How I lit $28,000 on fire with ads, and what it taught me about building a sustainable author business
I tried to scale a working newsletter with paid ads, and found out the hard way that growth without strategy burns fast.
Hi,
My saga with ads is long and sorted. There have been over a half dozen articles about my experience dropping over $50,000 on ads over the past year. I think this one will close it out, but maybe not.
If you want to catch up, here are all the other articles.
Let me take you back. Over a year ago, I ran paid ads to grow my newsletter. I spent over $50k on that project, and it did not go well.
I didn’t need to do it. I already had a newsletter that worked. It already made money, but I wanted more. We had a conference at the time, and it was revenue intensive, so I wanted to grow the list to grow the conference, among other things.
Since I started doing this work decades ago, I’ve known that in order to scale you need a self-liquidating offer, which is one that pays for itself when you run ads, and I thought I had cracked the code.
So, like any good entrepreneur trying to level up, I invested in paid ads to grow that list faster. I wasn’t starting from scratch. I wasn’t fumbling aroun…
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