 Today we're gonna have a bit of fun. Today I'm gonna do a tier list for all of the different skills and requirements that go into building a successful drop shipping business. If you're not familiar with these tier lists, basically the way it works is we have rankings from S to D, S being the most important, D being the least important, and we have all of the different things. I think I've covered everything. Let me know in the comments section if there's anything I forgot. So we have mindset, patience, SEO, consistency, customer service, all that sort of thing. And I'm gonna put them in order based on my own experience. So I'm somebody who's been drop shipping full time since 2017 and drop shipping since 2016. So it took me about six months or so to grow a business to a point in which I was able to quit my job and do this full time. I know I said we're gonna have a bit of fun, but there is some value to be taken from this video. If you are new wanting to start a drop shipping business, you may feel a bit overwhelmed. You may not know what kind of mindset you need or how patient you have to be or where to kind of focus your time and attention in developing the correct or at least the most valuable skills. So there is some value to be had. So make sure you stay tuned so you can see where these different things rank. That being said, let's jump into the first point. So mindset, by the way, I have no idea where I'm gonna put these things. It's not prescripted. So we may be chopping and changing things around, but we'll see how we go. Mindset, I would say straight away has to go into S. If you want to be successful at anything in this world, given technology, all that sort of thing, everything is more competitive now than it ever has been. Unless you have a strong mindset and you have the mindset of being the best, wanting to be the best and actually making something work no matter what, then you're probably gonna get fed up. You're probably at some point gonna want to give up when you fail. When you've tested that 20th product, unless you have a strong mindset that gets you through that 20th failure, then like I said, you're probably gonna end up giving up. You're probably gonna end up failing in the long run. So if this is something that you want to do, no matter what and be successful at it, you have to have a rock solid mindset. Number two is we have patience. So in fact, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna rank these based on my own experiences. So when I first started in dropshipping, so mindset was an S. At the time, I had a sales job for a plastics company. It was the most mind-numbing rubbish. I only managed it for about 12 months before I thought there had to be more to life than this. And that's when I started looking at other things. That's when I discovered dropshipping. When I discovered it, it fit my situation perfectly. I didn't have a lot of money. However, I did have time. When I wasn't at work, I didn't have any kind of responsibilities or people to look after. I was able to be very selfish with my time and focus purely on building a business. And no matter what happened, I was always gonna find something that allowed me to work for myself. So mindset at the beginning for me was definitely the most important thing. Next, we have patience. I would say it's close between an A and a B because in the beginning, like I said at the beginning of the video, it took me about six months or so before I was able to build the business to a point in which I was earning enough to quit my job. So I would say that it's very important. Given the average person who wants to start dropshipping, they wanna try and make 10K in their very first month, which is very, very unrealistic. You're much better off having a bit more patience, getting things right, making sure you kind of dip your toes in before you do a full cannonball into the pool of dropshipping and making sure that you build it profitably too. So you'll see a lot of people post big, big massive numbers, but numbers mean nothing. The most important number is always the one at the bottom of your profit and loss. So you're much better off being patient and building things slowly and profitably because at least in my opinion, that is the key to having a successful business that you can sustain in the long run. So patience, super, super important. Next, we have SEO for me and putting it in a D. Hey, just real quick, just 20 seconds of your time before we get back to the video. I just wanna make you aware of a free training that I've recorded and is available to everybody. This training will show you how to profit from Shopify dropshipping in 21 days. Now, I know that is a bold claim, but we've had hundreds of people go through this very same training and achieve that very same goal. So this training, it will show you how to find your very first winning product. It will show you how to find quality supplies that will deliver your product in less than seven days. No Chinese suppliers that take two to three weeks to deliver poor quality and plastic products. I'll show you how to build a professional and high converting industry standard Shopify store at above 3%. And it will also show you how to target people who are interested and want to buy your product. And like I said, find your very first customers in three weeks. It's 100% free, won't cost you a single penny. All I ask is for your email address. And I ask you for that, so I can also send you this. So this is also 100% free. Everybody who watches the training gets my personal hand-picked selection. It's a PDF download of 194 profitable product ideas for 2023. So by watching this training, not only do you get the products you need to sell, but you also get the strategy that you need to sell them. If that sounds good to you, make sure you check out the top link in the video description below. Thanks. Some people may disagree with this, but like I said, this is based on my own