Experienced Internet Marketer diving into Ecom

[waterlion]

I accidentally selected the same niche of one of Yaros' websites.

I only noticed it after 2 days of setting up my site. Oops.

Nonetheless, the first website will be a huge learning process for e-commerce.

I have 2 friends who do about $4.5 million/year USD in revenue's right now selling Sex-toys online.

They started in July of 2014.

Thus, I wanted to dive into ECOM a LONG time ago (for over a year now), but was put off by the shopify business model and their complete control of your site.

I make about 3-5k USD profit at the moment with other internet marketing stuff.

But I feel that ECOM is the longer-term asset, with the biggest long-term payout (imagine $10k+/mo profit within a year from ecom).

After all, Yaros went from about $200/mo back in August 2015, to $15k/mo profit in November, 2016. And that is a stable, and growing income.

Alidropship comes at a perfect time, and I love how it is constantly being updated at the moment, by a developer who actually uses it.

Nonetheless,

I've been in the IM game for over 3 years now, and have built dozens of wordpress sites.

As of right now (Dec 3, 2016), I'm still building the site.

For the social media, I would like to hire a SMM specialist to deal with Socialrabbit, and the other stuff.

My plan is to focus on IG fans and Adwords targeting. I have extensive experience with Adwords, but not much with Adwords + ecom.

For my free time, I'll be banging girls, and practicing muay thai

Cheers

Revenue $0.

 

[waterlion]

While I wait for my SocialRabbit purchase problems to be resolved,

Here are plugins that I normally install on a new wordpress site:

1. Akismet - prevents bot spam (not sure how this will work with review uploads)
2. cometcache - 1-click cache/website performance optimizer
3. companion auto update - autoupdates your wordpress, plugins, theme, etc (could break your site with new updates, be careful)
4. mailgun integration - for using your website domain to send emails using mailgun (already built into Alidropship it seems)
5. Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin - when certain pages act as a proxy to other pages
6. Really Simple SSL - required SSL activation
7. wordfence security - prevents hackers. Let's you know if someone tries to login as an admin
8. YoastSEO - if you want to get really anal about SEO optimization

Also,

CloudFlare - 100% of my sites are activated through this for an easy performance boost, and hacker mitigation
Mailchimp - for auto-responders and collecting emails

 

[waterlion]

Dec 5th, 2016

Tried to hire a friend of mine to handle the SMM.

While I think socialrabbit is awesome for it's automation, most users will become alienated when the posts 'feel' robotic and ambiguous.

Ie. 'Like if you are a fan. Pretty awesome right?

This is so cool', etc is ambiguous.

My friend would handle adding captions to the images that are actually relevant to the images.

Plus she's a big fan of the niche.

I've been busy with girls and muay thai, but so far...

Socialrabbit configured for Instagram page, and Facebook page.

Having Yaros' pages as examples really helps, because I feel the guides are lacking some actual examples.

The site has 20 products... I think the magic number should be about 50 products.

I want to have about 15 organic Instagram posts launched before going into IG shoutouts.

As an added tool, I'm using Archie.co to do simple auto-likes.

The tool is relatively expensive, but it's helped me build my personal Instagram account from about 100 followers to 800+ in the last 2 months (along with hootsuite).

Averaging ~12 followers/day without any shoutouts, while 4-5 posts per week of my own content.

Looking at Yaros' Facebook pages shows low levels of engagement.

I guess this is the transition from Facebook/pinterest/twitter into Instagram.

I feel like everything else now will become supplementary to gaming Instagram which is the cool New-new thing.

Finally, no word on my buddy and his Alidropship attempt. I hope he follows through for a little bit of competition, but who knows.

Salut

 

[waterlion]

Dec 7th, 2016

Website:

Went from 21 products, to 81 products.

After the initial import, it's just lots of manual repetitive copy/paste work.

A great way of just zoning out or while waiting for marketing campaigns to happen.

Shoutout Marketing:

Payed for my first shoutout on IG: A page of 420,000 followers, for 50 GBP...

I tried to negotiate for less, but only got it down from 55 to 50 GBP... which is about $65 USD after paypal fees and awful exchange rate.

Nonetheless, if this pays out well, then I'm sure we can negotiate a lower fee, for several posts in the future.

