(Transcript continued from the Episode 134 show notes and audio podcast)
I’ve learned a lot about Shopify, which is something that as a WordPress guy I’ve never touched before. It has all been very interesting. If you’re interested in learning more about what I’m doing, I found a great article for you on the Shopify blog about how to drop-ship with AliExpress. The course that I’m taking is really a version of this article on steroids. One thing that the course that I’m taking focuses on is Facebook traffic generation, which this article doesn’t talk too much about, but if you want to know about the business model itself, drop-shipping from AliExpress, you can check out that article on the Shopify blog. If you’re just curious about this kind of business model, I definitely recommend that you check that out.
How the Five People You Spend the Most Time With Influence You
This week I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a mindset thing and this incredibly famous quote by Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn is a motivational speaker and he is often credited with saying this thing where he claims that we are the average of the five people that we spend the most time with. Sometimes you’ll hear that expressed as you’re income is the average of the five people’s income that you spend the most time with. Whatever.
The idea is that you are very heavily influenced by the people that you’re around all the time. I wanted to break this down for you by example. What made me think about this is, a lot of you know that today (when this episode goes live) is actually day nine of my 90 day journey to healthy eating. We’ve talked about this on the podcast a little bit before, but I’ve been putting on two or three pounds a year for the last 20 years.
Like a lot of American males, I’m not in terrible shape – maybe by some measures I am in terrible shape – but I am carrying an extra 30, 40, and by some measures even 50 pounds. If you look at the Body Mass Index charts that are prepared by U.S. government people, I am well overweight. I’ve done work over the years to try and lose that weight and I’ve generally lost it and put it back on.
I was talking about this issue with Cliff Ravenscraft when we were at Social Media Marketing World. Usually when we’re somewhere in the world he will drag me, sometimes kicking and screaming, to Chipotle. I actually like Chipotle, but that’s his jam and he wants to go to Chipotle. We were going to Chipotle talking about the fact that he had recently started 100 days of clean eating. Cliff has a pretty straightforward definition of clean eating. He’s not all hardcore over on clean eating like Whole 30, but he is definitely in that direction.
He’s talking about no processed foods, carbs, and things that come out of a box. Cookies and anything that looks like a sweet thing, none of that, and no sugar. He talks a lot about how he’s just not eating anything sweet at all, so nothing that looks like sugar. No artificial sweeteners, I think in part because of the insulin response that can create and the fact that it has been correlated to retarding weight loss when you go hardcore over on artificial sweeteners. There is some data that suggests that tricks your body into creating an insulin response, which makes it harder to lose weight. No deep fried foods for Cliff. Nothing like bread or any simple carbohydrates.
He’s eating whole foods, essentially, nothing deep fried, always sort of healthy foods. Really a common sense thing. What Cliff is really doing is managing his insulin response. That’s a whole other topic that we could talk about. That’s something that I know a lot about, I’ve actually done a lot of research about how to do that.
What I lack is the self discipline to do these things very well. Knowing what to do and what thing you should do and actually doing the thing, as a lot of us know, are often two different things. When I was in San Diego with Cliff we went on this relatively long walk to Chipotle. If you’re familiar with San Diego, I think the Chipotle is on Broadway Street, so that’s a 10 minute walk from the waterfront.
We’re walking and I’m asking Cliff questions and he’s telling me about this diet that he’s on. Diet is not even the right word, this way of eating, this lifestyle that he has adopted for 100 days. We talked about the fact that he had done that before and I had done it a little bit before, but I had never made it for 100 days. He was arguing that one of the things that happens after that amount of time is you totally reset your body’s cravings, expectations, and you really build in this habit.
I asked him, “What are you going to do on day 101?” He said, “I’m just going to keep rolling, because by that time this will be the way that I do life. Instead of eating cookies, I’m going to be eating salad bowls from Chipotle.” Actually, insider fact, Cliff doesn’t eat a lot of salad, which is a whole big advantage that I have over him in this way because I love salad.
All of this to say that Cliff convinced me to do this thing, to eat the way Cliff is eating. I realize that this is a really good idea, it’s something I can do. He was very encouraging to me. In fact, when I got home from San Diego he was texting me, especially in the first few days, to make sure I was doing okay and that I had the encouragement that I needed to make it.
