 Hey, what's going on guys, welcome to a new video. So every few months then I like to do a video on this particular topic because I feel like it's important, especially for those beginners out there who have perhaps tried dropship and or tried e-commerce and they're struggling and not quite seeing the results they hoped for. So I'd like to do a video like this one to kind of give across some realistic expectations, talk about some of my own struggles when I first started to hopefully make you feel a bit better about the kind of situation that your business is currently in, especially because of the times we live in with social media, it can be quite bad or not bad or it's just one of those things that it gives across false expectations, false realities of what reality actually is and not just in dropshipping, it can be pretty much any niche. So if we take the fitness niche, for example, people can take hours and hours and play around with different lighting and different angles to take that one perfect shot, but us being the consumer, what we don't see is those hours of work, those hours of trying different angles, different lights, and depending on how you stand and kind of hold yourself can completely transform how your body looks and it creates a false expectation or reality of what people actually look like on a daily basis. And it's the same for dropshipping, people posting, it's very rare you'll see people talking about these kind of subjects or these kind of topics about how they've failed, how they're losing money on a daily basis, but what people also forget is that dropshipping e-commerce is a business and it's just part of business. There's gonna be struggles that you go through, times where you feel like that there's no way back, but it's just part and part of the nature. It's important that you hear about these things, especially if you're gonna be going into a business with not a lot of money. So hopefully in this video, I can kind of address some of those problems. I'm gonna talk about the three core elements that you might have heard me talk about before to any successful e-commerce business, give you some steps and some actions to take to ensure you're doing those correctly, and ultimately then try and help you be a bit more successful or at least moved forwards in the right direction. Before we move forward then, I just wanna say a quick thank you to you guys, the support in my last video, which was the first video for a couple of months, got a massive amount of support. In fact, I think we hit nearly 100 likes, which is really good for my channel, so I really do appreciate it. Like I said, there will be a lot more content coming at these three to four videos per week. So please do me the favor then, if you enjoy this video, please do make sure you hit the like button. And of course, if you like my content, please do make sure you subscribe as well so you don't miss any future videos. And with that being said then, let's jump straight into it. So the first thing I wanna talk about is expectations. When you go into a new business, it's really good to have really good expectations, but they need to be realistic. Otherwise, they're just gonna lead to you kind of being a bit disheartened and ultimately lead to you giving up. The amount of people who reach out to me is pretty crazy on Instagram, Facebook, just across all the different platforms, and they've been trying to sell the products for sometimes less than a week and they're ready to give up already after a week. So to kind of put that into context or when I first started, if you like, it took me at least three months. Go back, check out some of my first YouTube videos where I documented the whole kind of first few months for me, drop shipping wise, show you all the numbers, everything. But to kind of summarize, it took me at least three months before I started making any money whatsoever. And what I did and what I recommend to everybody starting this is to start really slow. Facebook ads especially can just be a money pit. If you don't know what you're doing, it's so easy to spend two, three, four, 500 pounds and see absolutely no results. So just make sure you start really slowly. Don't get overwhelmed by how much you've got going on and just build things from there because if you're not making money spending 10 pound a day on ads, you're not gonna be making money when you're spending a thousand pound a day on ads. So I guess the first point or tips I take from this is be realistic, have big goals but just make sure you start slow and build up to them. Don't try and run before you can actually walk. The next thing I recommend too is the, now this might seem a bit kind of counterintuitive but sometimes if you're spending too much time on something it can be counterproductive or at least it is for me. You might have seen through not the different gaps of my YouTube channel of uploading videos. Sometimes it's good just to kind of take a step back for a week, a couple of weeks. Obviously make sure you're not ignoring any customers or any things that do need kind of taken care of but sometimes taking that step back from outside of your business kind of changes the lens in which you're looking at. You can look at your business from kind of like an external point of view as silly as that may sound and you'll start kind of maybe thinking a bit clearer. You'll get new ideas coming to your mind and alongside that as well just make sure you keep educating yourself, keep watching my YouTube videos and keep watching other people too and the more that you learn and the more you can kind of be thinking about drop shipping and developing your skills then the better you're gonna get at it. Another point I'd like to touch on is a lot of people forget this by the way is that drop shipping is a business. It has to be taken seriously and arguably it's also one of the hardest things you'll ever do. I guess a good way of looking at it is kind of like the stereotypical saying if it is a saying is that if it was easy then everybody would be doing it. So what you might consider is required to be successful at drop shipping. Realistically it's probably 10 times that maybe even 100 times that and a good way to look at this then it's a metaphor I've come up with before in the past but I feel like it kind of represents how difficult it is in reality is that the harder something is or the greater the reward that comes from something than the harder it is and the harder something is the more hours you have to put into it in order to succeed. So if we take a skill for example of learning to drive, getting your driver's license here in the UK the average person takes about 20 to 40 hours. If you're looking at about 20 pound per lesson all in all let's say you're looking at about 1,000 pounds up to 40 hours to learn to get your driving license and because 40 hours then isn't an obscene amount of time that most people can get hold of same thing for 1,000 pounds then there's millions of people out there that drive whereas if you were to bump that up and say you had to put in 400 hours and 10,000 pounds obviously that makes it a lot more difficult to achieve and therefore less people would be able to obtain a driving license. And it's the same thing for business the less hours that would be required the less money that would be required the more people would do it. Hence why there's not many business owners out there in comparison to people who work for businesses or work for companies. So next time you're thinking about giving up just kind of take a step back and actually think realistically about how many hours you've put in how much money you've put in and if you haven't put as much as say learning to drive in then perhaps you just need a bit more time. If you're at the point where your business is just completely draining money then just my advice would be to shut things down if it's seen zero potential so you've spent let's say three, four, 500 pounds and you've had zero sales then my advice would be just simply to pause absolutely everything go back to the drawing board watch some more videos on YouTube join some