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Help me turn my store into a long-term Beauty/Health niche money making machine (44)

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Started this woocommerce store 2 years ago, http://www.melanotanza.co.za/, knew nothing about paid advertising. At the time I relied on SEO to rank my website and managed to get a few hundred dollars a month.
Last year around October time after hearing Pat Flynn and Viper Chill discuss paid advertising I straight away jumped into STM and started learning.
Right at the beginning I decided to stick to FB and master it first.

This is me still trying to master FB.

The month of October I started successfully running FB ads, thanks to STM I increased revenue from about R6000 a month to R80 000 ($6000), I promised myself I would double that figure the month after, I smashed my goal increasing revenue to R180 000 ($13 846)..Life was bliss.

December I had my first ever $500, I was ecstatic but towards the middle of December morale slowly began to squander as sales started slowing down along with my confidence in FB Marketing.
When I started these campaigns I would get around $2 a conversion with a $44 profit product,

Now when advertising I stuggle with...:

1. Getting reach with ads optimized for conversions (Ads just don't take off like they used to)
2. When using optimized for clicks audience don't convert as well as they used to.

I recently followed Zenos guide to create custom conversions (at the moment i'm running a campaign optimized for "people who click on a product on my landing page" reach issue has been fixed, however conversions are still not as good as they used to be.
I thought I understood my audience, I thought I knew what ads to present to them... i thought wrong.

Could it be that everyone is just out of money? Or is that just a excuse to myself? anyways the testing goes on.

A few things that I thought might increase my conversions is

1: Speed up page load time (80% of my audience buys through mobile), plus my target audience is in S.A (where signal is not always the best) Any ideas on how to speed up page load speed?
2: Better my landing page as a whole (any criticism on the landing page welcome here http://www.melanotanza.co.za/
3: Trying to learn how to create product catalogs through FB business manager, and pushing out ads this way. (Any useful resources for this?)

Will keep you all updated on how it goes, tomorrow is pay day in S.A, so I'm hoping this has all just been a dry spell

Looking forward to your replies

Franky

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No, people are not just out of money

Mobile optimising your page and decreasing load times will always help, regardless of what you are doing.

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On first glance your site most definitely needs optimising, lots of it. No offence meant at all, but the current design is dreadful! I bet you could probably double the conversion rates if you fix your design and apply some common conversion techniques. Perhaps the problem is how badly optimised the site is, not the ads themselves, I'm surprised you're even making money with this.

Here's some feedback regarding the design itself:

- The logo is way too big, and it's out of the site's grid on the left. It's also not clickable. Very distracting.

- Perhaps the most important mistake are the colours - here's a rule of thumb for inexperienced designers that works wonders on all sorts of LPs and improves conversions: You pick a main backround colour, usually white, 1 accenting colour, in your case purple, and then you pick a completely contrasting colour for all the CTAs and links. Pick a different colour at least for the your "add to cart" buttons - bright green, pink, blue etc., anything that stands out from the rest of the design.

Right now all of your "Add to cart", "Sale", "Free Shipping" are the exact same colour and this is extremely confusing ("Which parts can I click?"). I also bet if you install a heatmap you'd notice a lot of people clicking on "Free shipping" because they believe it's a button.

- Fix the copy and structure of the site. I had no idea what the site is about when I first visited. "NOTE: Are you from South-Africa?? If yes, we Offer FREE Shipping straight to your door!" - Free shipping for what? I have to either watch a 1 minute video, or scroll down and try to figure out from the rest of the copy what this is. There's no clear statement anywhere.

- The copy could definitely use some work - Cashvertising by Drew Whitman might help here. You have a headline below: "THE BENEFITS OF MELANOTAN 2 INCLUDE:", why not be more creative here and try and figure out a benefit-driven headline that invokes some emotion.

- Next up, images! Why are there plain looking, even scary looking, syringes and icons that represent vials? Show some actual images of your product, not low quality icons. On the topic of low quality, all of the imagery on the site has VERY low quality. Ecommerce sites benefit greatly from professional photography.

