PAID ADVERTISING EFFORTS
REVENUE: $0.00, (No Teespring Activity)
COST: $0.00, (No Teespring Activity)
P/L: N/A
BLOG INCOME
+$3,798.10
LIST BUILDING INCOME
COST: $1,871.35
REVENUE: 2,092.17
P/L: $220.82
$4,108.10 U.S.D
And another month goes by!
This month had a few ups and downs. I’ve always evaluated my months in terms of how much I’ve learned being more important than how much money I’ve made. Although the latter is what we’re all in it for, it’s what we learn that make it achievable so for me, this has always been a big focus.
April was a lot of learning. Building a business has many parts to it. Backend content/product creation is the first, easiest and most comfortable step, making sales is where people struggle. This is where FaceBook advertising and paid advertising mastery in general comes in. Once you conquer this, the next step is to RETAIN customers and build on a database increasing your repeat sales and building relationships with existing customers. THIS is what I’m trying to learn now.
Competitions to Build Repeat Customers, (email lists)
This month I collected a total of almost 15k emails. That’s a LOT for me considering most times I get 2-3 email opt ins for my blog. I also made over 2k from that list and am sure I will continue to make more.
Email list building is what Teespring lacked. Of course they collect that data for you and you can email out to your customers but OWNING that list is something else.
Now I have a customer base I can continually email products out to. Even if I sell 10-20 product per email and I email out once/twice a week, that’s almost a cool 1-2k. Best thing is, I don’t have to worry about spending money on advertising!
This is why my Teespring income has dropped. I’ve focused a lot of my attention to master this so I can build massive lists and in turn build big niche specific communities/blogs/forums/ecommerce sites and other assets that don’t disappear after a sale.
At some stage of their career, every affiliate marketer will want something more steady and stable and without so much cost to it.
Suspended Teespring Campaign
After such a long drought, (almost 100 failed Teespring Campaigns), I FINALLY found something that worked. After some tweaking it was a steady $250/day profit campaign and I was sure it would have gone on to make me 5k profit.
That was until I received a campaign suspension notice from Teespring. My heart sank and I felt like crap. It was a totally new design but had the same saying that another Tee had. Personally, I don’t think saying should be trade marked. It’s stupid to hold the rights to a saying U.S.A wide but oh well.
I spent 1.8k on advertising and had made 3.5k in sales. THANKFULLY Teespring paid for my advertising, (1.8k), my argument being they let it run for 6 days until calling it out and suspending it. That’s 6 days of me assuming everything is fine and increasing my spend budgets. Obviously if I had known from day 1, I would have stopped the camp immediately and moved on.
Oh well, you live and you learn and it’s just one of those things you throw behind you and forget about.
Stopped all Teespring Activity For Now
After the above saga, I decided to just drop Teespring for a while and focus on list building. It’s always good to take some time off. You’ll come back more dedicated.
I’ll probably jump back in and launch another 100 camps. I always have a quantity goal in mind when trying something and that number is usually 100. If I try an internet marketing approach 100 times, learning EACH time and tweaking things, I’ve always been confident I’ll break through. This case is no different, I just needed a break.
Giveaways & Free eBooks are GOLD for List Building
An email these days is becoming as valuable as a phone number. People are reluctant to give it since EVERYONE seems to want it. From offline business that want to build their customers to everyday services that spam you for upgrades to us internet marketers.
The only way I was able to build my list was by running giveaways. Have something REALLY enticing and run a competition for it. Monitor how much you’re paying for opt-ins and tweak accordingly.
Teespring campaigns are great for this. Run an FB -> custom product campaign as you would normally. If you’re getting sales and in profit than stop the campaign and run it as a competition where people have to opt in to be in it. i Had to run a good 5-10 competitions before I was getting decent opt in costs, (5-15 cents).
Our Teespring Forum
Our Teespring Forum has grown to over 300 members!
From sharing product reviews and opinions to having discussions on which platform do well, the Forum is quickly becoming a pretty good learning base even for me!
Some of the members are sharing a lot and have great experience with Teespring. If you’re not part of it make sure you are. Participate where you can and I’m sure you’ll learn a tonne.
‘Teespring Gems’ – Video Tutorials
I’ve been posting these EVERY day! What are they? Small snippets of gold nuggets that are directly Teespring related. From design techniques to marketing techniques, there’s something you can learn from every video.
I’d dedicate a good day in going through each one. I’ve made sure to make them 2-5 minutes so they’re easily digestible.
