10/22/2018
Hey guys! I want to share this post to the 2-3 groups that have the most valuable content & admins in the community right now. To that end, I want to thank Nick Peroni for his contributions to the community, and add my own.
That being said, here is a screenshot of one of my stores where I broke the 7-figure barrier early this month. 💵💵💵💵💵💵💵
🏋️♂ I want you guys to be motivated, inspired, feel that you can do this. Why? Because I could. And it was done analytically and by following a system, or blueprint, that was guaranteed to lead me to these numbers - NOT just by testing random products on Facebook ads.
🎲 There is already enough "randomness" or "luck factor" involved in any business, including E-Commerce. You increase your chances of success by reducing random variables as much as possible. The more experience you have, the more random variables you can eliminate, and the more you increase your odds of success. 💹
And success is determined by so much more than finding a "winning product" and targeting the right audience. That said, selling a great product to the right audience is definitely a very integral part of success, but you cannot succeed with this alone. It's like putting an AMG engine in a Lada. You will be the fastest to die perhaps... but that's usually not the goal. 🤷♂️
So, with post length in mind, let me attempt to share with you the most important steps I took in this 7-Figure journey, with some crucial tips that I believe will make a difference in your own journey to success. 🧙♂
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1️⃣ The first step I took was thinking of an audience that I could sell to. Not what products. Not what niche. But what audience.
This needed to be an audience with purchasing power, large enough to allow me to scale winning products and campaigns, and one where the competition was either limited, non-existent, or where there would be plenty room for another competitor. This had to be an audience that I was either a part of, or one that I could understand well enough to give them the experience that will make them purchase.
Once you know who you are going to sell to, figuring out what to sell and how becomes much easier.
2️⃣ After researching different ideas, I settled on an audience that is large, has great purchasing power, but where activity is focused on very few websites. An important factor here is whether you can provide an experience that is DIFFERENT, or BETTER than the current competition. Can you give better prices? Can you give products that are not being sold to this audience elsewhere? Can you give them a better experience? Many websites in 2018 are still ugly, and yet have huge traffic. Why? Because they fill a need. Can you fill a need? Even if you are selling mostly the same products - if you provide a better experience or sell something that they need that no other store provides, you have a good chance of succeeding.
💊TIP: The larger your audience, the higher you can scale. Your audience will eventually grow tired of creatives, products, and offers, and you will eventually have to launch new ads to keep getting sales and engaging your audience. The bigger your audience, the longer and harder you can run.
3️⃣ I researched this audience, the competition, the blogs, the magazines, and everything else that could help me to start my first campaigns a few steps ahead. When you know what products are selling to what demographic, and what triggers are being used to great success, you skip a lot of the TESTING that would take money and time (and luck) to optimize.
4️⃣ Once I had built my store to fit the audience, it was time to start sourcing and testing products that they would want. See - once you know who your buying audience is, a lot of the guesswork of "testing potential winners" is removed. You still have to test, don't get me wrong. But now, any data you receive from your campaigns can be used to better sell the next product you test. Any view contents, adds to cart, or purchases can be retargeted with your NEXT potential winners. Here, data is used to optimize. If you test different products BEFORE choosing your audience, any data you receive is most likely going straight to the trash. This is a business - make sure every cent you spend will give you some form of return, whether directly, or indirectly.
💊TIP: If sourcing your products from Ali Express, make sure to choose a seller that uses e-packet or USPS (sometimes they have stock in a U.S. warehouse). Anything slower than 12-20 days is a sure fire way to get increased complaints and chargebacks that make the dropshipping model untenable. Try to source products from the U.S. - there are plenty great products on Etsy and you can find suppliers and wholesellers for almost all products... The harder you look, the more gold you will discover.
💊TIP: Make sure to test your seller first! If they are Chinese, get them onto WeChat (the Chinese Whatsapp - download it from the app store), test their responsiveness and ask all the right questions regarding potential scale. It will get them excited to work with you (mostly) and you will be able to w**d out the good sellers from the bad. Make sure to test all potential sellers you will work with though, not just the ones on Ali Express.
