[COURSE] MY COMPLETE ECOM STRATEGY | Shopify Dropshipping

and that right there folks is my entire econ strategy a to z what's up y'all if you're new here my name is nate schmidt i'm 23 years old i do something called ecommerce for a living i basically sell things online i've generated multiple seven figures in sales this is kind of my thing and lucky for you maybe i also happen to enjoy teaching it so in this video i want to break it all down for you specifically i want to show you my entire strategy from a to z literally leaving absolutely nothing out this video is going to be absolutely insane everything i do how i run my businesses literally everything this is probably going to be one of the most valuable videos you ever watch so strap in buckle up let's get into it oh and if you're wondering why i'm willing to give this away for free well first off i was actually kind of hesitant to do so but one it's because almost no one will actually implement this and two all the stuff i'm talking about in this video are basically shortened or condensed versions of what we teach in our paid offerings so i'm figuring if you like this video then you might be more likely to check out our paid offerings and uh you know give me some money so that i can go buy a second life-size night so there you go ecommerce is basically just a fancy way of saying i sell products online if you've ever bought something off of amazon that's e-commerce if you've ever bought something off of etsy also e-commerce if you've bought anything online before that is e-commerce now of course when you're buying products online you're on the consumer side of things what i do i sell products online that is more on the producer side of things i'm not producing products per se but i guess you could say that i'm producing value so there's a lot of different kinds of ecommerce but for the sake of this video we're going to focus on the thing that i think most people are probably most interested in it's also how i got started myself which is called drop shipping drop shipping is a subsection of ecommerce where you basically find products from chinese suppliers on a website like aliexpress you take those products you then list them on your own website at a markup from there you find a way to get people to your site and that's something we call traffic we're gonna cover that a lot more in depth later and then when someone buys from your website you take their information and then you go and you purchase the product on aliexpress you input their shipping information the supplier ships it directly to them and from there you get to pocket whatever is left over after paying for product costs and advertising costs it's a bit oversimplified but that is basically how it works for a more detailed explanation if you're completely new to e-commerce or dropshipping you've like never heard of this stuff before i've linked a pdf in the description down below called e-commerce elementary that'll show you the basics of everything and just break things down in a little bit more depth now let's get into my actual strategy obviously most people's first question when it comes to e-commerce is well what should i sell and don't you worry we're gonna get to that in a second but first it's really important that you understand the context of how this strategy actually works here's the thing about e-commerce just about anything you could possibly imagine there are already thousands of other sellers already selling it amazon alone accounts for like 50 of all e-commerce sales walmart's making pretty serious headway too so if we want to build our own e-commerce business as the little guys we can't really compete with that we can try but we'll pretty much be guaranteed to lose just about every time now that also doesn't mean we give up instead we just don't compete with them and the way we do that is instead of just selling any kind of random product that someone might want we build a specific type of store for a specific type of person and sell them a very specific kind of product so that our store really feels like it's for them we take that and then we also combine that with killer marketing and that's like the basics of it people don't buy from us because we have the best quality or the cheapest price or really anything like that i mean a lot of the products that i sell you can find on amazon for a lot cheaper the reason people buy from us is because we are a specific type of store dedicated to solving a specific type of problem or fulfilling a specific type of need and people like to buy from companies that are dedicated specifically to that the point here is that we get extremely specific in what we sell and who we sell to by doing that we narrow down our competition significantly and just it makes things a lot lot easier now if you're thinking that doing things this way limits your market then you're kind of right also kind of wrong the thing that most people don't understand is it only takes a really really really small number of people to buy from you for you to make a really good living people have a really hard time actually being able to visualize 300 million people for example that's how many people are in the u.s if you had to guess how many of those people do you think that i had to sell to to generate 1.5 million dollars in revenue on my first store take a second maybe maybe you want to guess maybe i don't know the answer was about 30 000 customers or so that's how many customers it took me to do about 1.5 million in revenue that is 1 100th of one percent of just the us population that is not even including the rest of the world that is absolutely nothing the reality is while most people think that they need to target a broad audience so they have enough people in their market to actually make good money it's really kind of the opposite in reality it's actually really difficult to get so specific that your market is too small to actually make money usually it's the exact opposite problem that people have another important thing to understand about my strategy is what we're selling for the most part are impulse buys with the way that we advertise most of it is done through facebook and instagram so the way it works is someone is scrolling through facebook instagram they see our ad and it is tailored for a very specific type of person it's made exactly for who we're showing it to it's something they're interested in it's something that they're passionate about or they have a problem with or whatever this means that when they see our ad they're probably interested there's a high chance they're going to be interested so they click our ad they come to our website and then from there the process is honestly very simple most people who check out our ads and come to our website they come to our website and then they just leave pretty much immediately but some people well some people are more interested so interested in fact that they don't really take a whole lot of time to think about it they just buy right there on the spot and the reason they buy so quickly and so impulsively is because everything we're doing as i mentioned is for them it's for a very specific type of person it fits them perfectly it's exactly what they want and it wasn't expensive enough for them to have to really think about it too much so in a nutshell that is how it works now let us get into some more specifics the type of stores that i build are called niche stores or one product stores there's a lot of like honestly it's hoopla in my opinion hoopla it's hoopla about the different kinds of stores one product stores niche stores niche branded stores to me it's all really just like made up marketing terms by drop shippers and gurus and stuff who are trying to sell their courses i don't really pay a whole lot of attention to that a niche or a one product store just means that instead of like amazon selling literally everything we just sell either one very specific type of product or one small handful of very specific type of products generally we usually just start with one product and then we'll add more from there but the important part is all of our products regardless of if it's one or five or ten they all center around the same theme and the important part to understand here is this theme it's not about the product category it's about the market of people you're actually selling to because we could get specific and we could build a store that sold let's say cordless drills if we only sold cordless drills that's pretty specific right it is specific but not in the right way because if you think about it there aren't really any people who have a specific problem with cordless drills or who are really passionate about cordless drills there's not a community based around cordless drills which means that when you're getting specific it's not about getting specific in the type of product you sell so much it's more about getting specific in the type of people that you're actually selling to so taking the same example we could still sell cordless drills but instead of only selling cordless drills what we could do is instead of niching down the product we would niche down the market and let's say that we would only sell cordless drills that are say pink and that are tailored for single women who you know are not married or not have a man or a long-term relationship and they do all the housework themselves that's an idea that i came up with off the top of my head but after doing some quick research i actually found a brand that is doing this exact thing called pink power they sell drills and other tools and stuff like that that are pink and they kind of have this theme about them it's like a women empowerment thing it's all tailored for a very specific type of person and that is exactly what we want to do provide a specific type of product to a specific type of person so that we basically eliminate like 90 of our competition right off the bat and make things much much easier now as a result of doing things in this way one thing i do not do that is very common in the drop shipping industry is mass product testing some people test like a bunch of different products every week they have general stores and they test a bunch of different kinds of products and a bunch of different kinds of niches like all the time that's not what i do that seems like kind of a lot of work and personally i want to make things easy on myself so instead of mass testing products what i do is i take the approach of just trying to sell what people are already buying i don't really try to find what's trending or like a winning product or anything like that instead usually what i look for are kind of like normal products products that are like everyday products that all kinds of people are buying they've been