[eCommerce] My journey to financial freedom at 18

[LielS]

Hi guys. I'm Liel, 18 years old from Israel.
Don't wanna ramble too much here as you got the idea of the thread in the title.
I've been 'dreaming' about making money from dropshipping for about two years now, throughout those years only made literally "beer money". This thread is my way of committing to my dream of making stable income every day on the internet. I certainly do not want to go through the 'expected' route and have to sit in a office from 9-5 every day - It's not for me and it's not what I'm here for.

Anyways, I have big dreams and goals - and this is one of them. I hope to give you readers as much value as I can while I go through this journey, and hope to get some encouragement and criticism from you guys.

Starting Point:
Currently, I have 2 stores. 1 is almost ready and the 2nd one I'm not going to touch until I get stable income from the 1st store hopefully.
Store 1 - has an Instagram page with 5k followers, although the engagement kind of sucks because I wasn't consistent. I'll do my best to improve that, as I have basic IG knowledge and already made some money with it. Currently growing using follow\unfollow.

• Marketing Store 1: The plan is to start with Instagram Influencers because I don't have that much of a budget. I learned how to carefully pick influencers, negotiate prices on shoutouts etc. Basically I want to get started with influencers, hopefully earn some income through that - while I'm doing that I will learn facebook ads, and invest all profits in facebook ads. For now that's the plan.

Store 2 - has an Instagram page with 2k followers, but same thing as the 1st store I wasn't consistent enough with it so the engagement sucks. Currently I'm 'kind-of' active on the IG page but as I said, I'm not going to put any effort in Store 2 until I get Store 1 going with some income.

Shopify 50 order trial
The reason I'm able to have a few stores without worrying about losing money of paying for subscription is there's a 50 order trial on Shopify. Basically you don't pay until you get 50 orders. Just enter here - app.shopify.com/services/partners/signup/developer (not affiliate - trying to drop some value) sign up as a developer and then create a developer store. You can add a domain, apps (not paid though) and everything else.

Anyways, Welcome to my journey, thanks for reading. Going to work on Store 1 now

 

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[lejus]

Keep going, man and good luck. I will be interested to see your progress and updates.

Did you consider using WordPresss instead of Shopify since it's free? Especially as you make beer money, it might make a difference, I mean just Shopify fee is a lot more beer

 

[Jeff Noel]

Do you plan on establishing the store as a brand, or you're just going in for a quick sale but no fidelity from your the customers ?

If you plan on building a brand, perhaps you should work on long term relationship with people (I'm not sure follow/unfollow is the way to go).

Focus on store 1 exclusively. You'll have plenty of time to work on another project once this one thrives.

Just my $0.02 !

 

[LielS]

Keep going, man and good luck. I will be interested to see your progress and updates.

Did you consider using WordPresss instead of Shopify since it's free? Especially as you make beer money, it might make a difference, I mean just Shopify fee is a lot more beer

Thanks a lot mate!
I wanted to use WordPress for a different project and it's really cool, but for eCommerce I rather go with shopify because It's much more simple. But in my opinion when I'll have more knowledge, income and hopefully establish a brand I think I'll move to wordpress as it has much more options to 'design' the store as you wish.

Do you plan on establishing the store as a brand, or you're just going in for a quick sale but no fidelity from your the customers ?

If you plan on building a brand, perhaps you should work on long term relationship with people (I'm not sure follow/unfollow is the way to go).

Focus on store 1 exclusively. You'll have plenty of time to work on another project once this one thrives.

Just my $0.02 !

*Store 1 I plan on establishing as a brand, although I will be sending branded products from AliExpress at the start so I don't know how much of a problem that's going to be in terms of getting customers to return.. I know I need to work on long term relationship with people but I don't really know how! I try to interact, reply and initiate conversations with followers etc but I don't think it's enough. Do you have any other ways of growing quality followers instead of follow\unfollow? Thanks

*Store 2 is based on a passionate niche (which I'm very passionate about too) so I will try to grow\create a community of people who are passionate with that niche, and make money by selling accessories, clothes etc of that specific niche.

