In Internet marketing terms ‘throwing mud at the wall’ typically describes testing new business opportunities and deciding which work best (in other words make money). Those that do will take a permanent place in the savvy entrepreneur’s business portfolio.
It’s the opportunities that do work that represent the ‘mud’ sticking to the wall compared to the opportunities that fail and fall to the ground. ‘Throwing’ describes the research and testing process preceding all successful new product and business launches.
It’s a pretty mundane analogy, but throwing mud at the wall is, always has been, and always will be, the mainstay of my own business, whether I’m selling on eBay, marketing my own products at ClickBank or building websites and blogs for promoting affiliate goods and services.
Why I’m always throwing mud at the wall… and why you should be too
It always works well for me and it will work well for you too, even though the failure rate is notoriously high!
The truth is I test at least one hundred new opportunities every week of which 100% very often fail. That’s very good news indeed – really it is – because having early knowledge of potentially unprofitable ventures allows me to spend the majority of my working day promoting goods and services that do make a healthy profit.
Requirement number one for the mud-slinging challenge is being prepared to spend time – productive and unproductive – finding products or services that always make regular high profits. Requirement number two is a willingness to research several hundred opportunities before those winners emerge.
As an example, last week I spent two whole days searching for wholesalers of cufflinks with Masonic emblems for me to sell on eBay during the run up to Christmas when I often sell one hundred or more units of my most popular designs at upwards of £10 pure profit each…
That is IF I know which will be my most popular designs, which before searching I most definitely do not. Now research is boring, it takes time, and because most product searches fail to make money it can be very disheartening too…
Until you hit on one or two products that will generate an easy few thousand pounds pure profit before the competition spots what you’re doing and flattens your market! Okay, I never said this idea was perfect, but it’s as close to perfect as you’re ever likely to get!
Of just over three hundred different designs I found from wholesalers and manufacturers I selected twenty that matched my best-selling products from previous years, and which the competition has since jumped on with a vengeance, meaning I have to research new products all over again!
I asked permission to upload the product owners’ images to eBay without having to buy stock in advance – everyone agreed – then I created eBay listings for those twenty designs.
Ten days later, when my auctions ended, I knew exactly which listings attracted the most views, bidders, potential Second Chance Offers, and highest finishing prices. And it’s those listings that will almost certainly be my biggest money makers from now until the end of December.
Eventually I had ten cufflink designs that sold in double figures in their first ever eBay auction and fetched between ten and twenty pounds pure profit per sale.
Compare that to visiting wholesalers, buying bulk lots of products you think might sell like hot cakes on eBay, and discovering they don’t…
Cost to you? A few hundred pounds at least, along with lots of time wasted and a massive dollop of disappointment.
Cost to me using the mud-slinging technique? Two days, no disappointment, and tons of dosh going into my bank account from now to December!
This idea has various applications for online marketers, regardless of what they’re promoting, and irrespective of who the end user is, as a few examples will show.
– Let’s say, like me, you have dozens of different business opportunities invading your email box every day… tempting you to buy each new money miracle that comes your way.
How do you decide which is best for you?
Well apart from letting someone else do all the hard work of sorting the highly profitable from the incredibly suspect*, the only way to be sure is to research all those opportunities in detail, by visiting Internet forums and studying past buyers’ comments about those products. This might take days but at least you’ll find one or two opportunities that attract more positive than negative comments and could help you make a fortune fast.
* If you want to save time and money and get impartial advice about which business opportunities to trust, and which to avoid, have a look at the free content available on the Canonbury Publishing website: WHAT BIZ OPP LINK
– Now imagine you’re using Google AdWords to promote affiliate products available from Amazon and you end up paying more in advertising fees to Google than you get back from Amazon. A disappointing but common scenario.
At the same time you know some people are making tens of thousands of pounds very week promoting Amazon products entirely through AdWords promotions. How do they do that? More importantly, how do you do the same, and maybe even exceed their success?