Also, messaged several other IG pages.

I have about 5 pages that can perform a shoutout, including one with ~2 million followers... for $200 USD.

IG/FB Marketing:

Along with shoutouts, I will buy actual ad space on Facebook/Instagram.

I'll try to set these up for today.

Adwords

Will look into this once some sales start coming in.

Looking forward to Yaros' case study on this.

Instagram Account Automation

Social Rabbit is actively posting right now. ~2-3 posts per day (products and memes).

I'm trying out Instagress instead of Archie.co to auto-like/auto-follow users around instagram.

My IG page as of this post has 40 IG followers.

Additional Plugins

I've added PrettyLink to create custom links for the Bio-link.

So instead of mywebsite.com/some-long-ass-product-url-that-is-too-damn-long

It is: mywebsite.com/short-and-simple

And I added Yoast to edit the SEO automatically after importing the products.

Cheers

P.S. I injured myself in muay thai, so only work and girls for the next 7 days.

 

[Eric S.]

Great write up @waterlion - I'm glad to see someone else having difficulty finding shout-outs for under $25. I'm having good success with giveaways and will have some 'product-for-shout-out' items arriving soon as well.

I also am using Yoast and I've been editing the product slugs to shorten them and make them better for SEO. But PrettyLink looks cool so I may give that a shot.

Sorry about your injury. Heal up soon.

 

[waterlion]

Great write up @waterlion - I'm glad to see someone else having difficulty finding shout-outs for under $25. I'm having good success with giveaways and will have some 'product-for-shout-out' items arriving soon as well.

I also am using Yoast and I've been editing the product slugs to shorten them and make them better for SEO. But PrettyLink looks cool so I may give that a shot.

Sorry about your injury. Heal up soon.

For the product slugs, I just edit the title, and copy paste that into the slug.

I'm not going to assume my site is SEO friendly, considering google knows when you are simply importing content from other places.

My buddies with their E-shop were Sandboxed for over a year, because they copied and pasted a few product descriptions.

And thanks broski. I'll live

 

[waterlion]

Dec 8th, 2016

Shoutout Update
So the shoutout was a fail in sales, but as always a learning experience.

Numbers
IG Shoutout page: 420K followers
Cost of shoutout: $65 USD

Results
4000+ likes on the IG post
30+ new followers on my IG page
~55 Clicks on link to product page
CPC (cost per click): $1.18

0 sales

Things Learned
- One person posted that you could buy the product much cheaper on amazon. I can't moderate comments on other pages. Luckily, it was swept under by other comments
- other users posted on how expensive it is
- lots of non-english speakers commenting on the post...

Tips for the Future
- the product I selected could be too expensive at ~$56
- add a discount code. ie. 15% off all items in the store over a $30 purchase (your markup covers the discount anyways)
- maybe find a product with a video instead, and try advertising that

If I have time, I will select a different product, and launch that with instagram ads.

Cheers

P.S. Added a 'skype number' with a voice recording. I actually don't recommend this option, because their voice message recording option is horrendous. You COULD upload an MP3, but it's a bit complicated. Will look into it later.

 

[waterlion]

Dec 9th, 2016

Sitemap updates

A quick look at my sitemap revealed a few product slugs that needed to be changed from their imported values.

Check yours at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Adwords Installation

I integrated GAnalytics with Adwords.

Because I've had several adwords accounts suspended over the years, I use an amazon VPS to operate mine.

Basically, the adwords and analytics accounts are created on the VPS, and then the analytics account is shared with my normal analytics account.

The Adwords account I still operate only through my VPS (just to be safe).

I knew how to do all this, but it was a bit confusing, nonetheless - an advanced knowledge of GA and AW might be needed.

I ran a quick test with adwords to ensure my domain wasn't flagged by GA.

Google is also a DNS (I think), so they can see who owns the domain name (even if you install WHOISGUARD), and can suspend you like this as well. - so far so no issues.

Adwords Campaign

Quick $5 test - English only, 'all countries and territories in the world' at a $0.30 CPC - all devices.

No conversions, but I got more than 15 clicks, AND I can see the search data for optimization.

I believe this might be WAY more profitable than IG shoutouts - which is like a shotgun at a semi-targeted audience.

