David Schloss: $5/Day Ad Strategy, Retreat Marketing & Growing a Soul-Aligned Brand | Ep54

David Schloss is an online entrepreneur who began marketing in 2007 from his college apartment. 

Over the years, he has helped over one thousand businesses improve their website traffic, customer acquisition, and revenue using social advertising. 

His business, Convert ROI, enables businesses to succeed by taking complicated social ad plans and seamlessly turning them into easy-to-follow revenue producing campaigns. He manages over $3 mil per month in paid advertising via Meta, Google and TikTok.

He has been rated as one of the top “Experts to Watch” by Forbes Magazine, has been featured on Entrepreneur.com, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, and been interviewed on various podcasts and web shows around the topic of social advertising.

In this episode of the Successful Spiritualpreneur Podcast, Christian sits down with David Schloss—renowned ad strategist and founder of Convert ROI, who manages over $3 million in monthly ad spend across Meta, Google, and TikTok. With nearly two decades of experience, David brings a grounded, no-fluff approach to scaling impact-driven businesses through paid traffic.

He shares how coaches and spiritual entrepreneurs can start running ads with as little as $5/day, why content should always come before ads, and how to market offerings like retreats using warm audiences and soul-aligned strategy. David also opens up about pivoting your niche, building trust with low-ticket offers, and what it really takes to turn your purpose into profit—without losing your authenticity.

If you’ve been sitting on the edge of running ads or scaling your message, this conversation offers practical tools, strategic clarity, and a refreshing dose of integrity in the world of digital marketing.

Connect with David Schloss:

Follow on Instagram: @davidmschloss

Explore his website: https://convertroi.com

Contact David directly: david@convertroi.com

Core Themes

• Starting ads with just $5/day
• Creating micro-content that builds trust and authority
• Warm audiences vs. cold traffic (and how to use both)
• Retreat marketing strategy for conscious entrepreneurs
• Pivoting your personal brand and retraining the algorithm
• Building with low-ticket offers and pinned posts
• Blending data-driven marketing with spiritual purpose
• Scaling your business without sacrificing your mission

Connect with Christian

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YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@chrismauerer

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/chrismauerer

Business Inquiries:
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠info@lovepixelagency.com

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Transcript

Christian
What's up, beautiful people. This is Christian from the Successful Spiritualpreneur Podcast. And today we're going to dive deep into ad traffic with David Schloss. He's an online entrepreneur who began marketing in 2007 from his college apartment. And over the years, he has helped over 1000 businesses improve their website traffic, customer acquisition, and revenue using social advertising. His business Convert ROI.

It enables businesses to succeed by taking complicated social ad plans and seamlessly turning them into easy to follow revenue producing campaigns. He manages over 3 million per month in paid advertising via meta, Google, and TikTok. He's been rated as one of the top experts to watch by Forbes Magazine and has been featured on entrepreneur.com, Business Insider, The Huff Post, and also been interviewed on various podcasts and web shows around the topic of social advertising. Super excited to have you on the podcast today, David.

David Schloss
Appreciate you, thank you for having me.

Christian
Awesome. Before we get started, do you mind just sharing what's your handle on social so people can check you out?

David Schloss
Sure, so you can find me on Facebook at Facebook.com slash David Schloss or David Schloss depends on if you want the page or the profile. ⁓ For Instagram, David Schloss is the handle as well. And then ⁓ same thing on TikTok and YouTube. It's all practically the same. So either the middle initials there or it's not, but you will find me. So yeah.

Christian
Awesome.

Perfect. Beautiful. So today we want to jump straight into the topic of advertising, especially meta and TikTok. So from your experience and you know, our listeners out there are, would say rather in the beginning of their advertising journeys, a lot of coaches, spiritual entrepreneurs. What kind of advice do you have? You know, because it's been, you know, it has changed a lot throughout the past years.

work and get people started. Yeah, fill us in.

David Schloss
Yeah.

Yeah. So I know that for a lot of people, the biggest task when it comes to getting their foot on the ground and really like taking hold of their, their expertise, their authority, you know, basically standing out from the crowd on any social platform is having to create the content that's going to go out on all these places. Right. So even though I focus primarily on the advertising side, the biggest focus for me is making sure we have the right content for each of these platforms. Right.

So before I ever say, Hey, give me all your content. I'll put money behind it and everyone will see it. I want to ensure that we're actually putting out the content that you want to use as the representation of you and what you do. Right. So think of it this way for someone like me, we know that. Tik TOK re you know, Instagram, primarily the real side, which also can work for YouTube shorts. It can work for Facebook reels. It's like the content's all multi-purpose.

