Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2715 How To 10X Your Ad Spend With Just $1,000 About this episode Squeezing the most out of a modest ad budget can feel like a puzzle. Is it really possible to 10X your returns with just $1,000 a month, especially when sales feel stuck and every dollar counts? This episode shows you how to make it happen. Omar breaks down a strategy to maximize your ad spend, even if you’re new to paid marketing. (He knows it works because he's done it himself!). He'll help you learn to focus on retargeting warm leads, boost Instagram reels with smart posts, and use simple automations to stretch your budget further. With practical examples and clear tips on exactly where to spend, you’ll see how smaller businesses can outperform cold ads and build lists of engaged buyers without overextending. Ready to hear how to make every dollar work harder for your business? Hit play at the top of the page and dive into today’s lesson. Automate your Instagram DMs and comments with ManyChat. Watch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHiSUBSCRIBEYouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Podcast Feed Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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0:58 Speaker 02 Listen, you don't need to spend $10,000 to get results with paid ads. You can actually get a pretty insane return on investment with just $1,000 a month. But only if you stop spending money on strangers, people that are not ready to buy. You want to start spending money and focusing on people who are most likely to convert as a customer. Today, I'm going to show you exactly the strategy I would run if I only had $1,000 of ad spend every single month. This is a strategy that I have used year after year that gets me 5 to 10x return on ad spend. That is great, especially if you're desperate for sales. Now, there's a couple of things you need to know. Number one, you need to have a product for sale that is ready to go.
1:43 Speaker 02 A course, a coaching program, whatever it might be. Two, you don't need an expert, okay? You can build these ads yourself. I'm going to show you how, step by step. Let's go.
1:59 Speaker 02 Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.
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2:27 Speaker 02 There are two strategies I'm going to show you today that you're going to spend your $1,000 a month on. The first one is retargeting ads. Most people blow their entire ad budget showing ads to people who have never heard of them. Okay, when you are trying to get the most return on investment, do not spend it on people that have never heard of you. Okay, you can't afford brand awareness when you're first getting started. What you need to do is start running ads to people who know who you are, who know the value that you offer. Luckily, with technology, this is super simple, because you're going to be showing ads only to people who already visited your website. Timeout. By the way,
3:09 Speaker 02 when I say showing ads, we're talking about Facebook and Instagram ads, or meta ads. These are the least expensive ways for you to get into paid acquisition or paid marketing. Time back in. Okay, so you're going to be showing these ads to people who have already seen your website. Now, if you want to really go gangster and really have high conversions, you want people that have shown intent they want to buy. So, for example, they've been to a specific page on your website, like a offer page or a sales page. Now, quick tip, if you don't get a lot of traffic to your website, when I say that, I mean, if you're getting less than 2,000 visitors a month on your website, then it's really hard for
3:51 Speaker 02 you to actually make this work if you're only going for a specific page on your website. So it's better for you to do the whole website if you have less than 2,000 visitors to your website. If you have more, then you can get a little bit more specific. These people are your warmest leads, people who Know who you are, they know your value, they're in your niche, they're your customer. And best of all, they are the cheapest to convert. When they see an ad, they're more likely to buy your product because they know who you are, they understand the value you're offering, and they're hungry for a solution. Why do I know that? Because they're on your website, right? They're reading something on your website, something brought them there for a reason. Statistically, people who have seen your product page or your sales page
4:35 Speaker 02 are 10 times more likely to buy than cold traffic. So I like those odds, I'm gonna go with that. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna take $700, a big chunk of your $1,000 ad spend, your budget for marketing a month, and you're gonna put it towards retargeting ads. Because they're that powerful. Now you might be thinking, Omar, I'm not an expert, how am I supposed to put this ad together? It's actually dead simple, and it's getting easier by the minute because Facebook is using AI to make things super simple for you. So all you gotta do is go to your friend YouTube and just write down in YouTube, "Search how do I set up a retargeting ad in Meta?" And you're gonna find a less than 10-minute video showing you step-by-step how to do this. I don't want to tell you all the steps right now because the steps might change tomorrow,
5:20 Speaker 02 and you want to see the latest information that's on YouTube. When I first ran a retargeting ad myself, it took about 30 minutes to set up, and actually, it took me more time just to create the ad itself, about 30 to 40 minutes. What do I mean by that? Well, you need to put some copy together, you need to create an image for this ad so that you can upload it straight to Meta. Now, Meta is actually making this super easy now. They have their own little chat GPT inside of the ad manager where you can go ahead and type what your product is, you put the URL, it will create images for you, it will create different versions of copy. So it's actually easier than when I started doing retargeting years ago. So let me give you an example of getting a return on investment with retargeting ads.
