Run paid ads and scale lead flow 17 of 23 in this group
SOP 52
Set daily advertising volume and keep going until the goal is hit
What this page is for. Use it to turn everything else in this library into something you do tomorrow morning. It gives a pair of standards for daily advertising volume — one measured in actions and one measured in outcomes — the day structure that makes either possible, and a five-step plan that ends with somebody else doing the work.
SOP-52-Set-daily-advertising-volume-and-keep-going-until-the-goal-is-hit.md
1. A hundred actions a day
Do a hundred primary actions every day, a hundred days in a row.
That is the whole rule. What counts as a primary action depends on the method.
| Method | A hundred of what | Examples of the action |
|---|---|---|
| Warm outreach | A hundred reach-outs a day | Emails, calls, direct messages |
| Cold outreach | A hundred reach-outs a day | The same, plus flyers and cold calls |
| Content | A hundred minutes of making it a day | Short and long videos, articles, podcasts, infographics |
| Paid advertising | A hundred dollars a day | Direct mail, seminars, podcast spots, social advertising |
The one adjustment allowed, and it is allowed on one method only. If a hundred dollars a day is beyond you, you can adjust the figure down — at least on the paid-advertising side. The other three are expected in full.
On content specifically. Release at least one piece a day on a platform, and post more than that as you get better. If the hundred minutes produce enough for several platforms, use several.
On cold outreach specifically. Expect lower response rates than warm — that is what being cold means — and let automation make up the volume you cannot personally reach.
On paid advertising specifically. Measure it monthly or daily depending on the platform.
Flag: what the hundred counts on paid ads and content. Here it is a hundred dollars a day of paid advertising, adjustable down, and a hundred minutes of making content. SOP 147, section 4, reads the paid hundred as time given to the ads, with $10 to $100 a day of spend, and counts outreach and commenting inside content's hundred minutes. Read as dollars, the spend is set and the time is not; read as time, the spend can stay small, a hundred minutes go to the ads each day, and fewer of content's minutes go to making. A third statement counts the paid hundred as a hundred minutes a day spent making ads, kept up for a hundred days, with spend set by a daily budget that the sales target fixes (SOP 56, section 4); on paid ads it reads the hundred as time, as SOP 147 does. This page does not settle which reading is right.
1.1 Why a hundred, and why it is your problem
The four methods are the things one person can do to let other people know what they sell, and they are a hundred percent within your control. That is the argument. Look at a day in which you did not get enough leads and the cause is not the market: you did not do enough of the four.
Broken down to a yes-or-no question, it becomes unembarrassing. Did you send a hundred emails today? Yes or no. If no, do that first.
The honest cost. A hundred emails is roughly four hours. A hundred phone calls is roughly four hours. A hundred direct messages is roughly four hours. So your working day starts after that.
What doing it yourself first buys you, before you hand it over. You come to understand what a lead is actually worth. And you get enough repetitions to build a skill you can then transfer and teach — which matters, because knowing how to bring money in is probably the single most valuable skill an owner can have. Somebody who has it never has to worry about eating, because they can pick up a phone.
2. The volume lesson underneath the number
A hundred is not arbitrary in the sense that matters: a lot of the strategies in this library work, with enough volume, and fail without it.
The worked case, with its figures. An owner put out three hundred flyers and got no business. Told that flyers worked, he concluded they did not work for him. The question he had not been asked was what his test size was.
| Whose figures | What they did |
|---|---|
| The owner | 300 flyers, once |
| The operator advising him | For that operator, just for context: 5,000 flyers, as a test |
| The same operator, once the test cleared | 5,000 flyers every single day — about 150,000 a month |
The arithmetic holds: five thousand a day across a month is a hundred and fifty thousand, and a hundred and fifty thousand against three hundred is five hundred times the volume.
The response bands given with it, as the operator running them read those results:
| Response rate | The verdict |
|---|---|
| Half a percent | Okay |
| One percent | Really happy |
| Two percent | Doing extremely well |
Half a percent is the threshold that licenses the daily volume: once something is above it, it goes out every day. The condition attached to the whole set: these are one operator's figures from one channel in one trade, offered as context for a test size, from someone who had been doing it a long time.
