10 Tips to Make Money on the Source Wave Marketplace from the #1 Seller
It has been three weeks since I launched a couple offerings on Market.Source-Wave.com and this post is a review of how this business has been going.
What qualifies me to write a review/how to make money post for the new marketplace? So far I have had the #1 selling SEO service on Source Wave 3 weeks running…
The service(s) have been going great! To get the exact details on the number of sales and revenue click here. As a result August is on track to be a record month!
Alex Becker is a big personality with a big presence in the SEO world and love him or hate him he undeniably offers a lot of great SEO information and resources in an entertaining manner.
One of his recent ventures is the creation of a marketplace similar to Fiverr but exclusively for SEO services and not limited to $5. This is the marketplace I am discussing in this post.
What Services I Decided to Offer on the Marketplace & Why:
Product 1 – Done For You PBN Delivered in 24hrs! – This service is a little mind-blowing…24hr delivery on a reasonably relevant PBN with solid metrics and free hosting for one year all at an impossible to compete with discounted price! –
This service is intended to be the perfect introductory offering for someone looking to get started with a PBN and test the waters before getting a perfectly relevant, new PBN built. My profit margin is reduced substantially but since these are pre-built and some already used/cancelled the costs are low enough that it makes sense for me to sell at these prices.
Product 2 – Link on my Premium PBN (DA 30+ PA 40+) – This is a market.source-wave.com exclusive where I offer a discount on 1 post for my Premium PBN service for sale at LightningRank.com. This discount applies once per user only and is intended to introduce people to the power of my Premium PBN. Check out the discounted offer here!
How to Make Money on the Marketplace – My 10 Tips!
- Offer Undeniable Value – My services I offer are undeniably a great value. The positive feedback speaks volumes to that! My aim is to use my advantages (system, team, size, existing inventory) and make it impossible to compete with me. Each service should be a category killing offering that deserves to rank #1.
- Send Your Own Traffic – Relying on Market.Source-Wave.com traffic is a strategy that will surly result in your product getting mediocre sales. Even while in position 1 I am generating about 50%+ of the sales via leads from traffic I am sending.
- Optimize for # of Sales not $ Order Size – This is a key tip for getting to number one. All my upsells are for one site. If someone wants to order multiple sites they need to order multiple times driving up my sales numbers to push me up the rankings. Nothing shady about what I am doing…all above board but I could either offer up-sells in quantitiy or quality and if I choose quality up-sells on a per site basis I don’t have the option for them to enter multiple quantities.
- Add customers to an email list – Using the source-wave message system to send one on one messages whenever running a promotion is inefficient and potentially frowned upon. Instead every time you create a product make sure one of the pieces of information you ask for is their email. Once you have their email add them to a new list at whatever email responder you use “marketplace customers” and then email them promotions as needed.
- Over Deliver – Whenever selling a product it is a good idea to over deliver. With the review system in place it is all the more important to not have ANY negative feedback….to do this I try and make sure my metrics, site quality and relevancy always exceed my sales copy expectations.
- Systematize – Any readers of my blog would know this is on the list…I have now systematized the fulfillment of the orders to my VA and the question/answers to my sales manager. Systematizing the fulfillment allows me to truly calculate the costs of goods sold and scale as needed.
- Respond Quickly – Responding quickly to messages, user comments and testimonials quickly is important. This is something I have not done well enough yet!
- Promote on Monday – Think of Source Wave Marketplace as a wave(I know creative)…you need to paddle really hard Monday to get to the first page and then if you are delivering a great product you have a much better chance of staying there and riding the marketplace traffic wave for the rest of the week. But to keep the marketplace competitive you need to promote every Monday!
- Offer Monday Only Sales Prices – Everything revolves around Monday (obviously this is a central theme in this post)…make sure to offer a special promotion on Monday only to help drive the sales. Special pricing or limited quantity can be an effective way to boost all important Monday sales.
- Recruit Affiliates – Again nothing shocking about this one but generating traffic to your offerings that clearly offer an incredible value may make a lot of sense for many people. By driving traffic to your offering (especially on the all important Monday) your chances of riding the wave for the week are improved.
How to Make Money on the Marketplace in 5 Steps:
If you don’t know what you can offer here are some thoughts on how to come up with ideas…
- Identify top selling services on other similar marketplaces (FIverr)
- Identify which popular service you can increase the value of and charge more than $5
- Put a system in place to be able to over-deliver on the service and follow the 10 tips above
- Promote it on Sunday/Monday/Tuesday to push it to the first page using Facebook Ads or access to an email list
- Repeat and improve!
