758: From Zero to $120k/mo in 18 Months

25:49So over time, if you do find keywords like the example you gave there, maybe there's something really specific around the brand and the product name, you could create a search text ad campaign and eat up as much of that first page as you possibly can. So you'll have your shopping ads and maybe your search text ads there as well. But the easiest and quickest and most cost efficient way to start is to have that approach with the shopping campaigns. And essentially, the only reason you've got those three campaigns in there is because, just because of the way that funnel is set up and you need to have the keywords flowing into it and to be excluded.

26:19You can't just exclude the word sauna, for example, because it would be, you know, exclude any search that's got the word sauna in it. So it needs to be in still, but you just don't really want to be spending anything on that traffic. Do you ever run into brands or suppliers saying, this is all great. You can come on board, you can sell our stuff, but you can't bid on our trademark terms or you can't bid on our branded search terms. So that is one of the reasons why I prefer to steer clear from brands who sell direct to customer themselves because of exactly that type of thing is something I have seen before.

26:49So in part of that niche validation that we're doing in the supplier research, I tend to try and avoid those suppliers because of those potential issues you've got with them. Okay. Now on the ad traffic, what's a click cost these days? Let's talk about kind of the target ROI or some of the math behind driving paid traffic. So the bids are completely different between those three funnel stages. So that upper funnel traffic, that generic sauna type traffic, I'm bidding anywhere between two pence and five pence on that. And if I get a couple of clicks a week, it's fine. That's the sort of CPCs that I'm getting.

27:23For that bottom funnel traffic where someone's searching, they're searching specifically for an individual product with a long tail search. I'm bidding up anywhere up to five pounds for that type of click and maybe maybe paying that for it quite often it's somewhere in between a pound to five pounds but um yeah that's the type of CPCs that you'd be sort of expecting to see in that okay yeah so pretty pretty expensive you gotta be reasonably confident this person is ready to convert and my landing page is going to convince them to hit buy and so there's there's some elements that you have on there obviously you have the product and lots of images and the price and customer reviews to the extent that you can have them.

28:03You have the phone number for somebody. You have any questions about this product? Call us. Does that ring you or does that ring somebody on your team at this point? Somebody on the team at this point, but me at the start. I've heard that phone ringing at all times. Okay. What was it like trying to answer questions about this stuff if you're not a camper van person yourself? There was a bit of faking it until I made it, if I'm completely honest. It's a steep learning curve at first. I mean, obviously you want to try and do as much as you can to put yourself in a good, in a good position to be able to answer the questions.

28:30But if you've got 50, a hundred products on your site, you're not going to know every specification about everything. So just try and handle it the best you can. If it's a question you don't have the answer to, you can say, I'm just going to check that with so-and-so or my manager, and I'm going to give you a call back. And then you go away, get the answer and ring them back. I think you do learn quickly, but don't expect or feel like you have to have every answer straight away. Right. We had Holly, Finna Frock on the show recently. She said something similar. She was selling like pool and pond fountains and pumps and like crazy stuff that she didn't know anything about.

29:02And she was like, oh, I've got some ideas. Let me do a quick research and I'm going to give you a call back or I'm going to check with so-and-so. And it was like, yeah, I'm not being dishonest. And at the same time, it's kind of this proactive customer support to go above and beyond and try and make that sale. And having the number on the site adds a certain air of legitimacy and confidence for the customer like okay there's somebody behind this business that cares and is willing to help me out. Yeah completely and I can't overemphasize how important it is to try and get people on the phone in the early days.

29:34If you're able to articulate and present yourself to any kind of normal level then I think the more that you get potential customers to ring you and speak to you the more sales you will make. It's not something that is obviously scalable you sitting around doing that all day every day but the handful of phone calls you get at the start are going to be your best opportunities to make those initial sales and getting those initial sales at the start is just the most important thing it just gives you that bit of confidence to carry on momentum and then that's yeah that's really all you need to be focusing on at the start.