And so instead of having you create 20 different variations of something for one platform, so you can have images and video and all that, I oftentimes just tell people, what is it that you enjoy talking about? And can you talk about it for 30 minutes? Sort of like what we're going to do, right? But can you talk about it for 30 minutes and have it broken down into little micro tasks or micro lessons, I should say. So that way you can establish your authority for the next 30 days. If that answer is yes, we now have an endless supply of content ready to go.

for the advertising side. If you are good on camera, you'll know, right? Because you can easily turn on the camera and just boom, you're just ready to go and you could talk off the cuff and it feels like you've been rehearsing this thing for days, if not weeks at a time. That's me. I could talk about ads all day long. You just throw a question at me, no problem. I could talk about it. But there's other people who need things scripted and they need to be essentially mentally ready to go before all that stuff is created. So before you ever run an ad,

Are you even comfortable on camera? And if not, if you're going to focus on imagery, do you have stories to tell? Because stories sell. So you need to be able to talk about things that have happened in your line of expertise or in your life or whatever it may be that can all connect to what it is you plan to sell, whether it's a course, a service, coaching, you name it. Right? So just wanted to make sure that was established first. A little, little trick for everybody. Your reels, because they are multipurpose.

You know, they're all vertical. We all know that if you just hold up the phone, boom, start recording, right? Sounds easy and just something that you can just turn on the phone and start recording. Those all work for your TikTok, your Instagram, your YouTube and your Facebook. So by default, you taking care of four platforms right off the bat, just by going like this, right? Just get something on camera and then make it 30 seconds to 60 seconds max micro lessons and you're good. Now, if you could do 30 of those, fantastic.

You're a beast. Now, if you go ahead and create that content in advance, now you can schedule it all out and just monitor your data. Monitor how it performs because that's going to allow you to see what the next batch of content is going to be. Your first 30 days will be indicative of what subject you have to talk about for the next 30 and then the next 30. Right? But then here's the great part. All of this can be promoted for as little as $5 a day. Okay? I'm going to just get straight to it.

Everyone believes that advertising is incredibly difficult or expensive. That's relative, right? What's expensive to you may be cheap to someone else, right? So it's wherever you are at at that moment. And if you've never created an ad budget before, then everything's expensive, right? Cause you haven't developed the muscle memory yet to know what it's like to publish an ad and then see what it can do for you, right? How many people saw it that day? How many people clicked it? How many people subscribed or followed? And so that is something you're developing.

It's essentially you're going to the gym for the first time. The gym just happens to be the ads manager. And so as you were developing your content, you're essentially preparing yourself to go to the gym. And now you've gone to the gym and now it's up to you to just be consistent. so $5 a day is all you need to start. Now you could do a dollar a day, but let's be honest. You could spend five. You can, you could put $5 down and learn a little more about what content is getting viewed, saved, followed.

And that will allow you to then decide, do I create more content? I ⁓ just keep focusing on the ones that are already working? And you could put the $5 towards that and just keep showing up in people's feeds top of mind, showcasing what it is you know.

Christian
Beautiful. love that. Such a simple recipe, you know. I think a lot of times people just get hung up in like getting started.

David Schloss
Yeah, because it's a simplified process. We overcomplicate things.

Right. But here's the

thing. AI exists now. If we had this conversation two years ago, when AI was just starting to go public for a lot of us, two and a half years ago, we all would have been like, I don't know what to click. I don't know what to view. I don't know where to sign up for an account. But much like how Google exists, so does chat GPT. And when you don't know how to make something, guess who does? AI does. And so if you are not sure how to create an account, what question do you ask? Hey, chat GPT.

How do I create an ad account? It tells you word for word what to do, where to click, how to find it. Same thing with, I don't know how to publish an ad in the ads manager. Now you have two places to go. You can go to GPT and it gives you the written portion, or you can go to YouTube and find out someone who's done it already and is showing it to you. Here's what you can click. Here's how to deploy an ad. Here's where you put your images or your video. Here's where you put your text. The deployment process or the implementation is not difficult.

The part that can become difficult is knowing what is and is not working. It's data analysis. It's learning what is considered a good ad, what is considered a bad ad. When do you have to change things? That's the hard part because that comes from experience and doing it. But starting now, there's no excuse anymore. And on top of that, most of these platforms make it 90 % done for you. You just got to plug in the assets and just let it do its thing. So.

If you're like me who likes to get into the intricate details and actually decide where things go and what placements to put things on and where to optimize that, that's my job. I'm doing this 24 seven, 365. Like it's, it's, I'm in there. So of course it's easy for me, but if you're a newbie, you're just getting started. I could see where it's daunting, but the setup is not the hard part. And so just get over that. And then the rest actually will become a lot easier because you realized I finally did it.

And now that you've done that part, which you originally thought was difficult, and then you realize it's not, that's when you have to learn about what does this data mean? How does this determine what I do next? And that is where you have to do more learning.