The conclusion to take. The strategy was right; the amount was wrong. You might be running good advertising and running too little of it; you might be doing outreach the right way and not doing enough of it; you might be making content and not making nearly enough.
3. Keep going until the goal is hit
Working to the goal is the same discipline measured at the other end. Instead of committing to a number of actions, you commit to a number of outcomes, and you work until you hit it.
Where it comes from. A privately held chain of fifteen locations, run by a former football coach, required its sales managers to make a certain number of sales per day. The moment they hit it they could cut out, they could go home. If it took eighteen hours, they worked eighteen. If it took five, they worked five.
The same pattern elsewhere. One of the strongest door-knockers one company ever had would not stop knocking until he had set twenty appointments. He counted each one out loud as he went. Twenty was the number whether he reached it at midday, in the afternoon or after dark, and he did not stop before it.
How it differs from a hundred actions a day in practice. The hundred is an average that assumes a response rate — maybe some days the average holds. Working to the goal refuses the average. Maybe one day the replies you need might take a hundred and fifty reach-outs; maybe another day, two hundred. You do them, and doing what it takes is probably worth more than anything else here.
The standard it sets. What is required is greater than your best — which means your best has to get better.
Which of the two to run. A hundred actions a day is the baseline, the thing expected of everybody who wants to get where they say they want to get. Working to the goal is the same thing taken further. Both are offered, and step 2 of the plan in §5 asks you to pick one.
4. Structuring a day so either is possible
The practices below are probably some of the highest-return activities in one owner's own working day. The last is a recent addition to the others.
One — get a long uninterrupted block. Waking very early is the route that tends to be taken here, but the point is not the hour of the morning; it is having four to six hours entirely to yourself. Early is one way to get it; late at night is another, and some do it that way.
Two — start working immediately, with no rituals or routines. The test to apply to a morning routine is whether it raises output per hour by more than simply working those hours would. That is a hard case to make for two or three hours of routine. Fifteen minutes to warm up and maybe thirty minutes after that is the allowance given.
Three — no meetings before noon. Starting at five and working to noon gives seven hours a day with no interruptions — which, across a week, is a full working week's worth of uninterrupted time before the normal work day even begins. That is put as more than forty hours a week, which holds only if the seven-hour block runs into the weekend as well.
Four — schedule back to front, from the end of the day. Put meetings at the end and work back from there, so that the uninterrupted block is as long as it can be. Five in the morning to three in the afternoon is ten hours.
The block lengths given across this page do not agree with one another: four to six hours in practice one, seven hours in practice three, ten hours in practice four, and six or eight hours in the checklist in §5. No single block length is established on this page.
5. The one-page plan
| Step | What you do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Pick the type of engaged lead you want — customers, affiliates, employees or agencies |
| 2 | Pick a hundred actions a day or working to the goal, and commit to the daily action |
| 3 | Fill in the advertising checklist for that daily action |
| 4 | Do the daily action until you can afford to pay somebody else to do it |
| 5 | Go back to step 1 with employees as your target lead type, and repeat 1 to 4 |
On step 2. The commitment is a hundred reach-outs, or a hundred minutes of content, or an absolute number of dollars a day, or a percentage of dollars a day — either dollar form being the learning budget on SOP 42. If you want a bonus, add an extra hundred a day of a different one of the four methods on top.
On step 3, the checklist itself. The slots, in this order:
| Slot | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Who | You |
| What | Your offer or lead magnet |
| Where | The platform |
| To whom | The audience or list |
| When | The first eight hours of your day, or six — whichever you prioritize |
| Why | So you get a number of leads, or a number of people who get leads for you |
| How | Which of the four methods |
| How much | A hundred, or until you hit your goal |
| How many | The number of follow-ups, or retargeting passes |
| For how long | A hundred days, or until you hit your goal |
On step 5, and why the loop exists. The target of step 1 becomes the people who will do steps 2 to 4 for you. You run the four methods at them instead of at customers, and when one arrives you match your previous output with your time back — and can then either get better at getting customers or keep stacking people who get leads for you. Maybe it takes two days to find that person, maybe three, maybe a week. The sequence does not depend on which.
