A Journey into eCommerce and social media

Hi all,

Since I discovered BHW in summer 2016 I gradually developed a new idea to make money on the internet. I'm in a niche that I was very passionate about a few years back, but lost most interest in it the last few years. But still I know my niche very well and I know that there are my audience is very passionate about it too!

My project is a combination of several money making methods. Originally I wanted to make money with Amazon affiliates. But once I got my first sale the revenue was very low and I decided that affiliate marketing wasn't a good option for this niche. I started teaming up with a designer and made cool t-shirt designs on Teespring. He delivers high quality products and very good mock-ups for my niche. In the mean time I started building an Instagram account and got 1.7k followers right now. I grew my account manually and with some iMacro's script. My instagram account promotes my teespring products and nowadays every campaign gets a sale weekly.
I learned about dropshipping with AliExpress too and imported a few products on my website. But most of the products in my niche are copyrighted products and I can't sell them on my website. When I did I got an email from a big company to tell me to remove the products. I found a good product now and it has a very good ROI: 300-400%. I am promoting this product on my website and instagram.
Besides that I ordered a batch of products in bulk, I already sold 50% of it in pre-orders!

So I combine Teespring, Dropshipping and my own products on my website and it's steadily growing. I barely invested any money right now only my host/domain and 75 EUR for my own product. I am eager to scale it up.

I'm a newbie in SEO and that's why I will focus on social media a lot, especially Instagram and Facebook. Also I will build an e-mail list on my website by giving 10% off when someone subscribers for my newsletter. To help my e-mail list grow I also have a recurring giveaway on my website: I give a product away for free and to win this product a visitor needs to leave his details and email adress. I hope to grow my email list now. The product I'm giving away costs below 1 EUR so it's not a big deal.

To scale this up I am planning to buy MassPlanner soon and focus on IG and Facebook.
I will also buy a better host and improve my website bit by bit. All of this is fairly new to me and I am happy with the progress made last 6 months.

My goal for this journey is 20 EUR a day in profit. So that's 140 EUR a week.
I will update this journey every week to see my progress, ask questions and help others out.

Week 1:
Sales: 20.91
Expenses: 5.87
Profit: 15.04


Washand

Interesting journey! Good luck and I hope you will keep this thread updated.
It's really nice to see that you made some profit in the first week!

Update:

So first of all I wanted to say I had a long fever for about 2,5 week. Wasnt able to do that much. However my own product I ordered on AliBaba came in and I am very satisfied. Made me think of new idea's which is always good Already shipped 4 pre-orders! Furthermore I purchased Mass Planner and I am playing around with the follow/like settings on IG right now.
Came up with a new Social media strategy which will help me a little bit more in terms of visibility and as a brand. Also I updated my e-mail lists ( the give-away one and the newsletter one). Added some new products to the list and uploaded a new t-shirt design which my designer made on Teespring.

I made an Excel sheet about expenses/sales/profit but when I opened it I realised it was a mess. Decided to start a new one, and keep it more organised updated.

Week 2:
Sales: 22.40
Expenses: 14.50
Profit: 7.90

Social Media stats;
IG: 1881 (+131)
Facebook 223 (+13)
Twitter: 326 (+5)

Still a long way to go to reach my goal. The previous days I was upset about not getting any new sales and the fact that I barely had some new followers on IG besides the fact that my most recent two posts were top ranked for my main hashtag.

bleedsix said:

Interesting journey! Good luck and I hope you will keep this thread updated.
It's really nice to see that you made some profit in the first week!

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Actually I started this sooner than the thread but I wanted to track my progress along the way. That is why I started this thread.

Update!
I have had a very stressful week and didn't pay much attention to this project. I am not even trying to make a living out of this and sometimes it's better to focus on things with more priority in life.
I had some setbacks:
- Dropshipping: a customer didn't receive his order and I had to refund him. A few days later he still received it. He was happy with it and I decided to let him keep the refund money. It wasn't a big deal and also it just came way too late. This was something new for me and I think I handled it correctly. My vision is long term money and building a brand, and customer satisfaction is very important!

- My own product: I received a letter from the delivery service that I chose the wrong shipping method for my product and had to pay additional fees: 10.12 EUR. That's about my profit margin so I was a little upset. Well I payed the fine and learned from it. Still thinking about a better shipping method because I am no official company and sending express packages is way more expensive than sending packages through the mailbox. So again something I learned and I am confident I will find a way around.

- Teespring campaign: was doing very well. Made more sales this week than I expected so I am happy with it. Also waiting for the upcoming T2 update, I subscribed to the early acces and I hope I can feature my product on Amazon too! Secondly they will add new products every week and this made me so excited. Will definitely find succes

Furthermore I received two orders where the customers haven't payed me yet. These stats are not included.

Week 3:

Sales: 53,50
Expenses: 32,47
Profit: 21,03

Social Media stats;
IG: 2776 (+395) - Thanks to MassPlanner and two very good posts!
Facebook 227 (+4) - Haven't payed attention to my page
Twitter: 379 (+53) - Runned MassPlanner for a few days. Will continue next week!

Good luck on your journey! How are you growing your Facebook page? Do you have links to your social media accounts on your website?

Good luck on your journey!

DankHorse said:

Good luck on your journey! How are you growing your Facebook page? Do you have links to your social media accounts on your website?

