From Affiliate Marketing To Importing And Ecommerce

[hughjasle]

Did Shopify ever release the funds?

Yes and no. They technically did release the funds, but I still don't have them. They have been good working with me to get through it and i beleive we are (as do they) just a matter of getting me paid out now. According to my daily email back and forth with them, my payment for roughly $60k should finally be sent to me tomorrow, Dec. 4th. So we'll see what happens tomorrow.

What are some of the dos and donts of Shopify? Thinking of trying it out...

hahaha, honestly I'm not the guy to ask. Still extremely new to it. I did find out there are a lot of things that can get your "flagged" by risk management.

Some of those things are:

• Selling too much when you are still new
• Using an off-shore corporations
• "Certain" unnamed products or services are automatic flags they said, but wouldn't tell me what they were
• Having too many unfulfilled orders (even if you haven't been paid by shopify for them yet)

That's all I've discovered thus far.

I am very pleased even though I have had plenty of issues. Shopify account managers have been good to work with thus far and their support seems to be available 24/7. Honestly I did more fire - ready - aim on this project so I expected lots of issues. I just wanted to run, see what breaks, and figure out how to do it right so I can explode on my second run. I'm already talking to my manufacturer about doing an order for 5k units this time which is 10x greater than my last order. Not sure if doing that large of an order is good or bad. Which leads me to your next question:

Also how do you like aliaba

I like it. Quick and easy to work with. I went through Alibaba payment stuff for my last order. I had never done that before and I know lots of guys here prefer NOT to pay via Alibaba claiming cheaper prices, but I was fine with the price and it seemed like I was more protected this way. Would be nice if we can get someone else to chime in on updated info on how to best purchase goods from manufacturers found on Alibaba. If anyone has any experience or knowledge on this, please speak up! I'm looking to do a $50k order and want to do it right. Also, I need to fix this shipping/broker/customs crap. It was a nightmare getting my last order in... That deserves it's own post.

 

[hughjasle]

How do you determine if an ad is a success

Yes clicks is the main thing I am looking for, but I don't ignore things like the likes, comments, and shares. The ad CPM is right up there with clicks in what I look at AND the ad CPM is largely correlated with the ad engagement, which includes everything from the clicks, likes, comments, and shares.

Ultimately you are right when it all comes down to the conversions, but since I was just feeling the water for which product to start with, this was just a way I decided to use to try and find out which product would seem to have a better 'virality' <--(made up word) to it which would then mean more exposure and thus more sales.

Also as a side note for anyone reading - don't discount the comments and shares on an ad. Good comments, likes, and shares speak VOLUMES to you potential buyers. I know I pay more attention to something if someone I know gave a positive response to something...

 

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[hughjasle]

Do you have any tips on how to find customers that don't care about the price that much? (of course only if sharing some insights won't hurt your buttom line)
I just hate the idea of promoting product X for $29 and have people head over to amazon and buy from a competitor a similar product for $14,90.

It's gonna happen no matter what you do. So don't let it weigh you down too much. SOMEONE will always steal your product/idea and compete purely on price. Screw them. Beat them on everything else.

It's not that my customers don't care about the price, they do. They just find it a good deal knowing they are buying from a good company that treats them well. I refund people all the time for tiny little things. Or if they put up a good post on FB of them showcasing the product and it's super fire I'll private message them and refund them or even send them other products as a thank you. Would you continue to buy from me or go to amazon to get it cheaper and receive questionable products there or stick with the company that you know hooks you up and treats you properly?

As for your numbered list items, I don't like number one nearly as much as number two. I only target based on who is buying, not who I want to buy. Start broad and narrow it down.

 

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[hughjasle]

650K

650k isn't broad. I typically don't like them unless they have 1-2M MINIMUM. But that's just me.

3) Created shopify store with simple (basic) product photo - bare bones
4) Created a newsfeed ad literally of just a picture of the product with the headline being "Save $20+ when you order today" and the text above the ad reading something like "Do xyz and get xyz with this *adjective* xyz!!" VERY SIMPLE TEXT LOGO on bottom right corner of picture

If this works that'll be awesome and prbly means your product is gonna be hott. But you get out what you put in. LOTS of room to improve your ad and pages it sounds like.

