Home > Success, Wins, Achievements > Success Stories

---

$200 dollar a month in the guitar niche (23)

---

Hi guys,

this is my first post (apart introduction). Actually mine it's not a "success story", because earnings are too low so far.

Here's what I did:

1) built a website in the niche "how to learn playing guitar"
2) the niche is really crowded and the competition is very high, so in order to create something different, I coded some free online guitar apps (useful to learn scales, chords, fretboard and so on...they run in the browser, nothing to download and install) and made them available. I'm ranking n.2 for "fretboard game"
3) this brought some good traffic from google, not too much but enough to cash something
4) I created 4 pdf ebooks in order to capture email address (the mailing list has about 4000 subscribers)
5) joined the affiliate program of two big online lessons site
6) promoted the offers through mailing list, website links, and facebook page. No PPC.
7) I'm getting about 500 unique visitors a day
8) I'm making 4/5 sales a month :-/

The traffic to my site is from google (70%), social (15%) and referrals.

The problem is that I'm stuck. Earnings don't increase, because website traffic does not (I'd need to put more content and SEO, but this takes a lot of time).

I fear that Adwords is too costly and not effective (competition really high)

So I'm wondering what can I do. I suspect that the product "online guitar lessons" does not convert well because there is a lot of free material on the internet (my conversion rate is about 0.6%, I get 30/40$ commission per sale)

I'm studying copywriting, because I love it and I want to make my emails more effective (even if I'm italian mothertongue and writing in english is not so easy for me :-)

I'm thinking also to test other traffic sources, but I'm a newbie in this fields and I'd need some directions..

by the way, I'm a software engineer partly turned to internet marketing, if you need help about the ICT part of this job, I'll be happy to help

thank you very much!

---

Seems like a lot of hard work for not much reward.

However, on the bright side, it also seems like you have enough knowledge to create your own product if you can find an untapped niche within this sector and at least capture more of the value for yourself if you are willing to go through all this trouble to even code and distribute a free app. This way, instead of 30 dollars per sale you could get 100 dollars or whatever per sale. Then you can afford to pay all the other guitar websites a higher commission yourself for your product and you can feel more comfortable entering into paid traffic.

---

Thanks Cmdeal,
yes my own product could be a way. I can ask my 4000 subscribers what would be the useful features.
Do you think that exploiting other traffic sources (instead of Adwords and Facebook ADS) to promote the offers could be worth it?
thanks again

---

When I hear about guitar, Voyage Air always come to mind:



They basically built folding string guitars - and sold the license to the most famous manufactures.

---

>When I hear about guitar, Voyage Air always come to mind:
great idea!

Fooder, yes, I'm learning a lot from this experience. Programming things aside (I'm already skilled at html, css, javascript, python and mysql), I feel that I'm understanding deeper my niche, how they react to my emails, the right copywriting that works, what are the needs of someone who wants to start learning the guitar, and so forth..it's a good experience. But I'd like to get more money from that :-)

---

Looks like you've been pretty busy! Congrats on your efforts.

Your profit may be relatively minor but you're still ahead of 95% of other webmasters out there trying to make money from their websites - so in my book you're actually doing pretty well to be earning anything at all.

The great thing about your site is it draws on your own knowledge and is something you are passionate about which makes the content creation relatively easy from the off. I made my first website money through the same premise.

You may be new to the web development / marketing side of things but you likely have 10+ years of knowledge on a guy who simply thinks "learn to play guitar" would be a good keyword to make money on and tries to rank a thin site with crappy re-written articles. This puts you at a huge advantage.

I found your site and had a scout around.

Actually, I'm surprised you're making any sales at all since I found it difficult to find anything to buy from you!

Really - before considering how to drive any more traffic to your website you should really consider how your site flows and how best to funnel visitors towards your monetisation goal - whatever that may be - presumably a product purchase or subscription.

On this, have you actually tested any of the items you're trying to sell? Where can you add value to the chain? What do these products have that users cannot get for free on your site? WHY does a visitor to your site NEED this product?

Have you been in contact with the vendors to see what kind of volume they are doing and how other affiliates are running their offers?

Don't spread yourself too thin with product opportunities.

For example, I can see your most obvious attempt at utilising affiliate links is through your resource page. OK - that kind of makes sense - but it also presents the user with too many choices.

People want to be told what to do. YOU are the expert. They want to be helped by YOU. Which product should they buy and again... WHY?

Going back to funnels my suggestion would be to really anchor down on one product which you really feel people will get a lot of value with and begin to push it a lot harder.

Again, your decision should be based on how GOOD the product is and NOT which product gives you the biggest affiliate kickbacks.

This will ensure low refund rates, a strong relationship with your readership and return visitors.

Once you're set on a product you wish to affiliate strongly with then be proud of that relationship.

Maybe design a prominent banner in your sidebar, write a review, deep link to the review in some of your articles or refer to it OCCASIONALLY where relevant. Perhaps develop some kind of content upgrade for the product whereby people will get access to some videos, recordings, tutorials or something else exclusive when they purchase through you.

I'm not saying fill your site from header to footer with affiliate endorsements but I would certainly make things a bit more obvious. If you have confidence in the products you are recommending to people then you will likely find they will more confidently buy from you.

---

thank you! Indeed, I had a lot of fun with this stuff...actually at the beginning I did not plan to get some money from that, I've just wanted to build something mixing two of my passions, guitar and coding...but then traffic increased, so I entered in the world of Internet Marketing, I studied it a lot, and I love it!