around for a while people love them they need them they want them they solve problems whatever it is so i just do my research i try to find those types of products and then i figure out how i can sell them this method isn't guaranteed to work every single time it does fail sometimes but doing things this way significantly increases my chances of success now we're gonna get a lot deeper into exactly what i look for when starting a new store like pretty soon but for right now just understand that the overarching concept is sell what people are already buying i think this is really important to include here what my actual goal is in running my ecommerce businesses because with ecom and dropshipping there's a lot of different goals you could just want to make a small amount of money very quickly you could want to make a large amount of money very quickly you could want to make a small amount of money over a long period of time a lot of different goals and kind of different ways to do things so i want to tell you what i do basically for me my goal is to build a small handful of sustainable scalable and sellable brands that i can build and then profit from while i still own them and then eventually sell them and exit out of them and get really big lump sum payments to me that's kind of where the real money is i want to sell my brands for like millions of dollars and be able to get that all at once the thing is the timeline with this is much longer than what most people have like most people have a very very short outlook when it comes to drop shipping whereas my outlook is more of like a two to four year time span overall it's a pretty slow and steady process it's definitely not like a get-rich-quick thing it's more of like a get-rich-slow thing i think and that is why a huge focus of my strategy is sustainability the harsh reality of most drop shipping stores is they don't tend to last longer than like six months to a year and personally i've done it before it's not a whole lot of fun having to build a new business every six months to a year if you want to build things up in a way that can actually support you so that you can actually quit your job and do this full time then you need to do things in a way that's sustainable and that is why we focus on building a strong foundation up front that won't crumble over time and that will actually improve and get better as time goes on that there then leads me to the process that we used to go from drop shipping from aliexpress to building a real sustainable ecommerce brand it might be a little bit surprising but the way that i start new stores is i start just basically doing typical aliexpress drop shipping find a product build a store run ads and then while we're testing it initially we use oberlo and aliexpress and we just fulfill it through there like normal if you don't know about oberlo or aliexpress then again ecom elementary that will explain everything to you in the description being able to do things in this way is an absolutely incredible way to validate your ideas because you don't really have to spend a whole lot of money up front you have to spend money on ads but you don't want to buy inventory up front so you can get started for relatively cheap the downside of doing things this way though is it is not very conducive of a great customer experience shipping times are long suppliers are unreliable packaging tends to be kind of shitty and just the reality is if you're shipping from aliexpress your customers are probably not going to like you all that much it's for this reason that when we are still fulfilling with aliexpress we do not spend more than about 100 a day on advertising it's not really a huge deal if you have a few unhappy customers but you certainly do not want hundreds or thousands of them ask me how i know that's also why we move to u.s fulfillment as fast as possible i guess technically my strategy it's only really drop shipping at the beginning the rest of the time it's more so about building a real ecommerce so going off that there are really only three main ways to do your fulfillment with e-commerce you can do aliexpress like we've just been talking about you can have a chinese drop shipping agent which is still kind of a middleman but is a little bit better than aliexpress or you can place bulk orders from china get your products from china into the us and then ship from a fulfillment center in the u.s and have a lot faster shipping times the way we do things we tend to skip the chinese drop shipping agent and just go straight from aliexpress to fulfilling from the us once we have a store that's consistently profitable say it's doing like five to ten orders plus a day it's hitting a really solid row as like at least two ideally closer to three or higher that's when we place a small bulk order for say like a few hundred units of the product we'll have it ship to one of our fulfillment centers they'll take it in and then we pay the fulfillment center to ship it out for us and from there we have four to seven day or like three to five day u.s shipping which is a whole whole lot better than aliexpress and then since we do things this way and we tend to move to u.s fulfillment as fast as possible we also tend to only start advertising and selling in the us we don't really do worldwide we don't do big five or a lot of other countries we mainly just stick to the us only once the brand is established we might expand into other countries down the line but there's really not a whole lot of reason to there are plenty plenty of people in the us to sell to all right quick recap before we get into the meat of things here ecommerce is basically just selling physical products online the way we start out is by using a subsection of e-commerce called drop shipping we use aliexpress to source our products we use shopify to build our online store and we use facebook ads to drive traffic i.e get people onto our online store to actually buy we get very specific not only in what we're selling but who we're actually selling to in the first place instead of doing a bunch of random mass product testing we tend to do a lot more research and try to only sell what people are already buying our goal is to build long-term sustainable brands in specific niche markets in a fairly slow and steady fashion build them up grow them and then sell them for seven to eight figures a few years down the line we validate our ideas with aliexpress and then move to us fulfillment as soon as possible and for the most part we pretty much only sell in the us got it all right let's keep rolling well a lot of people might tell you that like quote unquote anyone can succeed with my strategy that's not exactly the case with mine i think just about anyone can but you're gonna need a few things ahead of time if you want a decent chance at being able to implement my strategy successfully here are the few key things that you'll either need to have or be able to do to actually do so the first is the skill of direct response marketing drug response marketing is basically the key skill behind e-commerce or really like any online business in general the definition of direct response marketing is a type of marketing designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging prospects to take a specific action in contrast to traditional marketing which aims to raise brand awareness and promote brand image long term direct response shows roi immediately it sounds fancy but it's basically just being able to put the right offer in front of the right person so that they actually buy right now it's pretty much the exact opposite kind of marketing that you learn about in school so if you are in marketing classes like i was you can kind of just forget all that now pretty much now make no mistake even if you don't use my personal strategy this is the skill that you absolutely need regardless of what strategy you want to use personally i think that not taking the time to learn the skill and not having the skill is like one of the absolute main reasons that so many people fail at this stuff the good news is though it's pretty basic and it's really not all that complicated to learn if you want to learn how to learn the skill of direct response marketing i've linked a video in the description that is going to show you the 12 resources i recommend to learn this skill like as fast as humanly possible so if you want to learn that skill and yeah you definitely should check that out and get those resources in that video the next thing you need to succeed with my strategy is a decent budget and the ability to test a lot of different things most people get into drop shipping and just completely underestimate just how much testing they will actually have to do to find success the way things work is there's like probably a less than one percent chance that the first store you ever start will actually end up being successful even for me i have a kind of a lot of experience at this point and even now a decent portion of the stores that i start do not end up becoming successful and the ones that do want to becoming successful it usually takes a ton of testing so to make this work i would say you need a budget of at bare minimum a thousand dollars and ideally closer to two thousand or three thousand dollars and then the key part about this that most people don't really talk about is not only do you need a decent sorting budget but you also need to have consistent income coming in from some other source it's entirely possible that you could run through your entire ad budget without really seeing a whole lot of success so to hedge against that you want to make sure that you have consistent money coming in that you can then reinvest back into running ads and running tests and basically just not be a scared little because you're running out of cash don't overthink this i literally did freelance work and delivered pizza to do this it's just important to be aware that ecommerce is not the way that you will turn zero dollars into a thousand dollars it's just pretty much impossible because it requires you to spend money on ads to be able to test stuff and then finally the last key thing you need to succeed with my strategy is a killer mindset and the right expectations since your thoughts determine your actions and your actions determine your results basically everything starts in your mind and because of that you need to really intentionally make sure that you are thinking about things in the correct way because if you're not then you're pretty much doomed to fail from the start now i could literally make an entire hour and a half long video about this topic alone but i'm just going to give you the two key mindset things that i think you really need to understand to be able to do this successfully