I know I’ve really lagged on posting this final update to the 30 day challenge that I presented to myself. Unfortunately, personal life got in the way and made it very difficult to have much focused time at my computer. My wife and I are actually in the process of selling our current house and purchasing a new one. During this process, I’m constantly forced to leave the house so the various real estate agents can show the house. Never knowing when they’re going to be coming by has made it extremely difficult to really get dug in to a post.
To top that off, the new house that we’re purchasing is about an hour away from our current house. Driving up there several times per week to meet with realtors and lenders haven’t made things much easier either.
So I really do apologize to all of you who have gotten sucked in to the challenge only to have me go silent for several weeks. It wasn’t my intention to do that…
Now… On to the results.
As you can probably guess from the title of this post, the results were less than stellar. I came really close to proving one theory correctly but nowhere near proving another.
To give you the synopsis, I’ve proven to myself that I can easily build a list close to 1,000 subscribers in 30 days. That’s actually pretty dang easy if you’re willing to spend some money to build that list. On the other hand, my attempts to monetize this list failed miserably. My efforts resulted in about $50 in sales so far.
Some of this failure to generate a lot of cash with this campaign may be due to losing some focus due to housing issues. However, I think the bigger issue comes from other issues…
What I learned…
1. All traffic sources are not created equal. I think the largest issue that I had was that the majority of my leads were created through solo ads from Safe Swaps. It’s now my belief that leads obtained from Safe Swaps solo ads are of poor quality. People on that site tend to build their lists through adswaps. To do an adswap people need to give away free products. Therefore most of the leads generate through solo ads from that site are people that are only looking for free products and are still unwilling to pay for information products.
I think, however, that even freebie leads from places like Safe Swaps can be warmed up and eventually turned in to buyer traffic but it will take some effort and some really good sales skills to eventually turn them.
2. Affiliate sales may not be the best way to start. With this challenge, I offered a free report to build the list and then immediately tried to sell an affiliate product. I now believe that it’s much easier to sell affiliate products once you’ve built your own personal brand a little bit. People need to know, like, and trust YOU before they’re willing to take recommendations on other products from you.
I think, in the future, the way to go would be to immediately attempt to upsell them on a product that I made instead of an affiliate product. This way people are purchasing something that’s highly relevant to what they opted-in for and they are getting an opportunity to get to know you a little better (making them more likely to take your recommendations in future).
3. Test more than one offer after the opt-in. One thing that I really screwed up on with this campaign is that I promoted one affiliate product immediately after the opt-in. If I was smart I would have continually split-tested different affiliate offers until I found one that actually made some sales for me. Instead, like an idiot, I kept holding out think that eventually the offer that I was promoting would start making sales… (It didn’t)
The results…
I ended up getting a total of 906 subscribers over the 30 day period.
This isn’t too bad of a result, seeing as I landed about 94 shy of my 30 day goal. It’s not the number I wanted but I got pretty close. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t monetize this list the way I had hoped. It was pretty dang unresponsive to my email blasts (as you can see from my open and click rates)…
Breakdown:
Total Opt-ins: 906
PPV Cost (TrafficVance): $313.53
PPC Cost (7Search): $34.95 (Paused Campaign)
Solo-Ads Cost: $572.06 (7 solo ads – 2,000 Clicks promised)
Total Cost: $920.54
Current cost per Opt-in: $1.02
As you can see, I got my cost-per-opt-in right where I wanted it to be. I was willing to pay about $1.00 per opt-in assuming that I could make $1.00 per month per opt-in. I’ve yet to see a return on investment but I’m not going to give up…
Next Steps:
I’m not giving up on making this profitable. I will get a return on investment out of this. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do it within the first 30 days but I will make sure I make my money back on it.
What I’m going to do next is build a mini-course with videos on how to do the stuff I taught in the free report I gave out. I’ll sell these videos for something inexpensive like $7-$17 immediately after they opt-in to try to build a buyers list. I’ll then continue to test mailing about different affiliate offers to the same list until some of them are successful.
I’ll continue to make periodic updates about what I’m seeing with this particular project so that I can prove that I will make it profitable.
I’m also moving in to a couple other side-projects. I’m experimenting with creating iPhone Apps as well as publishing books through Amazon and the AppStore. I’ll post more about how I’m doing these things in a later post. I’m already seeing a bit of income trickling in from my Amazon book sales so I’ll definitely be making a post about this in the next few weeks or so.
Feel free to leave any feedback or questions below. I’ll make sure to continue to keep you updated because I fully intend to make this project add, at least, $1,000 per month to my business.
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Thanks for the update Matt. I like your determination to make this profitable for you. It’s also good how you can see what worked and what didn’t work. Looking forward to hear how this project plays out for you.
Cheers,
Albert
Thanks Albert. I found list building to be insanely easy. I’ve found monetizing that list to be much harder than expected without much rapport with the list. I’ll keep working with it and building trust with it.
Matt,
Thanks for the update. I love this 30 day challenge and although you didn’t hit your profitability goal yet it still was fun to watch. Where exactly are you moving to? I live in Escondido so I’m just curious if you’re moving north or south from where you are now. Thanks agin – as always good stuff!
Thanks Irwin. I actually came real close to my list building goal. I’m just finding it harder than expected to make that list make money. The lack of name recognition and credibility definitely makes it harder than I was expecting. I’ll keep at it though.
I’m actually moving to Murrieta… So I’m actually going about an hour north of where I live now. Brand new house being built right now.
