583: $1000s a Month Sharing the Best Deals in Your Niche

23:02If it's a killer deal, you almost have to share it because that's the brand. And people will remember that and come back to you. And even if it's not monetized. Yeah. I mean, Amazon's one example. I don't have a partnership or affiliate relationship with Amazon. and you want to talk about mistakes or challenges, Amazon affiliate program is no joke. They are very stringent about making sure you play by the rules. I've applied and been in a couple of times. And then the most recent one, they said to me like, hey, basically your site is not adding enough value. You're not adding enough value just as a daily deal.

23:37So they're like, all right, we're cutting you out. But that's why they still include Amazon in there because they have some great golf deals. I am really shocked by that. I would have thought Amazon would be a pretty big chunk of the revenue pie. Yeah, I wish. No, unfortunately, they are nothing. Nothing right now. I wonder if you'd be able to run it through like a sub affiliate, like Skimlinks or one of these other services just to even get a piece because it's like you said, you're still sharing this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's really surprising. Yeah. Because I'm thinking like, shoot, you're going through all this trouble.

24:08Dude, I'm sourcing these deals daily. What are you talking about value add? Like, of course, I'm adding value. I save people a ton of time every day. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I mean, maybe they look at the website and back to scrappiness. If you check out the website, it's not the most beautiful thing in the world. I'll be honest. I started in a weekend in July, 2021. The updates since then, very minimal. So it's based on a standard WordPress template. It's a little janky. It's one that hasn't been updated in five years, but it gets the job done. So maybe they also looked at it and said, oh, this website is a little, not the prettiest.

24:42we don't want to sort of associate. The other piece I'll say on that more serious note with Amazon too is one of their things is pricing. So for them, pricing is critical. They want to make sure affiliates are always providing the latest. And they actually encourage a lot of people not to include pricing. They don't want the user to expect it's$10 and they go on, it's actually 20. So partially by the nature of my business being this deal is going to last 24 hours, eight hours. if I hover up there, it could be gone within a matter of hours. And then I'm sending sort of misleading people in their mind.

25:16I actually wrote some scripts for them to try and solve this problem and go back and forward with them to basically be like, hey, if it's an Amazon deal, remove it within 24 hours. And I thought that might address it. And then they're like, they let me back in. And then they said the thing about values. I don't mess with Amazon. It's a tricky one. Yeah. Sorry about that. That's troubling. We were talking a lot about technical details and AWS is written by engineers for engineers. It's like its own secret box in itself. But these are all solvable problems. Like you said, hey, I didn't have a huge technical background.

25:50I was able to solve it. And even for the, in my case, with the shoe business, I found outsourced developers to build this whole system for me. Like I wouldn't know the first thing about it other than like trying to, well, how would we logically go through this to minimize resources. So these are solvable problems. If you're curious, like don't get hung up on that. And there's always the manual way to do it too. Although I think this is much more sustainable long-term. Now I want to ask about the email list because this is something that, Hey, if I'm posting these deals directly on Reddit, not, and if I'm already subscribed to this subreddit, not a lot of incentive for me to join the email list, but at this point, over 30 ,000 subscribers.

26:30So obviously people are signing up for it. Talk to me about growing the list? A couple of things in terms of list growth here. So one is sticking in the footer of every single Reddit post. I have a little bit of an other section that says, Hey, you want to get these deals in your inbox? Click on this link and sign up, which actually generates, I don't quite have the numbers off top of my head, but is getting a number of people signing up, maybe about 10 people per day, even people who are obviously seeing it in Reddit. I think it's another way to hit them. Maybe they are browsing Reddit at work.

26:59It's probably not quite as acceptable as checking that email while they're sort of grabbing a coffee. So maybe there's a little bit more appropriate in terms of another channel. They don't want to miss them. And that's kind of a nice thing there. So that's one. Reddit's definitely a source and continues to grow, even if people have seen it there. The second one is Facebook ads. So I've done a ton of Facebook advertisement over the course of the business. I would say probably of the 30 ,000, I would say probably about 10 ,000, 12 ,000 of those came from Facebook ads. It's not the cheapest way to get started.

