Working 6-7 hours on your brand is not enough.
Not at all. If you are blown away by spending this amount in the first place, click the red x button on your browser and save yourself the trouble, this isn’t for you.
I knew how important branding is in this game, but you literally need to do everything you can possibly do to make your product seem better than the others.
When I first started, I was putting a fair amount of effort into it. But I didn’t understand the psychology of why people buy things.
In Dropshipping Psychology is everything.
So learn it. Why do people buy crap? What makes someone click on your ad? What creates a customer?
I supplemented Ali express product photos with Adobe stock imagery, color graded any photos to better fit my sites color pallet, used Shopify site elements to get the most mileage out of what you can do with a picture to shake up the theme layout.
I would also color-match every site element so that it was all cohesive, and made sure every site app was visually in line with the branding as well.
Telling a story is important, and convincing the customer to buy is what you need to do. In retrospect, I was lazy on the product page and telling a story, which is where most of the attention needs to be focused on.
Brand the hell out of your product.
This should take days.
Eventually, I learned that Shopify would never be able to give me what I wanted. I needed something that would sell a product. I shifted my focus from creating a store around products to a product that was my store.
This changed everything.
Most importantly you need to actually pick a good product.
Going on youtube does not count.
Looking up “dropshipping winner” does not count.
Sorting on Ali express by order amount does not count.
Doing what some YouTubers did does not count.
Segment your market.
Find a niche. Target those people.
Position yourself through your ad optimization to show them your Product.
If you are a college student, you have access to research databases. F’ing use them. Research demographics associated with your product/niche choice.
I would not bother with Instagram shoutouts or going with theme pages with less than 500k followers. These pages can’t make your Ads go viral for your product.
They are extremely hit or miss.
I’ve used nearly 40 different accounts, all with very different results, and all performed poorly or break even.
It is also not worth your time to sift through hundreds of users or to deal with most of these people anyways. They are flaky and unreasonable at times.
Test Facebook ads with your product video. It puts the control in your hands.
Maybe some people have success on IG, but it is still such a gamble, even when you spend hours picking the right pages as I have.
And no, buying an Instagram shoutout and then going “but facebook pixel data!!!” to defend it is not valid.
Statistical data on a sample size that small is complete garbage.
What, you got to say, 4 sales from your Instagram shoutouts that cost you $80?
Try to actually conclude reliable evidence from that handful of people. You can not, and that is not up for debate. Take a statistics class. Turn your brain to the “on” position.
As well as being inaccurate on the common small scale, it is not cost-effective.
Test everything before you launch your store. If you know what you’re doing, great, move on, but if this is your first time using WordPress, or Shopify, and Ali express, something WILL go wrong.
You dont want that to go wrong when you go to launch your product with your expensive little Ads.
If you arent comfortable floating the $5 to go from start to finish fulfilling your own test order, stop drop shipping.
Make sure you’re not in a “oh crap, that didnt work” position when you have sales. Super simple.
Stop being lazy. I personally HATE the term dropshipping.
If you spell out how to run a successful business, and then how to run a successful dropshipping store and hold them up side by side, they are the SAMMMEE thing.
There is nothing special about dropshipping. It is just a Fucking business, so treat it like one.
All that the “dropshipping” buzzword adds to the equation is the notion that you can do this as you are slumped in your chair, overcome by laziness, with no effort.
Dropshipping replaces all the pillars of running a successful business with “wanna make $72 million in the next 9 seconds without even lifting a finger?”
Just stop.
Don’t ever have that mindset. I have never had that mindset.
I can not tell you how annoying it is though to research with a sane mindset, but every other click you are bombarded with some scam artist/guru trying to trick you into something.
Quit perpetuating the mindset.
It’s stupid, and if you subscribe to it, success will NOT happen.
It is one thing to read advice, and a different animal to experience advice first hand.
Good luck!
