[SEO + eCommerce] Wholesale / Distribution Model [GOAL: $500k/month]

My previous journey goal was to hit $100 / day. I was able to hit that goal a month or two ago and have consistently hit it everyday. (You can read it here). I was going to continue to update that thread but things have changed and this isn't the same exact type of journey. I'm going to incorporate SEO, do a local take over, and build a national eCommerce store at the same time.

What I have In Place:

• Partnership with a 3PL - They'll handle receiving and shipping for me
• Wholesale and import contacts - Life force of the business model
• Inside advantage for new target industry - This industry needs licenses to operate in and I have one
• Offsite location - Smaller shipments get received and prepped here and then sent out
• Amazon Pro Seller account - This is where I'll be selling my products

What's Done So Far:

• Website built
• Links built
• Content ordered
• Citations ordered
• Social accounts ordered

Now this may be an SEO focused journey, but I spent most of my time is spent contacting new wholesalers / importers while maintaining relationships with current ones. A small portion of my time is looking to expand the team as well. Right now I have one VA that's looking for new products and soon I'd like to have another person that will verify everything and purchase for me. This means the updates for this journey is going to be a mixture of SEO stuff done, building relationships with contacts, and logistics.

SEO:
Despite building this website a few days ago, the links are indexing already, and rankings have already started to appear. I set up a call tracker on the website because I will be sending the leads to a business partner of mine. She'll be the one who will handle these leads and turn them into customers. I don't even have to worry about that part because she's been in the industry for 25+ years now and I know what she can do. She gave me the exact target market she wants, I picked the keywords, and we're already on track.

SEO Rankings:




Earnings So Far This Month:


Goals:

• $20k / month revenue @ 30%+ ROI
• $50k / month revenue @ 30%+ ROI
• $100k / month revenue @ 30%+ ROI
• $200k / month revenue @ 30%+ ROI
• $300k / month revenue @ 30%+ ROI
• $400k / month revenue @ 30%+ ROI
• $500k / month revenue @ 30%+ ROI

Keeping the first goal easy just to warm up. The revenue won't be the hard part of this business, it would be the ROI. From what I'm reading elsewhere, people hover around 5 - 20% ROI depending on their wholesale model. I'm not trying to be categorized with those guys.. this is why I'm setting a harder ROI goal than 9/10 people.

Until the next update.

I wish you good luck with your journey.

Looks like a very promising journey thread.

Good luck, I'll definitely be following this!

WowLancer said:

I wish you good luck with your journey.

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BBulldog said:

Looks like a very promising journey thread.

Good luck, I'll definitely be following this!

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Thanks you two. Hope you follow along until the end!

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Random Update
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I forgot to include some data from my Google My Business (GMB). The GMB is already appearing on maps, getting searches, clicks, and generating calls. This is a good sign and is telling me my set up is working. Going to be interesting to see what kind of "pop" I'm going to see when all these initial SEO work is done.




Man.. I'm getting excited seeing all this, but can't stray from my goal. Got to keep taking action and getting things done.

You did an excellent job in your first thread, 100% watching this. Solid plan, can't wait to see what happens in the future.

Dankedydank said:

You did an excellent job in your first thread, 100% watching this. Solid plan, can't wait to see what happens in the future.

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German Rodriguez said:

good luck, interesting journey

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DarkHowl said:

Very decent journey, good luck op.

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Doctor Sleep said:

Definitely worth to follow..
Good luck

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Djigit said:

Good luck!

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Thanks everyone! Hope you guys all enjoy the journey until the end.

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Random Update

Here's yesterday earnings:


Right now, I'm fluctuating around this amount every day. I'd say this would be an average day right now for me. Looking to break into the $1k daily revenue very soon. With my current catalog, I think this can be done by adding in one good wholesale product. Which I'm in the worked of talking with the brand right now. I actually think I can get into the $2k revenue days @ 30% ROI with that account.


There's a shipment that I'm having someone drop off at the distribution centre later this afternoon. That shipment is mostly filled with test units that I'm interested in opening future wholesale accounts with, but it depends on how they perform on this test. These items are more fast moving items but lower profit per unit sold. Still all good ROI's though, but I need to feed in some fast sellers into the catalog too.

Good luck, following your journey since the previous one!

Nice If you don't mind me asking, can you show us a way to find suppliers? If you kind see this a private matter, please PM me if you like so. Thank you

Haych2000 said:

Good luck, following your journey since the previous one!