Now, completely thanks to Cliff and my own desire to do this, I’m on day eight of this 90 day journey with a 100% success rate. I feel fantastic and I’ve shed over 10 pounds in the last eight days. Half of that is water, but I just feel great. These kind of diets are diuretic, meaning that they cause you to shed water so you’re not puffy anymore, inflammation goes down and it can really make you feel good. I feel great.
Why am I telling you all this about this diet? It turns out the reason that I’m doing this is because my life is the average of the five people that I do life with. This is a really good example of why.
It’s because the people that you’re around on a daily basis, the people that you spend the most time with, are going to influence you to do things that you might not normally do otherwise. This is an absolute fact.
I just gave you one example and I will give you another. That’s one that I talk about all of the time, which is my mastermind group. Yesterday in my mastermind group I talked to them about this new Facebook Live journey that I’m going on where I have created a Facebook group and I’m now doing weekly Facebook Lives. I did the first one this week on Tuesday. If you’re interested in being a part of that group and knowing about the Facebook Lives, you can go to LateNightIM.com/fbgroup and ask to join the group so I can let you in. It’s a lot of fun, we’re hanging out and we’re doing stuff in there.
That whole thing is a result of hanging around the right kind of people at Social Media Marketing World, but most recently the advice that I got about doing that group and the way that I’m doing it, and my motivation for doing it, particularly the live video, has come from the fact that I spend time talking to one of the members of my mastermind group, Leslie Samuel.
Leslie has been doing these amazing videos for his brand that really inspire me to do some live stuff. Leslie’s live videos are just over the top, he is really fantastic at video in general. Some of his live videos involve his wife and they do singing on Friday nights because they’re both incredibly musically talented. His stuff is just crazy good. I’m inspired by the fact that I see Leslie doing this kind of stuff and having this kind of traction, and he’s encouraging when I talk to him about doing live video and how to do it and how to think about it.
The people that I’m doing life with are influencing me and they will influence you as well.
I’ll tell you another general example of how this works in reverse is if you are hanging around people that are generally negative, or generally sitting on the couch, or generally instead of doing something productive they’re bringing you down or dragging you off to drink beer all the time or whatever, you average down.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have social time, I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that if you are around people that share your hopes, dreams, and goals of making their life better they will rise you up and you’ll rise up to their average. If you’re around people that are beaten down by the man and are sitting around not doing much and just complaining, you’ll be pulled down to that level.
The takeaway from this is I really encourage you to think this through. Who are you spending the most time with? Do they build you up or are they dragging you down? Are they sucking away your life force or are they actually adding to it?
One way to do this is spend a week actually making a note of who you’re spending the most time with. You might be surprised.
This can go across context, too. You might have a clique at work that you spend time with at your day job. Are these the people where you go out to lunch and they spend the whole time talking about what a crappy job you have or are these the people that are talking about how you can be more effective in your job, how you can do bigger things, how you can get ahead, how you can contribute more to the company? Which five people are you hanging out with? I think you should be intentional about hanging around the kind of people that are building you up, helping you be better, helping the company succeed at work.
The same thing goes in your private life. Are you hanging around a bunch of people that are really negative and don’t fit your entrepreneurial mindset? When you make this list and pay attention over a week of all the people that you hang around with and take some notes about who you’re spending time with, I think you need to honestly assess whether or not those people are building you up. That’s the key to take advantage of this thing that Jim Rohn is talking about.
So my action for you this week, I’m not asking you to go ditch all of your friends, that’s not what I’m suggesting, but I do think you should go through the mental exercise of making a note or keeping a log of the people that you hang around with and understand whether or not those people, each one individually, are building you up or bringing you down. If you’ve got people on that list that are bringing you down, I think you should really consider whether or not that is good for you over the very long run of your life.
Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint, this life thing that you’re living. Small corrections, even a small change in the amount of time that you’re spending with someone who is having a negative influence in your life as opposed to someone who is having a positive influence in your life, a small change in the amount of time that you spend with such a person can make a big difference over the course of these next few years.
Making Sense of Facebook Ad Manager
What I wanted to talk to you about today was one of the things that has always bugged me about Facebook. You get into the ad manager and it’s just this confusing, intimidating, crazy looking thing. It looks a little bit Google Analytics, so to that extent it is a little bit familiar. When you get in there, if you’ve never been in there, you have these tabs. If you’re in Facebook and you choose Create an Ad or you click on ads, you’re taken to the ad manager.