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Thanks! Yeah I do have links to social profile on the website and in the e-mails I send them. And some organic traffic too, but it isn't much for Facebook, I focus on it more later on.

thesarah said:

Good luck on your journey!

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Thank you!

Update!

Haven't done much this week because my main focus was on study. But still nice to get some sales. I installed a new theme on my website because I noticed my former theme wasn't working properly on mobile. If I have more times I will focus on customizing my new theme.

Week 4:
Sales: 36
Expenses: 13,98
Profit: 23,02

Social Media stats;
IG: 2522 (+346)
Facebook 234 (+7)
Twitter: 380 (+1) (picking it up again since today)

Hey, love your journey! One quick question. You use shopify or woocommerce and why ? ☺

amasel95 said:

Hey, love your journey! One quick question. You use shopify or woocommerce and why ? ☺

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Woocommerce it's free and wordpress has thousands of plug-ins. Never understood why someone would go with shopify. Just watch a few tutorials and ask help in forums or Facebook groups if you're stuck. After that you're good to go.

Teespring Creative let's your t-shirt be 'worn' by models so that you can promote the t-shirt better. I want to have a lot of these pictures but doing them manually on Teespring takes too much time. Any other websites that make this possible?

Week 5:

Weird week. some days zero sales and other days multiple sales. Redesigned my website with a better theme. It payed off also made two new products which my audience will love! Started a new campaign on Teespring which I will promote further.

Sales: 50,41
Expenses: 34,16
Profit: 16,25

Social Media stats;
IG: 2877 (+355)
Facebook 240 (+6)
Twitter: 385 (+5) (Twitter is a bitching bots right now)

Thx for update
You not try to scale it up?
Try with 10 account each media social..

Update time! I'm sorry I didn't took the time to give you an update earlier. Well no excuses, here we go:

An average week money-wise. But a great one in long term. I've a nice order from a possible influencers in my niche and also a company from norway has contacted me to buy items in bulk. I really hope I can make a deal with them. Other than that i gathered a small team of some of my IG followers to test new product possibilities for me. If they are satisfied and leave a good review I will put these up and sell. I've gathered a new strategy for promoting my products and see some promising perspectives in long term for this.

Also i've had a setback with dropshipping. The seller that sold my most popular item at a very low price, removed ePacket as a shipping option. I already talked to them and hope they will add it again soon! Otherwise I now consider to maybe buy them in bulk and sent them to my customers manually.

Here are the stats for week 6:
Sales: 72,35
Expenses: 50,77
Profit: 21,58

Social Media stats;
IG: 3568 (+693)
(left FB and Twitter out because I want to focus on IG only right now)

popoloko23 said:

Thx for update
You not try to scale it up?
Try with 10 account each media social..

Click to expand...

I registered a new account in a very similar niche and will moniteze it in the future. For now I only want to focus on this one. But you're right more accounts is more money to be made and scale easily. However, I am still very busy and have a pretty hard time to find quality pics in my niche.

Still doing this journey! Didn't have time to update yet. Got some bigger clients now which is really exciting for me as a brand and in profit. However these guys want an invoice for their order. I haven't registered as a business, is that needed? I live in the Netherlands by the way.
And my instagram is doing really well. Posting frequently everyday and followers grew to 5.4K now

Following

Update last week: launched a product that is very in demand on my site for free + shipping. The shipping is 3 EUR, in my country I really can't charge 10 EUR while it takes 2-3 weeks for the product to arrive from China. So 3 EUR was a good deal. Sold quite a lot of them this way and also had some regular orders.

I've got 3 big clients who want to buy my products in large order. Almost closed these deals! So that's something to look forward too.

Two clients got a broken product so I refunded them and asked the seller to ship a new one for these people.

My instagram live feature hasn't rolled out yet. Would really love to have it. Anyone else having this problem too?

Total in sales: 222,57
Expenses: 128,97
Profit: 93,60

Was able to close the two big deals an another one is coming up now! To let my instagram grow further I bought the Gramous ebook by @IGKing. Only scimmed it through but learned a lot. I also had to renew my MP license. My instagram grew to almost 6k followers right now. Also I will be doing a blog post every day on my website to document my journey with my followers. I'm going in for the long term! Managed to link my Twitter and Facebook to my IG and I'm seeing better engagement there. It was shit to be honest, not it's a little less shit there

Update last week:
Sales: 186,80
Expenses: 117,53
Profit: 69,27

It's great to see my profit is almost 70 Eur a day that means I'm on 50% towards my goal of 20 Eur a day/140 Eur a week.

Total profit March: 213,49

11 Days of april:

Continued to update my blog post. Took a little break of 4 days not posting anything which was stupid. Did great in sales first week: actual profit was 250+
Sold to another big client today which made me realise 125 Eur in profit

Teamed up with a designer to take care of my social media and blog post designs.

Haven't got the time to look into Gramous very well

Deleted some products because of slow shipping times (dropshipping) and temporary disabled one because 3 customers received a broken product. Considering buying some succesful products myself and ship to the customer. Not really sure how to do that efficiently. Also I tested a new product, two customers received it today and were happy about it. Need to work out some details but should be a winner!

I paused my journey because it took too much time and energy. I have to focus on my thesis this last months to graduate. further than that a pretty good week. Found some really promising plugins for my store to use and take it to the next level

Sales: 429,76
Expenses: 301,87
Profit: 127,98