Right off the high dive

[KnottedUp]

I have no business or sales experience so this should be interesting. The only way to gain experience is to do it. So here I go.

This first post will serve as a mile marker for where I'm at now and what I've decided to start. This thread will allow me to look back and review what I was thinking/doing at a particular time during this adventure. I will post updates on a weekly basis with actions that I have taken. No talk of what I'm going to do past this post.

I read through hundreds of threads and was able to narrow down the direction I want to take. I've decided to start in e-commerce. From the various threads I read, it seems that starting on Amazon to get the ball rolling is still considered to be the preferred choice. Then start your own website and work on getting traffic directed to it.

I thought about where I want to be in 5 years and then wrote a plan working back from that point. I know plans change, but it gives me a road map to begin on. I read several times that the path people started out on is not the path they ended up on. But they wouldn't have found the path if they had never started.

At first I will be taking from this forum more than I am able to give. Once I start learning and gain experience, I hope to be able to offer value to other members.

I also hope to look back and think: "Could you have been that dumb?". "Did you really think that was going to work that way?". "Wow! That was a horrible decision!". "You missed that opportunity?". If I look back and ask those type of questions that will mean I have really made progress in my life/business knowledge.

The main thing that I want to be able to look back and say is "I'm proud of you!"

 

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[KnottedUp]

Time for a long overdue update on my progress. I had intended on providing updates on a weekly basis. After thinking about it, I realized that weekly updates wouldn’t provide much value since the steps for importing a product are listed all over the forum and have been covered in great detail.


I followed biophase’s method of finding low competition products to improve upon because it fit the lifestyle I want to pursue. You have to understand that doing it this way is a long term play and can take a while to get going. I started researching products in January and didn’t get my first shipment into Amazon until late June.


I know people like to see real numbers so here are my results for the first full month (July) of sales:

Total Revenue - $1749.75

Total Expenses - $1376.48

Net Profit - $373.27

Margin - 21%


I priced the items lower than the competition and turned on PPC ads right from the start with no reviews. The product started selling faster than I would have time to get more units produced, so I raised the price and lowered PPC bids to slow down sales. The first order was shipped by air courier which really eats into the margins. Once I start shipping via sea freight and raise the price to where it should be I can really improve the margins on this product.


When this product gets going it should be easily in the range of 500 -1500 dollars per month. Like Kenric says, that may not be life changing for most people but you have to remember that this is one product. Think about the long game when you have 10, 20, 50, or more products each doing $500+ a month. And that’s what keeps the competition low on these products because most people want to go straight to making $10,000.00 per month on a single product.


Like I mentioned at the beginning of the post there isn’t much I can add to the importing process that hasn’t already been covered in numerous threads. This first round of importing went pretty smooth so I don’t have any horror stories to tell at this time.


One piece of advice I will leave you with is about domain names. If you search for a domain name that you may have interest in using and it is available, buy it immediately! I spent hours with a thesaurus coming up with domain name and couldn’t believe it was still available after checking on GoDaddy. I didn’t purchase it right then and when I went back to get it someone else had just purchased it minutes after the initial search I had performed. According to Google this a practice known as domain name front running.


I just want to say that this forum is life changing if you use the information and take action on it.