I would expand on your point about tweaking your ads to recommend actually conducting testing on them before allocating your full spend. Run several versions simultaneously and see which one wins. Google AdWords in particular provides the functionality to do this and further automates the process.

And to @Kris’s point about focusing on your most valuable customers, Bob Hoffman over at the Ad Contrarian (http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com; always bullshit free and he goes neck for neck with Naomi in the profanity department!) has a great ebook that talks more about this concept, as well as advertising in general.

You need to scale up through ads to make it big online.

Looking forward to the “Making Advertising That Doesn’t Suck” Speakeasy Naomi :)

I have no clue what my customers average value will be. I don’t have any yet!! So anything I do is rife with speculation at this point, however I do see advertising as a good avenue to generate some interest early.

And hence my conundrum. Advertising good. Spending money on unknown return BAD! As “Lord” James points out, its just a risk get over it, but at such a embryonic stage in my ittybiz development I am finding it hard to fork out for a new calculator, let alone advertising.

I get this feeling that I will have to attack the decision to advertise much like my decision to start my ittybiz, which in effect boiled down to ” Ah f*ck it, just do it!”. Now all I have to do is work out is how not to suck at it too much! :)

In my industry, we call it long-term donor value. All the analysis we have ever seen (and it’s a bunch) shows that donors acquired below a certain level will never, ever pay for themselves no matter how many dollars we throw at them to get them to give more. So we mostly recommend to our clients that the stop trying to cultivate those donors. It’s like throwing money out the window!

And we’ve been raising a bit of a fuss over on our blog for the past few months about all the social media events designed to get donors at $2 here and there. They will never, ever, ever break-even against hard expenses. But with all the momentum, we cannot ignore. So we need a new class of donors — maybe pre-acquired donors — and a new set of metrics — that also involve some of this social stuff.

Then we can sort out how much we should spend to “advertise” in our niche.

But I also know that the longer that waiting list is, the more stressed I feel. Yes, that is actually something I need to work on. It is okay to make people wait! (I keep telling myself.)

And a longer waiting list will make it a harder sell for some prospects.

Does it always go that way? Of course not. But you’ll never know until you try.