Set ad volume and harvest the ads you already have

1. How many ads to make

One of the top questions ad buyers ask: what number of ads fits a given monthly budget? The view here rejects that question. The answer, stressed: make more ads than you make now.

For anyone who insists on benchmarks, so they can at least measure themselves, these are offered:

Where you sell	Ads to make for each $1,000 of monthly spend
Nationally	1 to 5, roughly
Locally	5 to 10, roughly

A worked case. A local business spending $10,000 a month would probably want to make about 50 to 100 ads a month. The weekly figure given is 25-ish ads (section 3).

Why local takes more. Selling nationally, you can typically manage with somewhat fewer, since a national market tires more slowly. Local, believe it or not, can be harder, because you wear the market out sooner.

Search keywords are left out. These figures exclude keywords. Someone running pay-per-click search on Google, once they have found their keywords, more or less leaves them unchanged.

These are offered as starting benchmarks. Doing more of what already works before anything better or new, method by method: SOP 187 — Exhaust more before anything else.

2. Where the extra ads come from

Next come kinds of ad. Talking straight to camera is left out as obvious; the list comes from needing ways of making ads that did not use the owner's face. The reasoning behind the whole list: your ad output is probably too low, so the question becomes how to turn what the business already does into ads, material you create anyway and are not using in your ads. The aim is things that can get you more ads right away with nothing more for you to do, and that give you ideas for better ones.

The complete set of standing proof streams, with how to install each and which to build first, is SOP 123 — Run the standing proof streams; below is what this list adds to it.

2.1 Lifecycle ads

A customer meets you at several points. Picture them as calls on Zoom: a first and a second sales call, an onboarding call, then check-ins one to three. Most of those calls are probably on record already, so you hold what you need.

• Wait until a customer tells you they have won.
• Pull up that client's profile and recordings, and locate every call they were on.
• Cut a montage of them moving from the sales process through onboarding to the result, in their different outfits, with a small timestamp on it.

These ads reportedly do extremely well and add no work, since the calls happen anyway; they are simply not being used to advertise. The before, during and after moments, and the team checklist for recording and clipping calls, are SOP 123, section 4; lifecycle ads come last in the build order of its section 3, because of the editing they need.

2.2 In-person events

The view here is that as the world gets more AI-driven, demand will swing the opposite way, toward meeting in person: people want more experiences face to face. Whatever the business, on this view, there is a way to hold a client appreciation event, or to fold such an event into the services you sell. People want to get together, local ones especially, and national ones with interests in common too; wanting to be around people like you is common.

What stands out: at events you can stage many different moments for gathering testimonials, and show social proof about as well as it can be shown.

In one example, nothing was sold at a business's delivery events. They were purely marketing events for collecting ads, held once a quarter so that each could supply the next 12 weeks of ads. If this is not already part of your business, on this view, you are missing out; and if you hold no in-person or appreciation event at all, you should; it is called the easiest option, because people there are excited and glad to record things for you.

The kinds of ad to capture at an event, with a checklist for each, are SOP 124 — Produce proof capture at an owned event.

2.3 Communication, community and review-site scrapes

This is a process you can install in the business. If you run a community, or you have reviews, what they hold can become ads:

• Screenshot the reviews one at a time; each is an ad. You will not know in advance which will work, but the bet is that some are pretty good.
• Visit each review site you are listed on (Trustpilot, Yelp, Google, Facebook and the like) and go through the reviews individually. Sometimes a review comes with pictures, sometimes there are a great number of them, and sometimes videos come with them. Those reportedly make great ads.
• You can also take the counter approach: one brand ran a campaign made of its one-star reviews, whose message was that it is not for everybody.

The scrape of support chats, community wins and review sites, with folders and reminders, is SOP 123, section 7.

2.4 A testimonial competition

This one is recommended strongly, and the point is stressed.

• Offer a grand prize of something very valuable, the way you would for any giveaway, and open it to everyone on your email list or in your customer base.
• Entry is by submitting an ad. Give entrants a script for what the ad should look like, and your best ad as the example.
• You will get a pile of poor entries and a handful of excellent ones.
• You can run one about once every two quarters, and it brings a flood of ads you can use.
• Judge it by running the entries as ads: whoever's ad gets the best results wins. The platform's algorithm picks, not your guess, and telling entrants beforehand that this is the test makes them produce better ads.

The disclosure line, carried as a reading. One reading is that you have to disclose in the ads that they came from a competition or carried some kind of incentive; it probably makes no difference to how they perform, and the point is flagged for anyone in the U.S. because of the FTC. Advertising law and disclosure rules are not covered on this page.

