Ashley Brock (0:00)

Welcome to the Marketing Matters podcast for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and really anyone who has anything that you want more people to find. Because you being the best kept secret helps no one, right? And that's because you can be so great at what you do. But if you aren't great at advertising what you do, then no one can find you, right? That's why in every single episode, I'm going to show you how you can use paid ads to hit your goals 10 times sooner. It's time you finally learn how to win with paid ads. I'll show you how to score and be known by more. Let's get started. Today we're talking all things book launch party number one. How did the book launch go? How did I know what to do? Did I work with anybody? What were the results? Everything about the official book launch of how to Win with Paid Ads I'm going to share with you today. But before I do, speaking of winning with paid ads, if you have not joined the Win with Paid Ads challenge, you've got to do it. And the reason I say that is because the book is such a great starting point for you to get the stories and the examples and the strategies on how you can win with paid ads. But what's really special about the challenge is it is live. You are getting live coaching in the VIP room. You're getting to learn from all these other business owners and the questions that they have. And you're getting to learn from how I coach them and how I'll get to coach you too, because it is the one place where you get five days straight of live feedback. So, comment challenge. Or I guess we're not on Instagram. So click the link below this podcast, video, podcast or video. Or go to ashleybrock.com challenge and I cannot wait to see you live in the Win with Paid Ads challenge. All right, so let's talk about the Win with Paid Ads book launch party. How the actual book launch came to be. So here's the timeline. I decided to kind of tease that I was writing a book. I don't know, sporadically, maybe once or twice a month for the past couple of months. It's been very here and there. And then what I decided to do is, if you remember, I've spoken about this before. But it is that there is a difference between a launch and an announcement. And the way that I've kind of gone on to explain it and think about it, is that an announcement is we opened a store announcement is there's a book announcement is a Like kind of one moment in time where you say this is happening. And the difference between a launch is it is a story. And what does a story have? There's three things a story has, right? A story has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so that is what we did with the book launch party. So we had two weeks, just two weeks where we teased and said something is coming. So the way that we did it is we had two weeks before we spent seven days saying something's coming, being on the edge of your seat, that something cool is coming. And then the week of the book launch party. So we launched the book on Friday. So on Monday, that was the day we officially announced that there was a book. Like it was a book. And then we teased a little bit of it each of those next few days. And then we actually hosted a secret book launch party. And I say secret because we invited some current clients and some people who had come to the summit in the past and some, some friends and family. So it was a tight knit group. We had about 150@ the book launch party. And I actually didn't share the entire week that there would be a book launch party. It was just something special that I wanted to offer and to have with the people and clients who have just come together to grow this business that I've been able to have a small role in helping their business grow through paid advertising. So it was not a necessary expense. Like we totally could have launched the book. In fact, we actually hit Amazon Bestseller before the book launch party at 6:00. And I had had this plan. I was like, hey, I knew that after working with my book launch coach, I knew that there was a certain volume of sales we needed to have in 24 hours. And I was like, also at the book launch party. For anybody who hasn't gotten the book, we're only offering it at this one price for this one day at the book launch party. They can get their book and buy it there if we haven't hit that threshold yet. But we had actually became a best seller from launching it at 6am and then we were officially bestseller at 3pm so before the book launch party, we actually found out that, that we'd made it. So the book launch party was not necessary. And it was the very reason that I wanted to do it, because it was something that, you know how when you. Here's an example, and I may have shared this story before, but Kyle and I went to this really nice hotel called Hotel Bennett in Charleston, South Carolina. And when we were unloading the suitcases, we had a bottle of champagne and it burst on the side sidewalk. I mean, it just exploded everywhere on the car behind us. It was this whole thing. So it exploded. And by the time we walked into the hotel, they already had a replacement. And they were like, Mr. And Mrs. Brock, here is a bottle. Like, they did not have to do that. And it was the very reason that I respected and loved that whole experience even more. And that's what I wanted the book launch party to be was how can you do something and treat people in the way that you would want to be treated? And so we had just set aside some budget to basically say. I kept calling it the entrepreneur's wedding, but I was like, this is just a place where you can come and celebrate and get to know and network with these other six, seven and eight figure entrepreneurs. So it was really cool. So that was the book launch party. It was a great time to just like connect and love on past clients too. So it was really great. So here's the timeline. So we did the pre launch those two weeks before. Right. And then we had the day of on Friday, February 28th. Now I had heard from my book launch coach, McKayla, and I'll link to her Instagram below here. She's absolutely wonderful. She actually specializes in helping women with a nonfiction book. And she works with. Yeah, wait, non fiction means true? Yes, that's it. So she. It always gets me in school. You too? Like fiction versus non fiction. It