Archive for May, 2010
Man Makes Living by Selling Shirt on His Back
I’ve always believed that it was possible to make money doing anything. And I mean – ANYTHING. If you can design and market your product/service the right way, I’m sure that you can convince people to buy your stuff. That said, I’m always on the lookout for interesting business ideas that blow up and become successful. Recently I’ve stumbled onto a really interesting one. This is interesting because these guys got famous wearing T-shirts. Everyday, their job is to literally – wear a T-shirt.
What’s the Business About?
www.iwearyourshirt.com is an Advertising company that uses T-shirts to advertise for businesses. Founded by Jason Salder, the idea revolves around wearing a shirt emblazoned with a company’s logo. Sadler wears a different shirt for every day of the year. He advertises for the companies by taking pictures and by uploading videos about the companies to Ustream and YouTube. The site started on January 1st, 2009 and has been making Jason a very comfortable living by sharing his T-shirt wearing escapades.
Sadler initially came up with this idea behind I Wear Your Shirt after trying to come up with “a way to make some extra money without actually ‘working’”. In 2005, Sadler was inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage to create “something … that would hopefully be as successful and, maybe down the road, just as profitable”. He noticed that for promotional purposes, many companies gave away T-shirts for free. Knowing that T-shirts caught people’s attention, he decided to become a “human billboard” and “create an advertising medium through free social media tools”. After coming up with this idea, Sadler spread I Wear Your Shirt’s services through his group of family and friends and through Facebook.
How Does it Make Money?
Customers visit the website and purchase days for Sadler to advertise their products. For every day of the year, Sadler dons the shirt of a different company for a set price. On January 1, 2009 the price was $1. The price increased by $1 for every day after January 1. By December 31, I Wear Your Shirt’s last customer for the year paid $365. This means Sadler’s annual guaranteed income comes out to be $66,795. He’s publicly revealed that he received an additional $18,000 in 2009 from the sale of monthly $1,500 sponsorships. After factoring in the money gained from contests and other enterprises, Sadler’s total income in 2009 is $83,000.
In 2010, Sadler doubled the prices and expanded his operations by hiring Evan White, who lives in Los Angeles, California. Together they wear the same shirts on the both coasts of the United States and promote the company of the day by posting videos wearing a company’s shirt on Ustream, YouTube. They also discuss the companies that they’re promoting on Facebook and Twitter.
I’ve been browsing through some of their videos on youtube and they’re actually really funny.
(On a sidenote: I know the purpose of Sadler video is to convince me to visit the company website – but it’s working! I must have already clicked through to 3 or 4 company sites just to check them out in more detail.)
These two guys do such a great job making these companies look fun and snazzy.
Check out one of their videos below
Why is it Working?
The number 1 reason why I think this business has not only been successful but sustainable is that it flat out works. Sadler does an excellent job promoting these companies with his engaging personality and well edited videos. I hate to sound cliche, but I don’t think this site is really about wearing T-shirts. It’s about promoting great content on a consistent basis.
Let’s look at some facts, Sadler alone has over 1,300 friends on Facebook and over 21,000 followers on Twitter. It’s hard to develop such a large audience if you’re content isn’t engaging the audience.
Company’s recognize Sadler’s audience and this is the reason why they’re willing to pay such big fees for an one shot advertisement. Even if only a modest 1% of this audience converts that’s still over 200 new customers.
And of course a huge theme throughout the site is how much fun these two guys look like they’re having. Who knew work could be this fun?! These guys look like they enjoy what they’re doing and I bet they would be supercool to hang out with at a party.
How Much Would You Pay For a Pair of Nice Shoes?
One of my secret fetishes is collecting nice shoes. Maybe it’s the metrosexual inside me, but I find it extremely gratifying when I buy a sweet ass pair of shoes.
Now, I don’t want any readers out there to get the wrong impression that I have an uncontrollable shopping problem because in reality, I probably go out shopping fewer than twice a year, and typically each session is completed in less than an hour. This is all because I perform meticulous research comparing brands and prices, and I’ve already singled out the exact cut and style that I like – culminating in the what my girlfriend calls the most direct, to the point shopping experience she has ever witnessed (something that I’m actually pretty proud of).
Invariably, I always end up spending a big lump of money. But I like nice things, and I’m willing to spend a little more on a high end items because I know that I’ll enjoy them more.
I know some guys out there will disagree with me and say it is a complete waste of money to drop a couple bills on a pair of soft leather Italian loafers, but I feel like this type of spending is completely worthwhile. See reasons below…
Comfort – I have a confession. I have irregularly shaped feet. My feet are really really wide. I wasn’t born this way, and I’m not quite sure how exactly this happened, but over the past few years my feet have continued to grow in a width direction and normal shoes can be very uncomfortable to wear. I’ve seen some nasty looking feet in my lifetime – feet that have been stuffed in shoes that are too small and all sorts of terrible things begin to happen, such as: bunions, ingrown nails, bone deformations etc. These things look horrible and I’m sure can actually affect your standard of living. I walk a lot, and life would suck if it hurt every time I took a step. So I’m actually more than willing to pay a couple extra dollars for a pair nice fitting comfortable shoes.
But Paul, you might asks, does greater price equate greater comfort? In general, I think “brand names” have established a name in the marketplace simply because people find their products well crafted and durable. A brand would not be famous if it was poorly made. I find that wearing a name brand shoe is almost always more comfortable than wearing a pair of generic shoes. This may be due in part to superior material selection, such as leather grade. It may be due to superior craftsmanship or a better fitting cut. Whatever the reason may be, expensive shoes are usually more comfortable and offer a wider selection of sizes. I’m willing to pay more for a perfect fit than wear cheap shoes and potentially develop a foot problem when I get older.
