 How to build, launch and grow a profitable online store. Hey guys, you've come to the right place if you wanna watch a video on how to build an e-commerce store. Now, I will tell you there is a lot of money to be made in e-commerce. I've made literally millions of dollars over the years in e-commerce. But I will tell you this too, it's a lot of work and it's a lot of planning and there's certain steps you need to take. And if you wanna know what those steps are and you wanna do it right, you're gonna wanna watch this video to the very end because I'm gonna give you all the steps. Let's get going. Now, don't forget also to subscribe, hit that subscribe button down there, don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified every time I go live or I do a new video. And if you like this video, do me a favor, give a brother a thumbs up, I would really appreciate it. Okay, so let's jump right into this and let's pick step number one. Okay, number one is choosing a product. And this can be one of the most difficult and challenging parts to selling online. You've gotta decide if you're gonna sell it to the end user, if you're gonna sell it to a wholesaler, what exactly are you going to do? That has to be decided right up front. Now, once you've decided what your market is, and for most of you, it's gonna be from you selling to an in-use consumer, not too many of you are gonna be doing wholesalers, so I will focus a little bit more on that. But once you've done that, you've got to actually research that product. You're gonna wanna look at your competitors out there, you're gonna wanna look at the market, you're gonna wanna look at profit margins, that type of thing, and make some real concrete decisions. I also wanna cover where you're gonna actually get those products from because that's pretty important, too. I think the very most important thing you're gonna do, though, is research your competition. Take the name of your product, whatever it is, put it into Google, and find out who's selling that product. Look at Facebook pages, look at who's got Facebook pages, see what they're doing with that particular product. Look at social media, is it on social media? Chances are there's some people out there who have already figured out how to sell the product that you wanna sell, and with just a little bit of research, you'll know exactly what to do, too. Now, the next part, so many of you skip, but please don't, write some sort of business plan. I think that's so very important. Now, here's the thing with business plans. A lot of us say, well, I don't wanna write a business plan because I'm not sure how it's gonna work out, and I can't write everything down until I figure out how it's gonna work out. Well, I can tell you how it's gonna work out. It's not gonna work out very well unless you have a plan and you know what direction you're going. That doesn't mean you can't change your business plan on down the road. I know I changed mine many, many times, but I at least had a plan going into it. Now, once we've got that product picked out, we've gotta actually set up our business. We've gotta actually decide what kind of business are we going to have. We've got to actually come up with a name for our business, right? That's the tough thing. I actually do have the website, jrfisher.com, but my main business is Survival Cave Food, and I came up with that name kinda just out of the air. It's now actually a Google search term, but many years ago, I didn't know what I was doing, so I just picked it, which was probably a bad idea, but now it has worked out. So sometimes things do work out in your favor. But once you've picked a business name, then you've gotta get a domain name. Is your business name gonna be the same as your domain name? For example, iownjrfisher.com, it's my name, but that is actually run by Digital Enterprise Marketing, which is the actual parent company. I never used the name Digital Enterprise Marketing, but that's the actual business license. The next part is actually getting a logo. This is way over thought, way, way over thought. I see people spending days and weeks and maybe months working on a logo. It really doesn't matter. I'm gonna tell you that right now. Logos just don't matter. If you think of Nike, they have the swoosh and that doesn't really tell you a whole lot doesn't. So don't overthink this logo thing. I would tell you to make it more simple than complicated. And a logo is like everything else, guys. Don't worry, you can always change it later on. You're not gonna have the branding of Coca-Cola anytime soon, so I think you're gonna be okay. The next part I would tell you to study a little bit is SEO, search engine optimization so that your pages can actually get found. Now I've got a lot of videos on this channel. You can search SEO on this channel and you're gonna find a lot of other videos you can go and watch about search engine optimization. But it's really important. I think this is a step a lot of people skip is they don't put in the titles for their pages. They don't put in the meta tags. They don't put in the descriptions. And quite honestly, without those, Google can't go out and find your pages and show them to people. So this is really critical that you do this. I won't spend time on this video about that, but go to one of my other videos and watch SEO videos and you'll learn exactly how to do it. It's not hard. The next part is building your store. Where is it gonna be? I highly recommend Shopify. I will have a link in the description below where you can get a Shopify account. But Shopify is a really good store if you're doing e-commerce. It's designed for it. It's one of the biggest e-commerce platforms that's out there. You also will need an email provider. I highly recommend Cartra. Cartra is amazing. It does everything for you. It does sales pages. And quite honestly, you can get Cartra before you get Shopify and test some of your products with sales pages in Cartra. And then once you find some that are working out, then you can actually build out your Shopify store. At this point, I think it's time for you to think about how you're gonna market these products too. That's super important. What channels are you going to use? Are you gonna use social media? Are you gonna use ads? Are you gonna try to depend on SEO? I would not try to depend on SEO in the beginning because that takes a long time to build up good SEO. However, these other channels are really important. Social media is really important. Maybe you've already got a following. Maybe you've already got a list that you could actually market your products to. If you don't, it's not a problem. A lot of us start with no list. I started with zero people. But you can also think about maybe doing posts in social media where you give people free content. Maybe you're gonna be selling fishing supplies and maybe you've got some downloads on the best ways to do fly fishing. The best way to do deep sea