Gerd Tittel-FellerDigital Marketing & Transformation Consultant
Bio

Founder GTF Digital, passionate about digital innovation and geek in respect to meaningful KPIs


Recent Answers


Totally agree with Jeffrey on this. Also most no code parsing tools do not really work as expected most of the time. And websites change from time to time, rendering a one-of solution useless after a change in the code.
Plus you only pay for results and can determine the format you need for further processing.


It is the old question of time vs money, that most entrepreneuer face.

First everyone assumes their idea is great. I am not talking to you personally but the statistics show that this is not the truth. Even with careful market research (not just asking Google and friends) there is always a chance your product will be a failure nobody wants. So would you rather have tanked 50k to 100k on an expensive MVP nobody wants?

So what is your alternative:
Finding a co-founder, who can code it: less risk/less reward
Finding an investor, who will front you the money: less risk/less reward
Using one of the many NoCode options like Bubble.io - almost no risk / but takes a lot of time risking being too late or never getting anything finished

So you see there is always a downside. You are the business owner. Only you know the scope of your idea. Only you will ultimately have to live with the consequences of your decision.

If you need help talking about the specifics, just give me a call. I am glad to help.

-Gerd


I think you are already setting yourself up for success because you are:
1.) having a vision
2.) are not willing to compromise for your vision by allowing anything or anyone less

Very few people are willing to do that as they are only in it for the money and would just take people on or anything for that matter if it is what an investor wants.

Let's not kid ourselves. Just because you have a vision and very possibly a very good one, it does not mean everyone is just going . Keep on talking to people until you find the right one, as at some point you cannot do it all alone.

Also treat investors the same as potential co-founders and partners. See if they align with your vision. Again of course it is hard to say no to money. But I know some founders, who lost all their joy, due to being pushed to decisions that did not align with their vision, even would hurt the company in the long run, just for short term profits.

So when investors ask you about your lack of other team members, tell your story (looking but not compromising & doing all on your own from your own money). That demonstrates enormous confidence in your vision/idea.

Good luck and if you need any help let us talk

https://clarity.fm/gerdtf

Cheers

Gerd Tittel-Feller


I would not go with Wordpress

The disadvantage of Wordpress is that it is basically a blogging software, turned into a website software, turned into an e-commerce software, turned into everything. The point is lots of workarounds, safety issues, plugins needed that might not work with one another etc. Plus you must be able to maintain the server/ hosting environment. Just because it "runs'' as it does with a shared hosting (worst option for business purposes) does not mean it is properly configured for safety or speed.

In my opinion the best tool for your idea is Bubble.io
You can start free and only pay when you go into production mode.

A few big advantages of Bubble (especially in regards to your idea) are:

*in-built sign up/ sign in /forgot password functionality (can be implemented in 10 minutes with few clicks)

*in-built database, easy to create necessary database structure

*automate basically everything with an "If this / then that"- editor

*dynamically insert content from database

*you own your customer's data and can export it

*marketplace of free and paid plugins

* payment processing via 3rd party provider

Of course no software is perfect so here some of the disadvantages to consider:

* there is a learning curve, especially when it goes beyond the basics

* the UI editor is outdated, as it works with absolute positioning coordinates and width/height instead of relative value for easy responsive design. There is a responsive module but it is not intuitive and a pain to debug

* the application will be slow with lots of users

* while it is easy to build so it works it is hard for non-coders to build processes that do not slow down the software, as it all depends on how you write and read data.

Overall if you do not have the budget and just need to start out I would definitely say the pros outweigh the cons. As you can build a MVP in a reasonable timeframe, get started, build your community and deliver a proof of concept to get the necessary funding.

If you need any help with that let us chat:

https://clarity.fm/gerdtf


One of the best ways to code a MVP is a no-code platform.

No-Code platforms are visual tools that rely on a drag and drop interface and transform the interface, database structure and processes.

In my opinion the best tool for your idea is Bubble.io
You can start free and only pay when you go into production mode.