- One other thing I noticed is, you're talking about 1 product, and yet on your "landing page" you have 4 other products "TRY OUR NEW WEIGHT LOSS PRODUCTS!"

- Do something about the inner pages (http://www.melanotanza.co.za/shop/be...ray-wholesale/) - these look downright broken. You have only 1 image of those crappy icons, lots of copy with poor colour and accent optimisation and a tiny little "add to cart" button down below. Suggestions: Make the price tag a different color, something that stands out, same thing for "Free shipping". Add more professional attractive images, not icons!

- http://www.melanotanza.co.za/checkout/ Ecommerce sites need descriptions on these pages. WHY are you requesting so much information from your visitors? Write that out and tell them. Click here to login isn't visible, same for the other link.

- I don't see any reassurance that your site is safe to order from. There's not even a basic HTTPS. Add some trust badges like "Trust Pilot", "PayPal", "Visa/Mastercard" , "Verysign", "McAfee" and so on.

I can keep going on and on about this. I recently worked on an ecommerce site for a friend of mine, who made almost exactly the same mistakes as you. After a week of optimising his site, he's now getting 2.5x more conversions than before. Not to mention the effect this had on his overall ad budget and spend.

Here are a few links you should most definitely check out:

http://baymard.com/blog/checkout-exp...ry-information

http://www.business2community.com/st...7E7jqUayy8Y.97

http://monetizepros.com/ecommerce/5-...nversion-rate/

https://vwo.com/blog/ecommerce-ab-testing-ideas/ - Pay attention to this particular article.

http://blog.wishpond.com/post/982357...n-case-studies

Hope this helps. I'm sorry but every time I see a bad design I feel urged to chime in and tell it like it is.

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Some great advice here!

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I can not thank you enough, will be getting on all these points ASAP! You were dead right about people thinking FREE shipping is a button, 25% users clicked there.

Will post the changes I make, might have to change the whole store completely.

***UPDATE***


Shishev, I made some changes that you mentioned. Still not fully how you said but its a working progress, my plan is to revamp it completely.
Anyways I've made 4 sales since making these changes 3 hours ago! Coincidence? I think not!

Just awesome! your feed back removed my blinkers. Thanks again.

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That's great to hear Franky! I also think those 4 sales aren't a coincidence at all. Even though you said you've made just a few changes, I think they make a pretty big impact.

When I visit the site now, I know what it's about, and the colours(even though they're very bright, and may seem as "in your face") help guide my eye to the most important bits instantly.

This sort of conversion optimization works wonders, and yet a lot of site owners (not talking about us marketers) neglect it as something unimportant which is a very big and costly mistake.

I understand this sort of stuff takes time to implement, but I've subscribed to your thread and would be happy to provide more advice as you go forward. It's always super motivational seeing someone improve their business.

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I'd say get a complete website redesign.

A responsive wordpress e-comm store with "https" can be obtained for $400. Also you could throw stripe on there so they can pay onsite.
https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/checkout (click "Pay with Card" to see).

I'd say use stripe and paypal...doing a bank transfer is A LOT of friction.

I can get you everything shishev said in under a week for $400 if you want pm me. Alternatively just hop on upwork because wordpress "developers" are a dime a dozen. Every job post gets like 40 applicants in 24 hours.

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All I can say is shishev rocks.

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****Another Update****

Changes I made today:

1: Made the header logo smaller
2: Added "secure" logos throughout the site
3: Optimized images, took out google ads on the product pages.

Site generally looks and feels a lot better especially on mobile (my target)

Results:

Bounce rate dropped from 78% to 51%
Sent 300 people to the site via Fb ads and got 6 conversions, so that's about a conversion per 50 visitors.

Next step is to keep following Shishev's points he mentioned.

Main points I want to work on is:

• Better product images
• Improve product pages as a whole (bigger CTA etc)
• Simplify checkout process and explain the details I am requesting from the buyer.

