But if the products you sell change every year, maintaining that site is quickly going to turn into a mountain of work. Try to find products that aren't updated with new models every year. That way, the time and money you invest in a superb site will last longer.
But where would you buy a medieval knight's costume or falcon training equipment? You'd probably head to Google and start searching. The smaller the items, the easier they are to ship cheaply to your customers. Picking a profitable niche isn't easy and requires you to consider numerous factors. These guidelines should give you a good idea of the types of drop shipped products that work well.
For more on these attributes, please see this extended article on picking a profitable dropshipping niche3. If nobody wants your product, you'll have a hard time making any money! As the old saying goes, it's much easier to fill existing demand than to try to create it.
Fortunately, a number of online tools allow you to measure demand for a product or market. The most well-known and popular is the Google Keyword Tool. Fortunately, Google makes this search volume publicly available via its keyword tool. Simply type in a word or phrase, and the tool tells you how many people are searching for it every month.
There are entire training modules dedicated to using the keyword tool, and we're not able to cover the tool exhaustively in this resource. Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, you should use the exact match option. This will give you a much more accurate picture of the applicable search volume for the keyword.
For a more detailed explanation, see this article on understanding match types4. If you'll be selling primarily in the U. In reality, it's the longer, more specific and lower volume search queries that will make up most of your traffic from the search engines. Keep this in mind when you're looking at potential markets and niches to enter. If a search term has many variations that are actively searched for, that's a good sign that the market is fairly deep with lots of variety and interest.
But if search queries and related volume drop off precipitously after the first few high-level words, there's probably less related long-tail traffic. Google Tren Trends ds The keyword tool is great for raw search figures, but for more detailed insights you'll want to use Google Trends. For any given search query, you can see the growth or decline in search volume over time. Focusing on these popular and quickly growing terms can be helpful when planning your marketing and SEO efforts.
This can help you identify where your customer base for a niche is most heavily concentrated. For example, if you're selling canoes the charts below can help you determine that the majority of your customers will likely come from the Northern U. Because the keyword tool provides data on a monthly basis, you can draw some misleading conclusions if you measure search volumes during the wrong time of year.
If you measured demand in the summer expecting that it would be constant throughout the year, you'd grossly overestimate the size of demand: For any product you're seriously considering, you'll want to spend time understanding the intricacies of the niche's search volume. Using the Google Trend tool to understand search volumes, geographic concentration, high-level search trends and seasonality will offer insights that can help you avoid costly mistakes and optimize your marketing efforts.
Measuring Competition Conducting competitive analysis on a potential market can be tricky. Too much competition and you'll have difficulty building traffic and competing with established players. Too little competition can indicate a tiny market that will drastically limit how big you'll be able to grow. With this in mind, the best way to measure the overall competition in a market is to examine the organically listed i.
In order to generate a decent level of traffic, you'll need to successfully compete with i. The world of search engine optimization SEO is one we can't do justice in this dropshipping guide. But for the sake of evaluating competition, these four metrics will help you quickly gauge how strong the field is — and how hard it will be to outrank your competitors and generate traffic.
All else equal, the more links a site receives the higher it will rank in the search results. Knowing how many links are pointing to a site will give you an idea of how much work you'll need to do in terms of earning and building links to your own site to outrank your competitor.
There are dozens of different SEO metrics that are commonly used, but one in particularly is useful when evaluating the ranking strength of a site: the number of unique domains that link to it. To best understand this concept it's helpful to think of links like personal recommendations.
If your best friend comes to you and recommends a restaurant, you may remember it. And if he raves about it every day for a week a total of seven recommendations you'll likely be moved to eat there.
But even his fanaticism wouldn't be nearly as powerful as if seven unique, unrelated friends highly recommended the restaurant. Because they're independent sources, their recommendations hold much more authority. Instead, looking at the number of unique linking domains will give you a much better idea of how difficult it will be to compete with a site in the search results. Google places a high emphasis on unique linking domains, so you should, too.