You may not even be aware of this, but you can sort of choose whether you use the ad manager that is attached to your personal Facebook account or you upgrade to sort of the business ad manager, which is kind of a heavier weight version of the little ads manager that is present in Facebook. It doesn’t cost anything, it’s free, but the Facebook business ad manager allows you to manage multiple properties. By properties I really mean pixels.
In my case I have one set of Facebook activities where I’m driving traffic for this one set of properties that I own that are related to this niche site that I’m building on Shopify and then I have a whole other thing that is completely unrelated for Facebook ads on Late Night Internet Marketing. The business account allows you to do that and keep all that stuff separate and keep the pixels separate.
When you login to the Facebook ads manager for business you’re taken to this home screen where it shows the company that you’re working in, which is something that you can choose, you can be managing or involved with multiple top level companies or organizations. For example, my top level organization in the business manager is Mason World LLC, which is the name of my LLC that I operate under. Inside those organizations you can have different ad accounts. One ad account that I have inside of this business manager is an ad account related to this project that I’m working with Shopify.
When you go into your ad account in the Facebook ads manager you are presented with four tabs. One tab is an overview of your account that basically just tells you what is going on with your account, how much you’ve spent lately, it gives you some top level statistics on your account across a date range that you can specify. Again, at this point this looks a lot like the layout of Google Analytics.
The other three tabs are labeled Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. Those are the three views that you have of data and the way that you can organize the things that you’re trying to do in the Facebook Ad Manager. The question is; what are these? What’s the intention? What’s the difference between a campaign and an ad set and an ad? What’s the right way to think about organizing ads inside of the ads manager?
After all, if you’re going to do this you may end up with tens or hundreds, probably hundreds or even thousands of different ads. It’s obvious to me immediately when you get really aggressive about starting to learn Facebook ads one of the things is to understand this and know that you need to stay organized, and do that from the outset and understand how the Facebook manager is structured so that you can organize your ads and ad campaigns appropriately.
If you ask Facebook about this, what they’ll tell you is that when you set up your campaigns properly it helps you to better measure your performance and understand how to optimize your ads, because you’re able to measure your results by choosing the right kind of objectives by campaign to help you measure results and see where to spend your money.
It helps you test different audiences so you’ll be able to create different ad sets for the different audiences so that you can determine the most responsive audience and you can target the right people. That’s a huge part of this activity that I’m going through with my Shopify store.
When you’re organized well you’ll be able to identify which ads work better when you create multiple ad sets and you’ll be able to pick the top performing ads based on changes in the image, or the videos, or the links. That’s the reason for being organized inside of the Facebook Ad Manager.
Here’s the deal. Remember I said there are campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Understanding these three things will help you stay organized.
A campaign contains one or more ad sets. Campaigns are made up of ad sets. The important thing to understand about a campaign is that each campaign has an advertising objective (and we’ll talk about that in a minute).
Ad sets, as the name implies, contain one or more ads. This is where you’re going to talk about who your ads are targeted at, what your budget is, what the schedule is for running the ads, bidding for the ads, where you’re going to place them. All of that happens at the ad set level.
Then of the course the ads are the creative that you make, the ad that you actually run. When you’re on Facebook and you see someone advertising something in a square, that is an ad. Ad sets are a collection of these ads.
When you’re creating these campaigns this is the beginning of structuring your advertising activity on Facebook. You use this thing called the Ads Create Tool to create the campaign by defining the objective for what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with your ads. This may be something that you’ve never thought about or realized, but at the campaign level this is where you can easily turn your campaign completely on or completely off, look at performance and stuff like that. You do these campaigns based on the objective that you’re trying to accomplish.
Do you want more page likes? That’s a campaign. You would run a campaign to get more likes to your Facebook page.
Do you want clicks to your website? Do you want conversions? In my case with the Shopify store I am running campaigns where I am trying to convert people on Facebook to buyers on my website. Those are website conversion campaigns.
Are you trying to get engagement or installs of your app? Or responses to your event? Or views of your video? All of these are different kinds of campaigns.
Let’s take my Shopify website for example. I have a Facebook fan page for that site – whenever you’re advertising on Facebook you’re advertising philosophically from your page, it’s your page that is actually doing the advertising on Facebook – I might for social proof want a lot of likes on that page. I might run a likes campaign, where I would essentially write an ad that encouraged people to like my website.
You’ve seen these on Facebook, “Click like and come check us out.” That provides social proof for your brand whenever you’re advertising on Facebook, so that might be a really smart thing to do.
