How to Stop Advertising on Facebook, Google, and YouTube — No More Ads for Myself

How to Stop Advertising on Facebook, Google, and YouTube? As an advertiser myself, I have spent almost $300K on ads since I started my business in 2011. This has been a big struggle for me. My biggest problem recently with business is advertising.

I've struggled to stop doing the ads. I say, “Okay, I'm not going to run any more ads on Facebook, Google, and YouTube”. Then the next day I'm like, “Well, I have this great idea and I'll do some ads”.

Like today, I've got a very small window to film videos and guess what am I doing? I'm messing around making a bunch of ads which, yes, if you're trying to get some initial views and build your channel or your brand and lay some kind of a foundation, ads can be really helpful.

If you want your business to just skyrocket to the moon, ads do help and ads do work which is why it's been so hard for me to stop doing them. So, it's starting today. I do not intend to make any more ads for myself.

I will make ads for other business owners to get them, clients, locally. That is the one loophole kind of so to speak. For example, I'm intending to do ads for my hypnotherapist to help promote her business and ads for my personal trainer to help promote her business and perhaps for the massage studio.

How to stop advertising? At what point do I stop advertising myself? There are thousands of people that find me every single day totally free. I could do absolutely nothing and thousands of people will find me every day.

I don't even need to put new videos out. I've got thousands of blog posts on my website that bring about 2,000 page views in a day for free with no ads. On YouTube, the videos that bring in anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000+ views every single day for free from YouTube search.

I've also been through the process of cutting my expenses drastically down in my business to have a profit and to stay in business, sustain, and grow.

At what point do I relax and just say, “Okay, I don't need to self-promote anymore?” I need all of my energy to simply serve the people like you that are already here. I know I'm not alone in this either because I see people all over the place struggling with this same thing.

How to stop advertising? People come to me like, “I just got my Facebook Ads Account disabled. How do I get another one?” I had an account disabled and initially, I took that as a sign that maybe that’d be a good time to stop advertising and then I changed my mind.

I said, “Well, you know I know a lot about ads and I spent thousands more on a new ad account”. I can't prove that those ads did anything significant in the course of my whole business.

How to stop advertising? I'm sharing this because this is the most real struggle I'm going through that feels like an addiction where one day I'm like, “I'm not going to do ads anymore”. The next day I'm like, “Well, I'll just do something”. Next week I turn all the ads off and then the week after that I turn all the ads back on.

It's so addicting. The instant gratification you get out of the ads from all the clicks and the views that you get from the ads and then the ads do work. The ads drive lots of new comments, new subscribers and lots of views.

What I've noticed about my business is I've caused a lot of noise in what I do from all the ads I've run and noise makes it more difficult for the audience to focus. The $300,000 I've spent in ads made at least that much, if not much more back in income plus built me a much bigger following.

The 286K subscribers on Youtube, especially millions of followers on Facebook, are due in large part to the ads I ran. At this point, I see that all that noise makes things more difficult in my business.

If I just had followers who'd found me through Google search, Youtube search or word of mouth then I'd have a very focused audience who loved and chose proactively to follow me.

If this would have happened then all of the metrics for my videos, for example, the number of likes and the number of dislikes, would be in a much more positive direction. A lot of times what ads do, ads bring people casually who might have just been on Facebook.

I've got millions of followers on Facebook. Probably 1.9 million or so of my followers are from ads on Facebook. I'd say at least and the problem with that is a lot of those people that just click to like once on one of my ads forget why they followed me to start with and then hide all of my posts from the newsfeed.

That negative feedback then is potent within all the rest of the feedback and that consistent negative feedback I believe has driven down the engagement of a lot of my posts on Facebook.

In fact, some have suggested I ought to just start a new Facebook and a new YouTube channel and then just bring everybody over to that to have a really core established audience. When you think about all of this, it makes it ridiculous.

How to stop advertising? You'd think, “Well, why just stop all your ads right now? Don't do any more ads?" I did it. I just turned off all of my ads. I was spending about $40 to $70 on my ads.

I have made a profit this month but for the rest of 2019, I'd been spending so much money on content creation, so much money to try and grow my business rapidly which has paid off in a lot of ways.

The money I've spent allowed me to build a platform Uthena.com that has one of the best continuing education programs anywhere online with hundreds of video courses plus daily video calls.

Yes, that money wasn't wasted but at the same time, at what point do you relax and enjoy the business you have? At what point do you stop endlessly hustling for more and more people and just focus on doing a good job on the people that are already here? How to stop advertising?

I realized today that I'm advertising something that I haven't even set up the email marketing for. On my continuing education programs for the scholars and the university, I still have not finished setting up the email, to send the correct welcome email since I adjusted and made this new program out of it.

