5 Reasons I Don’t Do Facebook Anymore

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Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast
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Igor: Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your
host Igor Kheifets. So I’ve been recently playing with YouTube ads, I’ve been
studying more about it because I’ve been told that You Tube traffic is cheap, it’s
super targeted, and it’s really responsive. Of course that wasn’t the case,
because just like any other traffic source that’s being edified a glorified
YouTube, comes with its own set of challenges. We’re not going to get into YouTube
marketing right now, although I’m probably going to devote a couple of episodes in
the future to it, but as I was doing some research and I was trying to find some
videos to target, videos that had some good views, I stumbled into this video
where this Facebook ads guru, if you will, I mean they don’t consider themselves
that, but I’m going to basically tag them as a Facebook ads guru. In this video it
was somebody who is well known in the industry, who’s pretty successful, probably
not so much because of their Facebook ads activities but because they speak on
stage a lot. Basically I was looking at their videos and the video taught how to
start additional Facebook ads accounts. Now this was fascinating to me because as
an email marketer I accept that something like AWebber or GetResponse can shut you
down. Like an auto respond company that doesn’t like the way you email can shut
you down, and in one of the previous episodes I even described what to do if you
get shut down, and I myself got shut down many, many, many times.

In this case I was watching the video and I’ve seen that this Facebook ads guru
had like something like 32 or 46 Facebook ads accounts. That’s a lot. When I see
something like that and when I see them teaching other people how to start
multiple ad accounts and how to recover from an account that has been shut down,
I’m like thinking to myself, “Man, isn’t there a better way? I mean why do you
have to build a business on such a slippery foundation where at any given point
someone can come in and shut you down?” Because this is really different from if I
get my auto responder account shut down, I still get to retain my list, I still
get to re-upload my leads into a different company. They won’t even feel it,
they’ll just see a different unsubscribe link at the bottom so I’m not bothered a
lot by the fact that I may get shut down, as much as I was bothered when I got my
Facebook ads account shut down. Not to mention that the moment they shut you down,
they kind of put a little tracker on you in a way. It’s kind of like a wounded
animal that you track in the safari or the jungle. Because the moment you start
adding credit cards in the same zip code, the moment you start using similar
address or the same router or physical internet address, whatever, all the sudden
they shut you down again and again and again. You kind of build your business upon
it, even if you can make Facebook ads work, by the way. Which in and of itself is
a big challenge, especially today when it’s way too competitive and way too
expensive to run them. Even if you can overcome these challenges you’re still
playing a cat and mouse game and you’re basically going to sleep every night
looking over your shoulder thinking, “Man, am I going to wake up to not having a
business?” Because the moment they shut you down is A, you don’t get to keep your
audiences, you can’t really back them up, you can’t download a csv file with your
retargeting audiences or something like that. They don’t allow you to keep any of
your creatives, although I believe you still will be able to access your account,
you just won’t be able to advertise on it. But the moment you access that account
and then go visit your other account, they do one plus one or two plus two and
they shut you down. That’s exactly what happened to me.

I’ve had six Facebook ad account until I finally realized that, “You know what?
This is just not working out for me. I mean why am I being so stubborn and so
stupid about trying to get that on Facebook? Maybe there is a better way.” And I
went out there and I found a better way and made it work. Now I’m generating leads
for you know sometimes one tenth of the cost of what it usually takes you to
generate leads on Facebook for the same offers, plus I don’t have to deal with the
red tape, I can make claims, I can scale. I mean if you ever try to scale a
Facebook ad, it’s really quite an experience. So if you have a Facebook ad running
quite successfully at $10 a day you’re thinking, “Okay, so it’s not a scale and
all I have to do now is just double my budget.” And that’s exactly what you do.
You double your budget. And guess what happens? All of a sudden your cost per lead
is twice as high. So Facebook, and its really wicked smart algorithm, in its
infinite wisdom, is designed to help you spend as much of your money as possible.
I mean remember, that’s how they make money. So what they do is they just spend
more money, that’s it. And what you’ve done is, you didn’t scale your lead
generation, you made it worse. Of course the trick that is, in case you’re running
Facebook ads, so here’s a free tip for you, is to just duplicate the campaign,
instead of trying to increase the budget, you just duplicate the campaign for the
same budget and usually it works. But that’s, again, that’s Facebook for you.