Christian
Beautiful. And one thing that we hear a lot of our clients struggle with because, you know, behind the Spurge Pruner podcast is, you know, our agency LovePixel, right? We help people with web design, with development, you know, mainly on the build outside, not so much the traffic side. But one thing we've always hear from our clients is like,

Well, I'm a personal brand and I want to do multiple things. I don't only want to like post one thing. So right. Like that kind of comes back to the content conversation of like, people will never even get to like spending $5 because they haven't even like figured out maybe their content pillars or something like that. What do you have to say to that type of person?

David Schloss
Mm-hmm.

Right. Yep.

So I'm someone who has struggled with that too, right? Because I, as much as I do advertising every day, I have a lot of things that I love, right? I love talking about video games. I love talking about rap and hip hop. I love watches and clocks, as you can see behind me, right? There's all sorts of things in the history behind it. There's all sorts of things I'm interested in every day. But what I often find is that you can tie in your interests to what it is you do. So if you are somebody

who is interested in, let's say, finance and investing, which I am. I'm a huge data person, so naturally I'm into investing. How can I tie that into what it is that I do? Well, I didn't know it was easy to do this until one day I realized what I review in terms of a company's performance, let's say meta, for example, understanding their quarterly reports actually helps me understand when is the best time to advertise. I never made that correlation early on, but then when I did figure it out, it was like, wait a minute.

Meta's literally telling me, hey, this is when ads are getting expensive. This is when ads are not as expensive. This is when we're trying new features. Here are the things that are coming in the next six to 12 months. Like that allowed me to be a better advertiser. It also allowed me to talk about both the advertising and the investing simultaneously. So now I can merge two of my interests together and create content around it. So anytime you want to talk multiple subjects, either look for the correlation between

two or three of them and bring them together in one or chunk it up, categorize it, right? Maybe for 30 days you talk about, in my case, advertising. The next 30 days I'll talk about watches and the history of it and the business behind it. And then the next 30 days I'll talk about something else. But in doing that, I'm always going to find a way to wrap it back to what it is that I do. Because at the end of the day, people are here to learn how I can help them scale, grow, or even establish their businesses.

with social ads, primarily matters what I'm known for, so that's what people are coming to me for. And if I don't do that, my message gets lost into the massive weeds that is social media. And so you have to make sure that you are always going back to what it is you want to be known for. But that doesn't mean you can't talk about your interests.

Christian
Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same, same on my side too. so we have the agency, right? We have the podcast. I have my personal brand and then I have a tea brand on Amazon because I love tea and it gives you. yeah, kind of again, what you say is like finding what's kind of the split there. And again, don't forget about your core message because then otherwise you're going to become just a tea person, right?

David Schloss
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Right. Right. And that's the thing. If you want to be just a tea person, you can't, right? At some point you could decide a couple of months, maybe a couple of years from now, you're like, you know what? Everything's great. I'm evolving. I'm deciding to go all in on the tea brand. And you can do that because people know you have a tea brand. You've been talking about it. You've naturally been putting things out there that says, Hey, I have a tea brand. So it's always going to be able to come back around to that. Just like how you brought things back around to your design agency. Right. And so.

Never give up on that aspect of what could potentially be your future dream or the dream you're developing. Because for a lot of us, what we're doing now may not actually be the thing we do in the future. And so you want to discuss these other elements of your life and what it is that you're interested in because that also is the connection point, right? When I talk about watches, I've connected to people in person who've been like, I love that thing you did about Rolex and how it tied into the business and they have something to connect to me on.

and they don't have to just talk about ads. I don't like talking about ads with people in person. I actually like talking about everything else outside of ads. It just always comes back to that because they're like, hey, I have a question. I have something I need to talk about with ads. That's cool. But at least we were able to have a massive amount of other discussion on things outside of that. And that just allows you to have deeper connection with people. So don't give up on talking about those things. But when you're just starting, you have to tell the algorithm that this is what I do.

This is who I am. This is what I want to be known for. So you have to train it. It's just like training a pixel to say, are the people I want for my conversions. I want these leads. I want these purchasers. You can't do that if you're putting out hundreds of messaging that don't align with what your brand's about. So you have to start off with something to give it an idea of who it is you are and what it is you do and why you do what you do. And then at some point, you could bring it back to other things.

Christian
Yeah.

Beautiful. I think it's such an important point because it gets back to the core that sometimes people lose or sometimes people lose interest or sometimes just like the passion gets lost. Because when you talk about one thing, we're humans. We're like multilayered. So I think it's such an important topic to touch upon. So thanks for filling us in on that. And then.