the first is the concept of failing and failing fast frugally and forward most people have a very natural aversion to failure but anyone who's successful will tell you that they have experienced a lot more failures than they have successes a lot of people think that failure is the opposite of success but it's not not even in the slightest failure is the prerequisite to success it's not something to be avoided it's something to be expected and taken advantage of every failure should teach you a lesson every dollar of ad spend that doesn't work should give you new insights you're not so much trying to find what does work but more so trying to eliminate what doesn't if you do that enough eventually you will pretty much only be left with what works but of course you don't want to just be failing for the hell of it you want to be doing so with a purpose and that is exactly what fast forward and frugally means fast meaning you move on from failure quickly you don't just sit there and sulk for a while you move on to the next thing asap forward meaning you're actually learning new lessons from each failure and frugally meaning you are losing as little money as possible from each of your failures and then the second mindset concept here is basically just having grit and being resourceful grit meaning you don't give up super easily when you're faced with problems and you always keep going and resourceful meaning you can figure out on your own even when you don't really know what you're doing the reality of starting an ecommerce business or really any kind of business is that there will be a lot of times where you just do not really know what to do again even for me i'm a few years into this i face new challenges on an almost daily basis facing these challenges and knowing how to solve them is honestly like a huge huge portion of this entire game the thing is no one is going to be there for you to hold your hand or guide you through it this isn't like school where you can just raise your hand and the teacher will come and help you you have to figure out on your own and that is exactly where resourcefulness comes in use google talk to people who already have experience think critically use your brain ultimately what you're after when building an ecommerce business is self-reliance you want to be able to support yourself on your own time with your own money with your own business but you can't have self-reliance if you're not self-reliant and this goes absolutely hand-in-hand with grit most people give up way way too easily when they're faced with challenges the reality is every single day you will face new problems and it is up to you and you alone to figure out how to solve them my best advice here is take stock of the situation lay out all of the current information that you have and use it to make the best decision you possibly can with the knowledge the information and the skills that you have right now once you make that decision don't think about it just send it sometimes you might make the wrong decision and you'll have to course correct but that's just the nature of the game it's far better to make the wrong decision than to make no decision at all because if you make no decision at all you're never going to learn anything make a decision act on it and let the pieces fall wherever they may if you can just be resourceful have grit and follow exactly what i just said here this alone will take you so far it's honestly absolutely ridiculous all right it is now three days later i'm wearing the same shirt though i just went on a bender but it's all good most people spend their time on that is just not effective will not move the needle and will really not really be effective no matter how much they do it to maximize our efficiency we only want to focus on the absolute most important things that will get us the maximum results with minimum effort these are what i call levers and for e-commerce there are five of them the first lever is your market these are just the people that you are selling to are you selling to overwhelmed soccer moms who need some rest and relaxation are you selling to elderly people who have trouble hearing are you selling to mma addicts who spend all their free time in the gym who you sell to is one of the most overlooked but one of the most important aspects of them all the reason for that is different markets vary in how hungry they are how badly they actually want to buy the hungrier a market is the more reason they already have to actually buy from you and we're going to get more into this here in a second the easier it's going to be so you really want to make sure you choose a good market the second lever is your creative and creative basically just means your app it's the visual and the copy that you advertise to people creative is incredibly important because the results of your creative are at the very top of the funnel and the very top of the funnel determines the rest of the results that you're able to get so if you have a creative that's getting a click-through rate of 2 that means 2 out of every 100 people who see your ad click on it if you're able to make a better creative that gets a four percent click-through rate then all else equal you are getting double the amount of people to your website and making double the sales and all you did was make a better creative this is an absolutely huge lever and it's why we put so much emphasis on creative testing in our facebook ad strategy the third lever is your offer now this is the product that's one part of it but that is not the only part of it the other part of it is how you're presenting it it's the deal that you're offering is it 29.95 or is it 59.95 marked down 50 to 29.95 or maybe it's buy one get one free for 29.95 or maybe it's buy one for 29.95 or buy three for 39.95 maybe you include a free ebook with their purchase maybe you offer a 100-day risk-free trial maybe you offer a lifetime warranty all of these things can be part of your offer someone can see your ad and think your product is cool and be interested in it but then land on your landing page see the offer and think well that's not a very good deal you want someone to see your offer and think oh my god this is an absolutely incredible deal i would be dumb not to take this store up on this this is an absolutely massive level this is one of my personal favorite ones to play around with and it's also one of the easiest to play around with all you really have to do is switch up some stuff on your shopify product page the fourth lever is your angle i like to think of this as the sex appeal of your product what makes it unique what makes it interesting why should someone actually buy it the way you angle your product has a massive effect on your overall results is that ergonomic pillow you're selling for neck and back pain or is it for migraines will that health supplement help you lose weight or will it help you build a movie star physique there are pretty much an endless number of ways you can angle your product and the reason angle is so impactful is because when you change your angle you change basically everything that you're doing if you completely change the angle of your product then you're gonna go make completely new ads and you're gonna run completely new ads and you're also probably going to change your product page you're going to change the product copy the headlines and things like that that's a really big change and big changes are where you're going to see the most drastic improvement in your results and then the fifth and final lever is logistics this is a very overlooked part of e-commerce but incredibly incredibly important if you start out drop shipping from aliexpress and you start scaling and you don't pay attention to your logistics and improving your sourcing and your shipping and everything like that then your customer experience it's gonna suck if your customer experience sucks then not only you're not going to have a lot of repeat customers but it's also going to affect you in things like your facebook feedback score it's going to make it really really difficult to run ads especially now they're getting really really strict with that you and me can be selling the exact same product but if i'm shipping it from the us and you're shipping it from china and my customers are happy and yours are not my store and my brand is gonna do way way better than yours in the long term i have no way of proving this like with actual numbers but in my experience whenever we really put an effort into improving the logistics and the shipping and making sure that our customers are happy facebook tends to reward us with a higher roads and just less issues in general it's absolutely fine not to worry about this when you're first testing and you don't have something profitable consistently but once you get to that point where you're actually making profit every day improving your logistics is one of the most important things you could ever do to recap the five key levers of my strategy are market creative offer angle and logistics all right now we're getting in to the more sexy stuff in this section i want to talk to you about what i actually look for when i'm trying to find products to sell and i'm starting a new store there's a handful of key things that i look for and this next part is really important what i'm really looking for at the root of it are what i call advantages advantages are just things that give me a leg up on my competition or make things overall easier to me business is really all about advantage the more things that you can do that make your business stronger the easier and more profitable things will be so here are some of the main advantages that i look for when i'm starting a new store the first advantage is a specific hungry market we've talked about this a little bit so far but i want to get more specific here when i say specific hungry market i really mean specific we're not just talking about a general market like people with dogs or people who want to lose weight we want to get like a lot more specific than that for example parents of kids with learning disabilities elderly people with arthritis those are much more specific and again the more specific we get the easier things are going to be specific though is just the first part of that the second part of that is hungry what makes a market hungry is when they have what i like to call a strong motivating factor a strong motivating factor is basically just a reason that someone has to buy from you already they already actually need or want to buy from you usually this is going to fall into one of three categories pain problem or passion people in markets who don't have one of these three things are going to be much more difficult to sell to because they don't already