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Originally Posted by Margarita888  The things I did not describe I feel are irrelevant. But if you must know, we make cloth diapers for babies. I know, sounds gross and unglamorous. But it's a niche market. I think you have the highest probability of making money if you target & serve niches really well. Why would people buy our products vs. some brand from Walmart? Because people who buy our products are smart enough to realize what they're really buying. Again, it goes back to being in the niche we're in.
When I first started, I had no money to put into advertising. I put all my start-up capital into manufacturing the products. Even to this day, I hardly budget any money for advertising our site. I never relied on website traffic or site impressions to get people to our site to generate sales. We probably only get around 2500-3500 unique visitors per month. But we've been doing 7-figures in sales since our 2nd full year in business.
How exactly did I start? While it was mostly accidental, the general sequence that I followed was this: look for a target market to serve & listen to their frustrations-->find a solution to their problem-->figure out a way to deliver that solution-->reach out to your market. Since I was already using cloth diapers, I hung around forums where moms who use cloth diapers chat about. I created a diaper style that nobody at that time was making but many were looking for. When the site was ready, I simply sent out a few emails and announced an introductory promotion on the forums to get moms to try my product.
I think that where most people get stuck at is trying to do it the other way around where you look for a product to sell then try to figure out how to sell it to as many people as possible. I think that's just like shooting aimlessly in the middle of a forest hoping to hit a bunny. You end up using a lot of ammo and you may or may not hit a bunny. Why not try to figure out what bunnies like, get to know them, where they hang out, figure out what problem you might be able to solve for them. If you truly have something of value, the bunnies will come to you. No shooting required 
There's A LOT to be said about trying to make money doing something you enjoy. I know it's cliche, but it's true. When I started this business, I wasn't out to make millions. It was just a really fun project for me. I love babies and making cool stuff for them. I want to help save the planet, and I love working with other moms with the same vision. Several companies have tried to get into this business only with the sole intention of making money, and most of them are gone in 6 months or less. They're probably saying you can't make money making/selling cloth diapers....the same way a lot of people are saying you can't make money online.
It all starts out with the bunny. |
See this is what I am looking for
Most of the people that talk about there business and how easy it is don't describe HOW they did it... You made two good points, to make something unique that you know there is a demand for and to market to a targeted demographic.
I learned targeted marketing through experience with advertising but you do have a really good point as far as selling something outside of the box. I was thinking, for example, you made regular diapers instead of cloth why would people buy anything from you when they could buy a respected brand that mass produces and provides them at an extremely low price like "Huggies". But you found something outside of the box that has a significant demand with little competition, very good idea.
I am still interested on how you generated your site traffic or if you did any advertising offline like tv, magazines, newspaper, etc. because that is still an unusual amount of traffic for just recommending it to a few moms. Yeah, your totally right, the people talking about how they want them and wish someone would make them on a forum are probably like 100 times more likely to make a sale as compared to just raw traffic, but a couple thousand sales in your first month? How many forums did u post on? lol