How I made $54k in a single month selling Wordpress Woocommerce Sites.
It was early 2017, I had just gotten married. So I took a break from work to spend some time with my wife. I was also burning through my savings faster than I can replenish it ( Nigerian weddings are expensive đ also taking too much time off work after a wedding wasnât a great idea )
Anyways back to the story⊠like every success story, it begins with an epiphany. I was bingeing through YouTube one day, when I saw this video by Patrick Bet-David from valuetainment about time compression. Check it here ->
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elytvodHneA
Hereâs an overly simplified version â He basically talked about how reducing the time it takes you to deliver your service, from the moment you get the order to the final execution can increase your revenue. The idea is â If you can do it in less time, you can serve more customers. Which in turns means you make more money.
At this point in time, it usually takes me 3 weeks (meetings, design, and building) to deliver one website. On a good month, I max out at 6 clients a month. I was charging an average fee of $600/website. My clients loved my work, I was getting recommended all the time, but I just couldnât keep up. So the villain here was time.
The discovery:
After I watching Patâs video, I sat down to brainstorm how I can reduce the time it takes me to deliver one project. While examining my old projects, I noticed, I was building a lot of e-commerce websites and they all had similar structure. Apart from the branding, almost everything else was the same.
The breakthrough:
That was when I thought to myself; what if I built an e-commerce template and sell it for half the price of my custom designed websites? The color would be black and white, you pay extra to customize the colors, I do the setup (It takes 30s to clone from source. Content swapping takes 20 - 40 minutes), you upload your products with screencast video that I would send to you.
Boy was I right! The customers didnât care if they had a template design, they just wanted a functional website where they can sell their products. Although the first one month wasnât great, I only managed to get one customer from twitter.
Things picked up and went viral from there after I ran a Facebook ad. âAn online store with everything you needâ only for x price. With option to make a deposit and finalize payment at a later date. My WhatsApp was blowing up with orders. I had so many orders that I wasnât able to tell who paid for what domain, or remember their balance or product categories.
For days I was going through WhatsApp chats sorting and matching customers order to domains and servers. I just wasnât ready for it. I setup an excel sheet to help me stay organized. Even that wasnât enough. I couldnât find anything at the time to solve this problem for me.
I needed some sort of digital folder / customer account tool: where I can store my customers data, invoices, drop notes about the customerâs order, set reminders of due dates, etc.
That my friends was how I came up with the idea for UsePaperCloud.com But thatâs a story for another time.
In conclusion â What did I do right?
- I identified the bottleneck in my operation.
- Built a simple solution that solved a specific problem for a particular industry.
- Reduced the time it took to deliver my service.
My final take is â Thereâs a huge market for people who want services to be performed for them. Tap into that. Not everyone is tech savvy to setup something as simple as a Shopify store. Also figure out how you can reduce the time it takes you to deliver your service.
If you enjoyed this post please do checkout UsePaperCloud.com itâs a simple small business CRM toolkit.
Thank you for reading through đđœ.
Such a great achievement bro
Thanks mate. All thanks to Patrick
Hi Amani, congratulations on your huge month!
I was exploring this idea for wedding vendors in the Indian Christian space.
Two questions:
I'm curious as to how the customer's experience was in customizing their content.
This was a huge one for me as a way to make revenue recurring. Or does your audience generally understand how to upload a new product on Wordpress?
Cheers!
Wow, that was one breakthrough moment you had there. Great Job
Very inspiring. Thank you. :-)
Great
First, congratulation! I have one question, how to compete with Shopify? Why people paying several hundred dollars upfront instead using Shopify with their subscription. It's cheaper to start with Shopify.
I may be wrong but Shopify doesn't seems extremely hard. Especially if you compare to Wordpress, it seems Shopify is easier compared to Wordpress.
Not everyone knows about Shopify or want to use Shopify. Woocommerce is huge and still growing.
In the long run owning your website is cheaper than Shopify, no monthly subscription, no revenue sharing, and you have full control of your data.
WordPress and woocommerce is as easy as Shopify.
Good idea yeah when I do freelance work for co struction companies I noticed a lot of similarities in there business. Something Iâll definitely keep in mond
That's a good start. Try to streamline as much as you can. Also give the option to get the custom design if they don't want the template.
First of all, congratulations! What was your marketing process? Did you just use Facebook ads for it? What was the cost of acquiring one customer?
Thanks mate! Yes. I pretty much used facebook and IG ads. I usually spend $10/day for 10 days.
Nice Post,
Thanks for sharing this useful information with us.
great achivement, very inspiring story
Great information
Thank you so much for sharing it with us
Nice Post,
Thanks for sharing this information with us
Hey Amani! This is helpful and something I've been thinking a lot about for particular industry verticals so thanks for posting! Two questions for you if you have the time:
Do you have a sample of the sales page you used for? I agree that a tiered strategy works best. Any other best practices there?
Did you have a couple tries with FB ads and find any that work particularly well?
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Armani. I also render WordPress Website Design Services using templates, plugins and page builders and I have worked on projects as big as websites for some government ministries and parastatals in Nigeria. (Here is an example: http://aci.stage80.co/). That is the staging url, yet to deploy it to the clientâs server because of some difficulties from the clientâs end.
I donât code but I love to build websites and that was why I chose WordPress. I do make use of some little html and css code snippets from W3school and the likes.
But my question is, these templates you made mention of, how did you build them? Were they coded or you made the design with a page builder and you just import and export?
I noticed sites built from scratch with page builders are usually code-heavy and slows down the website? How do you navigate this?
