Choose the first paid platform

1. What you are buying

Paid advertising is advertising one to many, to cold audiences — people who do not know you. You pay another person or business for access to the audience they have already gathered.

Think of it as renting eyeballs. You do not buy them and you do not own them. You rent them for a fee, and the aim is that what you make from the rented attention, plus whatever sits behind it, exceeds what the rental cost.

How it gives you instant scale. Your advertisement interrupts somebody else's content — a feed, a broadcast, a stream of organic material of exactly the kind SOP 20 through SOP 26 teach you to make. You do not need an audience of your own, because you are interrupting one that already exists, and the platform takes a fee for standing in the middle.

What paid buys that posting does not: guaranteed reach. You pay for the reach, so you know the advertisement will reach a given number of people. What remains open is how efficiently you can extract value from those people relative to what reaching them cost.

So the question is never whether paid advertising works. Given enough money to reach every person alive, you would generate a return. The question is whether the return is larger than the cost. Paid advertising is a question of efficiency, not of whether it works — which is also why it is one of the fastest ways to scale, provided you manage the cost.

2. The four problems paid advertising creates

#	The problem	Where it is solved
1	Knowing where to advertise	This page
2	Getting the right audience to see it	SOP 36
3	Making the best advertisement for them to see	SOP 32, SOP 33, SOP 34, SOP 39
4	Getting permission to contact them again afterward	SOP 37

Getting the right audience to see it is probably the hardest part, and one of the hardest parts, of the whole discipline.

3. The four requirements a platform must meet

Find a platform where all four of these are true.

#	Requirement	Why it matters
1	You have used it and got value from it as a consumer	You then have some idea how it works, and will naturally format your advertisement to match the platform, because the aim is for it to look like content rather than like an advertisement
2	You can target the people on it who are interested in what you sell	Excluding the people who are not stops you paying for wasted eyeballs and raises the efficiency of the spend
3	You know how to make an advertisement in that platform's format	Format is platform-specific, and the research in section 5 is how you learn it
4	You have the minimum money needed to place an advertisement there	Different platforms have very different minimums

On requirement one. If you are not familiar with any platform, find the one where the highest percentage of your customers already are, and then get used to it and learn it.

On requirement two, worked. If you sell to women between 25 and 45, you exclude men in general, and you exclude women below 25 and above 45. A higher share of the people who see the advertisement are then people who might act on it.

On requirement four, with the history that explains it. Running a television or radio advertisement requires far more money up front than some of the newer platforms, where you can micro-spend — five dollars for an advertisement. Fifty years ago you could only run radio, newspaper and television, and the barrier to entry was enormous. Lowering it democratized access: many small competitors entered, which means more competition and more opportunity at once.

On the ambition that sits behind requirement one. As you make more content, make good content, and then use your best-performing content as advertising, content and advertising merge — and that merging is the point at which you become an exceptional advertiser. Doing that deliberately is on SOP 38.

4. Start where your competitors already are

Place your advertisements where your competitors place theirs, to start. It may seem counter-intuitive.

The reason it matters is placement, not just platform. Platforms often carry several different advertisement types, and they are not interchangeable:

Platform type	Placements available
A professional network	Message advertisements, or news-feed advertisements
An image feed	The news feed, or stories
A video platform	The sidebar, mid-stream, or pre-roll

Look at where other people in your space are placing theirs and start there. If they can make that placement work, so can you.

Match what works before you change it. If you are just starting out, replicate first. Once you have matched their performance, then get clever with it. And the distinction that goes with it: model, do not copy.

5. Research the platform before you make anything

The action step is to pick one platform that meets the four requirements, and then start watching, listening to and reading the advertisements on it. That is step one of learning to make one.

Use the ad libraries. Most platforms have a searchable library of running advertisements, because advertising compliance requires it, and you can search them for the top advertisements in any category.

Step	What you do
1	Search the library for advertisements in your category
2	Pick the ones that have been running the longest and have the most engagement
3	Transcribe 50 or so of them
4	For each, write down how it hooks, retains and rewards; how it makes the offer; and what the offer is
5	Do not copy any one of them — read all 50, let them sit, then write ten versions of your own
6	Format your versions like the platform's own content, and place them where advertisements are already converting

Length of time running plus engagement is the proxy for performance, and it is available to you without spending anything.

Do that and you are, in the phrase used, nine steps ahead of everybody else.

Flag: study other advertisers, or your own customers? This section starts from the ads already running in your category, and section 4 from where competitors place theirs. A second view, from an ads practitioner whose product has no close rival: that team does not study competitors' ads, holds that an ad someone else sends you will not work for you nine times out of ten, and starts instead from its own customer records, reading its best and most recent customers beside what each is worth. That view rests on the product being unique. This page does not settle which reading is right.

6. Stop skipping advertisements

A standing instruction that costs nothing and compounds: while you are learning a category, do not skip its advertising.

• Do not buy premium subscriptions that remove advertisements from the platforms you are learning.
• Click on every advertisement in your industry that you can, so that your feed fills with more of them.
• Do not let it bruise your ego. You are learning, and the advertising that is running and working today is the best school there is.

The result is that the highest-value thing in your feed becomes what you learn from everybody else, and the interruption stops being a nuisance and becomes the lesson.

7. The checklist

Question	The answer
Who runs this	You
What you are buying	Rented attention on somebody else's audience
What is guaranteed	The reach, because you paid for it
What is not guaranteed	The efficiency of extracting value from it
How many platforms to start on	One
The four requirements	You use it; you can target on it; you can make its format; you can afford its minimum
Where to place first	Where your competitors already place
How many ads to transcribe	50 or so
Which ads to pick	The longest-running with the most engagement
How many versions to write	Ten of your own
What the minimum spend is on any given platform	Not established on this page
When to add a second platform	Not established on this page

8. What this page does not cover

Getting the advertisement in front of the right people on the platform you chose is on SOP 36. What the advertisement says is on SOP 32, SOP 33, SOP 34 and SOP 39, and the reading level to write it at is on SOP 31. Where the person lands after acting is on SOP 37. Using content that already performed instead of making an advertisement from scratch is on SOP 38.

Bidding, budgets and the cost-per-customer arithmetic that decides how much to spend are not covered on this page.