30:05Do you remember your first sale moment or that notification from Shopify what did you sell what was going on there? Yeah I did it was it was an awning for a van lifer um so yeah one of one of my favorite people it was uh someone who rang me up on a friday afternoon and wanted to check if something was in stock so i was like oh i'll have to go and check that one with the warehouse quickly and give you a call back so i had to go and ring the supplier check it was in stock everything like that had a couple of other questions about delivery and then he was like okay how do i pay and all of a sudden i thought oh how does he actually how does he actually pay me with this you know and so i was like oh i'll just double check the you know the card machine's working and then i was like oh actually i can send you through this link and you can pay online and it was all fine, but definitely stumbling over the intricacies of that a little bit at the start.

30:49Yeah, which is risky. It's like, let me take down your credit card number right now and figure out how to process this. Don't want to lose that and risk sending a link that gets buried. Yeah. So know that before you take the first sale, unlike me. All right. Well, that's very cool. So up to five pounds per click for these bottom of the funnel, high conversion keywords. Is there a target ROI that you're shooting for in terms of the ad spend or return on ad spend? All depends on your profit margin. So know what you're netting on those products because one thing about dropshipping different brands and products is you're going to get a different margin from these different brands in terms of percentage and in terms of actual monetary value.

31:31So for me, I work out what my net profit is going to be on all of those products, if I sell it at full retail price, if I sell it at a 5 % discount, and then I'm looking at that margin versus my cost to acquire the customer. And anything ROI positive is great at the start. What's typical in terms of a product margin here, either a product basis or category basis? I've seen anywhere between 15 to 40 % gross margins on stuff. And that will depend a little on the price point of the product. I think if you've got really high ticket stuff, 10,$20 ,000 plus, you might see more like the 15 to 20 % range in some cases.

32:10But I think on stuff that's getting, edging a bit closer to that 1 ,000 mark, something typical around 25, 30 % is pretty standard. Yeah, so we're talking hundreds of dollars, potentially of breathing room to go out and acquire traffic. Exactly. Acquire the traffic. And you've also just got that sort of margin gives you breathing room for other things as well. If something goes wrong with delivery or something is not quite right with it and you want to be a good business owner and maybe give your customer a little bit of a discount on something or, you know, cover a delivery cost for them or something like that.

32:47You've got the room to do that in high ticket, which you don't in low ticket as well. Those sort of razor thing margins you might get$3 off a$15 product. It's, yeah, it's a difficult place to play in. Yeah. How does that work with some manufacturers might have map pricing, you know, minimum advertised price? Is that common in your niche? In the UK as a market, and I think a couple of others as well, there's no such thing as map pricing. Oh, okay. So it's actually a kind of different setup here. So people can, in theory, sell things at different levels. And I would say if I was ever doing niche research again, and I had a couple of niches where I'm looking, they both have really good plus points on them.

33:27and I'm trying to decide between them. A kind of final thing I might look at with that is just, am I seeing price consistency from the other online sellers? If I'm outside of the US anyway, I'd be trying to see how much price consistency is there. In the US, I think a lot of people just advertise at Map, essentially. Yeah, which makes it, in a way, it removes that variable. We're like, okay, we're not going to compete on price because everybody's selling the same thing for the same price. So what are we going to compete on? We're going to compete on service. So we're going to compete on delivery or other elements that have to come into play.

34:00But it sounds like maybe less of a factor in the UK market. It is for sure. There is still work to be done around what you said, though. With this type of business, you are going to be a victim of comparison shoppers. Even someone who's searching, doing that search, that long tail search word that we talked about earlier, they might be going and visiting five, six different sites that are all selling that same product for the same price. So you've got to get a little bit creative in terms of thinking about, okay, how can I make myself stand out to this customer as the place to buy this from? So that can be different in any niche, but there is a lot of things that you can do around that to build out your offer, as I would call it.

34:36So to make you the most attractive company to buy from. Yeah, what do you do for that? I think that's worth talking about. For sure. So I think at a base level, risk reversal is a big thing for people. So returns policies, making sure that you've got a good, clear, visible returns policy. Can you even make that the best returns policy in your market? You know, can you offer to pay the postage on returns? Can you extend the returns window a bit longer than what some of your competitors maybe are doing? That could be an advantage on things. This is something I see. I see 100-day returns advertised on the Camper Nation homepage.