Thanks a lot for your replies!

 

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[JB HedRooD]

I planned to also making money with shopify. But now i work to obtain my driving license first.(I'm living in France and it's very expensive cost me 60$ per hour for a driving lesson).

Good luck with your purpose. Don't lose faith, keep going and remember that invest your money in something that would give you money later is better than invest your money on something that wouldn't give you money later.

 

[Jeff Noel]

Do you have any other ways of growing quality followers instead of follow\unfollow?

When you say order branded items from AliExpress, do you mean pre-branded items, or custom branded ones fitting to your brand ? If it's the latter, it's all a matter of simplicity and following your own story:
Establish a brand story and a persona.

• Where is your brand coming from ? (Think "Colorado spring water, fresh from the mountains" instead of "Toronto bottled water" which sounds unappealing). People need to believe in your story... and the right people.
• Persona: Who are you selling to ? What is your market ? Is it the young men between 18-25 years old that enjoy speed, firearms and video games ? Women from 25-40 that love dogs ? Your persona will define how you approach your market and how you sell your brand. For the first group of people, you could advertize on Twitch, using video ads with flashy explosions (Fiverr is your friend). For the latter, colorful static ads in fashion magazines with pictures of dogs and your item in it.

I just want to give you an idea of what you can do, there's a ton of different things, but don't try to put ads for 60+ years old in the virtual reality market, it might work better in the newspaper.

You're already setup on Shopify. Get a logo (or just use a decent font that fits your brand), put that on a Facebook page, post your own, good pictures of the product (it works way better than the stock photos everybody sees) and talk about your brand, your story and try to create interaction.

Nobody will answer at first, but if you keep going, people will chip in. Invite your friends and family to like that page and keep posting content.

 

[LielS]

When you say order branded items from AliExpress, do you mean pre-branded items, or custom branded ones fitting to your brand ? If it's the latter, it's all a matter of simplicity and following your own story:
Establish a brand story and a persona.

• Where is your brand coming from ? (Think "Colorado spring water, fresh from the mountains" instead of "Toronto bottled water" which sounds unappealing). People need to believe in your story... and the right people.
• Persona: Who are you selling to ? What is your market ? Is it the young men between 18-25 years old that enjoy speed, firearms and video games ? Women from 25-40 that love dogs ? Your persona will define how you approach your market and how you sell your brand. For the first group of people, you could advertize on Twitch, using video ads with flashy explosions (Fiverr is your friend). For the latter, colorful static ads in fashion magazines with pictures of dogs and your item in it.

I just want to give you an idea of what you can do, there's a ton of different things, but don't try to put ads for 60+ years old in the virtual reality market, it might work better in the newspaper.

You're already setup on Shopify. Get a logo (or just use a decent font that fits your brand), put that on a Facebook page, post your own, good pictures of the product (it works way better than the stock photos everybody sees) and talk about your brand, your story and try to create interaction.

Nobody will answer at first, but if you keep going, people will chip in. Invite your friends and family to like that page and keep posting content.

Thanks a lot mate! definitely helped there. What I meant saying by branded products is that I dropship products from AliExpress and my suppliers are brands there that ship their products with their brand packaging and everything, so that's why it's a problem. If you want to understand the situation better I'll be happy to show you exactly what I mean, just pm me

=============================
5.2.2019
Sup guys, had a really busy \ productive day today. Worked for 8 hours (in a gas station) to save up money, went to see my dad to catch up, went to a real estate conference as I'm starting to be a realtor in March-April at the age of 18, helped at a basketball game and I could even squeeze some work on Store 1. Woke up at 5am, It's 11:21pm now and not even a minute was wasted today, which is a really good achievement for me.

