I think you need to be strategic with your ads. Now more so than ever, ever since the iOS 14 update where paid ads aren't as effective as they used to be. If you're going to spend money on ads, just make sure it is worth it. This is the show for creative entrepreneurs who have a message to share and want to live a life of freedom. Learn how to grow your network and net worth. Hear from exciting guests and more. My name is Dylan Schmidt and Welcome to Digital Podcaster. Let's talk ads and podcasting, specifically Instagram and Facebook ads. When it comes to paid ads for your podcast, there are a few things that you'll probably want to know. These are things that I've learned from working with paid ads, specialists, and podcasters. And I am not a paid ad specialists. But I do work with podcasters. I'm kind of in between those two worlds and can share what I've learned, I'm going to be referring to mostly Instagram and Facebook ads. Those are the most popular that I hear and talk about with podcasters. So first things first, if you are monetizing your podcast, or you have plans to monetize your podcast paid ads could be beneficial for you. If you're not monetizing your podcast, you have no idea how to monetize your podcast, I wouldn't look into paid ads just yet, because you're not going to see a return on your ad spend meaning when you spend $1. You want to know how much you're making back. If you're monetizing your podcast, you at least have an opportunity to recoup some of the money that you spent on advertising. If you're not monetizing your podcast, you're not going to see any return on your ad spent right. Just because you have 500 listeners that came from an ad isn't always necessarily best for you. So a lot of this will fall on it depends. Some best practices I've seen around advertising for podcasts is number one, not advertising your whole show advertising a whole show is a hard sell for people. Because you have all these episodes. And there's just so much to dive into listeners don't know where to start. That's why what I've found works best is advertising a specific part of your episode highlighting the best moments of your podcast in that ad. If you already repurpose your podcast and posted on social media, you can take your best performing organic posts, and then run those as paid ads to this specific episode. Also, you want to make sure that you're talking to listeners as if they were listening for the first time. Hey, I wanted to take a quick break. And thank you so much for listening to the show Digital Podcaster is continuing to grow because of the ratings and reviews it is getting. So if you haven't taken a quick minute to leave a review on Apple Spotify or wherever you listen, I would greatly appreciate it. Again, the success of the show is dictated by you the listener. So your ratings and reviews mean the world to me. Thanks again for making Digital Podcaster success. And I could only do this with you. Anyways, back to Digital Podcaster. So if you're running an ad to an episode, they go and listen to your episode, will they have enough context to know what they're going to hear in that episode to make them actually want to listen, at the end of the episode? Are you giving them a specific call to action? Are you making it easy for them to sign up to your email newsletter to be notified about future episodes and to get more from you. So when you have those things set up, it's a lot easier to harness the power of ads. If you just throw out ads, and you just spend a random amount of money, which I've had a lot of podcasters ask me if it's a good idea, I don't think that's a good idea. I think you need to be strategic with your ads. Now more so than ever, ever since the iOS 14 update where paid ads aren't as effective as they used to be. If you're going to spend money on ads, just make sure it is worth it. And it really again is only worth it. If you're monetizing your podcast and you are able to see a return on your ad spend or you want to grow your podcast strategically and you know exactly who you're going to target. And you have an exact plan and strategy for what you're going to do with those paid ads. It becomes really easy to throw money at the wind and hope that that will catch on and build your following. But a real organic following can be built for free using social media and your email newsletter starting today. So you don't need to spend money on growing your podcast. Using paid ads to grow your podcast is a choice. And a choice that doesn't really apply for everybody is not really needed. But it could be beneficial if you're monetizing on the back end. So those are just some things I would like for you to take into consideration if you're thinking about doing paid ads. I hope that helped. I will catch you in the next episode.