Showing posts with label The $100. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The $100. Show all posts

Friday, April 29, 2016

The $100,000 Challenge: March Update

march update

We finally finished the last month of the $100,000 challenge. March was an awesome month for Nutrition Secrets. Not only did the traffic grow to 218,811 visitors, but revenue did too—it went up to $121,492.65.

It wasn’t hard to hit the revenue goals as we had enough fish oil in stock, plus we started to generate money from affiliate sales.

So let’s dive right in…

Traffic

Compared to February, the traffic went up to 218,811 visitors and 269,814 pageviews. The increase was only 18,102, which isn’t much.

But considering that the popularity of nutrition and fitness sites is cyclical (January and February are most popular) and that Mike didn’t blog much on NutritionSecrets.com in March, it wasn’t too bad.

Overall, Mike has slowed down on the blogging front. Over the next few months, he wants to try a few fun content formats such as infographics and wants to see what happens if we were to dump a few hundred grand into the blog. It won’t be much of an experiment at that point, but we are just curious to see if we can get the blog to a million visitors a month.

traffic sources

Nonetheless, the traffic isn’t performing too badly. Even in April, the traffic has been on an upward trend while little to no effort has been put into the blog since the challenge has been over.

Revenue

The revenue is a bit more complicated to breakdown as it is coming from two sources now: Amazon and affiliates.

In March, revenue from Amazon hit $112,573.30.

amazon revenue

There are a few key elements to growing Amazon sales:

  1. Reviews – the more people you can get to leave a review, the better off you are. Most people don’t even read the reviews, but if they are high in ratings and you have tons in quantity, you are in good shape. If you have a blog that’s driving sales, a great way to get more reviews is through marketing automation. You can promote the product to your email list, and then after a few weeks of promoting your product to those people, you would send an automated email asking them to leave a review. You won’t really know who bought the product, but you would still put the review email—applicable to a portion of your list—in your sequence.
  2. Keywords – with Amazon, you can add keywords. Most people add basic ones like “fish oil,” but as you know, it is all about the long tail. Amazon opened it up so you can stuff hundreds of keywords now, and with the use of Google Keyword Planner, you can come up with popular variations. You’ll then start ranking for tons of keywords on Amazon.
  3. Combating negative Amazon reviews – similarly to what happens when people employ negative SEO, competitors sabotage your Amazon listing by taking up your front page with terrible reviews. They do this to tank your sales so they can generate more income. You fight this by building up your email list on your blog and continually blasting out to your list when you have bad reviews, asking your readers to up-vote the positive ones.
  4. Ads – Amazon allows ads on its platform. Whether it is profitable or not, ads help you generate more sales. And if you can increase your sales velocity, you’ll find that your listing climbs up higher and starts to stick—it stays up there even after your ads stop showing. Sure, other people can do the same thing, but most don’t.

As for affiliate income, we started to push stuff by the Truth About Abs guys. We started doing email blasts to our list in order to generate the sales, and it has been working out well. The copy isn’t too bad, but there are two reasons it’s working out well.

aweber

  1. We collect a lot more emails – we are generating 300 to 400 email sign-ups a day. It’s much larger than our previous numbers for one reason: we turned off double opt-in. Aweber usually requires double opt-in when you use third-party software to collect emails, but Mike called Aweber and got them to disable double opt-ins.
  2. Good copy – our copy converts well. You can see an example email below. And we have many more emails like this in the sequence. So, we continually send you affiliate offers over time, which helps.

Here is the email copy we have been testing:

Email – This plant food HARMS your metabolism & heart

Hi {!firstname_fix}

Sometimes it’s not the enemy you know that’s the problem, but the friend you think you know.

In this case, I’m talking about nutrition in foods. It’s common knowledge that stuff like sugary drinks are just plain bad for you. The best you can say is that your body can absorb the bad effects if you only have them occasionally.

But what about foods you thought weren’t bad, and you heard were actually good for you?

