In the podcast:
01:57 – Guest Introduction
05:12 – Stunt Marketing
06:42 – Drop Shipping
08:54 – What Changed in Drop Shipping & E-Commerce
14:37 – Key Ways He Built His Membership Site
17:41 – Digging Deeper with Stunt Marketing
21:01 – What Would Andrew Do Differently Today
23:58 – What Would Ilana Do Differently Today
25:42 – Pain Points to Address to Build Likeability and Trust
31:16 – Perspective on Specific Niches
Andrew Youdarian, founder of ecommercefuel.com has grown his online community to over 1000 members. In this episode, I interview Andrew to find out exactly how he did that. Hint: he did it in some pretty unconventional ways.
How Andrew Youdarian Grew His Online Community To Over 1000 Members in PDF
Ilana:
Welcome to today’s episode, I have a very special guest called Andrew Youderian https://www.ecommercefuel.com/. You might have heard of Andrew before because he runs a very, very popular ecommerce membership. But Andrew has done lots of really interesting things online, which is why I’m so thrilled to have him as a guest on today’s show. So welcome to today’s episode, Andrew.
Andrew:
Yeah, thanks for having me on. This is a traffic and marketing is gonna be fun. I appreciate the invite.
Ilana:
Yeah, it’s awesome. The pleasure is definitely mine. So I am fascinated by people’s journey. And you know, I guess I can relate to ending up somewhere that I never dreamed of. So you and I, both our corporate escapees, being that we used to live in the corporate world. And now we are in very different territory. So do you mind giving us I guess, a brief background about who you are and what you’ve done? And I guess let’s touch on kind of what you do now a little bit.
Introduction
Andrew:
Yeah, absolutely. So it was fun. When we met in Miami, we’re able to share some kind of corporate war stories and in similar histories, and so I got a college went to the finance world that making world for a couple of years. And glad I did it, learned a lot, but quickly decided I did not want to do that for the next 10-20 years. And so I quit, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. I had three options, I was looking at becoming an options trader on my own doing fashion photography, or starting an ecommerce business. And thank goodness that I chose the ecommerce business.
And so about 2008 and launched an ecommerce business selling radio equipment, ran that for a number of years and along the way started a second ecommerce company selling Trolling Motors. And then 2012 with both of those running in the background realized nobody was talking about ecommerce from a from a non corporate non, you know, massive fortune 500 perspective, and so started writing about it. And that kind of turned into a community for experienced store owners.
And so I’ve since sold those other two businesses. And now I focus full time on I’m running our community where we put on events, we’ve got about 10,000 members in the community. And we try to add value through live events. Every year, we have a you know, a conference for our members. Play it a discussion board kind of an in house private forum where all of our members talk and share what’s working, what’s not. And then some software we’ve built to help our members try to find what tools and what SaaS companies and contractors work well for their businesses and which ones to avoid. So that’s that’s kind of a story in a nutshell.
Ilana:
Yeah, interesting. And sure, you’ve definitely seen transformations and iterations over the years of when you had your own ecommerce stores to kind of what ecommerce store owners are doing now. Can you kind of touch on, I guess, your experience of growing the Trolling Motors website? And I guess, how you grew it to the level that it was and other strategies still relevant now?
Andrew:
Yeah, so my background is on the marketing side is largely and I would say two things. SEO based and kind of guerilla marketing, kind of crazy, unusual, stunt marketing more or less, I would say. So the Richard Branson style. So that’s I’ve seen big wins from that and big wins from long term SEO efforts. So both of those brands on the ecommerce side where we’re kind of just old school SEO, writing a lot of articles guest posting, making connections, influencer marketing back in, you know, before it was a term in 2009, or 10.
Remember, we gave away probably, it was a cheap site, and we gave away probably, you know, maybe $1,000 worth of equipment, and they sent us, oh, my goodness, probably $100,000 plus a free traffic over the course of a couple of years. And this is what it was much easier than it is now. So that’s kind of my background is old school SEO to build up both of those sites, both of their traffic. And one of the things was they were both drop ship sites in the, the margins weren’t phenomenal, which makes it hard to buy traffic. And the lifetime value was also not phenomenal, which also makes it hard to buy traffic. So SEO was really the only way to go.