David Schloss
Absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Christian
Let's make it a little tangible. So for example, let's say I am a coach. I offer the usual things, like a course, freebie opt-in, all those kinds of things that go with the offer stack of that. And also offer a retreat. What would you recommend? Let's say I wanted to sell a retreat. What would you recommend would be a great ad experience or stack or whatever you want to call it. Yeah.

David Schloss
Gotcha.

So retreats. The thing about retreats are they're typically best for those with some form of an established audience, right? Whether it's your following on social, your email list, retreats do really well with a warm audience. But then they also do great with what I would call the semi-warm audience, right? These are people who've been following you for a long time, but they maybe have never bought from you. So let's look at the, I'll call it the offer stack.

Most people don't start with a retreat. They usually end with a retreat. There's usually something along the lines that comes along with, maybe I've sold a course, maybe I've done coaching, maybe I've sold playbooks, lead magnets, or low ticket offers, anything less than $100. These people are in your ecosystem. They're getting the know, like, and trust you. They've read your emails. They've seen your social posts. Even someone who's bought something for $27 can end up buying a $1,000 ticket to a retreat. It's just the fact that they're in your ecosystem.

So with a retreat, if that's your first offer, and I'm just putting out this disclaimer, if this is your first offer, prepare to be very stressed, right? Cause you're, you got a lot of advertising to do. And that's the other thing you got to have one hell of a budget, right? Cause if you're selling a thousand dollar ticket and it costs you $800 to get a sale, how many tickets you trying to sell? Right? It's math. All of this is math. So let's just say for the sake of easy numbers that the tickets a hundred bucks, right? We'll just make this.

Super simple. Tickets $100 to the retreat. Well, do you have an audience? Yes or no. If the answer is no, well, you gotta establish something first. Why should people know, like, and trust you to even pay you $100 to go to this retreat? If you can't answer these questions, don't run a retreat yet. But if, let's say, you've been building this audience, you have 10,000 followers, you have 20,000 followers, you got an email list that's being built in the background from giving away something or selling a lower end product or ...

Maybe it's your coaching students you've had for the last five to 10 years. Those are great people to start with, right? I have 50 people that can come to this retreat and you can email or message directly all your past clients and existing ones and get them to at least fill the initial part of that room. Always start with what is the lowest hanging fruit first. That way you can have some sort of capacity already taken, you know, taken in because then on your ads you could say we're already at 40 % capacity. We're already 30 % there. Right. And so.

After you've gone through your warmer list or your warmer audience, the ads are going to be all around what people are going to experience. Because with retreats, what oftentimes gets them to sell more in the future is not necessarily the result. Don't get me wrong, the result is great. Everyone wants a result. I go to an event to establish some sort of result for my business. Got it. But people also want to know what they're going to experience. Who are they going to meet?

What is it that they're going to find when they get there? What are they going to find about themselves? Right? So there is a result, but it's also, what are they going to feel? If I know that I'm going to this event and I'm going to feel a new sense of enlightenment, refreshed, I'm going to feel healthier, whatever that may be, that aligns with as much as me going, I'm going to leave this event and have a plan to double my business. Sometimes I just want to get away. So with retreats, you have to remember.

that it's all those different elements that you want someone to feel. And can they experience that in two to three days? If you could tell that story and also talk about how other people have experienced those things, because testimonials work great with retreats, especially if someone's like, I came to this last year and it blew me away and here's all the things that have happened since, that's going to make it a lot easier to sell a retreat versus you being on camera saying, here's why my retreat is awesome. That's not enough. People want to be able to hear

what someone has gathered or learned or gained from working with you. So your students are the easiest people to go to for that because they could talk about you and what you've done for them and why they need to be at the retreat. Right. And this is only for people who are doing it for the first time. If you're doing a retreat for the second, third, fourth time and you're like, I want to make this the biggest retreat possible. Okay. By then you've had pretty much a opportunity to go back to every person you've ever worked with, even prospects. You've never worked with them before, but they've

engaged in conversation with you, this is your chance to find a way to get them to show up in person and you actually have that in-person connection you've been looking to establish for however long it's been. Right? Because that might be the thing that gets them to decide, you know what, I really do need to work with this person on a higher level, whether it's coaching or ongoing support, whatever it may be. So notice I haven't said anything about ads yet because there's a lot you have to do pre-sell in order to get people to show up. But from an ad standpoint,

A lot of that is just going to be telling people in video format, I'm going make that very clear, video format, what they're going to experience. If you've done retreats in the past or smaller events, use B-roll in your video ads. Make the ads short, less than a minute. Make them every size possible, square, vertical, make sure it fits every placement. And then you will be spending money promoting this. This is not a $5 a day venture. This is a hundred plus dollar a day venture.

