Home > Paid Traffic Sources > eCommerce

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From 0 to $10M Exit (25)

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Hey all,

The time feels right to start another follow along, this time around owned and operated e-commerce.

A little background:

I’m a long-time solo affiliate who got into Ecom a few years ago, and have primarily focused on native ads. I spoke at Affiliate World Barcelona in 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub1TINsbx7A which is hard to believe was already 4 years ago . Will be attending again here in a few days and looking forward to it!

Crazy also to think it’s been 10 years since I joined this forum and got into the world of online marketing. When I started I had no clue what I was doing and was in disbelief of people posting 2k/day profits here from Facebook, and now it feels like everybody knows somebody who’s doing 6 figures/day lol. On the flipside I also hear how tough FB is, and don’t hear much chatter from affiliates these days as the number of successful ones seems to have dwindled. Then again it’s all about who you hang around with, and I mostly talk to others doing e-commerce.

What I’ve been up to:

In 2020 I got into owned and operated Ecom after feeling the squeeze on profit margins with affiliate offers on native. Things took off fast and within 90 days was hitting $1M revenue per month during peak Covid and did around 7M in sales for the year. Unfortunately things ended with me filing suit against the partner and massive debt. It finally settled recently, but it's been a really rough few years.

Starting Fresh:

The good news is that I should be completely out of debt soon and have a newfound life purpose after going through all that, being stronger physically, mentally, financially, even spiritually of all things. And I've learned a lot of big life lessons as a result. The only real bad news is that I’m essentially starting over and have to start pushing the snowball up the hill again, and after taking a lot of personal time off. That said I feel motivated to achieve more and have an ambitious goal in mind...

The Goal:

To build, scale, systemize, and exit an e-commerce company to the tune of $10 million+ by Jan 1, 2025. To achieve this at a 3x multiple of EBITA, I’ll need to achieve roughly 3.3 million in profit per year, or roughly 9-10k profit/day within 1 and a half years time. That’s certainly no joke for starting from scratch again but I think it’s achievable, especially after seeing one business asset sell for over $500k and dozens more selling like hotcakes for 3-4x multiple of EBIDA on various flipping sites per month.

I also want to get outside of my comfort zone and make some great tutorials and content along the way, especially video.

Why I’m pessimistic:

• Past performance is no guarantee of future results and sales certainly spiked during Covid.
• Times are tougher in the ad space these days with rising costs, FB issues, supply chain issues, and the lingering threat of recession on the horizon for the US, if not already affecting things.

Why I’m optimistic:

• “If you can do it once, you can do it again”
• I’ve learned a ton from all the mistakes made and opportunities lost, so I feel I have a good sense now of what to do, and equally as important what not to do this time around.
• I’ve got a kickass group of friends and associates also doing e-com to bounce ideas off of.
• One of the past verticals is very lucrative with high customer LTV, but not sure if I want to do a very similar business over again.
• I’ve been overhauling my sleep, diet, and overall routine to maximize energy, and productivity in hopes of getting more done in less time and with less stress this time around.

What I will and won’t be covering in this follow along:

• I probably won’t be able to reveal the exact products I’m selling in order to avoid handing the keys to a big dropshipper to come in and compete. At least not until I’ve built more of a moat and back-end profit (which I’ll cover) to make it tougher for copycats.
• I will however strive to reveal as much as I can otherwise.
• One of the main things I want to share is are my wins and failures hiring and systemizing everything, as that's the real key in my mind.

First order of business
First big thing will be finding a winning product to do a few hundred to few thousand/day in sales with and start building out the systems again. I already have two in mind which I've had copy written for by someone (the first key role to delegate... more on that later) and briefly tested one as an affiliate product which kinda tanked but I think it was more due to the source. Have a few odds and ends to get squared away with backend setup tech stuff and hope to be ready to go by my return from Barcelona in a week.

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Looking forward to this! I used to read your threads about Native testing strategies and got a lot of wisdom out of it

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Kelly I'm so so happy to see you bouncing back from that setback! All that debt and the lawsuit during the past few years wasn't fun.

You've got this!! And thanks for letting us all witness your journey.



Amy

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Hey, sorry to hear about the setback but skills and experience will always remain. Is this gonna be dropshipping with Shopify style or amazon?

