 What is going on guys, welcome to a new video. So today then I'm going to show you how to start a dropship in business with less than $200. So when I first started dropship and then a little bit over two years ago now, Facebook ad cost and Instagram influencers actually were a lot cheaper than what they are now. They've certainly got a lot more competitive and a lot more popular. However, you still can start a dropship in business on Shopify then for pretty cheap. So today I'm going to show you if or what I would do then if I only had $200 and I had to start from the very beginning. So that being said then guys, that's the topic. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the video and let's get straight into it. What is going on then guys? Welcome to my computer. So just quickly then before we get into this, I just want to say a massive thank you to you guys really. Everybody who watches the videos supports them, hits that like button, comments, whatever it is. We've just hit over two and a half thousand subscribers, which is just crazy. I'm really looking forward to actually seeing where or how many subs we managed to get this year. I'm really excited for that. So just a massive thank you to you guys. I really do appreciate it and I am going to start doing some giveaways. I put a poll out on Instagram a few days ago and quite a lot of people voted for consultation calls, just one to one calls. So if that is something that you guys watching the videos want to see as well, make sure you leave a comment down below because I'm going to be starting them this weekend. So that being said then let's get straight into the video. So dropshipping with a low budget, less than $200. So one of the massive advantages then to dropshipping is of course there's not a lot of money that you need up front. But as I mentioned in the intro then Facebook ads have got crazy more competitive. So has Instagram influencers, a lot more people, especially on Instagram are cottoning on to the fact they can make money using just their bios, their profiles. So costs have gone up. So how exactly are we going to start business then with just $200. So to start with them we need a Shopify store. These are the must haves of course. You do get a free 14-day trial and there is a link down below in the description. And just to let you guys know, I do get a little kickback like an affiliate fee if you do use that link. So either way, whether you use it or not, completely up to you guys, I just want to make sure I let you know. But you need the basic plan after the free 14 days you will need to choose a plan. And to be honest, I'm not going to try and push you into an expensive plan. The very basic one, until you hit certain amounts in revenue, then the basic one is more than adequate. So don't go for anything more expensive until you're doing over say 10 grand a month. Then only does it prove beneficial to go for a more expensive plan because the more expensive plans have, they charge smaller fees basically per transaction. So go for the basic plan, only $29 per month. And then in terms of apps, there's only really three like really main ones you need. And number one is below. This is what's going to link us between Aliexpress to make sure we can fulfill our orders, etc. We 100% need an upsell app. Again, this is critical. As I mentioned, the costs in drop shipping are going up. So we need to increase that average order value because by doing that, we're going to increase our profit margins. And the quickest and easiest way to do that is to offer upsells. Now most upsell apps do offer like a two week trial again for free. So make sure you take full advantage of that. Make sure you have all your ads, everything, products set up ready. So as soon as you start that trial, you can start making use of it. But again, once that trial ends, then you're looking at about $10 per month, depending on how many views an upsell gets. Moving on to the third and final one then, which is an email responder. So whether you use email chip or not, me personally, I use mail chip. That's why it's on there. But you need to integrate email marketing as soon as possible. Literally from day one, whether that's people who have abandoned carts or people who have actually bought something and you send them another email to entice them to come back, whatever way you can, you want to be trying to drive traffic to your store for as cheap as possible. And if you're not using email marketing, then you're definitely, definitely, definitely not being as efficient as possible. You're leaving money on the table basically. So definitely implement those three things into your store. So moving on to the actual strategy itself. And believe it or not, I know I talk about Facebook ads a lot on this channel. If you've only got $200, I would stay away from Facebook ads all together until you've got a bit more money to put into them just because like back in the day when I first started, you could just put out $5 ads and you could see like easily make $50 on that pretty comfortably. I mean, not every single day, they wouldn't be that consistent, but it's a lot, lot more difficult today. Like me personally, I don't usually start an ad set with anything than less than $10 a day. And that's at the very minimum as well, just because they are getting so much more competitive now. So I would definitely choose Instagram influencers. And for these reasons here really, so number one, you can see instant