always got me. Anyway, she helps women with the editing, she helps with the planning, she helps with the writing. Or when I say writing, like the actual, like mapping out an organization. I wrote every word of the book. And you know, I remember, I remember being in New York City for a mastermind that I had invested in. And I was walking with my coach at the time, Macy, and It was probably 8:30 at night. There's a big group of us and we're just walking in the street. And I was talking to her about how I wanted to do ghost writing for my book. And I'm not bashing ghost writing here, by the way. I just want to challenge your thoughts as you decide ghost writing or not. So ghostwriting is where someone interviews you, gets to know you, and you share your story and your message with them. And then they take that and turn it into a book. And they're typically a really great writer. They're just great at communicating a message. And I remember thinking, I'm going to do ghostwriting because I'm so Busy. I was like, when am I going to have time to write a book? And one of my coaches, Kat, actually, she had told me, she said, divorce yourself from how long something should take. And so I was like, well, if I actually truly divorce myself, I could tell the story that, you know, it would take a year to write a book or six months to write a book. But I said, I'm going to write a book in 45 days. And I just told myself that it was so possible. And when I was walking in that street with Macy, she looked at me and she said, I don't think you should ghost write. And I was like, why do you say that? And she said, because the person that you will become from writing your book is someone you will never meet if you don't write it. And it forces you to pull out your messaging. It forces you to really think about how you're saying what you're saying. And I can tell you right now, one of the reasons I've had such clarity on my message, in my advertising, in this podcast, in my emails, in social media, in my coaching is because of the work that writing a book forced me into. And it allowed me to develop new frameworks. It allowed me to have something that I truly believe is unique and different. And I feel like people can see that and they can feel it in my content, but also in yours. You don't have to have a wide audience. You just have to have the right audience and other people who do something similar to what I do. I have noticed on occasion, they see that I've figured out the way to communicate it. They're like, no, no, no. This is part of what I do too. And I'm like, right. I've developed a way of speaking about it. And that is what happens when you write your own book. That is what happens when you are forced to actually be a thought leader instead of a thought repeater. And I'm gonna be honest. When I first got started, I looked to the people that I love that were killing it. And without realizing it, I was becoming a thought repeater. Now you have to start somewhere. And what I really want you to do is start by thinking, how can you be a thought leader? Someone who actually leads your own thoughts so that people actually come to you and they're like, oh, my gosh, I heard this from Ashley. Oh, my gosh, I heard this from Macy. Oh, my gosh, I heard this from Jeanette. Oh, my gosh, I heard this from Kimberly. Oh, my gosh, I heard this from Hannah. How can you be the one that comes up with your own thoughts? And the only way to do that is to sit down and legitimately think. Like, if you don't think, you can't have thoughts. So I want you to consider doing the work that allows you to pull out the messaging for you to create your own book and your own messaging too, right? Because I'll say it once, I'll say it again. New love songs are written every day. Tennis shoes are sold every day. Cameras and microphones are sold. Every coaching is sold every day. Books are sold every day. And there is only one you. Right? So sit down and write the book and divorce yourself from how long it could take and work with a book coach. Because honestly, Mikaela helped me so much in saying, here's our outline. Here's how we want to build it. Here's what the goal is at the end. And I just kind of had a plan. And when I had a plan, I could just go and. So if you're really wondering how long did it take to write the book? Well, it took over a decade of experience to write the book. It took doing ads all day, every day. And the experience in the methods were inside of me. They just needed to be forced to be thought about and written out. And that's why I know you can do that too. It's just gonna take you planning. Planning that. So. All right, so wrote the book in about 45 days, 30 to 45 days. Once I actually sat down and just put a clock on it, I would be like, one chapter this day, one chapter this day, one chapter. Like, I would just put it on my calendar, color coded, total Ashley style. Like, this is where is your one block to write a chapter every day? So that's kind of how I approached it. And then I gave her feedback. Mikayla did, like, the editing, and then she helped me design the book covers. And then, let's see, you have to kind of like map out the interior with the page numbers and the sectioning. She did all of that. She worked directly with the team on the back end. And then once the book was in final review, me mom, Kyle Lorbeth, we all read it, made final edits again, and then this is all over, like, Thanksgiving, Christmas time. And then once we were actually ready to publish on Amazon, Cause we, you know, self publish on Amazon, Michaela met with Laura Beth, my director of operations, and they kind of went back and forth and were able to get the book uploaded. So Laura Beth had never uploaded a book to Amazon. And yet with Michaela's guidance, she was able to know exactly what to do, how to do it, and that was really important in us being able to become a bestseller because there's all this strategy to it. And I'm not going to go into that because what I'm not is an Amazon bestseller coach. But what I can say is when you have someone who knows what the heck you're doing, it's like ads, you have someone who knows what the heck you're doing, you don't have to figure it out. You know, I joke about it and you may have heard me say this before, but I like for my clients to be wonderfully wonder