$10/day optimizing for link clicks on a click to website ad type
6) Products price tag is around $50 and cost is between $6-$15 depending on volume and manufacturer

spending too little. gonna take a while to get good data. Expect to spend $150 bare bones testing this. But those margins sound great to me. Without knowing your product, I'd be looking at $7-8 for the product and cost of shipping it to you. + $4 shipping to ur customer. +$10CPA (complete Guess) = $22. That leaves a healthy profit margin for higher CPA costs/other expenses and a nice profit.

similar to the 2-3 FB competitors but still more than them

Are you providing a different value than those other two? Most guys doing FB just do dropshipping. IF so GREAT! Then you have much higher margins than them to outspend them, plus you control the shipping and customer service. I love competing with and destroying dropshippers. They prove the market and that the product can sell on their margins, means I can come in, do it all right from the beginning and crush them.

spend $17 with only 5 clicks, so $3.42 CPC

This is terrible. Do a better ad 100%. Make sure your page is working properly. Get ppl to stay on ur page longer, add a video of the product that ppl watch so your bounce rate is lower. FB takes all that into consideration.

 

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[marklov]

I may be mistaken but I think that such processors are less of a bitch regarding freezing your funds' accounts, ive read many Paypal horror stories, a recent article in which a company got frozen by PayPal $20,000 as a "surety bond" due to their operational risk, creating a liquidity crisis for them and, at the same time, they got offered a loan by them for $20,000. Article from two days ago (1/8/2016)
Startup Founder Claims PayPal Froze $20,000 in Funds, Then Offered Him a Business Loan

Most of the people who get money frozen/horror stories are those who are using personal accounts to do business, get tons of chargebacks from dissatisfied customers( especially SEO Guys) and even confusion by not setting up proper invoices and contracts with clients/customers.

Look at it from paypal's perspective...... Hackers paradise + people traveling the world +collecting money = can you really blame paypal.

Speaking from experience, best thing to do is this.....

Call into paypal and discuss with a rep what you are using your account for, the amount ranges you can expect per transaction and ask them to tag this info to your account so whenever you might have a problem the future customer care rep can have this to go off of.

Things go along a lot smoother and faster.

 

[hughjasle]

What are 3 of your main takeaways that you've learned from your experience in AM?

1. There is a lot of money out there
2. Too many people cut corners for short term money and give up MASSIVE money later
3. Anyone can do anything if they just sit and freaking do it

will you be constructing a PBN for the other site to have authority?

No. But to make sure we are talking the same lingo - you mean private blog network right? PBN stands for a few things depending on what we are talking about. But I am not building a content/authority brand at all. Not for this. I do have plans for that. But those will be for niche specific high end brands. And even then, most will just be build out, yes on a blog for that site, but the majority of "content" will be on social networks etc.

 

[hughjasle]

Can I ask you a few question?

Yes.

When you started you already switched to the new pixel?

Lately all new products I use the new pixel only. I too find it worse, but the old pixels are going away soon and I didn't want to possibly lose data in the near future.

Are you products niche related or general products.

Most are more general products. They can fit into niches, but I like general products that have massive audiences.

how come that you have just spent just 500 bucks in testing.

True cost per test varies, but really $500 covers me pretty well on most products. I'm not looking to really sell a bunch of them. I'm just looking to see if there is interest at all.

So you always start with click to website ads and then when you pixel get more conversion you start conversion web ads?

Always is a strong word. There is no ALWAYS in anything I do. But starting with website click or post engagement ads while a pixel gathers data is a good move IMO. Even better, run all three at once See what does better in the short term, long term, etc.

 

[hughjasle]

I mean, until your cost of conversion and sale price is still good enough to get a decent profit.

I'm gonna rephrase that for you to what I think you are saying so you can correct me if I'm wrong:

"Keep running until the profit margin is so small that it's not worth it to run anymore."