sales. If you choose, if you go with a good influencer on Instagram, then the second they put out that post, if you've chosen a good one, then they will come onto your store and they will buy your product, you'll see instant sales. Because there's no past date required, as it says here with Facebook, the more people that go to your store, then the easier it is to find those people who are going to buy your products. Whereas you don't have to do that with Instagram because you don't need any past data. You're going pretty much to those people who are already passionate about your product, so long as you choose the right influencer, which will get into a minute in the marketing strategy. And then number three, kind of encompasses the previous two actually, which is cheaper initially. Like I said with Facebook, you've got to build up that past data, which can sometimes take about $200 in itself. Whereas you just completely skip that phase. That just isn't the case with Instagram influencers. So moving on to the actual strategy itself, as it says in brackets, $150. After you've paid for the apps, then that's pretty much what you're going to be left over with. Unless you are really kind of on top of things. If you get everything ready, products, everything and can start marketing strategy straight away and taking advantage of those free trials, then you could bump this up easily to say $180, $190, even the full $200 if you do start advertising from or within those first two weeks. So when it comes to choosing influencers, then we want to choose what I call micro influencers. It's probably a term you've heard before. Everybody uses it in fact. And it's typically pages then that up to 100,000 followers. And that's for a few reasons really. Number one, there's usually a higher engagement and a more personal relationship with the followers. And for an example, as it says there, me versus Tai Lopez, you probably know who Tai Lopez is. If you don't, then he's just got millions. He's an influencer online and within kind of like the business community. And he's got millions and millions of followers. And I probably have a more personal relationship with you guys watching my videos just because there's less of you, which means like you only have to look at my videos. I do get back through every single comment. So for that reason, people with a smaller following tend to have a better relationship with their followers. Now I've been talking to some of you guys on Instagram for like probably the best part of 12 months now. Just not every single day, but definitely every month where you keep coming back asking questions. So for that reason, I just find that level of relationship and engagement wise just tends to be a lot better with people that have a smaller following. So as it says there, up to 100,000 followers. Point number three then, which is cheaper. Again, obviously the less followers somebody has, the less they can actually charge. And the way you want to gauge how much. So when you start contacting people, which we'll get into later what to say to them. When they start coming back for prices, when you soon start talking to say half a dozen influencers, you'll get an idea of what a good price is. But a good place to start then is this website here, which is called shoutcard.com. You have to create an account in order to see what people are charging. But once you do, it gives you all these different influencers that have registered on here. You can see their name, their followers. Each page as well gets a score as well to kind of give you an idea of how good their engagement rates are. And it gives you what their starting prices are. So depending on whether it's going to be a post in the news feed or a story post, whatever it is, they charge different things. But there's their starting price and you can find influencers in all these different categories as well. So it is a great place to start your research on. And to be honest, what I tend to do, I tend to be a bit cheeky and if I find an influencer I like to look of, I'll find them on Instagram. I actually go to their Instagram page and contact them direct. And hopefully they won't realize what I'm trying to do. And they'll give me a slightly cheaper price than what shoutcard is charging. Because obviously shoutcard are going to have to take their cut for providing their service. So to summarize then, I guess if you're in the say, let's go for fitness and sports. I know a lot of you guys are. If you were to come on here, go on fitness and sports. And these are going to be all the influencers then within that niche. And you can see straight away, so 23,000 followers is charging. $50, he's got 20,000 followers and he's charging $10. There's quite a big gap there. So if you get people coming back kind of between the middle of that or a lot higher than that, then you know they're either trying to rip you off or they're really cheap. And if somebody's really cheap, they're not always the best person to go with. It might be because they've got a really bad engagement rate, or they might have paid for fake followers or whatever it is. And the way you can kind of fish those people out and not end up wasting your money, there's a couple of things you can do. So number one is choose an influencer with a face behind the page. So I've got an example to show you guys this person here. It's quite clearly the same person in every picture. And people tend, it goes back to that whole