 Okay, so in this video I'm going to be showing you some things you should do before you start a drop ship from business. Starting a business is a daunting thing. There's a lot of new things to learn, a lot of skills to develop, not to mention the time and financial investment that's at risk as well. And then when you take all of the different sources of information out there, it can be difficult to glue it all together into something that makes sense and gives you something actionable. It can often lead to you becoming overwhelmed, a bit of analysis paralysis, and not really knowing what to do. So I thought I'd put together a handy 9-10 minute video and take you through the sorts of things that you can put in order before you start a drop ship in business to make the whole process that much smoother. So we're going to be talking things about startup investment, what sort of products to sell, how to find those products, expectations, and lots and lots of other different things. And with that being said, thanks for tuning in. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Let's check out point number one. Okay, so point number one is save money. I would recommend personally, given my experience and the people I work with on a one-to-one basis, $1,000 seems to be the sweet spot. This gives you plenty of freedoms to get a very decent, well-designed and professional Shopify store made. It also gives you enough advertising budget as well to play around and find what works, find what product works, find what creative works, find what audience works, of course. There are three methods that require smaller budgets, like TikTok, Organic, those sorts of strategies. However, for the past six or seven years, my primary focus has always been using some form of paid marketing, typically social media advertising to generate those sales. If you want to go down that same route and same line and give yourself the best chances of success, having $1,000 to play with to begin with should be enough. You see a lot of videos out there start dropshipping with $0, start dropshipping with $100. It is possible. It is possible. However, it takes a lot more time to get up and running. Plus, when you're relying specifically on doing things organically, posting content, hoping it'll go viral, your business is very unpredictable. It's very inconsistent. And if you want anything from your business, you want it to be consistent and you want it to be sustainable to help you reach that end goal, whatever it may be. If you make a thousand pounds one week and then nothing for the next six weeks it's impossible to plan and budget or forecast anything. Whereas with paid ads, if you spend X on ads one day and X on ads the next day, it's definitely going to reach a similar amount of people and therefore that will translate into a similar amount of return as well. Number two is expectations. One of the biggest things people probably don't really think about when they start a dropship in business. They'll have this vague goal of I just want to make more money and make more money is different for everybody. And whether you want to make a thousand pounds extra a month or 10,000 pounds extra a month, those goals are achieved in a very different way. A business that makes four figures versus a business that makes five, six, seven figures look very, very different. The other mistake as well that I think a lot of people make is they think in terms of sales rather than profits. So they chase that number. They chase that 500 pounds per day in sales or 1,000 pounds per day in sales or 10K in sales per month. When in reality sales is, I was about to say relevant. It's not irrelevant of course, but what you should be thinking instead is profit. So instead of chasing that initial 100 pound per day, which should be your first goal, instead of chasing that think 20 pounds profit. Otherwise you can get carried away and you keep throwing more and more money into ads because you keep seeing these bigger and bigger numbers and you think bloody hell. I've done 10, 20 K in sales. I'm making it. I'm doing really good. When in reality you work out your costs, you work out your expenses and your net profit, and if it turns out to be less or even in a negative, then all that work and as great as you think it is to hit 50K in sales, if you haven't actually made any money at the end of the day, then it's all been in vain and a bit of a waste of time. Well, not a waste of time because obviously there's lessons to be learned along the way, but it's much better off, at least in my opinion, to make 10K in sales and do 10% in profit so you at least have something to show for it, something to reinvest back into your business. What this will also do is it will force you to spend every single penny very wisely in your business. Too often I see people get carried away trying to chase a bigger and bigger number, they become rushed, they skip corners, they don't put as much time or thought into areas of the business that they should and again ultimately this leads to less than favorable results. Number three, brand vision and think long term. Again, another common pitfall I see people making is them not thinking past the next two or three months. They jump into a business, they select products they don't really care about and they try and scale it to the moon in the first few weeks and when it doesn't work out they just move on to the next thing. You need to be thinking six months down the line, a year down the line, two, five, 10 years down the line and think is this a business that I want to be getting into? Most people get into dropshipping because they want to make some extra money and extra money is great, it's brilliant. Of course, everybody needs a bit of extra money. However, it needs to be enjoyable. What you're doing needs to be enjoyable and it needs to mean something more to you than just money because if money is your soul and only