35:09Yes. I think people get scared by that as a business because they might think, if everyone else is advertising 30 day returns and I'm doing 100 and someone buys from me, maybe my supplier only has a 30 day returns window. What's going to happen in that 30 to 100 day period if someone decides to return it during that? I would say firstly, the number of people that return during that gap period that I mentioned, say between 30 and 100 days, is a lot less than the additional sales that I'm getting as a result of people feeling like they've got the added security from it. I feel like generally when people want to return something, They may do it within the first few days if they're going to do it.

35:45And if they don't, the rest of your policy is still the same as everyone else's in terms of you'll see it needs to be in a like new condition. It needs to have all the original packaging. It needs to have all the bits that it came with. So the worst case is you have to just sell that product as an open box and cover your costs from it. And you're basically back at zero at the start. Do they send it back to you or do you have storage for this stuff or do they send it back to the original supplier? If it's within the supplier's return window, we try and get it returned back to the supplier. Yeah.

36:13And that's what we've done at the start. We now have a 3PL that we use that we take that stock back to, but it's not something you need at the start. Got it. Got it. And then you got to liquidate it. Okay. I got it. Okay. Yeah. But I would say also the returns rate in high ticket is a lot less than what you'll find in a lot of low ticket niches, particularly, you know, think of things like clothing or anything. It's nothing like that. You know, we've done 1200, 1500 orders over the last 18 months. And I think we've had 12 returns maybe in that time. Okay, yeah. People are really doing their research up front, making sure this is the right product for their need.

36:46And when it shows up and it is what it says it is, then they're going to keep it. Exactly. And you're selling proper products from proper brands. You know, if you're not willing to stand by these products, you shouldn't sell them. And I think the brands that you'll find are, it's rare that they're making, you know, bad quality products in this type of space. More with Phil in just a moment, including how he's slowly reducing his reliance on paid traffic with an avalanche SEO strategy, when he felt comfortable walking away from the day job, and what he might do differently if he had to start over.

37:20All that and more coming up right after this. We've been getting some work done around the house, and that involves calling different companies to get bids and feel them out. And it's wild seeing the spectrum of responses ranging from picking up right away to setting an appointment by text message to just a mystery voicemail box that maybe someone someday is going to check. But here's the thing. I kind of want to tell that last company about our partner Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the business phone system built so you never miss a call. You can even set up an optional AI agent to pick up the phone, answer questions, and book appointments so you never miss a lead, even when you can't directly take that call.

37:59Quo also lets you keep your existing phone number and all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place in an app on your phone or computer. So anyone on your team can pick up a conversation. They can see the full history and they can respond fast. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash hustle. That's Quo, Q-U-O.com slash We've done a ton of episodes with entrepreneurs selling products online, starting small, and often scaling up into a full-time business. The common thread in most of those stories is they built their business on top of the number one e-commerce platform in the world, and that's our partner, Shopify.

38:45It's like giving your business a head start because Shopify's templates and AI tools help you get a stunning site up and running fast with no coding needed. Plus, Shopify checkout means more customers actually buy, and returning customers can do it in a single click. Plus, if questions come up, their all-new AI assistant sidekick is ready to help you build, troubleshoot, and keep moving. It's really cool. Shopify already powers millions of businesses worldwide, from household names to small businesses just getting started. Will yours be next? If you're ready to hear the of your first sale today, head over to shopify.com slash side hustle to start your free trial today.

39:25That's right. You can start your free trial at shopify.com slash side hustle. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. Now I'm starting to see some more educational style content on the site rather than just product listings. We have like how to measure caravan awnings. We have a guide on how to put up a caravan awning. So trying to wean off of purely paid traffic as a customer acquisition and try and get some more organic juice flowing. Has that been working? Yeah, I would say honestly, one of, if not the biggest lever that we've managed to pull in the last year or so is organic traffic. As much as I talked about getting those early sales and getting people to your product pages and building momentum through ads that way.

40:12I think organic traffic and organic search is probably the biggest opportunity that you've got as an e-commerce business. It's the biggest section of the market. It's free traffic that you don't have to pay for every time. So your acquisition costs are better, you've got better margins, but you just need to be realistic about the terms that you're going to be able to rank for, particularly at the start. If you're the sauna seller, you don't want to be going and trying and doing all your best efforts at a six month old business to try and rank for the word sauna because it's not going to happen.

