Making Money on BHW: A Beginners Journal

Disclaimer

There was a thread recently about someone getting Jr VIP and selling sig space for his first IM income and I think we had an AMA on someone who sold an eBook in the marketplace. The threads were popular but it dawned on me I've never seen a journal for something like this so it could be interesting to try.

There are some obvious reasons for not doing this. Normally I don't get to talk about my cool projects on BHW because I don't want the competition but this is a little side hustle for me so compete away.

Note: This is not a sales thread. If you have a question from the perspective of running the BST then shoot. If it's a question about a specific product or service then you're probably best to post in that specific BST thread.

The Story So Far

I've been around IM forums for years but never sold to this market before so I have no idea how this is going to go. Normally I aggressively stick to the evergreen passive niches but recently worked on a JV offering my automation as a service and it was actually a lot of fun.

Not to mention I have the attention span of a goldfish so new is always better.


The idea seems simple enough. I have automation and JVs in some common BHW techniques. Some you've already seen and others are unique as far as I know. It's like $100 for Jr.VIP and $30 to list a sales thread on one of the biggest SEO/IM forums around? It seems like a no brainer.

I threw the basic copy up on a page so I could advertise in my sig. Again, my own design skills are shit and my designers are busy so I kept it simple with some basic text so I can get an idea of what kind of traffic it could draw.

Next Steps

Not an awful lot to do. I have some more stock I need to filter through and list.

Thinking Longer Term

If you haven't noticed already I'm a fan of starting lean. A little bit of text and a basic payment gateway. If it flops then no big deal. If it looks like it's going to work I'll put more time into it. This is how I start most projects.

It helps to at least have a rough plan looking ahead though. I've started with one service but I have several more in the same niche(ish) and I'd be looking to offer things on a monthly subscription basis rather than a one-off.

Let's see what happens.

All the best..!!

Good luck on your journey!

Alright, let's see how this one turns out. Best wishes.

Anyone who quotes Barney Stinson is worth following!

Interesting. Following as a jr vip and bst seller.

All the best in your journey. I already made use of your service.

Good luck and I will keep an eye on the updates.

All the best.

Good luck.

I'm pretty sure I was the one who wrote about using their sig to make their first internet dollars. I am interested in how this turns out. I have debated several times creating a BST thread.

Interested in hearing your perspective on the journey of a BHW seller. No experience of this myself but something I've thought about over the years.

Cheers folks we’ll see what happens.

Feels strange posting in a journal thread where the buyers might actually read it. Also super weird posting about a sales funnel everyone can see. I’m also not bothering with analytics or anything yet. I’ve been working with paid traffic more recently so the idea of not watching the traffic feels like I’m leaving money on the table - but this thread is likely to mess with the data anyway.

The First 24 Hours

Good start with two sales through the sig placement. Everybody seems to be using a banner so I suppose that’s the way to go. Limits you to just one offer however unless you use a single lander for different services. We might need to do some testing on that front but with a single offer at the moment I'll be looking to swap to a sig banner.

Got a bit of work to do on the scaling side of things. I thought a half dozen in stock would be enough to start with but maybe not. I also have to account for the fact that not everybody works the same way as I do and doesn't hop between niches the same way. I've worked out how to massively reduce my workflow and that's what I'll be working on today after I get through the backlog.

youtube1001 said:

All the best in your journey. I already made use of your service.

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Much appreciated! Hope you see great results with it.

Good luck with the journey.

Long Term Sig Traffic?

Been thinking about it today. Sig links seem to bring in some traffic but BHW ranks pretty well so that could actually become a passive income if your threads rank on Google.

So my obvious play now is to stuff this thread full of keywords, right? *cough* best seo super dooper seo secret hacks. Now I just sit back and wait for the money.

For real though. I'm curious to see how much passive traffic a sig is going to bring in. I'm not going to randomly start posting in random threads I have no interest in just because of a sig link (this isn't aimed at anyone) but I'm interested to see what happens when I continue to post as I usually would anyway.

Scaling

I spent a few too many hours this morning parsing through the first offer. I wanted to increase the stock level ahead of the BST to see if that improves conversion rates but it took a lot longer than expected. I improved the workflow but it's still taking a lot longer than I thought it would so I'm going to need to sink an hour into the code at some point tomorrow to really improve the workflow.

Confident I can reduce it way down from what we're currently at.

Third Sale

Yep. Obviously we get no metrics on what actually brings in the sig traffic but at some point today we picked up our third sale for $9.99. I always like it when a new project sells even when it's just for a few bucks.

BST Approved!

BST is getting approved so once I figure out how to pay for that we're up and running. No plans yet to run banner ads to it. At first, I'm just curious to see what kind of organic traffic is in the marketplace.

SEOMadHatter said:

best seo super dooper seo secret hacks

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, you're not ranking for that keyword just yet, will check again in a few days

SEOMadHatter said:

Feels strange posting in a journal thread where the buyers might actually read it. Also super weird posting about a sales funnel everyone can see.

Click to expand...

People felt the same when they started releasing their income breakdowns online. It's a weird thing but builds your trust with your audience.

Looking forward to seeing your BST. I'm sure you'll post a link here... So we can get a better view of your journey

I won't tag him since I'm sure he gets enough of that but thanks to BassTrackerBoats who spotted my dumbass posting the BST into the Jr.VIP marketplace instead of the normal one. I wasn't even aware that was a thing.