Because if every ticket is a hundred, you need to spend a hundred minimum, right? You want to sell a ticket a day? How many days in advance are you going to be selling? Is it going to be 60 days out? Is it going to be 90 days out? Right? If you're trying to sell a thousand tickets, you better be spending a thousand dollars a day, right? It's we're trying to sell out fast. We're trying to get people in the room quick because there's nothing more stressful than waiting two days out and your retreat still has space. And then you magically sell out at the last minute. Now you can breathe for 24 hours before you have to go teach for three days.

Right. We've all been there. And so I just want to make sure that part is clear because a lot of business owners and coaches and consultants don't tap into their warm audience enough before opening up their advertising, especially for events. Cause those are some of the toughest things to promote. And if you've ever been to an event that feels like everyone there knows each other already, it's because they do. They've all done something in the past together and that's the warm audience. Right. Also.

If it feels like everyone there just sort of feels, I don't know, let's just call it misaligned or not quite the right fit. There could have been some freebies sent out. There could have been some people who got free tickets to attend to fill the room. This is all part of the event space. And in case anyone's like, I've never heard of that before. When a room is not filled and there's, say out of hundred tickets, there's still 30 left. Those 30 are usually wholesale doubt to other people so that they could fill the room. Right.

So all they're trying to do is just have the appearance of we sold out an event. In reality, they sold 70 out of 100, right? So you have to keep this in mind. Don't go too big on your first try. Just try to fill a room with the right people, 50, 100, 150, and then you can develop what that would look like into the future. But don't go balls to the wall on your first retreat, especially if you don't have a budget to promote it.

Christian
Beautiful. And when it comes to someone, let's say someone has an audience, don't know, like let's say 10, 20, 30, 40K, something like that. Let's say under 50. Let's keep it under 50. And they want to start with advertising. What do you say, they have content, they have traction, they know something's working. How do you recommend them to start and invest and just a little bit bolster their audience?

David Schloss
Sure. So they have a cheat code. It's called having an audience already. Right. And so for them, let's use meta because it's perfect example. Let's say you have 25,000 people following you. Okay. Following you. And let's say you have some people following your, your Facebook as well. So you have an audience on both platforms in your ad account. There's a place called audience manager in audience manager. You can build an audience of all the people who follow you, all the people who've engaged with your content.

all the people who viewed your content, all the people who've clicked your site, all the people who saved your content. Saved is the really interesting one because that just proves that people have referenced your material for later. Not only did they see it, they're holding onto it so they can go back to it, right? That's a huge metric along with how many people followed you from a post. It's because in Instagram and in Facebook, you can view your insights of a post and see how many people start following you from that post.

So those two metrics alone can tell you, hmm, what language am I needing to use? What messaging should I use in my advertising? Because this is what's led to people saving and following my stuff. At the same time, you've developed these audiences to use not only to target them with future content or with lead magnets or with courses or whatever it may be, but you also can use these to create what's called lookalike audiences.

Right? So imagine you have that 25,000 person follower list from Instagram. You can make a lookalike of your followers. And then Facebook will go and create 2 million people in an audience, depending on where you are. In the US, it's 2 million. And it'll say, here's 2 million people with similar characteristics to those who are already following you. Here's 2 million people from those who've saved your content. Here's 2 million people from those who viewed your content. You can create lookalikes of every single audience you've built. And the reason that's important,

It's because it also allows you to see what Meta, Facebook and Instagram believes are the characteristics that are important to you based off those already following you. So if you have a large audience of women following you, then what will happen is, is when you create a lookalike, roughly 70 to 80 % of that audience is going to be women too, because it picked up on that. Especially if there's a certain age range or if there's a gender or if let's say they follow you on a certain platform more than others, it's going to create

an audience based on that. And so keep that in mind. If have too wide of an audience, right, all over the world, what's going to happen is your lookalikes aren't going to make sense. They're going to be a little bit everything. Same thing with your post saves. If all of a sudden it's just people from all over the place and it's not primarily in the location you were currently residing, your lookalikes aren't going to perform as well. So having that advantage of having tons of content and people engaging with it,

people viewing it, people clicking on it, that allows you to at least create audiences without having to guess. You're able to go in there and not only retarget them, essentially bring them to the top of the list of people who see your content first, but then you get to create more audiences from that and not have to guess what are they, what do they do and how they do what they do. Because meta is just using the existing data you already have. So that's your cheat code. Now you can use that to promote

Whatever you choose, you could tell people even to follow you, right? You can promote more content to these people, even the new ones, and just say, Hey, don't forget to go follow me. And then just rinse, repeat the cycle over and over and over and over. And so that allows you to stand out from the crowd quickly versus if you were starting from scratch, there is nothing to start with. There's nothing to use as a source or a reference. So you're guessing altogether. You're just putting everything out there, trying to establish an audience that is taking some sort of initiative.

to be on your list or to buy from you. So yeah, that's, that's your advantage.

