Selling my own product and scale

[Bimmer]

Hello there,


I’m new to the fastlane forums (see my introduction here) and I would like to share my progress selling my own product with you.

My initial goal is to quit my job and focus on the product. To do this I am aiming for €2000 profit per month.

My other goal is to get the highest conversion rate possible and recruit affiliates.

I hope that this progress thread will help you if you are also thinking about selling your own product and if you have any questions, just ask! And if you want to help out, I am all ears!


Beginning of 2014 I finally launched my own brand/product.

I’m not going to tell what it exactly is but what I can tell you is that it is a product which appeals to a broad demographic, men and women from all ages.


My site:

- has currently 5 pages.
- Layout: sidebar with menu, payment/shipping logo’s and call to action order button. Right side content
- Home page contains content and pictures to sell the product with CTA
- the other pages are: “how does it work”, “faq”, testimonials” and “order page”


How do I present my product on the order page:

- currently I have 3 packages that are presented in a “compare” table
- first package contains enough items to start and cost €39
- second package contains double the items + one additional item and costs €49
- third package contains the same as the second one, + 2 additional items. Costs €59

my profit margin is 50%


Traffic:

I’m currently only using google adwords to generate traffic.
Getting ~30 click a day.
Conversion rate is ~3% .
cpc prices are still high, even with my 15%+ CTR ads… so my end profit is really really low.

The reason the volume is so low is because I’m only targeting 2 countries: The Netherlands and Belgium.

Why: shipping costs, if I go broader my shipping costs double.

I’ve contacted a few fulfillment centers, and they are all telling me that they only want to work with me doing a minimum of 10 shipments per day.

Another thing is that I still want to test my product packages and that’s hard to do when your products are at the fulfillment center. (IE: offering 2 packages, offering 3 packages, change up the product a bit.. etc. )


But to do this with low volume will take months…. So I still have to figure this one out (other traffic source?).


So my main goal now is to increase the conversion rate

- Get great copy instead of my own lame copy
- Test out different product packages and prices


A week ago I contacted a great copywriter (well known on WF) and we discussed my site. He suggested I needed a whole different site layout, to much distractions and some other stuff, and one of his students will write new copy for me under his guidance since he is to expensive for me (asks 5k+ for copy).

Timeframe would be 2-3 weeks.


I will design a new product package compare table with only 2 packages instead of 3, and make the contrast much higher between the two so that it will look more like a great offer.

So I will offer the “first” package that includes enough to start for €49
And a “second” package that includes double the items + 3 additional items from €139 for only €59!

will report back....

 

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[Bimmer]

Hey Guys,


It think it might be interesting to tell your guys how I turned my idea into reality…

Like I mentioned in the post above I was interested in selling my own product after talking to a friend I’ve met on a internet marketing meetup.
I decided I needed to build something that can generate stable income and can be actually worth something if I want to sell the company it in the future.

My friend has a big list of affiliates who are selling his product all over the world, so the scalability is huge, and because he has affiliates who are generating the sales he can focus on growth and adding new product to sell in the future.

And that’s what I also want to achieve…


So I did my research for a few weeks to come up with a product that appeals to a huge market so it can be scaled true the roof.
After I decided what product I wanted to sell under my own brand I first wanted to do a test to see if the product actually sells.

So what I did was I bought some of these products on ebay, than I created an advertisement on a classified site for my country, took the URL of that page and set up some ads on Facebook and sent some traffic.
After spending €30 I got my first sale of €30 euro I broke even. And I thought that this was a good test to confirm this product sells. So after this test my goal was to setup my own store.

I do not recommend to test like this because I did not had enough data to really be sure this product sells, this could be a “lucky” sale.

What you can do is if you want to test out a product before going all is this: set up a decent html site with decent sales copy and sent quality traffic to it for a while to see how the product converts. You don’t actually need to have the product, you can sent the buyers an email that the product is out of stock as this is pure for testing.

If the product doesn’t sell at all than drop it.



So now I had to find a supplier for the product and I had to setup my website.

The Website

I asked my friend which company developed their site but they were pretty expensive $7k for design, development and copy.
Ofcourse I didn’t want to spend this much money on just the site so I went on Elance, posted a job and waited for the proposals to come in.
I made sure to not hire guys from india or Bangladesh or whatever because I had really poor experience with those, I was looking for a EU or US company.