5️⃣ Understanding potential winners. I could give you formulas here, but it would be too long to explain them. BASICALLY: if you are making easy sales with huge ROAS, you know you have something that can potentially be scaled. If I'm making money with a campaign, I will always keep it running - not only is it bringing in volume (which helps with your cash flow - I'll explain further down) but it's giving you data which will help you optimize! (Pixel, LAA, and all that jazz)
💊TIP: Once you have a product that is selling more than 500 per month and you still have room to comfortably scale (and your audience is nowhere close to being exhausted), start moving that product to a fulfillment warehouse!!! This will cut costs enough to mitigate a rise in ad costs (which is normal when scaling), and will reduce disputes and chargebacks which is the most important factor! Faster, more reliable shipping is a big plus in your customers' eyes.
6️⃣ SCALING - First of all, a very important tip from me to you: make sure to order a product that you will scale aggressively BEFORE you start scaling!!! Failure to heed this advice will open you up to a potential destruction of your business, where the product may be sub-par, the seller may be unreliable, and you may get tons of chargebacks (details lower down in the post) and angry comments flooding your social profiles.
If your product is good enough (doesn't have to be Apple quality, but shouldn't be a health hazard or something that breaks after an hour), you should create a video showcasing the product - either do it yourself or get someone on Fiverr to do it for you.
💊TIP: Make sure to target Instagram as well as Facebook! There are currently 300 MILLION daily users on instagram stories. Depending on your demographics, this could be a gold mine!
💊TIP: Here is one of my own scaling formulas that I use to scale FB and IG ads... I guess I should give it a name now, before other people claim it as their own... Let's call it "Ladder Scaling". 😅
🌵"LADDER SCALING" by Nathan Eitelberg🌵
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A classic way to warm up the pixel is to drive traffic with CTW first. I do it by doing WC Purchase. I’m not looking for those small sales. I’m looking for the products that convert most easily. The warmup phase will cost money whether you are doing CTW -> VC -> ATC -> Purchase, or straight up Purchase. The algorithm is better nowadays at finding those purchasers anyhow, so I spend the initial money going straight for the jugular.
That being said, you need 50 events per conversion window to optimize and get better results, so keep that in mind.
I start with $20 budgets (WC Purchase) and scale by duplicating the ad set and increasing budget by 100% or more.
If this works well after 24-48 hours, I will close the smaller ad set and duplicate the bigger ad set again. I will keep doing this until performance drops significantly. If that happens, I've hit the ceiling, and I will close the latest duplicated ad set and remain with the previous, increasing the budget by 20%-40% every 24-48 hours, depending on the metrics.
So for example. if I have a $20 ad set killing it, and I duplicate to $100 ad set -> if the $100 ad set performs well with the $20, I close the $20 and then scale to $250.
If $250 performs well to scale, I close $100 and dupe to $500. If $500 doesn’t work so well, I close and start increasing budget on $250 till I reach the sweet spot. Basically when I hit the ceiling, I try max out the working ad set slowly to not screw everything up. This is how I search for the "ceiling" with this scaling strategy.
As soon as I have 300 Purchases of product/category/store, I will start testing Lookalikes. It may take more purchases for the LAA to work, but I start trying at 300 anyways.
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💊TIP: Price your products to make money! Take into account ad spend, fulfillment cost, fixed costs, ALL money processing fees (not just the % charged on the purchase), taxes, increased ad costs (very important for scaling), and even potential returns. You don't want to scale a product that is making you a thin margin. You never know what could happen with so many factors not under your direct control, and you need a nice margin to fall back on if s**t hits the fan.
💊TIP: Take care of your finances BEFORE you start! I see too many people who finally start making sales, writing desperate posts because they cannot finance the scale. You need to figure out how much you can process on your card(s) per day, and use that to calculate how much fulfillment cost and ad spend you can afford. Open a business bank account and request as many debit cards with as high a limit as possible. Debit cards allow you to process a certain amount of money per day, while credit cards allow you a certain amount of money per month. Credit cards may help with temporary cash flow issues, but debit cards are going to be your bread and butter when it comes to spending money daily.
💊💊ADVICE: Make sure to avoid chargebacks like the plague!! Even if it means refunding the freaks that threaten to burn your business down because they didn't get the product within 24 hours. There is being right - and there is being in business. The customer is always correct not because he or she is, but because your business depends on it. Make sure to keep your chargeback ratio as far under 1% as possible. You can do this by having a good support team, using fulfillment centers when scaling, having a good connection with your sellers, and basically not dropshipping crap. To continue on something else I wrote above, about getting sales volume - the more sales you get when starting out, the better, as it gives your payment processor something to fall back on when assessing your account when you start scaling.