Easy. You do it by promoting a selection of products from Amazon and creating a few AdWords promotions based on low price keywords that attract hundreds of low cost clicks daily and ultimately lots of sales!
It can mean testing one hundred plus products, based on a few hundred AdWords promotions, and it might take a week of hard work and cost you a few hundred pounds in the process. But ultimately you’ll know which promotions are making money and which are losing it.
Continue the former promotions for guaranteed healthy profits every day, and delete the latter. Then go looking for more products to test and more Google AdWords promotions to create.
Now back to eBay, back to Christmas, back to you!
How can we make this mud-slinging technique work in our favour and help grow our eBay earnings between now and the end of December?
These ideas will help:
– Go to www.ebay.co.uk. Click ‘Buy’ in the top right of the screen and then click ‘Browse Categories’. On the next page choose a category, then a sub-category. Now search for Top Rated Sellers with Buy It Now listings for products you might enjoy selling. Click on one or two listings and study the numbers sold at the right of ‘Quantity’.
– If sales are high from one listing, I’d say 100 or more in two months is good, head over to Alibaba – www.alibaba.com – it’s one of the world’s most reliable product sourcing portals, where you can access many thousands of different products from reliable suppliers. This reliability is what makes Alibaba a good place to source products – the company keeps careful tabs on its product suppliers and bars any that prove unsatisfactory.
There are countless other places to start your product search, including my own personal favourite The Secret Source Finder [www.secretsourcefinder.co.uk
– Key the details of eBay’s top selling products into the search box of your chosen product sourcing sites.
Study the wholesale prices against those fetched on eBay to determine the likely potential profit per sale. Study discounts on products purchased in bulk, which add to your profit margins.
– Contact the sellers and ask permission to use their images and product details in your eBay listings. I’ve only been refused once.
– Choose as many products as you have time to handle and list them on eBay. Use auction listings to determine prices people are willing to pay, and how many orders ensue for specific price levels. This information helps you determine demand and profit potential for subsequent multi-product Buy It Now listings that allow you to offer hundreds of similar products inside one listing for the same price as a one product listing at auction.
– As soon as bids appear contact wholesalers and get them to put stock aside for your test marketing exercise. Most will agree as long as you tell them you’ll be buying stock in bulk later.
– When auctions end, invoice your winning bidder and send Second Chance Offers to unsuccessful bidders whose offers also generate profit for you.
– Isolate products that do make money from those that don’t – add the former to your permanent inventory and dismiss the rest.
Note: You must do constant checks on permanent inventory to ensure profits stay high. It’s also a good idea to do further checks on products that fall slightly below your profit expectations to see if changes to your listing might generate higher profits later.
– Take payment for goods sold in your test listings, buy sufficient stock to fulfil orders, use profits to pay your eBay and PayPal fees, spend the remainder on stock for future listings.
– Make replenishment of stock from profits your main priority and look for products that at least double your investment after overheads. This allows you to double your wealth every time you acquire new stock. So as long as the market for your products remains constant, or grows, you could end up with a multi-million pound turnover business in less than one year. Much less if you’re really keen.
To prove it, this is how a little capital reinvested in more stock over several weeks (or months if you’re working alone or part-time), adds up to a quick and easy fortune. This works where you begin with £100 capital and week one finds you making and reinvesting £200 in stock (original investment plus £100 profit), week two’s investment is £200, week three is £400, and so on. It goes like this:
Week Investment Profit
£ £
1 100 200
2 200 400
3 400 800
4 800 1,600
5 1,600 3,200
6 3,200 6,400
7 6,400 12,800
8 12,800 25,000 (rounded for ease)
9 25,000 50,000
10 50,000 100,000
11 100,000 200,000
12 200,000 400,000
13 400,000 800,000
14 800,000 £1,000,000 PLUS!
Of course, I’m not suggesting you’ll make that kind of money working alone, or that you’ll do it over just a handful of products, but with a concerted effort, help and lots of mud thrown at the wall, it just shows how much money can be made in such a short space of time!