If that's what you are saying then yea, that's the idea. At least that was my idea when I started. I have 1k of them to sell of now so I gotta sell em anyways. I'll see how they do. If all the numbers are basically the same as the last batch then I'll go forward with all this and hire someone to deal with the stuff like making sure I always have inventory, deal with shipwire, test a batch with FBA, get the products listed on Amazon, etc.

To me all that is just like data entry, super boring and drawn out. I don't enjoy doing it. I have more fun coming up with products and creating ads to sell them.

 

[hughjasle]

Maybe im overthinking, but ive been on amazon bestsellers and google trends and i feel like im getting no where...

You are definitely over thinking. Stop trying to come up with something. Once you do that something will pop up right in front of you.

The product I went with, I wouldn't even use myself. I could care less for it.

You never know what products can do well and what wont.

Additionally, you don't have to reinvent any wheels here. If you don't want to customize a product but see one in the market already that you know could sell if people just knew about it, you can just slap your brand on the product and just market it better than everyone else.

 

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[DWX]

I've been following this thread since it started and I have to say, it's so awesome the way you make everything sound so simple. Us humans have a strange knack of making things sound so complex for almost no reason.

You demystify things. And for that, I take my hat off, sir. Great job!

 

[hughjasle]

Alright at the airport now and have some time. Even though we met earlier today and went over these, I want to repost my answers here for others in case they had the same questions.

1. Do you create a new FB account for each product / use your personal account?

yes. A new ad account within business manager for each product and brand.

2. What is the process for the just testing of the ad itself? Do you still think its necessary? Is this where you set up a PPE ad?

Well, nothing is "necessary". I am constantly evolving as I go. BUT, in testing the ad, the purpose was just to get an idea of what it was like running a product ad. I was just wanting to see if for that niche was I going to be paying outrageous CPM's or low CPMs. I had no idea. So no definitely not necessary. Really, a waste of money now thinking about it. The ad objective (ppe, conversion, click to website, video view) doesn't matter to much. Any of those work to start. I prefer PPE, Click to Website and Conversions personally.

3. When you say you put content on your page are You are creating a page for the product's brand and just putting relevant content/photos/industry related knowledge? Is this for the ad test part before running ads to Shopify?

Yes. I make the FB page and put up content(posts and pictures) of both my product/brand and anything relevant that I think my customers would like to see that relates to what my brand is/does/offers. And yes you need a FB page in order to run ads on FB (with the exception of RHS ads) so make the page and make it right from the start.

4.Do you have any examples (not yours of course) of great facebook ads that do this? Would be extremely helpful to see a template. Do you always use newsfeed placements to do this or the sidebar placements as well?

An ad I came across recently that was done well and is a FANTASTIC example on how to interact with your audience is a ad by the company MONQ. They do some type of e-cig thing i think. I just remember checking out hte comments and noticing that they responded to EVERY COMMENT. They are doing a great job there.

5. For videos, do you create your own or use a stock vid that manufacturer has?

Both. However, you will want to make your own as soon as you have your own product with your brand and just use those.

 

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[MitchC]

Just so you guys know I have no custom domain and no logo, the text doesn't even look proper because my name is 2 words and it's joined them into one with not even a capitol for the second word. Honestly, I don't think conversions would increase if I changed this but I'm yet to try. So far the test is $50 spent, $180 revenue, 10 sales, about $30-40 product cost. I'm thinking of increasing the price as I don't think sales would slow down, but I want to have more data first and I also hope to do some upsells. Theme is the standard theme with a couple very basic changes, I don't know any html. I said to allow 20 days for shipping so I will dropship international orders and get a bulk order for local ones which should get there in time if any supplier will ever email back!

 

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[hughjasle]

Keep us posted on how you're doing!

Not much to post these days.

We just had 5 different designers (solo designers to big firms) each make us a page for a different product that we have ordered small quantities of for testing. Based on the designs and ease of communication, we are planning to pick and work with just one of them going forward. So far we believe we found the one we want. A couple of them upped the prices on us mid project so they are out, the design was crappy on another, and then with the 2 left we just have a much better experience working with one over the other so it made the choice easy.

