SuitcaseLifestyle.com

So now it’s been roughly 3 months since I started my e-commerce business, so it’s time for an update. I wanted to share a bit more on my blog, thankfully my business is not pure affiliate marketing so I don’t care about keeping secrets.

One of my earlier posts, titled Blueprint – Make Stacks Online, I laid out 10 steps to build a successful e-commerce site based on real tangible products. Now since I wrote that, I have pretty much completed all the 10 steps laid out in that post.

So how is the business doing?

Firstly, I created my own brand of Colored Contact Lenses. This was to give myself a competitive edge against my competitors by having a different product. And also in the longer term, the brand can become another business in itself. In the beginning, I ordered what I thought was a lot (1000 pairs) to get me started. These arrived at the start of December, and I started slinging these like no tomorrow via PPC and Social media ads.

I got so carried away with selling, that I didn’t keep an eye on stock levels and nearly ran out by early February. Now being a physical product, it takes roughly 3 weeks to get more stock in, so I had to pause all my ads and sit idle for 2 weeks doing nothing. I guess you could call it a schoolboy error, but a good one.

This is part of the growing pains of dealing with a physical product. You want to be sure you can move stock otherwise it just ties up capital. This is a downside to dealing with physical products rather than digital, as obviously with physical products, you can only sell what you have. However at the same time this is an advantage, because there will always be demand for physical products which cannot be replaced easily.

Initially, I was selling to Australia only, using a .com.au domain. But I did mention the best way to go international was to use multiple TLD’s as I covered in my Subdomain vs Subdirectory post. So I have also started selling to the UK(co.uk) and US(.com) markets, all the while shipping out of Australia. If you plan to sell internationally, you NEED to do this. Also don’t be lazy and take the time to create unique content for each site rather than clone it, it will pay off, trust me.

So within 3 months of launching, turnover is now into the 5 figures a month range, the next target will 6 figures a month which will in turn make it a 7 figure business. I expect this will take longer than 3 months.

So to take this business to the next level…

Optimize and Expand

By optimizing, it’s a two-part process, firstly, conversion rate. That means I’ve installed heatmaps(Crazyegg.com) to start tracking what users do when they actually visit my websites, so I can see WHERE they click and from that, optimize the layout for maximum conversions. In the long term, this will also benefit affiliates with a higher EPC. I’ll post examples of how this is useful as soon as my sites collect more data from CrazyEgg.

This stage will also include multi-variate testing of the landing page to test different versions of headlines, text and images to find the optimal layout of text, headlines and graphics. By optimizing the site for conversions, this will greatly help myself and affiliates make money, which will be one of the main factors when I gun for 6 figures a month.

The second part of optimizing will be to lower traffic costs. Without a doubt, Adwords has the potential to drive a metric shit ton of sales, and it currently does. At the same time, Adwords is expensive, so part of my optimization will include breaking down my current campaigns, tearing them apart, and putting them back up with the goal of getting EVERY KEYWORD to have a Quality Score of 10. If this means having a separate landing page for each keyword, so be it. When you look long term, 1 particular keyword could be spending $20,000 in one year. This keyword and it’s associated performance is a business in itself. So it pays not to be lazy, the smallest difference in QS could be thousands of dollars in extra profits.

Expanding the business will be a 3 part strategy. First is to expand to more geographic locations. At the time of writing, the main markets I am targeting are AU, US and UK. Future plans include CA and NZ and then moving onto foreign locations in different languages. Realize that for a product website like mine in a country like Australia with 20 million people, you can easily earn a living. What happens when you expand into the US(320 million), UK(80 million) etc? A lot of foreign countries have huge populations with credit card happy populations(Spain, France, Italy etc). The potential is fucking HUGE.

The second part of my expansion strategy is to list on affiliate networks, in the end I would like to try listing as both CPA and CPS networks. I’m still trying to switch card processors and a few things like that which is delaying me on this stage.

The third part of my expansion has nothing to do with expanding, but streamlining the business. At the moment everything is being shipped out of Australia, while generally things arrive within a reasonable time frame, it’s not the ideal situation. The goal here is to have 3 distribution centers, North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific, which will speed up delivery times.

Now the last step in my plan.

Be a lazy fucker

Yep, the last phase of the plan is for me to step away from the business and have it run on its own. Once business is running a lot smoother and I can break down business operations into menial tasks, my plan is to hire more staff to handle all the shit for me, so I can go sail the Caribbean instead of working.

If anyone can give me pointers on where to hire people for customer support, and basic per hour labor, get in touch – we should chat.

I escaped Buenos Aires on Sunday and headed 5 hours down the coast to Mar Del Plata, a seaside beach city. I should be surfing or something now but it’s raining like ‘gatos y perros’ so I’m stuck inside updating this blog.

In the mean time, find me on Facebook.