Christian
Yeah, it's really a cheat code, as you say. You know, if you have an audience, the things you can do with it, it works a lot faster, obviously, right? What would you say to someone that has an audience but wants to shift their audience? The noticed, yeah, I've served this, let's say, plant medicine, or something like that. Like, I've done that for the past, I don't know, five, seven years. I've put an audience that have 100,000 people now, or don't know, 50.

David Schloss
100%. Yep.

Christian
want to shift now into, I don't know, Reiki. Obviously not something that's completely different, like similar in each, but still different.

David Schloss
Yep.

Yeah. So that's going to require a content shift, right? You can have the existing audience and then all you have to do is change your next 30 days of content to basically tell the algorithm, I'm now going in this direction, right? If you want to go faster, you can do it a lot faster, but I'm just saying, let's say you produce one piece of content a day. You want to change that quickly? Do three to three to six.

for two weeks and you'll shift the whole thing very quickly. You'll notice your explore page is vastly different too, right? That's when you can tell the messaging is changing. When you can go to your own explore page and half of it is around similar subject to what you talk about, right? That's when it's figured out who you are now. So you have to change your messaging first through the content and then if you want to really speed it up, put some money behind the content you're producing so that more people see

Christian
Hmm.

David Schloss
that this is what you're talking about now. And because I mentioned those audiences that you built out in audience manager, the first people who should be seeing this new stuff are all the audiences you built from followers and engagers and viewers and clickers and savers. Just put them all in an audience and the audience manager and just run ads to all those people and then just say, hey, this is what we're talking about now, right? And just make them familiar. And for those who aren't interested, they're going to leave. And you know what's great? Once they leave,

The audience is updated, so you don't have to worry about that. So it's really just a matter of giving yourself a 30-day grace period and just present them with everything that's new in your life, and then make sure they see it. And the only way to do that is you got to put some money behind it. But it's not a lot. $5 a day, $20 a day, just something small, five to 20. And just every new piece you produce, put it in that campaign that's running $5 to $20 a day, and just let it stay top of mind with these people for 30 days.

And then you'll weed out those that aren't interested and you'll keep everyone else that is. And then you can go back to doing what you were doing, which is continually putting out more content or, know, maybe you shifted what you're talking about in your course or your coaching. They're, they're aware now you've been talking about it for a while. They're completely aware of it.

Christian
Beautiful. I love that. Yeah, I think it's sometimes very nuanced, especially when you have audiences that are already established.

David Schloss
Yeah. It's different when your audience is a million people or 200,000 people, because you could really shift it in a post, right? It could be one post, you could pin it and it just stays there. And if the engagement kicks off fast enough, everybody who's following you will see it, right? Because it's just the default or by proxy of all the engagement, right? It's just like when people say they're retiring and the post goes crazy. It's like, my God, I can't believe they're retiring, right? That engagement is what

allows them to stay at the top of the feed for all the new people to see and also all the established people to see. But if you're new or you have a smaller audience, 20,000, 50,000, yes, less than 100,000 is considered smaller, right? Even in some spaces, 100,000 is considered small, right? So if you don't have that engagement to kickstart your stuff to always be at the top of the feed when someone logs in, then they're not going to be aware of your shift. So you have to manufacture that. That's what the ads are for.

But if you have a larger audience, you could just say one thing for a day or two and everyone that needs to hear it or see it, sees it. And then you don't have to worry about making 30 days worth of stuff. So it's a different dynamic, but if you're on the lower end of the follower count, you got to trick the algorithm and you got to trick people. Yeah. Yeah.

Christian
Yeah, things take longer. know, lower the fallout amount, the longer it takes because it's

like data for the algorithm.

David Schloss
And I don't want to say trick in a negative way. It's more so you're just, you're, you're twit. You're changing up what it is that people are making aware of who you are and what you do. And same thing with the algorithm, right? You don't want people to be like, they do Reiki now. But then the algorithms like, no, they're a spiritual coach. That's not the same thing. I don't want to identify as that. I need to, I need to flip the narrative. So you have to create more content in order for the algorithm to switch what it is they make you out to be. Right. If I want to just be an entrepreneur and not an advertiser.

I got to put out more general content on being an entrepreneur. But if I go on Instagram right now and I look at my profile and it I'm an entrepreneur, I actually identify as a paid ad strategist. So I have to switch the narrative a bit more. So that way when I log in, it actually says that I'm in advertising versus being in general entrepreneurship. Same thing. So that's what I would do in order to flip all the story that's attached to you and then move it in a different direction.