After talking to a few candidates I went with a US company who would do the design, development and copy for $1500, that sounded much better than $7000.

The Design and the Copy was done within 3 weeks, but the coding was a big drama, it took 1 month to code the site, and 2 months for simple changes! I’ve worked with coders before and I’ve never seen such slow and bad coders before like theirs. Anyway after the site was finally “done” there were still a lot things that needed to be changed but I just didn’t want to wait another month for it so I searched for another company to fix it.

After this new company reviewed the coding of the site they said it was a big mess of pieces and bits and they needed to recode everything, turned out after looking at some traces the originally coders were also from India after all… Costs in total $1000.

I learned not to be cheap on coding!



The Product

It took me roughly 1.5 month to find a good supplier for my product

There were different routes to take as the product has different items composed together:

- buy white label products so that I only print my logo on the package

- buy the items for my product and put them together in the package myself

- buy all the items at the same supplier, they put it together in a box.


So obviously I had to go with the cheapest route here and I wanted to compose the product myself and not stick with the composed white label products.
After searching, mailing, calling and negotiating with various suppliers and testing samples I found a supplier.

I chose this supplier because they respond FAST , their products are good quality and they are also located in Europe which I am also located, so not so expensive shipping costs.

So this supplier supplies all the items needed for this product, and I put them together in the package myself which I ordered in my own country.


Getting traffic

I needed quality traffic and the Google search network was the perfect place. There was only one problem.. I was banned from adwords years ago after running some affiliates stuff they obviously not like. And it’s not easy to just setup a new account without getting banned.

After getting a fresh (IE: no traces of my IP or anything else that can lead to me) used laptop, new credit card, using internet from my neighbors (new ip), and email account I was able to create and keep my adwords account.

After sending traffic I learned quickly the CVR isn’t that great and I was losing money. After optimizing my campaign a bit, adjusting my CPC I was closer to break even.

In the meantime I build 2 sites that covers every aspect of this product and niche so that I can drive SEO traffic to my Store.

After generating some sales from these sites I quickly learned that a lot of people that clicked on my adwords ads will leave the store and do some research on my brand name to see if it’s any good (like many of us also do when we search for a product right? We search for reviews)

From that point I contacted a lot of bloggers who could review my product to increase credibility. A few made some reviews and a few are still testing. This process is still going on


And now we are here. I feel I am moving to slow but not sure how to speed up things.
Like I said in the previous post, a copywriter is currently working on new copy for the site to increase CVR, and will be working together with a developer to develop a new site for better CVR. This will take 2- 3 weeks to be completed

After listening to JasonR his Facebook advertising recording I’m eager to start advertising with Facebook sponsored stories but before I start wasting money I will wait until my new site design/copy is completed.

 

[ilrein]

Nice start, keep it up. Forget about FB advertising for now.

I'm surprised you don't want to share any info, since you can't get any feedback concerning site quality.

Good luck!

 

[Bimmer]

** Update **

So it’s been almost 2 weeks since I posted here because I was collecting data from my “split test” and I would like to share the results here now.

Back on the 13th of april I mentioned I would design a new “product table” for the products I’m offering.



The table above was before the 13th, the text in the red bar says “best seller”. the overall conversion rate was 4,7%:


The table above was after the 13th. The text in the red bar says “temporary promo action”. After one week I had to make an adjustment because one of the additional items in the “ultra” package was out of stock. So what i did was removed it from the package and adjust the old price to €119. The overall conversion rate is 6,24%

The results are very interesting to say at least.

1. With the old table I would sell the amount of products like this: 20% cheap package / 40% middle package / 40% expensive package .
   Now with the new table I’m selling 99% of the time the most expensive product.
2. Conversion rate went from 4,7% to 6,24%

Now not only did my conversion rate increase, but i’m also selling the expensive package 99% of the time.
What’s interesting is that lets say my conversion rate did not change, I would still make more money because 99% of my customers bought the most expensive package.

I'm still waiting for my copywriter to complete the copy, hopefully this will increase the conversion rate even more


What's next:

I'm looking to increase my profit margins by decreasing my product costs.
My best selling product costs me €15,25 (~$21) tax excluded.
Right now I'm getting my stuff from Europe. And 80% of that stuff comes from china. So right now I'm looking to buy those right from china. I received some samples yesterday, and indeed the products are exactly the same as my supplier from Europe.
I think I can cut the costs by at least 50% this way, hopefully 75%.