27:31I think my cost per acquisition is about$1.25,$1.30, which I've tried to do the calculation on is actually worth the payoff. And it's a bit of a question mark. I imagine it's around break even for me, given I get sort of small increments when you're on an affiliate business, but it's been a big source. And then the third one was actually a giveaway. So there was a company called Golf Advisory Council. Basically what they do is among other of various marketing channels, they actually bring together different companies and sponsor a giveaway. So this was a St. Andrew's giveaway, sort of Dream Scotland golf trip.

28:08Basically what you end up doing is if they worked with a local golf company, I was part of it and maybe like five other sponsors and everyone contributes to the prize pool. So that includes the trip. I gave some gift cards from one of my partners, people give golf bags and I don't know, values end up being quite high. It's maybe like$10 ,000 for the winner. And then basically everyone kind of pulls together, promotes it. And then as part of it, if you want to enter, you give your name, your email, your phone number, all of that stuff. And at the end of it, they draw out the winners. I think it was one person, then their friend.

28:43And then everyone who contributed and sort of paid to sponsor gets the email addresses on the other side. So what this ended up doing, I think it netted about 80 ,000 emails. And then what you had to do and trying to do this in the above board way and like sending a couple emails. If you don't get the engagement and you take them off or sort of as soon as any spam reports are unsubscribed, they're gone completely. But basically whittled that down to about, I think it was maybe around 15 ,000 of people who are actually interested and engaged and keeping those engagement metrics. A big one for me is obviously open rates.

29:15I try to keep my open rates around 40 plus percent, which is pretty good. I think on a daily email to keep that consistency over the 10-year. What's the email service provider that you're using? Self-hosted. I mean, if I'm extrapolating it out, it's in about 22 emails a month to 30 plus thousands. That ends up being about 700, 750 ,000 per month, which if you're trying to do it on a MailChimp or others, it becomes very pricey. So I actually self-host it on AWS via a program that's called sendy oh yeah basically i think aws or amazon has simple email send or something like that and i think it's a fraction of a cent per send and allows me to to do all of that for less than a couple hundred dollars a month yeah gosh you're like i'm not a coder i'm not technical but you're like throwing out all these like well that's not the off-the-shelf solution here it's not as easy as signing up for active campaign in my case but no i've had some other friends have recommended sendy to especially as the list grows where all of a sudden i i mean i talked about this in a recent episode having to pay like 7 000 bucks a year to active campaign for a list a little over 100 000 at this point and so it's like this would be the more economical way to do it but then to be able to do all of the automations and other features that would be a whole other ball game to try and set up on my own i can imagine yes but targeting 40 open rates is that helpful and sort of trying to find a similar giveaway to be a part of to a rising tide lifts all boats.

30:46Hey, we can band together. We can all promote this thing and collect some more emails in that way. And then scrubbing those down. These are some freebie seekers. Like they're not going to engage like, okay, well, how many net new subscribers do we get from that? I think that makes sense. On the Facebook ads, is there a particular image or ad copy? Like you probably split test different things. Like what's working there to drive email sites. That seems low, buck 25, buck 30 per subscriber? That seems like pretty strong acquisition. Basically, I think it's four or five images. The first one is like sign up to daily golf steals, the best deals, coupons, and something else that kind of like catchphrase there.

31:22And it's got a nice little arrow at the bottom that says like, check out to learn some more. And then you scroll over. And then the first thing it says is like, we partner with all the biggest golf brands and then lists sort of like four or five in there to find the best deals. And then the next one sort of shows, I don't know, a copy or an image of the best deal. We've got four golf balls and then one of them is gold and it's got like a dollar sign. And then the last one, I think in there, it's got like an arrow says like sign up now to get the best five in your email, sort of in your inbox. It's kind of like a carousel slider type of post.