40:40You've got a thousand other people trying to do that. So it's a very different approach to that. You've got some product comparison style posts. It's almost taken a page out of an affiliate marketing playbook where like, here are the best portable power stations for space heaters, like a very specific use case. Best portable power station for tailgating, another very specific use case. So it's like, not just best portable power station, but like, what is the longer tail version of that? We've got EcoFlow Delta 2 Max versus Delta 3 Series, the ultimate power station comparison. So kind of helping people in their decision-making process.

41:16And instead of an outbound affiliate link, it could be an internal product sales page link. Exactly. Yeah. It's, it all comes about from a method called Avalanche SEO is why I apply to this, which is basically the idea that websites are essentially put into different tier levels based on how much daily organic traffic they're getting. So for example, if you're getting between 0 and 10 daily visitors from Google, you're in level 0. If you're getting 10 to 20, you're in level 1. 20 to 50, level 2. And Google is realistically only going to let you show up for keywords that closely match your tier level.

41:54So if I'm thinking about the word sauna probably gets by itself 20 000 searches a month so my site with its five daily organic visitors is never gonna never gonna be able to rank for that word maybe ever but definitely not at the start so i want to be going after the keywords that are within my wheelhouse essentially that are in my tier level so that's why you see all of these informational terms they're really overlooked terms you know the other competitors are trying they're the ones trying to go after sauna and you know failing probably at it they're not interested in the the informational stuff around it to find those terms a pretty simple process one one tool primarily to do it answer the public neil patel getting another shout out from from me here but um answer the public go to that typed in the product category that i want to start building content around so if we take saunas in this case you go and search sauna and answer the public and it will give you essentially a list of all the questions that people are asking around that product on Google now also on AI, YouTube, other channels as well.

42:55And each of those terms I'm going to look at as a potential keyword that I could be building content around and targeting for it. So that's why you see all of those informational type pieces on there. So there tends to be low competition, info-based content, things like should you sauna after eating or, you know, is sauna good if you're pregnant? you do that at scale you build lots of those articles that are maybe all going to bring in 10 20 50 visitors to them but you build a hundred of those and all of a sudden you've got a base of organic traffic that then allows you to move up the tiers and start going over those going after those slightly more competitive words over time and that's kind of what we've applied to camp nation okay a very methodical stair-step approach to building out this body of content are you writing this stuff yourself?

43:41You've got a team member who's helping out? So initially I wrote some of it myself and I still do tweak things. But in all honesty, I've outsourced a lot of that work to a freelancer on Fiverr who I pay a few dollars per article to follow along a very specific SOP that we've built. But in terms of the content generation, we're layering a couple of AI tools on top of each other and then having a human sort of tweak it at the end to make sure it's all readable and correct. Got it. Got it. Okay. Answer the public, Uber suggest Shopify, anything else on the tools and tech side that you swear by to help run this business?

44:17Honestly, you don't have to spend any money to do some of this. You can just use Google at the start. I think people overlook it as a keyword research tool, even without any plugins or anything like that. If you, if you know a product type that you're selling, you can go to Google, type in that word and see what some of the predictive searches are around it. You can put the word what before it, how, if, why, and you'll get predicted results from Google. And that can quite quickly turn into a month's worth of content that you've got to create there. Even things like the people also ask or people also search for categories, they really are gold mines for potential searches, potential content that you can create and keywords that you can target because it's real data that Google has put together based on what people are searching for.

45:01Yeah, I used to do the same thing. I would put in a seed keyword like side hustles or ways to make money and then would go through the alphabet like A and then see what they auto suggest. I would fill in B and see, oh, okay, ways to make money, buy something, something. Oh, I never would have thought of that. But sure enough, there is some level of interest around it. That was my Friday nights at times. Going into Google, A, B, C on the keyboard and finding the different terms to go after. So yeah, I think that's a really key way of doing it. And I also think there's other overtime terms that are really useful to start ranking for that are overlooked.

