My Progress So Far

byLightsome

180 followers

4 years ago

Overview

Five months ago, I decided to put some serious effort into building an internet business.

I perceived that affiliate marketing should be part of the strategy alongside eCommerce and membership sites.

I'm having a couple of decades of IT experience, so technology-wise, I had a pretty good understanding of what to expect. I had also tried affiliate marketing and eCommerce a tiny bit in the past. I have had some little monies coming in from those. So, there was a good level of confidence that process works; at least it had worked in the past.

I have also studied marketing academically and more recently as a hobby and as a preparation for this internet business journey.

One of the things I had learned from my marketing studies was that "you are not your customer", meaning that don't make assumptions of customer behaviour based on your personal preferences. So, one should be methodological in developing customer profiles and take it from there. In a nutshell, do the work and research instead of guessing who your customers would be and what are their needs.

I decided that for the sake of learning processes and ways of working (and not slip to that personal preference thinking) I needed to choose a niche in which I don't have experience as a consumer.

After some rather serious contemplation about this, I decided to set up eCommerce store selling women handbags. Many business reasons were supporting this decision as well, mainly related to logistics and marketing aspect of things.

Additionally, there was one family reason to go for this niche.

I'm a father of two daughters who are coming to the age that fashion, shoes, handbags etc. are exciting. I figured that this business might be something that they could develop a natural interest to, and in-process learn a whole lot of stuff which would guarantee their independence in not so distant adulthood. So, my "secret" plan is to instill an entrepreneurial spirit in them so that they can be their own women where ever their paths take them in life.

Once this business is set up and it runs smoothly, then I plan to move on with few more niches, and hopefully, by then I would have learned correct processes to follow and would be wise enough not repeat all the mistakes, again. :)

Phase 1

Before this phase, I had figured out a niche and my reasoning behind that choice. So, the task at hand was merely to build the thing.

I won't bore you with the technical nitty-gritty, but a couple of words about setup would be in order.

So, sites are hosted here in WA. I set up eCommerce site first, which is sitting on WordPress and uses the WooCommerce shopping cart plugin to manage the inventory and handle the orders. The site also has a bunch of other plugins installed to enhance functionality and security. In essence, eCommerce site is a product catalogue with the ability to process the payments through the payment gateway.

Currently, there are about 50 products in it, and each one has a uniques product description.
I managed to bribe my younger daughter to write them, and her sincere volunteering and diligent effort made daddy really proud.

After the site was ready for customers, I placed adverts in Bing Ads and Google Ads and learned a whole lot of stuff what I shouldn't be doing. Regardless, the first customer made a purchase via one of those ads. This was, of course, the gratifying moment because it proved that the site could be perceived worthy of trust by the general public. At the same time, technical and business processed were confirmed functional.

After trying different campaign scenarios in those two PPC networks, I decided to put them on hold due to slim rewards when considering the time and monetary investment required.

Just a few ads were published in FaceBook, but their advert approval process didn't seem to work too well. First, they approved the ads (pictures of women handbags and text), then after a day or two displaying them, they disapproved them. When I requested the review, after cross-checking all the terms and conditions, and without changing anything in the ads, they approved them again. After these ads have been running a day or so, they got disapproved again.

At that point, I decided that it wasn't the best use of my time and decided to park FaceBook advertising for now.

This first phase took about three months to complete. Roughly 8 hours per day. In some days less and some days more. Those hours have fluctuation, which is driven what one is about to accomplish. Even with just 50 or so products, it is an amazing amount of time what goes into the tweaking all kinds of tiny details. Those PPC adverts and campaigns won't create themselves either; in the peak, I had about 150 different campaigns running in Google Ads to be able to see how results vary with different products and texts.

Phase 2

In this phase, it was time to set up the blog site on the subdomain of an eCommerce site.

I decided to go for subdomain just to keep these two sites in completely separate security domains.

The blog site has multiple authors and an eCommerce site has entirely different kind of user roles, aka different people. The eCommerce site also has a different security level requirements than the blog site has.

Point of having a blog site is to attract organic traffic and embed some advertising of eCommerce site's products into these articles and the sidebar. As of today, the blog site is having four blog post longest one being about 2800 words and shorts 1300 words. These are the outcome of me following WA training and completing tasks within.

It is still too early to say if I have got it right with those articles because I'm yet to see traffic coming in. Instead, what I can say that process of writing these articles has been painful and joyful at the same time. English not being my first language, I probably spend double the time I should in writing these and still won't get them entirely right.

So, I have initiated my bribing efforts again, and I'm currently waiting for one of two young ladies to bite and agree for proofreading exercise. Their skills in financial negotiations seem to have developed rather rapidly, though. However, daddy has also learned that it is more fruitful to offer to buy Nike sneakers than it is to offer to pay equivalent monetary value in cash.

On the other hand, the writing process is gratifying and gives deep satisfaction that one has managed to write something down worthy enough to be shown to the world, regardless of imperfections.

Glimpse to the future: Phase 3

I'm expecting to complete my remaining pieces of training and see traffic coming in.

When traffic is showing consistently reliable figures, one could have a better understanding of what kind of advertisement is working with this audience.
So, I guess it will be lots of A/B testing towards the end of phase 3.

Thank you for reading and feel free to leave your comments below.