Conclusion

But at the moment, what I'm promoting isn't bringing any profits.

I'll need to select a cheaper product for now - maybe in the $6-20 range.

Other stuff

I decided to add shipping methods for now. See how it goes.

Added Zendesk Chat to the site, and downloaded the android app. Will be interesting to see.

Added a 15% discount code, and a TopBar plugin to the site showing the discount code.

Still no sales.

 

[waterlion]

Dec 10th, 2016

Adwords

Lots of clicks on my ads, but since I'm using broad match, lots of these keywords need to be added to the negative keyword list.

I'm adding more products related to keywords searched and keyword suggestions at the moment.

Plus, I made a campaign for the lower cost products ($6-15 range).

Targeting desktop only for now.

Instagram Windows App

Windows 8/10 now has a desktop app for Instagram.

You can Direct message from your desktop, as opposed to using your phone, or Bluestacks/other android emulators.

Very convenient.

If I decide to run another Shoutout in the future, then I will be using this app for messaging.

Ecomm Suggestions

My ecomm buddies looked at my site and made a few technical suggestions:

1. On the cart page, remove the header and footer section. Shopify does this as well, to focus the attention on the purchase.

2. Add more 'add to cart' buttons... one below the reviews section.

Will update this throughout the day.

 

[waterlion]

Dec 10, 2016 - First Sale Today!!!

Weee, I just got that initial high, like the first time you make your first internet dollar, or you get your first lay

Product
Revenue: $19.99
Cost $12.42
Fees: $0.88 (stripe)
Cashback: -1.05

Revenue 2 = $7.74 (pre marketing costs)

I submitted the transaction to Aliexpress, and now I'm waiting for GAnalytics to indicate where the sale came from.

Instagram

Paid for another 30 days of Instagress to automate the account. It will now auto-follow/like on normal speed, instead of slow speed.

No plans for more shoutouts in the future.

Adwords

Optimized my keywords and ads.

Added more negative keywords, and paused many keywords that Adwords suggested, but had little relevance to sales.

I noticed that even though I selected 'english-only', I was still getting arabic searches triggering my ads. Fixed.

Facebook Ads

Launched the first shopping facebook ads today.

Still need to learn how to set this up for a shop.

Heatmap

Added PTEngine wordpress plugin to use their heatmap to see what my visitors are doing.

That's it for now.

 

[waterlion]

Analytics

Added an analytics goal. It doesn't seem to trigger at the moment, but I presume once the date rolls into tomorrow, it will show up.

 

[Poni]

Dec 10, 2016 - First Sale Today!!!

Hey, great journey and congrats on the first sale .

 

[Anthony Phillips]

Hi Waterlion, out of curiosity why would Adwords/GA ban your domain ?

 

[waterlion]

Hi Waterlion, out of curiosity why would Adwords/GA ban your domain ?

Back when i first started internet marketing, I used as many adwords coupons and accounts as possible. This obviously wasn't a good long-term strategy.

 

[waterlion]

Dec 11, 2016

Facebook Ad Traffic

Yesterday, I created a FB desktop-only campaign, with an auto-generated carousel creative.

I sent the traffic to the home page.



I did an English-only, all countries (bulk upload) targeting.

Despite this, I still received a lot of non-English speaking traffic:



No sales, but a shit load of clicks, and likes for relatively cheap.

Google Translate Plugin Not Working

So to adapt to this, I tried to install Google translate into the wordpress, using scripts, plugins, or whatever.

But at the moment, having a GT header breaks the site, by pushing all of the content into the footer, which blocks the cart.



Because I didn't notice this until a few hours later, I potentially lost a sale of $25 Revenue (looking at the orders page).

No big deal.

Adwords Campaign

So the 1 sale from yesterday was from Adwords.

My conversion/goal tracking still needs adjusting since $value is not reported in analytics.

Also, changing the countries to only top-tier ('high income'), brought decent traffic, but no additional conversions so far.

Discount-Code Email Submit Pop

I've added a simple email-submit pop that gives a 10% discount code. It's linked to mailchimp.

Anyways, still waiting on something to trigger for sales.

I'll start looking at a bunch of ecomm courses to see what they recommend for paid marketing.

Oh, and too much sex... slept too much.

Salut.

