BLOG INCOME
$699.00
PAID ADVERTISING
REVENUE: $11,951.50
COST: $9,967.75
P/L: + $1,983.75
TOTAL INCOME
$2,682.75
Promising First Week
For some reason, the first week of my months always seem to start of relatively BIG only to drop off somewhere in the middle 🙁 . Same thing here. I had a pretty sweet start to the month, then, struggled to keep the momentum. This seems to be one drawback with teespring and I’ve complained about it before in my earlier monthly reports. It’s difficult to keep the momentum with your design as once you’ve exhausted all horizontal and vertical expanding possibilities, it’s relatively dead.
I actually found a few really profitable teespring campaigns designs but the demographic wasn’t big enough to sustain the positive ROI for too long. After a week or so the frequencies of my FB ads started to reach 1.7-2.0 and CTR dropped significantly, consequently increasing my Click/Engagement Costs and yielding me neutral to negative ROI.
Because of the actual demographic and geo location I was selling my merchandise in, I was able to successfully sell hoodies this time instead of shirts and so my commission per sale was around $17! This gave me a pretty big marketing test budget as all I needed was 2 sales off my test budget of $30 to continue with the campaign. I had about 2-3 successful campaigns like this so my ROI for just those campaigns was pretty good.
Must.Continue.Testing
Whenever I hit successful campaigns like this I always make it a point to increase my level of ‘test campaigns’. For every 1 or 2 campaigns that are bringing me a decent profit, I have about 4-6 campaigns I’m testing. Testing meaning, they’re variant or completely new designs set at $10 a day to see if anything picks up.
I learnt the lesson a long time ago, if you don’t continue to test or grow your positive yielding campaign collection, then you’re bound to hit rock bottom again. You HAVE to keep your mind ticking with ideas and more importantly must act on these ideas, putting them into practicing and seeing how they fair in the real world.
This is another big reason why my overall ROI is so bad. Take Monday the 7th for example. I spent almost $1k on FaceBook advertising that day, only to return a profit of $165.48! Believe it or not, I actually expected this because I was testing about 15-20 campaigns that day. I was actually just happy I had a positive day lol. The big takeaway here is, if you want to make this a business, you HAVE TO HAVE TO HAVE TO keep testing things, so when your campaigns die off, you have others that take the spotlight.
Smashing Through my 100 Datafeed Sites & First Commission!
I haven’t ditched this. A while ago I wrote about how I wanted to grow my organic income. I decided to do so by building out 100 datafeed powered websites. If you don’t know what they are, I wrote a blog post for beginners on the topic. Have a read of it if you need to.
Although I did quite a lot with Teespring & FaceBook in July, my main focus was to make some serious progress with my Datafeed Challenge. I’ve documented the whole process in the AffPlaybook forums for those that want to dig a little deeper.
I ended up building almost 60 sites JUST in the month of July. When I first started the challenge and committed myself to building out 100 sites, I knew I’d lose motivation somewhere in the middle. Especially when the results from this datafeeds were only going to be seen 2-3 months after they’ve been built so I wouldn’t have any ‘small wins’ to motivate me through the process.
I anticipated this before I even started so I knew, in order to finish this challenge I HAD to outsource a large chunk of it so I could lay back and still have this project moving forward. My employee, (if I can call him that), was building 90% of the site, from building the actual store out on datafeedr to integrating it into a website. All I had to do was define the niche, find the keywords I wanted as categories and install wordpress on the domain so it was ready to go.
He did about 80% of each datafeed and made about 4 a day. I just had to come in and do some final touches and we were together able to build out 4 fully functioning datafeed sites each day for almost 20 working days!
Although, much of the praise should go to him as he did most of the work, I was proud of the fact that I was able to remove myself from the project and still have them working to the level I needed them to be.
In other news however, I got my first sale! I’ve really just had a trickle of traffic come in but someone bought a $400 product giving me a commission of around $19.00. Awesome feeling. The site was only 3-4 weeks old so no idea how that happened lol. Luck I guess. It gave me a bit of hope that this technique CAN work if given enough time. If you want to give this a go, I highly suggest using datafeedr, they make this SO easy. I’ve used beyondhosting to host all these in hence why they load so quick. Load times and server reliability contribute massively to your affiliate marketing efforts so if you want to try something like this I highly recommend beyondhosting.