小 猫, [19.05.18 15:41]
Hey guys! I want to share this post to the 2-3 groups that have the most valuable content & admins in the community right now. To that end, I want to thank Nick Peroni for his contributions to the community, and add my own.
That being said, here is a screenshot of one of my stores where I broke the 7-figure barrier early this month. 💵💵💵💵💵💵💵
🏋️♂ I want you guys to be motivated, inspired, feel that you can do this. Why? Because I could. And it was done analytically and by following a system, or blueprint, that was guaranteed to lead me to these numbers - NOT just by testing random products on Facebook ads.
🎲 There is already enough "randomness" or "luck factor" involved in any business, including E-Commerce. You increase your chances of success by reducing random variables as much as possible. The more experience you have, the more random variables you can eliminate, and the more you increase your odds of success. 💹
And success is determined by so much more than finding a "winning product" and targeting the right audience. That said, selling a great product to the right audience is definitely a very integral part of success, but you cannot succeed with this alone. It's like putting an AMG engine in a Lada. You will be the fastest to die perhaps... but that's usually not the goal. 🤷♂️
So, with post length in mind, let me attempt to share with you the most important steps I took in this 7-Figure journey, with some crucial tips that I believe will make a difference in your own journey to success. 🧙♂
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------—
1️⃣ The first step I took was thinking of an audience that I could sell to. Not what products. Not what niche. But what audience.
This needed to be an audience with purchasing power, large enough to allow me to scale winning products and campaigns, and one where the competition was either limited, non-existent, or where there would be plenty room for another competitor. This had to be an audience that I was either a part of, or one that I could understand well enough to give them the experience that will make them purchase.
Once you know who you are going to sell to, figuring out what to sell and how becomes much easier.
2️⃣ After researching different ideas, I settled on an audience that is large, has great purchasing power, but where activity is focused on very few websites. An important factor here is whether you can provide an experience that is DIFFERENT, or BETTER than the current competition. Can you give better prices? Can you give products that are not being sold to this audience elsewhere? Can you give them a better experience? Many websites in 2018 are still ugly, and yet have huge traffic. Why? Because they fill a need. Can you fill a need? Even if you are selling mostly the same products - if you provide a better experience or sell something that they need that no other store provides, you have a good chance of succeeding.
💊TIP: The larger your audience, the higher you can scale. Your audience will eventually grow tired of creatives, products, and offers, and you will eventually have to launch new ads to keep getting sales and engaging your audience. The bigger your audience, the longer and harder you can run.
3️⃣ I researched this audience, the competition, the blogs, the magazines, and everything else that could help me to start my first campaigns a few steps ahead. When you know what products are selling to what demographic, and what triggers are being used to great success, you skip a lot of the TESTING that would take money and time (and luck) to optimize.
小 猫, [19.05.18 15:41]
A classic way to warm up the pixel is to drive traffic with CTW first. I do it by doing WC Purchase. I’m not looking for those small sales. I’m looking for the products that convert most easily. The warmup phase will cost money whether you are doing CTW -> VC -> ATC -> Purchase, or straight up Purchase. The algorithm is better nowadays at finding those purchasers anyhow, so I spend the initial money going straight for the jugular.
That being said, you need 50 events per conversion window to optimize and get better results, so keep that in mind.
I start with $20 budgets (WC Purchase) and scale by duplicating the ad set and increasing budget by 100% or more.
If this works well after 24-48 hours, I will close the smaller ad set and duplicate the bigger ad set again. I will keep doing this until performance drops significantly. If that happens, I've hit the ceiling, and I will close the latest duplicated ad set and remain with the previous, increasing the budget by 20%-40% every 24-48 hours, depending on the metrics.
So for example. if I have a $20 ad set killing it, and I duplicate to $100 ad set -> if the $100 ad set performs well with the $20, I close the $20 and then scale to $250.
If $250 performs well to scale, I close $100 and dupe to $500. If $500 doesn’t work so well, I close and start increasing budget on $250 till I reach the sweet spot. Basically when I hit the ceiling, I try max out the working ad set slowly to not screw everything up. This is how I search for the "ceiling" with this scaling strategy.
As soon as I have 300 Purchases of product/category/store, I will start testing Lookalikes. It may take more purchases for the LAA to work, but I start trying at 300 anyways.
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------
💊TIP: Price your products to make money! Take into account ad spend, fulfillment cost, fixed costs, ALL money processing fees (not just the % charged on the purchase), taxes, increased ad costs (very important for scaling), and even potential returns. You don't want to scale a product that is making you a thin margin. You never know what could happen with so many factors not under your direct control, and you need a nice margin to fall back on if s**t hits the fan.
