$200k With ONE Print On Demand Product
Who’d have thought just eleven and a half months after starting, I’d have blown thru $200k with one print on demand product?!
And it only took ONE little necklace design?
That’s right – at time of writing this post I’m nearly at $204k in sales – and counting.
4190 luxury heart necklace units sold, the vast majority of them in the silver (cheaper) variant.
From the chart above, you can see 1984 sales from the engraved silver variant, then 1662 sales from the non-engraved silver variant.
The gold variant made a lot less sales.
346 engraved, and just 198 non-engraved.
It’s all money in the pot of course.
In total along with my other designs, over 12 months with Shine-On I passed $260k in sales.
That being said – let’s break the numbers down further 🙂
$200k – The Numbers
My design was an evergreen one.
I know people do great numbers with Fathers day designs, Mothers day, birthdays, anniversaries and etc.
Personally I prefer evergreen designs as it means I can push them year round without time or date restraints.
There were several dips in promo over the year due to illness and/or Facebook Ads being stupid.
The first $100k was easy and took just 3 months. (see my 9 hour video course all about this here)
The second $100k took me almost 8 months lol, so you can see the difference.
In all honesty during the second $100k I was battling being sick on and off for several weeks at a time, plus Facebook was breaking my balls here and there.
At points I had cut adspend down to almost nothing due to being in bed and unable to concentrate on doing ads.
I would periodically pick up the product, increase adspend, and sales would pick back up again.
At some point I got it into my head that I could take sales past $200k so I carried on going and did it.
Targets are important!
The Ad
Bear in mind that all this income came from one image ad.
One image I ripped from the Shine-On Shopify app admin. That’s it.
No video. No multiple creatives.
Just one image ad. (see below)
And – once you have so much spend pushed thru an ad, your social proof get ridiculous.
114,000 likes. 3500 comments. And 26,000 shares.
That’s a lot of social love, and looks great to potential customers.
Plus, with Shine-On being so awesome, everyone is getting their necklaces quickly.
Quality is good. Engraving is on point. USPS tracking is provided.
People are happy.
And all this is reflected in the beautiful comments that they then go and post on the ad.
It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
Design Variants
Once sales were banging hard for this product, people in the comments under my ad started asking for, and suggesting alternate designs.
Always listen to your customers!
I took my existing design and made a further 2 variants of it.
Just a slight change.
The wording stayed exactly the same.
I just altered one element of the design.
Both of these did great and I got a further 800+ sales and counting out of those.
Note – these 800 sales and the income from them is not counted in the $200k.
Ads Strategy
As mentioned in several of my YouTube videos and other blog posts, I don’t go complicated.
At first I was using pure open (no targeting) ABO campaigns.
Even with this, sales smashed in straight away and started climbing fast.
I duplicated the winning adsets and increased adspend on the new ones.
After that, once my custom audiences built to a good point (500-1k in size) I started on lookalike audience campaigns.
This isn’t complicated people.
Once you get a good design, scaling is easy.
I built 1-10% lookalike audiences for everything.
VC, ATC, IC PUR, and also from the ad and Facebook page itself.
After a lot of testing I found my best performing lookalike audiences and attacked them hard.
For some reason with this product they were all the higher percent lookalikes, in the 7-10% range.
Making multiple copies of each top performer and increasing spend, I took both sales and income up, and up.
By spinning the few hundred dollars I’d had in the first place, I was soon up to $1200-$1300 a day adspend.
At some point I introduced my design variants and took them up using exactly the same method as above.
Sales weren’t quite as strong as the original product, but they were still profitable so I kept them going as well.
The above method went along blindingly for the first 3 months, netting me over $100k in sales.
September Disaster
Once September started, for no reason that I could see at all, sales dropped like a stone.
Ok, $25k is $25k. But the month before in August I’d made $55k – more than double this.
And I hadn’t touched or changed my ads, nothing.
Looking back it was probably something to do with Facebook ads – an algorithm change or similar..
But, everything began to drop, and drop.
One by one I had to pull successful campaigns that had been running for months.
It wasn’t nice watching my daily income dive 🙁
October was even worse, with $19k in sales.
I was constantly trying more and more campaigns, desperate to get numbers back up again.
Also, I had my Chronic Fatigue illness going on, which was putting me in bed on and off for weeks at a time.
With that happening, it gets impossible to concentrate on ads properly.
I struggled with both my health, and Facebook campaigns, for the next few months going into 2021.
Money was turning over and I was in profit, but things never got back up to the level they’d been in August 2020.
CBO – Let’s Go!
At some point around March I found Ronnie McKenzie’s excellent blog post about how to do CBO campaigns.
I’d always struggled with CBO in the past but once I read this amazing post I put his methods to work.
And boy did they work! I did a YouTube about this that you can watch here.
If you’d rather read my blog post about CBO you can do that here.
Read his post – honestly it’s made me a ton of money.
It details not only how to use CBO campaigns well, but also how to configure and use rules in Facebook Ads.
In March 2021 I got income back up to just shy of $23k, then in April I broke $25k in sales.
This was pushing my main winner, and also the 2 design variants of it.
My illness came back in May so income dropped again, and more so still in June.
Plus, around this time Facebook updated yet again with the horror that was iOS14.
Watch my YouTube about this by clicking here.
Or, I also did a blog post about it. Read that here.
I kept going, seeing $200k in the distance and determined to break it.
On June 17th, pretty much 11 and a half months after promo started, I crossed $200k in sales with my winning Shine-On necklace!
Achievement unlocked! $200k with ONE print on demand product.
Final Thoughts
11 and a half months is a long time lol.
I didn’t realise I’d be pushing any one product this long when I first started.
Never get Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is the first thing I’ll say.
It ruins your life, let alone being able to run an ecom business successfully.
As I said earlier in this post, the first $100k was super easy and only took 12 weeks.
It was the next $100k that really seemed to grind out and take forever (almost a further 8 months)
Yes, a lot of this was due to being ill, but there were 2 big instances of Facebook ads just messing up and being difficult.
This, and many other things is what you’ll have to get used to if you are going to do print on demand.
It’s not always easy.
You may see huge screenshots posted on Facebook groups, both by myself and others.
Don’t get taken in by this.
Always ask yourself – how much of that is actual profit?
Print on demand and ecom are not always plain sailing.
You need to be dedicated, stubborn and hard working.
There’s a lot of learning to do before you see good results.
So many people I encounter try it out for a month or two, get discouraged and pack it in.
Or, they expect instant results – thinking they are going to get rich overnight.
Be realistic guys!
Learn as much as you can, and remember – test, test and test.
“You never fail until you stop trying”
My YouTube about taking one product to $200k, along with a month by month stats breakdown, is right here.