Stunt Marketing
Ilana:
Interesting. So you know, running a community of 1000 odd members, you would hear a lot of discussions about what people are doing now to grow their ecommerce brands. Do you find that those strategies of SEO and what you were doing the stunt marketing? Do you find that your members are doing that kind of stuff still? Does that still work? Or is it getting way, way harder, that that kind of people are moving to other areas?
Andrew:
I SEO still works. But I think the moats that people have built up around those combined with the fact that Google is continually diminishing the organic reach of traffic is it makes it much harder, I’d say it’s exponentially harder than it was 10 years ago, I think, interesting creative, different people are things that you can do still works pretty well, I think it probably works as well as it used to, because there’s so much noise out there that if you have something that’s crazy and different, it can kind of cut through that noise.
So that that can still work. But I think the SEO side is it’s just gotten hard, it’s not impossible. I know people that still invest in, you know, if you start investing in it, and you do it consistently for 12, 24, 36 months, you’re going to see where you’ll definitely see results in ROI. But it’s nowhere near what it used to be.
Drop Shipping
Ilana:
I mean, I remember back in the day way before I started in the PPC journey, I used to also kind of be in the publishing and SEO space. And I mean, I used to be able to rank in a few hours, but man, those days are long gone. You know? (laughs) you think of where it’s come and come from and you know, what you could get away with back then in the in the early days, it just doesn’t fly now. So you know, running your membership with so many ecommerce businesses, you would see such a cross section of, I guess, the types of ecommerce businesses and and their forms of marketing. So you mentioned that drop shipping was not such an all in sales, not such a great model, but the margins were good. And people still doing drop shipping websites these days. Do you see that?
Andrew:
Yeah, good question. So I did a big report this last year called the state of the merchant a couple months ago and pulled 400 plus store owners average revenue, I think was about 3 million. And, and it’s a third year I’ve done it. And so it’s interesting, because I can look at some trends over time. And one of the trends is today, this year was the number of drop shipping companies from year over year, you know, over a 12 month period got cut in half 50% drop, which is crazy. So, definitely, it’s getting harder, more people in manufacturing companies, companies that had their own in house branded product they created was that by you know, 30% plus.
And so a lot of those people, then that the channel, the type of business model is shifting to that for reasons that, you know, I think fairly obvious, but it’s so but but that being said, there are still niches where it you know, it can work, I think it’s really hard to get a drop shipping model business model, correct, because you’ve got to kind of someplace where you can add value while you’re at the same time selling someone else’s product.
So if you’ve got really deep product selection, that Amazon doesn’t have really the product expertise, and you’re somehow able to convince people to even once they know what they need to buy from you that can work or if you have proprietary distribution agreements for manufacturers who aren’t selling on Amazon back and work potentially, it still can work. It’s just it’s tricky to, to find the model and make all those things line up when it does, it’s great. You can run a business from anywhere. You have zero capital investment and you know, it can be a great model, but it’s tricky to get it get all the stars to line up right for in 2019.
What Changed in Drop Shipping & E-Commerce
Ilana:
Why do you think that? What are some of the variables that have changed that have seen a 50% drop in the variables not kind of add up? What do you think has changed in 2019? Now that wasn’t the case years ago,
Andrew:
I think there’s two things the biggest ones Amazon, Amazon solid distribution and a lot of drop shipping sites. There, you know, you’re a middleman right, the value you add a great drop shipping site, they can still survive in 2019 is adding a lot of value and other ways I can talk about super deep selection that no one else has, or expertise or you know, world class website with education. But a lot of them are just, you know, websites with kind of reselling existing products. And if you want to buy a product, you know the name of the product, and you want to get a fair price from someone you trust relatively quickly.