focus, there will come a point in which it becomes a chore and not very enjoyable for you and when things start to become unenjoyable and a chore and you have to force yourself to get out of bed to go to work and put time and effort into your business, it's going to be so much harder. You won't be as happy and ultimately it's going to lead to you slacking. It's super, super important that you think that far ahead so that you create something that you can be proud of, that you have pride in and you're happy to be working on for the next five, 10, 20 years of your life. Number four, a really, really important point if you want to advance your knowledge and give yourself the best chances of success, research successful stores. Use Flipper.com, use tools like Droperspy or MiniL or ShopHunter to find those stores that are making 10K plus per month, that are making 100K plus per month. Look at the design of their stores, look at the setup of their product pages, what sort of content are they using, what style of ads are they running, are they user generated, are they original, is it recycled content from suppliers, is their product private labelled, is it branded, how expensive are their products, how does it come packaged, sign up to their email lists, what kind of mail, email marketing are they using, try and learn as much as possible from those businesses that are doing what you are hoping to do. Point number five, something I don't really hear many people with or anyone talking about, which is the order samples of the products that you're going to be launching as for. There's a lot of benefits to this. Number one is shipping. You get to get a accurate representation of how long it's going to take for your customers to receive the product so you can put accurate shipping times on your product pages, on your Shopify store. Number two is the quality of the products as well. You may be pleasantly surprised, it may be a very superior and high quality products that you can charge more for, it may be the other end of the spectrum, it may be a bit cheaper and not as good, you may have to charge a little bit less. It also gives you a chance to trial the product, test the product, touch it, feel it, pick it up, throw it about, get it dirty, try and break it, try and fix it, and it gives you an idea of how to develop the product and improve it so you can create something that nobody else has on the market. The other advantage as well is to have in one in front of you is you can film your own content and you can produce content and put content on your socials, content on your website that nobody else has. Original content is much more likely to get attention, it's much more likely to get eyeballs on it and attention and eyeballs is where the money is. If you can get people talking, sharing, watching your content, then you can drive them to your website to make a purchase. If you keep posting the same content people have seen before, they're going to switch off to it and that is one down for one downside to using those softwares or services that just recycle existing content online. Also, if you check the handbook of any social media platform they prefer people to produce and post original content. I won't go into too much detail now but if you do a quick Google search for Facebook ads total value one of the things that Facebook takes into account when rating the quality of your ads is whether you have original content in the ad itself and actual original content on your website. If you're using the same content as everybody else it devalues the quality of your ad which tarnishes the results. It impacts the results of your ads and therefore impacts your chances of success. Number six, arguably one of the most important points actually on this list is what is your USP? What is your unique selling point? What makes you different to the next person selling the same products as you? We're not all going to be in the financial position in which we can develop our products from scratch, spend thousands of dollars creating something unique the world has never seen before. The chances are it's going to be a product taken from AliExpress, CJ Dropship in or an agent Zendrop anybody that somebody else could pop up a Dropship until the very next day and start selling the exact same product. If it was that easy everybody would be very very successful we're making lots and lots of money unfortunately it's not. The majority of the people who have reality at anything especially business is at most businesses fail within the first few months. So to separate yourself from everybody else who's going to be selling similar products you need a USP a reason why somebody would choose you to buy products from versus somebody else. What is your offer? Do you give away something free with your product? Is it an ebook on how to use the product? Are you selling some sort of dog training device? And do you sell or give away for free along with that device the top 10 training ebook tips for your dog whatever it may be what is the incentive basically to choose you versus all the other hundreds if not thousands of Dropship and stores out there selling the same product charity this kind of links in nicely with point number three which is having a vision thinking long term starting this business purely for money is not a good idea think something above that making a difference for example when it comes to pets it's an easy one partner with a local shelter or local adoption center and for every order you get donate a pound donate a certain percentage it's an extra incentive or reason why somebody would choose to buy from you versus Amazon somebody who cares about saying rescue cats if you have a cat store and they can buy your products from you and 5% goes to a local cat shelter or they can buy the products from Amazon and Amazon just keep all the profits the person who cares about cats is going to shop with you even if they can