Free Teespring Tutorials
I think there is a serious need for free entrepreneurship education online especially for those who are right in the middle of the industry and know what’s happening. Keeping this in mind, I’ve seriously decided to make a big set of free teespring tutorial sets. This report was late in coming and I’m writing it at the end of August so the tutorials are already out. You can check them here. I’ll elaborate more on this in my next monthly report but just know they’re out there, ready for you guys to watch and get straight into all this teespring action 😀
Same PPV offer giving me profits!
One huge contrast in my business is comparing the stability of my PPV campaign with my teespring efforts. I’ve had to continuously build on my teespring campaigns for months now giving it around 3-4 hours of attention almost every working day! Compare this with my PPV campaign which I’ve been running continuously since I first started this blog! That’s around a years worth of positive income for something I probably worked on for a month.
It still gets me around $500 a month, sometimes even $1,000 lol. It’s an offer I’m running off Maxbounty, (which are a GREAT CPA Network), and using popular PPV trafficsources like Leadimpact, Trafficvance and 50OnRed to promote. You can use any of those traffic sources as they all have really good quality.
I keep telling myself to go back to PPV and try and expand the campaign further as it’s so stable but just haven’t had the time to.
Ending Remarks – Going Forward
Both June and July were actually pretty good months. I see a good month as being a month I’ve learned a lot in as opposed to a month I’ve made a lot in. I really didn’t expect much of a profit during these months but my creativity and ability to continue to find profit somehow always seems to impress me lol. I still have random periods of negative only to have it all replenished and covered for 5 fold when I hit something good.
I’m also starting to become more and more disconnected to the emotional feeling of feeling sad or gloomy when I have negative ROI days. I’m realizing that these periods of time are more just a time and financial investment into something positive that will eventually come in the future.
Evolution of an affiliate marketer I guess 🙂
Moving forward, I feel August is going to be a similar month as I’m still focusing my efforts on other things. I’ll be releasing the report quite soon into the month of September though so look out for it!
All the best
~ Mateen
Want to get Serious with Internet Marketing? Join us on Aff Playbook Below!
Congratz Mateen that you disconnected to the emotional feeling on negative ROI days.
I learned a lot from your TeeSpring tutorial! They’re much better, have more value than many other paid products out there. Thank you so much!
Thanks Hieu,
You’re the first person to give feedback on them and I am grateful! I think I’ll make a tutorial section on my blog about anything and everything I have success with. Great things to come hopefully 🙂
~ Mateen
Hey Manteen.
It’s your reports that got me started in teespring and keeps me going in it.
Keep up the good work – very inspiring
Good to know Sig! Thanks commenting.
Hi, Mateen. First of all I would like to commend you for sharing these valuable insights. I noticed you have not been making significant amount of money from Teespring for quite some time. Personally I think Teespring is not worth doing anymore for me. More and more gurus are selling Teespring courses. If it still has great potential I don’t think they would share those strategies to increase their competitions. Most likely they are trying to squeeze as much possible from it before the ship sinks. But I do think Teespring is an ever green deal but just not as profitable as it used to be.
I’m totally new to CPA offers. In this post you’ve mentioned you’ve been generating consistent income from PPV for quite some time. I have a couple questions regarding PPV and Datafeedr.
1) How automated is PPV model? How much time do you spend monthly on it?
2) For PPV, if it takes very little effort to maintain then why don’t you scale it up like Datafeedr?
3) For Datafeedr, what traffic sources does it rely on?
4) Do you generate content for your data feed sites?
Hey Zenith.
Teespring is an interesting affiliate program. You never know what you’ll come across. Sometimes you come across small wins, sometimes HUGE wins. I think I’d agree with you to a large degree, it’s definitely harder to make big money with TS, but it’s still being done.
To answer your questions,
1) This depends on a LOT of things. Traffic source you’re using, offer type you’re promoting, budgets, competition etc. Sometimes you’ll find a great campaign only to have that offer pulled from the network. Sometimes your traffic source will tell you they don’t want you to promote that offer anymore. Sometimes the affiliate network will tell you your traffic source is giving them crap performing leads and so will tell you to stop promoting their offer. I would put PPV in between teespring and google PPC in terms of stability. It’s stable depending on what you’re promoting but still can be taken away from you in a matter of days. I spend maybe 1 or 2 hours on it a month just to check if everything is working well.
2) Datafeedr was more of an experiment, I just liked doing it in bulk. I spent a lot of time with this particular PPV campaign at the start and had decided to let it be where it is and move on to explore other things.
3) Mainly Google organic traffic but there’s no reason to not try other methods.
4) Nope, just set and forget right now. Again, it’s an experiment and so I don’t want to give too much advice on it till I can confirm certain parts of it as a success.
Hope that helps!