Well...my approach is the following: at first, I don't want to sell anything to the visitor. I try to transform him in a subscribers, using the 4 free ebooks as bribe to get his email...then, in the backend, with an autoresponder sequence I try to gain his trust, and then I propose the affiliate products...so it's a classic scheme: "capture in the front-end, sell in the back-end".... I studied some books about copywriting and email marketing (Dan Kennedy, Ian Brody, etc), and actually I have a good communication with my list, lots of responses with "thank you", "your site is great", "congratulations"... but sales are too low :-/

I strongly believe in the products I propose, I was a user and I have to say that they are of totally high quality.. let's say, these are the products I'd suggest to a dear friend who wants to learn guitar. I have some concerns about the conversion rate of their landing pages, I really send a lot of visitors to them, but the conversion rate is about 0.5-08%

I wrote a couple of reviews and I put some links in posts too.... for the banner I think that I'd need to prequalify the user before send him to the affiliate page. About the upgrade is a very good idea. I've planned to develop a new guitar practice tool, complete, with tons of new features (that I collected asking to my list), with 2 level of access: free, and pay.. the user gets access to the pay level only if acquire some of affiliate products (that by the way, are not expensive at all, if you subscribe to the lessons portals, you pay just 10/15 dollars a month, and you can cancel your account anytime).



thanks a lot for you message!

---

How is this project going?

---

John, thank you for writing this post, because I totally missed the fact that I could also ask how to improve my site income and it's value.
All those big numbers all way round are a bit scary
Good luck with your project!

---

The guitar niche is certainly a tough one. Just take a look at the 1000s of free guitar videos on Youtube. If you're a skilled and experienced guitar player yourself, you could definitely try promoting Skype guitar lessons to your list. The guys that do lessons on Skype typically charge around $50 per hour. Just some food for thought

---

That definitely is possible, but it really does not scale since the potential size of business will be limited by the number of hours you have in a day.

---

Well done OP, I think the lessons you're learning could easily be transferred to a blog where you could make some serious payouts.

All these little lessons will be useful down the road. 4K on your mail list is absolutely no joke

---

Hello,

I'm the OP, sorry for replying so late, I stopped my subscription on STM, and now I've just reactivate it under another name (johncarlof -> mrgianca). Now the revenue from affiliate links is about $300/$400 a month, but I'm developing 2 other things:
- I'm in partnership with a professional guitar teacher, we''re going to sell online skype lessons. He has just finished some teaser lessons to be published.
- I'm developing a desktop version of the software. I did a survey among the 5000+ subscribers of my site and about 400 people want an installable version of the online software. So this will be the product that I'm going to sell
I'll keep you updated!

---

Nice! Looking forward to the updates.

I take it you're aware of Pat Flynn and Smart Passive Income? http://www.smartpassiveincome.com He's an expert on the sort of site you're creating - you can probably get a number of good tips on how to convert effectively from reading his articles.

(For example, when I read Prof's comment on your resources page above, Pat's advice on resource pages immediately sprang to mind.)

Also, I'd be curious how many affiliate programs you've tested? When I've built the kind of authority site you're building in the past, I've found I had to rotate through a lot of affiliate programs to find the ones that converted really well. Obviously you have to balance that against finding quality programs, but given you've got a reasonably successful site you can probably persuade a lot of people with infoproducts to give you a review copy, so you can check they're decent quality.

---

Hi Caurmen,

yes I know Pat Flynn but I'm going to check the link you suggested, thanks!

About the offers, my idea was to stick with the 2 top online guitar lessons sites of the Web. They are really famous, it's not a mistery: guitartricks.com and jamplay.com
I believe that they are really worth it and they're very useful, so I'm really happy to suggest them to my users.

But I'm agree with you, I should to test other offers. I have not did this yet because my impression is that the quality of the remaining offers, compared to guitartricks and jamplay, is lower. But I think I'll follow your suggestion, I'll ask some copy to review, and I'll test them. Thanks a lot for your reply!!!

---

Awesome!

Looks like you smashed your initial goal and are onto bigger and better things!

---

Indeed!! And a BIG thank you to the STM family for inspiration and knowledge.
I know this is just the beginning of an interesting journey

---

This is awesome! Are you emailing your audience everyday? Are you encouraging people to share your content in exchange for free downloads/stuff?

Good copywriting will def help increase cr, but im guessing the people in this niche are generally broke hippies, but i may be wrong.

Also, i would consider running fb ads using a lookalike audience based on your emails, it would be fairly targeted, and i highly doubt fb would ban anyone promoting guitar education. Hope that helps.

---

use the site as a platform to connect users to trustworthy teachers that actually know what practice means. There are a ton of people trying to teach online and are struggling to find students.

This way, instead of spending your time teaching for $50, you're improving your site that will bring you $250 in that hour.

You have a seemingly good set up to allow something like this, something to think about?

---

I used Facebook ads to promote posts, links to review and even direct linking to the offers (I setup a quick cloacking system on my site), never had problem and ads were approved quickly.
I don't use aggressive emails, maybe I should, for now I sent a broadcast email twice a month.. Thanks!

---

that's a really good suggestion, thanks! Actually is what I'm doing with a professional guitar teacher, maybe I could provide this service to many teachers... anyway my main target is to complete the software that I'm going to sell, I feel pretty confident that sales will be good, I ask all the time to my subscribers the features they would like

---

Ive found people will allow to email them every single day if you offer value.

People DO NOT like aggressive emails...that will make the unsubscribe.

If you send helpful little emails everyday though (riff of the day! , student of the week! , helpful youtube videos, sheet music downloads, etc), then people will be super happy.

---

Yes I agree. Some additional thoughts:

Some additional thoughts: sometime I feel that the "online guitar lessons" niche is tough also because exist plenty of free alternatives: people go to youtube or justinguitar and find tons of free videos to learn from. Of course pay sites have more content and more quality, but it is an additional effort to convince people to buy.

thanks again to everybody for the insights!

---

Home > Success, Wins, Achievements > Success Stories