have a strong reason to buy and this is exactly what i mean when i said earlier about sell what people are already buying you want to find the people who already desperately need something it's a lot easier that way i could try for example to sell artificial indoor plants for people to put on their desks you know right now work from home is pretty big maybe that would be a good thing to sell the thing with that is there's no pain problem or passion associated with indoor plants no one really cares they're just like nice to have on the other hand something much stronger than that is let's say i could sell a foot brace to someone who has foot pain because they have a condition like maybe they have bunions or plantar fasciitis flat feet or whatever since these people are already in pain they already have a condition and every single day they wake up and their feet hurt they already wanted salt i don't have to convince them that they need my product they already know when someone already has a really strong reason to buy it becomes much easier to sell to them and the more painful or the bigger the problem or the stronger the passion the easier it's going to be as well these are the things that make people hungry and that is a huge huge advantage the next advantage i look for is people already buying this is a little bit more product specific but i don't try to sell products that people are not already buying that people are not already selling if i come up with an idea and i can't find any other stores any other competitors already selling that product then the chances are extremely slim that i was just the first person to ever come up with some genius idea that no one's really thought of yet it's much more likely that the reason no one's doing it is because there's not demand for it no one actually wants to buy it and the good news is this isn't complicated at all all you're looking for here is companies already selling the product you can google the product you can search on amazon ideally though you want to find people who are already selling it successfully with paid traffic i.e with facebook ads or on google do some research you can look around if you google something and then you find a brand then you can look up their facebook page you can go and you can try to look at their ads and see if they're running ads i found there's a sort of sweet spot for products that tend to work well where there's not a ton of people already selling it but there are some people already selling it and there's a little bit of a gap where there's room for other sellers to come in where it hasn't been like super super super overdone yet basically though if people are already selling it that's usually a pretty good sign the next advantage that i look for is value this is something i don't think a lot of people think about and specifically a specific way to provide a lot of value to a specific type of person everyone's out here is like looking for winning products but they don't really think about the fact that any transaction is a value exchange someone's not going to give you their money for your product unless they believe it's worth more than the money in their own pocket so your product has to actually provide value for the price that you're selling there's this misconception that all products on aliexpress are just like quality and that's not true at all i mean don't get me wrong a lot of them are pretty quality but there's also a lot of really solid quality products on there again since people don't spend their money where they don't think it's worth it you really need to make sure that your product actually does something for someone that they find valuable super simple concept but if you can do that it's just gonna make things a whole lot easier and it's really gonna shift your mindset into thinking about things in a more correct and more effective way too long didn't read basically just sell a good product from there another place we look for to get an advantage is our margins margins can literally make or break an entire store and a lot of lower margin products just aren't really viable with our strategy the basic rule of thumb here is the higher your margins the better one quick heuristic you can use for this is to make sure that you can mark up the price on aliexpress and this is including shipping costs your total cost shipped to your customer by at least three to four times on your own store the product's 10 bucks and you can sell it for 30 or 40 bucks then that's pretty solid if you want to get more specific and more accurate with it though i think the best way to think about this is in terms of gross margin gross margin is just your sale price minus your cost of goods divided by your sale price if we sell a product for 39 and it costs us 12 dollars to get shipped to our customer then 39 minus 12 divided by 39 that equals about a 69 gross margin personally i like this number to be as close to 70 and ideally as close to 80 as possible a three times markup from aliexpress is about 67 gross margin and that's generally about as low as i like to go i've run stores in the past where the gross margin was like 50 and it was like basically impossible all else equal you always want your margins to be higher and this does limit your options a little bit but again huge advantage the higher your margins are the easier it's going to be to get profitable now here's a few product specific advantages since we're trying to make things as easy as possible on ourselves i tend to stick with products that are not super complex in terms of what they do or their functionality the more moving parts a product has the more complex it is the more of a complex function it has to perform in order to work the more refunds you're going to get the less likely you are to have satisfied customers and it's just going to be more of a to be honest with you it's for this reason than anything with any sort of electronics or technology i tend to stay away from anything that needs to perform a big significant function in order to work i tend to stay away from to me simple products with very few or no moving parts like that's really where it's at along those same lines i also tend to stick with products that are small and lightweight since shipping costs are based on volume and weight the bigger and heavier something is the more expensive and just really the more of a it's going to be to ship that adds more complexity which again i like things easy i don't want to make things more complex on myself so the smaller and more lightweight of product is the more attractive it is to me and then finally the last advantage that i look for this isn't really so much an advantage the last thing i look for is products that are very white hat white hat meaning not sketchy or aggressive or against facebook policy or anything like that facebook policies are ridiculously strict i mean they're stricter than like billboards you can't advertise what you see on most billboards on the highway on facebook without getting banned so since facebook is so strict it's really to me not even worth it to try to sell stuff that is gonna go against their policies i've tried it in the past i've done it multiple times and it's just been an absolute huge just again not even worth it so nowadays the way i like to think of this is i basically just stick with more like family friendly products some things i stay away from for example are anything to do with weight loss most things there are some exceptions here but most things to do with skin care and then i've also tried this this year it was not worth it at all doing ppe selling masks and things like that on facebook not worth it at all it's probably a good idea if you haven't already to read up on facebook policies and see what they actually do not allow because there's a lot of stuff that they don't allow we're actually gonna get way more into that in a second and i'm gonna show you my account management strategy but those are really the main things that i look for when i'm starting a new store or trying to find a new product specific hungry market with at least one of the three p's evidence of people already buying and or evidence of people already selling products that actually provide real genuine value 70-ish plus percent gross margins simple products no complex functionalities are a lot of moving parts just keep it simple i like products that are small and lightweight and also white hat and family friendly and then one more thing to include here is i tend to stay away from products that have like 25 different variants if they have a bunch of different sizes or colors or a bunch of different sku's then that's it's a it's a i don't want to do it i don't want to deal with it i try to stay away from that just the simpler the better now before we move on here one thing to be aware of is that a product or store that you're looking at does not necessarily have to meet every single one of these criteria these are really basic guidelines that we like to go by not all of our stores meet all these criteria we try to get as many of them as possible but generally most stores are probably only going to meet like maybe all of them except for one or two so keep that in mind basic guidelines doesn't have to meet every single one the way i find products to sell is honestly like deceptively simple you can try to shortcut this with some of these winning product softwares there's a lot of stuff out there these days but to be honest with you i have not found anything that works better than what i'm about to tell you people think that finding a product to sell is like this big creative process and you gotta like rack your brain to try to find some million dollar idea or something it's not like that like not in the slightest your next winning product isn't somewhere lodged in the back of your brain where it is though is in your market since we're only selling what people already want to buy what we think is a good idea to sell is of absolutely zero consequence it does not matter at all the only thing that actually matters is what people in our market are already buying now of course when you're coming up with a new store a new product to sell you kind of have to figure out two things you gotta figure out what you're gonna sell which is the product and you gotta figure out who you're gonna sell to which is the market since we're relying on our market to tell us what to sell that means that we have to first figure out who our market is and who we're gonna sell to do research on them figure out what it is they're already buying and then sell that to them now that said using the process that i'm about to lay out for you a product can be the initial reference point that can be where you start and if that's the case that's totally fine