How I finally started making money online (A True Story)

One of the most frustrating things about reading forums such as DigitalPoint, is that you often hear about people making a lot of money, but they really don't tell you how. Its always ambiguous, and if they do give away their method, it is usually too late to do it for yourself. Because of this, I wanted to share with everyone the only way I've been able to make significant money long-term, that didn't fizzle out or become nonviable.

There were three keys to success here. The first was to realize that I was (for the most part) wasting my time with quick fix, blackhat/greyhat promotions on affiliate shit, and that I should instead be selling an actual product for myself. In other words, I should be in E-commerce.

The second was realizing that it was in my best interest to sell an actual product, and not through an affiliate program, but instead through a dropshipper. Dropshippers offer much much better profits than affiliate programs, and they usually don't require a whole lot of additional work.

The second key to success was in finding a niche that was actually profitable. This part happened by accident (as many great things do). I do freelance SEO and PPC consulting, and one of the projects I was contracted on was to do PPC and SEO for an adult toy site. During my work with this, it became apparent that I had stumbled upon an incredible niche. Here is what I learned about the niche during my time doing work for my client:

1. It has a huge number of consumers, there are millions of searches done daily for adult toy keywords.

2. It's not prohibitively competitive. There are a lot of sex toy sites, but most are bullshit affiliate sites that don't rank, and never will. If you have basic link building skills, expect to be pulling in a few hundred organics within a few months.

3. There are thousands of products. This means there are millions of keywords that people use to find these products. New products become popular often and there are always new opportunities

4. It's relatively recession proof industry. Sex, drugs, alcohol, these are things people continue to buy. I've noticed very little if any drop off since the economy went to shit.

5. Adult toys are becoming much more accepted and mainstream. Anyone notice how often sex toys are talked about or featured on television these days? The consumer base is expanding for adult toys in a big way.

6. It can't be eroded like free porn has done to other segments of the adult industry. You physically need to have the product.

7. People don't like to buy adult toys from brick and mortar sex shops. It's a private thing, and they want to do it from home on the internet.


So, needless to say, I decided to involve myself in this niche. I realized the only way to really make money with it was to go with a dropshipper. There are lots of adult toy affiliate programs (even ones that give you a "free" site) but they are shit, they look bad, and you dont own the site, and you make shit profits (10%with affiliate VS. 50%-70%with dropshipping). So I went on a hunt for a good e-commerce designer and a dropshipper that would do dropshipping for a startup. It was a frustrating search because of the few adult toy dropshippers, almost all require minimum orders. Usually in the amount of $100, meaning you would have to sell $200/day in sales to have a decent turn around time on orders.

Luckily, through some contacts, I found a dropshipper with no minimum order, that also did custom e-commerce design with their products pre-loaded. They also hooked me up with credit card merchant services so I could take orders through the site.

Once everything was up and ready, I started with PPC. I utilized some vouchers and was up on Google and Yahoo within the first week of having my new site online. I focused on building out a very comprehensive PPC campaign, creating campaigns for each catagory of product. Inside each campaign I did each sub catagory, and then specific products. for instance: Dildos & Dongs ---> Double Dongs ---> 8" Purple Double Dongs

etc. etc. and built it out as far as I could for pretty much every type of product, covering a good percentage of the longtail. I also did things like bidding on Competitors Brand names, and Manufacturers brand names, which was quite successful for me.

To give you an idea about how I did with pay per click:

In my experience, conversion rates are in the 2-4% range, and I can pull down at least 1,000 PPC hits per day at about 11 cents per click (using Adwords and Yahoo).

This gives me an ad spend of around $110 bucks per day. At a 3% conversion rate, that gives me roughly 30 sales per day. Average sale for me is $60, and I mark up everything on my site 100%. So profit on each sale before advertising costs is $30 per sale. Giving me daily profits of ($900 - $110 ad spend)= $790 Per Day.

Now getting to this point with PPC took effort, so anyone thinking they can get there by shitting out a crappy list of keywords is wrong. I looked at my analytics daily, and was diligent about adding keywords, pruning keywords, adjusting bidding and testing ads.

