BLOG INCOME
$2,510.25
PAID ADVERTISING
REVENUE: $33,363.00
COST: $20,717.68
P/L: + $12,645.32
TOTAL INCOME
$15,155.57
Gotta love those 5 figure months…
Finally, some Big Numbers
12.6k might not be that big for a lot of seasoned IMers but for little ol’ me, it’s quite a big deal. Especially when you add another 2.5k from my blog and convert that total to Aussie dollars by multiplying by a factor of 1.2.
That’s an 18k profit month! Full-time work would bring me 4k/month after Taxes so I’ve just bought in 4.5 months of full-time employment in one month! Although my mind doesn’t really think like this anymore. Attempting to hit 10k months has become the norm as the affiliates in my circle are doing much more.
Still, seeing a bank account increase of 18k is awesome.
Confessions of a Teespringer
One thing I haven’t mentioned previously, (at least I don’t think I have), was that 95% of my campaigns have come from every country BUT the United States. In fact, most have been targeting Australia and New Zealand.
Why? The same campaigns worked a lot better in these countries when compared to the States. I would think it’s because Aus/NZ were less saturated. The same campaigns, when launched in U.S., would flop big time. The problem with these countries however, was the considerably smaller audience size. A profitable campaign would last about a week and bring in 1k or so but I’d hardly have anything over 100 sales. I’d be in awe of people posting screenshots of 500+ sales which I knew was ONLY possible with a larger audience size.
Changing Things up a Bit
This month, I decided enough is enough and started to test heavily with U.S. I launched about 100 campaigns in the space of 2 weeks and found a few really big winners, (audience size 5 million+). Because of this I was able to sell 500+ shirts/hoodies and have campaigns run for a good month. Things felt more ‘passive’ and I started to feel like I found a solution to my 3-4k months.
From now on I’m focusing on making things work in the United States, you just can’t beat the scaling potential there.
Scaling The Right Way
Every time I would have a successful campaign that was giving me decent, consistent ROI, I’d try increase the budget/scale it. E.g, if I was spending $50 and bringing in $100, I’d try maintain the 100% ROI and increase budget to $100, expecting $200 in revenue.
Each and every time I did this, my revenue would stay the same or barely increase! I just couldn’t figure out why. This time around I decided to do things differently. I broke my winning campaign into multiple ad sets by set age groups. E.g, if my campaign was working for 40-65 year olds, I’d split it to,
40-45,
46-50,
51-55,
56-60,
60-65,
65+
I’d put $20-$50 towards each of these ad sets depending on which age groups were converting the best and monitor the campaign for a few days. The age sets that were doing well, I’d increase ONLY those budgets and keep the average performers with low budgets. This is probably common knowledge and you’d think I’d have figured it out by now but I hadn’t. By doing this I was successfully able to scale one of my campaigns from spending $200/day to $600/day! It’s still bringing in 100%+ ROI which is about 1.2k in revenue alone which is awesome. The audience size is 10 million+ so needless to say it’s a killer campaign. I’m expecting at least 2,000 sales at $20 per sale, ($40k), out of which a good 20k should be profit.
Increasing Profits with Jumpers
Christmas time was great for a lot of Teespringers that found success in Christmas Jumpers. I personally know someone who made 250k in November doing this. After reading his success story on Aff Playbook, I decided to give it a go! I got a couple working but got in way too late so couldn’t really make much with it.
HOWEVER, I found something really interesting. Something that’s increased my profits by over 30%. The base cost for jumpers was only $10-$13 compared to Hoodies at $20-$23! This means that I’d pocket $28 per sale instead of $17 if I were to push Jumpers instead of Hoodies.
Trying this theory out, I made a few campaigns where the feature product was a jumper, not a T-Shirt or Hoodie. Eventually I started selling at the same rate as my Hoodie campaigns, only this time was making much more per sale!
I recommend you guys to try it. Higher profit margins means more profit. You should be aiming to increase your revenue and decrease costs in every possible way and this is a definite way to increase your revenue.
Still Learning New Things
I’ve been focusing 100% on Teespring for pretty much all of 2014. It’s amazing how I’m STILL learning new things.