but you don't want to just be thinking about the product you also want to be thinking about the market so here's what this process looks like again it is mind-blowingly simple the first step is just to keep in mind what we're actually looking for and we just went over that in the last section so i'm not gonna repeat myself the next step is to expose yourself to a ton of different inspirations it's gonna do a few things for one it's gonna get your ideas flowing looking at different inspiration it's gonna get the creative juices in your own brain flowing but it can also give you really great points of reference to start from that you can then build on and when i say inspiration i say find a ton of different inspiration all i'm talking about is companies that are already selling products successfully online there's a lot of different ways to do this but my personal favorite way it's probably one of the simplest ways is just to scroll through facebook and instagram and click on ads you can kind of curate your instagram and facebook feed to show you physical product ads from e-commerce brands and from drop shipping stores if you just whenever you see one you click on it and you go through their website a little bit that is gonna let facebook know that you're interested in that and it's gonna show you more stuff like that one of my favorite and most relevant quotes here is it costs too much to be a pioneer when the road has already been paved that is from my man gary halbert instead of trying to do things completely from scratch and come up with some million dollar business idea i use existing products and existing businesses as my foundation that then brings me to step three keep in mind what we're actually looking for expose ourselves to inspiration and then in step three i don't copy other stores and businesses outright but i do steal bits and pieces of what they're doing and then piece that together in my own way so in step three i take what an existing business is already doing and i break it down into the key components i write down their market who are they selling to their product what are they actually selling their offer how are they actually selling it and their angle what's the sex appeal what's the big idea what's the reason they're giving people to actually buy this product and then finally in step four i will take all of these components and i'll play around with them and change one or two of them or a couple of them and i'll see how i can really make it my own my goal here is to take what they are doing and make it better more unique and something that is just more compelling than what they're already doing this is a pretty big topic in and of itself so i've actually linked a video in the description that shows it's actually a private video it shows exactly how i do this it shows you an example of how i kind of mess around with these different aspects to get new ideas for new products and new stores you can check that out after this video if you would like to it is free because i'm a nice guy nice guy so from here once i've done this and i've taken a businesses or a store's foundation and i've messed around with it a little bit to make it my own from here i'll put together what i call the initial concept which is basically just like the basic strategy of the store and then from there it's ready for me to build the store make my ads and test it out similar to pretty much everything in this video i think this stuff is fairly simple it's really not that complicated the way i build my source is also incredibly simple i build them with shopify i'm guessing you probably already knew that shopify is great it's very easy to use as such i try to get my stores built from start to finish in like as fast as possible like 24 to 48 hours max i tend to stick with one of the default shopify themes either debut or brooklyn some of the main things that i'm trying to do when i'm making my store is one i want to have solid product photos i want to have a valuable offer i want to have a concise but detailed product description i want to have some decent reviews hopefully and i can go a lot more into this but i've already made a video that's like super in depth that shows exactly how i build out my product pages in my stores the link in the description is uh yeah there's there's a link in the description for that how i make product pages that actually convert yeah it's in there you can watch that so at this point now that we've got everything built the only thing that's really left is to get eyes on our store there's lots of different ways to do this but the way that we get eyes on our store which basically is just driving traffic that's another fancy term for it the way that we do that is 98 of it with facebook ads the reason we use facebook ads for pretty much all our stuff is because right now it's just what we found to be the most effective it is by far the best ad platform with the largest audience the highest converting the best algorithm all that facebook is extremely good at what they do and that is why we use facebook so much so in a basic sense how it works is the first step is to create a business account from our personal profile once we've made the business account we're gonna go in there into the business manager and we're gonna create an ad account we're gonna create a pixel and we're gonna create a page we set up our ads and i'm about to show you exactly how we set up our ads here in like literally one moment but we set up our ads we start running them and then that enters them into the facebook auction the way it works is basically we are bidding against other advertisers to show our ads to the same group of people if our ads are good if they resonate with our audience if there's something that people seem to be interested in then facebook shows our ads to our target audience at a price that is fairly reasonable people see our ads they click through to our website and while most of them just drop off and never talk to us again a small percentage of them do end up buying and then so long as there's some money left over after we paid for ad costs and product costs then we profit yeah you profit yeah so this graphic right here is what our initial product testing strategy looks like we start off with the key factors that we mentioned earlier a specific hungry market a product an angle a creative and an offer from there the way we set this up is we have one campaign this is a conversion campaign and this is an ad set budget managed campaign not a cbo in that campaign we will have three ad sets and in each of those three ad sets we will have two ads and it's gonna be the same two ads in all three ad sets inside of each ad set the settings that we have for that are we set them at a 20 a day budget each the conversion event we always use purchase we do not use anything else besides purchase for the audience we do one different cold interest in each ad set of at least one million in size we leave genders and age default 18 to 65 plus all genders we do automatic placements we do not mess with where facebook is showing our ad we do seven day click and one day conversion window that should be the default we also only run ads in the us when we're first starting and really just generally we pretty much only run ads in the us we schedule our ad sets to start at midnight because we don't want facebook to spend all of our budget in a very short window we want them to have the entire day to spend the budget so we start them at midnight and that is the basic campaign setup for how we do our initial product tests once we have that running we're gonna let this run for about two to three days or until each ad set has spent two to three times our product's gross margin more on that here in a second on day one all we're gonna do is just make sure that all of our ad sets were approved and that they are all spending not gonna touch anything on day two most likely we're also just gonna leave them completely untouched we don't really wanna mess with things yet the only time we'll turn something off this quickly on day two is if the cost per click is like way out of whack like above like a dollar fifty or two dollars and that is cost per unique link click not just cost per one click cost per unique link click once day three rolls around that is when we can start analyzing results and planning our next move and then on day four we now have three full days of spending 60 a day on ads here we're gonna look at the entire campaign try to analyze the results see if it's profitable unprofitable or break even and then from here we're gonna decide on what our next move is and then implement it and repeat this process over and over again as i mentioned once we launch ads initially we're going to let them run until each ad set has spent two to three times the product's gross margin like a rough estimate of how much to spend before you make any changes so again we talked about gross margin a little bit but the gross margin is just the sale price of the product minus the price that you're selling it at and then if you want the percentage then you divide that by the sale price but for these purposes let's say that you're selling a product for 29 and it costs you nine dollars to get shipped on aliexpress just do 29 minus nine that's 20 20 is then your gross margin so in that case you would want to spend between 40 and 60 on each ad set before doing anything and then each time we do this each time we launch new ad sets and we let them run until they've spent two to three times the product's gross margin this is what we call a round of tests this is where ecommerce and drop shipping tends to get really complicated for people because they don't really know how to read their results or what to do as a result of that luckily i think i'm going to be able to simplify this like a lot for you because after you run a round of tests there's really only a few key things that you can actually do one you can kill the product in store entirely and move on to something completely new two you can keep running the same product but make big changes three you can keep running the same product but make small changes or four if your results are really good then you can keep running the same product and scale so i think the first one killing the product in store entirely and moving on and then four actually scaling i think those are kind of self-explanatory we're gonna get more into scaling here in a second but i think the thing that needs clarification is what's a big change and what's a small change a big change is something that has the potential to increase your results by at least a factor of two these are huge changes that can take a store from completely unprofitable and losing money to actually very profitable and making money