45:37And that is some of that versus type content that you've found. So if you're carrying brands that have some search volume behind them, and maybe their products have some search volume as well, you'll find that there are a lot of people searching versus between different products, different brands. And those are quite high intent searches that you can create pieces of content around and actually drive sales from those as well. And similarly with collection pages, you'll find that maybe you're not going to be able to rank for sauna now or whatever, but maybe two-person infrared saunas, you might be able to have a better chance of ranking at.

46:08And if you can build a good collection page around that with some useful content on, then you've got a pretty good chance of doing it. Yeah, absolutely. At what point do you feel comfortable calling it quits at the day job and saying, okay, this has legs, I'm going all in on this? I think erring on a little bit of the side of caution I wanted to have a good six months of first of all savings built up from the business but I also wanted to see a pretty consistent run rate over that over that time period as well so things can be a little bit streaky at the start particularly when you're in a high ticket niche where the number of orders you're doing is not a lot and the value of the orders is quite a lot so I wanted to see a stable and growing level over six months so yeah for me that was hitting 40 ,000 in revenue a month for six months in a row that That was when I felt like it was a good enough time to step away.

46:53Yeah, not just one month. That could have been a blip on the radar, but I want to see it consistently over the course of half a year. Yeah, exactly. I was kind of the same way. I wanted to have this track record of revenue going back six or 12 months that was at least going to cover my monthly expenses so I wasn't going to have to go in the hole once I had left the day job. Other people are like, no, burn the ships. Sometimes even pre-revenue, I'm going to quit. I'm confident I'm going to make it work, but I'm more in the risk averse camp like yourself there. Now, earlier you said, look, this is not passive income.

47:26So where is your time going today in terms of managing the operations? So we have a small team now behind me. So I think one of the biggest things you can do is leverage your own time to be spending it as effectively as possible. So a big time SAP previously was customer service. It was fulfilling orders. it was where's my order where's my tracking link answering that that type of stuff and so that was what that was the first thing i really outsourced to get off my plate so getting a virtual assistant in to basically cover that type of stuff and that then frees me up to be doing more more things that are a little bit more around growing the business so i still look after the ads i still handle some of the larger sales projects that we work on so i'm still i'm speaking to customers from day to day but basically everything from the from the point of sale onwards is not not really touched by me at all anymore unless there's a big issue that you know needs me to make a decision on everything else is uh handled elsewhere yeah are you actively trying to grow the inventory like onboard new suppliers yeah so for me it's been a staggered approach so starting with drop shipping so holding no stock so now we've started dipping our toe into the water of holding some of our stock uh holding some stock of our best-selling SKUs that we've got so we've built up that sales data and we can confidently say you know these are the handful of products that we know are going to sell and now we're starting to look beyond drop shipping so i think drop shipping is very much the quickest and cautious of saying easiest but quickest and easiest and least risky route to start in one of these businesses but i don't see it as the end point i see it as a means to getting to a point does holding your own inventory allow you better margins or what's the advantage of that i'd say it's threefold maybe margins for sure if you can place a bulk order with the supplier you might get 10%, 15 % better margin on those products, maybe more.

49:17And when you're talking about maybe a product that retails for a couple of thousand pounds, that's meaningful additional money. Yeah. And you're confident like, look, we've been selling five of these a month for five months. Okay. You know, it's going to turn. Exactly that. And also what you'll find is one of the drawbacks of dropshipping is you're reliant on someone else's logistics to deliver the product a lot of the time. You don't always know a hundred percent if something's going to be in stock. Not Every supplier has got a sophisticated stock management tool that can plug in. So if you hold that stock, you know you've got it.

49:46If the supplier goes out of stock, then maybe you've still got your own stock of it and you can sell it. So yeah, that's the real plus points for it. Got it. Anything you would do differently if you were starting over or advice you would give to somebody looking to get started in a similar business? I think I had a little bit of a lack of belief that people would really come online and spend this kind of money on a website, on an e-commerce website with little old me running it. And maybe there was a bit of an element of self-doubt in that. But I would actually say if I went back to the start now, I'd probably go even more high ticket than I have done with this niche.

