want to share where people can learn more about you bill or something like that?

Bill (38m 12s):
Sure. Um, if you're interested, if you're, if you're an author and you're interested in what we talked about, then you maybe are you want my help or advice or whatever. That might be something that I can arrange and you can contact me easily through the contact form or just email contact at my website, which is novel prizes.com. We didn't get to talk about content marketing and multichannel marketing and other stuff that I really enjoy today. Um, but, uh, that's, uh, one of my, my test basis is a novel prizes.com and you can just use the contact form there to, to reach out to me if you want.

Jesper (38m 51s):
Perfect. Yeah. And if you email me the link as well built and I will add it a for people to find in the, in the description in the year. Mopes so thanks a lot for joining us today, a bill. I appreciate it.

Bill (39m 6s):
Right on. Thanks very much for the opportunity.