The closing argument this rests on. There are four things one person can do: reach out to people you know, reach out to people you do not, post publicly, or pay to advertise. If you are not doing those four — for customers, for employees, for affiliates or for agencies — you are not advertising enough, and the person responsible is you. That is also the useful part: it is your fault, which makes it your responsibility.
6. What this page does not decide for you
These are gaps in the procedure, not omissions from this page.
- How far down the hundred-dollar paid figure may be adjusted. Adjusting is permitted; no floor is given.
- What outcome number to set when working to the goal, and how to set it the first time, before you know your own response rate.
- What to do on a day when the goal is not reachable. The door-knocker worked until dark; no stopping rule is given.
- Which standard to run, beyond one being called the baseline and the other the advanced version.
- How long the block in §4 should be. See the note there.
- What "enough money to afford paying someone else" means in step 4 — no threshold is attached.
- Whether the response bands in §2 transfer to any channel other than flyers.
7. The checklist
| Question | The answer |
|---|---|
| Who runs this | You, personally, until step 4 |
| A hundred actions a day | A hundred primary actions a day, a hundred days running |
| Warm and cold outreach | A hundred reach-outs a day |
| Content | A hundred minutes a day, and at least one piece released |
| Paid advertising | A hundred dollars a day; read as time elsewhere (flag, §1) |
| Which figure may be adjusted down | The paid-advertising one, and only that one |
| Roughly how long a hundred emails takes | Four hours |
| What doing it yourself first buys | You learn what a lead is worth; you build a teachable skill |
| The flyer test sizes | 300 against 5,000 — and 5,000 a day once it cleared |
| The response bands | Half a percent okay, one percent good, two percent excellent |
| Working to the goal | Commit to outcomes, and work until you hit them |
| Where it came from | A fifteen-location chain whose sales managers went home on hitting the number |
| The door-knocker's number | Twenty appointments |
| The standard it sets | What is required is greater than your best |
| The day-structure practices | A long block; no rituals; no meetings before noon; schedule back to front |
| The five steps of the plan | Pick the lead type; pick the standard; fill the checklist; do it; make employees the target and repeat |
| The checklist slots | Who, what, where, to whom, when, why, how, how much, how many, for how long |
| The right block length | Not established on this page |
| The right outcome number when working to the goal | This page gives no figure for it |
8. What this page does not cover
Which of the four methods to run is SOP 12, and each has its own page — warm outreach on SOP 17 and SOP 18, content on SOP 20 and SOP 26, cold outreach on SOP 27 and SOP 28, and paid advertising from SOP 35. Setting outreach volume against a target rather than a flat number is SOP 29. The learning budget referenced in step 2 is SOP 42. Handing the daily action to somebody else, which is step 4, is SOP 43 and SOP 44. Getting affiliates and agencies to do it instead is SOP 45 and SOP 47. Choosing between more volume, better conversion and a new channel is SOP 40.
Pay, hours and employment terms are not covered on this page.
Terms defined on this page
- Advertising checklist
- Ten blanks to fill in for the day's main action: who, what offer, which platform, which audience, when, why, how, how much, what follow-ups and for how long.
- Hundred actions a day
- Do a hundred primary actions every day for a hundred days: reach-outs for outreach, minutes of making for content, dollars for paid ads, and only the ad figure may come down. SOP 147 reads the hundred for ads as time spent on them, at $10 to $100 a day. As a rule of thumb, nothing counts as done enough until done a hundred times.
- One-page plan
- Five steps: choose the kind of lead; choose between a hundred actions a day and working to the goal; fill in the advertising checklist; do the action until you can pay someone else to; then repeat with employees as the lead.
- Primary action
- The unit counted under a hundred actions a day, which depends on the method: reach-outs for warm and cold outreach, minutes of making for content, dollars for paid ads. On a second reading (SOP 147), the paid hundred is minutes given to the ads, and content's minutes include outreach and commenting; neither is settled.
- Working to the goal
- Committing to a number of outcomes, not actions, and keeping going until you reach it however long it takes. It sets the bar above your current best.