Dates, prize, instructions, invitations and the thirty-day tally are SOP 126 — Run a testimonial competition judged as an ad, which also holds it to once or twice a year at most.

2.5 Outcome moments

If customers ever get a visible delivery, whether of a physical product, an experience, or a change they go through in becoming your customer, those moments are yours to capture, as long as you put a process around them. Unboxings are the example given.

The way it would be done here: bonuses, milestones and awards. In that setup, if they want recognition, customers have to give a testimonial to receive it. Or, where a meeting is already on the calendar, you can take a testimonial about the milestone at, say, the first check-in. Sample moments: making a first high-ticket sale, recruiting a first customer, getting a first job offer, and a custom-made vault arriving at someone's house.

Most of you have valuable moments in the business; the job is to set up a process for capturing them. The purpose of this whole list is more impressive and compelling material for ads, which you are producing already and not showing anyone.

Upon-delivery ads, and the bonus and award unlocks, are SOP 123, sections 5 and 8.

2.6 A post that did well, run with a call to action

In one practice this is probably one of the most used of all, for anyone playing the organic game, and very high leverage.

• Look at your feed, say 12 posts on Instagram, and pull one out.
• Add your call to action, tied to either your lead magnet or your offer, and run the whole piece as an ad.

Why it works. Make each piece valuable and good, with a strong hook, and run the pieces that outperform organically. If Meta or YouTube will give a piece free impressions, they will gladly sell it paid ones, since people enjoy it enough to stay on the platform. Ads interrupt a platform, so ads that are good and read as organic reach a wider audience at a lower price. On this view it is a huge hack for anyone who makes a lot of content.

Where it leads. In the view here, your paid side and your content side move closer together over time. You make a great deal of content; the pieces that outperform get calls to action, lead magnets and offers attached and are pushed out as ads. The brand grows because the content was good, more of the right people arrive, and the same pieces also earn a return.

SOP 38 — Turn the best organic post into an ad spots a piece by a second signal, the run of inquiries it brought in, and carries the platform's side of this, the list for the sales team and the customer-made flywheel.

2.7 Content made by customers

User-generated content comes last on the list, if possible, with two examples.

• Some of you might manage to have customers work for you without pay. Gather your hardcore believers in what you sell into a group, give them some kind of exchange, and they make testimonial videos every week, so a whole crew is making content you can turn into ads. In one business that does this, it reportedly works very well.
• For consumer products, TikTok Shop has done this well. The question is how to build that kind of effect inside your own business, and the answer offered is to bring in the zealots, the people who love your product or service most, to make the content that draws more people in.

Customers making videos as a machine that feeds your ads is SOP 38, section 6.

2.8 Influencers whose accounts you run ads from

A side note for bigger businesses, and especially true for physical products. In a very commoditized space, brand is one of the big ways to stand apart. If you can get influencers whose ads you can whitelist, meaning you run ads from their account while they sell your product, that is, on this view, worth its weight in gold. You can have an army of micro-influencers, or you can look for two to five really strong influencers, mega or just below, to run your ads through.

That is the thinking on getting more ads: if your customers come through ads, these are ways to build more of them into a business.

3. What this page does not decide for you

• The weekly figure. Counting four weeks to a month, 50 to 100 ads a month is 12.5 to 25 a week; the weekly figure given is 25-ish.
• Whether the delivery must be physical. SOP 123, section 5, says upon-delivery ads only work with some sort of physical delivery; here (section 2.5) an experience or a change the customer goes through counts too. What each costs: the physical-only reading leaves out moments such as a first high-ticket sale or a first customer recruited; the wider reading runs ads where SOP 123 says they will not work. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• What customers who make content get in return. Not established on this page.

4. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Make more ads than you make now
2	If you want a benchmark: roughly 1 to 5 ads for every $1,000 spent a month nationally, 5 to 10 locally; search keywords are left out
3	Once a customer reports a win, cut a lifecycle montage from their recorded calls
4	Hold in-person or appreciation events and stage testimonial moments there
5	Screenshot reviews one by one and run them as ads
6	Run a testimonial competition judged by ad results; one reading says to disclose the incentive
7	Put a process around outcome moments; one way ties recognition to a testimonial
8	Run posts that outperformed organically, with a call to action added
9	If possible, have customers make content for you
10	Bigger businesses, especially in physical products: run ads from whitelisted influencers' accounts, if you can

5. What this page does not cover

Writing hooks and building ad creative are not covered on this page; SOP 212 takes them up. Targeting and bidding are not covered on this page; they are SOP 213 — Fix ad targeting and bid for return, not cheap leads. Advertising law and endorsement rules are not covered on this page. Filming and editing are not covered on this page.