RR#091 - Case Study: Ads in Justin Welsh’s Newsletter

Jan 14

I don’t know about you, but I love me some organic content marketing.

I’ve driven nearly $2 million of client sales in organic content marketing. And 99% of it from just one channel: LinkedIn.

All without spending a dime on advertising.

When it comes to creating content and harvesting attention to generate client sales, we do it as well as anyone I know.

But, organic content marketing comes at a cost:

Countless hours creating, editing, & scheduling new content
Engagement with your community & other Creators on platforms
Harvesting that traffic by starting conversations and selling by chat

In other words, it takes a lot of work.

Organic content marketing is a sweat equity channel. There’s a reason they call it “earned media.”

When you’re getting started, it’s an incredible source of leverage.

You can reach hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people in your market without spending any money.

And as you grow, you’ll find a way to systematize some of the ‘sweat equity.’ You’ll automate some things and delegate others to a VA.

But, if you have aggressive growth goals, you’re still likely to hit plateaus if you’re marketing on one channel.

At that point, you’ll have a decision to make:

Take what you’ve learned from one channel and apply it to another. Or, find alternative ways to generate demand, like paid media.

Faced with this decision last year, I opted to test paid media.

Specifically, I made the decision to test ads on Justin Welsh’s newsletter, The Saturday Solopreneur.

Justin has an audience of ~200k highly engaged Solopreneurs who follow his newsletter. And a subset of his audience, the experts who want to productize their expertise into a scalable service, is a perfect fit for my 12 Week Bootcamp or Accelerator coaching program.

So, we rolled out a few ads.

And the results were mind-boggling.

I literally rethought my entire content and marketing strategy after this campaign.

I recorded a 12-minute video sharing details about this campaign and the results, including an A/B test to compare 1.5 years of organic content marketing to less than 2 weeks of paid media.

Watch full video.