The best way to get this figure is to use a tool called Open Site Explorer9. When examining Google's search results, you'll want to look most carefully at the link metrics for the top few sites 1 and 2 in Google as well as the link metrics for the last site on the front page 10 in Google. This will give you a rough idea of how much work is needed to not only rank 1, but also to simply make it on the first page of search results.
The vast majority of searchers ends up clicking on one of the top ten results in Google, so you want to understand how difficult it will be to get your site ranked there. Here's a quick cheat sheet for interpreting the number of unique linking domains. These are only rough guidelines but should help you make sense of the numbers. Most sites with quality content and some focused marketing and SEO effort should be able to get 50 linking domains within a year. It may take a multi-year approach to build a backlink profile in this range, but it's feasible.
A competitive landscape with this profile often offers the best work-to-reward ratio, especially for individual dropshipping entrepreneurs or very small teams. It's not always a deal killer — just make sure you're ready to face some entrenched competition.
Authority of Competin Competing g Sites When determining a site's rank, Google doesn't just look at the number of links a site has.
It also considers the quality of those links. The metric Google uses to measure a page's authority is called PageRank It's not the end-all-be-all of SEO metrics, but it's a quick way to get an idea of how important Google thinks a page is. As with unique linking sites, you can get a sense for how competitive a market is by looking at the PageRank for the homepages of top-ranked sites. You can also check sites manually using sites like this one PageRank in this range for the top homepages likely indicates a relatively small market.
It's not necessarily easy to reach this level of authority — but not impossible, either. Markets in this range usually offer the best work-to-reward range for individual drop shippers.
To reach this level, you'll need to get numerous links from respected, authoritative sites, in addition to a fair number of other links. Because you'll need them to compete in a market with sites like this. Do they appear inviting and welcoming or old and outdated? Are the sites well-organized and easy to navigate or is it a struggle to even find the search box? Do they provide high-quality information and detailed product listings or do you have to squint to make out the grainy product images?
In short, how likely would you be to purchase from those sites? If you're blown away by the top sites in a market, it will be difficult to differentiate yourself and you may want to consider a different market. But if there's a lot of room for improvement — or, as we see it, opportunity to add value — that's a great sign. Alternatively, the most beautifully designed site might have a widespread reputation for awful customer service.
It can be difficult to judge a book by its cover. Check with the Better Business Bureau14 to see if a company has a history of customer complaints.
You'll also want to do a web search to see what people are saying on social media and in online forums and communities. If the top competitors are slacking in the service and satisfaction department, there might be an opening for a store with superior service. An Importan Importantt N Note ote on Search Results When you perform a search, it's important to realize that Google personalizes the results you see based on your geographic location, your browsing history and other factors.
When we're analyzing a market, we need to see unbiased results so we can understand the real competitive landscape. Also, if you're living outside the states but plan on selling to US customers you need access to In this mode, any personalized settings or browsing history will discarded so you can get an unbiased idea of how sites actually rank.
For a more detailed explanation of how to implement this, please see this guide to tweaking geo-targeting with Google15 and this list of country codes used by Google One Final Thin Thing g Aspiring dropshipping entrepreneurs commonly want to know, How can I be sure that my niche will work out? The answer is, you can't! While the tips and guidance in this chapter will dramatically increase your chances and help you make an informed decision, there's no way to know for sure if you'll succeed in a market without diving in.
We've started numerous businesses — some of which succeeded and some of which flopped — and we've always had doubts at the beginning. That's part of the uncertainty that comes with starting a business and venturing into the unknown. What separates entrepreneurs from mere dreamers is a willingness to move forward despite the uncertainty and give it their best.
But then make the best decision you can and move forward despite your hesitations and fears. Before you get started, you'll want to consider taking the following business and financial steps if you're serious about your new venture. Some are mandatory from the outset while others are just a good idea, but dealing with them up front will save you time and headaches down the road. The Commitmen Commitmentt Req Required uired As with any other business, building a successful dropshipping business takes significant commitment and a long-term perspective.
