The $100,000 Challenge: October Update

The seventh month of the $100,000 challenge has wrapped up. In October, overall traffic on Nutrition Secrets was 42,822 visitors, down from 66,743 in the previous month.

The traffic drop was mainly due to social media. The blog posts didn’t do very well on Facebook in October compared to September. But the overall search traffic is continually rising. For example, October’s search traffic of 25,086 surpassed September’s number of 19,595.

The interesting aspect of October’s activities is that we finally started to monetize our product in hopes to bring in revenue.

Here’s how things are looking…

Traffic

As you already know, social media traffic is a bit unpredictable compared to search traffic. Although traffic from Facebook is down overall, the number of search engine visitors keeps increasing month over month.

Why?

Because Mike adds content each day. As long as he blogs once a day, there is more content, which increases our likelihood of being found in the search results.

The issue with the content he is writing is that a lot of it is basic. For example, he is writing posts such as “The health benefits of bananas.” Well, everyone already knows bananas are good for you, so posts like that (which are the majority) aren’t generating much traffic.

On the flip side, posts like “What happens to your body when you quit eating sugar” are unique, and those are the ones that are generating the majority of the search and social traffic.

I’ve been trying to teach Mike to blog only on unique topics instead of those that are beaten to death, but he is still struggling with it. Over time, he should get better at it, and I am sure our results a year from now will be great.

Monetization

We finally started to make money with Nutrition Secrets. We are now selling fish oil on Amazon (I’m not linking to the product as I am trying to avoiding cheating: I don’t want Quick Sprout readers to buy the product to help reach the revenue goal).

The key to generating sales on Amazon is reviews. The more you get, the better off you are. We are only at three reviews, and we need over 1,000 to see a real impact.

The tricky part is you can’t pay for reviews as that breaks Amazon’s terms of service. Nor do we have the financial ability to pay for reviews as we are trying to do this whole project on a budget.

So, what we are doing is giving away the bottles at cost. Mike is handing out coupons to anyone who is interested in fish oil supplements. They get a good price, and we potentially get a review (you can’t force people to write a review).

We were also given 28 bottles free when we did the white-labeling deal—selling someone else’s product under our label. So, Mike is also giving away 28 coupons for a free bottle…but that won’t last long.

We don’t know what percentage of the people who purchase a bottle at cost will leave a review, but we will know more in the next 30 days or so.

Once we get to 500-1,000 reviews, Mike and I will sit down and focus on adjusting the pitch (copy) on the fish oil supplement page to make it more attractive. If you look at most Amazon product pages, they aren’t written to be persuasive. We think that is a good competitive edge for us, and it should help drive sales in the long run.

Here is our game plan for the Amazon fish oil product:

1. Analyze the competition to figure out what the ideal price point for this product should be. It’s currently too high.
2. Focus on acquiring more positive reviews while following Amazon’s terms of service.
3. Adjust the copy on the product page in order to maximize sales.
4. Once the product generates more sales, focus on creating a more attractive label design.

Conclusion

Over the next 30 days, you’ll see us maintaining the current content levels and handing out more coupons to generate more Amazon sales.

Now, every time we hand out a coupon, we don’t make any money as we are just breaking even…so, of course, we still have a long way to go to hit the $100,000 a month income goal.

After a few months of doing this and fine-tuning the Amazon product listing page, we should start seeing natural sales, which will help with the $100,000 monthly goal.

The goal by the end of November is to generate 30 reviews. By the end of December, we want to have 300 reviews. And by the end of January, we want to have 600 reviews for our product on our Amazon page. If we can hit those numbers, there should be enough traction for the product to generate close to $100,000 in monthly sales.

So, what do you think of the progress so far?

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