Online marketing is all the rage. You get beat to death with offers to build your firm from LinkedIn gurus and website designers. But here are a few cold hard facts from my own life.
In 1995, I could buy add clicks for 25 cents and sell $5,000 a day in book and tape orders out of 1,000 clicks ($250). Today I pay $25 per click, and I need 100 clicks to get one new customer ($2,500). That customer might spend $3,000. My cost has gone up 100 fold, and results are down by 90%.
Between 2006 and 2017, I paid over $100,000 in consulting fees to big-name gurus, trying to go back in time to 1995. The leads I generated were plain awful. My phone rang, but I am too old to tolerate fools and bottom feeders.
My guess is the biggest money on Facebook is selling courses on how to make money on Facebook. Yet, I still use it every day. My lead cost is lower, and I my closing rate is awful but I still end up with some good clients out of Facebook, so I push my books there.
But when I need leads for ghostwriting mortgage brokers or ghostwriting for accountants, I still use Facebook.
My advertising starts with one of my books, and offers to sell it for $10,00 on Amazon, but if they click here I will send it out for postage only. I want the lower value sales because Amazon will not give me the name of buyers. If they buy the book from my web site they are a good lead and we move the name to MailChimp for follow up, until the prospect calls us.