6:04 Speaker 02 So you're spending $700 on retargeting ads. Let's say you have a course that's $300. If you just get three sales a month, you're beyond break even. That's $900, you spent $700, you're profitable. You made $200. Anything beyond that is even more pure profit. So as you could see, you know that there's going to be people that go to your website, that read your emails, that are interested in your product or services, but just need a little bit more of a nudge. They need a reminder. They get busy. More than three people in my experience have that problem, or kind of get lost in the weeds and need a little bit of a reminder through Facebook, through Instagram that, hey, don't forget, we have this great offer,
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7:29 Speaker 02 And don't forget this part, send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners. Bitcoin services provided by Block Incorporated Brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. Support for today's episode comes from Square. You probably know Square is the thing you tap your card on at your favorite coffee shop, restaurant, salon, or local store. But for the person running that business, Square is a whole lot more than a way to get paid. Square brings the tools you need to run and grow your business together in one system. From payments on appointments, to staff, inventory, sales, and customer relationships.
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8:44 Speaker 02 Every time I ran a retargeting ad for my software company Webinar Ninja back in the day, or the $100 BA, whether it's challenges, or courses, or whatever it might be, it always outperforms cold ads by a country mile. It's so obvious that these things work. And it's not because it's magic, it's because you are targeting people that already are in the buying cycle, right? They're already interested in what you have, they're educated in what you have, and you're just taking them over the line. When you finally see ads making money instead of burning money, your entire belief in paid traffic starts to change. That's a good day, that's a good moment, for sure.
9:27 Speaker 02 Many people think that ads are about awareness. And yes, it is for big companies that can afford to pay for awareness. Smaller startup companies need to use organic content and content marketing to get awareness, and they use ads for conversions. So you don't need more people, you need to convert the people you already have. Now, I said there's two strategies, right? You still have $300 in your budget, you have $300 out of the 1,000. So let's get into strategy two, which is to boost posts and have a DM system to get targeted leads. So what does this mean? Well, you're gonna look
10:08 Speaker 02 at all your reels, all your posts on Instagram. I like looking at Instagram because that's where I feel like this converts really well. And you're gonna look at the posts or the reels, I like to focus on reels, that are getting the most traction. So you wanna look at a combination of which ones are getting the most views, comments, and likes. Listen, don't guess, don't hope, use the dashboard and use the winners. There's a little dashboard, creator dashboard, inside Instagram in your app or on the desktop, and you can see all your stats. The next step is that you're going to boost those posts that are getting traction already, that you know are resonating with your audience. Now boosting a post is basically turning it into an ad. And what Instagram is gonna do is
10:53 Speaker 02 You're going to show it to more people outside of your followers. So that way you can get more traction. Now, quick tip, do not boost a post from your phone. Not from your phone, because a lot of these app stores like the Apple App Store will charge you 30% more by running ads off your phone. I know it sounds crazy. It sounds like this should be illegal, but it isn't. But just run the ad or boost your post from your desktop computer, because that is going to save you 30%. Now, the next step is you want to add a keyword or call to action into the description of your reel. So say, for example, you are a golf instructor. You're a golf expert and you show people how to improve their golf game.