relationship thing and trust. People tend to have a better relationship if they're actually talking to a human being, rather than just talking to a page that posts, say recipes. And then the second thing you can do as well is look at the comments and the replies. Now the replies is key as it's bold in there. Don't just look at the lights because people can buy lights really easily. So you want to look at the actual comments. Make sure they're legit comments from legit accounts and look for the replies, which is key because this, again, shows a good relationship with the followers. If we just open up this, so our name is just us league fit. And if we just scroll through the comments and look at the kind of people commenting on it. So as you can see, she's replying to pretty much every single person. So Tiffany, A and G fit, that sounds like a real person. You can always click on the account to check. And as you can see, she's really engaging with her followers, which is just a great sign that she's got a really good community behind her. And therefore, if she was to say post a fitness product, the chances are a lot of her followers would at least give it the time to look at the products because it's coming from her. They trust her. They probably talk to her on every single post she does, which is just ultimately the best thing that you want to be looking for when it comes to an influencer. Now going back to cost then, it says that aim for 10 shout outs for $15 each. Now that is a very rough guideline of all of them. Now, when it comes down to price, it doesn't matter how expensive an influencer is if you're going to see a return on it. So if you're just starting out for this strategy, especially, then obviously we're going to be looking at that $15 range unless somebody can provide proper proof that when they post a product, they get real results, then don't be willing to pay top price. Just try and find influencers that are going to charge around that number. And then finally, if one page is profitable, so if you do find an influencer, decide to go with them and they put out their post and you see a return in terms of traffic and sales and it's profitable, then go back to them. Tell them it was profitable. Tell them you'd love to work with them again and ask them for a bulk shout out cost. So what that is, is basically rather than say $15 for one shout out, how much would you charge for say 10 shout outs once a week and hopefully if you're paying for more than one at a time, they'll give you a discount. And then moving on to actually contacting them or what actual posts do you want to do? So there's two options, there's shout outs, which is obviously then putting a post in their news feed that people will see and then there's a story where they basically just show your product in their story or talk about it or link it, whatever it is. So when it comes to shout outs then, which are probably like the most popular one, obviously you want to go for news feed or story, these are going to be the areas which get the most eyes on. And now most people will have the contact details in their bio, but if not, then just DM them directly. Now if nobody advertised business inquiries in their bio, then that can be a really good sign because it can mean that if they're a micro influencer, they've never been approached to do something like this, which means they might not necessarily know how much to charge and they might be quite flattered that somebody like us has taken interest in their page and wants to pay them to do something, which essentially they do pretty much every day for free, like they post on Instagram for free. So if we're going to pay them to do that anyway, they might be quite flattered by the fact. So here's just an example message then that you could send to them, hi, and then just obviously integrate their name, being enjoying your content for a while now. So straight away we're showing interest in them. We want to make this as much as possible about them. I would love an opportunity to work with you. So what we're saying here is we're pretty much like making them the dominant person in this message, if that makes sense. We're saying that we really like you and we'd love to work with you. It's not the other way around. We're not just saying, hey, we want you to work for us and we want to pay you. It's quite a casual way of approaching it. And we're saying that essentially the ball is in their court and we'd love to work with them. I think it would make the perfect face for our brand as we only promote delicious vegan recipes to our viewers. So again, you want to make that connection between us and them. If they're in the vegan niche and so are we, then we need to tell them that we are. We need to tell them that we agree with the principles and kind of like the morals or the story that they're actually pushing in their Instagram profile. At the end of the day, for somebody to take time out of their own days, every single day to post on Instagram about a certain subject, then they're actually quite passionate about it. So if we're, I don't know if we're selling, it's an extreme example, but if we're selling meat products and we're approaching a vegan page to try and advertise our products, then obviously it's just not going to work. We need to find an influencer that wants to work with us because they agree with the kind of content and story that we're pushing as well. It's all about reputation. So, and then to