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Since creating my course, Flourish with Facebook Ads, my students have seen amazing results with creating and running their own Facebook ads.

Facebook ads can be used for a variety of different strategies. They can be used to increase affiliate revenue, drive sign-ups for webinars, and get your message in front of more people.

Pete McPherson is the owner of Do You Even Blog. He’s a full-time husband and dad, an idealistic entrepreneur, blogger, marketer, CPA, data nerd, STAR WARS nerd, and really fast typer.

He spends his days teaching people how to grow profitable and impactful blogs. He’s also a student of Flourish who has successfully grown his email list for as little as $0.73 per subscriber!

Let’s dive in and see exactly how Pete has been able to achieve these awesome results!

Changing the Way the World Thinks

Pete didn’t start off as a blogger and podcaster. In fact, he started out like most of us.

He was unsure of what he wanted to do when he grew up and ended up changing his college major five times before graduation.

His career as a corporate CPA wasn’t necessarily the right fit for him. So, in 2009, he discovered blogging and the world of online business. Since then, he’s started several businesses and blogs with varying degrees of success.

According to his own estimate, he’s started around 45 different businesses and blogs!

While some of these ended in failure, he did gain many skills along the way, and a purpose to change the way the world thinks about work.

With that mission, his current venture, Do You Even Blog, was born to help bloggers create world-class content as a full-time business. He also has a fantastic guide that will help pretty much anyone learn how to monetize a blog in no time!

Running Ads Without Big Results

For the first three years of running Facebook ads for his various ventures, Pete spent around $2,500 and had a negative experience overall.

The biggest reason he was running ads without achieving the results he was looking for was because he didn’t have an overall strategy for how ads could help build his business.

In November 2016, Pete began running his first new ad campaign after finishing module one of the course. His goal was to invest $100 to get as many entries as possible for his blogging bundle giveaway. Each new entry would be a new subscriber to his email list.

But again, he didn’t see the results he was hoping for.

In fact, Pete got ZERO conversions from the first half of his ad spend of $50. “I was impatient and that was a mistake,” he says. “It flopped!”

Here’s Pete’s original ad:

Turning the Tide

Luckily, Pete continued to work his way through the course and also took advantage of the group coaching calls — including the bold move of being in the “hot seat.”

Students can apply to be in the hot seat during one of our group coaching calls that occur two times every month. Jumping into the hot seat allows the students to share their exact ad campaigns to get specific feedback for improvement.

During Pete’s hot seat, we re-wrote and re-designed his ad to look like this:

After conducting an overhaul of Pete’s ad copy and the image for his ad, he was able to get 73 subscribers using the rest of his $100 budget.

This means that his cost per email subscriber went from zero conversions to just $0.73 (73 subscribers divided by $100 = $0.73). This includes the first half of his budget where he got zero conversions!

Pete’s campaign results completely turned around after jumping into the hot seat and getting feedback from the group and me!

Imagine the results he could have achieved had his higher-performing ad run the whole time!

Facebook ad costs and results generally improve over time as the algorithm gains a better understanding of who to target within the specific audiences selected.

Thus, the results from the other half of his budget being put toward the better-performing ad could have more than doubled the number of email subscribers he received.

Pete’s Biggest Takeaways

Still, Pete did all the hard work when it came to going from 0 conversions to an average of $0.73 per subscriber. He took a chance and invested in Flourish — even though he had a not-so-great experience with Facebook ads in the past.

He was also open to feedback and was up for making the changes that were suggested. And his hard work paid off!

During this time, Pete also created his own “swipe file” of various Facebook ads from his past campaigns, as well as ads he’s found while scrolling through his News Feed. He says that reviewing and taking note of the ads being put out by other, similar brands can be helpful when creating your own ads.

The biggest lessons Pete learned from his experience is that time spent considering the overall strategy for your Facebook ads will result in less wasted money on low-performing ads.

It’s easy to rush in and want to get started creating ads, choosing images, writing copy, and end up wasting money. Instead, having a thorough understanding of your campaign strategy and objectives will pay off with better results.

If you’re ready to create your own Facebook ads success story, click here to to learn more about Flourish with Facebook Ads, my step-by-step system to create campaigns that convert!