If you're hoping for a six- figure income from six weeks of part-time work, you're going to be sadly disappointed. By approaching your business with realistic expectations about the investment required and your profitability, you'll be much less likely to get discouraged and quit.
When starting a dropshipping business, you'll need to invest heavily using one of the following two currencies: time or money. Investing Time Bootstrapping and investing sweat equity to build your business is our recommended approach, especially for first-time dropshipping entrepreneurs. It may be a bit more challenging, but it's definitely possible to get started with dropshipping even if you're still working a 9-to-5 position assuming you set appropriate expectations regarding customer service and fulfillment times for your customers.
As you start to grow, you can then transition into working full-time on your business as cash flow and profitability allows.
If you have the option to work on your business full-time, it's the best choice to improve your profit potential and chance of success. Focusing all your efforts on marketing is especially helpful in the early days when building momentum is crucial.
Much of your investment pays off in terms of the efficiency and scalability offered by the dropshipping model. Investing Money It's possible to create and grow a dropshipping business by investing a bunch of money, but we advise against it.
We've tried both approaches to growing a business bootstrapping it ourselves versus outsourcing the process and have had the most success when we've been in the trenches doing most of the work. In the early stages, it's crucial to have someone who is deeply invested in the success of the business building it from the ground up. Without understanding how your business works at every level, you'll be at the mercy of expensive programmers, developers and marketers who will quickly eat up any profits you're generating.
You don't need to do absolutely everything yourself, but we strongly recommend being the primary driving force at the outset of your venture. You'll need this for minor operating expenses such as web hosting and suppliers and to pay any incorporation fees, which we'll discuss below.
For information on incorporating a U. If you happen to be Canadian, this guide to Canadian incorporation17 should be helpful. So if your business is sued, your personal assets also may be in jeopardy.
Filing requirements are minimal, and you simply report your business's earnings on your personal taxes. No other state or federal business filings are required. While the liability protection isn't foolproof, it does offer more protection than a sole proprietorship. You may need to comply with additional filing requirements and will need to pay both incorporation and ongoing fees. They are likely to be more expensive to incorporate and are subject to double taxation, as income doesn't pass directly to the shareholders.
So which structure to choose? Again, we're not lawyers and would advise you to consult with one before making any incorporation decisions. Most small entrepreneurs tend to go with either a sole proprietorship or an LLC.
Personally, we've used an LLC for all of our dropshipping businesses because we feel it offers the best trade-off regarding liability protection, autonomy from personal finances and costs. You'll need this number to file your taxes, apply for wholesale dropshipping accounts, open a bank account and pretty much do anything related to your business. You can easily apply for an EIN number online Gettin Getting gYYour our Finances in Order One common mistake entrepreneurs make when starting a business is blending their personal and business finances.
This causes confusion, makes accounting more difficult, can lead to personal assumption of business liabilities and is a big red flag for the IRS if you're ever audited. You'll want to keep your business and personal finances separate as much as possible.
The best way to do that is by opening up new accounts in your business's name. All business revenue should be deposited into it and all expenses should be withdrawn from it. This will make accounting much easier and cleaner. Because you'll be buying a lot of merchandise from suppliers, you can rack up some serious rewards with the right rewards travel cards. There's a good chance If your state does charge sales tax, be prepared to collect it on the limited number of orders from customers in your home state.
You'll want to contact your state's Department of Commerce to register as a retailer and find out how frequently you need to submit the tax you collect. Local Business Licenses Most cities and towns require businesses to get a business license that needs to be renewed on a regular basis. However, this requirement may differ for dropshipping businesses, many of which will likely be operated from home offices.
You'll want to look into your local laws and regulations to see what, if anything, is required. Incorpora Incorporatin ting g Outside the U U. It can be complex, but it's possible for international merchants to incorporate a business in the United States, giving them access to U. The merchant will need to come to the U. Next, you need to decide how to get your products in front of prospective customers.
Several sales options are available, but you'll most likely choose one or a combination of selling on your own online store, eBay, or Amazon.
