In November of 2017, I decided to finally start a glorious adventure of trying my hand in bing ads affiliate marketing by creating my FIRST bing ads campaign. With eager anticipation I also started my first shopify store after taking an expensive video course on it!
This was an exciting new endeavor because Christmas was around the corner, online sales is going like crazy, and everyone has yet to hop on the Bing Ads wave! I’m ahead of the game AND I got $200 Bing Ads credit for free to usa as ad spend! So I thoroughly went through the bings ads-shopify course multiple times over during the time span of 2 weeks. Want to know what happened? Did I strike it rich!?
This was a calculated move for me. I refused to buy another course where I was to invest time and money, only to have it direct me away from perfecting affiliate marketing. I’ve been trying to stay focused. However, I had $200 worth of Bing Ads credit that was free money! I might as well try my luck right? I feel like I’m in a casino saying that. If I strike it rich from a successful campaign, I’d feel like I’m in a casino for sure!
Since gambling isn’t my thing, I studied this video course thoroughly for a number of times before I took action. I know how I am. I can get excited about something, put in the work, not see any results, and then jump to something else. NOPE…not this time. I was going to give this an earnest effort without distraction.
After taking the training, I successfully created a shopify store! I’ve watched all types of courses go by my inbox for the past 2 years about shopify and now I’m finally diving in to give it a try. The method that was taught in the course was to create an ad in Bing, drive traffic to my shopify store, and get people to purchase my product. The product had to be cheap enough to where I offer it free, but the customer had to pay for shipping.
The customer would then be in my email list, allowing me to send them offers all of the time without paying ppc-platforms in order to drive traffic to my offer, now that I would have a powerful email list built up. The niche I chose to do this in was beauty, with the sub niche being hair. That’s right ladies and gentlemen…weave and extensions.
[pic] of weave
Let’s be real here for a minute. I’m black (African-American). I know a lot of black women who hit up the hair salon every week to get their hair done (“get your hair-did”, for those who want to be technical). Ladies put products in their hair while wanting certain styles, but most importantly, they spend TONS of money on weave and extensions!
I’ve been around ladies with weave and extensions all of my life. I have friends who own a salon and selling hair is one of the most profitable services that they offer! I knew I was going to make some money with this method. So of course, I found hair products on Ali-Express to sell.
It took me about 2 days to properly setup my shopify store. The methods that I was implementing involved selling the product as a free item, as long as the customer paid for all of the shipping. I had to invest a lot of time into researching my products along with the pictures and description of the product so I could have good sales copy on my store. If the description of your product is not on point, customers will not buy. For this reason, it took me a number times to get the process down but I finally got it. After making it look all pretty and colorful, I was ready to launch my store and drive some traffic to it!
[pic of shopify product descriptions]
This was a proud moment for me. If you don’t like me using the term “proud”, I can say that this was a milestone moment for me. I was exploring new territory that I was unfamiliar with, and I knew that this was something that other marketers needed so that they could they can make money online. I wanted to be a success story. Even if it was a $5 profit or something, I wanted to tell the world “I did it! So can you!” That’s what I always do for you when I create a success story right? J
After doing all of this, I set up my campaign accordingly. The user interface for Bing Ads was a little uncomfortable because it is not as user friendly like a facebook ad campaign, but if you’ve messed with Google Adwords in the past, it is somewhat similar. It took me a little while, but after a few tries, my ads were finally live!!! My ads were setup properly, my shopify store is up and connected with my desired products, and my Getresponse autoresponder is properly integrated with my store so that my customers can be inputted into my database after they make a purchase. Let’s do this!
Guess how many conversions I made!?!?
0!
Guess how much money I made!?!?
0!
Guess how many people opted into my email list!?!?
0!
Lol. You get the point by now. I had 100s if clicks on my offer but no conversions. What does this mean? Does it mean that it’s something that doesn’t work? Not at all. After I created my ads, I started noticing other campaigns that were up and doing similar methods, so I know it works. Because of the fact that I had so many clicks, I knew people were interested in the ad. I averaged about 65 cents per click which isn’t too bad. A little more than I wanted to pay, but it’s a decent amount. So what was the issue?
This goes for any type of PPC campaign that you do. If you are getting clicks, but no conversions, something is wrong with your offer. It goes back to research. I knew people were purchasing hair online. I looked at similar products on ebay, Amazon, and Alibaba. These products sold like hotcakes. What I didn’t pay much attention to until it was too late, was the fact that many of sales were purchases from customers overseas. This mattered because my idea of weave and extensions was a little different than the rest of the world. The audience I targeted, wear more high quality products. They don’t just buy anything. I knew that going into this niche, but I experimented with the wrong products. I tried to make something work that was not a fit. The girl below is wearing something that would not do well here in the US. She’d probably get laughed at.
[pic of Asian girl]
My method for using my shopify store for this type of product while doing free shipping only worked well for US buyers. It is not feasible/profitable for me to use this particular method for international customers. Reason being is because I have to provide different shipping options that are more expensive for international customers. It’s possible, but I haven’t figured out how to do that just yet. Since I’m trying to practice what I preach. I am not trying to deviate from the techniques taught in the video course that I purchased. So this leaves me with 2 things to do if I’m to continue this method in order to be successful.
1) Find out how to do this method offering free products but paid shipping with international customers
Or
2) Find higher quality products that are proven to work well in the US. Something like a specific kind of virgin hair (look that up if you don’t know what it is).
Being an entrepreneur of any sort is all about “pivoting”. Just because you hit an obstacle and something doesn’t work on the first try, it doesn’t mean you have to quit and give up. Pivot, and find out why it’s not working and tweak what you’re doing so it CAN work. Though I did not make any sales on the first try, I’m going to stick with it. Once the sales begin to rain on me, you will be able to look back at this specific blog post and you will see how I stuck with it.
And the journey continues…Emancipation Occupation baby!