finish off, we'd love to hear if you'd be interested in our sponsorship. Hope to hear from you soon. So again, it's talking about them and how they can benefit from us. They can be sponsored. And as soon as you say to somebody's sponsorship, then they think like they'll get something for free. They'll become part of a team, part of a story, part of a movement. And it's just a great way that, like the number one goal of this first message is to strike up a conversation because you might not necessarily do the deal in that very first message. It's just to get them to message back. So you can get the conversation going. You can start building up that relationship with them and ultimately work on a working relationship. And hopefully get them to come around to the idea of promoting your product for you. Moving on to the second option then. And I always recommend starting with number one, purely because you're going to see those... It's going to be a lot easier actually to get people on board because they're going to see like an instant return in their work. They're obviously going to get paid for their shout out, whereas with this second one, they don't necessarily get paid until somebody actually buys something. So you can actually get them to be an affiliate for your product. So for example, then in my video description, I've got a video link for Shopify. If you click on that and then within 30 days, sign up to a Shopify account and pay for a plan, then I get a kickback by becoming an affiliate and I get rewarded for that. But there's no money up front. So I don't get paid anything for putting the link there. I only get paid if somebody actually signs up through that link. And this is, it works in exactly the same way. So there's no initial expense. So if you run out of money, this is a great way, a great kind of route to go down. And as it says there, in terms of contacting them, it's pretty much exactly the same way as you would for a shout out. Now in terms of the process then of sorting this all out, paying commissions, tracking commissions, et cetera, there's a few apps you can use, or there's a couple of different ones that I actually recommend. So number one is this lead dyno affiliate marketing. There's a 30 day free trial, which is absolutely awesome. Again, don't install it until you have all of your influencers kind of signed up and ready to go, just to take the full advantage of that 30 day free trial. It might take you 30 days to negotiate with an influencer, in which case you'll just waste those days. And this reversion one as well, again, another one I've used that I can really recommend. Going back to the actual message then, it's very similar to how we would approach someone if we wanted them to do us a shout out. However, you would end the message differently. So we'd love to hear from you if you'd be interested in being an affiliate for our new cookbook we can send you, or if you're not selling a cookbook, then it can be a certain kitchen product or vegan free products or whatever it is. And you can, by saying that we can send you it, it's kind of us saying that like, they're going to get something free out of it that they can show in their stories. Like it's our investment into them. We completely trust them. And again, it's just making the whole message about them. We can send you this, you can be the face of our company. And it's just, when you contact someone, you have to make it about them as much as possible. If you basically just want to use the word I as little as possible. The more we make it about us ourselves, the less they're going to be interested. Ultimately, you want to make this message short sharp to the point, if you send them an essay, they're just going to get bored. And that there's not going to be bothered to read the whole thing. So make it short sharp to the point, make it casual and friendly. Make it about them as much as possible about all the benefits that they get from working with us. And make it personal as well. So sign off. Don't sign off with the name of your page or the name of your company. Sign it off with the actual name. Another thing you can apply that to is customer service as well. When you start talking to your customers and instead of just saying the sales team or customer service team, actually sign it off with a name. People, it's just a better way of becoming friendly with your customers and providing good customer service. People prefer to actually speak to a human being an actual person. And by signing off using an actual name, people just feel a lot better about contacting someone that they know the name of. As stupid as it sounds, it's just little touches like that, which give people a better experience ultimately. So that being said, then guys, I've pretty much covered everything I wanted to say. If I had to start over again, this is 100% the way I would begin. Just because Facebook ads have got so expensive now that for less than $200, unless you're really clever about the way you spend your money and you get a bit of luck actually as well, then I think you're going to struggle within that amount of money. So definitely go down the Instagram influencer route. Use micro influencers. And when you say build up, I would say at least $500, then start experimenting with Facebook ads. So that being said, then guys, if you're still watching the video, thank you very much. I really do appreciate it. And yeah, thanks very much. I'll see you all in the next one.