We just wrapped up the eighth month of the Nutrition Secrets’ $100,000 challenge. Not only did we start generating revenue (kind of), but we also generated good traffic numbers because of the continual increase of our search traffic.
Traffic went up to 58,260 visitors, which is a nice increase from the 42,822 visitors in the previous month. That’s pretty good, considering that content production has slowed down. Mike currently blogs only two to three times a week instead of seven.
The main reason for this is to give him the chance to focus on promoting our fish oil supplement, which I’ll get into in a bit.
But first, let’s go over our traffic numbers.
November traffic stats
As I mentioned above, the traffic grew to 58,260 visitors. Of those visitors, 36,288 came from search engines (mainly Google).
Over time, that number should keep rising as the content continues to rank higher and we build more links. We have built a few EDU links and GOV links by just doing backlink checks on our competitors using Ahrefs and then begging those people to link to our site.
The model works, and over time, our search traffic should continually rise.
Overall, I am happy with our search traffic and growth, given the fact that Mike isn’t very creative when coming up with headlines. That really is the key to growing both your social and search traffic.
Just look at Quick Sprout. The reason it does so well is because I’m able to come up with headlines that hit hard. For example, when I blog on Quick Sprout or NeilPatel.com, I run a headline through an analyzer that estimates how well a headline will do…
One day, we’ll be releasing this free of charge to all the people who sign up to the Quick Sprout tool. But Mike didn’t have it, so it’s a bit harder for him to create headlines that do well.
Nonetheless, the numbers are good, and they keep rising (most months).
Revenue
We started selling fish oil supplements on Amazon like I discussed in my previous update.
As you can see from the screenshot above, we are starting to get more reviews and feedback from people. We collected most of the reviews by going to Amazon’s top reviewers and offering them the product at a discounted rate (break even) or free. When you do that, the reviewers will then place an honest review, which will help skyrocket your positioning on Amazon.
When you hit up the top reviewers, you’ll find that most will ignore you unless you give them the product for free. Our supplier provided a small batch that we were able to give away, but we can’t do that in quantity, or else we will lose money.
When you offer a discount, you’ll find that not as many top reviewers will accept your offer. So, you’ll have to go down the list and avoid hitting up anyone in the top 100. The lower you go on the list, the more likely you are to get people to accept your product at a discounted price.
When doing this, you’ll quickly learn that giving away your product or offering it at a discount doesn’t guarantee a review. But it’s a numbers game.
As you can see from the screenshot above, there is revenue, but the numbers are deceiving. Most of the sales are for the product at a discounted price, so you can’t really count that as “revenue.” Or at least I’m not counting that as revenue.
It’s a bit difficult to figure out whether a sale was at a full price, discounted, or a giveaway as Amazon’s backend is a bit archaic.
Over the next month or two, the number of discounted or free bottles will decrease as the product gets more popular and generates more organic sales.
Roadblock
Even though the product is doing well, we’ve encountered a few negative reviews.
Although we have a good deal with the company supplying us the fish oil, we need to make sure quality control is high. The current labels are arriving to customers a bit smeared, which has been hurting our reviews.
The design of the label isn’t very appealing either, which makes our product hard to stand out. Over the next month, I will be working on fixing this with the supplier.
Email list
The email list is continually growing, and we started to market the product to a small portion of the list. We are offering our fish oil to these subscribers at a reduced cost. So far, 61 people from the Nutrition Secrets blog redeemed the coupon for a discounted product.
This should help generate reviews, and in the long run, it should help boost the revenue numbers.
Fine-tuning
The other thing that will be adjusted as we generate more traction is our listing on Amazon. Making the headline more descriptive and answering more objections in the copy of the listing should help generate more sales.
One simple thing that we will be implementing over the next 30 days is answering general questions in the listing. For example, we will answer questions such as “Is the fish from Japan?” or “How is the oil being filtered?”
Answering these questions, as well as others, will help put our customers’ minds at ease and help increase sales.
Think of it as copywriting. If you can persuade people through text, which most people don’t do on Amazon, you should be able to increase your sales.
Conclusion
I’m happy with the progress so far. As we fine-tune the Amazon listing, we will be aggressively using the email list to generate more sales.
In addition to that, you’ll start seeing ads for the fish oil all over the blog. As the blog traffic grows, it should be easier to generate more and more sales.
Once the revenue starts kicking in, we will have more cash to spend on ads to grow the sales faster as we currently have a bit more than 40% margins.
How do you think the project is going so far?
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