Christian
Got it. So we're coming up towards the end of the show. We have about like, you know, five, seven minutes left and I wanted to ask you, ⁓ maybe some quick actual takeaways for the audience. then, you know, just like a personal question for you at the end. And so if someone, you know, listening right now, wanting to run their first, the very first ad this weekend as a coach, you know, they have a small audience, let's say under 10.

David Schloss
Yeah.

Yeah.

Christian
What three things would you tell them to do first?

David Schloss
Build out the audiences I mentioned of those who are already following you, clicking, engaging, viewing, all that. I'm not even going to say set up the ad account. You should already have one set up. So that's by default. But build out those audiences. Second thing is I would create a low-ticket offer, somewhere between $7 and $97, for people to consume, because buyers are the best people to have on your list.

Especially if it's a low ticket because you can always move them up towards your other offers later but you want them to showcase that they are committed to your work by buying it and Make sure that offer is in your bio Sitting there to be purchased at any time of the day, right? And I like to keep it cheap enough to wear it and it's a Offer that they just go, you know what? I'll give it a shot, right? So usually if it's 7 to 27 people just take the chance they just go you know what why not? It's cheap

And if you blow them away with a low ticket offer, they're going to buy everything else that you got. Right. So you put that in your bio, make sure it's in every bio that you are posting on, right? Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn. If you do LinkedIn, you tick talk, all of it, just make sure it's there. And then the third thing would be just put out at least seven days of content, pin the three best ones, and then run ads to them.

run ads to the pinned comments or the pinned posts, excuse me, because what I had realized is for those of us who aren't consistent creators is that when your pinned posts have a lot of engagement, whether it's through comments or reactions or post saves or shares, every time someone lands there for the first time, the first three things they see are those three posts. And there's nothing that keeps them more engaged than seeing three posts with tons of reactions and comments and shares.

And so if you're an inconsistent creator, you just want to make sure those top three things are your most popular and they stay there, especially if it has a great looking thumbnail, because it'll get them attracted to want to click it and see what's going on. Right. So just make sure you have three pinned posts that you're proud of. Right. So you might have to put some money behind it to manufacture some engagement, but in doing that, you are simultaneously promoting your brand. You're getting people to want to follow you. You're getting people to want to check out your offers.

Having that offer in the first place, huge step forward for a lot of people. They all just have coaching offers or something high ticket. Guess what? Not everyone could afford your stuff in the beginning, and they need to just understand why they should be following you until they can afford your offer. And then, just being able to say, I have my audiences already built an audience manager, and they're always there, and they're constantly growing from my efforts. You get to see those numbers go up, and you're always reminded to use them whenever you're running ads. So if you just do those three things, you'll be generating

low ticket sales anytime you post content, anytime you run ads, but then you'll also be growing a following simultaneously because you basically show people that your content's growing every time they log in. Every time they see those posts, they're going to see that the numbers are different. So I would do those three things.

Christian
Beautiful, thanks so much. And then, yeah, I'd love to ask a personal question because obviously, you know, you're not just a robot spitting out wisdom, ⁓ which is what a lot of people look at you probably. ⁓

David Schloss
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I'm a GPT of ads. That's all

it is. They just ask me questions all day. But yeah.

Christian
So I just wanted to ask you a personal question, like, what's your...

And I know that's a rather deep question, what are you looking to do? What's your mission? What's the why you're doing it? And what are you looking to leave behind? would you see yourself in, I guess, the universe?

David Schloss
Yeah.

Yeah.

So I was actually digging into this quite a bit over the last couple of years. So my main vision at the moment is to help a million businesses add an additional million dollars of revenue to their business, which would create a trillion dollars in GDP for the world. Million dollars for a million people. That is a huge undertaking. I don't wake up going, my God, I don't know if I've reached a million people, but I just know through my work indirectly and directly.

that I've impacted tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, whether it's through podcasts or these shows or, you know, my speaking gigs that I've done or just content I put out there over the years. know somebody's out there has watched it and has decided, you know what, I'm going to start an agency or they've watched it and said, you know what, I'm going to start running ads for my business. And that was the thing that got them to start spending five, 10, $200 a day, whatever it may be. And that could have propelled their business to making

hundreds of thousands, not millions of dollars. I also know that I've gotten access to accounts that I'm super thankful to be a part of where I've spent a million dollars a month for them. And I've millions of dollars to their revenue every single month. So I know that through what I do day to day, but also through how I present myself in person, online, how I showcase my expertise, I'm not trying to come off as cocky. I'm just confident at what I do.

Right. And so naturally I make sure that people feel that and that they want to take action on everything I say. But even if they don't, they could see that I'm a genuine person and I'm authentically me. So that way they go, you know what? There are people in this world just trying to help and that they actually would do maybe just a little bit of what I said. Right. If someone on this, you know, on this show is watching this and they're like, you know what? I'm going to start making the content. My job's done. I'm good. Good job. You did one of the three things. That's all that I need you to do is just one.