I'd also forgotten that I'd added one of these 'post below for the coupon code' things in the thread. It makes sense since people then bump the thread for you but also means having to actually send a PM.

Watch out for my new BST! 'Auto BST Coupon PM Dominator 9000'!

For real though that's the BST live. Going to give it a few days and see what the organic traffic is like then look at the cost of running banners etc...

Satal said:

Unfortunately, you're not ranking for that keyword just yet, will check again in a few days


People felt the same when they started releasing their income breakdowns online. It's a weird thing but builds your trust with your audience.

Looking forward to seeing your BST. I'm sure you'll post a link here... So we can get a better view of your journey

Click to expand...

Damn! I clearly have to purchase 5 tiers of GSA links to the thread.

I don't mind posting about my income for topics I'm talking about. The difference there is my market isn't blatantly obvious so while I might be talking about POD or affiliate marketing with PPC someone can't just come along and copy my exact model. This one is a bit different.

I won't be adding the BST links here since that might border on promotion and you guys will screw with my analytics enough.

I only have two projects at the moment which involve talking to customers and I somehow managed to launch them both on the same day. Not my best of plans.

We had $123.20 in sales yesterday. I think it probably would have been better if I'd had more stock in place but since it costs like $130 to run that thread for a year I think it's safe to say BHW undercharges for their marketplace.

So the learning points the first day running a BST:

• RIP my inbox. I expected people to post in the thread asking for the coupon but hadn't predicted people sending a PM. Not opposed to this but I'm going to need to work out a way to manage this better.
• There's a rule about posting in your thread too much. Maybe it's because I just haven't had my coffee but I'm not overly clear on how quickly I can respond to questions there.
• The coupon requests are a mixed bag. Most of the people requesting probably won't actually use them. Automating the PM will break the forum TOS so it's a mix between not having people bump it or not having to constantly PM. I think the next BST I'll try without the whole coupon thing and see how it compares.
• Selly might not be the best choice for this. Their delivery seems to only go out by email and wind up either delayed or in junk boxes. I'll have to set up a woocommerce or something.

Overall the BST start was good. It could have been better if I was more prepared but that's life.

I've made some improvements last night to the workflow which means more stock in less time focus at the moment is going to be keeping the stock coming and seeing how it continues to perform.

I was going to buy it to support the site. didn't think about monetizing my sig

At this rate, it's looking like BHW undercharges for their marketplace and the support from the forum staff has been fantastic. $130 for a year is a steal. We're officially in the green now with 350~ days to go. I'll be switching to weekly income reports rather than clogging up the journal section too much though.

Learning points so far:

• There seems to be a big culture of review copies but honestly, I don't really get it. If you're giving something decent then it's going to get good reviews and those reviews will come from people interested enough in your niche/product to buy it - so their review will be worth a damn. I'm not saying this to knock on anyone who asks for review copies but I don't think I plan to offer them. Don't see the need.
• I was sweating not replying to coupon requests within the hour because it would cost me sales or something. I would still prefer to automate this process to deliver them quickly (if it wasn't going to break the TOS) just to remove that pain point but I'm not going to sweat it. Once or twice a day is probably fine and the majority you send out doesn't actually equate to sales anyway. About 60% of the sales have used a coupon though and it bumps the thread so it's worth doing.
• Selly kind of sucks. I used it because I wanted a quick setup and wasn't sure if I'd make a sale. It doesn't have a lot of features I'd like so I'll be swapping to something else reasonably soon.
• It might be a good idea to type up at least a basic guide or something if your product/service isn't already a guide.
• BTB kindly clarified the forum rules. You're allowed to reply to questions daily but can't post promotional stuff more than every 72 hours. Makes sense.

It took a chunk of work yesterday but I've whittled the workflow right down so it's a lot less work to create stock now. There's not really much else to do with this now other than keep it stocked and see how consistent sales are.

Deciding against running banners for the first BST since it's limited stock and there's no lead gen it probably won't be a good ROI. I think we'll have to try something different with no stock issue and run a banner for that.

sickminds said:

I was going to buy it to support the site. didn't think about monetizing my sig

Click to expand...

No harm in doing both. You can rent out your sig to other people if you don't want to offer something yourself.

Do you know what could be a BST? A service that sends coupon codes for BSTs. You'd probably trigger some PM spam warning within 10 minutes though.

I've got a product-based BST up and a couple of ideas for service-based ones based on stuff I do for myself anyway but I wanted to try my hand at something a little more scalable for the second one. There doesn't seem to be many info based products around but there are a couple of niches I know intimately and they're next to impossible to saturate. I'm writing up a full guide with everything I know and plan to put a low price tag on it because it'll build a list of IM buyers for services down the road.

I'll have to dig around the marketplace for other products to see what kind of copy it takes to sell an eBook here. I don't really want to bother with a big fancy image but it'll probably take more than "Buy guide. Make money."

Hopefully, I'll get the second BST up in a week or two and we'll see how it does vs the first stocked product one.

Continued learnings points:

• Selly is a pain in the ass. Had another service suggested it's $50/month but just looks far, far better. I'll be moving over within the next week I think.
• You get a lot of requests for discounts really regardless of what your pricing is. I've probably fallen behind on even replying to half of them now. Can't fault them for trying but it's not a priority to keep up with.