things like changing the product itself that's kind of like the first one where you kill and move on but that's a big change changing the product big change another big change is changing the offer coming up with a completely new angle talked about that a little bit earlier changing the actual market or the target audience itself getting completely new custom content making a completely different product page or making completely new ads so i'm going to show you exactly when is the best time to make a big change like this here in a second but first i want to show you one of small changes a small change is something that has the potential to increase your results and make them better but not by as big of a factor definitely not by a factor of two it might just be able to increase it by a little bit things like testing one new ad or maybe making improvements to your product page or changing the fonts the theme or the colors maybe adding reviews to your website that's a pretty small change anything pretty small like that that's not going to dramatically increase your results but could help a little bit that's a small change the really important thing to understand here is that if you're completely unprofitable and not even close to breaking even your results are just like honestly terrible then the only way that you're going to get out of that is by making big changes a lot of people get stuck in this loop of making small changes to something that is just not working over and over again and they don't realize that the changes they're making are just not impactful enough to get them from that zone where they're just not profitable at all to the zone all the way up here where they actually are profitable so as i mentioned after each round of tests what we do is we take a look at the results we analyze them and then based on the results we decide one of these four things to do now what i'm about to show you is actually something that was in one of our paid products our facebook ads course as a bonus but i'm gonna show it to you in this video for free because again nate schmidt super nice guy super super nice guy it's called kill tweak scale and it's gonna show you which one of these four things to do based on the situation that you're in all right so i want to go through and i want to show you what to do in all these different types of situations the most common situations you're likely to run into when you're running ads for e-commerce uh walk you through what we do so as we mentioned a few main things you can do kilt and start over from scratch keep running make big changes keep running like small changes or keep running and scale so let's say in a situation you launched ads initially you spent three times your gross margin on all ad sets but got zero sales in this case what we would do is we would keep running the same product but we would make some really big changes a new offer new angle new ads new product page etc we would choose one or multiple of these things and we make some really big changes to try to get the results better now let's say that we've done three rounds of tests or at least two rounds of tests spent three times the gross margin on all ad sets two plus times still got zero sales at this point if we've done multiple rounds of tests and we're not making any sales whatsoever that is when we kill it and start over from scratch new product new offer new angle new market etc now let's say that we've spent three times the gross margin on all ad sets and we've made a few sales but it's still not close to profitable it's under a one row as uh in this case what we would do is we'd keep running the same product but we would make some big changes next situation let's say that we have spent three times ago as marginal assets and we've done this three plus times so we've done three plus rounds of tests we're still making a few sales but not close to profitable and results are not improving if this was the case then we would kill it and we would start up from scratch new product new offer new angle new market etc another situation let's say that we spent three times the gross margin on all ad sets we've run three plus rounds of tests we are making sales results are improving and we're getting close to break even but we're not quite profitable yet and this is generally going to be in the one to one and a half road zone the next step here would be to keep running but make some small to medium changes and or improvements so maybe not changing everything but making some decent size changes new content maybe make some better ads make a better product page tweak the offer slightly things like that now let's say that we've spent three times the gross margin on all ad sets we've done that five plus times then five plus rounds of tests we're making sales results are improving but similar to what we just talked about it's close to break even but it's not quite profitable if this is the case then what we would do is probably one last ditch effort and we would make everything as good as we possibly can run the best possible round of tests that we could and if that doesn't work then we would kill it and move on another situation let's say that we're right around breakeven results are a little bit better than in these previous situations some days are profitable some days are unprofitable this is generally going to be in the 1.5 to 2 rowhead zone this is a really good place to be honestly and in this case what we would do is we would keep running the same product but we would make small changes and improvements to try to get from 1.5 to 2 rows to more like two to two and a half to three row as in this case that could be new content better ads better product pages like offer tweak etc small things that you're not going to change the entirety of everything you're doing because what you're doing is already working to some extent you just need to improve it that's basically kind of the the entire name of the game to be honest with you another situation this is a little bit of a different one but let's say that you were profitable and you tried to scale and now it's unprofitable this is a really common situation in this situation what we would do is we would scale back down to whatever level it was profitable at and then when we tried to scale again we would select scale a lot slower this time no more than twenty percent increase in overall daily ad spend every three to four days or so now let's say that you are consistently profitable there are still some off days where it's unprofitable but for the most part it's mostly profitable and you're around a two broads also a really good place to be in this case you know we don't want to make any major major changes what we want to do is we want to keep running the same product and make some small changes and improvements like we've been talking about earlier another situation consistently profitable every single day two to two and a half plus rounds this is a really good place to be next step here is to keep running the same product make small changes and improvements and then slowly scale our best ad sets so we're keeping what we're doing we're making gradual improvements to things over time but we are slowly scaling what is working and continuing to test to find more stuff that works as well better situation to be in you're consistently profitable with a high row as a three plus row as in this case it's pretty much kind of the same you'll notice that in all of these regardless of our results we're still not just leaving things and just scaling it's always a constant process of improving and making small changes and improvements over time but when we're in this zone when we have a three plus rows consistently at this point you can actually start seriously scaling and you can kind of break some of the scaling rules and scale a little bit faster than you would if you had a lower row as and basically sometimes you need to keep iterating sometimes you need to move on this whole process is basically a balance between not wasting effort on a lost cause something that's just not gonna work no matter what you do and also not giving up too soon on something that has potential and you gotta keep in mind the name of the game here is testing and testing a lot and probably a lot more than you think and it will take time it will be frustrating but at the end of the day you really only have to hit one home run to change your life now let's get back into the rest of the video to give you a better idea of what to do when you launch ads and the results are just not very good how to get it from that point to the point where it's actually profitable i want to run through a few examples with you real quick so let's say we launch ads and the results off the bat are just horrific we ran a round of tests they made a few sales but it's not anywhere close to profitable from here what we would do in the next round of tests is we would make some really big changes if we were selling this dog anxiety vest from one of my previous videos for example something we might do is change the angle and get a lot more specific in that video in the initial test what we did is we angled it towards all kinds of dog anxiety from all different sources if we're gonna run another round of tests something that i think would be really good to do is instead of angling it towards all kinds of dog anxiety making it much more specific to a specific type of dog anxiety like separation anxiety this might seem like a relatively small change but this could actually be huge because again as i mentioned earlier in this video by changing the angle that's also going to change our ads and our product page in a practical sense let's say that the three ad sets we initially launched that were just not really anywhere close to profitable let's say that none of them were really doing all that well maybe one or two of them got sales but none of them were performing like way better than any other ones in that case we would kill all three ad sets and launch three entirely new ad sets in those three new ad sets we would have two completely new ads using our new angle and then we would also change up the product page to really focus on that specific type of anxiety that separation anxiety and make the product page congruent with the ads depending on the results we would either keep running the same three interests that we were before or let's say that one of our ad sets with one type of interest did much better than the other two in that case what we might do is we might keep that one interest that did better than the other two and then try to find two more interests that were similar to that one that did better than the original other two that's kind of a mouthful but i think that makes sense now we take those two new