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Following along

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Good question I'm going to be doing paid traffic with Shopify as the backend, and no Amazon to start. Will be doing as little dropshipping as possible as I found it affects refund rates, payment processing, and page quality scores too much to be worth it long-term without a solid strategy. Definitely keen to add Amazon as a channel though once I can hone in on a solid product with a custom branded name, as it should boost revenue a good 10-20% in general. Organic traffic boosted revenue a good 15-20% as well from running a ton of ads and people googling the product name, and I've heard having your product on Amazon can have an equally big boost to revenue.

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I remember watching this video on youtube a multiple times as a beginner in native ads.
Didn't know it was you.

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Ecom is pretty hard these days, ever think of shifting your focus a bit to either some sort of Recurring service or Lead Gen? Happy to provide tips on either of those if you want to dive in a bit.

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I've love to hear any tips you care to share on either.

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Great FA, will definitely follow

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Following along, nice motivational story to get prepare for AW

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May I know what's the best advice you can give to aspiring affiliate marketers who want to make $100,000 per day profits?

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Want a step by step guide or do you prefer a wire instead?

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Here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...table-XX-first!

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Should I go for paid traffic or organic traffic?

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The answer highly depends on your skills and talents.

Generally speaking paid traffic works faster but involves the risk of losing money. Building up organic traffic usually requires quite some investment of "time".

That being said... the best advice one can give you is simply: Take action today!

Otherwise your dream of 100k/day profits will stay nothing but a dream.

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$100k profit per day?
You need to have realistic goals.

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What's the most stable and quickest way of growing an organic traffic?

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$100k per day with organic traffic? Pretty much not possible unless you're lucky enough to create the next BIG thing.

$100k per month? Yup, that's doable and there are many bloggers doing that kind of money but it's a LONG process.

$100k profit per day with paid traffic? Doable, but VERY hard.

I would really follow jeremie's advice that he posted just a few posts above

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There is no quick way of building organic traffic... unless you are super lucky.

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Holy shit, @thedudeabides is back and he's gonna make a $10m exit

Some of the best Native threads on STM (and AWC vid) are by this guy, so definitely looking forward to glean whatever I can.

Hoping for some more hidden nuggets of Native traffic wisdom as well

Actuallllly. Using paid traffic in addition to organic traffic will build up your site rank (and traffic, obviously, duh).

Writing content helps too (targeted content using ahrefs).

And buying backlinks. Good ones. Like In the Ks.

I'm no organic guru tho. Just what I've heard.

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That was my understanding of how it works too, but my own test didn't confirm this.

I started to buy some traffic to that cooking blog of mine just to see if it helps any. Didn't really see any effect of these activities though. I'm still buying some cheap clicks from google (display network)... managed to get the cpc down to something between 2 and 3 cents, so I keep running those since it helps to finetune some aspects of the site. On the side I had paid campaigns in FB, Insta... but nah, the SEO effect was/is minimal if any.

Working on the backlinks now. My original plan was to test how far I can get without that but seems like it's no possible to reach any serious numbers without this. But I don't feel like spending Ks on links, so starting with small 3 ABC trades to see how much that will help.

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2 and 3 cents?! I'm using the wrong traffic source

Do you just target 'the whole planet? all devices?' I've never actually used GDN (pretty sure I can count the STM threads on GDN with one nostril). I imagine you might get higher quality traffic by dropping some money on FB, Native, google/bing search, but it's also a nice way to burn money.

Again, I have no clue what I'm talking about. But. I've heard it still takes time for google to send out their army of bots to lick the ice cream.

And it depends on how how well your internal links are setup.

They call it silos. I have no idea what thae means tho.

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+1 keen on a thread on this

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2-3 cents in UK, US and CA But the traffic is not that good and not very targeted. I'm using photos of food in the Ads so it naturally attracts a lot of clicks. But once it hits the website, most of them bounce and not many signup for the newsletter. But at that price, I don't really complain.

Google takes ages to rank with that's for sure

Ah yes silos... you basically set a main topic and then diversify the categories as you go down. So in my case that could be like:

Meat based recipes -> that splits into pork/beef/poultry -> poultry would split into chicken/turkey/duck and so on. One silo would represent a major category basically.

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