get it cheaper because they know that some percentage goes to charity towards a good cause and cause and you're not just a business that is purely for profit then we have product so this can be you don't have to necessarily develop and create something original but you can take a proven past winning product and sell something that is a different style of it or something very similar of it because then you have taken that kind of proven concept that you know works and then sending a different style of product people haven't seen before but you know it still solves the same problem or offers the same features and benefits as that past proven winner number seven a really and crucially important point as well something that pretty much nobody does which is get feedback on your store before you start advertising I cannot stress this enough I had a I did a consultation call like an onboarding call with somebody the other day who spent $1,200 on ads and I took a look at the shop if I store and just he could have spent 10 grand he could have spent 100 grand on ads in that store and still not have made a sale because the store was just not ready it was missing so much key information and it wasn't his fault like he's a beginner he's new to this he doesn't look at things in the same way that somebody would experience would and this is why it's very very important that you get feedback on your store start with friends and family get them to be as honest as possible tell them to put themselves in the mind of a consumer to look for the certain pieces of information that a consumer would want to know shipping times quality what the product's made out of how much it is when to expect it how long the battery life is what the guarantees warranties returns information that sort of thing and then if possible try and get a feedback from people that you don't know go to Facebook groups or these communities on the different platforms and try and try and try to get some specific advice from somebody who's actually looked over your store and somebody who has experience on this sort of thing because it can literally be the difference between success and failure making a few tweaks that you otherwise wouldn't have even thought about failing that if you can't do that try and find a successful juction in the store that's selling the same product look at what they're doing and then take what they're doing and do it in your own way have the same information but rewrite it have the same images but in a different style or different setup the key thing here being of course don't just copy and paste because that'll get you in trouble point number eight before you start selling have at least five proven products lined up ready to go ready to test what do you mean by proven products? are products found using tools like Trapperspy or Minia or Shophunter these are products that are currently being advertised on Google on Facebook on TikTok on Reddit on any platform and have a proven track record every single week I do a video on these types of products and show you how to find them and how to identify them make sure you have at least five lined up because then the law of averages says that at least one of them is going to work out and be successful for you number nine is your goal and be specific as possible and put a date on it as well if you just have something generic like I want to make more money and there's no cutoff point or there's no specific amount of money then your idea of what a bit more money is going to change your idea of a bit more money might be an extra 500 pounds per month somebody else's idea of a bit more money might be five grand a month and when you get to that extra 500 then you might start thinking I want to make an extra two grand a month so be specific on your goal set a date in which you want to achieve that goal for so there's a deadline if and it forces you to be accountable and get things in line so you can achieve it what it also does is it gives you a reminder of why you're doing this in the first place this is business at the end of the day and there's going to be nights in which you go to bed stressed not knowing what to do thinking about giving it all up and just taking the easy route of continuing in the job that you're doing or finding a low stress easy job that's going to cover the bills each month but if you have a goal and a motivation for doing it that's going to remind you to keep going even through those tough phases because it will business is not what it's painted out to be on social media it's not as easy as working from a laptop 24 seven driving to the gym whenever you feel like it after you've got out of bed at 11 a.m in your Lamborghini it's not as straightforward as that it is more difficult than that so it's really important that you have your goal and your motivation and your reasons for why you're doing this and with that business guys that brings us to the end of the video before you go though a very quick message I do have some spaces open in my mentorship program as it stands as I record this video so if you would like some one-to-one guidance some hand holding through the entire process of selecting a product finding a supplier building a store and launching some ads and scaling your business to that milestone of 10k per month then check out the link in the description below what you need to do is go to this mentorship link here and click this bit.ly.link once this page loads up it's going to take you to a series of questions super quick two or three minutes it's like half a dozen questions it's an opportunity for me to get to know what your current level of experience is now and where you want to be in the next two to three months time if it's a realistic goal that I can help you achieve it'll take you through to my calendar where you can book a time and date in which we can jump on have a chat in more detail thanks for watching guys I'll talk to you soon