interests that were similar to the one interest that was working a little bit better and then we would test those two new interests in two of our new ad sets let's say that we run that and it does better the results improve and it's closer to break even but it's still not profitable from here we can try to make another change maybe something that's not quite as big but still something that has the potential to actually improve our results i think at this point a great thing to do would be get new custom content we could order the product ourselves and get it ourselves with just our iphone we don't even need any real skills for this to be honest with you your iphone camera is fantastic or we could hire someone to do it for us websites like fiverr and upwork are great for this using that new content we can then use that to make better ads and then also ideally improve our product page content as well now throughout this process each time we run a new round of tests keep in mind that we're not always killing every single ad set from the previous round of tests if we have an ad set that's running close to profitable or close to break even and this is really dependent on the results of this ad set compared to the other ad sets but if we have an ad that's performing a lot better than our other ad sets then we tend to keep it running when that's the case we would kill the other two ad sets that were not working well keep that other one running and then launch two new ad sets and basically what we're looking for when we're running these rounds of tests are the audience and marketing combinations that actually work when we find the ones that do work we keep those running we kill the ones that don't work and then we keep testing new ones to try to find more and more that do work it's a lot of testing a lot of times it's a lot a lot of testing and it can take a lot of rounds of tests to get to the point where most of your ad sets are consistently profitable the way you get from a failed test to a successful store is by testing all these different aspects your offer your creative your angle your offer your ads seeing the results and then improving on these things gradually over time i think most people have some really really up expectations they think it's just gonna happen overnight and they run like three rounds of tests and then all of a sudden money's gonna start raining from the sky that's generally not how things work ecommerce is really a never-ending process of testing even when you have something that's working you're still constantly testing to try to beat your current best and try to get better results here's a fun part of the video how i deal with facebook ad bands part of ecommerce is dealing with and avoiding facebook advance that's kind of the nature of the game it seems to just kind of happen randomly at this point if you're getting your accounts abandoned you're not sure why trust me you're not alone it happens to me it happens to all my friends it happens to literally everyone i know facebook has gotten super trigger happy with the band hammer but there are ways to minimize the effects of bands and to avoid them in the first place so let's talk about it there's three main types of bands you have ad account bands business manager bands and personal advertising access bands the first step regardless of whichever kind of band it is is to make sure that you're not actually violating facebook policy again i highly recommend that you read up on facebook policy because they're constantly changing and there's a lot of stuff that you can't do so if you don't know what the rules are then it's gonna be really hard to operate within those rules so make sure you know what the rules are then obviously if you are doing something against policy fix it and if you're not doing anything against policy then you can skip to the next step which is to appeal the decision you can do that through the automated form that facebook gives you it should show up somewhere in your ads manager or your business manager wherever it's telling you that you're banned now if you can a really good thing to do is to hop on chat support unfortunately most people do not have this option because you only get the option to have chat support now if you've actually spent a decent amount of money and you have a decent history with facebook so once you've appealed the decision the next step is usually just to wait sometimes they'll get back to you very quickly sometimes it'll take longer but usually they'll get back to you within about one to four business days or so now here are some of the most common reasons for facebook ad bans actually violating policy repeatedly getting ads disapproved or rejected super aggressive direct response advertising ads or stores that appear low quality or spammy if you're traveling facebook might see that as suspicious failed payments if you have a bad payment method they will ban you for that sometimes it's just random sometimes they will require you to verify your business and need business verification and then one of the worst ones is circumventing policy if you break facebook policy get banned and then you try to circumvent their policy to keep running ads that's circumventing policy now some key facebook ad policies to be aware of you can't call out specific groups of people like you can't say hey truck drivers or hey moms you just can't identify people like that you also can't say stuff like do you have diabetes it's like a leading question you can't do that and you're creative or you're visual you can't focus on any specific body part can't show like abs close up you can't show like someone's leg or foot close-up you also can't really show before or after images this is mainly to do with weight loss and there are some cases where you might be able to get away with before and after images but to me it's just not even really worth trying and you also can't run ads that facebook considers to be social or political in nature without getting some sort of verification first they have a specific verification process for this so those are some things to be aware of now here are some tips for avoiding facebook ad bands in the first place you want to use a real facebook profile when you're running your ads i.e just like your own facebook profile you don't want to make a new account or anything like that stay away from sketchy products or aggressive marketing again that's why we do pretty much entirely white hat stuff these days you also want to make sure that you scale your ad spend slowly facebook does not like when you ramp up your ad spend of really aggressively very quickly something you can do on new accounts to try to prevent getting banned right off the bat is to warm up your ad accounts with a page likes campaign or some sort of a traffic campaign or something basic where you're not actually running the actual ads that you're planning to run you're just running super benign stuff to try to warm up the account without actually risking getting banned and a huge one is don't use any payment methods that have been associated with previously banned facebook business manager or ad accounts if you get an account banned that payment method that you were using on it to me i mean that's basically like a dead payment method like you may as well never use that on facebook again it's actually one of the main ways that facebook was able to link you back to your old account now if you do get hit with a ban here are some things to help you deal with that you have to do this before you actually get banned so this is a really important thing honestly make sure that you have someone else added to your business manager as an admin besides yourself if your personal advertising access gets restricted then you will not be able to run ads but if you have someone on the business manager who's already an admin then you can log in through their account and run ads through their account and another thing a lot of people don't do this but you absolutely should do this is appeal as many possible times as you possibly can even if you appeal a ban and facebook says the decision is final and there's nothing you can do it's not and you absolutely should still appeal it as many times as it will let you sometimes it just takes you getting in front of the right person to get your access back and i've seen accounts where i've gotten them banned and then i've repealed them like two or three times and they've been denied every single time they told me the decision was final and then i came back a couple months later and i killed it again and i got it back and then finally it's always a really really good idea to have at least one and preferably more but at least one backup business manager that way if your current business manager gets banned you have another one that you can go to to run ads on that's not banned oh and then one more tip here the facebook feedback score this is a survey that facebook sends your customers to ask them how good of an experience you're providing it's gotten way stricter recently so it's really really important that you be on top of this if you're drop shipping you want to set the survey time to go out eight weeks after their purchase besides that there are other kind of sketchy services that will offer you to try to increase your facebook feedback score if it gets really low personally i stay away from those i think that those are probably more likely to get you banned than just anything else these kind of tricks and hacks to me are short-term solutions to long-term problems the best and most guaranteed route to avoid any problems with your facebook feedback score is just to provide at bare minimum a half decent customer experience ship your orders quickly have decent customer service with a quick response time and sell a product that's just like not complete quality the feedback score is a huge reason that we emphasize moving on from aliexpress so quickly because the feedback score tends to kick in i think around 300 orders so the quicker you start delivering a quality experience then the less likely you are to have issues with your facebook feedback score now one final note here on account management the nuclear option facebook strategy if your business manager your ad accounts your personal advertising access whatever if all that gets banned there is one thing you can do which is like again the nuclear option this is like the last case scenario and it's basically just to start over from scratch with completely new stuff a new personal facebook account from a friend or a family member or even a stranger whoever you can get it from really a new business manager a new facebook page a new ad account a new payment method new ad copy and new content not the same ad that you're running before