experience. I have paid a couple of people to help me out with SEO. It is a strategy that I've somewhat explored. I mean, granted, I haven't given it the time and attention I've given to the likes of Google ads or Facebook ads, but SEO, I mean, I don't even know what percentage of my business comes from SEO because it's that small. Plus the biggest factor that I've known to affect SEO. And when I say SEO, so search engine optimization, it's basically how far your website appears up the results. The biggest thing for my own experience that I've found to affect it and have a positive effect is how much traffic you're getting to your website. Not how many keywords or how many backlinks or whatever it may be. So I've been able to build, I like to think a pretty successful number of businesses throughout the years without spending more than a thousand pounds on SEO. So that should give you some idea of how important it will be for your business. Next, we have consistency. So when I say consistency, this is the ability to stay in the drop shipping business model and keep staying in it, keep thinking about it. So rather than spend a week building a business, then take a week off and then come back to it. Consistency is the ability to stay in it, keep learning, keep developing your knowledge, keep watching tutorial strategies on YouTube. I would say I'm gonna put it in a B for now or at least for me, for me at the beginning there was probably an A. Like there was nothing else on my mind in the beginning. It was just the second I woke up, I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it at work. I had an Apple watch. I was watching my audits come through in my phone. I just thought about drop shipping. Apart from when I was asleep, like literally 24 seven, there was not an hour that went through the day in which I wasn't thinking about drop shipping. So for me consistency at the beginning, I've definitely put for an A. Customer service is B, if not a C. I mean, I'm gonna leave it as a C for now because at the moment I probably deal with maybe 5% of customers, just the tricky ones or the ones that my VA's don't necessarily know how to handle so they'll kind of let me take care of them. And so the reason I'm gonna put a C then is because number one is you can outsource customer service very quickly and very cheaply and find people who do a very, very good job as well. And number two, customer service when it comes to drop shipping majority of the time it's whereas my order. So it's very easy to handle and deal with as well. However, it's not to be neglected. As long as you have people who can respond like same day, if somebody messages you or send you an email, most of your emails will come in the morning or in the late evening before after people go to work. As long as you can get back to people first thing in the morning if they come through in the evening or get back to people later that day when they come through in the morning then you're always gonna keep your customers happy. Plus when it comes to customer service you can build templates, you can build strategies for dealing with certain inquiries or dealing with certain customers to keep them happy. So it's a relatively easy thing to get right in my opinion or at least that level that I'm at perhaps I'm not at the same level some people are which they might be getting, I don't know 100 emails a day whereas I'm not getting quite that many. Next we have content creation. So I'm gonna refer to content creation as just posting on your socials maybe basically organic content. I'm gonna put this, again it's a difficult one. I see now again some people might heavily disagree with that but like I've mentioned building my business again building my businesses organically has never been a strategy of mine. Not, it's never been where my focus has been where the majority of my focus has been it's always come from paid ads purely just because I find it to be such a what's the word I'm looking for a long-term strategy there's so much time and effort that goes into it and the payoff is a year, two years even longer than that down the line and you don't even know it's going to work when you get that far down the line as well plus when it comes to creating things and being creative and putting imagery and designs and stuff like that together I'm not very good at it. So I'm gonna put it as C. I'm gonna leave it as C for now. Next we have expectations. This one links in closely with mindset I would say. In the beginning I had no expectations like there was things I wanted to achieve but I didn't have numbers that I wanted to achieve. There was no I wanna make 10K by the end of this month until things started to ramp up until I was seeing consistent results there was no expectations I was just going to keep going until I made it work. Speaking from somebody who now teaches people how to drop ship I would probably say that expectations are more important than ever because it's so so so easy in today's world to go into TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube see people show screenshots or their Shopify dashboard at the back end and see how much money people are making and just Twitter's really bad for this as well or ex should call it now. People will post screenshots and say not to in fact I saw one this morning not two million dollar months just by this three or it was like just one of those spammy posts and if you're like inundated with stuff like that all the time on every social platform you go on it can be really really easy to get the expectation that everybody's making loads and loads of money and they're doing it very very quickly when in reality it's like the top 0.5% or like the top 1%. So if you have unrealistic expectations again it's just gonna lead to you being disappointed and ultimately giving up. So expectations, realistic expectations super super important in the beginning. Website design I'm gonna put as a B just purely