Growing a personal brand from scratch. Testing Twitter Ads

It’s week one and I’m already re-discovering the challenges of starting something new.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You get inspired and actually commit to starting something. Usually triggered by seeing someone else do it and you say:

“How hard could it be.”

Then you get into the grind. All these tools cost money, ads aren’t converting, you’re shouting into the void, and you’re losing money.

Let’s dive into some of my wins and losses.

And remember the sooner you start building your email list the better (Here’s what I use.)

Twitter ads for followers and email subscribers

I started with something I’ve wanted to test for a while, which was just a basic follower campaign:

$2 per follower, not good, and to be honest the quality of follower was average. Ultimately this was more of a vanity effort for me to expedite follower growth. There’s a lot more cost effective ways I’ll be experimenting with the gain more followers that I’ll share once I have some data.

Subscriber campaign:

I spent around $25 so far and gained 10 subscribers at $2.50 per subscriber. I’m running a basic text message style creative:

Yes I lowered the battery level to 3%.

I’m running 3 different ad sets with different targeting:

Interest based campaign

Since it takes up to 14 days for these campaigns to optimize I’ll watch my conversion rates and CTRs. Currently sitting at .40% CTR with $.40 CPCs on the interest campaign. This will improve as I continue to split test ad copy and optimize my opt in landing page (which is basic).

Keyword based campaign

Stats for this campaign are .43% CTR with a $.39 CPC which is only slightly better than interests. I’m keeping the same ad creative throughout so I can isolate which targeting method is performing.

Follower look-alike campaign

.73% CTR and $.40 CPC. This is the targeting I’m most hopeful for as it makes sense that this would hone in on the audiences I want. Facebook use to allow for more specific targeting like this but have and continue to eliminate targeting options. I am getting a near double CTR but paying about the same for clicks. I’m fine with that as my hunch is the quality of click and subscribers will be better.

Takeaways

Clearly the takeaway here is test more.

More creatives, more audiences and give it more budget and time to optimize.

I’ll be testing video ads, gifs, memes and new ad copy.

I’m more familiar with running Facebook ads so learning the best practices and what’s working on Twitter will be a fun challenge.

New supplement brand in the “Total Man” niche

I won’t go into much detail here yet but I have a new supplement brand I’m starting called @maximuman_

https://twitter.com/maximuman_

This was an account I set up ages ago when IFTTT first came out.

I setup a simple automation that basically retweeted blog posts from Precision Nutrition and forgot about it.

It grew super slow but over the years and I found it had 2700 followers. Not the most ever but I’ll take it.

My strategy will be to build this as a themed account to speak to all things masculinity and then monetize with the supplement brand Lumberjakt. I already have the first supplement made and in hand. I’ll be building a shopify store and entire marketing system there which I’ll document here.

Rather than creating content for the supplement brand to start, my hunch is using a themed account that speaks to the genre will gain much more exposure and trust that I can recommend the brand later.

The idea is around what is a Maximum Man?

I’m a married man with 4 sons and want to use this as a platform of what I would tell my sons.

Follow along for that journey I’ll be posting about on future newsletters.

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