and then this is kind of optional i'm not sure how impactful this is but if you really want to make sure then you can also change your website url and then also change your website product page and the content on there so it's not the same as it was before basically the nuclear option is to remove any and all ties that you could possibly have between your old account and your new account from here you can do what we said earlier where you warm up the account with a page likes campaign or you can even do a conversion campaign and send traffic to your old product page if you want to but if you do that just make sure that the ads you're running are not aggressive at all and are just like super basic you don't even care if they really convert you're just using it to warm up the ad account do that for a few days let it get warmed up a little bit and then from there you can launch your real ads the key part about scaling that's changed in the past year or so is you really have to make sure that your logistics sourcing and shipping are really dialed in before you even really think about starting to scale you can certainly try to scale without doing this but in my experience facebook is getting so strict with the facebook feedback score that it's really not even worth it so again while we're still fulfilling from aliexpress we only will spend a maximum of a hundred dollars a day on ads that way if we do have some unsatisfied customers before we actually go and improve our logistics and shipping process then that way it's only a few customers instead of like a couple thousand so basically once we have more reliable logistics in place either through a sourcing agent or by placing bulk orders and fulfilling from the us only then do we actually start scaling when we do start scaling there's two main ways we do that the first is horizontally and the second is vertically horizontally basically just means we are adding more ad sets we're scaling horizontally by adding more ad sets vertically means we're scaling our ad sets vertically i.e increasing their budget most of the scaling we do in a general sense is horizontal we tend to do more horizontal than vertical and there's three main ways that we go about doing our horizontal scaling with all three of these ways we start by duplicating an existing ad set that's already working well and then from there there's three options we can keep our same audience in same budget but switch out our existing creatives for new creatives we can change the audience but then keep the same budget in the same creatives or we can keep the same audience but raise the budget and then either keep the same creatives adding old winning creatives that we've used in the past or add new creatives and this last one is partly vertical since we're raising the budget but it's more horizontal in my opinion either way it doesn't really matter you just want to keep in mind that rarely do we ever duplicate an ad set and keep everything the same we almost never keep the audience the budget and the creatives the same we almost always change something now again as i mentioned most of our scaling we do is horizontal but if we have an ad set that's doing really really well we might increase the budget and just leave it alone just not change anything about it not duplicate it just increase the budget that's scaling vertically but again for the most part we like to scale horizontally now here's some tips on the actual speed of scaling as a general rule we only like to increase our total daily ad spend by about 20 or so per week there are exceptions to this at lower scale say if you're spending less than about 300 a day you can scale a bit faster than 20 per week maybe 20 to 40 per week you can even do 20 to 40 every three to four days if your results are like super profitable so for example if right now we're spending 100 a day and the results are great we might then raise our total daily ad spend to say 130 bucks and then if three to four days after that the results are still great from there then we might scale them to about 170 to 180 of total ad spend per day when you're at lower spends and you're getting really great results you can get away with scaling a little bit faster but once we start getting into bigger territory spending multiple hundreds or thousands of dollars a day on ads that is when we start to scale a little bit slower on a week to week basis now this is hugely important regardless of the actual scale level you're at it's extremely important to make sure that you are not varying your daily ad spend too much day to day if one day you spend 100 bucks in the next day you spend 40 bucks and the next day you spend 180 bucks you're not giving facebook a chance to actually do its job people varying their daily ad spend so much day to day this is a huge reason for volatility in results so you want to keep the amount that you're spending on a day-to-day basis relatively similar and then just scale it slowly over time that is gonna help you avoid a lot of the volatility while scaling can be a pretty complex topic there certainly can be a lot that can go into it like everything else pretty much in this video everything else in our strategy we really like to keep things simple by getting everything right that we've talked about so far in this video we really make the scaling process pretty easy because it doesn't really matter exactly how we do it if our results are great and we're getting all the marketing right when it's time to scale it's pretty easy i already gave you the three main ways that we actually scale horizontally and when we do things in this way it doesn't really matter which of them we do personally we use a combination of all three there's not one that we do more than the other really our results are just really solid and our business is built on a solid foundation so it doesn't really matter which of the specific ways we do it it just works now if you're thinking that scaling this way like 20 increase in total daily budget per week if you're thinking that's a slow way to do things you're kind of right it's definitely not super fast you have to understand that over time this compounds and adds up very quickly and to be honest if you think about it even if your business only grows 20 per month that is still absolutely huge growth most people have these crazy expectations that they're gonna go from zero to doing like 1k a day or even higher like completely overnight that's just not the reality of how things work be a little bit more patient be willing to scale a little bit slower when you do things like this it's much more sustainable and your store is much more likely to last long term now finally before i let you go i want to leave you with some final mindset tips to help you implement all these things that we've been talking about in this video the first one is it's easier when you make it easier there's so many different moving pieces that you can focus on in this game but it's really important if you can just focus on the few key things that matter that is really where you're gonna get like all of your results from get specific sell to hungry people who are already buying and really focus on just getting good at marketing the second tip is something we mentioned earlier it costs far too much to be a pioneer when the road has already been paved don't try to come up with what you think might sell just look for people are already buying let already successful companies and their success you know they say success leaves clues let that do most of the legwork for you you don't need to come up with some crazy new innovative idea or invent something or anything i used to think that you had to you don't have to do that at all you just gotta find what people are already buying and then sell it to them the next thing is when it comes down to it mainly what this is all about is just about being better at the core skills of e-commerce and marketing at the end of the day it's like anything else nothing beats skill set if you are good at this game then you will be good at this game and you will be able to make money if you're not then you probably won't next treat this like a real business because it absolutely is your goal is to provide so much value to someone that they are willing to pay you for in my experience it's much better to focus on providing value than it is to focus on trying to find some winning or trending product another huge thing is that testing is the name of the game so play it and play it well in all likelihood you will have to test a lot of different stuff to find something that actually works which means that the faster you test and the more that you are able to test the faster you will find that winning combo in my experience simple is always better when you're faced with a problem it's much easier to just go with the simplest solution instead of trying to over complicate it and then finally really what this is all about is just making incremental improvements over time it's not about being perfect from the start i wasn't perfect from the start you won't be perfect from the start it's literally impossible it's more about focusing on having a solid foundation and then building and improving on it over time it's hard for us to conceptualize this because it's hard for us to see these daily changes on a day-to-day basis but over the course of a couple months to a year you will be amazed at just how much progress you can make if every day you were just getting one percent better y'all i hope this video was valuable to you i put an absolutely immense amount of work into this this took me like three days to record and like even way longer for me to put the entire outline together and put all this information into one place for you if you're still watching if you enjoyed this please like this video comment share it with someone that you know help us get this out there because i really spent so much time on this video it would be a real shame for this not to get out there into the youtube algorithm and actually start helping people it's also free so it helps me out i really appreciate it thanks for watching folks and i will see you in the next one you

Channel: Nate Schmidt

Views: 61,604

Keywords: shopify, dropshipping, shopify dropshipping, ecommerce, ecom, shopify2019, dropshipping 2019, Nate Schmidt, shopify winning products, product research, shopify store, shopify dropshipping strategy, Facebook ads, dropshipping tutorial, one product Shopify dropshipping, Shopify training, How To Create Dropshipping Facebook Ads, online business, mindset, make money online, how to make money online, best dropshipping guru, how to start dropshipping, aliexpress, oberlo

Id: 8bpZd5fghhM

Length: 66min 7sec (3967 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020