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Online Business Ideas Chapter 4 of 5: Starting a dropshipping business

By: Cubosale
05-06-2020
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Online Business

I am going to discuss what I think is the easiest way to get started with dropshipping business from complete scratch so if you're a beginner and you've been struggling to just get started get those first few sales and you don't have a lot of money to invest. I think this article will help you in how I got started with the dropshipping business and this is what I would do if I had to start over from scratch. I just want to clarify what I mean by starting from scratch the dropshipping business so that we're all on the same page. So by starting from scratch I mean that you're starting with about $200 in the bank and that's all you have to your name and you also have a credit card. So $200 I think is pretty much the bare minimum that you can have to start dropshipping and it's still really not a lot if you have more it's better.

 

Start a dropshipping business with 200$ :

 I'm going to share things about starting from scratch a dropshipping business with about $200 and a credit card is also necessary because if you start getting some sales and you spent all your money on promotions there's a delay between the time that you get the sale and when you get the money in your bank account and you're not going to have money to fulfill those orders so having a credit card is a must and just for ease of use. I mean like this there are so many things that you can just plug your credit card in and then it makes everything easier. So you need to have a credit card when you're starting with drop shipping.

 

Build a website for your dropshipping business:

 

Your first expenses are going to be $29 for your Shopify plan plus about 15 bucks for a.com domain name which leaves you with about a hundred fifty dollars left for promos and as for apps for your Shopify store, you can use free trials like pretty much every app has a free trial. So that shouldn't cost you any money and for themes like I always recommend just using a free theme and customizing it well so you don't need to invest in a paid theme so yeah that leaves you with about a hundred fifty bucks left for promotions.

 

How to find a good product to sell?

So the first step is finding a good product to sell for dropshipping business when you're just starting a dropshipping business from scratch and you don't have a lot of budgets there's no room to test a bunch of different products and find the next big winning product. So what you want to do is you need to find a product that's proven to work and then model your competitors.

 

Use Instagram, not Facebook, why?:

The best way that I like to do this is searching on Instagram rather than Facebook, searching on Facebook works great, if you're trying to find the next big winning product for your dropshipping business but the problem is let's say you get targeted by an ad and it has like two million views a lot of comments and everything so you're like wow this must be a winning product right? 

The issue is that you don't know if they spent thousands of dollars in testing to find the right audience and you don't know if they had previous warm audiences for that product to sell to, so you don't know what the barrier is for that product. It might work well for them but if you try to do the same it wouldn't work because you don't have the same data as them. You don't have the audiences and you don't have the budget to do a lot of testing as they did.

So what I recommend doing if you have a very limited budget is searching on Instagram for proven products for your dropshipping business there because for Instagram influencers there's no barrier to entry. People just post a message to a page, they're like hey can I buy a shout-out on your page, and then they post it and you can do the same thing right, nothing is stopping you from doing the same thing.

 

Niche Product:

On Instagram, if you see a product for your dropshipping business that's constantly being advertised on Instagram that tells you that the product must be selling and you can do pretty much the same thing so that's what I like to do to find these products. I like to browse through the Instagram explorer page and see if there's any product that keeps popping up so you can do this over a few days and just try to pay attention to see if there's a certain product that keeps popping up on your feet. It means that product probably is selling well right because no one's going to keep buying promotions if they're not making money with them so that's a great way to find these proven products.

So not waste money testing a bunch of products, so to show you an example I found a bunch of ads for the same teeth whitening product so I took a few screenshots here but I saw the ads like 10 times at least just one time scrolling through my feed so that tells you that this product is selling well on Instagram and you can model what these guys are doing and do the same thing so yeah this is the teeth whitening pen product and as you can see four different pages and they're all promoting the same thing and it's getting a lot of engagement and this is all in the explore page right.

 

 

So if something's on the explore page it means that it's getting a lot of reaches, the explore page is kind of when a post goes viral so these guys are making a lot of money with this product. So once you find a product for your dropshipping business you can look it up on Aliexpress and get more information about it. So that's what I did here I just searched teeth whitening pen on Aliexpress sorted by the number of orders and I found this right here and as you can see it has 26,000 orders which are a lot of orders so this was a winning product.

 

However just because it has a lot of orders it doesn't necessarily mean that it's still selling well, so you can do a little bit more research and get more info for your dropshipping business. So let me show you how I would do so first off you want to copy the URL and then head to your dropshipping Center. So you just go to Aliexpress, then dropshipping center, then product analysis, and then once you're there, just paste the URL and then you can get some information. I mean there is a huge boost right here so this was Black Friday so that makes sense as you can see this product has been getting like 200 orders a day consistently, so you know if it has 26,000 orders and it's getting 200 orders a day that means that it's already been going for at least at the very least it's been going for like a few months, like three-four months.

 

So you know you're not at the start of the trend with this product for your dropshipping business but you know it's still selling well because we're seeing all these ads for it on Instagram so what this tells me is that you know it's maybe not the best time to get into this product for a long term because it's getting exhausted however it's still selling well, so you could probably just model what the guys are doing on Instagram and make a quick buck with it.

Another thing you can do to find out more about the product is, go to Google Trends for your dropshipping business, type in the product teeth whitening pen and this will show us where the product is at, in its cycle, so each product kind of have a cycle it goes up and then it goes down. We can check out where the teeth whitening pen is at so as you can see so this is the United States in the past twelve months and you know it really started trending around in July and then it peaked in October and then it crashed pretty hard and now it's going back up again so now we're at 72% relative search interest.