This led someone yesterday to join and then pay extra money to book a call that should have been free which I refunded but that created extra work for all of us. Meanwhile, I've wasted no time spending over $100 to advertise the said new program.

It appears almost everyone who joined it joined for free just by watching videos or reading blog posts without even finding anything in ads. Perhaps the worst part about this is that I then aim at my content creation specifically for ads.

For example, I've got another addiction to put out like these videos that are just for ads that if I wasn't advertising, I wouldn't have filmed it that way but I know I'm doing this just for an ad and therefore, I film the video to be used in an ad which doesn't always make the best experience for you as a viewer that just saw this without it being in an ad.

Therefore, when I do that, I'm messing with the experience of you that are watching without seeing ads. I'm making these videos for ads. For example, I just put out an almost 7-hour “How to get more views on YouTube”.

The whole reason I did it that way was to (a) test a really long format video and (B) I planned on dumping a bunch of money in ads to rank that video and that requires testing. So getting that video rank I imagine with the ads, giving it an artificially boosted watch time, then it has a good shot to rank much higher in the results.

How to stop advertising? Then I'm like, “Man, how much time am I going to be spending doing those ads instead of putting out new videos ?” Right now, I don't have any videos, maybe I have one video scheduled ahead of time with my speed of filming.

There's no reason that I can't have a week or two of my videos scheduled in advance. That way if something comes up, videos still consistently come out on my channel. That way I can take a vacation without needing to obsess over being able to film videos.

That way I can take a holiday. I can take a few days off. I work 7 days a week and I have been through this process of letting go, cleansing, and dropping things lately. The ads have been resisting.

I was like, “I know this work. I'm getting views. I'm getting subscribers. People are buying stuff”. I've talked about this because it's very important I find to share what I'm struggling with openly, especially if I want to move on and to do better.

How to stop advertising? I see that everything's not so cut and dry in life. It's not the best thing for me to just say I'm never going to advertise anything because ads can help other people who could benefit much more from help than me.

For example, my hypnotherapist. I can sell peer-to-peer for her. If I sell you on my stuff, that's not peer-to-peer essentially because I'm a seller and you’re the buyer but if another buyer sells it to you as another buyer, that can be very powerful for a sales pitch instead of the seller to the buyer and my hypnotherapist does not have the skills currently.

She could if she wanted to but it would take a lot from her to make a video ad for her business and try and advertise it. It's super easy for me and then with a local approach that can work really well to bring her clients.

So I see a clear distinction today is to stop self-promoting with ads and stuff to start focusing completely on doing a good job for you that's already found me and this is my biggest struggle that I'm going through today.

In fact, last night, I couldn't sleep because I was so excited thinking about how I could get ahead with more ads that are so dumb. I already have close to 10,000 people a day that find me for free.

When you combine everything, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Website. When you put it all together like at least 10,000 and sometimes 20,000 to 40,000 people a day see what I create.

Google alone is probably anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 people every single day to see for free what I do. Do I really need to advertise on top of that? No. It's ridiculous and if I look at my sales report, yesterday people were very generous in buying lots of things from me and over the last week and most of them were not coming in through ads.

Thank you if you were one of the people. There was a Mobile App Developer Forever Bundle sold. A hacking course sold and someone was kind enough to pay almost $300 an hour for my time. We've got a subscription to the Scholars Program, a Partner Membership, a Sponsored video and several more sales on the partner program.

At this point, I have enough work to do to serve my customers and to do a good job for you and I hope this is helpful for you today because I see this as a common struggle. I've talked in depth about this because I imagine this can help you.

It seems a lot of advertising spending online is kind of addictive. It's done out of a mindset that I don't have enough. Now, I love sharing my message and I've been rationalizing it. Well, I should use the ads because I love what I've got to say so much that I want to share it with everybody.

I'm grateful for the authors who reached out to me with their books and blah blah blah. They used advertising and marketing. At what point do you just say I've got enough? 30,000 to 50,000 people see what I do every day for free.

Isn't that enough without pumping more ads? So, today I'm committing to serving you completely by just doing a good job for you and trusting that when I do a good job for you, I'll have what I need that I don't need to go hustle, try and get more people to find out about me that I've got enough today.

How to stop advertising? Maybe when I have enough today and you see how I work through these challenges, maybe that'll be helpful for you when you're you're struggling with something.

I appreciate you reading this and if you'd like to ask me anything, I've got my info up at jerrybanfield.com/contact and you can send me a text message, WhatsApp, an email, join me for a workshop, ask me to do speaking or hire me for one-on-one services.

I love you. You're awesome. Thank you for learning about how to stop advertising, giving me the chance to serve you and to be enough today.

Love,
Jerry Banfield

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