31:53Yeah, exactly. Carousel. I'm sure I could do better if I spent the time on it. It's working. I mean, I started those from almost the following month after that one saying, okay, yeah, I I think it was about that timeframe started them. So it's been running for a while now. I'm sure if I hired an expert, back to kind of my mentality here is give it a go, kind of figure it out. And then at a certain point, if it's worthwhile, go and hire an expert to do it better, like the AWS on the automation tool, bringing that online. But there's no tracking to say, okay, I know that long-term, an email subscriber that opens 40 % of the emails and buys three pieces of new gear a year is going to be worth$5.

32:32So I will happily spend a buck 30 all day long to get them on my list? I tried to back into it, if I'm honest, using expected clicks. Okay, what is the value of my click? My clicks actually are only per click is pretty low. I think we're about 10 cents per click, which isn't great. And that was one of the things I compared notes with Cameron. That said, it kind of works out. I would say it's probably about breakeven, but the interesting part is the conversations you can have. Like that's, I talk a bit about the revenue smoothing concept, starting to work with more one-up partnerships, it's a lot more compelling to say, I've got a newsletter of 33 ,000 people.

33:10I will be able to guarantee I'll put a deal in front of between that and Reddit about 30 ,000 to 50 ,000 golfers. I couldn't, even if it's more pricey or I'm not quite breaking even, you start to have those types of conversations that I think starts to get the flywheel going. Yeah, a little more social proof. That makes a lot of sense. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call? It's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications.

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35:08It really varies based on size, based on the partnership. I would say it ranges from 1%. There's a couple, I don't really spend a ton of time with them just as a result up to my highest are about 20%. If I'm trying to extrapolate out there, it's probably the bigger guys are starting to be into the more of the range between like five to 10%, sort of the big names you've heard of, Global Golf, Callaway Pre-Owned are a couple of my big ones. And then when you get into more of the 15 to 20%, that starts to be sort of smaller brands who need to try and attract that attention. They're more the direct to consumer kind of scrappiness using affiliate channels versus the other guys have just that negotiation power.

35:50That said, I have also, and back to the social proof, back to the tenure, you can start to engage and start to negotiate with them too. I'm having the conversations. I regularly talk to my guy from Callaway Pre-Owned a bit about what we could do together, talking about commission rates as well. So it's back to if you can generate and demonstrate the value and the numbers kind of start to be compelling. I say to people, hey, on a monthly basis, I'll get about 750 ,000 impressions to a million impressions. I'm generating 130 ,000 to 150 ,000 clicks. And it's like, all right, me as Callaway pre-owned, it's worth a conversation and start to demonstrate that value after a couple of years.

36:29Yeah. So you're able to sell sponsorships in the newsletter. What does that conversation look like? Yeah, it's translated into that. And I think about the phases of a business. One of the big ones for 2023 was how can I put more money in my pocket on day one, as opposed to just relying on the affiliate. Like especially in the daily deals, your revenue looks like this based on how great a deal did we find yesterday for today. So part of what I was trying to do this year is a couple of things. One is almost like pre-purchasing deals. So the ability to say, I want to do a package of four deals every single month for the rest of the year and giving them effectively a discounted rate.

37:07I'm doing flat fee, which is kind of nice. They get the upside, but I'm getting some fixed money in that side. So one is package deals. And then the second is sponsorship, which you highlight. This would be probably more with like the direct-to-consumer brands or something. Yeah. Although a couple of big ones. So Callaway Pre-Owned is actually a sponsor on the newsletter themselves. So they do it, which is great. That's kind of one piece is package deals. I do that with a couple of golf ball companies. I do it with a couple of apparel companies. The second is the sponsorship. And if I look at it kind of I've got a few different properties at this point.

37:37There is the newsletter, which is generating 15 ,000 impressions, 17 ,000 impressions on a daily basis, which is great. So you can sort of do a bit of a sort of a banner in the middle, one at the bottom, one's there. And then the second is Reddit. So I have a little bit of an other section. I'm trying not to blow it up too much, trying to sort of be thoughtful about not spamming there, but also having the space there that's getting a lot of impressions. I kind of feature a couple people, might cycle them through as well on a monthly basis. And then the website as well as a third one, although that's kind of smaller.