I have some bad news, and some good news. The bad: some so-called “healthy” foods may be the cause of why you work so hard to eat healthy and haven’t seen the results you expected. The good news: There’s a solution I read about from best selling author Mike Geary.  Read on… (removed affiliate link)

Email – 2 Simple steps to REMOVE visceral belly fat (the DEADLIEST type)

Hi {!firstname_fix}

People often refer to past times as “the good old days” with a nostalgic tone. At least when it comes to many nutritional and health practices, I think of them more like the “bad old days.”

For example, people thought the wonders of science had delivered new, healthy products called “trans fats” that were featured in margarine, to replace that nasty butter. We now know that trans fats are about the worst thing you can coat your innards with.

People also thought they could do “spot reducing” of unattractive belly fat by using those jiggling-belt machines, or some other gimmick.

Well, belly fat certainly is still unattractive, and research says it’s also a danger sign. But research has also identified more-effective ways of getting rid of that spare tire. Here’s how. (removed affiliate link)

Email – 7 “fatty” foods for a flat stomach

Hi {!firstname_fix}

I spend full time on nutrition- and health-related activities. That’s the business I’m in.

I’m also an improvement junkie, always looking for the latest, best information. So you can imagine that I’ve pretty much seen it all: Every product, every supplement, every type of exercise.

Most of them are underwhelming. Yawn.

I’m writing you today because I recently came across something that made me sit up and pay attention. It’s a short-term blueprint for eating the right foods to burn substantial fat, and it’s all explained here… (removed affiliate link)

You can find high converting offers on sites such as Clickbank. They even sort the offers by popularity. I need to get a screenshot of our Clickbank revenue and our other affiliate income sources from Mike as he created the accounts and has the logins. Once I do, I will update the post with a screenshot (we use three networks).

The total affiliate revenue was $8,919.35.

Profit

As for monthly profit, it was high…but for a different reason than you might think. When you sell tangible products, you buy tons of inventory and then sell it over the following few months. We didn’t want to be out for our last month, so we spent a good chunk of money in the previous month, and, of course, we bought more in March.

Here is a breakdown of the expenses:

  • Fish oil – $68,492.52 (including Amazon fees, shipping to Amazon for Prime, coupon-related expenses, and producing more inventory)
  • Aweber – $149
  • Designer – $375 (continually tweaking the site)
  • Hosting – $249
  • Mike – free (Mike doesn’t get paid, but he owns a percentage of the blog)
  • Accounting – $290 (we are now paying a bookkeeper to help out with the books)

Total expenses came out to $69,555.52.

That brings the total profit to $51,937.13.

Of course, to maintain the growth, we would have to keep buying fish oil, but after awhile, we would cap out on sales, and our margins should be a healthy 30% plus. As for March, I didn’t spend much on buying tons more inventory as I wanted to show that selling supplements can be profitable.

Conclusion

Overall, the $100,000 challenge was fun, but I wouldn’t do it again. It’s just too much work with everything I have going on.

It was still a good learning experience. One thing I realized is how much harder it is to rank on Google today compared to 5 years ago. Almost all of my sites are old, so it is much easier for them to rank.

And although NutritionSecrets.com generated good traffic, if it were 5 years ago, the blog would have been at a million visitors a month with the same amount of effort.

So, what do you think of the $100,000 challenge?



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Monday, March 21, 2016

The $100,000 Challenge: February Update

feb traffic

Hey, everyone! We just wrapped up our 11th month of the $100,000 challenge for NutritionSecrets.com. As predicted, it was a down month.

Traffic was up overall, but because we were running short on fish oil inventory, revenue wasn’t as high as it was in the previous month.

For the month of February, traffic grew to 200,709 visits and 251,834 pageviews. That’s not too shabby, considering we had 159,945 visits in January, which had two more days.

As for income, revenue went down to $54,285.30… So, let’s dive right into the numbers…

Traffic

Shockingly, traffic was up significantly. It mainly came from search, but I never expected it to grow as January is an extremely popular month in the health and fitness space and February isn’t. As March rolled around, we noticed that the traffic growth started to slow down, but I’ll get into that in the next month’s update.