I might want to drive people to my website to convert them to a sale, like I’m doing on my Shopify site where I advertise a product. The goal of this campaign is to get people to actually buy that product. I’ll use the Facebook pixel in this case to help Facebook understand which traffic they’re sending to my website that’s actually converting. If they start sending hundreds or thousands of people over to my website, it’s very helpful for them to understand which few of those hundreds or thousands of people are actually buying the product.
I instrument my Shopify website with the Facebook pixel and that feeds back into my campaign, “You sent me 1,000 people, but these 10 actually bought the product. In the future please send me more people like these 10 people that bought.” And, by the way, it turns out that these 10 people that bought were females between the age of 35 and 45 who also are fans of Rachael Ray because I’m selling some cooking thing. That’s the kind of thing that you do at the campaign level.
Once you have a campaign, inside of that campaign you create this next level down, which is the second tab called ad sets. Generally speaking, you use ad sets to determine the audience you want to target.
You can also set your budget at this level. Maybe you want to spend more money advertising to women between age 35 and 45 than you want to spend advertising to women between age 25 and 35. Maybe those older women are cooking more and you’re selling cooking stuff, or they’re cooking for their kids or with their kids, and their husband is cooking for them, whatever your demographic is, and what they’re doing in their life is different than what 25 year olds are doing. They’re early in their career, they don’t have kids, and when they cook they’re cooking with their boyfriend and it’s a meal for two.
Those are two totally different audiences that would probably need two totally different ad sets with different graphics and maybe different calls to action for a different appeal. Ads are going to work differently across those two groups, so your targeting for each ad set is going to be different. You’re going to manage that activity at the ad set level. One of the cool things about that is you can set daily and lifetime budgets for these ad campaigns at the ad set level.
The third level that is underneath that is the ads level. Within this ad set of women that are 35 to 45 that also like Rachael Ray that we’ve found are responsive to our offer, we will have different ads. The cool thing about having different ads is you can have different creative pieces (as you would call them in marketing) that are effective in different ways.
Maybe you have five to 10 different great images of women in your demographic using the product, or maybe women in your demographic respond well to pictures of men cooking in the kitchen. In the beginning you don’t really know, so you can test these different creatives inside these different ad sets to try and understand which one of your images works the best.
I’ll give you an example. When I first started out my Facebook fan page what I needed for this Shopify experiment that I’m running for drop-shipping one of the things that I wanted to have was likes on my fan page to make it look less like a brand new fan page that was just created yesterday and to increase the social proof of this fan page for people that saw my Facebook ads and visited the page, because it says 400 people like this. I ran a “like” ad campaign where the objective was Facebook likes in order to grow the likes on this page.
In order to do that I used five different images that I picked at random that I thought might be effective in generating page likes for this page. Guess what? Two of those images were way more effective than the other three, and two of the images accounted for 90% of the likes that I was able to get in this campaign. That is something that Facebook was able to figure out for me by the automatic split testing that it has inside of the ads manager and it was able to optimize the campaign in that way for my demographic.
Could I have guessed that those two images were going to be the best two images for my ad campaign? Absolutely not. This is a thing that I’ve generally found to be true about marketing forever. What is actually going to work and convert is very hard to predict. Sometimes the only way to know what’s actually going to work in your ad campaign is to test it.
These different ads allow you to choose different creatives. It might not just be images, it might be video, or maybe you have one image that has a big free shipping logo and one image that doesn’t. You can test all of these different ad creatives with different calls to action, different colors, different pictures, all of these different ideas you might have for what ads might work inside of your ad sets by using different ads.
That’s how it works. It’s a hierarchy. There are campaigns, and campaigns are made up of ad sets. Campaigns are where you target a particular objective, ad sets are groups of ads that you have that target particular demographics. You have a top level of objectives, the next level is who you’re targeting, and the final level are the ads that you use.
I hope that helps you demystify a little bit about the Facebook Ads Manager. Maybe in a future activity we’ll talk a little bit more about actually running ads and some of the other things that you can do to demystify Facebook ads.
Wrapping Things Up…
That wraps it up for this week. I hope you enjoyed this discussion of Facebook ads and I hope you spend some time this week thinking about who you are intentionally doing life with.
Again, I’m not suggesting that you ditch all of your friends, but the people that you surround yourself with make a big difference on your outlook and the outcomes that you’re going to get and I think you should be intentional about the way that you do things in your life. You’ll get a lot better results that way.