 

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[Bimmer]

Hey Everyone!

Just wanted to let you know how things are going.

From the 4th untill the 10th I went on vacation to Ibiza and it was great. What was even greater was that I had a little "taste" of the fastlane life.
While I was having fun with my girlfriend, laying on the beach, driving around on the island, went to restaurants enjoying terrific food (oh I love good food)... I was actually MAKING MONEY. While It were just a handfull sales a day and nothing special, I still felt like I was living the dream.

Now back, working at my job, I'm motivated more than ever and I know for SURE that i want to QUIT MY JOB as soon as possible so that i can put all my energy into my business.

 

[NicoleMarie]

Hey Everyone!

Just wanted to let you know how things are going.

From the 4th untill the 10th I went on vacation to Ibiza and it was great. What was even greater was that I had a little "taste" of the fastlane life.
While I was having fun with my girlfriend, laying on the beach, driving around on the island, went to restaurants enjoying terrific food (oh I love good food)... I was actually MAKING MONEY. While It were just a handfull sales a day and nothing special, I still felt like I was living the dream.

Now back, working at my job, I'm motivated more than ever and I know for SURE that i want to QUIT MY JOB as soon as possible so that i can put all my energy into my business.

That's so awesome!!

 

[Bimmer]

Thanks @Nicole S , it felt awesome !
---

- A couple days ago I had a really good day and hit my highest revenue (and profit) day to date - $603 revenue ($322 profit) - and I am also about to surpass last month's sales in the next day or two.

- I've already been able to cut the cost a bit for one of the items i'm selling, and i'm still busy trying to cut some more costs of other items...
But those chinese people aren't the best to comunicate with... you really need to double check and ask everything before you order/pay... For example: I needed 1000 pieces ASAP, they said they could sent them right out, but after asking it again if they are 100% sure they can ship it the same day she came back and said "sorry sir, we only have 300, is ok?"....grrr.

- The new sales copy is done and I think it's awesome, I hope my potential customers will also think that with their wallets! Right now they are designing the new site. It will be a one page site with a menu that if you click something in the menu - let's say the FAQ - it will take/scroll you down to that point on the page where the FAQ is listed... That way the visitor will not leave the page and will have less distraction to buy.

 

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[Bimmer]

So…. This month I already have successfully surpassed sales of the previous month by 50%! Since the start I'm growing each month (month 1: ~13 sales - month 2: 33 sales - month 3 : 62 sales - month 4 (so far): 94 sales).

Currently, I’m getting 3 sales per dag on average, and this has been going on for the last month, and I already feel I am standing still.

I’ve been waiting for my new site layout to be done, so that I could start moving forward and start advertising on facebook. But this is taking really really long….

The next month is just a couple days ahead, and I really want to increase sales so I will translate the sales copy (from English to Dutch) and place it on my current site, and I will start advertising on facebook anyway.

Goal for June:

[ ] Hit 10 sales per day

 

[jec1521]

Great thread. Keep up the hard work

 

[Bimmer]

So it's been a while I've updated this thread.

The reason is that in late june I got sidetracked because of personal circumstances.

Also the new site design i was waiting for all the time has never been finished due problems, and i got a refund... back to the drawing board.

Anyway here are stats for the previous months:

** June ended up in 115 sales with a revenue of €7.123,34 ($9.565,22) and July ended up in a total of 112 sales with a revenue of €6.974,8 ($9.365,7)**

SO... did I hit my goal I set the 30th of may....?

The next month is just a couple days ahead, and I really want to increase sales so I will translate the sales copy (from English to Dutch) and place it on my current site, and I will start advertising on facebook anyway.

Goal for June:

[ ] Hit 10 sales per day

Yes, I did hit a couple 10 sales p/day... but I didn't do any facebook advertising at all. I did start a google adwords retargeting campaign that's bringing in extra sales.

I will try to summarize what have happend since my last post here:

So I heard so many good things about the course "traffic blackbook" that i decided to buy it before starting advertising on facebook. It's a great course and I've learned alot. It also made me come to the conclusion that I should work on my customer value by adding upsells and email funnel and whatnot.

