ESYB2 140 - Make Money by Selling a Physical Product
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[00:00:00] This video is going to be for e commerce and selling products. I'm going to give you a few options for how to source, meaning how to get the products or how to have them created and how to sell them and where to sell them. So let's get started. So sourcing options. This is great. If you can create your own products, if you are crafty, some examples are art clothing, like if you can sew or knit.

Or if you can create furniture, if you're good with woodworking or look through Etsy, anything that is there, things that people actually make with their hands, that will give you a wealth of ideas for what you can actually create on your own without needing some kind of third party manufacturers that you can turn around and sell online.

And it ranges from like soap even, people create like handmade soap. I mean, you really should just browse Etsy for a ton of ideas, a lot of them you can make. Also, if you can invest in a 3D printer, 3D printing is one of the future forward looking businesses and [00:01:00] you can create a lot of products, you don't have to be crafty at all, and you can get products made at home and then sell them online.

And of course there's Alibaba and AliExpress. The difference between them is Alibaba is basically selling products from China for cheap. But you have to buy in bulk AliExpress you can buy one by one and AliExpress will also drop ship meaning if somebody orders that manufacturer in China can actually ship it.

The main problem with the drop shipping from China is that it takes like two or three or four weeks to get anywhere in like the Americas. And also in Alibaba when they require you to buy a lot of inventory you might get stuck with a lot of inventory and then. Sometimes it's hard to sell the inventory.

So you got to be careful of the risk. So starting with AliExpress is better, but they both have their challenges. But on the other hand, they both have tens of thousands of products you can get and sell. Another thing you can do is if you just want to start out and you don't want to create products, you don't want to buy from [00:02:00] AliExpress or Alibaba, you can go to like your local 99 cent store.

or discount stores or Walmart's and whatever. They have really cheap prices. You can buy a few products and try to sell the very same products online just to start learning how this whole online e commerce thing works. And if you start seeing success that might give you ideas for what you can realistically do.

At a bigger scale. So that's a way to get started. Now, how do you sell these products? Of course, the biggest online store in the world is Amazon. If you can sell on Amazon, that's fantastic. And Amazon has a lot of problems. Like, they have rules, they take commissions. But everyone I've had this conversation with, if they dominated their niche in Amazon, they were beyond happy.

No matter what their concerns were. And Amazon does put a lot of requirements on sellers, but those are typically outweighed by the benefits. Because of course you want to be in the bigger store in the world. I mean, they can make you a millionaire. I literally had clients who struggled to sell on their own side.

Then when an [00:03:00] Amazon six months later, they're making six figures a year later, they're making a million. Like I've literally seen that happen. Next of course, is Etsy. com for. handmade products and they even sell some digital products as well. You can sell eBooks there and you can sell vintage items.

There's a lot of different things you can sell on Etsy. Also, a lot of people ask, should I open my own Shopify store? Here's the deal with that. If you want to get your own store, it's great. But, you're going to have to be the one driving traffic. It's really hard because your store has no credibility, like Amazon, Etsy, they have credibility.

Consumers know, if something is wrong, they're going to get a refund. In your store, that might be true, but they don't know that. Or they don't trust that, even if you tell them. Most of the time, the bottom line is that, Shopify store owners, their biggest struggle is getting the traffic and the sales. Most people cannot get past that.

So, Etsy and Amazon and [00:04:00] Ebay of the world, those are easier places to start. Shopify, that will work if you have a fantastic narrow niche that you can dominate, but outside of that, it's really hard. Now, how do most people shop, usually, online? How do your consumers find your products? Well, most people shop by searching.

They search in Google, they search in Amazon, they search in Etsy, they search in eBay. That's not the only way they shop, but it's largely how they shop. Imagine if you were shopping for socks. You're going to go on Google or Amazon, you're going to type socks, you're going to find socks, and you're going to order some.

For most people, that's the process. If you want fancy socks, cute socks, you might go to Etsy. But You shop for socks, maybe like a few times a year, exactly when you need it. So when a consumer searches, they're not only telling the search engine what they want, they're telling the search engine exactly the right timing, which is when they're searching.

The main problem is it's really hard to rank in search. If you can rank highly, [00:05:00] you can sell a lot. If you don't rank highly, you're gonna struggle. And in most consumer verticals, there's already some very strong competitors that you have, so likely they're the ones selling a lot. But you can overcome them in time.

And the same is true in Google, Amazon, and Etsy. And Google is the hardest to compete in search, and Amazon and Etsy is a little easier. So, a lot of people ask, well, if search is so hard, can I run ads? Specifically, can I run Facebook ads? And I would say, for shopping, Facebook ads are a little overrated.

Because you can serve an ad to a person, sure, they can click on it, but they're not shopping necessarily now. Their interest level is not that high, because on Facebook it's impossible to tell the timing. When can you tell the timing? When people are searching. So, search based ads. Google has a specific type of ad.

for shopping and you want to run those ads. And of course if you're selling on Amazon, Amazon has its own native ads you can actually run inside Amazon. Those are very effective and of course retargeting ads. If you're not [00:06:00] familiar with what a retargeting ad is, I'm sure you've seen it online many times.

For example, if you go to Amazon or any big site. And you click on some product and then you go on Facebook and for some reason, Facebook is showing you that exact product as an ad. That's because Amazon is retargeting you. They want to bring you back to buy that product. So those are the retargeting ads and you can actually set that up.

In Facebook, in Google Ads, you can set it up easily. But those are very effective because they're bringing back people who already know about your site, who've already been to your site, warm leads who are better targeted than cold leads that are gotten by the other types of ads. And very quickly in case you weren't sure what I was talking about when I was talking about the Google shopping ads, you see these pictures here?

These are actually ads. You see it says sponsored. These only come up when you search for products. These are very attractive kind of ads. They have pictures, they have prices, they have stars. So these kinds of ads, they're highly [00:07:00] converting, and they appear before the products, before the actual websites.

So this is the Google shopping ads, not to be confused with regular text based ads that are the more common Google ads, like these, right? You see, these are the regular ads that have no picture, nothing. But the shopping ads are really beautiful looking ads, showing products, and they are very effective ads selling most kinds of products.

