Video Highlights

• 0:04 Something that screws up a lot of the Ecommerce Businesses
• 0:24 The Reason Most People Start a Business is Because They Need Money
• 0:57 One of the Biggest Things that Holds A Business Back
• 1:22 The Most Common Area I see This
• 1:31 I use To Sell A Facebook Ad Course
• 1:47 I Told Them They Would Have To Spend Money
• 2:35 You Re Dooming Yourself To Failure
• 2:45 They Tend To Gravitate Towards Free Traffic
• 3:11 Content Marketing Has A 12 Month ROI
• 3:35 But Its Free
• 3:53 You Can Split Test
• 4:18 Spending Money Is A Requirement
• 4:23 Closing Remarks

What’s up, guys? Tanner Larson here. Let’s talk a little bit about something that really screws up a lot of the e-commerce businesses that I see. It honestly has nothing to do with the business itself. It’s 100% having to do with the owner or the CEO or the person who’s trying to run or start this e-commerce business.It comes down to the reason that most people get into business is not because they have money. It’s because they need money, right? People go out to start a business because hey, I need to make more money. It’s not because they have an abundance of money.

Some people do, or they’re cushioned, or they’re good enough, but for the most part, a lot of us got our start, even when I started in business it was because I needed more money. With that, because you need money, you’re focused on only making it, and any time it comes down to spending money, you kind of clench, right? You turn into a cheapskate. You don’t want to spend money, and this is one of the biggest things that holds a business back is that unwillingness to spend money and basically being a cheapskate.

Let’s clarify here. It’s okay and even a good thing to be budget conscious when it comes to building a business, but to be a cheapskate when it comes to spending money that’s going to help your business, you’re killing yourself. You’re basically cutting your own feet out from under you.

The most common area that we see this, and specifically that I see this, is when it comes to spending money on advertising. It’s funny.

I used to sell a Facebook advertising course for a couple hundred dollars. It was about a $500 course, and I’d get people all the time who couldn’t wait to give me that $500 to buy my Facebook advertising course, and then when they got into the course and I told them they were going to have to spend $5 to $10 a day learning the ropes, testing the campaigns, stuff like that and then they wanted to scale and ideally be spending hundreds of dollars a day or thousands of dollars a day, they freaked out.

“I can’t afford that. I can’t spend that. How am I going to do that?” I’m like, “Then why did you buy a course on Facebook advertising?”

People do all kinds of crazy stuff. They won’t balk at all about spending money to go attend a mastermind, or buying a course or buying more inventory or spending money on RND for a product, but when it comes down to spending money to actually advertise that product or generate sales, they immediately turn into the world’s biggest cheapskate and

“Oh, we can’t afford a $5 a day budget on Facebook ads” or “We can’t afford to buy that email drop for 5 grand” or anything like that.

That’s just nuts. You’re literally dooming yourself to failure. Again, because of this tightwaddedness regarding advertising, people always, specifically ecom business owners, they tend to gravitate towards this concept of free traffic and focusing all their efforts on the free traffic because, “Hey, we can’t afford to spend money on advertising, so of course we’re going to have to get free traffic”, right?

Then they start doing SEO and content marketing and all of these things, which are great, okay? They have their place in your business, in a business when it makes sense. Content marketing, like a podcast or like email marketing or anything like. All of those things, not email marketing. Excuse me. Content marketing like blog marketing or similar to a podcast. All of those things have a 12 month minimum ROI. The ideal here is to build up something that’s going to build over time and eventually create that torrent of traffic. It’s not something that’s going to create traffic from the get go.

People are like, “But it’s free. I can get visitors from Google” and all that stuff, and it’s like, okay, well you’re spending dozens to hundreds of hours a month trying to eek out a few visitors from Google, and you’re only getting whatever Google feels like sending you, or whatever happens to find you. Instead of getting hundreds or thousands of visitors a day, you’re getting 2 or 3 or 4 or whatever. Now, you can’t split test. You can’t do any accurate testing. You can’t do anything because you don’t have enough data.

These business are jumping out after that free stuff, and they’re ignoring the type of traffic, the type of business building advertising that’s actually going to give them the biggest result, make them profitable faster, and allow them to have the money to do these kinds of advertising things that they need to do.

Spending money is a requirement specifically on advertising if you want your business to grown. When you start to feel yourself trying to go cheapskate when we start talking about advertising or Facebook ads or some kind of advertising, catch yourself, and then stop doing it.