The problem was that my store is build on magento, and that i'm not able to set up my own upsell/downsell funnels on there. And there aren't any extensions for that also.
So I decided to higher a magento coder that could build me this thing into magento.
After alot of trial and error, $400 and 2 weeks, it was finally finished. After setting up the products in the upsell/downsell funnel (which was still a pain in the a$$) i sat back and waited for the upsell orders to come in.
YEAH, 2 initial product sales later and i got my first upsell! This thing is working! Than 25 initial product sales later I haven't sold an other upsell yet. Turns out it takes to long to get redirected to the upsells after the customer made the first purchase. And my conversion pixels were screwed up, so i wasn't able to track conversions anymore, and my coder was telling me that it was un able to get it working or so.
I decided to disable the upsell funnel because it wasn't working properly anyway, and then I could see where my conversions were coming from again.

At this point I still did not know what I exactly needed to get this up and running. So I did some more research, learned about oneshopping cart and infusionsoft, posted jobs on odesk and elance searching for experts that could help me find the solution.

After talking to a infusionsoft expert i was even more confused. I needed to get a wordpress site, with optimze press and a bunch other stuff, and i just found it to complicated, and it would cost me $3K to get it all set up. I didn't feel this was the best solution, i mean how are all those other direct response supplement guys doing it, not this way. I also had the feeling infusionsoft is more for digital products.

Anyway, I kept searching and found out about platforms like limelight, ultra cart and other ones who are made for what I'm looking for. This is what the big boys are using.

After a while I found a company who works with these kind of platforms all the time, and made an appointment to see what I exactly needed for my goals, and how much this would cost to set this thing up. Turns out limelight is the go to platform, but also the most expensive one which does not fit my budget at this time, so he suggested Ultra cart to start with.

Finally, I am heading the right direction to set this new site up with the complete funnel, at this point I'm pumped because i can't wait to get this up and running. Estimated costs would be $1500 for setting the site and funnel up + another $800 for an payment processor integration for dutch customers. This is just the coding, not the design.

But before they can start working on the project they need the design, all page content, and all the details...

So next step was getting this all sorted, starting with the design. After a week the new site design was completed.

In the meantime I also got in contact with a fulfillment company in the US (that I noticed in one of @(zen*******) postings where he mentioned this company) and we had a call, they exactly know how my business work because they work with alot of familiar businesses, they also have alot of experience with ultra cart and have a madule for it which is important, so they seem like a great fit!

Now I also need to figure out how to get my products imported in the US without any problems..

By this time the personal circumstances arose which made me unable to focus on my business. Since than I did not made any real progress and my motivation dropped.


Today I decided to pick myself up again and get this business growing.

My goals for the coming week (4th - 10th august)

- Sort out all the details, and website content and sent everything to the developer so they can start building the new site.
- Sort out a way to get my products imported into the US, or maybe find a manufacture in the US who can deliver the products straight to the fulfillment company (no hassle with the customs/tax etc)
- Expand my current google adwords campaign for more volume

 

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[TaylorB]

You mentioned that your customers search for reviews about your brand of your product?

What about starting a blog/forum about your product looking like a 3rd party and then push your brand on that blog/forum all the while educating consumers on what the product is, does and how to use it...

 

[Bimmer]

You mentioned that your customers search for reviews about your brand of your product?

What about starting a blog/forum about your product looking like a 3rd party and then push your brand on that blog/forum all the while educating consumers on what the product is, does and how to use it...

Hey Taylor, thanks for your suggustion.

I am exactly doing this already, at the moment I have two educational blogs that explain everything around the niche, the available products on the market, and ofcourse a top 3 of the best products. These sites are responsible for about 40% of the sales (have to check analytics for better figure bit that's about it). It's funny because you see alot of people searching for my product name ending up on these sites, and eventually buy , I'm also getting traffic from people who are searching for my competitors, and they end up buying my product.

 

[Andy Black]

Great thread. Well done on progress too.

Do you want to post some of your AdWords stats and see if we can help you out with those? 15% CTR seems pretty good so could be you're already well optimised...

 

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[Bimmer]

Great thread. Well done on progress too.

Do you want to post some of your AdWords stats and see if we can help you out with those? 15% CTR seems pretty good so could be you're already well optimised...

