3 years later, no more ideas...

[Thibault]

Hi guys,

3 years ago I decided to white-label an fashion accessory on Amazon and set up an e-commerce site.
Got ranked first or so in my category on Amazon pretty quickly, so a good amount of sales coming from there, it was cool. It's harder now because there are some competition now, but I'm always in top 5.

I also started an Instagram with original pictures of my product, and went to 10k followers with the help of some black hat methods, and I don't think I can do much more now than what's already rolling.

I tried to pay for some Google/Facebook ads recently. I think my margin is too low to get a good return: I make $6 margin on $35 product.

I can't find a way to reach the next level. It's been the same level of sales for a year now, I can't find hacks to make it grow faster.

Am I missing something? Should I read some thread or guide that would give me ideas around finding some hacks?
I feel the one thing I didn't try is SEO but I don't know where to start there are hundreds of topics here..

ps: my website/market is in french, so it makes it harder to apply some ideas I see here. Also I can't expand easily since it's a product that is hard to ship overseas.

 

[louiszhao]

Have you ever tried to explore the FB French groups in your niche?
About FB Ad, you just need to spend a few Euro per day.
Is there any way that you can cut down the cost of the product?

 

[BreaknBrix]

Every idea that exists has already been written or spoken. And I can't tell you what you should do but I can tell you what I'd do.

First, I'd reevaluate what I'm selling. I'd research the market as much as possible, check forums, etc and make sure there's real demand for what I'm selling.
After I'm fully convinced there's a market for what I'm selling I'd optimize for conversions as much as possible.

THEN I'd move on to building a funnel. If you're getting traffic from keywords a, b, & c... it's time to add d, e, f, g, h, i, j ... the entire alphabet.
I'd build a YT account not around the product, but the market. If the market is there, make great videos, get on YT and build a following.
If the markets been around a long time, I'd reinvest profits into a small but strong PBN.
I'd find hobbyists in my market, people with market exposure who aren't in it for the money and offer special affiliate deals.
I'd join popular forums with 10-20 accounts each and intelligently spam them with power posts. I still do this with my music site it works great.
I'd do strategic commenting on targeted blogs.
Explore FB for opportunities.
Set up shell (dummy) sites for my more reckless but creative spamming.

Sometimes I get really stupid, controversial ideas that I'm too scared to test on my money sites. So I test them on dummy sites first. I can't emphasize how important this. In BH there's a tendency to think of really smart, creative ideas. Ideas that have the potential to be A) extremely profitable or B) reckless enough to wipe out a business. The older and more profitable a site becomes, the less willing I become to take risk. And eventually that fucks with my ability to sell and be super creative. It's like setting up proxys during wars. Maybe the CIA wants to test something risky. But it's too risky to do themselves. So they build proxys to shield any blowback.

Marketers are familiar with using proxies to scale a method. But very few apply the concept of proxies to the foundation of a method itself. Like your entire marketing strategy. If you get a radical idea that might cause blowback and ruin your reputation... but might also make you a shitload of money.... you have to test and measure these ideas.

Finally, if you're only revenue stream is 1 physical product that's limited to French markets, you have to diversify. Start researching English markets.

 

[Thibault]

Thanks for your detailed answers, I truly appreciate.

The older and more profitable a site becomes, the less willing I become to take risk

I relate so much to this right now.

Those are good ideas, I'm going to try some.
I can't reduce cost of the product, I already reached the MOQ needed to have access to great pricing from my supplier.
It's also not a product that has communities around it or its market.
I'm going to learn about PBN, sounds like a good fit.

The US market is really hard to get into, since I need to have some inventory over there. I could use Amazon FBA but that's a lot of money & hustle which I don't think would be profitable at the end. I'm already on the European market but I don't speak fluently german, spanish, italian, so it's harder to find the right keywords, to initiate contacts with influencers, etc.