Like where you go? You go to Amazon, and so that’s just destroyed the drop shipping, shipping world. The other thing too is, is selling online has gotten easier. So if I’ve got a brand that I’ve spent a ton of time and pain and energy and sweat and capital to build, and I’ve got my own in house proprietary product, they’re still value it potentially for some people and having dealer networks, but there’s a lot of value for the same brands and selling direct and capturing the margin for themselves, right? And so when it takes, it’s not that difficult to spin up a Shopify site and sell direct a lot of people are going that way too. So I think it’s , you’re getting pressure from both sides.
Ilana:
Interesting. So what do you see, given your exposure to so many ecommerce businesses in all these different industries? What would you say is their biggest struggle in 2019? From a traffic point of view, as a product point of view? What’s the biggest struggle?
Andrew:
That’s a great question, and I’d say the biggest struggle is probably Amazon for most people, I’d say Amazon and traffic in general. With maybe a one behind that being regulatory issues,like sales tax. So an Amazon and traffic kinda kind of go hand in hand a little bit, you know, so many more people are going to Amazon and Amazon’s the ultimate “frenemy”, you can, you can really build a business there that, that does well, that scales incredibly quickly. But you also are giving up the keys to your house in some sense, and that you don’t own the customer. You depend on them for for all your traffic year, you’re building your own asset, you’re leveraging someone else’s, and that can be taken away through suspensions or fees going up or, or you know, any number or Amazon deciding to as they often do, see which one of your products are selling the best and making their own in house brand or or house label brand and, and competing with you.
So I think that’s a big one. I think traffic’s another one because you have three companies that own 80% plus of the web traffic online. And it’s crazy you know. and they all have all three of those increasingly are making you pay to access that traffic. I mean, organic reach on Facebook is not even a thing anymore? Like if you post something to your fans, can you? I mean, if you have, if you have 1000 fans, you might have how many views? I mean, you know this one better than I do Ilana, how many fans? Do you think if you posted something and you have 1000 fans on your Facebook page that would actually see it without paid promotion? 50? 40?
Ilana:
I was gonna say 50. Yeah, is strictly a pay to play platform now. It’s crazy.
Andrew:
It’s nuts. So that is really difficult, because ad costs from that report, for merchants of that size are going up roughly 15% per year, every year, there’s some good things too, in terms of conversion rates seem to be going up and revenue growth seems strong and margin seems steady. But on the paid side, like your traffic, it’s scaring people.
And I think people are increasingly noticing like, this is like this is hard this year, and looking out three, four years. So like, what am I going to do when I have to pay 40%? More for traffic? And I? Yeah, so I think that’s so traffic, Amazon. And then the third one is just sales tax. I know you’re in Australia, the sales tax issue in the United States is just an absolute disaster. And that’s causing a lot of pain and headaches for people and it’s scaring them too.
Ilana:
Yeah, it’s interesting, you know, talking about those three behemoth companies, Google, Facebook and Amazon owning 80% of the web traffic. I mean, I know from running so many ad campaigns that you know, those three companies are the judge and the jury when it comes to traffic. I mean, who are you to dispute what Google or Facebook tell you in terms of the data of how much you paid for a click, you can’t dispute it, there’s no way of verifying it. I know when I’ve run lots of campaigns to act from Facebook, let’s say to Amazon, and Facebook tells me I got this many link clicks at a certain cost per click. And then I go in the back end of Amazon, and the numbers are wildly different. It’s you know that these guys, these companies are the judge and the jury in terms of the data they provide, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.
Andrew:
Yeah, it is crazy. And I mean that the model that Google rolled out with, I don’t know if they were the first one, they must have been one of the first if not the first of an auction based system for advertising was really brilliant, because it’s a great pricing strategy, because they can extract all of the surplus value from the market, right? Like when you didn’t have many people on, it was cheap all the days that Oh, miss the days of AdWords for five cent clicks, because there’s nobody on it right.
