A Dropship Journey - Multiple methods

Hey guys!

I'm starting some projects and wanted to share it + keep tab on it.

This is day 7 since I started.

What I did:

• Set up a website in the Toy Niche on Shopify. Dropshipping from Aliexpress. Bought logo from Fiverr. Bought Long Tail Pro (60$) Took me 50 hours.
• Advertising on Facebook following Frank's method.
• bought 25$ in Google Ads to get Shopify's 100$ coupons.
• Set up an Ebay Seller account. 200 products listed from Amazon. Profit margin: 30%, use PriceYak to do the dirty job. Using great keywords thanks to Drop Kingz. Took me 15 hours.
• Set up some 2.0s blogs (5) with one article and letting them age. Took me 2 hours.
• Bought some articles for the blogs 2.0s for maybe future Amazon affiliates about my niche.

The results (day 7)

• Website: One sale from natural search. Others (3) are from Facebook ads. Failed on one order and actually lost money lol
• Facebook Ads: No lucky ad that has low CPC yet.
• Blog 2.0s: No views. I guess they need to age etc?
• Ebay: Gold mine

What I need to do:

• Optimise website's SEO
• Bigger listing in ebay (need less limits)
• Optimise website's look
• Create an ebay shop for my website, maybe it could bring some moneez.
• Actually study for my finals

Numbers:

• Ebay: 27 sales, 182$ profit, Priceyak (-60$) = +122$
• Facebook ads: 60$ spent, 20$ made back in sales = - 40$
• Website: 1 sale, 15$ profit, Shopify (-30$), Aliplugging (-30$), others pluggins (-25$), Long Tail Pro + Platinum (60$) = -140$
• Blogs 2.0s: 3 articles (-21$)
• Total: -79$

Thoughts:

• I like how ebay sales supports my tries.
• I'm doubting my niche

If you feel like you can help, oh well, go ahead! I need it.

Good luck mate

Good Luck with your journey OP !

your plan looks solid, also eBay runs well, so im looking forward to see more

Nice journey.

So you created a shopify store and an Affiliate store with aliplugin? using the same toy niche?

Thank you guys!

ratonjd said:

Nice journey.

So you created a shopify store and an Affiliate store with aliplugin? using the same toy niche?

Click to expand...

Yes, my Shopify store runs the Affiliate plugging. When I sell, I get the 100% markeup price AND the affiliate revenues. I basically go trought the orders myself with my own affiliate links. So I get 100% (2x price) + 8% (affiliate bonus) + shipping fees.

Great growth so far!

Day 10 !

Finals almost over and I will be able to work more pretty soon.

Website:

• Contacted every single seller from every product I listed (500) asking them for a watermark free and white background picture + asking them not to add invoices, etc.
• Listed more products
• Updated SEO internally for half of my products
• Contacted blog owners for external SEO links (7) by spying on my competitors using SEMrush and MOZ Open Site Explorer.
• Made my website look nicer
• Searched for more keywords and made a list
• Trying to update my social Facebook as much as I can
• Put 3 3000 words high quality articles in the blog
• Got a 42$ sale but the guy shortly contacted me after to get a refund (?) didn't want to say why. I just gave it to him
• Got 1 keyword ranking #31 lolz, others not updated yet and/or not ranked yet

Affiliate Blog:

• Wrote 2 more articles targeting 3 keywords each
• Made it look nicer

Facebook:

• What a disappointment. Lost 100$ total and no results. Plus Facebook just ate 5$ a reach because they went crazy. Meh!

Ebay:

• Still making good sales
• Got my first negative review because I had to refund the guy for out of stock

What I need to do:

• Create Site Map for website
• Let the blogs age
• Let the affiliate blog age (I think?)
• Add more products
• Update my products with the upcoming good images
• Do more external SEO (what a pain in the ass)
• Order more articles for both of my projects
• Read more and more and more and more and more and more...

Thoughts:

• I realized I bought Black Hat SEO and that it's bad and that I'll probably get penalized
• Facebook can fcuk off!
• No more hiring people with bad english on Upwork

justaregulardude said:

Great growth so far!

Click to expand...

