Course Overview & Implementation System

Welcome to 80/20 Author Ads. Thanks for joining! If you have any questions or encounter any technical issues with the course, drop me an email at [email protected].

Hope you find the class helpful! You’ll find an implementation system below for applying and working your way through the course. If you have a system that works for you already, don’t change it. If not, however, then this framework can be used wholesale or as a starting point.

-Nick

APPLYING THIS COURSE: SHORT TERM

Most important: set aside 30m – 1h a day for the next 30 days to watch the course videos and/or implement. Of these two, implementation is far more important than watching every single thing in the course.

I’d recommend speeding up the videos, since they’re watchable at 1.5x (or even 2x) speed.

  1. Watch the Quick Start first. This is the ultimate 80/20 overview of the content, designed to get you up to speed on the fundamentals of ad strategy, tracking, and all three platforms in around three hours. Even if you’re advanced, it is vital that you have the fundamentals down, and my approach often differs significantly from what you may have encountered elsewhere. If the fundamentals are shaky, then shoring these up could instantly skyrocket your results. It never hurts to confirm that you’re approaching things the right way, since that gives you confidence to layer more advanced concepts on top of the fundamentals.
  2. Focus on mastering a single ad platform first. Better to be good at one than bad at all three. You can branch out once you have your feet solidly beneath you.
  3. Focus on making one series profitable first. Begin testing with the one that has historically been the most profitable. It is generally far easier and more effective to make good performers work better than to use ads to drag struggling series up from the depths. Better to have one profitable series than a half dozen that are all burning money at a prodigious clip.
  4. Track daily for 30 days when learning a platform. I’d recommend moving to weekly or monthly after this initial learning period, but tracking daily helps enormously for developing an intuitive feel for the numbers and what constitutes signal (important data) and noise (random fluctuations that don’t mean anything).
  5. When watching the videos, pause and copy the settings / process as I walk through it. Trying to recall every detail later results in errors.

LONG TERM IMPROVEMENT and MANAGEMENT: AFTER THE FIRST 30 DAYS

Once you have effective ads running, I find that spending too much daily hands-on time tends to be counterproductive. Let them work for you and make adjustments as the need arises, rather than constantly refreshing / changing things that are making you money.

You can continue with the daily hour to work on another platform or keep honing your skills on a specific platform (i.e., trying more complex things or testing features / ideas that you come up with). Or dramatically scale back your daily time investment if you’re satisfied with your progress and results.

Note that #4 and #5 might not make complete sense if you haven’t watched those videos yet. They’re part of the Quick Start (The Art of Book Marketing Alchemy and The Ultimate 15m Ad Copy Exercise).

  1. Track weekly and monthly.
  2. Check on the ads daily for 5m – 10m to make sure there aren’t any problems.
  3. Have a set day each week where you schedule an hour to track, make adjustments, and/or test new backlist ads. I suggest Sunday or Monday, as these days will allow you to cleanly compare week-to-week data (which is usually taken from Monday – Sunday). You do not need to test new ads if the performance of the current ones is good. You can also start test ads on other days as needed. This standing appointment ensures that you consistently take a deeper look at the data, rather than just letting things run endlessly unattended.
  4. Do the blurb hand-copying / writing exercise every day for 30 days. This can be part of your core marketing hour. It is the single best thing you can do to improve your marketing as a whole, not just ads.
  5. Commit to at least one optimization (alchemy) test per month: cover, blurb, pricing change, back matter, newsletter, etc.