E.g, this month I learned,
– Scaling while maintaining good ROI
– Focusing on U.S.
– Pushing Jumpers to increase profits
– I’m sure there were more,
Bottom line, you can never call yourself a guru at something as you’ll always remain a student. Sure, you’ll be miles ahead of others but there will always be something more to learn which can further better your business. It just amazes me how I keep learning things from others even now and makes me feel like people wanting to get Teespring right straight off the bat are setting themselves up for disaster.
I’ve said it before, you need to treat Affiliate Marketing like a marathon not a sprint. You’ll have considerably more failures than successes, it’s just the nature of business. The main thing is pushing on and increasing your knowledge to the point where more of your decisions will be successes than ‘failures’.
Input VS Output
Prior to this month, I’ve been working quite a lot. About 4 hours per day to maintain my income at $200 profit/day. This month however, I started of REAL strong. 5-6 hour days, 10-15 campaigns per day. One week later I started slacking and the whole holiday mood started to take effect. Second week later I was barely working but luckily by that time I had found some massive campaigns.
I started working around 1 hour a day, mostly updating stats and launching the odd 1-2 campaigns but since I was bringing in a good income and knew it would continue for a good 2-3 weeks, I started to get lazy.
The input VS Output ratio in this business is kind of everywhere. You have people in this business barely working at all and making huge numbers where as others have to work 10 hour days to sustain the same income. What’s the difference? A lot of things. Processes, Smarter work ethics, Outsourcing, Different Affiliate Models.
This month I worked about 2 hours TOPS on my blog and it made me 2.5k in revenue with almost 0 cost. THIS is the type of income I love. No work, barely any maintenance and still a decent, growing income. It made me think about what I want in my life. There’s no point earning a lot of money when you’ve got to be stuck behind your computer to earn it.
Moving Forward
It’s 2015 as I’m writing this and I’ve achieved a lot of my goals I set in 2014. However, most of my activities was based on short term goals. This time, I want to look in the future and make decisions that increase my income and at the same time DECREASE the time spent earning it.
Ideally I’d like to work 4-10 hours a week and make 5 figures a month. To do this, I need to get myself out of Teespring. Either outsource a lot of the processes or stop it entirely and focus on other, long term affiliate models. My own product, blog growth, my own websites, etc.
before my focus was making a lot of money. Now it’s freeing up my time and focusing on my health and personal life. Let’s see what 2015 will bring. Hopefully success in every way for all. As long as we remember to put in the hard work, everything is possible.
What are Your Goals for 2015?
Mine are to build a more stable business. None of this 1k one month and 20k the next. I want to be hitting 20k EVERY month. To do this, I need to focus on asset building on not just the Teespring hit and run. I hope to,
– Engage more with my Blog Audience, (Twitter/Fb Group/Affengineer Forum)
– Build a 5 figure/month organic business. Something similar to this blog.
– Network with all the top affiliates in this industry. Not a fake ‘I help you, you help me relationship’, but a genuine one where we can just chat about non-affiliate related things and still enjoy each others company.
– Another 6 figure year. I made about 143k USD profit in 2014. I want to maintain 6 figures.
Comment Below on what you guys want to achieve. Good luck for 2015!
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Awesome work Mateen. Always inspirational reading your posts. Thank you for the tips. Got any advice for selling Teespring without FB?
Cheers!
Thank Neil!
I’ve had success with Google Adwords, (hit a $100/day campaign for a good month or so). There’s a case study on my blog somewhere about it, you’ll find it if you do a search).
Apart from that I heard Pinterest is going ahead with paid advertising so I’d definitely give that a crack.
I know someone who’s had success with media buying so try it with Google display network.
I haven’t really given it a fair go but am sure there are many methods out there that people don’t know about!
Hi Mateen. Many thanks for that advice. That’s great to hear. I’ll try Pinterest and Adwords and post on affengineer any results. Thanks again!
I am thinking of having my own t-shirt or shirt kind of e-commerce portal. Its take same effort and money as Teespring required..it will be very good long term business
Go for it!
“This month however, I started of REAL strong. 5-6 hour days, 10-15 campaigns per day. ”
Could you please explain what do you mean by “campaign”?
