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bcrawfordtwc

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Hey guys, my name's Brandon. Here's my background story.
A friend of mine
I was in door-to-door sales for ten years and was actually very successful. Doing door-to-door I learned some extremely vital information on the science of selling and dealing with people on a personal and business level. I ended up opening my own company and succeeded at being an owner as well. At that point though my heart just wasn't in the business anymore and I was ready for a change. The industry I was in was Prime and organic beef and high-end seafood products. This was about two years ago. A friend of mine in the industry had just recently began moving from the door-to-door end of things and marketing his products and company online. Everyone told him he would fail, he was wasting his time, you know all the same stuff that negative people say. Within six months he had to hire a third shift to package and ship his products because his website exploded. He was literally shipping and filling orders 24/7 to satisfy the demand. I couldn't believe it. He taught me how he set his website up (Shopify) and taught me a little bit about paid advertising on Facebook. At this point I had started dabbling in freelance writing through content mills and Fiverr and Upwork, so I knew a little about paid ads, content marketing, and SEO. A few months later I opened up my own website for my company, knowing only the little he taught me through a two hour crash course over the phone. I got my first sale the day after I set my site up and got approved for my Facebook ad campaign. My first customer spent $237...I was hooked. From that point I went on to grow to the point to where I was profiting close to $500 a day with my store. I paid a Fiverr freelancer to look over my Facebook ads because for some reason I felt like I was doing something wrong (all I knew was gurus online so I thought $500 a day meant I was underperforming...lol). I didn't know shit about CTR, ROI, it was foreign to me. I was literally operating blind. I didn't know about split testing or any of that. I threw an ad up, put money on it, targeted my market and let it go. Well, my CTR was somewhere around 12% which he told me was incredible. It still didn't mean a lot to me because I was still very ignorant to all the terms and details. I was gonna hire the guy to do an ad campaign for me and the guy straight up told me he probably couldn't match the stats my ads were producing. I got into writing a blog for my store and started generating organic traffic as well, and started learning about re-targeting and marketing towards my e-mail lists. I got up to to about $700 a day in profit, and disaster struck. I forgot to mention when I opened this store it was right before the pandemic began. As the situation grew worse and things like the mail started to go south, so did the business. When you're shipping frozen food, even though you use dry ice and insulated coolers, you don't want a package arriving any longer than three days. Otherwise, they're getting a thawed out product, period. The slowdown in the mail was causing my packages to arrive in five, six, seven days, sometimes longer. Well needless to say, when you're shipping out that much product and you have to issue refunds its not a pretty sight. USPS would only honor insurance claims up to $100 and my average order was $167. I was hemmoraghing money. Eventually, they quit honoring my insurance claims at all. In total I lost close to $15,000 and had to shut the site down. I vowed that I would reopen it once things got better, but for the time I was completely burnt and deflated. I continued to earn money as a freelance writer, building up my portfolio by the day with new blog and marketing clients. This got me interested in affiliate marketing and having my own authority site. To date I've ran a couple of campaigns and had some success, I've made a couple hundred bucks here and there but I just haven't been able to grab ahold of this thing and pin it down. There's way too much information out there and its overwhelming thinking about where to start. I've started a couple of authority sites but after a few weeks they were neglected because I'd find some other course or method I thought wold work better and I'd go with that. I just recently started a website centered around teaching people how to blog called The Blogfather. I wanted to come up with some sort of brand I could monetize with a blog that delivers helpful content, and has a name I could use to eventually market things like ebooks, courses, t-shirts, etc. Obviously through a site like this I can promote an endless list of CPA and affiliate offers. My hopes in joining this course is to learn how to develop the website the correct way so it lasts for the long haul. I thought back on my stats for the facebook ad campaigns I ran and figured I could be onto something. If I did it once, I could do it again, I just need guidance. I'm ready to buckle down, set goals, and really put the work in to make this thing last for the long haul. I'm ready to make this my career and bounce back from the hit I took with my e-commerce store.
 

zoe

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Hi Brandon,
Welcome to the forum.

Great to know about your story. Great efforts in terms of learning, you seem like a real ambitious person. In order to develop the website the correct way so it lasts for the long haul, I suggest you to learn WordPress, if you haven't already. It is a CMS that helps you in creating websites without much effort, as it is pretty simple itself. Once you do this, then move on with learning affiliate marketing.
 

clearmachine

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Hey, Brandon welcome to the group man.

Sorry to hear about the downturn in the meat biz due to the pandemic. You are not the only one who has had to deal with chargebacks because of shipping delays. Hopefully, shipping times will get back to normal for everyone. I would definitely give the meat delivery another go when things go back to normal.

500 bucks a day is nothing to shake a stick at. That may be less than some affiliates are making every day but still, something id be proud of regardless of experience.

12% ctr is definitely good. You must have had some juicy creatives that cut into the customers scrolling.

I think you are on the right track with the blogging authority site, the name is really cool too! You are a writer and you should be able to pump out content and start making money in no time just on organic traffic.

You are right there are certainly tons of affiliate offers that would fit with blogging: hosting, CMS, image and video library offers etc...

One thing you may consider after the blog has sufficient content and has been SEO'd is to add GoogleAdsense. You may still want to run straight-up CPA affiliate campaigns but Adsense has a few advantages I can think of:

1. You aren't chasing advertisers for money, perhaps many of them.

2. You do not need to build and manage a campaign.

3. You can spend the time you were on managing the CPA offers and campaigns, doing what you know best, writing.

Good luck and let us know how it goes!
 

joeybabbs

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Hey welcome and great story...

That definitely sucks about the deliveries.

The Blogfather sounds great. It seems you are going after the make money blogging niche? I have some experience in that area...

It is definitely a great niche as many people are super eager to make money, but they are also very smart and understand when they are being marketed too.

I decided to recommend tools and training resources to people rather than pitch CPA offers to people in that niche. It seems to work well for me as I truly do know the tools quite well (aweber, anstrex, adplexity, bluehost etc)...

People need to trust that you know what you are talking about...That will be the key to success on the Blogfather.

So when it comes to pitching CPA offers to your audience who you want to gain trust with, just be extremely careful that those offers are in fact valuable. There are some good offers in the Biz Op niche on some CPA networks like MB. Then there are some REALLY shady ones. All depends on what your end goal is.

If you look at my blog at https://dayjobhacks.com you will see my face plastered everywhere...so I don;t want to be known as some sleezy salesman who pitches crap products just to earn a buck....

But I still get hate emails - :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
 

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