My Adult Merchandise Journey

[Dooglers]

I am only starting this to keep me motivated and to offer the "opportunity" for people to witness the hopefuly growth of a very new website in a very, very competitive and interesting market: adult toys.

I know it's not going to be easy and most of you probably think I'm going to fail because of the competition, but I think that's what will make it interesting. This is one of the hardest markets to crack, but I want to try, and I will be doing everything I can to be successful.

With that said, as of yesterday I have created my website (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post my URL given the nature of it's contents) and gotten pretty much everything up to par to where I'm ready to start marketing my products without being embarassed about my site's design or lack of functionality.

My website will be Wordpress-based and will have Woocommerce integrated. I have impemented Google Analytics and starting tomorrow, I will be ready to start documenting everything I do to help this business grow. Any help, advice, or criticism is greatly appreciated

 

[Dooglers]

Before I start getting into the details of this post, I want to say that because I'm new to this, even though I've tried doing as much research as I could on the niche I'm in and the dropship process in general, I haven't had to learn from any mistakes yet so PLEASE let me know if you see something I post that sounds like a waste of time, waste of money, or is just plain stupid. So here we go.

I started by purchasing SEO services from this gig on Fiverr: darksider02/promote-your-site-to-the-first-page-of-google-in-a-week?funnel=2513df6e-b92d-4ea0-935f-f8773c0dca2d (I can't post links yet because I'm too new)

I was "awarded" with a special offer of $140 for him to rank 5 of the pages on my site and 3 keywords for each page. I selected the 4 categories of sex toys on my site that had the most products within them so I could hopefully be able to take advantage of the wide selections if/when visitors got to either of the pages. The last URL I chose to round out the 5 didn't have as many products in the category but the products were higher dollar amounts and is a more "specific" product niche, so I was hoping I could get ranked quicker for that page with less competition. With all that said, he is performing keyword research right now so we can decide which keywords to target for each of the 5 pages. I also want to point out that I plan on performing my own SEO as well, so this service is to go alongside what I'm manually doing myself and I'm not completely relying on it.

I established my social media accounts yesterday and hired a social media manager that has 10 years experience in social media managing, as well as a few years of experience in the adult industry. She's maintaining my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts as well as engineering content and posting once a day. She has also already created the copy and implemented profile pictures/banners on each platform. I'm paying her $250/month.

I have continued reaching out to individuals for potential affiliate partnerships, but have had no success yet.

It's Mother's Day so I probably won't get much else done, but I feel like I've at least got some of the basics done.

 

[Joshhazzord]

Keep it up will be good to follow!

 

[Niglapmeth]

Great experience, i will follow this topic

 

[Dooglers]

Keep it up will be good to follow!

Great experience, i will follow this topic

Thank you guys for the support, I appreciate it. Although, suggestions, useful tips, and criticism would be great as well

 

[Dooglers]

Day 3

So yesterday, for Mother's Day, I spent approximately 6ish hours applying to various affiliate programs and researching into the best ones my niche. With the help of some users on here (looking at previous threads posted by people in the past), I decided to signup and implement ShareASale with my website. The signup fee is hefty for me since I haven't even made a sale yet, but I've read over and over that the long-term impact will outweigh these initial costs. Currently waiting for the approval email, which they said could take up to 24 hours before I can activate the account and get to work with that.

In addition to this, I hired an affiliate program manager who has 12 years of experience with managing ShareASale and other adult-related clients for $1,200 per month. Again, another hefty price for me at this point, but I am hoping to take advantage of his expertise, learn along the way, and let him professionally take the reigns of my affiliate program and hopefully see him recruit some solid affiliates to grow my sales team. He's currently in the process of getting it all setup, and I will share our program offers later - though I am thinking lifetime revshare of 40%. I will gather his opinion on the steep percentage and see what adjustments, if any, I need to make. One of the primary reasons I hired an affiliate program manager, in addition to learning and initial recruiting, was to give my future affiliates the ability to bounce their ideas off of my manager and benefit from his knowledge. I think I can use this nice "feature" as a selling point to get people on board and offering them a "tool" that can hopefully help them make more sales, which in turn earns them more money to keep them (and me) happy

Lastly, I added my link to a bunch of adult affiliate directories as a merchant to hopefully get some backlinks and potentially some sales or additional affiliates for my program. At this point, every little thing matters.

 

[Dooglers]

Day 4

I got accepted into ShareASale so I activated my account and spent the majority of the day inserting all my information, creatives, and learning the program. My affiliate program manager was already knowledgeable about the whole software due to his 12 years of experience, but he went in after me and "optimized" everything so we can gather some solid affiliates. Woke up this morning and had 19 publishers in my program, which I was pretty happy to see even if there are only a few solid ones. I noticed that 2 of them directly corresponded with my niche and there were around 11-12 with positive feedback over 9, which sounds good to me.

I spent another hour or so posting on various forums. These days I'm a member here, DigitalPoint, and a couple Adult Webmaster forums, so I have been going to each one, going through the sub-categories I'm interested in learning about, opening about 5 threads per section, and tying to learn at least 1 new thing from each forum. I have also sparked the interest of approximately 6 or so potential affiliates just from participating in these forums every day, so it's paying off a little bit so far.

 

[Olgi]

I am looking forward to read the updates

 

[Dooglers]

Day 13

I'm starting to get discouraged, guys, but I'm sticking with it. I've dumped thousands into this site already and not a single sale yet. I have no idea if I'm doing something wrong or if this is just part of the process, but I'm going to keep grinding. With that said, here's what's been going on:

My ShareASale affiliate program is up to 54 marketers, and in the past week, which is when I launched this, I've had 466 clicks from these affiliates. Like I said earlier, no sales. This has been the most frustrating part because I feel like with this many clicks and visits to my site, there HAS to be at least 1 sale, right? Any help/guidance would be appreciated here.

I got accepted into CrakRevenue 2 days ago and will focus on that once this weekend is over. Hopefully I can get this rolling as well. I need some sort of boost. I need something to off-set all these expenses.

Speaking of expenses, I hired a team to go in and do on-page SEO for my category and sub-category pages. I have been doing individual products here and there myself, but don't want to waste too much time here since I import a data feed once a month and all of it will be lost anyways (I think). Hopefully this on-page SEO gets me in the search engines sooner rather than later. I still don't have any pages or keywords in the top 100 results in Google for any keyword.

Lastly, I've been active here, Digital Point, and GFY (an adult webmaster forum). Over at GFY, I've been messaging people and getting some affiliates that way, but I'm waiting for that to flourish into something.

Thanks guys, and as always, please share any advice or constructive criticism

 

[webjohn]

Try to get some affiliates to promote your site.

I check out your site. It looks quite good.

 

[Dooglers]

Try to get some affiliates to promote your site.

I check out your site. It looks quite good.

Hi, WebJohn. I actually have over 60 affiliates. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place for quality ones, but I do have a large number (for having a 1 month old site).