Hi Andy, thank you for offering help. What kind of stats would you like to see?

 

[Andy Black]

What kind of stats would you like to see?

How about just showing your campaign stats for the moment (blurring stuff you want to keep confidential).

 

[Bimmer]

It's been a while again, I should update this thread more frequently...

Some things that happend in the meantime:

- The goals I have set for the week of 4th-10th august have been met, but sorting everything out for the new website took more time than i thought so that delayed a few days.

- I also found a manufacturer in the USA that could deliver me the products. Unfortunately they are 3 times more expensive than the chinese manufacturer. But for now i don't mind since I just want to get this up and running.

- My new website on the ultra cart platform is being build as we speak, should take 3 weeks to complete.

- I figured I needed a credit card payment processor for the USA store. After research ended up with Braintree. I did notice they have a high refund rate ($15) which makes me thinking if braintree is still the right choice or not, since I offer a money back gurantee and i have a 5% refund rate.... hmmm

- I'm using a simple sort of bag as product packaging. Now that those bags are almost out of stock, I'm looking to replace this for a box packaging, or a more proffesional bag with a better quality. I rather have a bag since for some reason i feel it adds value to the product. The new bag has to give you the feeling that when you see it and have it in your hands you should really think "this is a quality product".. Now finding this bag is not so super hard, i can have it custom made. The problem is the costs... I want to keep the costs as low as possible, and still remain quality... still doubting about this what the best choice is (IE: is packagin really that important, can it really change the way people think about your product)



Sales:
This month's sales are not so good. Selling just half the ammount of the previous two months. I don't know exactly why, the amount of traffic is about the same, conversion rate is just lower.
BUT, it seems sales are picking up again since last Friday... hopefully this will remain.

Struggles:
I'm not really struggling on the business side... But I am struggling with my self a bit now.
I feel like things are going sloooowly because besides my job and spending time with my girlfriend i just have a few hours a day to work on the business which is great but It's hard to stay focussed in these few hours because i'm feeling tired when I come home from my job. I find this a bit frustrating. In my first post i said that once i hit 2K profit, i can quit my job and focus on this full time. Well i've hit that figure a couple times now. But i have to reinvest this money to grow this business so i can not just quit my job and take money out of this business.

I've been thinking about asking that i could work 4 days a week instead of 5... and get a full 1 day to work on my own business. But I'm not sure how to ask... Why? Well, My job is not just a job. I'm working in a family business (for 6 years now) with my father and brothers, my father knows i'm working on my own business, but he is still convinced that I want to get into the family business (he wants to give his shares once he quits). I do not want to dissapoint him, but on the other hand I have my own dream. Also,they rely heavily on my task here in the company and beacause of that I feel pressure on me... I know i should talk to my father about the company and my future. But I'm kind of scared... I'm not sure how he would react. I'm afraid he will be mad and dissapointed and find me ungrateful because i do not want to continue the Family business... I'm not sure yet how to figure this out.

Anyway here is my todo list to for the USA store:
- Find a company who can print the instruction manual.
I'm also thinking in improving the manual. right now it's just a white paper with text and logo. I'm thinking on creating a full colour manual, with pictures etc.
- Find a USA company for the product packaging.
- Sent everything to the fulfillment house

I'm also looking to scale to the French market:
- find someone to translate the site to French
- setting up a French version of the site
- creating campaign for france, and another in Belgium for the French people.

General to do:
Get more professional product pictures, let it look more as a quality porduct

 

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[Andy Black]

Dude. Chat to your dad pronto. I have 4 boys... if I found out that any of them were stressed because they wanted to talk to me but didn't know how, I would be devastated. Guaranteed - he wants the best for you ultimately.

 

[tycoon7]

YEAH, 2 initial product sales later and i got my first upsell! This thing is working! Than 25 initial product sales later I haven't sold an other upsell yet. Turns out it takes to long to get redirected to the upsells after the customer made the first purchase.

Could you explain how your upsell works? Basically after the person made the purchase, you right a way show them the message/page like
"To thank you for your purchase you can add our 'name of upsell item' for 30% off"

Something like that?

 

[Bimmer]

@tycoon7

Yes, after the inital purchase the customer will be redirected to the upsell page(s) that offers them a discount for a related product, or the same product in a multi pack.

 

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