• In hopes of recovering my engagement, I started liking 1-2 photos of all of my followers to 'let them know I'm alive' as Instagram algorithm is probably not on my side now. (obviously a bot does this automatically, no manual work here)

• I started importing reviews from AliExpress but ran into a few obstacles as I'm trying to find an app with a free plan. Thing is this app could let me import reviews for only 10 products, meaning that all of the other products will be left with no reviews which I guess isn't a good indicator for the visitors, so I'm kind of in a dilemma right there.

• I searched for products for a new category on AliExpress but couldn't find anything worthy. Will search tomorrow when I'm on a clear head, super tired right now.

• Tweaked a little more stuff like variation names, deleted logos from pictures etc

- What else I need to do on Store 1:
*See if I can find any good free apps that will allow me to add product recommendations on the product pages (for example "More products like this")
*Add more products in all categories so I have more variety on the site
*Use another IG page I own in the same niche with 4.2k followers to my advantage, need to schedule posts and find targets for follow\unfollow

That's it for today. I'm in it guys. waiting to try my luck with IG influencers in 5 days!

 

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[William Liedner]

I started importing reviews from AliExpress but ran into a few obstacles as I'm trying to find an app with a free plan. Thing is this app could let me import reviews for only 10 products, meaning that all of the other products will be left with no reviews which I guess isn't a good indicator for the visitors, so I'm kind of in a dilemma right there.

Test Ryviu: Pricing – Product Reviews Platform – Ryviu | 50 products free - otherwise just 10USD for more than 50

I also recommend DotCom Secrets, by Russel Brunson. He talks a lot about finding the right Dream Client, creating value in of what he calls a ''Value Ladder'', Smart Email Marketing Campaigns and much more!

Of course, he'll talk quite much about funnels and Clickfunnels. If that's not for you, skip those pages. Focus on the things you find relevant.

Best of luck!

 

[LielS]

Test Ryviu: Pricing – Product Reviews Platform – Ryviu | 50 products free - otherwise just 10USD for more than 50

I also recommend DotCom Secrets, by Russel Brunson. He talks a lot about finding the right Dream Client, creating value in of what he calls a ''Value Ladder'', Smart Email Marketing Campaigns and much more!

Of course, he'll talk quite much about funnels and Clickfunnels. If that's not for you, skip those pages. Focus on the things you find relevant.

Best of luck!

I can't thank you enough for the recommendation of the Ryviu app. It's all I needed and it's free lol. No watermarks, I easily import reviews from aliexpress and can change the images and the actual reviews. Thanks a lot!!

==================================
6.2
Was not a productive day for me. Because I worked pretty hard yesterday and was busy I let myself sleep as long as I wanted without an alarm, woke up at 10:30 and the day went by really unproductively. I did work for 3 hours from 6-9pm on the shopify store, and went to the gym. Going to work at a night shift right now at the gas station to save some money.

What I did today in terms of shopify is ;
* Someone from a discord group said that he is planning on having some kind of mentorship, 1 on 1 coaching etc. This dude helped me and gave me value in the past so I thought why not, he's going to charge 50$ for a month. If I do invest this I hope he will give me value and help me make some money

* I added reviews to ALL of my products. Checked that the reviews have good language, quality photos and everything. I think that will add a lot of trust for customers. hopefully I'll get some sales on my first shoutout lol. Just to get the ball rolling

That's it for today, I won't make that alarm mistake again. I feel very inspired and motivated but I know this won't last long, so I just gotta remind myself my purpose and stay discplined.
thanks for reading

 

[LielS]

8.2.2019
I'm being consistent and I like it. I think I'll cut explaining what I did throughout the day cause I assume nobody gives a fck lol and get straight to the point of my goal and what I did to achieve it.

Today I allowed myself to focus on Instagram instead of working on the shopify store. Was actually really productive, worked for at-least 4 hours non stop. All I need is just good music in the background and I'm in the zone, love this feeling.

