How much better would you sleep at night with a business that make you $120 000/month? beardbrand.com is a successful e-commerce store that grow their website from 0$ to 120 000$/month in less than a year. Today we will go over everything you need to know to create your very own e-commerce store and make it successful. You will learn:
- All the step you need to create your brand new e-commerce
- How to get your product idea manufactured
- How to generate traffic to your online store
How to evaluate market fit for your product
First, find out if your e-commerce idea will sell. Is there enough people looking for what you offer to sustain your business. You want to keep profiting from your e-commerce for many years to come so make sure that what you choose is in an upward trend and has enough potential customer.
Listen to what people say
Put your ear to the ground and listen. Go on forums, groups and social media pages and listen to people comments. Are people saying things like: “where did you find this?” or “I have been looking everywhere but never can find this” or “where can I buy X item” If you hear any of this, you might have just found a market that is under serve. This is exactly what you are looking for.
The more specific and niche you go the better it is usually. Take beard brand for example. http://www.beardbrand.com/ They are in a very niche market, the beard grooming product for men. His store has been growing very fast thanks to is social presence on youtube and facebook. He is now grossing over $120 000/month.
Once you know what you want to offer, you need to do some keyword research to make sure that enough people are looking for your product.
To find this out I use those 4 tools
- Keyword planner
- ubersuggest.org
- google.com
- market samurai (free trial)
Method 1 (using tool 1, 2 and 3)
I usually start out with keyword planner. I will have a few ideas and I will type them in to find out right away if my keywords are getting any searches. In the following chart, you can see the popularity of the word “selfiesitck”. It is trending quite a lot on google so it looks like a good keyword to start with.
Once I have a few good keywords I start digging deeper. I go on Google.com and type those keyowrd in to see what google auto-suggest will give me. I put myself in the shoes of someone looking for my product and ask myself what would i type in the search box? things like “selfiestick review” “where to buy a selfiestick” etc… Google will auto-complete with words that people search often.
Now that we have a few solid keywords I go on ubersuggest.org It’s a free tool that allows you to enter a keyword and it will returns hundreds of long tail keywords suggestion. Ubersuggest is a really great tool for keyword research and its free. So I take the list that Ubersuggest give me and put it into keyword planner to see how many searches they are having. You can enter all the keywords and put them into the keyword planner and see which one is generating more traffic.
Method 2 (using Market Samurai)
Now you can do all the above step manually or you can just use my favorite tool when it comes to keywords research. I love using market samurai when doing keyword research. I use it for product idea and for all my blog post. It shave hours of my keyword research. It will save all your keywords for you in different campaign so you can access them anytime. It is one of the only piece of software that i keep using again and again so it is worth the investement. You can download market samurai for free here
Creating your online Store
- Its easy to use
- No technical skills needed
- Look like a professional e-commerce out of the box
- Always up to date
- Customer support available
- Let you focus on your business instead of technicality of the website
- Not free
- Cannot be customize as much as wordpress
- Most good plugins are not free
How to get started with Shopify?
I personaly use shopify on my snapcane.com website. It is really easy to get started and i had a professional looking website instantly after registering. You can grab your free trial here and click on get started.
How to have your product manufacture
The 3 Alibaba rules
Alibaba sell anything, you can purchase anything from golf ball to powder juice. You can get anything custom made as long as you have the blue print. To choose a good manufacturer there is a few things to look for.
- Always use the Alibaba escrow service
- Only deal with sellers that have good communication
- Contact a lot of sellers to find a good one
Rule #1 Always use Alibaba escrow service.
Some sellers will ask you to pay them before delivery directly via paypal or wire money via western union. DO NOT send any money unless it is with the escrow service of Alibaba. You can stay away from that rule if you dealt with the seller before but if it involve big amount of money, always use escrow. It is worth paying the small fee than losing all your money.
With the escrow you are 100% protected. Once you have placed your order with the seller, you will make the payment to Alibaba escrow service. Alibaba will charge a small fee, hold the money and act as a third party. When the goods are deliver to your warehouse or wherever you receive them and you have verify the quality of the delivery, Alibaba will release the fund to the seller. DO NOT go without it.
Where to stock your product
Getting people to your store
- paids ads
- social media
- cold calling on business
- passing flyers
- friends, family and word of mouth
- door to door
Hi Alex, your a great inspiration as I’m looking to follow in your footsteps.
I’d like to know why did you keep your e-commerce and blog separate? wouldn’t it be more practical to merge both blog and e-commerce?
thanks,
Stephen
Hi Stephen
That’s an option for sure! But your blog needs to be in line with your product. If they are, you can keep them together for sure.