38:11So that's really where the fixed piece is. As I put a couple of grand in my pocket from day one, as opposed to just waiting for the affiliate to get there. On Reddit, do you post once per day? Like, here's the top five things that we found. Are you making like individual posts for each of those deals? Yeah. So it's all consolidated. It's here's the top seven callers. So it's kind of like, here's the seven daily deals. And then at the bottom, I have an other section that's effectively, it's kind of like, sign up for my newsletter. Hey, if you're a veteran or first responder, here's all these companies that give you discounts and then kind of a couple other things in there.

38:47So Global Golf, really one of my big partners, I plug them in there. So that's kind of how it works. Okay. Does the website matter? Like if the majority of traffic is coming through email and Reddit, like do people go to the website? Honestly, not really. But you need it. I mean, coming back to the affiliate pieces, I couldn't go to an affiliate program and be like, hey, I've got a newsletter. I mean, maybe you could there, a newsletter at Reddit. They want to look at something. They want to see something that you're actually applying with. And it generates some traffic. When we talk about SEO, you start to get trickling in.

39:23Like if you search golf daily deals, I think I'm in the first spot or a couple variations, but you're getting, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 clicks per day. It's really small kind of in the grand scheme of things. So, yes, you do need it. The other piece, and this was more of a discovery for me this year, and we talked a bit about from the get-go not trying to spam seven links that go to daily golf deals that then go to affiliate. I was trying to do two to three because I didn't want to create that additional friction for people because you see a big drop off as well. What I found is actually the website and the template that I put together actually has almost a create some redirect for you.

40:01So it goes www.dailygolfsteals.com slash go slash Callaway pre-owned deals, something like that. And then it's got a number after it. I can actually copy and paste that redirect, but then uses that affiliate link and put it into Reddit. So starting in 2023, once I realized this, I just actually, every single thing that I put in Reddit, whether I'm getting a commission, I'm not getting a commission, I'll just use that slash go, which then rather than monetizing three out of seven deals, I was then able to monetize seven out of seven deals, which was also another kind of boost to start the year two.

40:36If that makes sense. Sorry, help me understand that. So that's like an affiliate link redirect plugin. It's not even a plugin. It's basically just part of the native functionality and this template that I found. But yeah, it basically creates a redirect link that Reddit is happy allowing me to post and it effectively goes Reddit. You click the link, it goes Daily Golf Steals, it redirects, it goes affiliate link, it goes website. So it's kind of created an artificial and a redirect in there that just allowed me to effectively, as I increase my traffic on every single click by 40 % where I was losing them when they were clicking through to daily golf steals as an interim.

41:16And then the second click to the user, they're not stopping on your website. They're flowing directly through to whatever they clicked on, like the, whatever the deal was that they clicked on. Which is a win-win for them. I mean, people, and back to your question about how does the community react? They don't, some of them probably don't even know that daily golf steals actually exists because they're just clicking that link. If they're not paying attention to the bottom, what's the theme or template for the site? The theme is Clipper. It's one, I think I found on one of the WordPress marketplaces way back when seemed to function out as I needed.

41:45Clip is the name of it. Gotcha. Well, thanks for sharing that. So we've got the affiliate partnerships. We've got the sponsorships. Anything else monetization wise? That's it so far. My philosophy on all of this and why I've kept doing it is build an audience. To me, building an audience and whether you monetize via affiliate, whether you move into physical product or something like that, It's just giving you a base. But right now, it's all about affiliates and sponsorship. Sounds good. And then between the email, between the Facebook ads, between Reddit, anything else you're doing to proactively market the business?

42:20It's honestly conversations like this. So we talked about SEO search engines, really not a huge source of traffic. That's largely a result of not having the right backlinks, the right type of engagement. So having great conversations like these, and we got featured in a blog via one of my affiliate partner kind of platforms. They wrote something. So pieces like that, I think just getting some of that link juice should also help. We talk about when you talk about search engine, I guess there's a lot buried in the long tail. I mean, if you think about it, I've got 4 ,000 deals out there. So there's actually a lot of content and a lot of long tail phrases.