Mike posted about a post a day, which helped February’s traffic. As you can see from the screenshot below, there is a healthy mix in traffic. Google is our biggest driver of traffic, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise since it is for most blogs. The direct traffic includes email, and social media is starting to pick up.

feb traffic channels

If you are wondering how you can replicate similar results, you need to do two things:

  1. Write content using these guidelines.
  2. Use the templates in this post to find and build links. Make sure you use the “basic link request, PR pitch, and funny link request” templates. Although I wrote that post years ago, those tactics still work, and they are what Mike uses to generate links.

As you are building links, focus on getting them to all your internal pages. Don’t focus on anchor text; focus on relevancy and quantity. Over time, your rankings will naturally go up.

You saw it with the NutritionSecrets.com challenge, and you will see it with your own website: you build links, and your traffic doesn’t go up. But if you wait 3 to 6 months, you’ll see it all kick in, assuming your content is high in quality and people want to continually read your blog.

Revenue

In February, we generated $54,285.30 in revenue, which is less than January’s revenue of $76,326.90. The main reason…we ran out of fish oil. I estimate that our income would have been closer to $98,000 if we had enough inventory. But we should be good for the month of March in achieving our $100,000 goal.

feb rev

In the meantime, to supplement the revenue, we tested out being an affiliate for Organifi. We signed up through Clickbank and tested to see whether we could generate some extra money.

After a few days, we turned it off as it didn’t generate any sales. The main reason I think it didn’t work was because of the email copy they provided.

It’s a great product that I have tried in the past, which is why I didn’t mind testing it out from an affiliate perspective, but I should have known that their email copy wasn’t maximized for conversions.

Companies that offer affiliate programs typically have incentives. If you are the best affiliate for a certain time period, you get bonuses like a free car…and yes, I meant to say free car. I’ve seen people like Russell from Clickfunnels give away a Ferrari.

Organifi didn’t have large prizes to give away to affiliates, which usually means they aren’t as large as some of the other companies. And if they aren’t that large, the main reason behind that is because the offer usually doesn’t convert as well as other companies’.

Again, they have a great product, so instead of using their copy, we should have written our own copy to promote their product.

Inventory

I’ve been getting a ton of questions over the last few months about how to find someone to help produce tangible products. Most of them require minimum orders and money upfront, but it is all a negotiation game.

The person we use is Austin Song, who has facilities in Cleveland, Ohio (or somewhere around Cleveland)… He has staff and had extra hours that weren’t being used in his warehouse, so he was more flexible on the deal terms as he was paying employees when they didn’t have anything to produce.

The way I found Austin was purely by spending days Googling for people who can manufacture products. Austin is busy these days and won’t do the same deal again (or else you would have seen 4 or 5 more products from NutritionSecrets.com).

Expenses

We didn’t make much profit in February because we had to produce more fish oil.

Here is the breakdown of the expenses:

  • Fish oil – $53,204.44 (including Amazon fees, shipping to Amazon for Prime, coupon-related expenses, and producing more inventory)
  • Aweber – $69
  • Designer – $250 (continually tweaking the homepage)
  • Hosting – $249
  • Mike – free (Mike doesn’t get paid, but he owns a percentage of the blog)
  • Accounting – $210 (we are now paying a bookkeeper to help out with the books)

Overall, we turned a profit of $302.86. It’s not a great number, but that’s what happens when you have to dump a lot of cash into producing more product.

Conclusion

Overall, the month wasn’t too bad, considering we ran out of inventory. March should be an interesting month. From a revenue perspective, it shouldn’t be hard to hit $100,000 because we are also working on utilizing other channels to generate income.

Next, I should have a detailed update with new revenue channels (hopefully, they work) and what we learned.

How do you think the challenge is working out so far?



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Monday, February 15, 2016

The $100,000 Challenge: January Update

jan traffic

We just wrapped up our 10th month of the $100,000 a month challenge at NutritionSecrets.com, and it was a great month.