You have to be aware of all these little tricks. I just hate it, I just I can’t
begin telling you how much I hate it for how hard they make it to be. Now you
think that they’re not supposed to be that way, you think they’re supposed to be
easier for marketers because that’s how they make money. Isn’t it? I mean if
Facebook makes money based on how much advertising it sells every month, then how
come it’s being so bad to marketers? And I’ll tell how, you I’ll tell you why.
Basically because you’re not their customer. The marketer is where they make the
money but it’s because of their users that the marketers come to the network. So
what Facebook does, it focuses on the experience, on the customer experience and
it is designed to pull people into its ecosystem for as long as they possibly can.
So their job is to not make our life as marketers life easier, it’s actually to
make our life harder. And any time we found a loophole that allows us to
profitably advertise, Facebook will be quick to shut down, because usually
whenever there is such a loophole, it somehow ruins the user experience. Think
back when in the golden days of Facebook you could actually scrape the Facebook
groups and you could advertise just the people who are members of the groups. I
remember scraping a group that was about 8,000 people of folks who were interested
in buying Solo ads, and running so massive that I was generating 10 to 15
customers a day just running a stupid simple Facebook out to that group because it
was so targeted, and I was shut down. Because Facebook decided that, “Hey, enough.
We’re changing our terms of service, we’re changing the rules of the game, and we
were not going to allow people to scrape groups anymore because it’s disturbing
the user.” So it turned out what happened was, people started complaining. Not
just on my ads, which I’m sure they did, but overall because everybody was
scraping groups at the time. And all of the sudden people who are members of a
certain group started seeing ads for that particular interest, and they shut it
down.

Now ironically today Facebook is actually tracking everything that you do across
all the websites that you go to even listen on your phone calls. So when you talk
to your friend about a Canon 70D camera that you want to buy or something like
that, which is the camera I use to shoot my videos courtesy of my friends, Dennis
and Anastasia who were kind enough to give it to me on my last birthday. If I
mention over the phone, I’ll start seeing ads for Canon 70D on my Facebook because
that’s a technology now. If you have Alexa or that Google thing where you could
talk to it, they too listen to your stuff, they too listen to your conversations,
and they too now show ads with your interests in mind. Now how is that even
different from what we see you with the groups? It’s not, but now Facebook is
doing it, and they’re the only ones who can and not everybody else. So they’re
ones profiting from it, not us. Again, I can keep going on and on and on how much
Facebook is unfair, how unfair it is, how annoying it is, how much I hate them.
And that’s actually one of the reasons in addition to all the obvious reasons that
I went off Facebook for a year, and I’m now selling my Facebook page recently to
increase my productivity and to just stay sane. The point of today’s episode, the
lesson here is, if you’re trying to build a business that requires you to have 36
ad accounts and expect to get shut down, then it’s probably not the best business
to be in. Because you don’t seem to be in control of your income and, as a result
of course, in your life. Now I personally tried that method and I that remember
exactly what it feels like when you got everything figured out, when you got all
your ads dialed in, when you got only a domain set up, you purchased your SSL
certificates, you’re all good in way to go and bam, they shut you down, you wake
up, your ad account is blocked, you can’t access your audiences, and worse, the
absolute worse part about this is that you don’t have any customers coming in. And
now you have to spend the next month or two months or three months rebuilding just
to get a trickle of customers. So not only you’re spending money, and not only
you’re spending time to build this “new foundation”, you’re not making money, and
the foundation you’re building will get shut down next month anyway. So what’s the
point? I just don’t get it. So this was just a quick rant about why I hate
Facebook ads. So anyway, thanks again for tuning in for the List Building
Lifestyle, and until next time we chat, have a good one.

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to
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one conversion tactic we share on the show might double your list and double your
business. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at
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of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival .
This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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