because when it comes to selling online at least from my experience the product is obviously super important and how we get people to see your products is super important but you can have a very basic website as long as your offer is good then you can be successful plus your website design you can outsource it as well so I'm gonna put it as a B. Knowledge is obviously super super important I was gonna put it in A but I'm gonna leave it as S knowledge slash skills again obviously if you wanna be successful at this so in fact I did a video on this a couple of weeks ago it was I think 10% of Shopify stores actually make money and when I say make money like make more than a dollar most of them fail and shut down within I can't remember what it was now but it was over a short span of time so basically what I'm saying is that if you wanna be in that top 10% that actually make it a success and make money from Shopify drop shipping then your knowledge has to be in that top 10% as well given my experience of teaching drop shipping and doing videos on YouTube like this I would say that most people probably commit to drop shipping for like three months before giving up if they can't make it work within three months so that's three months of experience and knowledge and development of skills so if you wanna put yourself in that top 10% then you've gotta go above and beyond that or you've gotta be somebody who can learn faster and smarter than everybody else so knowledge is super super important because without it you will not succeed so I'm gonna say that's an rank of S next we have copywriting so copywriting is I'm gonna put it A it could put it S actually I'll leave it as A copywriting is basically writing product descriptions writing ad creatives it's the words that you use to convince somebody to buy a product or service in fact I'm gonna put it as S because it was something I neglected in the beginning I just used to think if you were trying to sell a camera for instance you would write how many megapixels it has you would write about all the different functions and features of it whereas what's more important is the benefits and depending on what product it is you're selling people don't care it's really difficult depending on what the products is so when I'm putting a product page together then there's what I'll always do on a piece of paper on a Google document I will write out all of the potential questions a consumer will have about that particular products because if you leave anything unanswered it could be the tiniest thing like how long will the products last on a full charge if you do not address that then they're probably gonna leave somebody needs to be 100% have their mind made up about a product before they buy it if there's any hesitations then more often than not they'll leave their website so that's the first thing I do I write down a potential list of questions so that people can fully understand exactly what the product is and what it can do for them before they buy it I then write down my customer avatar so who is the ideal person to buy this product so for example if we're picking a camera like this typically this would be a camera that's bought by people who want to vlog so I write down who that perfect person is and do a bit of research so it's probably somebody who is wanting to be a vlogger wanting to be a YouTuber so when you look at the average YouTuber vlogger they're probably teenagers, low 20s they're probably at school they're probably watching certain people on YouTube they probably have a certain budget have a certain lifestyle that they want to live and they're all the benefits of that lifestyle or whatever it is that you make a list of and then that is the picture you paint with words and that is in essence I guess what copywriting is next we have ad creation I'm gonna put this as a it is super super important and worthy of putting in an S but as a skill personally I am not very skillful when it comes to ad creation I have people that do this for me so it's not a massive the brilliant skill that you need to have I'd say you need to have a reasonable understanding of what a good ad creative is so when you get it back from that person you know what revisions that you want them to make because you have a rough kind of idea of what it should do and what it should look like so I'm gonna leave that one as A product research slash product selection it's gotta be S I would say it's the most important part of any business it's a close one between product and ad in terms of what's more important for your business I would say product research or product selection is definitely more important because that is what makes you your money is your product unless you know exactly what kind of products to look for they're not gonna make you money so in the beginning it was six or seven products or so the first one I started with was these I think they were meditation beads what did I start with first I think it was this pleather fake leather owl handbag oh horse watches that was another one trying to remember the first products I got started with but I knew it was six or seven it was this hideous oh it was this hideous pug necklace it was this leather bag that had an owl's face on it it was horse watches lots and lots of different pieces of jewelry animal types of jewelry and if I had the skillset or knowledge that I have now when it comes to picking the right types of products then I think I would have found a winning product a lot, lot faster so when it comes to developing your knowledge and your skills when it comes to product research I definitely think that is one of the most important parts if not the most important part to any e-commerce business next we have suppliers suppliers are super, super important often underrated however they are kind of like other than your customers obviously they are the lifeblood of your business if you do not have a good supplier then you're going to fail