11:37 Speaker 02 And let's say you have a reel that did really well. That's all about improving your swing, the technique of the swing. So in the description or in the first comment, you know, what you post the reel and you can always edit your reels. You can write something like, "Want my free lesson on improving your golf swing? Comment the word 'swing' in the comments below." Now, this is going to do two things. One, it's going to create engagement. It's going to add actual comments in your reel and it's going to kind of send a signal to Meta that, hey, this is a popular post. Let's show it to more people because people are engaging. But two, this is the trigger that you need so that you can automate a way to contact them via DM.
12:21 Speaker 02 Now, this is very easy to set up with a tool called ManyChat. And ManyChat has a free plan that starts where you can have 1,000 transactions for free. And I think their pro plan or their next plan is $15 a month, very affordable. But the point here is that ManyChat will allow you to automatically DM somebody if they comment like a keyword like "swing." So what you can do is go to ManyChat, create an automation that when somebody writes the comment, writes the word "swing" in this post, then DM them this message. And the message could be like, "Hey, get my free lesson on how to improve your swing." And you send them to a landing page. That landing page will ask for their name and email address. And then in exchange, they'll get your free module of your full
13:03 Speaker 02 Course is like maybe your first lesson of your course and they get a taste of what your lessons are like and they can learn how to improve their swing. Now, the reason why this works is because you're getting a targeted lead, somebody who's interested in improving their swing and they wrote the word swing, they made effort, right? And now you're giving them a DM and now they're gonna give their name and email address and be part of your email marketing system and now they're consuming a free lesson from you. Now they're really a warm lead and now you can have an automation email that goes out and say, "Hey, if you like that lesson, you'll love my full course. Here's a coupon code, here's a great offer, you can get these free bonuses, go ahead and grab it." Very, very simple, but what we're doing here is we're pulling out the people that are
13:47 Speaker 02 best suited for our product or service by attaching the video and this is important, make sure the video, the reel is attached to the product that you're offering or linked or related to your offering. And it really allows the people that are meant to be served by you and meant to buy your product to surface to the top. So what we want to do is we want to do this for two reels. So you want to split your $300 budget between these two reels, so 150 each. And this gives you the ability to A/B test and see which topic, which hook, which reel format pulls higher quality leads. You can then say, "Okay, the people that commented swing, those people, you know, I got five sales off that, but my other reel that says comment golf only got two sales,
14:31 Speaker 02 so I can understand that this type of content converts better." So why does this work? Well, they already like your reel, okay? They're already engaged with you. So they're actively typing a word, they're working with you, and this is ultimately, again, warm traffic. And this allows you to build a list of qualified buyers and you're getting the email contacts. So maybe they don't buy right now your offer, but maybe it'll be ready in a couple of months and you can continue to send them offers on your email list. So you're at least getting a lead from your ad spend. Most entrepreneurs think they need a huge budget to win with ads and as you can see, the truth is you only need to work a little smarter with the budget you have. And the key here is to stop trying to talk to the whole world, okay?
15:16 Speaker 02 Start talking to people that are already raising their hands, that are already showing indication that they are interested in what you have.
15:25 Speaker 02 If this episode gave you any kind of clarity, gave you some inspiration to start spending your money a little bit more wisely with ads, then share it with a friend. Share with somebody that maybe you think is thinking about running paid ads as well, or is thinking about starting a business, or just share the podcast with them. You can send them a WhatsApp, send them a personal message, or just tell them in person the next time you see them. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A thousand dollars isn't a limitation. It's actually a filter. It makes it easier for you to understand that, hey, I need to only focus on the people that really are ready to buy. It allows you to then say, okay, I spent a thousand dollars and I made $5,000 in sales. Wow, that's great. Now I can maybe invest $2,000 in the same
16:08 Speaker 02 technique and see what kind of return on investment I get. It forces you to focus. It forces you, again, to talk to people that are closest to the buying line. And when you do that, ads stop feeling like a gamble, starts becoming a science.
16:24 Speaker 02 If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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Previous MBA2714 Q&A Wednesday: I Can't Quit My Job. How Do I Start My Business? Next MBA2716 Extended Interview: Tina Tower - How A Breadwinning Wife And Mother Of Two Built A Multi-Million Dollar Online Business Empire Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
