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We are in the middle of looking for our first house. Everyone who has gone through this process knows how time consuming it can be. Plus, we live in the Boston area, which means houses are both insanely expensive and are only on the market for about 12 hours before they’re snapped up. The decision to spend a boatload of money on a house needs to be made after only spending 15 minutes in it along with 50 other people. So… stressful is probably an understatement for this part of my life right now.
Because I apparently don’t have enough to do (house hunting, writing, work, mom, wife, human who likes sleep), I also started a second time-consuming activity: my first Facebook ads.
The ad itself only took about 30 to 45 minutes: searching for the perfect image, writing the copy, checking the Help! My Facebook Ads Suck! book for the tips on how to set things up properly, selecting comparable authors to target, etc.
Phew, that was a little intense, but now l’m done! Time to get back to scrolling through the MLS feed.
Not quite…
Since I only have two standalone books (albeit one as part of a joint series) and I am also running Amazon Ads (set up with this book to guide me), the tracking is taking up a good chunk of time every evening. And now I’m spending Saturday morning rereading the chapters in the books on making adjustments to ads.
How is this like house hunting? A few similarities popped into my head this week:
- Research. What area to focus on? What price? What resources should I look at?
- Uncertainty. Is this the right area? Am I spending more money than I should? Is this person I’ve picked to help me the best one?
- Distraction. Hmm, instead of writing, let’s check that website one more time…
- Obsession to the point of annoying everyone around me. Topic of conversation in my writer friends chat? My Facebook ads profit margins*. Topic of conversation with all of my colleagues? My house hunt.
- Time. “Oh we know what we like, we should have a house picked after a few visits” 15 houses later… “Oh I’ll just update the stats one more time” Three hours later…
The $7 per day that I’m investing in Facebook ads is only a tiny fraction of what I will need to spend on a house in the Boston area. So I shouldn’t be as worried about it, right? The numbers are so small right now, I can experiment without too much risk. And with Facebook ads, there is a tantalizing promise of being able to crack the code, figure things out, make sense of it all. It’s math! It should make sense!
House hunting has no such reassurances and the risk and investment is much higher. Maybe that perfect house will appear this week, or maybe it will appear the day after we’ve signed all the paperwork on an “almost perfect” house. Maybe we go too low on the perfect house and one of the other 20 offers gets it instead. There is no way of ever knowing what will happen!
Okay, so maybe the link between the two topics is a little tenuous, and the real similarity is just that they are two things I happen to be spending a lot of time and energy on right now. They’re also two things I should probably be spending way less time on, if I just let myself accept that uncertainty is part of the process. And that’s a very hard thing for me to do.
So I’ll keep checking the MLS listings for the eighth time this hour, hoping that the ideal 19th century updated victorian in our price range will suddenly appear. And I’ll keep tinkering with ads that should probably be left alone, hoping that I can make $100 somehow turn into thousands overnight.
Maybe that’s the link between the two. Hope. It’s just another word for uncertainty. But it’s much better to say I spent a Saturday feeling hopeful than a Saturday feeling uncertain, right?
What about you? Have you tried Facebook ads? Or bought a house? Or done both at the same time? Do they bring up similar feelings for you, or am I being a little crazy?
(*In case you’re wondering, my profit margin including both Facebook and AMS ads so far is an average of $2 per day. I’ve almost made enough to cover the cost of the cover for my next book! Hurray!)
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