And so that was the most people you know, that was the market price. But it’s a really brilliant system, from their point of view, and I got to credit, whoever designed it, but it doesn’t leave a whole lot of surplus on the table, because people will pay just enough, you know, that almost pull all of their margin all their goodwill, all of their profit out of there. And it’s, it’s brilliant for them, but it’s tough for merchants.
Key Ways He Built His Membership Site
Ilana:
Definitely. So let’s talk a little bit about your how you’ve grown your ecommerce full membership, because 1000 members is an amazing achievement, Andrew, so well done on getting to that level of success? What would you say are some of the key ways that you have built that membership? Because building membership is not easy? So what are some of the ways that you’ve done that?
Andrew:
So I think one is just taking a really long term approach. The first year, the community, I started a blog that I spent blogging on for a year before I started the pot, before I started the community and, and taking a long term approach, I think is really important for something like that I didn’t have any network to speak of in the ecommerce space, a few friends that were doing it but you know, less than 10. And, and so I spent a whole year doing nothing but writing really in depth articles and trying to build relationships.
And I spent the first two weeks of I launched the site and then spent two weeks sequestered in a cabin in Arizona, eight hours a day doing nothing but writing a guide and how to pick a niche, which has become pretty woefully outdated at this point, you know, but at the time, I felt like it was a fairly something I felt like I could have charged 100 couple hundred bucks for and the idea was to give it away for free to help drive traffic. And so yeah, big one was just putting out as much value as I could for a year to build connections, build traffic, and build a little bit of a reputation. So that was a big one. The last blog posts were really long, very in depth. And yeah, that was that was kind of the foundational part of it.
Second one, I think was word of mouth. When I think about today, where we get most of our, our leads, like whenever people sign up for our community, our paid community, it’s, they tell us where they came from. And two, there are two that stand out probably attribute to 70, or probably 80% of our referrals, and one is the podcast, I think podcasting is still a pretty good place to be able to connect with people and market your business. second one’s word of mouth referrals.
And just those two I on the podcast, I think you can unless you build rapport with people at a, you know, at scale in a way that’s pretty unique. And word of mouth referrals, I have the fear theory that, obviously that those are the best kind of, you know, the best kind of advertising in the world. But I don’t think people focus on a great product and word of mouth referrals. And I think as online marketing channels get so packed, and crowded and expensive, like we’ve been talking about having just a rock solid, phenomenal product that people can recommend, I think it’s gonna, people are going to start focusing on that, again, more in terms of just especially on marketing jargon perspective.
And the third one is kind of some of those marketing stunts, I don’t know how much you want to get into those. But anytime you can do, there’s been two or three things I’ve done that have been very different and unique and all scary. But they I think they got some pretty big visibility, at least for a short period of time, which, which helped with link building, building up the authority of the ecommerce domain, and also maybe getting the word out there to people.
Digging Deeper with Stunt Marketing
Ilana:
Well, you definitely piqued my curiosity with number 3! (laughs) So well done there. You must be a very good writer. So maybe do you want to kind of give us some ideas of what you mean with that sort of guerilla kind of marketing? start marketing?
Andrew:
Yeah, I think anything you can do that’s totally unusual and different, and puts you in a position of vulnerable is, is good for marketing. And so I’ll give you a couple examples.
One, my trolling motor business, the way I sold, that it wasn’t a real big business, and I decided I wanted to sell it to focus on the other two. And I thought, you know, I could just sell this and kind of go on my merry way. Or maybe there’s some potential here from from something I could do fun on the marketing side. So I thought like, how can you? How could you sell a business in a way that would get a lot of attention and be unusual. And so the idea came up with was to do a totally public sale, everything about the business public, from the you know, the traffic to the financials to the profitability, a few things, I kept private, you know, like our best selling items, things where people could just completely rip off the niche, but for the most part, pretty visible, very visible sale process. And then I ran a reverse auction. So I said, I’m going to start the business at x price, I think I sold it 485,000 bucks, every day, or every week, I don’t get a bid, I’m going to lower the price by $10,000. And the first person to bid on this and accept the price. It’s going to get it and so was able to write it up, it was unusual in those kind of those kind of two regards, it was really scary too.
