Read Time: 3 Minutes

April 2020.

The world had just shut down.

My video production business — our entire household income — had come to a grinding halt overnight. No clients. No shoots. No revenue.

And my wife was two months away from giving birth to our twin boys.

To say money was tight would be an understatement.

It was in that pressure cooker of a moment, with our backs against a wall, stuck between a rock and a hard place, that I started running ads for my wife's books.

Not because we had the money (we didn't). But, because we were desperate to find something — anything — that could bring money into the house.

I started with about $10/day. Not through strategy. Through necessity.

But here's what I've since learned from having a tight budget constraint:

That tiny budget was a baptism by fire.

I had no idea what I was doing. No strategy. No playbook. Just a desperate hope that something would work. I guessed. I made mistakes. I winged it in ways that would make my current self wince.

But when every dollar counts, you pay attention in a way you simply don't when money is no object.

Those first few weeks of running ads changed everything for me about how I think about advertising.

And it's why I'll always push back when authors tell me they can't get started because their budget is too small.

Here's exactly what I'd do with just $150/month — $5 a day.

Step 1: Don't Touch The Ads (Yet)

Before a single penny goes to any ad platform, I'd fix the book.

That means asking some uncomfortable questions:

→ Does my cover look like it belongs in my genre?
→ Would a reader scrolling Amazon stop on it, or scroll past it?
→  Is my blurb doing its job — hooking the right reader, building tension, making them desperate to know what happens next?

This stuff isn't glamorous. It doesn't feel like marketing. But it's the most important work you'll ever do, because every ad you run sends traffic to that product page. If the page doesn't convert, the ad can't save it.

I learned this the hard way with my wife's books early on. We thought our ads were the problem. Turns out we just needed to look at the page people actually landed on.

Get the foundations right first. Everything else builds on top of them.

And the good news? This step doesn't take months. A focused weekend can be enough to audit what you have and make meaningful improvements.

Only then are you truly ready for ads.

Step 2: Start Small. Stay Focused

Now we advertise.

And here's the only rule that matters at this stage:

Pick one platform. And give it a real chance.

Not two platforms. Not three. One.

I see so many authors spread themselves thin trying to be everywhere at once — running tiny budgets across multiple platforms, none of them getting enough data to make any real decisions.

It's the fastest way to waste money and learn nothing.

$5/day on one platform, focused and intentional, will teach you more in two weeks than $5/day split across three platforms will teach you in three months.

So pick the platform that makes the most sense for your books and your readers. Start there. Go all in.

At this stage you're not trying to be profitable. You're doing one thing, and one thing only: 

Buying data.

Every dollar spent is an answer to a question. What resonates? What doesn't? What does your reader actually respond to — versus what you thought they would?

Run your first campaign for 7-14 days. Resist the urge to tinker. Let it breathe.

Then look at what the data is telling you.

Step 3: Double Down On What's Working

By now, something will have stood out.

Maybe one ad is getting more engagement than the others. Maybe your cost per click is lower than you expected. Maybe a particular angle or message seems to be resonating with readers in a way your others aren't.

Whatever it is — you now know something. Something you didn't know before you spent that first $150.

And that knowledge is the whole point.

This is when you iterate. Keep what's working running. Switch off what isn't. Test one new idea alongside your winner. Then another. One small experiment at a time.

The authors I see building sustainable, profitable ad campaigns aren't the ones with the biggest budgets.

They're the ones who treat every dollar as a lesson. Who stay patient. Read the data. Keep improving.

Do that consistently, and the budget takes care of itself.

$5/day isn't a limitation

It's a constraint. And constraints force clarity.

You can't afford to skip the foundations. You can't afford to spread yourself across every platform at once. You can't afford to make decisions based on gut feeling instead of data.

In a strange way, a small budget makes you a better advertiser.

Start there. Build from there.

That's all for this week. See you next Saturday.

To Your Success
– Matt