Very nice. Love it!
I enjoyed reading your story Amani. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you đđŒ
Congratulations! Do a good job, bro. How do you market? Social media? SEO? or...Ads?
This is a great post. I like this topic. I found many interesting things from this site. Thanks for posting this again
https://www.myfedloan.online/
Hello Amani, thanks for that. Could you possibly show us some examples of these black-and-white stores your helped setup? Thanks
Sure thing, i post a demo video on twitter.
Interesting article. But I think otherwise!!!
Thatâs pretty good. Did you ever post to theme sites where people buy your products or did you only ever sell from your own site?
Nah, i sold them directly to my clients. At first i had a landing page exampling everything. Later i tried asking them to DM to see a Demo.
People were DMing me more than checking the landing page.
The key thing here was i was doing the setups for them so it wasn't like you would buy then setup yourself.
Crazy, it's amazing. I've been thinking lately how I could explore this web building for people (ps: I'm a marketer)
And this is how!
Very interesting read
UPDATE: I just checked out Papercloud, it's simplicity sold me. I use Simplenotes for brainstorming and all that pre-work stuff, but now I might just port to Papercloud đđœ
Thank you đđŒ
I like the content of this video, thank you
Great insight Amani, keep up the great work.
Congratulations @amani_art!
I'd love learn more about your Facebook ads targeting?
How did you scale and improve your workflow?
Thanks
Thanks. Things got out of hand, I had to start hiring to keep up.
I tried a combination of Facebook and Instagram ads. I don't send traffic to any landing page or anything like. The ad goes goes back to my IG page where I share all my previous projects.
In the body of the post I ask them to DM me their WhatsApp number so I can send them a demo of the site working.
Great job Amani.. Great insight. Keep growing
Good idea yeah when I do freelance work for co struction companies I noticed a lot of similarities in there business.
That's a good start. Cheers
Hi Amani, Congratulations! I'm Nigerian too and oh, I love seeing Nigerians wins! :).
I started a small wordpress business this year and currently at 12 sales. I never thought anyone would like my themes; plus, everyone I spoke to reminded me of the saturated market! But hey, I'm proud of my beginning. I don't run ads yet, but preparing my Facebook page to begin.
While I struggle with self-sabotage, I've managed to list 6 themes. I'm currently not making profit because of the marketplace I'm using, but hopefully the ads I run brings customers to my own website. Thank you! Join indie because of your post.:)
Hey Onome,
Can you tell me if you build these themes yourself or if any good online theme can be repurposed for this?
Amani, I would like your thoughts on this too.
Glad to read this! Ignore what people are saying... The market is only saturated at the bottom.
Consider content marketing for your themes and showcase the usecases.
The sky is your limit.
Good tips but if some people googlea
How make a e-commerce website
No.1 Shopify like wix dot com for users without knowledge
N.2 WooCommerce more for web developers.
One woo YouTube tutorial and you r done.
Buy a One domain
On Wordpress theme
Buy a Server 5$/m and you are done with your shop online.
Woo and Wordpress for free
Client take of course No.1 one click solution.
So how do you find $54k in a single month?
Fb ads? really, with companies competitors killing your fck ads đ
I'm not criticizing you.
I'm only realistic in 2022
Funny because someone said this exact thing to me on Twitter when I first started.
You underestimate how much people value their time. You also underestimate the number of people who don't care or want to deal with any of what you just mentioned.
Also the service is not for everyone.
I think you need to open your mind to the possibilities.
When I finally understood SEO I didn't think everything was right under my nose.
PS: As a digital marketer, I tell you Facebook ads are working, especially for small businesses too. But like I said, open your mind to new techniques online and you'll see.
I'll be happy to give you some suggestions on social media marketing when starting out, or want to improve.
Cheers!
Did you watch the linked video at all?
That's a very good idea! I'm definitely going to take action on this.
It's genius, just build a template that works and sell the system.
Businesses are just interested in making money, they don't care as much about the technical stuff.
As long as you can integrate the right tools for their business, they're golden.
This is why the ecommerce website design demographic is pure gold.
Are you still implementing this nowadays?
That's correct! Businesses don't care about all that. There's a lot of opportunities in ecommerce space.
I still do on occasion but nowadays I'm focusing more on my startup.
I really enjoyed your tips! I'm starting a small wordpress website development business and like you I just got married and my daughter is due tomorrow lol. Do you have more tips on how to make a website development business successful?
Oh wow! Congrats in advance. I wrote a post about this a while ago. I'll link to it at the bottom, but here are the main points.
â First thing first, find a niche you can relate to. Don't try to do everything
â Have tiered pricing mode. This is super important to increase your revenue as you let customers pick which package they can afford.
â Embrace facebook ads. Lets be honest you can't reach half the people you could own your own without some sort of platform ads.
Here - > How to package yourself and charge more money as a freelancer >
https://blog.usepapercloud.com/how-to-package-yourself-and-charge-more-money-as-a-freelancer/
Love the process of coming up with the idea.
Thanks mate! All thanks to Patrick.
thank you for sharing to us
thanks man for sharing such an amazing video about the process of doing and how we can improve the process as fast as fast!
Hi Amani, nice concept that I used several times with multiple services even within my work in enterprise.
Just wanted to tell you that the design of Usepapercloud.com very appealing.. It immediately captured my attention.
Thank you Wael. I've been so scared to share this post. It's been sitting on my notes app for months.
So inspiring thank you just launched my dev agency https://criov.com/ this was a coup de main for me
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