Because ultimately, like you could sell a really expensive asset. And if nobody bids on it, I mean, it can drop them, you really lose your you lose a lot of money. Anyway, having a little bit an email list and Hacker News and a few other things was able to do that and really blew that up and got a ton of great backlinks. A lot of discussion. It’s you know, it’s something was probably one of my most of my most popular blog posts ever. And I think the ripple effects from from that really helps with marketing in a tremendous way. So things like that you can do that are kind of crazy, totally unorthodox, and obviously, very basically was positioned a niche by niche. But usually I feel like some of the I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but the best content outline, you gotta be careful here. But a lot of times, like the best stuff, the stuff that does the best for you get the most traction is using stuff you’re the most scared to hit publish on. And I think that’s to some extent true.
Ilana:
That’s really interesting. So did you have a reserve price or a floor price that you were willing to not go under? We willing to go down to like $10?
Andrew:
I did. So it was like I think it was about $100,000 plus or minus right around there. So I did have a reserve price on it. But it was way below if I sold it for that. I mean, it would have been rough, I would have been a terrible, terrible place to sell it at. So I did I did have a little bit of insurance on the downside.
Ilana:
Interesting. I’m just curious, would you do that again? Like was it that effective that you’d probably do that again? No, I guess having done that is the kind of thing that you kind of have to do something different.
Andrew:
I think it would depend on the size of the sale for the size of so there, I was willing to take the risk and willing to give up the information and potentially scare off some buyers who some people saw it and love the approach. Some people are like, I don’t want that business. That’s totally been, you know, aired out in the public. No, thank you.
If the business was in the same size, I would potentially consider doing it again. If it was meaningfully bigger, like let’s say, you know, two to three x bigger or larger, I will probably be a little more careful about especially given that I’ve done it know, it you would depend.
What Would Andrew Do Differently Today
Ilana:
Interesting. So let me ask you this question and might be a bit of a tough question. If you were starting your ecommerce fuel membership from scratch now in 2019, with a sort of no email list or no traffic, what’s something that you would do in 2019? That taught to start it from scratch? Like if you were starting again? What would you do? Sorry, if that’s an unfair question. (laughs)
Andrew:
No, no, it’s a great question. I think…do I have? Do I have a network of people? Or am I starting in my like you? Do I have ecommerce experience. I have a network?
Ilana:
Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, yeah, you’ve got ecommerce experience, but then a small network, let’s say.
Andrew:
A small network… I would go to my network, go to a conference, try to get as many people as I knew, first, I try to round up a list of all the ecommerce sellers, I knew that had meaningful businesses. And I’d reach out to them and say, “Hey, I want to know like, what’s the biggest pain point you’re experiencing? What’s the biggest thing that’s that’s hardest for you” or I look into the resources of just trying to figure out what the biggest struggles are online. And then I would probably try to identify one or two things, and then spend an entire month trying to create the absolute best resource in the world, for whatever that problem was, like, maybe its sales tax, you know, sales tax, we talked about that, or traffic, sales tax could be one, or maybe you just go through and you write, you know, maybe it’s a book, maybe it’s a resource, maybe it’s.. you create something that can solve a massive pain point for people. And you give it away for free with your branding on it to a website, that that you control and have some opt in.
Or maybe you just give away part of it for free and have an opt in very similar to what I did to start ecommerce. So I think I’d focus on giving away as much value as I could and trying to build a name for myself for that specific site. And gives much reputational authority and link authority by giving things away for free as I could and have a you know, at least, I think probably commit to probably a year or two now because it’s gotten harder. So I probably cheating because I’m just recycling my what I actually did is that totally cheating?
Ilana:
Not at all! And I think that’s actually really relevant and honest, because it was effective. And it’s interesting, like from an ad point of view, we do a lot of strategies that we’ve been doing for five plus years that still work. Now, it doesn’t have to be new, and it doesn’t have to be innovative. If it works, then why reinvent the way like so, you know, in our agency, we do new stuff. But we also do classic tried and tested stuff that still works like why would we not do that it still works. And so I guess the same applies for you and for what you’ve done and how you’ve grown your membership and your business.