I noticed from FB tracking about 10% of visitors added a product to their cart, which is VERY frustrating. How can I get these people to actually finish the checkout??

For those of you that has just joined, here is the website:

http://www.melanotanza.co.za/

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This is good news! As for that cart I was going to suggest using a one-page checkout like this magento extension has it going: https://www.iwdagency.com/extensions...-checkout.html but it seems your site has it well like it is.

The current low percentages of Add to cart actions mean the site still needs further optimization, but I guess you could perhaps test having one more button, along the lines of "Add To Cart & Checkout Now", or just "Checkout Now", "Buy Now", "Place Order Now" etc. and see if that makes any difference. These tests you make now will help you come up with a super optimized new design/revamp imo.

I found some more articles with useful insights for mobile ecommerce specifically:

http://bluestout.com/blog/3-ways-you...le-e-commerce/

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/mega-ecommerce-guide/

http://www.usefulusability.com/9-tip...ommerce-sales/

They all mention loading speed, social integration, not having to register to buy, coupons and so on. One other thing might be adding some urgency, like a countdown timer from the first articles I pasted in: https://vwo.com/blog/wp-content/uplo...-4y0RiYQLu.png

I'm 100% confident this will improve as you keep optimizing the site.

Is that little bit of traffic you sent profitable, or not yet?

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The site still need A LOT of work, but it is definitely heading in the right direction!

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Great will start working on these, the site has been profitable today (Spent R550 Received R2050 Profit), but as you said I think there's still massive room for improvement.
Looks like some more awesome information here, going to smash it tonight and tomorrow, will do a post end of play tomorrow afternoon.

Appreciate the responses Shishev and Cmdeal, keep em coming

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I would have taken this deal asap if I was you.

Don't try and do it yourself

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****Update****

Changes made today:

1: Added explanation for details requested upon checkout
2: Stripped a few unnecessary details at check-out
3: Removed "enter coupon code" at cart and checkout (Keep buyers focus on buying)
4: Added a time until next shipment
5: At the moment I'm busy messing around with the product pages.

Results:

Bounce rate improved slightly
Today I sent so far 213 people to the website from FB and received 9 conversions

Next step is again to keep grinding at Shishev's points he mentioned.

Main points I want to work on is:

• Better Product Images
• Think about getting my site on a CDN
• Product pages need improvement

For those of you that has just joined, here is the website:

http://www.melanotanza.co.za/

Another thing to add is I decided to go ahead and get a developer to start designing a whole new website for the above store, the project is going to be over 8 weeks.
Some more criticism and guidance will be appreciated, so far its been awesome!

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You're almost at 1:20 ! awesome man, very big improvement in a very short time.

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Very very nice improvement indeed! There's also this sort of urgency to the site right now, much better than before. With these sort of conversion optimisations + a brand new high quality design it should work even better.

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Thanks Shishev, think I need to order the product from the supplier myself and take my own photos. You were right the product images definitely need some work.

A quick update, woke up this morning to 6 orders already with 80 people to the site, so there is no doubt in my mind these new changes are working.
Today I'm just going to be smashing the product pages.

Will be back end of play today with an update.

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Hey franky, any updates on your site? I'm gonna pull out the whip if you leave this behind, ha!

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Why not to use some platform like Shopify?

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Great progress, however I still would also recommend Shopify to make next improvments easily.

And for UI issues you can check points from www.goodui.org

Keep rocking!

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This is a great read, I'll add it to the design resources thread here.

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Haha hey Shishev

Site is still converting well, today especially.
13 conversions with 363 visitors to the site.
Also upgraded to a self-hosting server, load speed seems to be a lot faster.

The changes made have made a HUUUGE difference to the site. However I think you guys are right, still a lot of changes needs to be made.
Just reading now what meathead suggested, think i might try implement that.

Been getting too complacent with the site again, needed that whip!

Have you had a look at the product pages etc? Any major errors that stand out!