it's not always as easy as chop and changing between suppliers depending on what stage you are so if you're at the beginning yes super, super easy and a matter of a few clicks you can be placing your orders with a different supplier you're probably drop shipping on Aliexpress or CJ somebody like that at this point but when you do get to the point where you're private labeling your product then you need to have that good open relationship with your supplier when I say open I mean like communicative you want to be talking to them and making sure that everything is running smoothly if you are in the beginning stages then your supplier is probably like a B or C as long as you don't go for really poorly rated ones on Aliexpress most of them are going to get most of your orders to your customers when they say they are on time and it'll be decent quality as long as you're not going for really poor like dollar products but as you get more experienced as you've got more orders going outdoor as they're private labeled then you supply you could probably even go up here as well but for now I'm going to leave it kind of middle of the road let's go for B so if you're more established and you have a business which is your sole income let's say suppliers like A or S in the beginning though if you're just drop shipping on Aliexpress then it's like a C maybe a B so I'm going to leave it as A for now then we have data analysis so what I mean by this is that when you run a Facebook ad looking at the data the CPC, CTR and to cart rate is there any purchases what the frequency scores are that sort of thing knowing what to do with that data understanding the data and if you do not understand the data you will fail I'm going to say this is an S I'm going to say it's an S just really because numbers don't lie like what they are is what they are and if you understand what they are and what they mean then you know where the problem is in your business so for example if you're running ads now if you've ran any ads in the past for a product and it hasn't worked out for you then what I want you to do is go into your ad account and see what the click-through rate is of that ad if that click-through rate is less than half a percent then the person who is seeing your ad is not interested in your ad so either your ad is really poor and it's not getting people's attention it's getting them to stop scrolling and clicking it or you're just putting it in front of the completely wrong audience and you're trying to sell I don't know eyes to the Eskimo so much stupid like that but basically your audience isn't interested in it or you've got a really poor ad creative so when you have numbers that are as low as that they do not lie they tell you where the issue is and like I said as long as you understand what they are and you know where the issue is then you know what you need to fix you know what you need to change consumer psychology I'm going to put this up as A it's not an S how is it an S? I'm going to leave it as A now just because I'm putting everything on S at the moment consumer psychology is basically the understanding of why people buy certain things a certain driving factors in pretty much everybody's life why they buy something the main kind of top three are health, wealth and happiness happiness is a broad one because there's lots of different things that go into that so health wise either buying something to make them healthier to fix a certain pain do they have a certain back pain if you look at A's mend their thing is health that's the driving motivating facts of why people are buying that products because they're wanting to buy something that's going to help them with their health to help them with their back pain and wealth either buying something that's going to make them wealthy help them make money so it might be a course on like drop shipping or something and then you have happiness that goes into all sorts of things really like relationships people's perceived kind of what's the word I'm looking for impression of somebody so the reason why somebody would buy a T-shirt from Louis Vuitton rather than just go to Primark and pay three quid is because of the perceived impression somebody gets from seeing you wearing that expensive brand so in summary consumer psychology is super super important if you understand the reasoning why somebody is going to buy your product then it becomes a whole lot easier to write to do your copyrighting and that sort of thing and build your ad creators because you know what kind of marketing angles you want to use last but certainly not least is email marketing this isn't S 100% this isn't S if you have a good email marketing team or company doing your emails for you or you're good at writing them yourself then you can expect an extra 15 to 20% on top of what your current sales are for that month if you are a business turning over as an example 100,000 pounds per month and you are sending zero emails with a good email marketing strategy you can bump that up to 120,000 pounds that is a massive massive difference it is not to be underestimated and the second you start getting some traction on your Shopify store this should be where a lot of your focus and attention goes into until you have it set up and once it's set up then it's kind of set and forget to some degree but you should always be thinking about different emails you can send to your customers to have that personal touch to bring them back onto your store and to buy your product or service whatever it may be and so with that being said that is my tier list for drop shipping skills I think I've covered everything I'm not 100% sure let me know in the comment section if number one you disagree with any of these and if number two there's any I've forgotten make sure you point them out put me in the comment section and I'll be happy to respond with where I would have put them thanks for watching guys see you in the next video cheers