Is it okay to lose your money at first?

[Dopani]

Hello everyone, I'm currently building my email list using forum marketing and ads from forums and Facebook. I'm getting 4-6 subscribers per day for $5-$8 and I'm not getting enough profit to cover my expenses. Is it okay to lose money now and build my email list which will cover these expenses in the long term? Or is it a practice?

 

[samimnoorzaitgc]

4-6 subscribers per day for $5-$8? hmm... well, doesn't look good. Try doing it with lesser money, it'll be good for you. It is natural that we lose some money when setting things up but it'll be perfect if we get the right way a bit sooner.

 

[elcidofaguy]

Hello everyone, I'm currently building my email list using forum marketing and ads from forums and Facebook. I'm getting 4-6 subscribers per day for $5-$8 and I'm not getting enough profit to cover my expenses. Is it okay to lose money now and build my email list which will cover these expenses in the long term? Or is it a practice?

You need to take every effort to improve.... What you describe is a perfect representation of agile principles of "Transparency, Inspection and Adaption"... In otherwords keep track of everything and strive to improve... Clearly your results and ROI is not what you want to achieve... Therefore ask yourself:

1) Why is your conversion rate so low?
2) What can you do to improve your conversion rate?
3) Are you using multiple sources for ads? If so which sources are the best so far?
4) Do you have ideas that you want to split test?
5) What other traffic sources could you leverage?
6) Do you have the appropriate means to measure outcome effectively?
7) Do you have a plan in place for the short, mid and long term?

At the end of the day we all have lost money on experimenting... The key is to focus on where to improve and to take appropriate action in response....

Hope that helps!

 

[professorrosado]

As a general rule, I would not invest money where I am not sure that what I am doing is absolutely correct.
The second consideration is: how much does each subscriber represent to you?

as a generalized example:
Let's say your eventual list offer converts very well at 1/100 (1 conversion per 100 visits) you spent $8 max for 4-6 subscribers - so lets just use the max 6.
$8 divided by 6 Subscribers = $1.33 spend to get 1 subscriber.

You need 100 to get 1 sale = $133 spend / per sale.

So does your offer payout enough to make this worthwhile?

The reality for most is that they need to send 1000 visitors to an offer for one sale - in the case above that's a $1,330 ad spend to get your list to that number and then only 1 sale! Unless you're selling Real Estate for a few points, I don't see that as a good thing.

So I wouldn't and haven't spent like you on any ad campaign. Some marketers will tell you that its normal, but so is losing money on Internet marketing.
What elcidofaguy said above is spot on, but it will take some money to get you to the optimized state you want (to find the sweet spot).

It's either that or hone your SEO skills and leverage other traffic sources until you can afford to become your own ad agency.