42:56If you specifically search this very one-off and wrote deals at the end of it, if I can actually boost my domain authority, there's probably a decent chance I could actually end up on that first or second page and start to get the trickling in, but just haven't focused on building those backlinks to date. Yeah. Even if that is long since out of stock or that deal has expired, you know, you're hopefully getting traffic to it and maybe they set your affiliate cookie and, you know, maybe they find something else that is in stock or that is relevant, or maybe they signed up for the email list. I missed this one, but it sounds like a cool service so let me sign up for this so that makes sense we'll get you a backlink for appearing on the show so about an hour on the deal sourcing side an hour on the operational side that's a day in the life anywhere else that the time is going i mean that's really impressive to build something to this level in just a couple hours a day then that's the nice thing is like it's two hours of my contractor's time my time really is spent around the edges so a couple things It's true.

43:55That's not even you. Somebody else is doing that. And they're doing the email formatting. It's like, oh, even better. I don't even touch it at this point in time. So my time is spent on a couple of things. One is partnerships. So that's both engaging with these affiliate partners, having some of those interesting conversations, building some of those new sales, new relationships, some of that fixed sponsorship. So I call it revenue generating activities. And then it's a bit on like, how can I improve or keep things sort of running behind the scenes? So if we need to create a net new template or just something, I'm building that out myself or working with my developer to do so.

44:30So it's all kind of like improvement behind the scenes and then generating revenue. At this point, I'm probably spending about three to four hours a week on it, I would estimate. And then that spikes based on if something's happening or we need to spend some time. But consistently, I'm able to step back. It's all nice to have, let's call it, as opposed to need to be involved in the day to day. That's right. I imagine there's some seasonality to it. But hey, we got Black Friday coming up. We got holiday shopping season coming up. So it's never a true off season for golf, despite summer being, I imagine, a little bit higher.

45:01So that's really cool. If you had to start over, anything you'd do differently? If somebody else is staring down the barrel of like, man, I should do daily deals in my own niche. Like, what would you do differently to accelerate? I'd say it's gone pretty, honestly, it's gone pretty well. I think I've just been more efficient in some of this stuff, like the automation probably would have tried to bring that in sooner. So just recognizing, I mean, to me, consistency, everything in this, you can't be a daily deal site if you end up only doing it four days a week. So anything that you can do to be that consistent every single day, making it in a way that actually allows for your lifestyle and you can have another job, have a family, have a life outside of work.

45:43That would probably be one that I might try to pull a bit earlier. Yeah. Weekly deals or whenever we feel like a deal is just didn't have the same rig to it. Yeah. I've experimented. I think another one maybe I've started playing around with is even niching down a bit further. So one segmentation I did on my list is left-handed versus right-handed golfers. Yeah. I saw that on the opt-in forum. Yeah. Yeah, which has actually gone surprisingly well. It's back to how can you give me exactly what's relevant? And I think lefty golfers, I'll say it, they feel kind of left in the dark. People don't like them as much.

46:17So the fact that now they have their own special email, I mean, open rates on that 60, 70 % and click through rate is about 10x what I get on my regular newsletter. So it really seemed to be quite effective. And maybe there's a niche here back to niching down. It could be lefty versus righty. There could be a room for lady golf steals, just as another avenue that I think is sometimes overlooked in the golf world. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, the lefty, they've been burned too many times clicking on the, it's only a right-handed club. Like, I'm not going to do this again. Oh, it's specifically for left-handed clubs.

46:49Like, okay, I'm going for it. That's really interesting. So we've got an opportunity to expand vertically. Like I can go deeper into the golf niche and serve the women golfers or serve left-handers, or I could expand horizontally. Like I could take this model using the automation and knowledge that we have of what made this work. We can expand horizontally into different niches like, and go kind of broad that way. I mean, maybe we're just early days of this. I think this, I mean, do you see it becoming a full-time thing? Where do you want to take it? Yeah, I think it'd be interesting. I'll just add a third leg to your one would also be geographies.