Do you produce 10-15 different designs, or maybe ads for several designs?
Thank you.
And congratulations
Hey Paul,
One campaign = One Teespring hoodie that’s being promoted. So 10-15 campaigns means 10-15 designs that I set up to be advertised for that day.
Hey Mateen, Congratulations for your fantastic achievement! What do you think how long is teespring going to be profitable? Do you see it as a trend or as a stable business? What about the datafeed sites have you give up on that?
Teespring is a hit and run type model. The stability depends on how hard you work.
I think there will always be opportunity with Teespring. I mean there’s a lot of people that will just buy something if they like it.
You’re awesome man. I just found your blog a few weeks ago and have gone through most of your posts now. Awesome stuff, thanks so much for writing out all the helpful tips. Hope you keep killin it it 2015!
Hey Mateen, Great results! Wish I could afford to roll out 100 campaigns.
What is a “jumper”? I am a male U.S. citizen and have never heard of it.
Thanks for sharing your journey!
Brett
Hey Brett,
Basically a Long Sleeve hoodie without the hood. Like this,
http://teespring.com/BORNRIDE56#pid=11&cid=377&sid=back
What’s it called in the States? (I’m from Australia).
Hey, Mateen, happy New Year!
So basically you are now selling long sleeves for $40 ?
Thanks for tips on scaling! I had a lot of sauch situations when i needed to scale , and my approach was to increase the budget which didn’t worked for every campaign..
Happy New Year to you too!
Yes, it’s my main item. I also have hoodies and shirts available. The item your customers see as soon as they land on the page will get the majority purchases usually.
Happy New Year Mateen!
Awesome results. Thanks for sharing!
Happy New year to you too,
No probs!
Hey Mateen, Greetings from India.
Just want to say thank you for being so open about your successes like what works and what doesn’t, coz its these things that really helps people like me who are planning to have their first campaign.
There are lots of “how tos” blogs in the internet that blabers about how its done, without really telling us what actually works.
You do that mate. Thank you so much for that.
Peace.
Hey Sam,
Thanks for the kind words, it helps me continue with this blog 🙂
All the best with your first campaign. Hopefully you’ll have many.
Hi, Mateen
Greetings from Monterrey,Mexico.
I have been folliwing your progresss for the last two months, I has motivated me to keep working at this IM thing, And I ‘m starting to see some positive resukts myself. Thanks!!
Great to hear Luis!
Congrats, and looking at the numbers of the Last days in the month, January Shirley be also a Great month.
Why do you compare your income before taxes with a Job After taxes? I guess your Business also has to pay taxes?
Thanks Marco,
January is looking pretty promising also.
Well, mainly because it makes me feel better :P. Although I DO pay considerably less business tax compared to when I was employed. It’s one of the perks of being in business. I do everything by the books but the way I’ve set things up, I don’t get taxed anywhere near as when I was employed.
I have recently published my first ever Income report on my Blog. Hope i could reach these people soon ..!!
My income report: http://blogunation.com/my-game-blog-monthly-income-traffic-report-december-2014/
My first aim is to reach $1000 per month. I think you are making it in one day here :3 . However, please have a look at my blog and give me some suggestions 🙂
Nice, I just checked it out. Impressed by the amount of traffic you’re getting. Keep it up!
“By doing this I was successfully able to scale one of my campaigns from spending $200/day to $600/day! It’s still bringing in 100%+ ROI which is about 1.2k in revenue alone”
1.2k revenue per day?
Thanks.
Yes, that’s correct.
Hey, have you experimented with lookalike audiences at all? I notice facebook usually creates large 1M+ audiences when you do this even with their most narrow audience option. Might be an opportunity to scale.
Yeh I ALWAYS Give Lookalike audiences a go. Base them off your conversion pixel when you want to expand a winning campaign. Always give them a shot, they’ve done wonders for me!
Do you have a certain amount of conversions you wait for before creating it? It would make sense that facebook could create a more precise lookalike audience with more data.
I actually wait till the first campaign is finished and then I make a LA audience which I don’t think is the best thing to do.
Probably best to make it after 20-40 conversions.
Man, I’m nowhere close to numbers like that…yet. Haha. Keep it up!