With those new pages and new test products in we will be able to start testing ads and variations of offers. Like using the new products for upsells on existing products, using them as trip wires (free + shipping) or other low barrier trips, combining for big bundles, just straight selling the products, etc. Lots of options and thus lots of opportunity to make something work.

ATM these new products are just in the manufacturers packaging. Once we find winners we will have our new product design team (different than the web design) match our current branding (that they overhauled for us) so we can have a uniform brand and start really running ads and send them out to our "brand ambassadors" aka influencers and content producers which will bring sales and more importantly, content for us to use in on our site/social media as well as ads.

In the meantime we are also doing a lot on the back of of each sale with our customers and our email list. We are close to pinning down what each email is worth. The LTV of just the emails on the backend can add a SIGNIFICANT amount of revenue and change the entire plan if we so choose.

For example, if we are selling a $10 product and getting a $6 CPA. That doesn't leave much room for profit, COGs, and shipping/fulfillment + costs like employees etc. Shipping/fulfillment alone would be $3. So most likely that wouldn't be worth it no matter how much traffic/sales you could do. However say for each sale we also get 9 other people who signed up for the newsletter and gave us their email, but didn't purchase, that leaves us with 10 new people to our email list. If we can make just $1 extra on average for each email, that changes the entire plan and now allows us to keep that $10 product up and running even though it is not profitable on the front end, but all those emails that we get per sale brings us in an extra $10 which then makes us profitable.

 

[hughjasle]

Alright - Have a question for you Shopify users.

I have a few orders that have an exclamation next to it signifying that the "order may be fraudulent"

I am just gonna try calling these people on Monday during normal business hours to confirm they indeed are the person who ordered the product.

My question for you all is - what do you do in these cases? What have your experiences been? Is Shopify just super conservative and tend to over flag on the side of caution, or are they typically correct?

 

[hughjasle]

1) What fulfilment house/service do you use?

Don't remember off the top of my head. I'll have to look it up later. Dealing with some of the typical affiliate nonsense at the moment too keep money rolling on that side of things. But i'll do a post on them later once we see how they do with shipping etc.

2) What type of FB ads are you running? (carousal, video, etc)

I've used all the above. However, to answer your question, right this second the videos are doing the best on this product

 

[hughjasle]

You said that you have 6 different products, do you have a different site marketing each product on its own or one larger storefront with all the products listed ?

I don't have 6 different products, I TESTED 6 different products and picked the top performer is all. When I was testing them (if they even made it to the point where I wanted to create a site to test actual checkouts/purchases of the product, I create complete new sites for each. This only takes like 30 minutes on Shopify per product so it's not a big deal to do.

Any organic traffic or is it all paid ?

All paid. Though, since turning off my ads to do selling out and placing the "sold out" sign on the store, I still get a good amount of traffic to the site now and emails almost daily asking when it will be back in stock. I wouldn't call that organic, more like, the after effects of mass marketing.

Im going to be importing a product which retails for $350 a piece so I am going to take advantage of paid advertising any tips ?

Test it before you get into it. See if you can actually make 10 sales before you put all your money down on ordering the product.

Did you brand your goods or are they generics ?

I branded them. However that was the only mod I did, they are otherwise 100% generic. I did get a different color than most of my competitors, but it was still a generic color. My original color choice would have pushed me back another 45 days in manufacturing time. So I took what was available.

 

[hughjasle]

Are you going from page post > hard sell landing page > offer on Shopify

No. As stated earlier it is AD>Shopify product page.

Can you reveal anymore about your flow leading up to the transaction?

Seriously I feel like ya'll are overthinking this. Could be that I'm just exaughsted and should have gone to bed hours ago but affiliate summit is going on right now so I'm wired on red bull.

Here is an example I found. My page is similar to this. Just WAY less text/info lol. http://hakshop.myshopify.com/collec...cts/usb-rubber-ducky-deluxe?variant=353378649

My site doesn't even have any other accessable pages. Just that one page and the checkout pages/stuff that appears after you click on checkout/buy.