Thinking of keeping the website and getting someone to clean up the code and just make it look a bit more modern/responsive instead of getting a whole new site made, I have another technical project I am working on that would be completely passive income, so I want to spend the majority of my funding on this project intead. http://houseplanshq.co.za/ (Still in the rough)

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Awesome find! Thanks Greenzone

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Hey Shishev

Whats your take on pop-ups and a chat now button?

I am thinking of introducing a pop-up to give people an incentive to make a purchase, like offer a free ebook or something.

With the chat now button I am worried that it will take the users focus away from making a purchase.

What are your thoughts on this?

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Pop ups are fine, especially if you have an incentive so you can build a nice list. But don't have it showing up immediately after the page has loaded, it's gonna scare people away. There are time triggers, exit intents and all sorts of scripts, all for a reason.

Chat buttons, from the sites I've worked on, have done more good than harm - some people often have tons of questions and they need them answered ASAP. If you make it clear you're there to help them with their purchase etc. I can only see this benefiting you. Plus it adds more trust!

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I would highly recommend using the chat now feature even if it's just for education purposes. Instead of just using as a sales tool, start noting down the questions your users ask. It's very likely you will find that users will ask similar questions. Now use that data to help build a higher converting website.

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Great tips.

I'd add:

1) exit intent pop
2) a phone # (cheap to get.. like $1/mo. for south africa) => u can have it forwarded it to your phone. adds trust
3) i'd test these versions - video on top, long copy, welcome gate

Not sure if you're doing retargeting but I would add retargeting on
1) GDN
2) native - revcontent, yahoo gem, etc.

For speed loading you're using WP.. so i'd suggest
1) caching (wp super cache)
2) minifying css/js
3) cloudflare (if you're not using a CDN already)
4) use google hosted jquery
5) use lazy load
6) compress images
7) use LEMP stack (faster than LAMP stack)

I'm not in africa, but i did test w/my desktop browser in NYC and yes, your pages are slow. Your CVR could be higher just doing the tech stuff. But shishev is right.. you have product market fit, just need to work on design and copy.

I hate SEO (b/c of douchey SEO people). But nothing beats SEO (and email) in ecomm.

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First of all congratulations on the improvements that you seem to be seeing on your website. It really serves as a testament to the power of digital marketing skills that is so pervasive on the STM forum.

However, are you confident that your product is safe and effective?

In the UK at least, these products seem to have been banned by the General Medical Council and the MHRA

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...ng-nasal-spray
http://www.scotsman.com/news/health-...ucts-1-3067014

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Amazing thanks Shishev. Time for some more work!

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@franky88 Amazing thread man. great to see the improvements done along the way and the results that back up your time spent on it.
Good luck!

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This ROCKS

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A quick update on this store.

With the help from this thread we comfortably scaled the store up to $50 000 revenue per month. Unfortunately we had to shut it down, one of our winning weight loss products that we started to rely on was pulled from the market by our main supplier.

With the experience we gained through this store we started our own weight loss product, and straight away did $50000 in it's first month with a 8X profit margin compared to our 30% previous drop shipping margin. Our suppliers pulling the product was a blessing in disguise.

Unfortunatley this was short lived. FB banned our account and we are in the process of getting things up and running again.

Once we get the ad account going again I'm certain the store will do great things.

My biggest take away from this experience is when a product you are drop shipping does well enough, stop settling for pennies, drop your supplier and create your own product. Drop shipping only works well up to a point.

Thanks to all who contributed to this thread, especially Shishev.

Franky

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Great to hear you were able to reach solid numbers!

And now facebook taught you another lesson ... do not rely on just one traffic source with your business. Focus on organic, grow email list, explore the options of working with influencers and bloggers ... and also test other traffic types that are less sensitive : native, mobile ads in apps ... there is a lot you can try

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Wow, sounds like a valuable lesson which transitioned into a very lucrative success story!

Make sure you have ad accounts ready for action to ensure the continuity of your campaigns.

