The Benefits of Starting Your Own Business
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do in life; starting your own business can be one of the best decisions you make. It was for me and many other people I know. And if you’re going to start an online business, one of the most popular ways to do that is with dropshipping. So whether you’re looking to spend more time with your kids or your family, have more freedom to travel, or just have more money to get out of debt and buy a home, whatever the reason might be, starting a business can be one of the best ways of finding that financial freedom. And to be clear, I’m not selling a course. You might have seen a lot of videos online of people telling you dropshipping is great and then telling you to spend a thousand dollars on a course. We don’t have a course. This is entirely free information. We believe in free information to help you get out of whatever situation you’re in and find a better future. And if dropshipping is that for you, then this is the article to read.
A Brief Overview of Dropshipping
Now, in this article, we’re going to talk about, in the next 15 minutes, a brief summary of everything you’ll need to know to get started with dropshipping. I’ll talk about all the different steps, including what dropshipping is, how to set up your store, where to do this, how to find a product, and anything else you might need to know to find success with dropshipping. So let’s start off from the very beginning.
Understanding Dropshipping
The first thing I want to talk about is what dropshipping even is. Now, dropshipping is essentially a way of selling as an online retailer, but you never own any inventory. So what is the benefit of this? Well, obviously, the benefit there is that, first of all, you don’t have to spend any money on inventory. So not having to have a warehouse full of shoes or whatever you might be selling means that you naturally have lower risk. You have less money required to get started. And if everything goes wrong, the most money you’re really going to lose is whatever money you already spent on the website or your advertising. So that’s the first big reason there. And the second thing is that it’s a very easy way to get started. You don’t have to worry about managing a bunch of people or shipping things and all the different stuff. You just make a website and you start dropshipping yourself. So it’s a very popular business model to get started. But I would be kidding you if I said it was exactly the same today as it was in 2015 to 2017. The truth is, in 2021, we have to take a slightly different approach. And that’s something that you’re not seeing in a lot of videos on YouTube. So in this video, we’re going to talk about really the right approach you should be taking in 2021 and 2022 and even going forward from that. Because a lot of times, if you start a dropshipping store and you do it just as a quick little money grab, you might find success for one year, maybe a year and a half. But eventually, somebody else is going to make that same store and outcompete you. So that’s going to be a big focus of this video is finding a way to not only make a store but make one that’s going to last and give you an income for the rest of your life.
Finding Your Niche
With that being said, let’s start off with the first thing. The first step into making your dropshipping store is actually finding your niche. Finding out what category of people you’re trying to sell to. Who is your market? And in order to know who your market is, you should probably look back at yourself and see what markets you are a part of. Because in order to best sell to a market, it really helps a lot if you’re part of that market. So, for example, if I don’t own a dog and I’m not a dog person (which I am a dog person, but pretend I’m not a dog person), I would definitely not want to sell dog stuff because I don’t know what dog people want. You can try to guess what they want, but if you are an avid rock climber, it’s going to be a lot easier to know what other rock climbers are looking for and to connect with them and to sell to them and to find a successful business in that niche. So the best way to get started with this, in my opinion, is to just sit down and take out a piece of paper and just make an entire list of every possible niche that you’re in. And you could look at this as what you’re interested in, what you spend your money on, what type of groups you’re involved with on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter, or basically what kind of channels you subscribe to on YouTube. You can look in a lot of different categories and figure out what you’re interested in and what your niche is. And this doesn’t even have to be obvious hobbies, right? Like if you don’t like fishing, if you don’t like running, then maybe you are very passionate about the way your home looks on the inside or anything along those lines. It’s very easy to find a massive list of categories that you would identify with. So once you find all of these, there are a couple that you really want to keep an eye on. So out of this list, you want to look at ones that other people in this group would have disposable income. And you want to find groups that people are very passionate about, which is why I use the example of dog owners. Anybody who is a big dog person probably has some disposable income. Like it’s not cheap to have a dog. You have to buy food and stuff. And they’re probably very passionate about their dog. If you’ve ever been to a party where somebody just spends an hour showing you pictures of their dog, like that’s a good example of somebody who’s very passionate about their dog. So dog lovers are great. One of course, fitness or home chefs, homesteaders, glampers, house appeal, like there’s all different categories. So that’s the first thing you need to do, is figure out at least one, if not two or three different niches that you really identify with, that you know other people would have a lot of money and a lot of passion about.
Selecting the Right Product
The next step is to actually find a product that really resonates with that group of people. And of course, this is the bread and butter of dropshipping. This is really going to be what you want to focus the most of your time on, to figure out what is the perfect product. And of course, it’s not necessarily going to be your first product. You might make two or three or five, maybe even ten products before you find that home run product that earns you a lot of money with very little effort. So, of course, dropshipping has been around for a little while. And I mentioned that you don’t want to do the same thing everyone else does. You don’t want to end up making a store that is very replaceable, that somebody else could just come out with their own store in six months or a year and drastically eat into your margins, if not crush your store entirely. So in order to make sure that you don’t fall into these pitfalls, you want to make sure that you’re finding a product that is not only very unique, but something that you can customize and really make your own, really make your own brand and really put yourself ahead of the competition. And before we get too far ahead of this, I want to talk about what type of products would really make ideal products. And so the first one you want to keep in mind is the size and weight and ship ability of your product. Ship ability might not be a word, but you know what I mean. You don’t want to be shipping like 50-pound dumbbells because if you are dropshipping 50-pound dumbbells, you can definitely bet that the lead times are going to be long and the shipping costs are going to be astronomical. So you want to make sure that you have a relatively cheap shipping device or product that is also a little bit more expensive. So if you can find something that is smaller and lighter and easier to ship, while also being more expensive, this would be a fantastic example of where you can reduce your shipping costs and increase your margins. So that’s one thing to keep in mind. Talking a little bit more about the products, I said expensive ones are good, but you want to make sure that it also appeals to impulse buyers. So there’s really a little sweet spot there where the product is expensive enough that you have good margins, but it’s also not too expensive like a laptop or a TV where somebody might be thinking and spending more time before they actually buy it. You want to find that sweet spot where if it’s a dog toy, maybe it’s like $40, $50. Just whatever that threshold is for your group that they don’t think twice and they just go and purchase that because they’re very interested in the product. So that’s definitely going to be something to keep in mind, especially if you have an audience that has more disposable income. Impulse buying might be something that they do more.