They have some nice houses in Murrieta! And you’re getting a brand new house too – congratulations!
I’m looking forward to reading about what you do to make money from your list. Good stuff as always Matt.
Hello Matt!
Is there a way to contact you? email?
You just did contact me.
You can also reply to any of my emails that I send out when there’s a new blog post, etc…
Hey Matt, thanks a lot for the update, have really learn much from it. I’ve had similar experience when i gave out free ebook in exchange for emails though i used paid advert. Within one month i was getting about 800 subscribers. But what that got me pissed of is the fact that when i send out mails to them, only about 2% out of the 800 subscribers will open it. Please whats your own advice to this?
Lets Succeed Together.
Thanks for commenting Theodore. I think the problem is in how the list was built (at least in my situation). I built it using mostly solo ad purchases from people who built their list with freebies… These don’t seem to be buying leads.
I also offered somewhat higher ticket priced products when I promoted to the list. In my next round, I’ll be experimenting with promoting much lower priced items and then working the buyers up to higher priced items over time.
I am surprised you were getting such a low response rate from all that advertising… I have never used PPV or PPC, but I have bought $250 in solo ads from Safe-Swaps and SoloAdDirectory and I was able to make all my money back the same week with only 2 follow ups.
I had a fully monetized, rebranded PLR funnel offering 21 video trainings for $10-$17 depending on if it was an OTO, discount offer, or email followup. The thankyou and download pages had 3 affiliate offers which converted really low, but enough to make a couple extra sales.
I actually got into ad swaps and was able to make a sale per day by doing daily swaps for two weeks, and I very quickly burnt out my list of 1,700 and had to start all over.
I did find that people were attracted to the video offer. The perceived value of video is definitely much higher than text or anything like that.
I have been reading through a lot of the posts related to this challenge (I found your site from a link from a blog from a Tweet from Ana Hoffman lol), and it’s really interesting to see how things went along.
Thanks a bunch,
-Gabe
That’s very interesting Gabe. Safeswaps solo ads seemed to build the list easily for me but they all seemed to be bum leads… As in they’ll opt-in for a freebie but ignore any attempt at something being sold to them.
I may give the traffic method another go in the future but I need to work with much lower priced items. I was promoting $97 products as OTOs and in list mailings. Maybe the trick is to sell them real low priced stuff.
More tests on the way.
The subscribers I had loved products in the $7-$17 range, but when I shared Traffic Dashboard with them I only sold 1 copy to that list ever. It was weird, since cold traffic bought that from my last blog at almost 10%
The biggest problem I had was finding quality products in that range to sell. I still don’t even feel ready to create my own products (but who really does before they actually just do it?), but that might be a good idea.
And awesome! Tests are always fun and interesting!
Thanks,
-Gabe
I agree. Not all traffic is created equal. I think, these days, it’s real hard to see results with a list if your primary goal is affiliate marketing. I think being a product creator as well helps build that credibility and helps people trust you and want to buy your recommendations…
Hi Matt
thanks for sharing your resultas on your challenge. It’s so important to know your conversation rates as you do, and now you have a list of more than 900 people – treat that list as pure gold and build raport with these people, and you will get back your investment.
Good luck with getting your old house sold and move into a brand new home
cheers
Tina
Thanks Tina. I’ve got some ideas that I’m going to test and I’ll share them as soon as I have the results!
Thanks for the update, Matt. I appreciate that you fronted up with a less-than-stellar result.
I think the really interesting part comes next. I mean, most online money-making strategies don’t work at first. And most people give up when they belly-flop.
However, success usually comes when you learn from a glitch, adapt your methods, and then find a new way through.
I’m impressed with your attitude, Matt! I like the fact that you’re determined to continue.
Thanks so much for putting yourself out there, Matt. It’s like you’re doing the experiments for us.
I could imagine a whole series of challenges where you take up different pathways to residual income.
Is there any way we can support you in this? I mean, apart from writing comments?
- Mary Jaksch
PS Here’s an idea: put a ‘Donate’ button in your sidebar and I’ll donate $10 towards your experiments
Thanks Mary. The experiments are fun and I’m in a position now where I’ve got the capital from my other ventures to really test them out.
I’ve got a lot of ideas for other challenges! Including iPhone applications, Kindle books, etc… It will be fun to show them all as I work on them.
Thanks so much for the comments and the support.
This experiment hasn’t been a total failure though. I did build my list to nearly 1,000 subscribers. It’s an asset. I’ve just got to really over-deliver with cool content to that list and get them paying attention to me now.
Hey matt, if solo ads from safe swaps are not good, where do you recommend me to get olo ads? thanks
Well it’s not that solo ads from Safe-Swaps are no good… It’s that I couldn’t make them work well for my experiment. It could have been the quality of the lists I purchased from, it could have been that my offer just stunk… It’s all a testing and tweaking game. I don’t know of other places at the moment for good solo ads other than Safe-Swaps. Test a couple from there and see how they work out for your offer.
I actually tried two, one’s list didn’t even download what they signed up for, I think there is some kind of manipulation going here..
Hey matt, it’s been a while since you have finished the challenge..what’s the results so far?
I also started a challenge of my own!
Setting up goals really keeps me motivated to take action again and again!
I will be posting the challenge results soon, and if the results are good I will
explain step-by-step how I did it
You can check it out on – http://www.tomyevsikov.com/TrafficChallenge
By the way Im in a v.i.p group with alex jeffreys and I understand what you mean by building a database of fans instead a huge list!
you guys both rock.