Neither was I one year ago, things just click eventually. Keep at it Wess!
Hi Mateen,
Happy New Year!!
Some of fancy tee patterns with ribbons, skulls, etc. However, I don’t have the skills to design them based on my PS knowledge. How did you design your own template except searching from Google/freepik? Any other places has the fancy resources?
Thanks~
Happy New Year Alex!
Most are just text base designs. The images I do use are free images, sometimes heavily modified and manually edited on PS.
Hi Mateen,
Great stuff with your blog and journey, especially when you let us inside your thought process.
Are most of your successful / monster campaigns just text only designs? I notice in your tutorials you add images as well, but I watched other youtube videos where they say you can kill it with just using text.
If not, I may have to outsource the design, which of course will increase the cost.
Both. I’ve had massive ‘just text’ campaigns AND some design + text campaigns.
You’re more looking for a strong ‘appeal’. You can do that just with text but sometimes the text will be too vague and you’ll need some images.
I’ts weird how it works, just test a bunch and see what you get back.
You CAN kill it with just text BUT still be a little creative with the type of text and size/colors you use.
What is driving your blog revenue? Affplaybook commissions?
Mostly they’re APB commissions. Also Aweber, Datafeedr and a few products I’ve mentioned here and there.
Hey man thanks for all the valuable info.
Quick question:
How do you allocate your budget on the 10-15 campaigns per day? At what spend do you decide to stop a campaign? From those 10-15, on average, how many do you maintain?
thanks!
Test budgets are set at $30/day. This doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll spend the whole $30 to test. I want to figure out within a day whether this campaign is good or bad so I’ll monitor the data I get back during the day and stop, increase budget accordingly.
I stop campaigns early if they give me real bad CTR or if I’ve spent $30-$40, without a sale.
Out of the 10-15, usually one will be breaking even – slightly profitable. Big winners are found after a lot of testing, sometimes 40-80 campaigns but when I DO find them, I’m able to make variations and expand to other countries which is worth it.
so around $300-450/day testing budget? ($30/day for each campaign)?
thanks for the candid response man! really appreciate it.
Yes but remember I don’t spend the FULL $30 for some campaigns, I might stop some at $15. Realistically I’ll spend $150-$250.
Hi Mateen,
I am struggled with some of my campaigns in which only sold 1~2 shirts after 2 ~ 3 days, the CTR was about between 5% and 6%, and spend about $20. I confused in this situation, if this is a good campaign should persevere with or should stop. Could you give some advices, what would you usually do in this condition??
thanks a lot ~
+ 150 likes
So you sold 1-2 shirts at total $20 spend? I’d definitely keep going. More people buy once your campaign has more sales.
Great, I’ll move on to see what happen. Thanks Mateen.
hi, how much do you think i should paying a designer per month and do you think you can outsource the research aspect of teesprings.
This part is complicated. You can outsource design but you will have to go back and forth many times before you can start getting the design right. I used to pay around $10-$20/hr = 1-2 designs based on how complex they were. Mostly text and a little design, which I would do the template of.
This is such an awesome blog man, such great value here, keep up the good work!
Thanks Alan!
Hey Mateen, good stuff.. quick question.. in an earlier blog post you mentioned you switched your campaigns to run with the conversion tracking in FB and were soley using this method, but in this blog post you mentioned you had to split your campaign into age groups (40-45, 46-50,51-55) to find the best converting ones (something you wouldn’t have to do with conversion tracking) so are you no longer using conversion tracking method in the campaign setups? If not what is the setup you mostly use (newsfeed promotion, optimized CPM? CPC? promote likes? etc) thanks!
Meaning optimize by conversions? At the moment I run PPE ads and split test age groups to find the best converting ones. I’ve thought about just going back to optimize by conversions in which case you’re right, you don’t need to split into age groups but I think having manual control over ad spend is better or FB just allocates random spends to each age group based on conversions, PPE performance etc.
Right now I use,
– Promoted Page post ads
– optimized CPM
– Optimize by PPE
Hope that helps,
Smashing it Manteen!
Inspiring and continuing to take your advice.
Thanks for the income update I check in here every month man.
Thanks for dropping by Sig!