Andrew:
What about for you? Like if you were starting the business, again on the agency side, or on the training side, and just starting from scratch? What would you say? Either that or actually even maybe even more interesting than what you mentioned? There’s a lot of things you’ve done for five plus years of work like what are some of those are like old school tactics that you’re still doing that still are effective today that were so effective, you know, 2014 or 13?
What Would Ilana Do Differently Today
Yeah, so I guess, on the agency side for clients, even though I’m doing less and less of that now. The stuff that still works is sort of a classic retargeting campaign or remarketing campaign, it’s like, it’s tried and tested. And we can do it with my eyes closed, pretty much. And I guess very traditional forms of lead generation still work really well, especially probably more so in the non internet marketing industry.
So, you know, not trying to sell people how to run Facebook ads, for example, maybe you’re in the playing guitar industry with the people who are learning guitar and not familiar with click classic online marketing strategies, like Product Launch Formula all that kind of stuff. I mean, that was invented, you know, 10 plus years ago, and I still see it work today.
But you know, it takes on lots of different forms. The concept is providing a whole bunch of value to people up front, and then asking them to take the next step, which is kind of like what you talked about, you know, what’s the biggest pain point? can I provide that for free for people, when, in the attempt to build likeability and trust and value and then getting people to take the next step. It’s, it’s the same thing just dressed up slightly differently. And it’s putting in front of the right people?
Pain Points to Address to Build Likeability and Trust
Andrew:
Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s kind of silly to say, but yeah, like the old formula, just deliver a ton of value first, and you get so much more trust from people. It hasn’t changed in a decade. I, one of the things I hate the most is, is one of my biggest pet peeves is inbound emails from people saying, like, Hey, I have this SAS service that I do would work great for you. Can we spend 15 minutes on a call to see if it’s the right fit? And I’m like, No, I do these emails ever work? No, absolutely not.
But you know, if people have if you have a really good offer, and you say, I know this about you, I know this is a massive pain point, we do have to hop on a call, here’s the solution for it, you can just have it over time. And people do that once or twice and or even once. If it’s great enough, then the level of rapport and trust you build out of the gates when you do the heavy lifting and the heavy work ahead of time, like it just it helps a lot. I wrote a post this really old digging it up. It’s called the stalkers guide to guest posting, and it kind of talks about how, like, why so many guest posts, I’m sure you get these to like the guest post articles that people send are so atrociously bad that it’s, I mean, it is so bad. But if you do it right, with a great pitch email with a great content, and you have the authority to build rapport and authority, it still works really well. But just it’s done so badly. So much of the time.
Ilana:
I think people are so focused on their own ulterior motive, they cannot transport themselves into the mind of the person receiving whatever it is they’re sending them to think, well, if that were me, how would I feel, you know, they’re so focused on what they are looking for, what their goal is, that just comes through, you know, with this, like LinkedIn request of, you know, trying to, you know, get you on a call, like, Did I ever express an interest in your product or service? No, you know.
Andrew:
And I think we’re all guilty of it at some level, maybe just in different ways. Like, I remember one, there’s one ecommerce store owner, I was I was talking to, and we, for some reason, we were chatting says I was helping her out with something. And I started, we started diving into her business and, and just a phenomenal product with incredible margins, like in out of this world conversion rates. People just ordered this stuff over and over and over.
And I, it was like, the perfect ecommerce business and I started drooling. And I’m like, Oh, I, you know, this is amazing me. And I think what I said to her at one point was like, Hey, if you’re ever looking for like somebody who, you know, you want to bring us an advisor and investor, I’d be happy to let’s talk about that.
