If you’re thinking of starting a drop-shipping business or you have already started one but have been struggling to find success in it, you’ve come across the right article. Drop-shipping is hard. Way harder than people make it seem like it is on social media platforms and it’s something that I’ve been pursuing for about three years now. It took me two years to finally launch a drop-shipping store that brought me a positive profit margin. And I ended up walking away with just $300 on my first successful store. But over these past three years I’ve learned a lot. Too much to sum into just one article. But I’ve noticed that there are 4 key things that you need to do in order to finally get on the right track. I personally think these 4 things are crucial and they all must be done at the same time. Any time I have lost sight of just 1 of these things, my entire business has failed. So without further ado, let’s talk about it.
#1: Build Impulse Control/Consistency:
We’re going to start off with this because I personally think this is the most important one. What’s impulse control you might ask? In short, it’s the ability to stay focused on one task/venture for a long period of time. Seems easy right? Well in my experience, not quite. And if you’re reading this article, you’re probably a lot like me. You have that entrepreneur mindset, and you’re constantly getting distracted by different business ventures at a time. Anytime you see someone on social media post about the “brand new self-employed business model” that will allow you to “never work a 9-5 job again” you want to jump on it. I do too. It’s natural, we feel like we’re missing out. But I’m telling you, things finally changed for me when I forced myself to work on drop-shipping and only drop-shipping everyday for just three months. Yes, every single day. This is what made me go from losing hundreds of dollars every time I tried opening a new store to finally making my first $300 profit. And when you take a step back and look at it, it makes complete sense. Every single day you are staying consistent, improving, and learning what works and what doesn’t. If you do this, you’ll almost have to find success eventually. Do you think when Steve Jobs was spending hours every single day creating Apple he was getting side-tracked by someone telling him about how he can “make thousands of dollars doing a door-to-door pressure washing service for people’s driveways?” No shot. I know it’s hard to stick to one thing, but find a way to force yourself if you have to. And this applies to any business you want to do, not just drop-shipping.
#2: Move With Speed
Now when I say this, I’m not saying rush everything and produce poor quality. But when it comes to drop-shipping, time is definitely not on your side. Drop-shipping is a very popular business mode, especially with it gaining so much attention on social media now and days. So if you feel like you have found a new product that is unsaturated and has potential to do well, chances are, if you wait too long to start working on it, someone else will do it before you. You must test new products rapidly and consistently until you find a good one. Don’t take days off if you don’t have to and start that new store ASAP. Also, the quicker you do things, the quicker you will master each part of the business.
#3: Stay Up To Date
What works for drop-shipping is constantly changing. For a while it was Facebook Ads that were making people millions, and then before I even realized it, people were making millions off of organic Tik Tok ads. For several months, I was so focused on trying to create good Facebook Ad campaigns, not even realizing that Facebook Ads weren’t really working for anyone anymore. And when the next big social platform comes out, there is no doubt that there will be a new method for promoting products. The worst part about these changes is that no-one really tells you the new thing that is working until after that new method has become saturated. It makes sense, the people that discover these methods want to keep the money to themselves for as long as possible. So for this one, you’re going to need to do most of the work yourself. Don’t expect your favorite drop-shipping youtuber guru to tell you what is working for them. What I try to do is always stay up to date on new social platforms or new features on current ones. I also try to search common drop-shipping products on all sorts of platforms to see what people are doing differently. Sometimes it’s not a new advertising platform, but just a new style of video that people are creating to promote their products. The changes can be small and subtle so you have to keep a good eye out for them.
#4: Build Or Find An Audience
This is by far the hardest one of them all but it is crucial. What do I mean by audience? When I say this I’m pretty much just talking about any big population of people viewing your content or ads. This can be views on a viral tik tok video, a large number of followers on any of your social media accounts, or even a large amount of followers on someone else’s influencer account. If you couldn’t tell already, the money is always where the audience is at. Social media influencers make tons of money because they have an audience. Famous clothing brands make money because they have an audience of customers. Anywhere you can build or find an audience, you have the opportunity to make money. You might have to do this by building your own social account with a lot of followers, paying for a tik tok ad to go viral, reaching out to someone with a lot of followers to promote your product, etc. It could be anything. It is very difficult, but once you have this you are golden. And when you finally have that audience, other monetizing opportunities other than drop-shipping show up knocking on your door as well.
I hope this article helped. Like I said before, there is much more to drop-shipping that I can’t fit into one article, but you will be able to find that information on other articles at our site. But if you constantly do all 4 of these things at the same time, you’ll drastically increase your chances for success.