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Thanks for following me since the beginning!

lomas007 said:

Nice If you don't mind me asking, can you show us a way to find suppliers? If you kind see this a private matter, please PM me if you like so. Thank you

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Wholesalers can be found anywhere. If you're familiar with Google Search Queries, you can do searches like: candy intext:"wholesale" then look for footprints and now you can a new Search operator like: candy intext:"view prices"

There's also business directories (citations), real business do create these, not just SEO's. You can lookup distributors there for a niche as well and you'll get tons of contact information.

Go to stores and see if you can find distribution stickers on the products.

There are endless options - Think about where and who wholesalers / distributors sell to, and how they find them. Working backwards is a great way to find them.

wow impressive result you have done a great job, will following you

Goodluck op

adultguru said:

wow impressive result you have done a great job, will following you

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DarkHowl said:

Goodluck op

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Thanks guys. Hope you two enjoy my journey.

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Update

Yesterday's Earnings
Earnings were great yesterday. I like to adjust my Sponsor ads on Amazon every Saturday and it looks like the new adjustments on one product is really taking off now. I'm going to have to forecast the inventory again at the end of the month because I'm going to have to reserve cases of the unit months in advance. This is because importing right now is taking twice as long (2 months).

I asked my current VA if she would like additional responsibilities on top of her current task (with pay increase of course) and she said yes. She's now going to handle sourcing and purchasing for me now. This week will also have to include creating a SOP for purchasing. One less task that I have to do now and more focus on growing the business.

SEO Update
It looks like more links are getting indexed and I got another boost in rankings. The other keywords are starting to appear now and there's only 5 out 25 keywords that haven't started ranking yet.

I'm still waiting on citations and my social account. I'm thinking they should be delivered mid-week or towards the end of the week. I'm going to be needing both my citations and social accounts for the next step for SEO.

Random Update

I was in the market for a new 3PL because of some issues I'm having with the current one. I found a new one in my area, which is super important for me because I like to sometimes hire people to pick up from importers / wholesalers and get them to drop off at my off site. With a local one, I can drop off directly at the 3PL. This saves me money on shipping and time on prep work.

Now, I screened them and they seem legit and more eager than my current 3PL. Going to send them a test batch of a complicated item to see how they do.

I didn't get a response yet from a brand owner, but I have a retail contact who sells their items. I got a bulk discount by talking to him and now it's cheaper than other retail places. Not the best, but the profit margin works out in my favour. He will also source and find the item for me (currently a shortage) and let me know when he's secured it. Works for me, this guy really wants his end of year bonus with his company haha.

UPDATE

Wholesale Update
The shipment I sent out on Monday was delivered and received yesterday. The items that were unloaded already starting getting sales same day and one item sold multiple times. Great to see, as these were item I was interested in opening wholesale accounts for. For the one item that sold multiple times, I reached out to 2 companies. One is a distributor and the other is the main supplier for the country.

The main supplier process was creating an account and wait for their admin to verify the account. Not sure what's going to happen there, but I'm going to call them if I don't hear anything by the end of day today.

The distributor had a contact form and I emailed them earlier this morning. They got back to me with an application form and I filled it out and sent it back to them. Going to wait to hear back from them now and planning on following up tomorrow anyways.

Yesterdays Earnings


SEO Update
Citations and social accounts were created. The citations look great, the content was manually spun so it's all unique and reads well enough. Going to set up the rest of the foundation today and start planning out the next steps.

The next steps going to take place in October and I'll be planning out the content properly now. Right now the ranking pages have less than 100 words as I'm not a fan of writing. Once I create the outline, I'll be sending it over to my writer, and optimize it when he sends it back to me.

Will have to play with my Schema as well to make sure that everything is set up correctly.

Rankings

Update
Wholesale Update
I was able to open a new account for the test items and more! The test items are great and I'm happy to have a source for that, but their catalog is the real prize. Once my account manager sends that over, I'm going to have my VA go through it and see what products are worth selling.

On top of that, I was able to open an account with a new 3PL provider. These guys are more strict and had a minimum requirement to joining. I needed to send them x amount of units a month to keep my account open. I didn't have those amounts at the time but I had no doubt I would figure it out. Now with the new account, I can easily hit their requirement.

This is just one account, I have to open more to really hit my goal of $500k / month. I'm estimating that this new account should bring me into a steady $15 - $20k a month, with the test items that passed. Could be higher depending on how well the rest of their catalog does.

SEO Update
So the links are indexing and I'm waiting for the law few citations to be approved. I've set up my socials in IFTTT so that everything syncs together. Going to be creating the last few citations needed to complete it this weekend and then focusing on the content side of things.