Dropshippin Dropshipping g on eBa eBay y As the world's largest auction site for physical goods online, eBay is a site most people know well. Create an account, add a listing and you're in business. Millions of people will see your listings, and the fairly robust and active market will help ensure you get a decent price for your products. This saves you time, as marketing is one of the biggest challenges associated with launching a dropshipping business.
In the dropshipping market, where margins are already fairly thin, this will cut into a large portion of your profits.
Some tools help automate this process, but it's still not as straightforward as listing a static product for sale on your own ecommerce website. Any goodwill you bank up through excellent service will likely be lost. The marketplace structure is created to serve itself. You will be significantly restricted in how you communicate with customers, how you brand yourself, the design of your store, and so on.
When you sell on eBay, you're not building a lasting brand or web property with any tangible value that can be sold in the future. Dropshippin Dropshipping g on Amazon Although Amazon stocks and sells a number of items, many of the products listed are actually sold by third-party merchants via Amazon's website.
Like eBay, Amazon acts to help facilitate the sale and to resolve any problems that arise. Amazon also offers its own fulfillment warehouses Fulfillment by Amazon , which allow you to complement your drop shipped items with products of your own without having to deal with packing, shipping or warehousing.
Again, if you're working with relatively small dropshipping margins, this will take a hefty chunk out of your profits. Amazon has been accused of using this data27 to identify great selling opportunities and strengthen its own involvement in the niche, ultimately pushing out other merchants selling through its marketplace. Be prepared to be severely restricted on how you can brand your business, display your products and communicate with your customers.
This is the method that attracts most people interested in building a successful dropshipping business. You can customize the look and layout, and create custom product pages optimized to best inform your customers about the products.
If you choose to build your online store with well respected hosted ecommerce platform your site will likely be responsive, which means it will look great on an iPad or mobile phone. Some online store platforms, like Shopify, let you manage your entire business from your mobile device. This is particularly attractive to dropshipping business owners who often like to run their business on-the-go, or even on the beach somewhere.
Most importantly, you'll be building a business with equity. It's much easier to sell a business built around an independently owned website. There's more cost involved — either money or time invested — and you'll need to be willing to invest in a long-term campaign to promote your new store.
With your own site, you're ultimately responsible for configuring the design, layout and structure of your store. And if you're hosting your own store versus using a hosted service like Shopify , you'll be responsible for any technical configuration related to the software and servers. So which platform should you choose?
There's a lot to consider, and different platforms will be better suited for different people and situations. If you're looking to dip your toes into the dropshipping waters and explore it as a hobby, selling on eBay and Amazon can be a viable way to move forward if you can find products with enough margin to cover your fees and still make a profit.
There are many people making money selling on eBay and Amazon so you shouldn't dismiss it. That means posting 1 post every day or running a PPC campaign that builds more and more traction over time. A good marketing plan can help you build on the momentum and stay consistent. The purpose of a marketing plan is to ensure that marketing activities are relevant and timely to achieve an organization's objectives. It's a plan defining a sustainable competitive position and defining the resources necessary to achieve it.
This becomes the foundation of your marketing plan. There is no set length for an executive summary but it should cover all of the main elements of your marketing plan. It should also quickly tell your story and highlight what you are trying to achieve.
Add your KPIs, marketing channels, strategy, and budget. A good executive summary should give a quick taste of the entire plan and entice the reader investor, upper management, CEO, etc to read the rest. The key is to keep it precise, short, and powerful. Employee feedback on this is critical because marketing and sales activities have to align with the mission of the company so all the various teams in the business have to be in agreement on the general mission.
The worst thing you can do is have a mission that has no direct correlation to the actual activities or tasks. The vision is like the why, the overarching goal and foundation of the company.
This is where you can find the vision and mission of the company. Next, they almost always mention the size of the market and they quantify the opportunity that they are presenting to the sharks.
A market analysis is a quantitative and qualitative assessment of a market. A common framework that can help you create a good marketing analysis is called the SWOT framework. It stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Strengths - what is your company really good at? What is your unique selling proposition USP?