free. Like you're not having to wonder what to click the Type A. And you probably stresses out when you go to open up Ads Manager if you, if we don't work together and you're like, I don't know what to click or something's working and I don't know why. And so I didn't want our team to wonder, which is why we paid Michaela. Like, could we have figured it out? Yes, there's Google, YouTube, you could probably Google or YouTube a lot of stuff. And like we needed speed and efficiency and we didn't need to do it the wrong way the first time. And so Michaela helped us say, this is the category. Here's the pros and cons. Here's, here's how we would do this. And so we picked our categories. And so it would have been safer for us to actually launch the ebook first to become bestseller, because yes, you can become an Amazon bestseller by getting a lower volume of purchases on an ebook. Or you could say, I want to do actually the physical copy of the book and you have to hit exponentially more copies in 24 hours. And so of course I'm like, let's go big or go home, you know. And so Alex Hormozi, he actually owned, owned the number one spot in advertising for this category. And I'm like, if he's number one, like, I have this vision. I was like, I could see it. Like, I would play it in my brain over and over and over again. Like I could see my book and then his. And I thought about that for so long and I was like, it has to be this category and it has to, it has to be this one. So she's like, all right, well, here she has this tool and it shows about how many you need. And it was this whole thing to get in that 24 hours, but it was within 24 hours. And so we started at 6am and by 3pm we had hit the category. And this is an interesting thing, but it only counts when the order ships. So I just want you to think about how on Friday, Amazon's magic. It's like they had to order and they had to ship it for it to count towards the count. It was crazy. So let's see a few other things I wanted to share with you. So we ended up the results. So we ended up being number one in advertising, number one in new releases, and then number one in top movers and shakers. So it was like boom, boom, boom. And we got those screenshots. But did you know that actually wasn't like the coolest part of all of this? The coolest part was that for Friday, February 28, 2025, we were number 360 of all books on Amazon for that day. All books. So there are like, I don't know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of books on Amazon, but we were in the top 500 for that day, which was pretty much actually. And here's why that's actually important. I do have a dream of becoming a New York Times bestselling author with a not self published book, but an actual official publisher. And I already know the name of the book, already know the mission of the book, I already have it. But in order for me to get that deal, to pitch that to them, to do a publishing, that screenshot alone of the fact that we were in the top 500 books in all books on Amazon the very first day of release is really powerful and it adds credibility. So, so that screenshot was worth it. So as you think about your book, like when you're gonna do it, go all in, get those screenshots, get the volume. So those were the results. And let's see, we talked about the certain threshold. There was something else I wanted to share. Oh, so did you know on Amazon you can create with ads, you can create a different tracking link for anything. So here's what I mean. I made a tracking link for my organic Instagram, I made a tracking link for my ads. I made a tracking link for email. I made a tracking link for the book launch party for anybody that bought there. Like I made a specific tracking link for anything. That's why I'm huge. Why one of my clients is an incredible fashion influencer and blogger. And it's so cool because she, her income is through Amazon and we can track it and measure it and optimize it so well. And so you can do the Same thing too is you can track very detailed way. So I set up tracking to put it in my email ads everywhere. I want to ask you, pause for just a second. Where do you think the majority of sales came from on the day of the book launch party? I mean, I think because this is a paid ad advertising podcast, you're probably assuming it is paid advertising and it is not. It actually was email. So I had really built up my email list through paid ads, mind you, which is really nice. So that is just one of the reasons why email is part of the strategy that I teach. How do you grow your email list and how do you use paid ads to do so, and how do you make sure it's the right people? Because I don't have a massive email list. I mean, it continues to grow every single day. And it's a metric that we track as a company. But I don't have a massive email list. I don't have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people on there. What I do have is the right people. I don't have a massive audience on Instagram right now. I think we're at just about 14,000, and I hit a million when we were just right at 5,000. And what that means for you is that you don't have to have a massive audience to be successful. You just have to have the right audience. And so with the email list, we were able to get the majority of the purchases there. And then we did Ads was number two. So it was email, then ads, then organic. And I just sit here and think you'd have to have a massive audience organically to be able to do it as quickly as we did. But at the same time, it was just. Even if you could have hit it organically, knowing that I had grown my email list as a way to really be successful was really powerful. And it's one of those things where you're casting your vote for future you when you prioritize running ads to your email list so that when it is time for you to share something or launch something big, you've got these people that are your people. They're the people that can't wait to hear what you have to offer. And they're on your list, which is really cool. So, yeah, organic or sorry, email, then ads, then organic were where the purchases came from. And I want to ask you this. So Robert's here. I'm filming a podcast episode. He's helping me. You're the best. So, Robert, I asked this on a group call, but I'm Curious, because I told him I was going