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AdWords for Lead Gen - Hire Out or DIY? What Would You Do?

What would you do?

  • Do It Yourself

    Votes: 3 75.0%
  • Hire A Professional To Do It

    Votes: 1 25.0%

  • Total voters
    4

FreedomVibes

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Hi All,

A bit of a background - I am in the works of growing the commercial side of my business (selling physical products with commercial applications to businesses) and am going through @Andy Black's adwords posts (thank you Andy for the wealth of information) to learn how I can use Adwords to generate potential leads. Adwords and lead generation are all new to me, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what's out there, let alone put it into practice yet. I am currently going through Andy's Jumpstart to Adwords guide to get my campaign started.

The question I am wondering right now is whether I should hire a professional to build out an Adwords campaign for business lead generation rather than trying to complete this task myself? My thinking is that I already have limited time due to a full time day job, and learning all the info, putting it into action, tweaking mistakes will likely take me a few weeks at least, and my first try definitely won't be as effective as someone who is a professional in the space, and can build a much more successful campaign in a shorter amount of time. The other side of me wants to do it myself, not because I am afraid to invest the money to hire a professional, but because I know it will be another skill I learn if I do it myself and also because its my business and I want to grow it myself.

Is this a scenario where working on the business rather than in the business stands true and it makes more sense to hire a professional rather than spend however many hours it takes to DIY? If I hired out, there are many other things I could focus on to grow the business in other areas. The business is profitable so I have capital to reinvest. If you were in my shoes, what would you do? Looking forward to hear everyone's thoughts.
 
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FastNAwesome

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I've been DIY type for quite a while.

Then a time comes where your perspective changes. Letting go of need to do it all myself caused 2 things:

1. It got me busier! Instead of wasting hours and days to figure how to do something (and not too well either), I'm busy focusing on what I do best. And since someone else handles what was taking me days, I'm able to move faster and have better problems to solve.

2. It vastly improved quality of what I do. When you outsource - to the right person(s) - they won't just save your time, they'll provide a better quality work than you could do, and also valuable feedback from their experience, and their point of view.

It's really a mindset shift. To be fair, there are also many successful "one-man-shows". Specifically in blogging. But I think they also reach out to professionals for services like design etc.

At this point in my life, I will still do things myself when it's something I'm already versed in - or some skill I personally want to master. And due to a limited budget too.

But bringing in the right person/team into the mix - in my experience always had synergetic effect.

Now as for finding the right ones - that's a different topic:)
 

Andy Black

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Hi All,

A bit of a background - I am in the works of growing the commercial side of my business (selling physical products with commercial applications to businesses) and am going through @Andy Black's adwords posts (thank you Andy for the wealth of information) to learn how I can use Adwords to generate potential leads. Adwords and lead generation are all new to me, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what's out there, let alone put it into practice yet. I am currently going through Andy's Jumpstart to Adwords guide to get my campaign started.

The question I am wondering right now is whether I should hire a professional to build out an Adwords campaign for business lead generation rather than trying to complete this task myself? My thinking is that I already have limited time due to a full time day job, and learning all the info, putting it into action, tweaking mistakes will likely take me a few weeks at least, and my first try definitely won't be as effective as someone who is a professional in the space, and can build a much more successful campaign in a shorter amount of time. The other side of me wants to do it myself, not because I am afraid to invest the money to hire a professional, but because I know it will be another skill I learn if I do it myself and also because its my business and I want to grow it myself.

Is this a scenario where working on the business rather than in the business stands true and it makes more sense to hire a professional rather than spend however many hours it takes to DIY? If I hired out, there are many other things I could focus on to grow the business in other areas. The business is profitable so I have capital to reinvest. If you were in my shoes, what would you do? Looking forward to hear everyone's thoughts.
I think it's well worth having an understanding of what AdWords can do for your business.

Whenever I have clients I am keen to train them up on the Keyword Planner as I think it's an invaluable tool.

I also spend a lot of time trying to help them visualise what's going on. They don't need to know how to build the campaigns, but should know what makes up a good campaign.



As I've mentioned in a different thread, I believe the biggest benefit of AdWords is the data and insights you gather:

1) You find out people want (from search terms).

2) You find out how to sell it to them (from ad and landing page tests).

3) You find out whether you can make a profit or not (this suddenly comes to the fore when you're dipping your hand in your pocket every day).


The clients that do best are ones who dig into the search terms and identify pockets of poor and gold phrases. This always gets their wheels turning.


You can get up and running very quickly (as per The AdWords Jumpstart in the Speedway forum).

You can run on a whiff of spend and get valuable market data, as well get a good insight into AdWords.


I'm aware that I've written quite a body of work on AdWords by this stage. Someone estimated it took them 6 days reading 3-4 hours a day to get through all the threads listed in my master post.

I like that some people have worked their way through them and got running.

I've wondered whether there's almost too much information there now.


Soooo... I'm updating The AdWords Jumpstart for 2017, and creating a short, sharp video series to help people get an ad running within an hour. It takes less than 5 minutes to get an ad running when you know what you're doing, so much of that hour is getting a bit of theory first.

When I'm happy it's short and will help busy business owners, or others starved for time, then I'll release it into the market place.


I'm all for outsourcing, but there's a couple of things I don't think you should try to outsource fully: passion and insight.

Get enough knowledge to be dangerous (to the competition or two yourself!), ideally get some results or market insights, and then you may have some extra revenue to pay for a gun-for-hire.

You'll certainly be better able to determine how good a potential gun-for-hire is, because you'll have already dipped your toe in the water.

IMO, there's book learning (or reading my posts and listening to me ramble), but it doesn't compare to releasing your own ad into the wild.



As Dan Norris says in his great wee book The 7 Day Startup:

"You don't learn until you launch."

(although I'm preferring the word "release" to "launch" more and more now-a-days).


My vote would be to have a wee go, then decide whether to bring in hired help, and make sure the hired help enables our to get the insights from the data you're buying.


Hope that helps.
 

Andy Black

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