A few big advantages of Bubble (especially in regards to your idea) are:

*in-built sign up/ sign in /forgot password functionality (can be implemented in 10 minutes with few clicks)

*in-built database, easy to create necessary database structure

*automate basically everything with an "If this / then that"- editor

*dynamically insert content from database

*you own your customer's data and can export it

*marketplace of free and paid plugins

* payment processing via 3rd party provider

Of course no software is perfect so here some of the disadvantages to consider:

* there is a learning curve, especially when it goes beyond the basics

* the UI editor is outdated, as it works with absolute positioning coordinates and width/height instead of relative value for easy responsive design. There is a responsive module but it is not intuitive and a pain to debug

* the application will be slow with lots of users

* while it is easy to build so it works it is hard for non-coders to build processes that do not slow down the software, as it all depends on how you write and read data.

Overall if you do not have the budget and just need to start out I would definitely say the pros outweigh the cons. As you can build a MVP in a reasonable timeframe, get started, build your community and deliver a proof of concept to get the necessary funding.

If you need any help with that let us chat:

https://clarity.fm/gerdtf

All the best

Gerd Tittel-Feller


When you say you are working on some affiliate marketing sites you are referring to joining them and promoting their affiliate products.

The first thing to consider in affiliate marketing is to be successful in affiliate marketing you must first treat it as a business. It is not a magic way to make money overnight. If you think you can follow an easy step by step formula, doing what everybody else does then you are destined to fail. I am just saying this because there are so many fake guru's out there preaching some easy road to riches and usually Clickbank (CB) or Maxbounty are the first stops, as they accept everyone.

But as you are already assembling a team I think you are taking it seriously.

1.) Find a niche:

Many people think affiliate marketing is just about promoting any product you like. Not true. It is virtually impossible to promote unrelated products profitably unless you have an email list. And even then, people would soon unsubscribe if you one day promote a flight to the Bahamas and the next day an Excel beginner’s course.

On the other hand, let’s say you are in the travel niche. People will not mind if you send them offers of cheap flights, hotels and so on, mixed with great content all year long every year. And best of all you only had to pay once to acquire the customer and when you do it right you will get many commissions from this one customer for many years to come.

Now how do you find the right niche?

1.) Write down topics you know a lot about.

2.) Write down topics you are passionate about.

3.) Find those that you know a lot about and are passionate about.

4.) Go to Google Trends (Google Trends) and type in your main keyword of your niche. Change the time frame from past 12 month to past 5 years and check if the trend is stable all year long. You do not want a seasonal trend like focusing on an affiliate business for e.g. Mother’s Day gifts or on a fad like fidget spinners. You want what we call an evergreen niche, so you build it once and grow it instead of building something new every time.

After you have found an evergreen niche make sure it is big enough. It is better to get a small piece of a huge pie than a slightly bigger piece of a tiny pie. Or in other words the niche Jellyfish t-shirts might just not be big enough in order to be profitable… or is it? I did not bother to check. But you should for your niche.

Go to Ubersuggest's Free Keyword Tool, Generate More Suggestions which is a free tool to check search volume for your keyword. There is no hard and fast number, but your keyword should have at least a couple of thousands searches each month. I would even say at least 10,000 searches.

2.) Find an angle:

Now that you do have a niche find an angle/ idea on how you are going to build value around it. For example, let’s take the travel niche again.

There is Skyscanner, which is a tool to compare and find the cheapest flights. Booking.com: The largest selection of hotels, homes, and vacation rentals does the same for hotels. Then there is Tripadvisor which provides reviews. We have HolidayPirates, where you can search for deals. Last but not least, there are lots of travel blogs that could be considered reviews but differentiate themselves from review sites by giving their customers a unique perspective about the places they have visited.

So, as you can already guess from the examples above there are traditionally the following angles:

1.) tools: mostly comparing and searching for deals

2.) reviews

3.) coupons and deals websites

4.) blogs

5.) combine elements from above

6.) find your own

3.) Find affiliate offers

Login to your networks and type in your nice related keyword in the search. Maxbounty also assigns an AM. So it is vital to build a good relationship, as they can point you to great performing offers.

When thinking about promoting a product or service I always ask myself: would I buy this product from this website myself if I was in the market for it.

Another set of question is:

Is this a well-known brand?

Does the website look appealing?

Is the website built to convert?

Are there a lot of positive reviews/references?

Is the product priced competitively?

Does the product owner offer competitive services (money back guarantee, free shipping, etc.)?

Of course, you also must look at the commission. Sometimes you have similar products but with a big difference in the commission you would receive. Let’s consider two products with exactly the same price. One is a well-known product with 10% commission. The other a more generic brand with 30% commission. All things being equal the well-known product would have to convert 3 times as much as the generic one to break even. And this might very well happen due it is better brand recognition, but then again it might not. Therefore it is worth testing.

