Posted by Ryan Burglehaus, July 14, 2010

I was reading through an email about some latest and greatest product a while back and came across a statement made about being willing to lose $100 on your first PPC campaign while learning the ropes. For some reason it struck me as odd that anyone would even think twice about losing $100. Especially when that represented valuable learning in the ways of PPC and how to ultimately make money online.

Related to this, I was searching for some new tips for running ads on Facebook and happened on a couple of threads where people were absolutely 100% swearing off ALL Facebook advertising because it was a crappy network with poor ad performance and was a waste of money. (As a side note, this is absolutely fine with me. Less competition for my FB ads!) Interestingly enough, these people were talking about sub-$100 ad spends.

All of this got me thinking about what people are willing to lose to learn a valuable skill that gives them the potential to earn far more money than they currently make. I realize, in the end, it boils down to your individual context of money, how much you have and how much a dollar is worth to you at that moment in your economic context. But sometimes I think people get way too hung up on $100, $500 or even $1000 spends.

I’m certainly not saying you should rush out and blow $500 just because it’s REALLY not that much money. But come on. When’s the last time you looked back on spending $100 in a month on coffee and said to yourself, “I really regret doing that.” I guarantee you that none of us is going to even remember spending $100 on crappy, burnt, overpriced Starbucks coffee a year from now.

Bring it back around to your desire to make money online. Instead of sweating a $100 or even a $500 loss on a PPC campaign while you’re learning, my feeling is I couldn’t spend it fast enough on traffic. In that case, I want to learn as quickly as I can. And I know I’m not going to look back in 5 years and go, “What in the world was I thinking?!” or feel regret for spending a grand figuring out how to optimize a PPC campaign. Most likely I won’t even remember spending the money!

I guess $100 or even $1000 just isn’t what it used to be for me. Sure that’s the context of a dollar to me these days, but I also realize now more than ever that the chances are dang slim that I’ll look back and have regrets for spending that money…even if it was a big gamble that I’d even walk away with anything at the end of the day. The potential to learn based on that risk is just to great to ignore.

I’d like to see people stop bitching about a $100 ad spend and instead brag about “losing money”. And while they’re bragging, talk about the valuable PPC lessons they’re learning along the way. In fact, we should take the term losing money out of the equation and call it buying eduction. Heck, parents spend $40k A YEAR to send their kids to college. Surely we can afford to spend $100 on a PPC “education”.

You may or may not agree, which is okay, but I’m curious how much you’re willing to lose to learn something like PPC? Would love to hear from everyone what they think.