But this was like on the first phone call. Totally. It was like asking, you know, it’s like going on a date and asking someone to marry you after you know, before we even the check comes right like, and I was so eager, so much opportunity that I couldn’t help myself and completely blew any chance that the right move there would have been to help them for two to three months, show them that I can meaningfully help with my advice and with my actions, improve the business. And then maybe you talk about that after months of work. But I so it’s really everyone does it at some level. I’m not any, you know, less guilty of other people. But it’s really hard to hold yourself back.
Ilana:
Totally. I know exactly what you mean. And especially when you’ve been around this space for a while where some people hit on niches or niches, like inadvertently, and they don’t realize, as you say, like, what an amazing business they’ve got in the margins are like insanely good, they don’t realize and so when you have the lens that is got exposure to so many different businesses, and you can go hang on a minute, you don’t even realize what you’ve got here. That’s kind of feel quite exciting.
So I know exactly from a client’s point of view. And I see clients come to me and their industry converts like crazy, and they’re like, they’re getting you know, 50 cent leads, and you know, hundreds a day and they think, Oh, is this good? I’m like, Are you crazy? This is amazing! (laughs)
Andrew:
Yeah, that’s cool for you to I always think buddy’s interesting, because my sister was, you know, a banker for a while and she nobody, people do not talk about money candidly at definitely not you know about how much they’re making unless they’re like family or insanely tight friends, or very a typical and the lens, which, you know, a banker has just looking at a bank accounts at the different people that walk in is kind of like what, what you having some substance, being able to look at people’s ad spend accounts and seeing what type of industries work well, what businesses work well, which don’t, it’s, it’s a fascinating view that so few people have.
Ilana:
It’s true. And to be honest, that’s largely why I went into the agency type work to get exposure to lots of different industries. And let me tell you, in the seven years that I’ve run my agency, I have seen so many weird and wonderful industries that I never, ever would have to be a business, you know, like, from people running membership sites for a specific type of subject taught at school, to all these like, you know, hypnosis, training, etc.
I mean, I’m saying it all my husband laughs at me, because he’s like, I’m working on this is, of course, you are like this would ever dream that that’s an industry, you know. But um, it’s amazing. I guess there’s the saying goes, the riches are in the niches of American saying, never true. You know, and I’m sure you’ve seen that in all the ecommerce businesses that you’ve seen come through your membership, like, how many weird and wonderful industries there are out there to have a business.
Andrew:
It’s crazy, some of the applications that we get you read and you just go, you have got to be kidding me. This is this is this $5 million selling, selling gold plated pipe cleaners for ceremonial? You know, like, it’s insane. I question for you. And I know you can’t, you got to be sensitive to your clients, and you can you know, name websites, or even super specific niches, but broader niches kind of categories?
Are there are their categories like, you know, like health and beauty sporting equipments at a broader level? Is there a category that you have seen can be a great choice from a conversion and from a lifetime value? And from a cost per acquisition standpoint, is there a category where you would advise people to stay clear, and absolutely don’t get into in terms of marketing and in competition, if you had it, because you such, it’s such an interesting view on the analytics of so many companies.
Perspective on Specific Niches
Ilana:
Yeah, um, so as somebody, I guess, who has specialized in buying leads online, hopefully, at a profitable level, then definitely, you know, a recurring aspect is such a huge advantage. So, if you’re selling something where somebody buys it over and over again, be it a product, or even a service, that gives you huge amounts of flexibility in terms of how much you can afford to pay for that first lead, you know, we all know that somebody who’s bought from you once before is more likely to buy from you again. So if you’re selling something where there is what’s called a back end, or a recurring aspect to it, that opens the door, so many doors for buying traffic, because you can afford to pay quite high for a customer.
So maybe businesses will lose money on the front end, or the first time they buy that customer because they know they make it back in month two or three and, and then they’ve got a long standing customer if they provide a really good product or service. I do also find that the non internet marketing industries work so well.