What are some of the key resources, processes, and capabilities that your company has? Weaknesses - what are the weakest points of the business? What are some of the areas in which you could improve on? What is your company lacking compared to your competitors? Opportunities - what are the biggest trends in the market that could give your company an edge or an advantage?
These could be demographic patterns, lifestyle choices, population dynamics, or governmental regulatory policies. Threats - what are some of the elements in the market that could negatively impact your business? What are some things that you should be aware of? What are some possible changes that could threaten your business performance and success?
The next vital step is to understand your competition and what the competitive landscape looks like in your industry or niche. The best way to create buyer personas for any brand is by creating a customer journey map. A customer journey map is a visual representation of all the various touchpoints that your brand has with a prospective customer. Shoppers can find and interact with your brand through hundreds of channels, both online and brick-and-mortar. Identifying the specific problem that your target customer is looking to solve is critical.
This is how you define your persona and this is what ultimately affects the rest of your marketing decisions. The first step when building a business marketing plan is to understand and define which business goals are the plan aiming to achieve. Business and marketing should always go hand-in-hand - remember that. Questions you should answer are:.
Want to get more insight on how to plan your marketing for success in ? Pricing is often part of the market and competitive analysis sections but sometimes brands discuss it separately. It depends on how important price considerations are for your business and how competitive your market is. For example, if a major advantage in your business is that your product is priced significantly lower than your competition then a pricing strategy will play a key role in your marketing plan.
On the other hand, if you are a brand like Apple that is trading on the quality and its other features more than a price comparison, then your focus will be less on price.
This is when the price is solely based on the costs of the products. The company simply takes the cost it takes to produce the product or service and adds a markup. This strategy is based on the perceived value of your product.
So a great example here is a company like Apple that prices its products significantly higher than its competitors because of the perceived value they provide. This is when a company sets a price based on what the competition is charging. A great example here is gas stations. Each gas station competes with the other stations on the block, trying to outbid the other.
This strategy involves setting a high price and then lowering it as the market evolves. A lot of tech products have a high price when they first launch in order to maximize profit and increased their perceived value. Penetration pricing is the exact opposite of price skimming.
It involves pricing a product really low at first in order to enter a competitive market, and then increasing the price slowly over time.
As you can see, there are a lot of different pricing strategies out there. Picking the right one for your business will depend on the previous steps in your marketing plan - the customer or buyer pain point, the market analysis, and the competitive analysis.
Much like marketing goals and KPIs, your budget planning depends on your business lifecycle stage are you a startup or an established brand. Normally, startups invest more in gaining market share and acquire new customers, whereas established brands would invest more in retention and reputation.
Each industry has a different marketing structure and consumer behavior, so your niche defines your marketing budget allocation as well. E-Commerce in a competitive niche like fashion, for example, will need ways to lower its CAC customer-acquisition-cost and upsell. Every channel should have a different amount allocated to it based on the ROI and your profit margins. So make sure you invest enough into each channel to move the needle.
Up until recently, only big brands invested in their brand. Small eCommerce brands could only spend their marketing dollars on advertising campaigns. But as PPC prices are rising and the cost of acquiring new customers is getting higher due to the competition, small online brands have to increase their retention and build relationships with their audience, to be sustainable.
You will learn how to be as accurate as possible, how to ensure it is complete, what it should include, how to optimize your listings to show up on the first page and where to list it and what to include, and finally how to use it to amplify your digital presence.
Here is another free internet marketing eBook to help you stand out in the digital space because as you may know, today consumers head to the reviews section first before they decide to buy a product.
And this information is always out there for anyone who is interested, and it ends up shaping their first opinion regarding your brand.
Free marketing eBooks like this one cover the impact of online reviews on your brand. It guides on the ideal sites to use if you want to get reviews, tips, and strategies of getting reviews for your products and the secrets of getting the shiny five-star reviews, and more.
That headline makes or breaks your piece of content is no secret anymore. It is also demonstrated that on average the headline will be read by 8 out of 10 people, while the content just by 2 out of 10, so the better your headline the better are your chances to get your content read.