Thank you I can't wait to make some sells on the website though. Since it's the first time I touch websites + SEO this is kind of stressing me out (what if...? what should I do about...? etc!)

I hope I'm doing at least decent - that would be perfect!

nice journey. how many ebay listings do you have up?

ZimGorilla said:

nice journey. how many ebay listings do you have up?

Click to expand...

Hey thanks I hope I'll be able to ditch my psych major (even if it's pretty much done lol) and work for myself instead.

I have 160 ebay listings because I unfortunately can not list more atm. My limit is at 200, usually at 100 but I called them last month to temporarily get it up. Can't wait for it to go up, I'd like to have + / - 1000

I've played the drop shipping game before. The best advice i have for you is to only drop ship until you get to a point where you know what products are hot and which ones you know you can sell and order them and keep your own inventory, i had a long dark road with drop-shipping, unhappy customers because of shipping times, poor quality products ( you can avoid this by getting samples of products before you sell them) anyhow i lost a lot of money in returns because my drop shippers were in china haha so i either paid for the shipping back to china or the junk product in my basement.
Best of luck to you

It's been a while since I updated this. I've been really busy!

So I decided to drop the blogs I was doing. I also decided to let my ecommerce website in stand-by for a few months because of this: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/806365-what-about-copyrights.html (potential copyrights issues I don't know of and until I can hire a lawyer to tell me it'll stay unused)

Since I don't want to work for nothing (especially not using black hat methods...), I went ahead and created another blog on a well-researched niche.

Niche is moderately competitive and has millions of searches every month. I have listed thousands and thousands keywords I can rank, anywhere from 200 to 50 000 searches and from easy to moderate difficulty.

I ordered some articles (maybe for 40$ total - I lost count...) and wrote the rest of it myself. In 6 days, I've published 32 000 words split in articles from 500 to 3000 words. (Yes, it was a pain in the ass - I hope it ranks)

I've also done a lot of internal SEO for each of my pages, built some backlinks (blogs, forums, websites from friends and my freelancers). I purchased a theme and some plugins for a total of maybe 150$ and hosting at 90$. I lost count of this too.

I don't have any results yet for the blog but it is not surprising as it's only 6 days old. I did get some traffic but I got an hacking bot attack or whatever you call them so it's a bit confusing in Google Analytics ATM.

Talking about hack attempts, it took me a full day to stop the fuckers. Nothing lost though. Pfew!

I've made some more sales with my ebay - I'm up to 324.76$ in profit.

The stopped ewebsite has made 64.36$ profits in sales since the beginning.

Overall, my losses should be in the 400s $ (3xx - 700 $) (because of Facebook and the monthly fees of my softwares). I lost count because I lost some data in my Excel files. I don't really mind as I learned a lot of things in this short process. I do hope I will make some profits from the blog pretty soon so I can order more articles. I've found someone who writes them for me at 5$/4000 words and that is high quality. I stopped myself from spending any more because I'm in deficit otherwise this guy would be flooded.

IF my noobie skills are not wrong and my on-page SEO doesn't totally suck, I think I could reach 200$/day in two years. I'm sticking to this blog atm. I've also got another niche that is smaller but easier if this one doesn't give me results in 2 months.

Except typing to infinity and adding the KWs there's nothing much else to do except trying around for links and wait.

Oh wait, yes there is! Read Hekke's and Argan's threads, salivating.

Hey Op,
Great journey, any updates this year ?

Wow, you've done a lot in just a few days.Well done.
Although you made some mistakes but I think the lessons is just valuable.
I'm failing as fast as I can as well (within limits of course).

Got really inspired by your thread and placed some orders on odesk to get some writing done.

Where did you find your writer?
Look forward to read more about your journey.

1. I would like to dropshiping indian women clothing business to srilanka for my niche : Ladies Fashion In Srilanka. Is there anyone can help me?

2. What is Advertising on Facebook following Frank's method?

Thanks

Its good that you got yourself a legit method, good luck and keep working at that pace, it will definitely pay off.

Any update this year? Since we're bumping old threads.

Good luck

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How's the journey so far OP? Any update?