And especially if you’re very clever in your in your ads and your strategies, people are not aware. So lots of we online memberships work very well. So teaching some kind of musical instrument or content that some out of the make money online kind of space also works extremely well. But yeah, I have, I have done so many weird things that I never dreamed would be an industry. And I wish I could kind of talk about it. Well, more publicly. But yeah, obviously, I am bound by confidentiality of my clients, which I totally respect. But I find these people stumble upon them by going into rabbit holes, you know, they so they that they pick one thing, and then they do that, but then that leads them to something else, and then they go hang on a minute, this is the thing that I want to focus on it and sort of had they not started, then they never would have ended up at that final destination, you know, sort of the whole pivot process. Just quite interesting.
Andrew:
Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s a cool perspective. You’ve got I, I, I’m jealous. I wish I had it.
Ilana:
Well, he kind of do with running your membership, seeing all the other fine, people are quite cagey about what they sell, or they an open book.
Andrew:
No, they’re pretty open. And so one of our requirements for membership, apart from the revenue guidelines is you have to be, you have to be candid about Yes, you don’t have to tell everything you’re doing under the sun, but you have to be public about at least one qualifying revenue generating high six or seven figure business and it’s gonna, it’s gonna be a real name, your real picture, your real real storefront on there, and none of this like, you know, “Drecar47” username stuff, because like, you want to talk about real stuff, you want to know who you’re dealing with. So people are pretty, pretty open about it.
But at the same time, open, you know, they’ll they’ll share their website and their details, what’s working a lot of times, but in terms of full, full revenue and conversion rate numbers and campaigns, things like that, not quite at that detail. So it’s, I do you’re right, I have a really, I have an interesting perspective.It’s always really cool to see what, what, what’s going on. But yours is just a little deeper, I think.
Ilana:
Well, because I actually get cost per acquisition data. And I’ll never really delved out into when I started growing my agency and delved into sort of first iteration into sort of we industries, I was like, Whoa, what is going on in this industry? You know, like, off the charts, I can, you know, some fit, especially passion projects, people are really passionate, and they like to share ads like crazy, you’re like they’re commenting hundreds of comments, hundreds of shares. Health and wellness is a big one, certain types of like diets are really big. So yeah, I guess some, it’s all about kind of what’s a value to people that really drives in and what problem you’re solving for people at the end of the day really.
Andrew:
I would guess cars, automobiles, especially like in the performance side or the niche side of cars and off road vehicles. That’s one that I have. See, I again, I don’t know if they haven’t seen that done with the X ray vision that you do, but from things I’ve observed from my behavior from other people’s behavior, sometimes some of the niches were just people just common sense goes out the window. It’s insane what people will pay for stuff when they get passionate and excited about.
Ilana:
Definitely, and I would say, the dog space. That is really true. I recently got a puppy and now I’m getting kind of excited. It’s like, you get dog people and then you got normal people. You’re not normal. That sounds bad, but you get some crazy dog people. So pet is also a really, really big one. I’m mindful of the time Andrew so where can people find out a little bit more about you and what you offer? And I guess obviously specifically ecommerce is where can people find out more information about what you offer people?
Andrew:
Yeah, thank you. So ecommerce fuel is the name of the community it’s a private community for seven figure plus store owners. So if you’ve got a business that is doing that level or maybe slightly below if you as long as you’ve got a proprietary product and selling not exclusively on Amazon that’s that’s our membership community.
So you can learn more about that if you’re in that, in that part of the world is your business, ecommercefuel.com. And then I also do a weekly podcast where I talk about all things ecommerce, so chat with people about a lot of United States, what about paid traffic and the display network? We talked about that manufacturing, sales, tax tariffs, different shopping carts, anything, if you’re in the ecommerce world that you and I like to geek out about?. So it’s just called the ecommerce fuel podcast. You can get that anywhere you get, you know, this podcast, so and that’s those are the two best places to find me.
Ilana:
Awesome. And I can definitely vouch for both of those, your podcast, and I’m not a member of your community, but I know lots of people who are who absolutely rave about it. So definitely check that out. Andrew, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to come on our show. I’ve certainly enjoyed it. And yeah, look forward to chatting to you again.
Andrew:
Yeah, it has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much. Appreciate the invite.