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Wow that is super impressive, well done!

I've kinda got a feeling you're only at the start of this, if you can develop a system for facebook with measures in place to offset account bans, and like Matuloo said begin to reach outside of Facebook, 8x margin is monstrous!!!... $100k+ a month is within your reach if not more!

Would love to see further updates but really thanks for stopping by and posting again, this will be a huge energy shot for a lot of people on this forum to get into gear and think outside the box!

Did you simply copy the product and rebrand or did you go step further in your process and make it even better?

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@matuloo

Lol Facebook sure did.

We have been working on SEO but this takes time. My previous store had a decent amount of SEO. It contributed to around 30% of sales.

Also been experimenting with adwords, no luck. Conversions always seem to be too expensive.

Do you have any tips on running native? This is something I haven't tried yet.

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@diamond

Thanks man.

Just sourced 5 credit cards, going to warm up 5 Ad accounts concurrently while running ads again. Definitely great advise, won't be making that mistake again.

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Thanks Maynzie.

Really appreciate it. And it's only a pleasure. Really hope others can learn from this.

I agree. I definitely need to get away from relying on FB. It's become ridiculous. If you can think of any other ad networks that will work well in South Africa please let me know, will dive into them. Apart from that, our SEO should slowly start picking up. Thanks to the extra profit margin we have a lot more money to buy high quality links etc.

After 4 FB account bans we are also trying a different approach with FB. We spent $1000 on a 30 day diet Ebook which we will be giving away through FB ads for free to generate leads. That will give us an opportunity to hard sell the weight loss product via email.

After running weight loss for a while we kinda learnt which were the best ingredients to use for weight loss. With that knowledge we contacted a local GMP certified manufacturer and they helped construct a winning formula. So I would say it's MUCH better, but I may be a bit biased.

I'll definitely keep this thread going, looks like there is still a lot of interest in here.

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I have limited experience with native on my own, but from what I know ... it's very important to find the right widgets/placements. Ton's of native ads are placed on sites that are just build for the purpose of simple arbitrage ... you've seen all those "top 10 of this top 20 of that" sites that are basically native banner farms. These usually do not perform all that well, so you need to watch for them and cut early. Category targeting helps a lot and so do default blacklists that some native networks are willing to share.

But there are also true gems in the native world, quality sites that use native widgets as a supplemental form of income, those can turn nice profits.

Basically, native is about testing quickly initially and sorting through the bad widgets as fast as you can ... larger budget is needed, since there is a lot of poor ones in the mix.

You will also need to test lots of ads, and since native networks are VERY often VERY slow with approvals, make sure you submit a lot straight away ... then pause some and un-pause as needed.

Cheers,
Matej.

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Thanks man. I did some research on some native networks and Taboola seems to be mentioned quite often. Is this a good place to start?

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Taboola, outbrain, revcontent ... these 3 are the biggest I think. For the start I would chose revcontent from these 3 and there is also mgid that is traditionally less strict with affiliate stuff, so might be a good choice for initial testing.

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A quick update on this one.

Managed to get 3 FB ad accounts running smoothly. Two run straight to Shopify, the other runs to advertorial style landing page. Strangely enough running traffic straight to the product page is converting a lot better. But they are both profitable so I'll keep them both running.

Getting a decent ROADS again...over 5.0. Thank goodness.

Ad accounts have been running smoothly for 3 weeks now and in that time we did $30k in revenue with minimal effort. It's winter here and weight loss only usually kicks off around October, so I'm optimistic that the second half of this year I will be breaking my personal revenue records with a sweeter profit margin.

Spent a decent amount of the profit on a new "free eBook" funnel that will be going live within the next week or two. We also got a long sales letter built out. Spent about $5000 on this.

I'm hoping by the end of this month we will have 5+ ad accounts running traffic to 4 different funnels at a decent budget. We should be in a position to blow this thing up. At the moment we are only spending around $350 to $400 daily so we have a lot of room for growth.