 

[waterlion]

Dec 12th, 2016

2 Additional Sales Today:

Revenue: $67.91
Pre-Profit: $35

Pre-Profit = (aliexpress costs + paypal/stripe fees, does not include marketing costs)

Technical Issues During Checkout

I had several technical issues during checkout today.

1. The cart would hang on the Aliexpress page during purchase. - This was a chrome issue.

2. My old CC was still in the Aliexpress system, so I had to setup Alipay and change the default card

3. I needed to manually order 1 T-shirt because the system did not process the payment (displaying 'internet technical difficulties' only on this one item).

4. The T-shirt would not process in my main account because it assumed I already ordered that shirt (limited to 1 piece per customer).

5. Thus, I had to create an additional account to order this shirt.

6. Lost potential cash-back revenues (~$3) due to these technical issues.

Basically, I will need to use Firefox from now on to process my order - this is most likely because chrome has too many extensions running.

Conversion Tracking

Still can't track the $amount from each conversion into analytics.

Also, I would suggest incorporating the actual cost of the product into the dashboard to better calculate revenue/expenses, rather than doing it manually.

Finally, both conversions came from Adwords for $1.3 cost per conversion.

I'll try adding more top-tier countries to adwords, and maybe expand to mobile and tablet.

Cart-Purchase Optimization

I really need to optimize my process for checking out if I'm to outsource this eventually.

My first order, 2 days ago, also had technical difficulties.

Facebook

Since Yaros had success with organic facebook marketing, I'll try setting up a facebook campaign today as well.

I setup an Instagram ad last night, will check on the status of it later.

Salut

 

[Eric S.]

Congrat's on the sales! The ordering process is finicky. I don't think you can use the auto order process with Firefox as it uses the Chrome plugin. My last couple have gone a little smoother, but I'm not sure why.

Looking forward to seeing what methods work best for you and what kind of margins you end up with.

 

[cristiane]

While I wait for my SocialRabbit purchase problems to be resolved,

Here are plugins that I normally install on a new wordpress site:

1. Akismet - prevents bot spam (not sure how this will work with review uploads)
2. cometcache - 1-click cache/website performance optimizer
3. companion auto update - autoupdates your wordpress, plugins, theme, etc (could break your site with new updates, be careful)
4. mailgun integration - for using your website domain to send emails using mailgun (already built into Alidropship it seems)
5. Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin - when certain pages act as a proxy to other pages
6. Really Simple SSL - required SSL activation
7. wordfence security - prevents hackers. Let's you know if someone tries to login as an admin
8. YoastSEO - if you want to get really anal about SEO optimization

Also,

CloudFlare - 100% of my sites are activated through this for an easy performance boost, and hacker mitigation
Mailchimp - for auto-responders and collecting emails

Hello
Good luck, continue like that, because I myself is starting now and it is not easy, but we arrive at the right time on alidropship and I believe a lot, especially with the new platform theme that will happen ... good continuation And we hold the chips ...

 

[waterlion]

Hello
Good luck, continue like that, because I myself is starting now and it is not easy, but we arrive at the right time on alidropship and I believe a lot, especially with the new platform theme that will happen ... good continuation And we hold the chips ...

Thanks brother. It's a great platform, but I would still like to see several additions and potential improvements.

 

[waterlion]

Dec 12, Updates

No additional sales for today.

Adwords

The profits that I made are slowly being burned right now with adwords.

I've copied my desktop-only campaign, and made a mobile, and tablet campaign.

I also loaded my ads with Ad extensions (sitelinks, prices, etc), to see what happens.

Also, adjusted some of the bids for the top-clicked ads... to get more clicks for my $

Herd Plugin

I bought this plugin for now: https://wow-estore.com/en/wow-herd-effects-pro/



I bought the 'pro-edition' to adjust the position of the pop (bottom left - similar to shopify), change the color, and frequency.

You can find a list of 600 names (male and female) and 300+ Anglican city names here for the plugin: http://textuploader.com/dd4k8

I hope alidropship can incorporate this in the future.

Will update if this makes any difference in the future.

Instagram ads

The 'conversion-based' IG ads didn't pull in a lot of traffic, so I'm going to change them to CPM-based ads.

Facebook

I'll create some different facebook ads later today.

That's about it for now.