Because that got you started. You'll eventually do ads. And for me, that's been my core focus has just been like, how do I get more people to realize there's nothing wrong with spending money? And there's nothing wrong with spending the money that's going to make even more. And then what you're going to do with it is your bigger purpose. I'm making my money now to support a different vision. I'm completely aware of that. I don't expect to have an agency until I retire, if I ever retire.

I just know the agency is the vehicle for whatever I'm going to decide to do in the future, which I will determine at a later date. And so I just wake up every day going, how do I make someone another million dollars? And then that's exactly what I focus on. And that's probably why I get these people that I, that I get as clients because they hear that and they go, that sounds awesome, but they don't do it from a sense of, I just want to make a bunch of money. They, they see that.

If that was the only thing that you care about, I'm going to have that same reflection back on you. If you're going to be a hard ass about that, I'm going to be a worst person to work with because I'm going to drill you to get things done so we can hit the number. Or we can have fun doing this and we can develop something that you enjoy doing day to day. And then I will come off as that direct mirror of this is awesome. Let's keep doing this thing. And I support your vision too. Right. So I oftentimes am just operating from.

complete happiness of what I do. And then I also am aware of this is just one part of what I'm going to be doing in the future. I know I'm going to be on a stage somewhere talking to 10,000 people at some point about how I started this at 18 years old when no one else was doing it. Cause I literally started when the platform was brand new and how I was able to help millions of people get started in their journey of running ads for their business when they thought that running ads was difficult or they didn't need it or it was too expensive. And that's all relative.

And so at some point that will be my, my bigger calling, but for now it's to just help people grow their businesses and creating their dream business. They've always wanted, right. And so they can do that day to day, you know, year over year. So, yeah.

Christian
Beautiful. Well, thanks for sharing that. I can definitely feel the authenticity behind it, you know, because sometimes people in the space when it comes to advertising, they're just a little sleazy. ⁓

David Schloss
Mm-hmm.

It's a, it's a data world, you know, we, it's

very easy to turn on the robot brain and be like, let me give you all the stats on why you need to be doing what you're doing. But I don't believe most people in this world operate off math. I think they operate off intellect and feel. And so I'm not going to lead with the data. I handle the data and how does the data translate into what you want? That's my job. You want to make a bunch of money and buy a boat?

Christian
Mm-hmm.

David Schloss
Let's reverse engineer what that looks like, right? And let's go ahead and make that a reality. And I've done that with people. Had a client that's like, I want a Lamborghini. This was 10 years ago. I want a Lamborghini. Cool. And then which one? Picked it. Vision boarded it basically. Right? Why is it that six years later that exact Lamborghini was at his house? Because we worked on it. Like we got to the point of getting there and he still has to this day and he's never going to get rid of it because we worked on it together to get to that point. Still works with me, right? 10 years later, still works with me.

That means something, right? Or I could just be like every other advertiser, help you get the Lambo and then just say, Hey, was the invoice paid and have no feelings towards anything and just only look at you as a number. Right? So I think the first part sounds a lot better. So yeah.

Christian
Yeah,

beautiful. Well, it's exactly what we embody here at you know, successful spiritual podcast because it's at the intersection of spirituality and entrepreneurship, Kind of like this balance of divine masculine, divine feminine, right? Where is the yin and yang of every person? Because at the end of the day, the one thing that AI will never be able to copy is our spirit, our soul, right? It's always going to be incredibly

David Schloss
100%.

Correct.

Christian
intellectual and smart and very soulful and empathetic too, but like the soul and like the humanist, like it's going to be very interesting to see how that's going to evolve. So thanks for being such a beautiful example of that concept.

David Schloss
Mm-hmm.

My pleasure. I appreciate you for having me on and being able to provide as much wisdom as I could around advertising. So yeah.

Christian
Yeah,

it's been an honor and I celebrate and see you already on the stage. So thanks for being who you are. Cool. Thank you, David. Let us know where people can find you. And yeah, thank you.

David Schloss
Thank you, appreciate it.

Yeah,

absolutely. All platforms, David Schloss or David Schloss, search both. You'll find me. I have checks on all of them. Right. So just make sure you add that one. And if you want to email me direct, if you want to work together on something, maybe you want some consulting or some education, just david at convert ROI.com and you reach me directly. It's not going to an assistant or an AI. It's me. Right. And then I will make sure that you're taken care of.

Christian
Awesome. Thank you so much for being on, for sharing all your wisdom, all your heart. yeah, it's been an honor.

David Schloss
Absolutely. Thank you.