Also been working on SEO, organic traffic is around 130+ per day now and growing daily. For anyone who wants advise on SEO, scrap building PBNs and rather spend money on buying decent high quality links. Around 1 decent link that is getting real traffic is worth 10+ PBN's, on top of that you don' have to constantly maintain your PBN's which can be a nightmare. 80/20!!!

PBN's is not worth your time anymore. Getting rid of mine was the best thing I've done.

That's all for now. Will update soon.

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I was wondering how you were doing, glad to hear you're still running and seeing solid numbers. You're right about the weightloss market, it's way more active before summer than in winter ... time for the record numbers to come in

Paying attention to SEO is possibly one of the best decisions you have made too, stable flow of targeted traffic that comes in for free ... that's always great to have.

Looking forward to how much you will manage to grow!

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Wow - what an epic thread! Congratulations Franky!

And thanks for sharing your experiences! This will no doubt help our members with their businesses also (I know I have picked up some gold nuggets from this thread!)

Capturing emails and selling on the backend is da bomb! Cost of acquiring a customer is the highest, so by selling to them again and again for free/cheap can potentially increase your profits by leaps and bounds.

Speaking of leaps and bounds, here are 3 pieces of advice that EACH has the potential of massively expanding your revenues or profit margins:

1)Offering some kind of continuity plan. Weightloss is the perfect product for this type of thing.

If you'd do a search on this forum, I've summarized a part of an excellent ecom book called "Ecom Evolved", in which there's a very informative section on continuity products.

I'm not suggesting offering automatic rebills and getting yourself into legal hotwater, but if your product is solid, it shouldn't be difficult to get them to sign up for monthly autoship until they cancel.

And even when customers are checking out for the first time, it really wouldn't hurt to do some upsells and downsells. It's basically free money when offered after you've captured their payment details.

2)Don't leave it at weightloss! There are lots of other types of supplements available that you could also be selling to the same customer base, either as upsells/downsells at checkout, or via email on the backend. I'm thinking other types of health supplements - e.g. energy boosters and muscle building stacks and such. But you can get lots of ideas from asking your manufacturer for recommendations. Most private label manufacturers have a list of "stock formulas" which would be a good place to start.

And of course, you can set up completely separate businesses for the other supplements.

That reminds me: When running on FB, it would be better to target men and women in different campaigns and craft your creatives accordingly (pain points are different, and you'd be using images of the associated gender). Also, building separate mailing lists for each gender will allow you to push more appropriate products later on to maximize conversion rates.

3)(Proceed with caution) Get more FB accounts. As a mod I'm not at liberty to discuss blackhat stuff in too much detail. But in short: With the kinds of profits you're doing, and the limited experience in farming accounts, why not buy or rent accounts and just focus on promotion instead of farming? At least until your next batch of accounts are ready (which can take a few weeks to a few months).

One of the biggest deterrents of renting accounts is the account owner may steal your campaigns, which in your case isn't as much of a concern.

Basically you'd be looking at paying anywhere between 15-50% ad spend to the account owners. But since you have 8x profit margins, it may still make a lot of sense to rent. (Again, at least until your farming operation can produce larger batches.)

You'd need to ask around though for reliable sellers/renters, and will probably need to test a few to find a reliable provider.

The more accounts you have, the more money you can potentially make.

And it's better to spend less per account in order to make them last longer. The more you spend through an account, the sooner it will trigger a ban.

Think big: If you're happy with your current revenues from 3 accounts, imagine running multiples...

Make sure you have a plan in place though to deal with the potential backlash. For example don't link ads directly to your product's permanent domain - you don't want to get that blacklisted on FB. Make sure you think things through and have a plan B ready in case anything goes wrong.

It would depend on whether it's money or branding you're mainly going after. If branding, then you'd probably want to be less aggressive with the multiple accounts. If money, then it probably won't be too difficult to rebrand the product under different names and domains.


Hope that helps! Best of luck with your business!



Amy






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