Look nice – Other guys may not care as much about your feet, but the ladies can tell you that one of the first things they notice about men is their footwear. If a guy is wearing a nice pair of shoes, this means that he’s not a stingy mofo, and implies that he’s willing to fork over the cash to take her out to a nice dinner and maybe one day buy her a nice shoes as well. And what kinda woman doesn’t like shoes?? Wear a nice pair of shoes everyday and you will increase your chances of getting laid by 10%. This is the money grubber guarantee.
Confidence – Wearing luxury name brand goods is like having 6 pack abs – it just makes you feel good knowing that you have it, and that other people want it. I’m nowhere near a bigshot CEO, but wearing crazy nice things can definitely make me feel like one. I’m of the mindset that anything that feels good must be good because as long as I feel great, life is great!
Google Adwords Experiment – Week 1
Here to tally the official results from week 1 of my first google adwords experiment, and frankly the result are a bit disappointing. Google adwords is a complex beast to tame, and for someone with no previous internet marketing experience, this has been a harsh learning experience. But I don’t give up so easy!
The Results
After running my campaign for 5 days, I spent a total of $229.12 and sold 3 copies of my study guide. This produced a net loss of $139.27 (sad face).
During the 5 day trial, my little adwords campaign made 501,889 impressions and received 3,586 clicks. I’m actually really satisfied with the amount of traffic this experiment drove to my website. My GMAT study guide site usually receives around 50 unique visitors a day, and during this campaign, my traffic skyrocketed to over 400 visitors a day.
However, I didn’t like how that the campaign ate up my budget so quickly. And I really didn’t like that my conversion rate was so low. As I mentioned in my previous week’s post about how I setup my google adwords campaign, previous months show that I average a conversion rate of 0.34%. Yet my conversion rate during this adwords campaign was a pitiful 0.08% – a whopping 76% less (double sad face).
I think this is definitely a testament to traffic quality. Most of the people that come to my website usually find it through organic google search or are referred from gmat related internet forums. I feel like these people (1) give my site more credibility since they are the ones actively seeking me out and (2) enter my site with greater purpose and hence are more willing to spend money. The adwords traffic I received definitely seemed to be on the poor side of the quality spectrum. I also didn’t like the fact that my click through rate (CTR) was a pitiful 0.71%.
First Week Mistakes
- Don’t just let your campaign run. Monitor it closely for the first few days. I foolishly let my campaign run for 4 days before I checked it and was a surprised to see that I had already spent $200 but received only 3 study guide sales. The first two days were definitely not profitable, and I should have known to first pause the campaign and then to figure out why.
- Know the difference between the Content and Search Network. My next warning signal should have been when I didn’t see any stats next to the keywords I was bidding on. For some reason I stupidly thought that maybe the system lagged a bit and the statistics would populate within a day or two. It never did. If you look at my results table, you’ll see that my ad impressions are split into two groups: search and content. The search network refers to regular google traffic as seen when you perform a engine search, and content traffic refers to advertisements placed on websites by using adsense. I only spent $0.32 on search traffic but I spent $228.80 on content traffic! The differences in money spent and traffic received leads me to believe that I should follow different tactics when targeting a search or content audience, so I’m going to split this into two campaigns in the future: one for search network and one for content network.
- Track and Analyze Everything. One of the biggest reasons why I’m running an adwords campaign is because I wanted to test which keywords convert well for my niche topic. Advertising on the google search network is an excellent way to track this. The content network on the other hand is not. The content network doesn’t track keywords because your ads show up depending on the content of the website its placed on. I tried to track where my ads were showing up on the content network, and it’s showing me that the majority of my content ads were placed on random pdf and ebook download sites. No wonder I got such crappy traffic – the majority of visitors were people not that interested in studying the GMAT to begin with.
- Don’t be afraid to reduce your budget. $50/day is a lot of money to spend on traffic that isn’t converting. I already laid out my thought process for how I came up with this budget. But if you find that it’s not working, you can always reduce your risk by lowering your budget to a level that’s more tolerable. I really just need this experiment to show me some signs of life before I throw anymore money on it.
Campaign Improvements
- Focus on Search Network Traffic. While I’m not ruling out advertising on the content network, I’m really not impressed so far. I spent a lot of money running ads on both networks and it seemed like the content network just ran up the tab without churning much in terms of results. So I’ve changed my campaign settings to only focus on search for now. I want to master one element of adwords at a time.
- Reduce my Budget. I reduced my budget from $50 to $20. I want some proof that an adwords campaign can actually be profitable before I scale things up. I should have started out small like this from the beginning.
- Increase Adgroups and Keywords. I noticed that I actually have very few clicks on my search ads, so I’m going to try to overcome this with an increase in quantity. I had about 10 adgroups running, targeting around 50 keywords. But I’m adding an additional 10 adgroups to increase my total number of keywords to 500.
- Include Spelling Variations and Typos in Keywords. 500 keywords seems like alot for 20 adgroups. But less than 200 of these are actual different keywords. I’m using this Spelling Typo Generator to come up with a list common typos and variations of my most popular and expensive terms. It’ll be interesting to see if spelling variations are a successful tactic to increase exposure in my campaign.