I’m also making a lot of ‘design’ oriented videos that will get you up to speed with using photoshop for Teespring. It’s going to be tough for any affiliate depending on fiverr or their own designer. It CAN work out but not being able to do small tweaks your self is a BIG down side. Whether you’ll use it in your Teespring adventures or some time down the track, it’s a GREAT skill to have.
Go through the Teespring Gems section, check back every week and watch what you haven’t yet. It’s a mind dump of EVERYTHING I know.
Teespring Related Tools
I want this blog to become the go to place for ANYTHING custom product related. Whether you’re running Teespring campaigns or your own niche eCommerce site, hopefully this place will have all the information you need to make money from them.
Something that occurred to me recently was that there’s just SO MANY Teespring products out there. From Tools that claim to guarantee 5k months to eBook charging you an arm and a leg.
I’m hoping to go through all the popular ones and giving my honest critique on what I think of the tools/services. If there’s anything that comes to your mind let me know!
Moving Forward
May has been a whole lot of the same. Building lists, running competitions and learning how to best monetize them. Again, there’s still so much to learn, I’ll be doing this for a good while.
Hopefully all this will pay off once it all starts to click and mesh wonderfully together. The benefit internet marketers have over many others is knowing how to drive paid marketing to profitable sales campaigns. Trust me, that’s a HUGE skill to have in this day and age.
Now, it’s just putting it all together and finding something that works best. That’s where I’m at at the moment.
~ Mateen
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about the suspend design. Are you still “miss” him.
Didn’t quite get you Dave?
Instead of dropping the TeeSpring-model, why not start your self-hosted shirt shop so you can build your list and sell shirts yourself? I’ve seen a few API-based shirt-printers out there – so you could still automate the whole thing (and run evergreen campaigns at the same time) :).
Yeah, I’m trying something like that! I’ve found a few good platforms that support that model, it’s just trying to find a good number of buyer traffic and keeping products fresh.
Hey Mateen,
15K list subscribers in the month is awesome and at 5-15c per opt-in even better! Was this for the blog or a different niche?
I’ve been totally distracted with Teespring for the past couple of months but am getting back to also dedicating time to building a long term blog with an email list. I had my first attempt at list building last year and my cost was about $1.80 per subscriber – checked out the FB targeting I used in my ad though and it was TERRIBLE! Teespring has taught me a lot that should get that cost down significantly this time around.
Hey Krista, yeh thanks, it is quite a bit. Different niche, not this blog.
Great thing about Teespring is it’s taught us how to target! That’s the reason I could get cheap opt ins. You should definitely give it another go, 50 cents per opt in is pretty easy but I try and bring it down to at least 20 cents.
I followed your blog for a long tome bur this is my 1st comment.
i would like to ask you 2 question one of them is how did you create this list subsribers and your blog income is only from affengineer.com or do you have another blog
thank you
Subscriber list was generated through running competitions and giving away a shirt for someone randomly drawn. I’ll write more about this later. Blog income is 100% from this blog. I have some more projects but they’re yet to bring in decent income.
Thanks for continuing to do these Income Reports, Mateen. They’re very inspiring and informative. Can you explain a little more the following paragraph? “Teespring campaigns are great for this. Run an FB -> custom product campaign as you would normally. If you’re getting sales and in profit than stop the campaign and run it as a competition where people have to opt in to be in it. i Had to run a good 5-10 competitions before I was getting decent opt in costs, (5-15 cents).”
Do you mean run a “Win this t-shirt for free” competition? So people have to opt-in and are then redirected to the Teespring campaign? Also, how are you tracking your cost per opt-in?
Basically yes. I use a the kingsumo giveaway plug in. REALLY expensive, (cost me like $250!). It tracks opt ins and runs the giveaway for you. I insert a conversion pixel into the plug in that lets FB track cost per lead etc.
I’ll write about all this in some other posts, I just need to master it first so I know what I’m talking about lol.
Great work!
Kind of sucks about teespring though, are you going to jump into it again?
yeah, just need a break ==’
Have you already tried teespring alternatives like represent.com, fabrily, etc? I´ve been testing represent seller dashboard and think it has better tools for selecting tshirs styles and color and for tracking your campaings, but I rarely see ads promoting tees made at represent, even using teespy, what dou you think about it Mateen?
Unless there’s a clear benefit in trying a different platform, I don’t bother. I have had issues in the past with some of my tees and Teespring seem to always resolve them to my satisfaction. Not to mention, it’s hard to trust other platforms with big payouts.
That being said, I try a few other platforms due to having a different product range. Eg, Fabrily, Fyves, myteestore, etc.
hi, i am wondering if you can do some training video in list building
Yep, I want to make money with it first, then I’ll make tutorials. That way I know it works. No point making tutorial videos on theories that I think work.