• I mentioned before that the engagement in the IG pages of Store 1 and Store 2 is shit. SO I tried to do something about it: a) Using a bot, I like 2-3 recent photos of every follower I have. That way I remind them that I exist, maybe influence the algorithm and then I will appear on their feed more often. I don't know how efficient it will be, but a bot does this so I don't care. b) I'm back to scheduling posts on the bot. Because I have a hard time being consistent with uploads when I'm doing it manually, I just schedule posts for the next week. All that left is to post some engaging stories and that's it.

• I set-up another niche Instagram page, but this one has nothing to do with either Store 1 or 2. It's just a store to open me up to more opportunities in the future. Scheduled posts, did hashtag research. I will set-up one more page tomorrow, in a niche that I'm actually passionate about. Once again, doesn't have anything to do with the other niches but I just like having doors open (or opening in the future) and I actually love those niches. (I didn't do any product research or niche research in my life, It's about what I like since I started. When I get the ball rolling and make some income I'll obviously carefully pick what niches I'm going into.)

• Did hashtag research for all 3 accounts. I think I was using hashtags the wrong way so I came up with 30 new ones which hopefully will increase engagement a little bit. Mistake I made was using too many BIG hashtags on my SMALL accounts. Therefore my posts just get lost in the hashtags in a matter of seconds and they (hashtags) don't help. I searched for small-medium hashtags that fit my pages in terms of size, but big enough to open my page up to new audiences that might be interested in my content. (My content = reposts from other niche pages)

That's it for today! I like those daily updates and hopefully I make big progress and can look back at this in 6 months and laugh.

 

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[LielS]

Didn't do much today, spent the day hanging out with my friends and family. At-least I went to the gym

• Tried searching for products for the new category but couldn't find quality enough products, now thinking about giving up on the extra category and just add more variety to the categories that are existing.

Not much for today but I feel like I'm making progress every day. In 2-3 days I get my salary so I need to think about which ads I'm going to post, which influencers I'm going to work with. That will take some time, so that's the goal for tomorrow - find influencers, think of ads, (anyone have any ideas for converting ads\sales? I thought of free+shipping but my main products are 30-45$ so that doesn't fit here. Maybe do like 15% sale or something?

By the way are there any people following this journey? Would like to know haha. holla at me !
Have a productive weekend everyone

 

[LielS]

9.2:
Hi guys, so today I got my salary and it’s time to work on marketing Store 1.
Didn’t have much time to work so what I did was:

• Look for influencers on Instagram, for every influencer I check the engagement, whether the comments are real and not from engagement groups/other big pages, likes etc.
• sent messages to those I found, asking for prices, where the audience is from, story views etc.
• started negotiating with a few influecers.

I did not find enough of them so I will repeat those steps for the next 2 days until I’m confident enough that I found the right one. I gotta be smart with my money since I don’t make a lot.

That’s it for today

 

[LielS]

I've been looking for influencers and negotiating with them all day. Also watched some shopify courses trying to maximize my knowledge before I start marketing Store 1.

for Store 2, after the hashtag research 2 of my last photos became viral and hit more than 1k likes (reminder- Store 2 has like 2.5k followers). Guess I got my research right haha

Throughout the day I've been asking for help on websites and groups etc. I've noticed people don't like helping others unless there's some money involved. (I'm talking about small advice, not mentorship or something like that which obviously is worth the money).
I can't wait to have enough knowledge and experience to help others and give them value. Whenever I have the knowledge I do my best to help the person in need of advice and commit to them, fck the money. I wanna do the same thing with shopify and ecommerce. I will succeed

 

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[LielS]

Failure 1\xx
I posted the shoutout - 300k page, average engagement, my ad fit the content and was not spammy. The amount of visitors I had from the ad, you could count on one hand. Spent 15$ on that. My mistake is that I compromised and rushed to quickly get a shoutout in.

And by the way, 10 minutes before the shoutout I find out the review app doesn't work anymore. Woke up, suddenly works again. something weird, but It's alright, I'll change it when I make money.

