[$1000 / Day] eCommerce Journey

What's up guys? I've been doing IM as a hobby for a while now and this was the year that I realized that this is what I want to do. Good old marketing and building businesses from nothing. If it wasn't for this forum, I never would have even stepped into this world.

This is my current business that I'm building and it's in its second month right now. The business was created back in April but there was a lot that needed to be done. Things like finding my target market, creating the products (yeah, this isn't an alibaba -> shopify dropship), and all that jazz.

The current plan is PPC, Social Media, and other marketing tactics that my competitors aren't doing. SEO isn't even a focus right now, I rather not ride that roller coaster again or rely on one traffic source... Funny thing, I'm getting some trickle of organic traffic anyways. Will focus on it after 1 year, since Google takes age into a consideration. I rather get the foundation done first.

Anyways, this is a Shopify website and my products right now are $1.xx. The average customer spends $4.xx on my store. Yup, that shit is cheap, but there's no shipping involved because everything is a digital download.

I'm looking to release a new product every week and some other types of content to help grow my email list and give existing customers / email subscribers content.

Stats Last Month


Stats This Month So Far


Website Right Now

That should be everything I needed to say in this opening posts. Will do a daily update to keep you guys posted.

SilverJanuary said:

I'm getting some trickle of organic traffic anyways

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can you tech me your trick?

Ariful.arif said:

can you tech me your trick?

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There's no trick to it. If your content is good and you're putting it in front of people with interest in it, they're going to share it. It's just how it works, I'm sure you've shared some cool stuff you've found on the internet with your friends.

Those shares become free social signals, backlinks, and etc.

FaceBook Ads
FaceBook ads didn't do too well today, I managed to make $10 from it but was in the negatives. The previous day was a lot better. For the same amount of spending ($10) I made at $41. I did scale it from $10 -> $15 though. Looking to slowly scale it as it goes so I'll be watching to see how well it does with the new daily budget.

FaceBook
I managed to share a new post on my FaceBook page (8k followers) which did well too. While I'm growing this page, I'm also growing a FaceBook group for my website. It has no attachment to my website and comes across as a generic group for my vertical. The FaceBook group is currently around 240~ members. I won't be posting anything to my website from it until it gets to around 5k in members.

Pinterest
Set up 10+ boards for the Pinterest account for my website. Queued up high-quality posts for each board for the entire month and posted all of my products + some free content onto a board too. The goal here is to work my way into group boards with real people (no bots) while growing my account.

My game plan is to slowly diverse my traffic sources one source at a time. This way I will never be chained to one source of traffic and will always have people coming onto the website.

Analytics + Earnings

This update will be from July 8 - July 13. I didn't get a chance to do much this week, some other things came up. There's an event offline for my vertical and I did a last minute sign up for it and will be attending it tomorrow. I spent the entire week preparing and making sure I had enough products to sell at this event. Of course, when I spend 100% of my attention, the digital part will take a hit.

That's all good, I know that this event will be good for the business. Get the brand name out there locally, make some sales, and see what others are doing.

Analytics

Sales

Personal Notes
Lots to do, I sent out an email to my existing customers about how they felt about the product and their experience in my store. I want to be able to improve everything about my business for my current and future customers.

FaceBook ads are starting to shine as I find the right demographics and behaviour. The age and gender has been taken care of though. Last night I created a mobile ad for Facebook, 50% cheaper than Desktop ads, and already had a conversion today (not included in this update). Will be honing in on this and trying to get more conversion per day.

To-Do For Next Update
Expect the next update in a few days. I wanted to release this one to let you guys know I'm still here. I want to get this offline event over with first beforehand.

Goal
One new product and content for that product. The product will be ready in stores and content will be up on all channels (YouTube, FaceBook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Email). I'm giving myself until next weekend to do this. This new product will be based on what users are searching for on my website currently.

is it possible to explain more about your store and explain how meny products you have what is your price range ? how do you target your people ?? ex ( free shipping method ) ?

that would be great and price methods and what kind of content are you talking about ?

thank you again

mamadpersian said:

is it possible to explain more about your store and explain how meny products you have what is your price range ? how do you target your people ?? ex ( free shipping method ) ?

that would be great and price methods and what kind of content are you talking about ?

thank you again

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My store has two types of products right now and around 20 - 30 products.

One is a digital download, so when they purchase the item, they get an email for the product. These are priced at $1.50. I'm looking to introduce $5.00 products for this section.
The other section is a physical good that I ship out. Those are $9.00 + Shipping. I'm revamping this section this week (new product pictures and videos).

I target people with my imagination at first (not even trolling). I try to think of my perfect customer, their likes, income, gender, and etc. From there I look around the internet and find the places where these people hang out. I adjust what I come up with to what I find as I create content / products.

Sorry folks, I'm rather bad at updating this thread and will try my best to do daily updates. I'll continue off where I left off and catch you all up.