💊TIP: Take care of your finances BEFORE you start! I see too many people who finally start making sales, writing desperate posts because they cannot finance the scale. You need to figure out how much you can process on your card(s) per day, and use that to calculate how much fulfillment cost and ad spend you can afford. Open a business bank account and request as many debit cards with as high a limit as possible. Debit cards allow you to process a certain amount of money per day, while credit cards allow you a certain amount of money per month. Credit cards may help with temporary cash flow issues, but debit cards are going to be your bread and butter when it comes to spending money daily.
💊💊ADVICE: Make sure to avoid chargebacks like the plague!! Even if it means refunding the freaks that threaten to burn your business down because they didn't get the product within 24 hours. There is being right - and there is being in business. The customer is always correct not because he or she is, but because your business depends on it. Make sure to keep your chargeback ratio as far under 1% as possible. You can do this by having a good support team, using fulfillment centers when scaling, having a good connection with your sellers, and basically not dropshipping crap. To continue on something else I wrote above, about getting sales volume - the more sales you get when starting out, the better, as it gives your payment processor something to fall back on when assessing your account when you start scaling.
小 猫, [19.05.18 15:41]
💊TIP: Hiring a workforce - do you think you can make 6 figures on your own? 7? 5? Hell, if you want to make your business grow, you will need help. Whether it's starting off with a designer (upwork, freelancehunt, fiverr), or hiring a team of VA's to help you with support, product copy (onlinejobs.ph) or any other tasks, you will need help. Don't try to do everything yourself. Not only is it impossible, but you will end up doing much LESS than you could if you had help. Hiring VAs online is not expensive if you are making sales, and it can be scaled with your store. Use Time Doctor to monitor them, and pay them with Paypal, or bank wire after they provide you an invoice that you can take to your accountant as a business expense.
7️⃣ Don't only use Facebook + Instagram! While they may be the best places to get traffic for many products, they are not the only places! You can get amazing traffic from Google Shopping ads and Google Search ads! If you do your audience research and competitor analysis right, you know more or less what keywords are relevant for your audience and for the products you may sell. It's all about understanding the mindset of the people who may be searching for products relevant to them. This is another part of understanding your audience and their psychology. Know that Google searches bring you buyer intending traffic, while Facebook and Instagram ads bring you more of the impulse buying traffic. Understand this difference and target each accordingly.
*Use SEMRush, MOZ, and Similarweb to do keyword analysis on your competitors.
💊TIP: Placing high in organic search or in paid search are key to getting a good CTR! My best search campaign gave me a click through rate of 26%!!! This enabled me to make a pretty penny on this campaign. In order to target keywords that are buying intended (long tail usually) and not overly expensive, you will usually target keywords with low to medium search volume. Increasing your position will increase your CTR significantly which will bring you many more sales!
8️⃣ Creating a brand - or at least the illusion that you are a brand. In this world that is saturated with advertising everywhere you go, take a moment to really look around you - at a mall, center of town, bus stop, etc - ads everywhere!!! People are accustomed to this. If they see you as a brand, they are more likely to trust you and feel that their cart is worth the checkout. If they never heard of you, and they don't see any indications that you are a brand, you will have a tougher time getting sales even if your ads are performing well and your CTRs are through the roof.
💊TIP: Add content to your social media pages. Many people will go to your page to see whats up. Add content to a blog on your store. Retarget people on different placements. Set up proper email flows with design that matches your store. Have a phone number and address prominent on your header or footer of your store. Give people incentive to leave reviews or share promotions that you may run. Be creative! Have fun with it. Try to give your audience a reason to be a part of your business other than that "potential winning product". If people see that others are active, especially if they are people from the same audience, it increases motivation to buy.
9️⃣ Incorporate upsells and cross-sells that MAKE SENSE to increase your AOV once you start getting regular daily sales. Don't do this before you make sales as it's like having someone hold you a parking spot when you are still an hour away from the location. But, once you have a product that is selling, try to increase your average order value - this is a big part of scaling your store! Start with a low ticket item that makes sense. Try to play with the price if you are getting really good CTRs and conversion rates. Be creative. And most importantly, make sure you give the same amount of attention to increasing AOV that you do to launching ads for products that could be potential winners. Testing is key here, but doing it with your audience in mind will get you success much faster.
