September Q/A Roundup
Hey it’s Opossum here! Welcome to my free monthly Q/A Roundup. Today’s post is on some of the best questions in the last month. Each week I write about a new topic or analyze a new digital business. If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:
Question #1
How do I start sending to an email list that isn’t cold but hasn’t been emailed in years. The users have opted in but they haven’t heard from me.
The question was actually way longer and much more convoluted but that’s what they were trying to get to.
Here’s the basics you need to know in this scenario.
You should create a secondary domain that you *only* send from. If your website is website.com, buy the domain website.co or websiteemail.com. Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s separate and seems like the same brand.
You need to clean your email list if you haven’t been sending. You start sending with a high bounce rate, you will burn your IP address and ensure every email from that domain ends up in spam. Forever. Use NEVERBOUNCE or a similar company to clean all hard and soft bounces.
Warm your IP. A warming service will send email on your behalf to ensure the ISPs don’t view your domain/IP as spam. They have a network of emails that they can tap into that all send fake email to each other. These services will start with a small amount of email sends a day. 5 emails on day 1, 10 emails on day two, etc. until they reach their limit for warming.
Once they reach their warming limit, let it sit and continue to warm for a few weeks. After the few weeks is up, make note of the number of max sends per day. If it’s 50, you’re going to only want to send to 50 people initially from your email list above. On day 2, send to no more than 100. At max, doubling every day. Keep this doubling (or slightly less) every day or two until you’ve sent to everyone on your list once.
Keep on with the IP warming service while you’re doing the above.
All email cleaners aren’t created equal. Watch carefully for any of those emails to bounce. If the bounce rate reaches above 2%-3% (ideally 1%), stop immediately and get a new email cleaning service.
Also ensure that you have an opt out button in these emails and do not send to them again if they opt out. When sending emails to people that haven’t heard from you in a long time (or ever), you want to remind them when/where they signed up. You need to ensure that they don’t mark your emails as spam.
If you want to learn more about email marketing, follow @HarambeMoney and @alxberman
They focus on cold email but there’s a lot you can learn from them if you’re doing email marketing in any domain.
Question #2
I’ve got these two paths I can go down for a product/service. One is B2B and one is B2C.
All things are never equal but assuming they’re anywhere close, always go B2B. B2B is going to be easier to scale to 6 figures. Here’s some differences you want to think of first.
What can you accomplish while still maintaining your job. If you have to visit locations, etc. If you can’t manage B2B clients while maintaining your job, it’s obviously off the table. Everyone likes to assume that they can just get a bunch of clients at the same time as they quit their job. It doesn’t work that way. You have to have some sort of transition period.
B2B clients do not push the envelop on marketing. In substance or compared to their cost. In B2C, if we have $40 in profit, we will push our CAC as close to $40 as possible to grow. We do this because we know that getting their email and future purchases is critical to growth. We may even go above $40 if we’re reasonable sure what their LTV is.
Most all B2B doesn’t do this. They don’t do CAC/LTV calculations and push their marketing. B2B has high tickets and margins with plenty of room for scrappy entrepreneurs to squeeze in.The ideal way if the first bullet is your problem is to start B2C with a similar product and value prop. Use this audience as your testing grounds. Test copy, marketing tactics, etc. with this audience. Grow your B2C product close to your current salary then make the jump to B2B. This way, when your B2B clients start to take up too much of your time (that you’re supposed to be spending with your day job), you can make the jump and have your B2C clients float you while you build the B2B clients.
Question #3
When doing Low volume KW research on SEMrush, what range should new sites be using for copy? 50, 100 etc?
First, let’s remember that everything in SEMRush is an estimate. It’s not uncommon to see KW’s that say 50 search impressions actually having 500. SEMRush seems to underestimate the true demand for low volume KWs.
Second, Keyword Difficulty is what you want to focus on. Not KW volume. I like to stay below 30 for new sites for a long time. Also note that KD is an estimate. Google every KW that you’re going to write about first to ensure that there’s not a lot of competition.
Ideally, you find keywords that have a low difficulty and high search volume. Unfortunately, those are hard to come by.
Question #4
How do you know if your niche is bad?
Almost no niches are bad niches (except if they can only be monetized by Amazon affiliate revenue). It more so depends on when you get in the game. Taking your question as a “bad niche to start from 0”, below are a few guidelines that you want to follow.
There’s obvious exceptions to all of these. If there was a perfect formula, I’d be giving you that perfect formula. Most niches hit at least one of these boxes, you want to stay away from niches that hit multiple of the below.
If the margins or commissions are low, stay away.
If the entire industry is in a big decline.
If you personally can't build a custom audience/offer around it. You want to be able to drive repeat visitors by keeping your visitors engaged long term.
Commodity product or low end product. If you can’t differentiate your product, you’re always competing on price. You likely don’t have the scale to compete on price.
Niches where you plan to do exactly what every other competitor is doing. You can make money doing exactly what the competition is doing but it’s better to have a differentiated brand, traffic source, funnel, retention strategy, etc.
For example, trying to arbitrage ads to collect leads for law firms is a hard game to play as the CPC is extremely high and you’re fighting with law firms. On the flip side of this, the content side of this business model is much less competitive and worth a go compared to the ad side.
Question #5
Content spend vs ads spend, do you follow any framework / specific % of each or just play by ear.
This is very much a play by ear scenario. Depends a lot on the CPC, competition, and timeline.
If I were starting a supplement business, I wouldn’t focus too much on content/SEO. So many of the KWs in the space are very competitive and you’ll be competing with the likes of Healthline. There’s a finite amount of SERP space but a ton of ways you can differentiate your ads.
I would however, try to buy a supplement content site that’s monetized by Amazon and redirect most of their links to my supplement brand.
If I were to try to help a law firm specializing in trusts, I would do the opposite. I’d initially bid on local ads to get enough clients to be stable. Once that was accomplished, I’d focus on on a content database as there’s a lot less competition in that area. I’d then have an estate planning checklist that’s I’d be giving away in exchange for their email.
Once I had built up enough domain authority and expertise, I’d build with the same strategy that AcuteSEO.com is using.
I’ll leave this article ending on this note. Try to figure out what Acute SEO is doing and how you can replicate. You will likely need a SEMRush or Ahrefs account.
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Disclaimer: Nothing written here should be construed as legal for financial advice of any kind. These are opinions and observations, written by an anonymous cartoon Opossum, built up over years working in e-commerce & affiliate marketing.
There is something wrong with your emails. It does not show up in my gmail anywhere. When I search for it I can find it but I do not see any of your emails when you send them unless I search for them.
Hey Opossum.. reg question 1... shouldn't we also have to set up a redirect from the second domain to the main domain?
Or, will that affect the main domain's credibility if the secondary domain is marked span often?
Great post, as always! Really appreciate the effort!