 

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[hughjasle]

Yes I had a pre-existing LLC that I used for it. I have since gone back and created it's own special entity etc.

*I decided to edit this response after thinking about it for a bit, the following is my addition*

I am not a lawyer - I hate law crap so I can't say you have to have anything set up prior to selling or not.

However, having that set up before hand makes ZERO difference in the stores success/failure.

I don't want people thinking they have to do all this before even making a sell.

I have other businesses that I don't want at risk from this and so I created this ecom business with those in mind from the very start. I wanted to make sure the time I could give this to make it successful was there WITHOUT disrupting my other stuff, made sure if this returned me nothing, that it wouldn't affect me whatever and I can eat that loss and continue, made sure I couldn't have some stupid lawsuit come in and take down everything, etc.

I'm sure this response is preaching to the choir to most of you, but there are lots of lurkers and people who genuinely don't know. I wanted to be clear for their sake.

 

[MitchC]

I just want to share this it's something I will no doubt never see again. They ordered. 1 impression, 1 click, 1 sale, what are the chances? Let's hope this scales, this could be my first winner looking at how my other ad sets for it are doing. Thanks Hugh, you haven't made me rich yet but I guess I'm closer than ever.

 

[hughjasle]

And you are always bidding on a CPM basis?

Not always. I like to believe that the closer to bidding per cpm the better. But I often bid for conversion of CPC as well. Especially when just starting something. I like to do manual bidding and make my bids unreasonably high. This helps me to get prime spots on the newsfeeds and not at the bottom after the user has just been scrolling for 10 minutes. Costs more to start but is worth it. Higher CTRs etc. So FB will start giving preferential treatment to your ads over other because you have a higher CTR.

 

[hughjasle]

Found an impulse buy product that I see on Alibaba. $3-4 unit price with high volume. I'm comfortable marking the price at $60. It's generic, so I could brand it. Small size. I would buy it myself if I saw it in store. My audience would be for women 20-40 age.
That's the main idea for product selection right?

Wow that sounds awesome. I don't put super huge emphasis myself on "impulse buy". I don't know how to explain this well, but I just kinda know the types of things that will sell. For me I guess it's more:

Is this a good product? (Good to high quality, does what it says it does) Yes or no

If no, move on. If yes:

Can I come up with a sales pitch/angle that if pitched to me would get me to want to know more. If Yes then go ahead. If not, move on.

 

[hughjasle]

I think it would be wise to continue until costs are in your favor

What costs in my favor?

Are the customers from ads landing on generic shopify product page or some sort of landing page?

ads go straight to my shopify product page with the checkout button on that page. Literally its just some images of the product a quick description with bullet points and how to use the product and price with the checkout/buy now button. Nothing fancy.

 

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[hughjasle]

About your shipping costs when customers are buying from your website across different states, how do you sort out these varying expenses?

I'm sorry I don't fully understand the question so I'll try and answer by saying what I do with everything regarding shipping until further clarification I guess.

I charge a flat fee for shipping. Sure the shipping costs vary depending where they live. It doesn't affect me really. I know numbers by their averages. So I know my average shipping cost. They are sorted via the software so if I cared to look what each individual product shipped for to where I could. I just don't.

My books have the individual shipping costs if you care to look that deep. But really all anyone looks at is the total cost for shipping for a given period of time. Year, month, week, day, whatever.

Hopefully I covered your question with all that rambling.

 

[hughjasle]

Does that mean you initially made a FB page for each of your products and did some ads leading to the pages?

Yes - each product get's it own FB page.

Right now i'm having doubts if it is ok for the brand to keep on refunding/cancelling orders due to no inventory. Did you have any issues with this?

Run the test under a different brand name if you wish. You shouldn't be doing any super significant amount of sales at this point. Just enough to figure out your rough CPA costs and consumer interest levels. On most of my tests at the moment, most of my products (the funnel/page) with said product being tested, doesn't even have a brand mentioned at all. Think of an amazon post with pictures of the product and maybe a video, with some bullet point on the features of the product and a quick description.