I'm not sure if I have any chances with such a saturated market, or that's just my mistake for using a fakey influencer. Would love to hear some ecommerce people on how they got started and what are your stories. thanks

 

[LielS]

Failure 2/xx
Posted another shoutout, this time a little different ad with a call to action, 15% engagement rate - no likes, no visitors. Something is weird here with all those influencers and I don’t know if it’s my fault!

I’m thinking of selling my store and starting with a different niche that is less saturated so I feel like I have a little chance. Any opinions from anyone reading this? Would love to get some guidance. THANKS!

 

[amp0193]

Failure 2/xx
Posted another shoutout, this time a little different ad with a call to action, 15% engagement rate - no likes, no visitors. Something is weird here with all those influencers and I don’t know if it’s my fault!

I’m thinking of selling my store and starting with a different niche that is less saturated so I feel like I have a little chance. Any opinions from anyone reading this? Would love to get some guidance. THANKS!

Are these niche pages, or individuals with "personal brands" and large followings?

 

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[LielS]

Are these niche pages, or individuals with "personal brands" and large followings?

They are niche pages. Do you think I should sell my store and start with a less saturated niche?

 

[amp0193]

They are niche pages. Do you think I should sell my store and start with a less saturated niche?

Sell your store that's making no sales? For what, tens of dollars?

There's no loyalty or social proof generated by running an ad on a niche page.

Get an actual real person to take a pic with one of your products, and share it with their 300k followers, and I guarantee that your results will be radically different.

 

[LielS]

Sell your store that's making no sales? For what, tens of dollars?

There's no loyalty or social proof generated by running an ad on a niche page.

Get an actual real person to take a pic with one of your products, and share it with their 300k followers, and I guarantee that your results will be radically different.

I understand. I realized I need to do things differently and put more thought into it, give real value to whoever is visiting my page or site.

So do you think I should keep going at it and don't give up despite my saturated market?

 

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[amp0193]

So do you think I should keep going at it and don't give up despite my saturated market?

First rule of business is that no one can tell you what to do.

Make your own decisions.

 

[LielS]

I have decided to try and sell Store 1, right now only listed it on exchange marketplace. If anyone knows more platforms for selling Shopify Store I’d really like to know!

Store 2- I’m still active on the social media page of it, the engagement has been crazy - 3k followers and getting more than 1k likes on my photos. It’s actually not really a store yet as I have not decided what products I want to sell (in the niche) but I’m focusing on building relationships with my audience and posting quality content, which is definitely something I didn’t focus on Store 1.

In a month from now I am starting to be a realtor, so I won’t have much time to develop everything. Hopefully I will be able to get in at least an hour of work every day.

 

[LielS]

Sold store 1 for 180$. PayPal limited an account that my bank is linked to but I can't seem to remove the limits, going to call them tomorrow.

I've been working on a store with a friend, well call it Store 3. It's going to be marketed to our country only and not worldwide, we just finished everything and bought the domain - tomorrow I'm starting to post on social medias and promote the product. Hopefully we get good profits!

Store 2 Instagram page is going crazy, I'm getting 50k views on videos, 10k+ likes on photos and I'm growing FAST! Last monday I was at 4.3k followers, now this Sunday I'm at 6.4k followers. I feel like I'm missing out on not promoting a store or even having a bio link, so I'm going to start building it (I already have the basis to the store, but have no idea what products to focus on since there's A LOT you can sell in that niche - but I don't want to have too much variety so people won't know what to choose and then not buy at all. So I'm thinking about it now.

I'm still active, just won't update daily because It's not as interesting. I'm working at a gas station and learning real estate right now, starting my realtor course in a week. I'll do shopify on the side - but I'll think about it 24\7. It's my dream, to be a digital entrepreneur - and I'll f**ing make it.

 

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[LielS]

Started learning facebook ads. I don't have much budget, but I'll probably test them on Store 2.
Store 2 is a one product store.

Facebook ads will also help me when I'll be a realtor I think, going to try and differentiate myself from all the other realtors who are still stuck on the old marketing ways. Guess it's my advantage of being a young realtor