4.) Getting traffic

A further misconception is when you build it, people will just come. Of course this is not the case and therefore promoting your business is of utmost importance.

You should start with one traffic channel to begin with. Also realize there is no real free traffic. Free traffic always costs time and your time also is worth money. Therefore if you have more time than money focus on free traffic if you have more money than time it might be worth considering starting with paid traffic as you get either immediate results (not the same as conversions) and learn what works and what does not.

Free Traffic Sources:

With any free traffic source, it is important that you do not SPAM! Most think writing a few lines and then always putting their affiliate link underneath will do. But that is still SPAMMING. You have to be willing to provide real value, connect with people and then you can link back for more value to your website, blog etc. when appropriate.

1.) Quora

2.) Forums

3.) Facebook Groups

4.) Instagram

5.) Pinterest

6.) Medium

7.) Youtube

Paid Traffic:

With paid traffic you should know most people do not manage to be profitable on one offer. This means if you get say 50 USD commission you will most likely not be able to get a conversion for less than 50 USD. This is where many people fail and give up, as they only focus on this one conversion and wonder why they can’t make it profitable, as their guru promised them. But when you build a real business, even as an affiliate, meaning not owning any products but your business, you are not only getting to promote one offer but many and the average lifespan of a customer is let’s say 2 years and the average lifetime value is let’s say 200 USD. Then even when your average cost of acquisition is 80 USD, which would be a 30 bucks loss on the first offer, you still have a 120 USD profit per customer over the 2 years.

List of paid traffic channels:

1.) Google Ads

2.) Youtube Ads

3.) Facebook Ads

4.) Instagram Ads

5.) Pinterest Ads

6.) Bing Ads

7.) Reddit Ads

8.) Quora Ads

9.) Outbrain

5.) Managing your team

Managing a team is not easy. Everyone should have a clear understanding what his or her role and task is. It is also important to define performing the role successfully and completing tasks successfully. Do you expect them to build1 landing page per day or 5? Is conversion rate of 1% the mark or should it be 3%? If you cannot set a clear vision and expectations, then you are to blame if nothing gets achieved.

I know this is a lot to digest

I want to leave you with a link to a collection of many successful affiliate websites as a source of inspiration and wish you the best of luck:

https://nichehacks.com/affiliate-websites/22-examples-lucrative-affiliate-websites

And if you need any help give me a call.
https://clarity.fm/gerdtf

Gerd Tittel-Feller


This question is really hard to answer without knowing about what kind of exact B2B business we are talking about.

However it is very easy to split test the whole process. You can use a free solution like Google Optimize or paid tools like: https://vwo.com/ab-testing/

Just make sure to attribute any leads correctly to the test like have a hidden form field with "no-price" and "showing-price" that will be pushed to your CRM, so you can find out the total conversion. Also make sure you get to statistically significant numbers. Most people stop way too early and believe they have found a winner.

Just a word of caution based on my experience with one of my clients. When he added packages with prices, it made things more difficult along the way. My client thought he standardized his service with packages but it turned out he still needed to negotiate various details.

That is because it is very hard to think of every aspect of a complex service and put it in a pricing table on your website. So potential customers asked for extra services, my client did not plan to include in a package. But after the fact it was hard to justify an additional fee because the price was already set in the mind of the potential customer.

I hope that helps and if I can help you with split testing or anything else give me a call.

Best of luck.

Gerd Tittel-Feller


First of all I am going to assume you meant a CPC of $ 15 and not $ 1.5 because the latter would make you ROAS positive at a 5% conversion with $ 64.

My second assumption is that a CR of 5-7% is your average CR and not for this keyword because at $ 15 / click you would not have enough clicks to get a CR in a $ 100 test-

If this is correct then unfortunately you have not been near a statistical significant result because with $ 100 you can only have 6 clicks. Even if it was $ 1.5 and we were talking about 66 clicks this is still not statistically significant. I am sorry but this is far from statistically significant.

Statistically significant would be at least a few hundred clicks spread over a minimum of 5 days (ideally 7 days).