I was looking to use the website conversion ad type for FB.

I know this wasn't a question but I wanted to address it anyhow. You can still use website conversion ad type. I use it all the time. The only issue you may run into (other than FB being a hot mess right now while their development team is messing with the back-end of FB's ad tools and algorithm) is that the website conversion pixel works off of - you guessed it, conversions. You can start using conversion bidding right off the bat, but will typically get poor results as the pixel has no data to work with. I try and place the pixel on my site but use clicks to website or a different objective FIRST, to let my pixel gather data. After it has some data and I know who to better target (as I'll then have the data to see what ages, genders, etc actually purchased) I'll make a new campaign with the conversions objective and target those people.

 

[hughjasle]

Looks like you're getting close to the 7 fig revenue mark

Not sure what you mean by getting close, but blew past the 7-figure per year mark a long time ago. Pushing up to the 8 figure per year mark now, but thank you

Are you running whitehat or doing the classic nutra cloaking/ account farming?

I originally was doing the later. I am working on getting WH affiliate offers working now though, but finding WH takes just as much work.

 

[hughjasle]

are you optimizing these test campaigns or just running broad and figuring that as your "floor CPA"?

Well, really there are two testing periods. First period is just to see if you can get sales or not. Second part is when you know you can sell it, you try and establish a base CPA to know that you can at least break even on the product. You know that if you can get a CPA that is close to workable (since the CPA is the last piece of the expense puzzle as all the other expense already known) you can adjust the funnel/optimize the targeting/etc to really make it profitable after you have the product and can steam roll with the social proof.

 

[hughjasle]

Do you use a video production company?

Yes i use a production company now, but I also use youtubers who are self proclaimed influencers. HOWEVER, i don't really care for them as influencers - but I have found that getting the right personality and quality video is key and many of these youtube influencers know how to make high quality videos with great personalities for it. And usually if you can find the right people, it is cheaper to get one of them to do a video over doing a professional shoot. Sometimes all it takes is sending out product.

In the past I'd send out product to a bunch of people and ask for vids. While those works, they weren't nearly as good as the pro's or influencers.

 

[hughjasle]

Isn't it just.

People > Processes > Technology (in that order)

Idk if there is an order or not. I have yet a lot to learn

But those are definitely the three pieces. In my case the technology is not my end product, it is part of my process and thus product is my third pillar. Same thing. Just different wording as I don't want to confuse all these young Americans.

During the course of this thread I have received many PMs and I learned that people take what is said wayyyy to literally. While I do give some specifics in here, the vast majority of the information here is loosely given. It is meant to convey the idea of e-commerce and selling via FB. Every case is different but the idea should be roughly the same.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[hughjasle]

What tips/pointers would you give to someone who is struggling to find a product?
What are some attributes you think a product must have in order for it to pass the cut / even get considered?

There are different trains of thought here really.

There is the toss it up and see what sticks method if you really have no clue of what to sell

Or there is the, I know what these people want and I'm going to make it for them.

Or the, constant keeping your eyes open for new products and ideas and seeing things that are brilliant, but not many people know it exists or hasn't been applied to different problem.

My personal qualifications are very general. I just want products that are of quality, they actually do what I say they do, they are 100% legal in every aspect, there is enough margin to make it work.

I know the constant question is always "how much margin?" so i'll just address it.

I have products that I sell for under $5 and I've had products over $100. They both worked and made a lot of money. That said, I like the higher priced stuff wayyyy more as it was less headache. A $1 increase in CPA or CPM could be make or break on those low dollar products, and not even affect the high dollar ones.

If anyone continues to struggle for products, I suggest biophases amazon coaching. He has his own methods of finding products that rocks, plus you'll get to learn amazon with it

 

[hughjasle]

current software project

Not to derail the thread, but make that project work! I'm going to assume you already tested the market and found it was a needed software. Push and make it happen. Don't look for backups just yet. Affiliate marketing isn't going anywhere. Focus on making your project work. If you can learn to push through and make 1 project work, every project thereafter will be that much easier.