In January, traffic grew to 159,945 visitors—139,417 of which were unique. Those visitors generated a total of 195,665 pageviews and purchased $76,326.90 worth of fish oil supplements.

Although the numbers for January were great, I expect February to be slower because we ran out of inventory, which I’ll talk about in the next update.

So, let’s dive into the January numbers. 

January’s traffic

As you can see from the screenshot above, traffic grew greatly in January. It was partly because of the season—everyone is trying to set health and weight goals in January—and partly because the rankings are just starting to climb.

SEO is a long-term game, and when you write great content and build links, you don’t always see results immediately. But when you wait patiently for 3 to 6 months, you start seeing the fruits of your labor.

Compared to December, which had a visitor count of 69,813, January saw a 129% increase in overall traffic.

search traffic

As you can see from the screenshot above, the majority of the traffic growth came from search engines: 117,070 visitors came from Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The majority of those visitors came from Google.

I am new to the nutrition space, so I don’t know whether the traffic will die down in a few weeks, but I hope it keeps going up.

Content production

Because Mike knew that January was going to be a hot month, he prepared in advance. He wrote more content so that blog post production could go back to seven posts a week. But because Mike needed to produce so much content, the topics he wrote on were basic.

The increase in content production hasn’t been helping much with social traffic, but it has been helping with search engine traffic. Over the next few months, I’ll have Mike continually push out seven pieces of content a week as it will help us hit the revenue goal of $100,000.

Revenue

As you may already know, numbers can be deceiving. Although we are getting closer to the $100,000 revenue mark, more revenue doesn’t necessarily mean more profit.

search traffic

As you can see in the screenshot above, revenue hit $76,326.90. We tested a few different price points, changing the price of our product by a few dollars up or down to see whether we could generate more sales, but we didn’t see a big difference.

Now, of course, if we dropped the price by $10.00, I do believe that the sales numbers would go up drastically, but that would eat away at our profit margin.

Here is the breakdown of the expenses for the month:

  • Fish oil – $56,401.91 (including Amazon fees, shipping to Amazon for Prime and any coupon-related expenses)
  • Aweber – $69
  • Designer – $750 (made changes to the website, including linking to the product)
  • Hosting – $249
  • Mike – free (Mike doesn’t get paid, but he owns a percentage of the blog)
  • Ads – $9,481.29 (We’ve been testing ads, and in the following updates, I will show you the screenshots and share the lessons we learned from running the ads. Overall, they haven’t been performing too well from a profit margin standpoint.)
  • Accounting – $185 (we are now paying a bookkeeper to help out with the books)
  • Lawyer fees - $2,000 (this is to get rid of people selling our product with our label on Amazon. We are sending them seize and desist orders.)

That brings the total of the expenses to $69,136.20. That means our profit was $7,190.70.

Conclusion

The big focus right now is on adjusting the listing copy on Amazon. If we adjust the text, it should help a lot with sales, but it’s hard because other people on Amazon are selling our product.

Once we get rid of all the other products, Amazon should update the text. I don’t know why it works this way, but it just does…

Escalating the promotion of the product on NutritionSecrets.com should help as well. We have already been doing a better job of this in January, and we will continue to push forward with the same strategy in February.

What do you think of the progress so far? I’ve been happy with the revenue growth, but I need to focus on improving profit margins.



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Friday, January 8, 2016

The $100,000 Challenge: December Update

december traffic

We just wrapped up our ninth month of the NutritionSecrets.com $100,000 challenge. December was a decent month, considering that the holidays slowed down our sales and traffic.

In the month of December, traffic grew to 69,813 visitors. That’s not too shabby, taking into account that a large part of December was slow due to the holiday. The overall traffic grew by 19.8% over the previous month.

As for revenue, sales in December hit $22,702 dollars. The real number, however, is actually lower than that, which I will go into in a bit. But first, let’s discuss the traffic and what’s coming up.