to ask him this question, but I didn't tell him the answer. So, Robert, what do you think was how much do you think I spent on ads on just Friday alone? If you had to guess, how much on ads do you think I spent? Oh, are you saying how long? Well, I launched the ads at 6am and then I turned them off at 10pm1200 dollars. Okay. Okay. So it was 2,800. Okay. That was good. He knows me so well because he knows, like, I'll definitely spend the money, but, like, we didn't have to spend that much if you think about it, which is a good thing. You know, I asked this question to my mastermind group and some of them were like $100,000. And I was like, no, no, no, it wasn't that wild. I mean, I would have spent it, but we just didn't need to because we started to see that sales were coming through organically. And with paid, I was like, we're in a great spot. So we well beyond surpassed the threshold that we had to with Amazon. So it was really cool. So what that means for you is you can hit these big goals when it is the right audience. Now, listen, over the past decade, you know, I've been running ads, and over the last three years, I've really been honing in on my audience, my people, my messaging. And so I just want you to take a moment and think, when you, with paid advertising every single day, are honing in on your audience and your messaging, what if there was a way that you could hit a big goal and a big dream by not having to spend a hundred thousand dollars simply because you're targeting, your messaging is aligned. That's what's possible when you refine and work on that. And that's why I feel like it was, it was such a win on Friday because we'd taken some time to kind of build up the momentum, have the right audience, and then use paid ads as part of the strategy to. To have a really big day. So I think that's everything that I wanted to share today. I'm looking back, I think it's just a reminder that this is why I teach tracking. I know I mentioned the Amazon thing, but if I could sit, if I sat here and I was like, I don't know what worked. Something's working. That would be really challenging, right? Because I wouldn't know for the next book, for the next promotion, how am I going to allocate my funds? Am I gonna like, build My email list before more. Am I going to spend more on ads that day? There's so many pieces of it. And I think about other people who had landed in this category. I think some people may have, like, I don't know how much Alex Hormozi spent on his day. He had. He is such a killer. I mean, so good at the affiliate stuff and the partnerships. That's like a big piece of his, too. And it was really cool that with a smaller audience and smaller ad spend, we could still hit a very large goal and that the power of paid advertising and how you can win with paid ads, too. So I want to remind you that this is a transferable skill. So had I ever launched an official book with ads ever before? No. And what I did know was setting, targeting, messaging, testing, and tracking. I had all of that. And so it is why ads is so powerful. Because it's not exclusive to a book launch party. It's not exclusive to real estate agents, it's not exclusive to videographers, it's not exclusive to a local service provider, it's not exclusive to a. An online boutique. When you have this skill, this advertising skill, just like pancakes, I don't care whose kitchen it is. If I have pancake mix and the ingredients, I can make a pancake anywhere. Now, some pans are gonna be less sticky. Some ovens. Well, you don't put pancakes in the oven necessarily. Well, you could if you're keeping them warm or want it to be extra crispy. But the whole point is that when you have a skill, you can transfer that. So my cfo, Hannah, she came over to my house and she made coffee with my coffee machine. Because she has a skill with it, she was able to transfer that skill from her environment and her setup with her coffee beans to my environment, and she was able to easily adapt. And that is what's so cool about paid ads, is whatever business you want to advertise, you can take it, take the skill with you for literally ever, and use it for the business you're running now and the business that you grow after you scale this one and want another business that doesn't require you. I read recently, I think it was Dave Ramsey. He said, if you have a business that can't run without you, you don't have a business, you have a job. And the goal for all of us. Well, I'll tell you right now, I love what I do every single day, and I'm going to use these skills to grow this business. And then one day we'll likely take some of the profit from this business and start something else. Maybe it's more Airbnbs. Maybe it's another business. Maybe we'll buy another company and have that run too. It's so empowering to know that no matter what, you know how to get people to find you. Because you're not just exclusive to Google Ads. You're not just exclusive to meta ads or TikTok ads or YouTube ads. Like, when you can understand all the ads, you have a competitive advantage over everybody else. And you can have a big book launch party. You can have just any goal that's in your heart that you know you want to achieve. You can do that with paid advertising. So if you haven't joined the challenge, the five day how to Win with Paid Ads challenge, click the link below this podcast video or this YouTube video and or go to ashleybratt.comchallenge and I cannot wait to see you on the next episode. And by the way, by the way, if you didn't listen to the episode before this, about Carrie's story, it was gold. Like, you should listen to it a couple times. I mean, she talked about how she used to spend. Like, the example she gave was how she spent 23,000 on ads with an agency and got 68,000 in revenue. And then she worked with me and spent $1,000 on ads. Or no, it was 3,000. $3,000 on ads and did over six figures in revenue. Hello. That is, that is why it feels so good to charge what I do for these programs. Because I know that the payback is coming or the payoff is coming. And it can happen in a month, it can happen in a week, it can happen in a year. But then when it happens, you have the skill for the rest of your life. So go listen to Carrie's episode and otherwise I'll see you live on the Win with Paid Ads challenge or on the next episode.