47:22So one of the things that I keep getting people on Reddit asking me for is Canada deals. Back to people left out in the cold. They feel like, oh, they see all these great deals I'm doing for the US. And then they say shipping's$50 on this club. Yeah, that negates any deal that was once there. Yeah, exactly. So that would be another potential angle. As far as the future, yeah, I mean, I'd love to do it full time. I think if my attitude here is if I'm being able to have this type of traction of success in my four to five hour model a week, what could I do if that's 10x that amount? That's definitely on the horizon.

47:52If I can consistently sort of hit my goal in terms of revenue, especially throughout the off season, it would be amazing to do that and really see, do you start going and doing that Lady Golf Steals? Do you go and do another niche? Do you do another geography? And so you've got kind of a, I'll call it a waffle iron here. I've got the template. I've got the tools. I've got the newsletter. I've got the processes, got the people. If I had more time, you might start it again. Though the only tough part I'll say is Reddit's an amazing asset here. I'm not sure if there's that same asset that you can get that base for others but we'll see check in with me again in six months time yeah lock in those other domains we'll have to do a follow-up see what's going on so again dailygolfsteals.com check David out over there really appreciate you joining me this is such a cool business and especially the way you've got it set up to yeah it's daily but hey it's automated and outsourced for the most part so very cool to hear let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation show up every day be consistent, be putting a product out there that people are excited about.

48:50And I say, do it in a way that works for you. Really try to find that, I'll say, consistency to get to a point where you say there's something here and make it work for your lifestyle. There is opportunity for automation, figure out yourself or figure out some help to get you there. Exactly. I think that showing up every day is super underrated. And I remember my brother had this habit tracker that he showed me at one of our side hustle meetups. I think it was spend five minutes a day writing or spend five minutes a day on my website. And it was like, once I sit down and do it, I might find 15 minutes or 30 minutes.

49:22But it was just like, as long as I did five, I get to check that box and feel that completion element. And the Jerry Seinfeld thing, don't break the chain, write a joke every day. It's like, build that habit, build it into really part of your routine, part of your life there. So appreciate that. And even though the side hustle show is not daily, it's something that has become a part of, well, it just happens every week. You know, if people are like, well, how do you do it? Like, I don't know, just every Thursday, it just happens. So I like that, that called the consistency. I like this call to automate as much as you can.

49:51Like, how do I work smart? Like, there's got to be a way just versus manually checking 15 different sites and browsing the clearance section. It's like, no, no, no, no, there's got to be a better option here. So working smarter, not harder. And then what really helped it take off was finding a crowd of people who wanted this stuff rather trying to build something completely from scratch and being a good steward of that community. Reddit in this case, which can be very fickle, can be, hey, we don't want you promoting your stuff in here. So trying to be helpful first. And that goes with a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, or any type of community that you're a part of.

50:27But like leading with value, hey, I found some great deals. Cool. This is awesome. Again, dailygolfsteals.com. Notes and links for this one are at sidehustlenation.com slash David. While you're there, I think you should check out the list of 20 other hobby niches that you might be able to apply the same general business model to. Again, sidehustlenation.com slash David, or just follow the show notes link in the episode description. Now, what to listen to next. If you liked this model, we mentioned it on the call. It is episode 485 with Cameron Stover. That was hunting gear deals, very similar business, but had some different promotion strategies.

51:04Again, 485, another daily deals site example. And if you don't like that model, that's fine too. We've got hundreds of other side hustles to choose from. In fact, I've been interviewing awesome entrepreneurs like David for the last 10 years. It's crazy. So go binge on the archives, go find one that's a fit for you. Or you know, why not build yourself a personalized playlist of the episodes that are most relevant to you? You can do that at hustle.show. All you got to do is answer a few short multiple choice questions and you'll instantly get that custom curated playlist that you can go add it to your device.

51:35Again, that's hustle.show. Big thanks to David for sharing his insight. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And we'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.

52:04We'll see you next time.