Traffic

In December, the blog had 69,813 visitors, and 60,155 of those visitors were unique. Although the blog is receiving a decent number of visitors, the returning visitor count is low.

returning

As you can see from the image above, only 16.2% of the visitors are returning. There are a few reasons for this…

The first reason is poor collection of emails. Typically, you will generate more returning visitors by sending out an email blast every time you write a new blog post. And to collect those emails, you have to leverage pop-ups and opt-ins.

The pop-up on the blog is an exit pop-up, but it doesn’t get triggered on mobile devices, which make up 66.8% of the total traffic.

mobile

In addition to that, the blog isn’t optimized for email collection. The offer isn’t very strong, so in the next week or so, it will be updated.

The homepage won’t be the blog; instead, it will be an email collection offer. In addition to that, the posts will have an email opt-in offer at the top. It will be something similar to what I use on NeilPatel.com:

journey

As for January, traffic should be much better as we make these design changes. Plus, January is a hot time for health and nutrition. I’m already estimating that the blog will generate over 100,000 visitors for that month as the stats show that the blog is generating in excess of 4,000 visitors a day.

Content production

If you look at the content production, it’s slowed down. Mike went from posting 7 times a week to 3 times a week. He has been working on increasing the production back up to 7 posts a day, which you’ll see at some point in January.

If you look at the previous months, traffic grew faster, but we were also producing more content. It just goes to show that the higher quality content you create, the more search traffic you will receive.

As we generate more income, you’ll also see new types of content on the blog, e.g., infographics. They do really well in most spaces, but it costs money to create them.

Revenue

December was a decent month for fish oil sales. On Amazon, we generated $22,702 in sales.

sales

Now, although that figure looks great, a lot of those sales came from coupons (we slowed down providing them now). Nonetheless, $11,516.16 came from sales that didn’t use the coupon code.

The overall number of sales should start going up in the upcoming months as we promote the product more aggressively to our email list as well as on the site.

In addition to that, you’ll see direct sales taking place on the site as we are adding e-commerce functionality and will start running paid ads. This should help boost the revenue. My overall goal for January is to hit at least $46,064 in sales…which is 4 times the amount of the previous month.

One of the things that should help with the sales is the bottle design. Now that we are generating income, I was able to use $500 of it for new designs.

bottle

Once the copy for the Amazon page is fine-tuned, it should also help boost the sales numbers.

Here is a list of our expenses:

  • Fish oil – $6,924.59 (including Amazon fees and shipping to Amazon for prime)
  • Aweber – $69
  • Designer – $500 (better bottle design)
  • Hosting – $249 (just switched to a bigger server to handle January’s growth)
  • Mike – free (Mike doesn’t get paid, but he owns a percentage of the blog for putting in time as I discussed earlier. I did this because you didn’t want me to use my name for the challenge, so I found someone else to be the face of the blog.)
  • Accounting – $185 (to help out with the books—we are now paying a bookkeeper)

Total expenses for the month were 7,927.59. Which means the total profit was $3,588.57.

Conclusion

The big focus over the next 30 days is going to be fine-tuning the site to be more like Quick Sprout and NeilPatel.com when it comes to optimizing for conversions and email collection.

It will take some time to run A/B tests, but I’m fairly confident that the numbers for January (on all fronts) will be improved because January is the most lucrative month of the year in the health and fitness space.

I know I could be doing more with NutritionSecrets.com and I am not following most of my own advice that I use on my personal blogs, but you have to keep in mind that I focus all my energy on my software companies as that’s what generates my income.

Mike is a newbie to the marketing world, so it takes some time to get him up to speed…especially with my hectic schedule. But overall, the progress isn’t too bad.

What do you think of the progress so far?



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Friday, December 11, 2015

The $100,000 Challenge: November Update

nov stats

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).

search traffic

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…

headline

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.

fish oil

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.

sales

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.

bad review

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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Monday, November 23, 2015

The $100,000 Challenge: October Update

search traffic

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).

fish oil

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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