I've been focusing heavily on FaceBook ads and have started Adwords today. I’ve also been working on my email list and cart recovery. 80% of my day goes towards that while 20% goes towards working on a new traffic source. These days, it’s been Pinterest.

Pinterest has been a bit of a pain. Not that gaining followers is hard, that’s not what I want out of it. I want to drive sweet and targeted traffic from big boards. I’m a part of a few but they’re not so good. The good boards straight up won’t reply to my outreach or are full and not taking in new contributors.

To solve this, I’ve been growing my own group and page on FaceBook. I have a 9k page and a group with 4k members. These drive me traffic and sales. Will be using this to leverage a trade for funneling each other traffic.

The reason I say followers don’t matter on Pinterest is that if I really wanted to grow my account fast, I would just invest into paid ads there. Right now, It’s not a major focus, but I’ll be doing Pinterest ads very soon too.

Anyways, here’s my earnings from my last update to now. This business is now self-sustaining with profits left over to throw right back in to scale and create new ads, work on new ad networks, and other strategies. Shit, maybe even SEO (yuck, what a waste of time).

Nice!

Though this journey is for eCommerce, there has some good information that I can apply on blogging journey for sure.

kindly keep us informed!

randybishop said:

Nice!

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Thanks randybishop

Premium Rocket said:

Though this journey is for eCommerce, there has some good information that I can apply on blogging journey for sure.

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End of the day, it's just marketing. It'll work for any kind of website.

CuriousMe :) said:

kindly keep us informed!

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Will do! Hope you stick around to the end of this journey.

Another day, another dollar. Today was my highest day for revenue to date and for profit. Feels good when you grind away and start to see results.

Spent the day handling customer emails. I don't think I ever talked about this in the past updates and I barely see it being talked about here. Customer service is god damn vital. I've read a few threads here where people straight up ignore the customers. Customers are a business lifeline. My existing customers are raving about my product and website to their friends, family, and their neighbor's dog. That's free money and customers that I couldn't have reached other wise.

Created a new ad creative for my best seller to try to drive up sales. I'll be starting with mobile first as my customers are more on their phones and tablets than their computers. If this new ad creative does well, I'll scale and add in desktop versions. I noticed that FaceBook added a new option to their Web Conversion ads. Now you can have it optimize for links first and then it'll switch over to optimizing for conversions when it has enough data. Pretty neat in my opinion. Will see how that goes for the next few days and if it's worth doing from here on out.

Earnings:
Spent - $168.72
Revenue - $324.56
Profit - $155.84

I'm nowhere near where I want to be, but it's only the beginning.

wow. i always read your com journey. many thanks

sulli said:

wow. i always read your com journey. many thanks

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Hope my updates will keep you coming back for more!

SilverJanuary said:

Hope my updates will keep you coming back for more!

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Just found your journey. Quite inspiring! Keep up the grind. Will definitely be watching this.

Nice journey.. I want to go into ecommerce too. I need some advice

nice one, the product is a creation of your own? or you just resell it ?

KillerQuail said:

Just found your journey. Quite inspiring! Keep up the grind. Will definitely be watching this.

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Thanks KillerQuail! Glad to have your onboard my journey.

seowarlord said:

Nice journey.. I want to go into ecommerce too. I need some advice

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Thanks seowarlord! All you need to get started is market research and luckily for you, that's free to do.

silverleafy said:

nice one, the product is a creation of your own? or you just resell it ?

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Thanks silverleafy! The product is my own creation.

FaceBook ads are doing great. There are some ads that I think I’m going to have to cut as the ROI on them isn’t good. Either going to redo them or duplicate and increase the budget by $5. Maybe I’m not reaching enough people for it to convert. The new ads I made last night are going great. I think I’m going to start all my WC ads with this setting (optimize for link clicks until it has enough data to optimize for conversions). Created another ad creative and mobile ads for another product. See how this one will do over the next few days.

I know, I say that SEO is yucky a lot, but it’s still a vital part of online marketing. I would be a fool to ignore all the targeted traffic I can get. I checked SEMRush and new keywords have appeared as well as some have jumped right to the second page. Fantastic, all these social sharing have been doing great for building me natural backlinks. I did some blog commenting on related blogs to funnel some traffic and had links pointing to the homepage of my website. All brand anchors and not in the actual comment but the Username instead.

Replied to customer emails and applied some feed back to the store as well. Some of the products needed to have their description re-worded as it confused me. If it confused me, I’m 100% sure a customer would have been confused as well.

Did an email campaign for the newest product added to the store as well. I’ve been aiming to email my list at least once a week. I only ever email them to give them updates or let them know about new products and discount. Got a few instant sales and more should trickle throughout the week.

Earnings
Spent: $201.19
Revenue: $430.63
Profit: $229.44