An ebook that aims to teach you SEO strategies for your blog, on-page SEO , how to target the right keywords for traffic, and promotion strategies for improved effectiveness.
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Here is help, study my Marketing Toolkit for Solopreneurs and update your marketing knowledge to facilitate your business growth! What makes content marketing work and how to create a content strategy that works? This template on content marketing strategies aims to show you the path to building genuine authority via a strong content creation process.
Jon Morrow from Smartblogger offers to help you for free to write popular posts and use directly what is proved to work and not to take a try and error path. His Headline Hacks are a great starting point. This guide covers everything from how search advertising works , how to organize campaigns, ad formats, how to monitor and optimize ads performance.
You will become familiar with basic and advanced concepts including search fundamentals, bidding and targeting strategies, ads performance and monitoring reporting, and more. A guide created by Google to detail their Display Advertising service and explain the concepts, be it basic or advanced behind it.
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This is the number one marketing activity that you must invest energy and money in if you want to grow your business.
To successfully build your email list you need a combination of skills: content marketing, design, copywriting, sales, and paid acquisition. And this is exactly what Teachable aims to teach you through this free internet marketing ebook. This is your chance to find out how to attract a ton of visitors to your site for free without paying Google or Facebook. Jeff Bullas is ready to share his hacks, ideas, and strategies he has used to attract over 16 million visitors to his blog over the last 4 years without spending a cent with Google or Facebook.
Take a look at his insights concerning social media, search, email, partnerships and collaborations, content marketing, mobile, social proof. This in-depth guide from Foundr Magazine reveals how they went from k followers in under 8 months on Instagram and proves that Instagram can be a great tool to generate business if used properly.
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And consequently, strengthen your business with a new reliable channel. Shane Barker gives you the tools to take your influencer marketing to the next level via a clear methodology to identify the appropriate influencers for your business, based on a set of criteria built on reach and engagement. You will also learn which are the tools to optimize influencer marketing campaigns, tips to correctly reach out to influencers, create a compelling pitch, and ways to create and maintain lasting relationships with relevant influencers.
Also, it puts at your disposal techniques to build great landing pages with the help of different landing page tools. The secret to powerful digital marketing is traffic. If you can master traffic acquisition, you have a solid foundation for higher sales and growth.
Keep in mind, though, there's more to digital advertising than throwing up an ad and hoping for results. Well, I guess you can You have to have a plan, and you have to know how to separate the winners from the losers.
Yes, some of our ad campaigns flop, too! Here , you'll learn the secrets to crafting a digital advertising plan that actually works. It's about being present where your audience hangs out—so you can engage with them, build relationships, and make offers your followers will love. But there's more to social media marketing than simply being on it.
Your end goal isn't more "Likes. Which is why we've broken down social media marketing into 4 stages of the Social Success Cycle. Learn the Social Success Cycle and how you can use it to attract your fans and followers, engage them, and even sell to them through social media. Forget any rumors to the contrary. Email is alive and well—and if you know how to use it, it will help you exponentially grow your business.
That's 4 times higher than any other marketing channel! The key to generating that ROI, of course, is mastering the foundations. Things like Learn the role of email in a growing business and how you can use it to quickly move prospects and customers through the Customer Value Journey.
Search marketing has radically changed in the last few years. But we see that as good news! Today, search engine optimization SEO can boost your website's traffic and visitors' trust while supporting your other digital marketing disciplines, as well.
Every year sometimes, every few months , Google releases another algorithm update. Search marketers who are "playing the system" often get hit hard, losing the rankings they've achieved. But search marketers who use white hat tactics and understand Intent-Based Search Marketing do well. Because they're optimizing their website for their users first—which is what the search engines really care about.
If you want to compete in the search channels and attract free organic traffic to your website, this chapter is for you. Learn the right way to do SEO here. If numbers aren't your thing, we've got you covered. Website analytics is a powerful tool for helping you figure out what's working, what's not, and what to do next.
And the way to get started has nothing to do with numbers. It's simply about asking the right questions Once you have the answer, you simply need to follow 3 guiding principles
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