So you know this tells me that this product is probably kind of in a downtrend now it's already reached its peak but it's still working well apparently because I keep seeing ads for it on Instagram so I wouldn't get into this product for the long term however if you wanted to make quick money and if you're just starting with dropshipping and you're trying to learn how it works you could try to do the same thing that these guys are doing on Instagram. It would probably work because it seems like it's working for them.

 

Setting up a store:

So once you find a good product to sell the next step is setting up a store for that product for your dropshipping business and the way that I like to do it is setting up a one product type store kind of a niche store around that product. I find that that helps you get an edge over the competitors, who are just selling the product in a general store for their dropshipping business So you could kind of make it more branded and build your whole store around that one product. Another thing is you want to model your competitors and don't reinvent the wheel so you know for example the product descriptions you can see if the product description is working well for them you can base your product description out there.

So you pretty much copy theirs, copy it in a word document and then start editing make it more personalized to your website, try to make it better and then use that because you want to save time and you want to move fast and you don't want to reinvent the wheel as you're starting with $200 you don't have time to just test around a bunch of different things. You want to find something that's working model it builds up some capital. 

 

Promoting your store:

So now that you've got your store set up the next step is promoting your store for your dropshipping business so when you're starting from scratch I recommend staying away from Facebook Ads because Facebook Ads requires a lot of budget for testing and if you only have two hundred dollars in your beginner it's the quickest way to just below $200 and then you're going to be done with drop shipping.

So stay away from Facebook Ads especially if you have a limited budget and you don't have any prior data to work with, instead what I like doing is using Instagram page influencers so like meme pages theme pages that type of thing. I find that that's a lot easier and you can just model the what the competitors are doing that we found earlier so one thing that you want to do is install your pixel right away even before you start running Facebook Ads so that you start collecting all the data about your people visit your store, people who buy all that type of thing.

So you want to install your Facebook pixel right away so that you can eventually switch to Facebook ads but when you're just starting from scratch I recommend starting with Instagram influencers you're also going to need to make an ad for the product. So when you're just starting and you don't want to invest money into actually getting your ad made what you can do is just take some clips from YouTube and make your little montage and make it out that way or you can just steal your competitor's ads that's what a lot of people do however it's unethical and you could get into some copyright issues so that I don't recommend it but if you're desperate you know what you got to do and make sure to model your competitor's ads right.

 

ROI, think better:

You don't want to reinvent the wheel so don't try to go crazy with it just see what's working and then do a similar thing for your dropshipping business. So you're going to want to find small but engaged pages within your niche and by small. I mean from 50,000 to 200,000 followers and that's the range that I found it works best to get the highest ROI so you're not going to get crazy volume with that size of the page but you can get cheap posts and they can go viral and they get a lot of engagement.

So usually you'll get a great ROI on these pages so preferably you want to find pages that don't do promotions yet those will give you the best return because you know people trust the owner more and you know since they don't do much a bunch of promotions. If a page does a bunch of promotions people kind of start being immune to those ads and they just stop responding to them versus a page that's never done a promotion before. It's much more likely that people are going to pay attention to it so yeah what I like doing is negotiating for a good rate usually I go for 12-hour posts because I found that those give me the best bang for my buck and I recommend negotiating for $25 or less for those 12-hour posts.

A good way to get low prices is to say, Hi can I do this much for my first post and if it does well I'm going to be buying a bulk deal of like five posts or something and if you do that they're going to let you know test the page for cheaper and you can get a great ROI. that way so yeah like I said smaller pages usually give the highest ROI especially if they don't do many promotions to get the best results. With this method, you do need to put a lot of work into finding the best Instagram influencer pages for your dropshipping business and you know that takes some time but there is one method that I like doing that saves time and you can start building a big list of influencers to promote on.

Another thing I want to point out is when you post something on Instagram when you post a video you can click there's a little tab it says to cover and you can select a frame in the video to select the cover so selecting a good cover is something that is going to kind of like clickbait right that's going to make all the difference for your Instagram influencer promotions. So that's a really important tip you want to make sure that you're selecting a good cover for your post but yeah that's one of the easiest ways to find Instagram influencer pages to promote on just look find your competitors ads and then you know find suggested pages and keep searching and you can keep looping through until you find something that meets your requirements. 

 

Orders, looping in :

When you start getting some orders from your dropshipping business that's where using your credit card comes in and then you can use your credit card to fulfill those orders with uber low I'm not going in-depth at all with into how do you fulfill orders and how to set up over low and all that stuff because you know there's a ton of free content on YouTube. So it’s going to be a lot easier right off the bat because you're going to have money to test with and you're going to have data from your pixel that you installed right from the start. So all the sales that you made on Instagram all the people who visited your website all that stuff you're going to have all that data to work with when you're working with Facebook and you know that's going to make things a lot easier.

I recommend beginners to get started from complete scratch because this method saves you a lot of guessing and I see a lot of people just complete beginners jumping into Facebook ads and then they waste a ton of money they do they're like down a few thousand dollars just made a few sales and it's you know it's because Facebook Ads is tough especially if you don't have data and you don't have a lot of budgets to test with. So this is definitely what I would recommend, al the best.

 

 

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