Starting your dropshipping store with a $200 budget (a beginner’s guide)
Starting your own business can be a daunting task. Especially if this is your first business. A good business that to start when you are tight on funds is dropshipping, a lucrative sector of the eCommerce market, the dropshipping industry makes a collective $102.2 billion a year, and the good news for you is that you don’t need a big investment or starting amount to enter into the industry successfully. With a starting investment of just $200 and the right advice, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a dropshipping mogul yourself. So here’s a guide on how to start your own dropshipping company on a $200 budget:
Step 1 — patience.
The first step to starting a successful dropshipping is patience! Don’t start your dropshipping business with the naïve idea that you’ll be turning over a million in profit in your first month of running a dropshipping store. In the business of dropshipping the tortoise wins the race all the time! Often the people who expect to make a million in their first month, are too hasty to spend money on ads, too hasty to spend money on staff, and wind up losing money. The ones who start out small, and build up slowly are the ones who end up making the most in the long run.
Cost so far = $0
Step 2 — build.
Develop a quality store. As the majority of your time and effort as a newcomer to the dropshipping scene will be spent mostly on marketing, advertising, and managing your online presence rather than any actually managing sales in the beginning, it is important to sustain and maintain this online presence by developing and working on the website from which you hope to make the bulk of your income as a professional drop shipper. You can build a website for FREE on Shopify and only pay once you have made 50 sales. But no matter the tools offered to make the building of your site all the easier, it helps to always consult and learn from the experts in the dropshipping field and learn from people who have been doing it for longer than you have, and who are making a killing while doing so too! That’s why it helps to go and look over the design and layout of stores that are already killing it in the dropshipping industry, check out the winning landing pages that we upload with all our winning products, that will be a good place to start your research.
There is a ton of tools out there where you can build your brand for free, like free stock images, free logo creators, etc. No need to spend money during the building stage.
Cost so far= $0
Step 3 — Product Research.
Use a professional product research service, there is honestly no greater resource to any would-be drop shipper than this. Product Mafia is generally recognized as the best in the industry. By using Product Mafia from now on will you get a general idea of what is good as far as the product is concerned, but you can also be assured of the popularity of products on offer as the product, as all are proven winners, along with winning Facebook ad, trusted suppliers, winning landing pages, etc, for each product. We make your journey to dropshipping godhood all the easier by doing the research and offering the products you can sell, for you, this gives you more time to focus on your online presence and organically grow your social media ads and following, by helping you decide what niche market within the dropshipping industry to cater to based on region and which products to sell. There are two levels, free and PRO. If you are not making money yet, there is no need to upgrade to pro. In fact, if you are a beginner, still learning the ropes, chances are you will not see a good return on investment from your PRO membership.
Cost so far = $0
Step 4 — Marketing.
And last but not least is marketing. As dropshipping is an eCommerce business which means it lives and dies on the internet, marketing is vital to the success and survival of your business online, and since you can’t be expected to buy hours of ad space or spend big on ad revenue on a $200 budget, social media is the best avenue to get the hype around your business and products on a tight budget. There are a number of channels available to you online through which you can connect your intended target audience to the intended product, as the modern era offers a plethora of social media platforms from which you can promote your business and sell your wears. But in the interest of objectivity, I’d suggest using Facebook as your primary social media platform for the level of engagement that often translates into solid membership and sales for those in the dropshipping industry. This is not to say you must use Facebook as your primary marketing vehicle, but as an industry expert, it will bring you the greatest results. There are many ways to promote your website for free, but they are time-consuming and hard to scale, for dropshipping Facebook ads is by far the most effective. Although Facebook advertising is technically a ‘cost’, try to think of it more as an investment. If you spend $100 on Facebook ads, and you make $200 in profit, are you really spending money? There should be no fixed budget at this stage, your only goals should be based on
profitability. Think about it, if you have a money machine, and every $1 you put in, you get $2 back out, how much would you put into the machine? As much as possible right?
If you have a $200 budget, this is where your $200 will be spent, so long as you have done everything right, you should have made more than $200 in profit. And you can start the whole process again.
Cost so far = $200
Summary
A dropshipping business is one of the cheapest and most profitable businesses anyone can start, but it does require hard work, time, and patience, like any other business. Fortunately, one thing that dropshipping does not need high start-up costs. In fact, the low the start-up costs, the faster you will reach profitability (not vise versa)/
Final Note
To aid in the marketability of your products and business at large for a possible viral marketing campaign, it helps to know which products are trending, something you can easily learn from industry experts. And there is no greater expert for this end than Product Mafia as we use the highest caliber of data research and actual Facebook marketing campaigns for each product to help you build your niche in the industry and chose the most popular products to sell through your business in that niche. Each product on Product Mafia has with it an accompanying social media stat sheet to help you chose products the most likely to go viral on social media, profit price projections to be made on the product, plugins to add the product to your WooCommerce and Shopify sites, along with a list of suitable Instagram influencers to promote your product. All designed to make your social media marketing experience all the more seamless and successful which is why it is of the utmost importance you consult and utilize services such as Product Mafia should you wish to have any hope of making it past the marketing phase of your dropshipping business.
So there it is all the essential components to starting your own successful dropshipping shop with links to industry experts to guide you along the way, so what are you waiting for, get yourself out of the humdrum existence of a mediocre life and into the exclusive club of dropshipping moguls and millionaires.