50:22I think if I was going to start over again, maybe at some point in the future with another store, I'd go even, yeah, the higher the ticket, the better to some extent. Yeah. Is there an upper limit, you think? I mean, people like the higher the price, the more likely somebody is going to want to get on the phone. And so there's more warwick labor intelligence involved in making that sale i don't know what have you found i think the more potential problems or stumbling blocks that someone has pre-sale the more opportunity you have as a drop shipper seller of other people's products to help that person answer their questions and ultimately win the sale from it i think if there's no work or guidance that's needed pre-sale that's when you can very much be a victim of comparison shopping whereas if someone's going to have questions around installation sizing requirements any of that type of stuff if you can provide value to them before you take their credit card details i think there's actually a really big opportunity there for for you to be able to to win those sales rather in a way that's not just based around price has there been any big surprises or horror stories or you know things that have gone wrong over the last year and a half of doing this the biggest issue we had was we had a bunch of products that needed to be installed.

51:33They were being built, needed to be installed. We had a national installation company that was going to be installing all of them for us. And then two days before the first installation, they pulled out of everything, out of all of the projects. So we had to scramble last minute to find these local companies to come and install these products for us, for a customer. So that was probably that sort of headache that you get very different to what you'd get normally in a corporate role. That type Epithin was a pretty steep learning curve and a bit of a wake-up call. A little bit of a fire drill, but never a dull moment.

52:07We got to figure this out. We got to deliver for the customers. Exactly. Well, Phil, this has been awesome. What's next for you? Where do you want to take Camper Nation? What's got you excited? I think, honestly, just looking towards the future, I think we are thinking about getting some of our own products manufactured now. A bit of a staggered approach from dropshipping, holding some stock, and then now we want to start looking at getting our own brand of products together designing some products getting those better margins on it and releasing that hopefully sometime in the next year yeah that's an exciting next step bigger risk involved upfront capital involved but hopefully a long-term win and it's in the name right it's side hustle nation it's camper nation it's like this persona and maybe they keep coming back to you for the next the next thing that they know to build out their epic camping setup exactly i think side hustle SideHustleNation CamperNation is the collab that neither of us realized that we needed.

53:00Yes. Awesome. Well, CamperNation.co.uk. I encourage you to check out the site. It is phil at CamperNation.co.uk if you want to send an email. And you're also part of Jaden Clark's 1 % Ecom Club on school, which Jaden was an episode earlier this year. I think 736 was his episode number. So we'll link that up as well. let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation don't let revenue clouds your judgment focus on profit oh i love that what is it what's the line uh revenue is vanity profit is sanity or something patch flow is king yeah exactly it's it's so true yeah there's another one it's like revenue feeds the ego and profit feeds the family there's another one I've had.

53:50Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's like, oh, I've got a million dollar business, but I spent 1.1 on ads. Like, well, you know, make sure we got some margin in there to play with. Very, very cool. I really liked this episode from the standpoint of, look, I can start low risk. I can build this up in a really systematic way. I can target these long tail, high buyer intent type of keywords, and then I can build out this organic traffic machine. And now I can invest in making my own products really turn this into a really valuable e-com asset. So Phil, impressive what you've built and what you'll continue to build.

54:24CamperNation.co.uk. We've done a couple other recent dropshipping or e-commerce episodes that might be worth checking out if you like this model. 704 was with Holly, the municipal pool fountain stuff. That was a really interesting one. And 736 with Jaden Clark. All, I believe, drawing inspiration from Ben and John at Dropship. Breakthrough. Ben's been on the show as well, so we can link up all of those in the show notes. And if dropshipping is not your thing, I appreciate you giving it a fair shake, sticking around to the end in this episode. If you want to create a personalized playlist of some episodes that might be more up your alley, you can do that at hustle.show.

55:04Just answer a few short multiple choice questions, and it'll spit back out a curated playlist of some of our Greatest tits episodes based on your answers. Hopefully they'll be more impactful for you. Hustle.show for that. Big thanks to Phil for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. Sidehustlenation.com slash deals is where you'll find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. 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. Fire off that text message.

55:36Maybe it's that van lifer in your life that needs to hear this. until next time let's go out there and make something happen and i'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on