Now about your question of what you can do on the advertising side. One thing you can do is to improve your Quality Score. Check out this Google article where to find it and the components of it:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454010?hl=en

Also check the Expected CTR as described in the link above. This might be a reason why this keyword is so expensive. If you can a better CTR than Google expects your cost might go down.

Of course as usual the overall relevance of the keyword to your ad and your landing page is also important. So if it makes sense from a marketing perspective you could tweak your ad incorporating the keyword. You can do all this by using experiments and only changing one variable. But this is all very theoretical without knowing your correct situation.

However before you do all that: ask yourself this is it all worth it? How much volume does this keyword get? What impression share are you getting? How many additional conversions can you most likely generate, even if cost were not an issue? And then decide if it is worth trying or if there might be an easier way to improve/ expand your advertising.

One more tip: You were asking about the advertising side. I always tell clients to look out for possible micro conversions. You can think of micro conversions as sign post along the way to the goal (e.g. reading a certain article, visiting the site x times, signing up for the newsletter). If you give Google Ads all this additional data there algorithm can create a much more detailed model of your ideal customer because you give it more input to work with.
Then you will get more quality customers which in turn will increase your CR and decrease your CAC.

If you need help just give me a call.

All the best

Gerd TF


You do not need a website builder. You need an e-commerce platform, since your end goal is to sell online. Therefore beyond the visual storefront online and the customization you want, you need a backend:
1.) connecting to payment provider
2.) process orders
3.) sends invoices
4.) keeps track of your inventory
and more

Although WooCommerce has proven quite useful in the past and still today many shop owner use it, I would definitely recommend Shopify (shopify.com)

The reason is Shopify is an all-in-one service provider when it comes to e-commerce solutions. It is the Swiss Army knife of e-commerce shops so to say.

You not only get beautiful templates out of the box that you can easily edit with a drag and drop editor. Even more important sometimes, you get a premium server infrastructure with a team taking care of any necessary updates and technical issues, defending the servers against cyber attacks and making sure that every shop can scale from 1 user to 1 million users.

When people choose Wordpress + WooCommerce they focus on the free aspect and forget they need hosting and have to figure it out themselves. Also since Wordpress is completely open source it is more vulnerable to hacking, since hackers can study the whole code. Since Shopify is a business it also keeps its core code to itself and while advanced users can modify almost everything with code it does not allow users to modify certain vulnerable areas for this very specific reason.

If you want to build your online shop fast and focus on your business and less on the technical side I would strongly recommend to choose Shopify. They have a 14 day trial (no credit card required). The options might look a bit overwhelming at first but they even have a wizard to guide you through the process and a free online academy:

https://www.shopifycompass.com/

Finally the plugin you would need to customize your product options is:
https://apps.shopify.com/best-custom-product-options?surface_detail=custom+product&surface_inter_position=1&surface_intra_position=1&surface_type=search

If you need any more help just give me a call.

All the best

Gerd TF


Do not think too much of your references in the beginning. Think about it like this. Most startups do not have any references to brag with when they start out but are still able to find partners.

However what you should think about is your USP. What is it that makes your cashback reward app unique and why should anyone partner up with you, when there are already well established cashback apps with huge audiences.

When you figure that out, come up with an elevator pitch as you would for an investor, where you clearly detail what makes you unique compared to others, what the advantage would be for your partner and how you plan to scale your audience.

The last part is also important. Many people always wonder how entrepreneurs come up with any numbers for their future revenue, when they are just starting out. Well they are making them up in sense and investors know it. The questions is not do you hit the exact numbers you have presented in your first pitch or come even close to it but do you have an exact plan and a grasp of the numbers and marketing dynamics. How else would someone trust you and partner up with you?

Last but not least make it as easy and painless for them to join your program. Offer them a sponsored positioning for a year if they try you out or a blast out to your future e-mail list/ push notifications. Anything that makes it a you can't lose deal.

When it comes to approaching your partners make sure you know exactly who's your ideal partner. Then do not start with the biggest player. They are more conservative and will most likely join you later when you have other partners similar to them. However mid-size companies are often more flexible and keen to try something new. Go to LinkedIn and find the right people from marketing or business development. Connect with them. See if you have any common friends and try to get a warm introduction. Otherwise your objective should be to schedule an initial call where you can pitch your idea in ideally 5 to 10 minutes as you will not get more time. When they are interested you schedule a follow up immediately.

If you need more help it would be my pleasure.

Best of luck.

Gerd TF


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