Rankings are looking good, I think I'll be hitting the first page by next week or soon. The keyword graph from SEMRush is starting to appear and more keywords are appearing now and Search Console is showing lots of impressions. The only missing is traffic and means the SEO side isn't successful yet. Not until traffic is being generated.

Search Console

SEMRush

Rankings

so are you still selling these products on amazon still or are you switching over to actually distributing and being a wholesaler? I am just confused about why you started the website.. Thanks and will be following!

patrickrarr said:

so are you still selling these products on amazon still or are you switching over to actually distributing and being a wholesaler? I am just confused about why you started the website.. Thanks and will be following!

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I'm still selling these products on Amazon because the market and traffic is too important to let up on. That's easily going to be my main cash cow to fund this entire operation. The reason I created this website was because I wanted generate leads for service providers, set up banner ads for people that aren't direct competitors, have an eCommerce side for the back end logistics, and appear more legit so that I can secure bigger deals easily.

Thanks for following!

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Update

Wholesale
It was getting busy towards the end of the month, but after I opened the account with the wholesaler and with the new 3PL, I got started on organizing everything. Sometimes being the middleman is easy and sometimes it's a bit tricky. This was one of those tricky times because I wasn't familiar with either ones processes. After a few days of back and forth between everyone, I did get it all out the door and to the 3PL warehouse. They should be packing it now and shipping it out by next week.

With one of my other suppliers, I placed a massive order for $12,000 worth of a product. They're going to import it in for me and should arrive in 45~ days. The return on this product will be $24,960~ and ends up being $12,960 profit / 108% ROI. Yeah, that's not a typo.

The next step is to find and secure a new loan of money. I want to get in bed with some bigger suppliers out there, but they have a larger minimum spend. I'm going to try to get a $500k~ loan, but I'm only needing maybe $300k right now - just need some room for error.

Last Months Earnings:


SEO
Rankings popped, leads are being generated, and traffic is going to Amazon now as well. This is all fantastic to witness as it's only going to get better. I have a specific service I want to build a page, with the goal of selling leads to someone else. These are just super easy wins and probably one of the easiest ways to earn good money in SEO in the first month.

Current Rankings


Keyword Graph

Analytics

Google My Business

Conclusion
All in all, September was an excellent month and I'm excited to get through October as there's so much opportunity out there. Hope you guys are taking action out there too!

Damn..this is real nice. I run an amazon fba private label product business too at about 50k/month mark and now I'm starting to build outside of it through shopify ecom platform. Would love to pick your brains on some ideas? For instance from all content and back links 2 of my products with combined search volumes of 12000 per months are on page 2 and page 5. Some clearly defined strategy to move them to page 1. Things like this.

Happy to share my journey if it helps.

rufflewaters said:

Damn..this is real nice. I run an amazon fba private label product business too at about 50k/month mark and now I'm starting to build outside of it through shopify ecom platform. Would love to pick your brains on some ideas? For instance from all content and back links 2 of my products with combined search volumes of 12000 per months are on page 2 and page 5. Some clearly defined strategy to move them to page 1. Things like this.

Happy to share my journey if it helps.

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Nice to hear, PL has some attractive margins. It's sounds like you got past the product launch part and have an excellent product.

I generally recommend a content piece that is high commercial intent based, something like "Best X for Y" or "Top X Reasons for Y" and link internally to the product page(s). But hard to say right now without knowing your website structure, current ranking page(s), and backlink profile.

Let me know if you want to discuss further in more detail.

onlinemagic said:

You've over complicated it. I'm not white labelling or doing anything like that.
This is what I do:

• I buy a Macbook Pro for $800
• I list the Macbook Pro on Amazon for $1200
• Customer buys the Macbook Pro and receives a Macbook Pro

I don't change the branding or anything. I sell it as what it is.
PS: Apple products are restricted on Amazon, so sorry to anyone who wanted to sell fakes / used there after reading this.

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I copied this from you first journey thread my friend. I want to ask this from above example. Now this wholesale journey means, you are buying 100 macbook pro first and list those in amazon. am I right? I mean buying those 100 macbooks at once you're getting discount also. That 3PL (Third-party logistics - as I found on google) means they doing that above buying and distribution for you now. You are not handling that part. right? Only thing you're doing is listing the product on amazon pro seller account and also on your website.

I'm trying to understand what you're doing here, because I'm totally newbie for this. This is the idea currently on my mind about your journey. correct me if anything wrong.