You don’t need major skills to be a drop shipper these days. You don’t need to stock inventory, ship anything, or even guess what might sell.
Heck, you don’t even have to use your own money to pay for the goods.
You can work a couple of hours a day or week, depending on how serious you are.
And frankly the drop shipping method I’m about to show you is so straightforward, a teenager can do it.
Hint: Get your kids started with this when they’re in 8 or 9th grade, and by the time they graduate high school they’ll have a very nice nest egg for college, along with more real world business skills than most college graduates.
Now then… how do you find products?
Amazon can give you a wealth of information on what’s selling and what’s hot at the moment.
Go to Google (yes Google, not Amazon) and run some searches such as…
• Most popular kitchen gadgets on Amazon
• Most popular fitness items on Amazon
• Most popular electronic gadgets on Amazon
• Most popular pet products on Amazon
• Etc.
The first few results will be from the Amazon website itself, but don’t stop at those.
You’ll also find articles pointing out what’s new, what’s selling and what’s especially popular.
Be sure you’re only looking at results from the last 12-18 months – anything else might be out of date, especially if you’re looking at anything electronic in nature.
Make a list of possible products you’d like to sell. Once you’ve got some research done, you should have an idea of what niche you’d like to focus on.
Once you’ve chosen your niche, dig deeper into that niche to find products. You might even choose a sub-niche to make targeting your prospects easier. For example, instead of choosing ‘dogs’ as your niche, you might choose a single breed such as ‘Great Danes.’
When you have your chosen niche and your products, go to Shopify and open your own store with their 14 day free trial.
Next, go to Oberlo and sign up to get their free plugin. This is going to make it super simple to add products to your store.
Now add the Oberlo plugin to your Shopify store.
Set up your payment processor. This is probably going to be PayPal or Stripe, or whatever service you are currently using.
Last, go to AliExpress and open a new account.
Once you’ve done that, import your products to your store by using the Oberlo plugin.
Did this sound like a lot of work?
Remember, you only have to set up these accounts once. After that, anytime you want to add a new product, it will only take you a few minutes to open things, grab the product and put it on your site.
Once you’ve done everything above, you are ready to start driving traffic and making money.
If you already have a list in this niche, then that’s your first go-to place to get traffic.
Same way if you already have social media accounts and followers in this niche, you’ll want to promote your store in those accounts.
When you’ve done those things, it’s time to invest a little money and start advertising.
Let’s use $100 as an example. And if you don’t have the $100 to spare, you can always sell something on a site like Craigslist or Gumtree to get it, or just borrow it someplace.
Your goal will be to set up a Facebook page for your store and test ads until you find your winner. Figure on initially spending $10 a day for 10 days to find the ad that gets the sales.
Don’t overthink this or get stressed. If you’ve chosen hot selling products, this really isn’t going to be that difficult.
As an alternative, or in addition to using Facebook, you can also find large Instagram pages in your niche that have at least 50,000 followers and decent engagement.
To figure out the engagement rate, add up the number of likes for their last 10 posts, and then divide that number by 10 to find the average likes. Once you have that number, divide it by the total number of followers to find the average engagement rate.
You’re looking for a bare minimum of 1% engagement. Once you find these pages, send them a direct message asking if they’re willing to promote your product.
Rates for promotion are typically $15 for 50,000, $20-25 for 100,000, and $30-$50 for 200,000. But these rates aren’t written in stone. The higher the engagement, the more you might want to consider paying. And a lower engagement means you shouldn’t be paying as much. Negotiation is key.
Look for the pages that most closely match what you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling something for rose enthusiasts, you ideally want to find a page that focuses on roses, not on gardening in general.
By investing $50 to $100 in Instagram, you should get 2-6 promotions and several sales or more.
Use your profits to reinvest in your advertising. Closely monitor what’s working best, and do more of that. Tweak and test your page for optimal results.
Add products, rinse and repeat.
See how easy that is? Yet I know that 98% of people who read this won’t do it. Which is good news for you… much less competition that way.
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Nick James
Discover how to engage and excite new customers into taking action and spending money with you by using these simple free marketing tips from Nick James, The Internet Business Coach