Howdy folks.We’re back in action on the site. Going to be publishing more content, getting deeper into the e-commerce game, and getting jiggy with it.
The Main Site – What this whole lab has been about from the beginning.
The Clone Site – Taking top-performing articles from the main site and recreating them with 1.1¢/word and AI-generated content.
The eCommerce Site – I took all my old digital products from Gumroad and am selling them on my own property. It was a subdomain, now it’s its own domain. Expanding this greatly over the next few months.
I started replacing links when that dropoff happened, and a sitewide redirect was set up today for the old e-commerce site to the new one.
Total revenue is combined for all the sites because, in some cases, it’s impossible to delineate earnings without creating new accounts.
Breakdown of revenue
I thought taking all the revenue sources and graphing how they look stacked would be fun. As you can see, mustard yellow, sky blue, and red are the dominant forces. We like the sky blue’s consistent growth. We don’t like mustard yellow’s volatility.
That sliver at the top in hot pink is sales from my e-commerce site, neon green is sales from the Amazon ebook. I’m making a concerted effort to improve both.
Note that the top two colors (plum and dark blue) are part of mustard yellow and red but separate programs (PPL vs. % of earnings), and I got tired of separating them, so they’re consolidated starting in January 2023.
eCommerce
So, on the affiliate front, we’re pretty tapped out. Hence why nothing has been published on the main site for 6+ months. However, I found a ton of products I can create on the digital front, opening up a ton of new content that can be created in order to drive potential purchasers.
I started with social media caption packs. And people are buying them. So that’s lovely.
Creating the products takes next to no time now that I’ve set up my processes. Shoutout to OpenAI’s API.
Content
Since we’re pumping out products, we need to get some content created that’s tailored to the market. Most of my traffic is for people looking to spend money on affiliate offers. They wouldn’t buy what I can offer. But a portion of the traffic is people looking to make money online, and that’s who I want on my mailing list, and I’m creating products for.
I imagine that for every product I create, I’ll create 3 pieces of content pointing to that product and publish one article on each of the three sites. No keyword research, I’ve been starting with the products that are selling now, and once those are created and published, I can move toward the other products.
Email
Since I actually give a shit about ecommerce, it’s required to give a shit about email marketing. So that’s back.
Fortunately, all the basics are set up, like welcome email and abandoned carts. I switched the opt-in from a PDF to a 30-day email drip “challenge” to get people who look at email to opt in. Lower opt-in count daily, from 15-25/day to 5-15, but that’s good.
I’m also creating segmented lists that I can pitch products. Example: someone goes to an article like “Social Media for Bakeries: How to Get Started” I can send them a few emails about how social media is good for bakeries, the benefits of creating great captions for Instagram, then BAM! drop that pitch to the caption pack and any other products I have created for bakeries.
To reiterate, the plan looks like
- Create digital products (for example, 100 Social Media Captions for Bakeries)
- Create 3 articles about that product (How to Write Instagram Captions for Bakeries)
- Publish one on each site
- All of the articles link to the e-commerce page for that digital product
- Create email automation for people that look at pages with ‘bakery’ in the URL, which I’ll jab, jab, jab, right hook a la. Gary Grifterchuck.