Stupid Newb Questions- selling coffee

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madpiratebippy

Yay! Noobs with Boobs
Oct 30, 2008
3
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Texas
www.coffeeforpirates.com
I've been reading WickedFire for three days trying to get a particular set of questions answered, and while I have learned HOLY FUCK a lot, I haven't gotten these particular questions answered so I figured I'd go ahead and ask, and just hope the flaming is kept to a minimum because I have nice tits and this seems to be a boob-happy place.

I make coffee. I decided to try to make more cash with my coffee by selling it with fun pirate labels, because I can kind of draw and my husband is a ninja, so we are always smack talking pirates vs. ninjas. I made a little website, www.coffeeforpirates.com, and I wanted to set it up on some affiliate networks so that other people who are better at marketing than I am can go ahead and start getting people to buy my delicious pirate coffee. As soon as that breaks even I'm going to make ninja coffee and if the pirate coffee sells more, that will prove that pirates are better than ninjas and my husband will do the dishes for a week. If Ninja coffee does better I'll do the dishes, but I am completely unafraid of this outcome. :p

In no particular order, here is what I am trying to figure out:

1. What affiliate networks/programs are best for someone selling real goods (instead of the clickbank/e books/virtual goods)?
2. Should I give a percentage of sale to the affiliates or a flat amount per reffered customer?
3. What's a good percentage or amount? Most the coffee sells for about $10-12 a bag, I want to give enough that my affiliate marketers are very happy but not so much that I don't make money. What would you consider a very good payout?
4. Is affiliate marketing a good way to go for real goods like this? Is there another direction I should look as well/instead of affilliates?
5. Is there anything I should change about my webpage that's super obvious to anyone who isn't a total newb? I'm changing it every day on advice from people who Know Their Shit (tm).
6. Is there anything else I should be smart enough to ask, but being the Queen of Nebular Newbs, don't know that I should ask?
 


You MUST work on the website design. Honestly, you will not get any sales with such a website. It's clearly not attractive and doesn't look legit. I would recommend paying a designer $300-$400 for custom made designs for your website. Once you have an appealing website, that is when you could start thinking of marketing it.

Either way, let me answer your questions:

1. What affiliate networks/programs are best for someone selling real goods (instead of the clickbank/e books/virtual goods)?

I would suggest signing up on the following networks:
1)HydraNetwork
2)Copeac
3)NeverBlueAds
4)Ads4Dough


2. Should I give a percentage of sale to the affiliates or a flat amount per reffered customer?

Percentage

3. What's a good percentage or amount? Most the coffee sells for about $10-12 a bag, I want to give enough that my affiliate marketers are very happy but not so much that I don't make money. What would you consider a very good payout?

Depends on the product. I would say 15-20% for your product. BUT, since your product is low value; the affiliate's commission will be low. So I would suggest to provide recurring commission to the affiliate. So they receive lifetime commission from the buyer, as long as they keep purchasing.

4. Is affiliate marketing a good way to go for real goods like this? Is there another direction I should look as well/instead of affilliates?

Can't say without trying. Some products will do well, some won't.

5. Is there anything I should change about my webpage that's super obvious to anyone who isn't a total newb? I'm changing it every day on advice from people who Know Their Shit (tm).

I already answered that.

6. Is there anything else I should be smart enough to ask, but being the Queen of Nebular Newbs, don't know that I should ask?

Ask yourself how big your budget is.
 
Your site has the best privacy policy I have seen in a while. If you want to go with the pirate-speak text for the whole site, you should give the visitor a better idea of the speaker. You need some sort of mascot.

Rather than using affiliates (or in addition to), I believe you would benefit from doing some humorous stunts on video and having them spread across the social media sites. Get some friends to dress up like pirates and make a video of them pillaging a Starbucks.

Take a look at other pirate coffee sites (there is at least 1 other) and see what they are doing.

It may also be worth your effort and $$ to advertise on sites like this
 
Rather than using affiliates (or in addition to), I believe you would benefit from doing some humorous stunts on video and having them spread across the social media sites. Get some friends to dress up like pirates and make a video of them pillaging a Starbucks.http://www.piratemerch.com/

I second this idea. It would be hilarious, and draw a good amount of traffic to your site.
 
Craziness... I want some of whatever you're smoking! :D

My sister also sells coffee, and I know over here the fairtrade/ethical market is massive, although getting saturated now the big guys have jumped on the bandwagon.

I'm not sure what it's like in the states, but getting your products listed on ethical consumer sites (the US equivalents of ethical superstore) might be a direction worth investigating. Maybe your organic coffee?
 
As for the network - I would probably try Sharasale since they deal with actual retailers. I would have suggested CJ, but thats just too cryptic for a new retailer.
 
If you're going to stay with a cart like that, try to utilize less boxes so maybe you can get it down to one column of boxes. You have one language and one currency right now, so you can get rid of at least those 2 boxes.

You also might want to add a security seal to the front page to let customers know right away that when it does come time to check out their financial stuff is safe.

Also, though I've not had experience with that particular cart, can you add content around it, gracefully? Can you educate your customers about why your coffee is any better than Folgers? Why freshness matters, etc? Articles can bring links and visitors.

Joomla with Virtuemart can give a nice look with article management and a seemless cart. Not real simple to put together, though, if you're new at it.

Maybe you could do a Wordpress site on your root domain then put the cart on a subdomain and link to it. Making them look fairly seemless may be a challenge.
 
I've used Zencart before and it worked great, but nothing has been better than osCommerce.

Very cool idea, looks like something they'd sell @ thinkgeek.com

Props, if you have any questions feel free to hit me up.

GL ;]
 
The general advice that people are giving about promotions will probably serve you better in the beginning.
Look at it this way: Pretend you're an affiliate that does push physical products. You see a shop selling relatively low volume, low margin stuff and you've never even heard of it before. It's unlikely you're going to want to push it.
However, if you HAD heard of "pirate coffee" before because you've seen the tshirts for sale on Zazzle, and someone sent you a youtube video of it the other month, you're a bit more inclined.

Get a more Piratey designed site (try to find some otaku that can do decent webdesign. They love the pirates V ninja crap!) and then promote the hell out of the site.
Little videos are easy enough to make, and if you've got a tripod, and know a little bit about filming, you can make a decent video on the cheap.
You can go guerrilla, and have a whole bunch of friends go to a Starbucks, get coffee in a non suspicious manner, and then have some other friends in pirate gear rape and pillage them in the store for not drinking your coffee. To make it look authentic, have two other people get the video of it on their phones from different angles, and psot it under two different youtube accounts... Then social bookmark the crap out of them! Even an www.addthis.com on your site will do well for that.

Once you've got a little bit of promo for the site going, get some merchandise as well.
It'll bulk up the potential sales gross, and I think people are more inclined to buy cute merchandise online without even getting the coffee.

If you find things really expanding, try to find a few well known webcartoonists that are willing to whore themselves in exchange for some free caffienne. Sohmer from Least I could do is always going on about how he can't live without RedBull, and he does seem to love both ninjas and pirates, so there's a potential shill for you right there. He also does some really cool animations.

For actual networks, AceMenace has given you some good advice.
I know a few people that wanted to get affiliates promoting their products and now they swear that ShareASale is responsible for a 300% increase in their business.
 
Just a thought, if design is your thing, create a second site and labelling scheme, Coffee For Ninjas.

Then you can wage an online, and offline, battle between the two brands. Sort of like owning both Coke and Pepsi brands.
 
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