No Secrets – Offering a great service and promoting the hell out of it on Monday is the key!!
Market.Source-Wave.com Review
What I Like About the Marketplace
- 100% Free – Everything is free! Signing up, commissions etc…right now there is no money taken off an order
- Very very simple setup! – I was able to be setup and selling in a matter of a couple hours. But there is no auto save on the editor so make sure to save often J
- Affiliate Program – When you refer people to your sales page and they decide to go with a different product (or another product in addition to yours) you make a 20% affiliate commission!
- Free Traffic & New Customers – This is what attracted me most to the marketplace…the ability to expose my services to a broader audience!
Improvements the Marketplace Could Use:
It is never a good idea to complain about something that is free and generating a ton of value…so let me stress that the marketplace is fantastic and very functional with no changes. But for the sake of transparency here are the limitations of the marketplace and ideas for improvements…
- Ability to search transactions – Having hundreds of orders it gets very complicated trying to find any customers order in question with now search function.
- Down Time (Cost me $600) – This is definitely understandable for a brand new growing marketplace but still sucked! I had a 24hr guaranteed for the first orders and hadn’t missed any! Then the messaging and order delivery system went down for over 12hrs and my VA was unable to fulfill orders before they were auto-refunded. OUCH! I had done the work but was unable to deliver due to the system failing…luckily most of the clients re-ordered and we fulfilled their orders quickly.
- Still a little buggy – There are still a handful of bugs. It currently shows my average response time is 14 days even though we respond almost hourly.
- Message Tagging – Having multiple people working in my account to help manage the orders I wish their was a way to tag different messages to different people or at least mark the messages as unread so we don’t lose messages.
- Set Different Affiliate Commissions – It would be handy if we were able to define our commission based on product. 20% one size fits all is nice and simple to launch with but doesn’t make sense for all products.
- Integration with Email Auto responders – Right now we manually add all orders into an email service for weekly promotion mailings. It would be handy if we could integrate this within each product.
- One Time Offers – Having multiple products that are related to one another in the marketplace it could make sense to offer my 2nd product as a one time offer on checkout for product 1.
- Affiliate Competitions – With affiliates being a large part of the marketplace having the ability to promote affiliate competitions with prizes would be a good cultural fit for the marketplace (in my opinion).
Maybe some of these are already on the development list but even if none are the marketplace is obviously fulfilling a need for many people and will continue to improve as more people use it and the reviews of the best services continues to increase.
· What has been your experience with the Marketplace?
· Or what is your gut reaction to it?
· Am I stupid for selling my services on a platform I don’t control and potentially cannibalizing my own sales?
Want to see my exact revenue numbers? Revenue numbers revealed here!
Great post Jon. It’s nice to see some real results coming in from the marketplace already. I’ve recently posted my own offering (Conversion Rate Optimization) and already have one order. I’ll be putting your practices to work to boost my sales.
Thanks Ryan, hopefully the article inspires others to put a solid effort into the marketplace. It looks like there are a lot of people only partly committing to it and putting up weak offers with no promotion.
Hi Jon,
Nice going! It’s great to follow your blog and innovative tips. In this case, unfortunately I’m not in the SEO niche so sadly I can’t replicate what you’ve done. But your post still inspired me. Maybe Udemy is an option for me instead.
Just wanted to let you know that the link to the discount in product #2 is missing.
Cheers again for the update!
Hello Jon,
I’ve been hearing a lot about source wave lately and it shows that its really growing rapidly and thats so good. I’ve not really visited the site more than twice but i think i will have to start getting used to it.
Do they allow affiliates to market the services in there?
I was on the first page during the startup week and it made a huge difference in my orders. I’ve not done nearly 5 figures but I’ve been promoting and also creating posts and even a video. Thanks for the post. I will definitely be using more of those techniques to promote, and hopefully be back on the first page.
Great first experience from Source Market. It is still new and can only see it moving on to greater things! Alex Becker is really the ultimate SEO out the box thinker (and doer)!
wow this is good to see this you are the best seller in Fiverr. it’s much inspired me to work properly in fiverr. thank you
Hi Jon,
Thanks for sharing these, it’s great to see good tips accompanied by actual results. This marketplace sounds like a great alternative to places like Fiverr. I’ve already signed up to check out the services!
Well done, looks like you have some great reviews there, might have to check out some of the services in future 😉
Thanks again!
Saskia
Hello Jon, thanks for sharing , I have one question for you, do you know why system block me sending message to seller again, Firstly I gave him and message, he just reply and I want to reply again, but I found the message box is disabled, do you know why? Thanks for your time.