fishing. The best way to do open lake fishing, you know? And you can give some of these downloads and start to build your list. Once you build this list, you'll have somebody to market to. Next up, you wanna think about the delivery of your products. Now, you should have decided up front if you're gonna actually buy inventory or you're gonna have drop shipping done. I highly recommend drop shipping in the beginning because that way you don't have to invest in inventory. You can do print on demand. You can do a POD where they actually ship out all your shirts and hats and whatever it is you're gonna sell. And I think that's the best way to go in the beginning. You do wanna set up your KPI. If you don't know what that is, that's key performance indicators. So a key performance indicator may be I need to make 20% profit on my T-shirts. And you wanna make sure you have something in the beginning to go by. I know in the beginning you're not gonna know. I mean, you're gonna say, well, gee, I don't know. Do I make 20%, do I make 30%? KPIs can be adjusted later on. So once you've decided on 20% and you see you're making 28 or 30%, you can certainly adjust it and say, well, the rest of my products, I want all those to make 30% too. The trap you get into here is a lot of people will start to sell very expensive items on down the road and they're still trying to make their 20% or 30%. To give you an example, my survival food company, maybe we make 30% on a $159 case of meat, but if we sell a year supply, maybe we only make 18 or 19%, but that sale is $5,000 versus $159. So I don't mind doing it. It's the same amount of work and I make a whole lot more money. The KPI is gonna be different for that high-priced product though. Now of course the next step, get a customer. You gotta figure out how to get a customer, right? And I wanna talk about that a little bit in this section because getting your first customer is so important. I remember when I got my first sale, I was so excited, I'm like, oh my God, I sold something online. Somebody actually sent me money. It's a really cool feeling. And once you do that and once you sold something online, you kinda get bitten by the bug where you're like, I can do this. I can actually make money online. I can do what other people are doing. I'll tell you the number one fear that I see people have in the beginning is that they're afraid they're gonna lose some money and unfortunately, you probably will. I would suggest getting more training on this subject. I mean, I can't cover every single thing in this one video about how to set up your store. I can tell you advertising is really good. If you've been trained how to advertise, I do have a course below called Facebook Ads University. If you wanna learn how to do Facebook Ads, it's a great course. I would certainly tell you do not do Facebook Ads, do not do YouTube Ads, do not do any ads without getting some training first. It's way too complicated but you're gonna need to know how to do it. Ads are super important to building your store. Yes, you can do stuff through social media, you can use Twitter, you can use Facebook, you can use YouTube and you can do some posts there. It's gonna be a lot slower to get going there and quite honestly, places like Facebook aren't gonna wanna show your posts where you're trying to sell something without buying an ad and technically in their terms and conditions, you're not supposed to post anything to sell anything on their platform unless you're actually running an ad so you gotta be really careful with that. I've seen a lot of people lose their Facebook accounts. I know I've lost Facebook accounts myself so I know that can certainly happen and Facebook is not as friendly as far as letting you know why or what you need to do or what to change. They just cancel your account. So another thing you can do is what I'm doing right now, I'm doing a YouTube video. In the bottom of this description here, I have some affiliate links. I have some links to some of my products and by doing these content videos like this people learn from me, they learn how to do these things, they're more apt to click on one of my links down there and actually buy some of my products and that's certainly a great way to go. Now this is a basic blueprint to get started. Like I said, I can't tell you every single thing there is about running a business online. It's way too complicated in this one video but you've got the gist of it now. You've got the base overall of what you need to do. I would suggest if you want some more free training, just go to my channel, search in the search bar for any subject you want, whether it's advertising, whether it's YouTube, whether it's SEO, whether it's building a WordPress website, whatever it is, start getting educated. I think that's so very important. I've literally have watched thousands of videos on how to make money online and I've made guys close to 900 on this channel alone so that's quite a few. Depending on when you're watching this video it could be in the thousands but right now it's below 900 and I never would have guessed a few years ago I would have that many videos. In the beginning they were terrible. They weren't good, okay? It took me a while to get going and that's another thing I would tell you. In the beginning you're gonna be really worried about making mistakes. You're gonna make mistakes. It's just the way it is, okay? So get over that, make your mistakes, try to get some training, use my channel with 900 videos or not quite 900 but it's getting there. With that many videos you can learn something and you can learn it for free and if you wanna accelerate your learning check out some of my paid training in the description below. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you got a lot out of it so give me a thumbs up down there. I would really appreciate that. You may still have some questions and if you do I would like for you to post those in the comments below. Whatever questions you have about building your online business feel free to put it below. I've literally sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products online. I do this stuff every single day. I don't just teach. I actually sell products online every day and I'll be happy to share that information with you. I hope you liked the video. If you did make sure you subscribe. If that subscribe button is red down there you need to click it, turn it gray and when you turn it gray you need to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I do a new video. Thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you. Oh wait, there's a free course. I just thought of it. My God, there's a free course. Down in the description there's a $97 course you can get. Grab it because it's free right now. I'm giving it away free. Grab that course. In addition to that, like I said I got a lot of other videos. Check them out. Thanks so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.