Facebook groups start asking some questions and just keep developing your knowledge about the business. And with that being said that kind of leads me into what I mentioned in the intro being a three core elements to any successful e-commerce slash drop shipping business. And the first one I'm gonna start with then is your Shopify store. So the biggest mistake I see people making is they do not get feedback on their Shopify store before they start spending money on ads which is a huge mistake especially if you're a beginner especially if you have zero experience with web design then you might not always be able to spot the correct things or the adequate things that need doing before you start driving traffic. If you don't have a Shopify store that is trustworthy that is professional looking, looks credible there's no two ways about it you are going to fail you could be selling solid gold bars 10 P to the pound but if nobody trusts your website then nobody's gonna trust you enough to be able to take that risk and actually buy those gold bars even though they're getting them for 10% of the cost. So just make sure that once you've built your Shopify store you can join my Facebook group for example anybody can go in there post their link and get feedback it's a really great bunch of people so do post it in there and you'll get some genuine feedback from there or every single week I do to subscribe to store reviews so just keep entering that and with any luck then I'll see your store and I'll be able to feature in a video and give you some really good feedback. The second core element then after your Shopify store of course has to be your product if you're selling a product that nobody's currently buying or doesn't have that desire ability then nobody's going to buy it. You could have the most professional Shopify store in the world you could have an awesome Facebook ad campaign but if you're trying to flog a dead horse nobody's gonna buy it and again your business is just gonna fall flat not gonna make any money. So when it comes to picking products then I'll give you kind of like the easiest two ways or not the easiest two ways kind of like the main two ways of picking products to kind of give you the best chance of success. Number one is trending or seasonal products. This is the strategy I've followed now for the past four years and the reason I do it is because I was gonna say it guarantees that your products are gonna sell but nothing is ever guaranteed in business. It gives you the highest chance of success. So for example, if you're trying to sell summer products in summer then it's a good match and the chances are people are gonna be buying that product. If you're gonna be selling say LED products like LED dog colors when it's really dark out from say four o'clock during the winter when people have to walk their dog in the dark then again it's a trending it's a seasonal product that is in demand and people have a need for it that certain time of year. So trying to sell those products sets you up to give you the best chance of success. And in terms of finding those products or finding information behind those products you can use tools like sell the trend which is the only product research software I use myself. There is a link in the description below and Google Trends as well and you can also use the AliExpress dropship in center. Have a play around with that. Again, I've done a tutorial video on that but they give you some pretty useful information and data too. And then the second type of product you can pick this kind of applies more to brands in fact because it comes under the category of like desirability. If a product is really desirable then lots of people want to buy it. So for example, if you were trying to sell Rolex watches for half the cost it's obviously a really desirable product because most people like Rolex watches because of the brand people know how quality they are people know how expensive they are so they're a desirable product. It doesn't just have to be watches of course it could be clothing, it could be Hugo Bass it could be Louis Vuitton it could be Gucci. It applies to any single niche and the single most easiest or most effective way to build desirability for your product is to use an influencer hands down if you ask me. The reason being is because influencers have audiences loyal audiences that watch them on a regular basis or engage with their content on a regular basis so they trust the words of that influencer. So when an influencer recommends a particular product instantly the audience or the majority of the audience is going to trust that influencer's word and therefore it makes that product more desirable. The third core element then that I want to finish this video on don't make this video too long this is kind of like a brief summary of what they are. If you want me to dig deeper of course just make sure you leave your comments below. I do read every single one so if there is one or two that keep cropping up I can make a video on a specific element but the third element then is your marketing campaigns whether it's Facebook, whether it's Google whether it's Instagram you have to make sure that you're tagged in the right audience you have the right creative that's going to get that attention across social media. Social media is a crazy busy platform and people aren't always on there to buy things they're usually on there to look at other things watch funny videos, watch memes talk to their friends, spy on their friends. So when they come across an ad that's asking them to buy something not necessarily in that buying mood so unless you have an ad that really captures somebody's attention and is really specific to them so they have that connection then they might not always notice it and therefore your conversion rate is going to be really low. This is why when you hear me talk about product selection I talk about it being a skill or picking products for a specific platform and I guess to kind of give you a good example of this then is if you were to advertise a sofa on Facebook and try and sell a sofa because of how expensive it is because of how broad it is it pretty much applies to anybody who has a house or a home then you're not going to get much success because it's such a broad product and nobody is really passionate or that excited about sofas or at least nobody I've met anyway whereas if you were to try and sell a sofa that was say had like printed dogs on or printed pugs on and you were to target people who own pugs then that particular sofa is going to get so much more interest and attention because it's different from normal sofas there's like a funky element to it there's a unique selling point and you're advertising it to an audience that has a passionate kind of not obsession but kind of connection with it people who own pugs own pugs because they love pugs so if they see a sofa that has pugs on that sofa then instantly they're going to have that connection the sofa is going to be more kind of stand outish and it's going to get a lot more attention basically and you're going to have a lot more success so that's kind of like a quick way of illustrating how important it is when you come to picking products and how important it is when you're targeting audiences and with that being said guys I'm going to wrap the video up there I have absolutely no idea how long I've been talking to this video could be 10 minutes long it could be 20 minutes long either way I hope you enjoyed it I hope you've stuck with me if you have thank you very much please do make sure you hit that subscribe button and hit that like button before you leave and then one final thing too if you are looking for a Shopify training program that comes with my full support and guidance amongst a few other different support resources make sure you check out my Ecom Academy there'll be a link down below in the description there is a callback service too so if you want to hop on the phone with me and just ask me any questions you want before joining we can do this and yeah that's that being said thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one