In addition to PPC, I set up a blog for the site, and began writing blog posts on a regular basis. Basically I found funny sex/sexuality related shit and posted it, then submitted it to social media sites like reddit.com, reddit.com/r/nsfw, digg, and a bunch of others (I used one of those automated sites that helps you submit to all the social media sites). Over a few months I picked up enough links to start to see some real gains in organic traffic (this niche is not extremely competitive organically, You can actually rank on the long tail fairly easily) , and all the sales from that have been gravy on my PPC sales.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that with everyone here. I love Digitalpoint, and I havent contributed much, so I figured maybe this would redeem me a bit. If anyone has any questions, I'd always love talking more about it so you can hit me up on AIM: ctynski14 or PM me.

 

Very nice, Jack. It's always interesting to read others' success stories, even though I did not get much into details I actually got the point. Wise approach to adult stuff. Interesting.

 

Thanks for sharing your story it really sets the bare bones and steps one would need to go through. I'm also interested in opening up an ecommerce site but I don't know how or where to start. I'm new to ppc, adwords etc.

 

Wow you really went all out on all levels. You really did your homework.

 

Hi
thanks for sharing your success story, i will try to follow your way.

 

I think he is right cause I recently read/heard somewhere that the adult toy market is still on the rise even though the rest of the adult industry was on a bit of a slow down.

 

They don't tell how because they're fibbin'.

 

Thanks for sharing your success story.
You worked hard and thus got rewarded.
Yep its the right idea to look on money pothole.

 

You're right that adult toys are on the rise, especially compared to porn. Anyone notice how often adult toys are featured on TV? or is it just me because im in the BIZ now?

 

Im surprised to hear drop shipping gives you 50% profit on just a no minimum order?

How did you exactly find this drop shipper, just get on the phone and call around? Would you say its pretty rare to find one like that?

How is the shopping cart set up on your site. Was it pretty easy to do or do you have to do a lot of technical stuff, etc on your end too?

 

Very nice read. This is how I make a side income as well. E-Commerce. I don't have close to the knowledge you have and I'm actually in a very competitive market in my opinion, but I make a nice side of income that averages me about $2000-$3000 CDN a month.

It feels good logging into paypal and just seeing sales. I'm in the video game accessory business.I just did it on a whim and should have done more research into it, but I'm doing ok. I have a regular job still. I just bought a template and then got a design group out of Calgary to fix it up for me soit looked more professional.

The hardest part for me was finding a legit wholesaler. I don't dropship. I get all my items delivered and do the shipping myself. I've even made some money giving people access to my wholesaler for a small amount of money (Like people have directory lists on Ebay).

I'm not staying in it and my partner (Who is 4 years younger) is just going to take over soon and give me less profits.

Overall, like you said, E-Commerce can work great.

 

How did you find your wholesaler?

 

AliBaba. Contrary to what people say, you can get legit and honest ones. Mine also let me start off with as low as 5 pieces, but of course I ordered a lot more than that.

I have my wholesaler on Facebook and MSN and keep in touch constantly. She's really great.

I did get ripped off though the first two times I tried finding one.

 

Wow, what a great story. It goes to show when you set your mind to something success will follow if you work hard and smart at it.

 

Congratz on your success. Always do the research and get know more about the market, then do somthing with high market demand, and you will success.

I agree that there are huge customer (not only on adult toy but also other area), i'm doing some trading and it is easy to get customer if we provide quality and cheap product.

 

thanks for the info, i hope to get to your level soon

 

Thanks for sharing this important info !!!

 

nice info i wanna try too....

 

Congratulations, it sounds like you've got yourself a nice business there (and all the toys you could ever want!)

 

This is quite an inspiring story. I like the way that you decided to share your success, but also went into detail on how you did it. This is something that your rarely get for free these days. Forums become full of people saying this and that about what they earn, but it was a pleasure to reed your in depth experiences and your journey. Best of luck to you for now and the future, and thanks for a great read.