If you’ve been following this dropshipping series, you should have your store up and running now, or at least ready to get started. We’ve broken down and detailed the intricacies of dropshipping to a large extent, and by now, you should confidently get started.
However, some “must-do” actions will help you soar and grow your business. If you can do these successfully without letting some negative results pull you down, then you have great chances to succeed. Let’s get started!
1. Create and Add Value for customers
One of the most important factors of succeeding in your dropshipping business is having clear plans of how to add value to your customers. While this might not be vital in other businesses, dropshipping requires creating value due to its highly competitive nature.
Successful merchants know that the secret of selling lies greatly on value addition, and this makes them stand out. They don’t just sell products; they sell solutions, insight, and information. Of course, they see themselves as information marketer and not just merchants.
Now, bringing this down to your business level, the question becomes “how do I add value and help my customers solve their problems?” If you’re not clear about this, go back to one of our previous chapters (chapter 4) and spend more time reading to find solutions. However, if you can’t answer the questions of value addition for your present niche, you may want to consider changing your niche.
If you can add value via quality guidance and sharing helpful information with your customers, you’ll stand out and have only price competition to beat. Please note that in as much as you need value addition to stand out, you still have to work on many other factors.
2. Specialize for market niches
Diversity might be key to many other businesses or activities but not definitely in dropshipping. Take a look around, most of the successful stores specialize in a particular product or niche.
You may want to sell particularly, backpacks designed for worldwide travelers and not just selling backpacks. Likewise, instead of selling security camera equipment, you feel security systems custom to gas stations.
Many sellers and business persons believe that when one narrows one’s focus, they tend to lose their potential customers, causing poor sales. This is not true. Get this; specializing gives you the chance to communicate with your customers effectively and stand out from the competition because you’re competing against a few other competitors. You’ll hardly find a scenario where specializing yields bad results in dropshipping.
It’s not uncommon to feel confused as per which sub-niche to focus on when starting a dropshipping business. This is normal, and that’s why you need to narrow your focus after some time when you must have gotten some experiences. Work on your business to focus on the needs of your customers, and you’ll be shocked at the conversion you’ll experience.
You need to know that when everyone becomes your customer, you practically have no customer. That’s why specialization can never be overemphasized.
3. Badass Marketing and SEO
When you’re able to add value and drive traffic to your new online store, then it’s easier to succeed. Most ecommerce merchants who are new in the industry often feel like backing off because of little or no traffic. Imagine after spending resources and time working on your store, only to launch what your audience doesn’t know exists.
Immediately after launching your site, marketing, traffic generation and optimizing for SEO should follow. This can take up to 6 months or more before significant results pop up. Once your marketing foundation has been established, you can cut down a little on the effort you put in. If you’re not good at SEO, you may follow these resources to get grounded.
- SEOmoz – A popular online SEO community
- SearchEngineLand – An SEO blog with new posts on SEO daily.
- SEOBook – Home to SEO professionals
- Distilled – Has educative courses and guides on SEO
Likewise, many other online resources and hubs can help you with marketing ideas and guides.
4. Have an Eye for Long-term Results
When it comes to building a dropshipping business, you don’t do it just for the moment. It’s a long-term investment and requires great effort, commitment, and investment. It’s almost impossible to build a passive six-figure income after a few months with dropshipping.
It’s good to re-emphasize that the first few months are often very difficult, and the faint-hearted will always quit. You don’t just have to struggle, but run into difficulties and suffer poor or no sales. Just have it in mind that this is normal and will be over with time. Simply put; get prepared and do away with the get-rich-quick syndrome and mindset.
5. Don’t Spend So Much on The Details
Believe this; your company logo, theme or name will hardly bring you sales. In fact, they’re not determinants for your success in dropshipping business. What matters have been mentioned severally. Your marketing strategies, customer service, specializing, long-term commitment and your ability to add value will grow your business.
6. Offer Outstanding Service
Your business reputation is necessary for its growth. Once you don’t offer amazing customer service, it’s easy to spoil your brand because a few customers can let the entire world know how bad your services are. That’s the online space for you.
It’s obvious that dropshipping business, sometimes, can go wrong but you have to keep going. As discussed in one of our previous chapters, you may need to pay up for errors you never caused or propelled. No matter what, don’t pass blames to your customers. Suffice it to be that if you don’t lose money sometimes, just to satisfy your customers, then you’re not doing it rightly.
Selling to a convinced buyer is way easier than selling to a new prospect. Also, to build a loyal customer base, you need to create an outstanding customer experience each time they buy. They don’t just leave your site happy but are ready to spread the good news to others. When you do this, a large chunk of your revenue will be generated by repeat customers.
7. The Vital Step
While all these elements discussed above are necessary, the most important one is getting started. Most people drown in fear of uncertainties and the unknown, making them procrastinate a lot. Many people believe that successful entrepreneurs were very optimistic at the initial stage, but this is not always the case. When you dig more, you’ll find out that many of them were full of fears and were never certain about the results, but they started and kept pushing anyway.
If you must build your dropshipping business, then you should get started immediately. Make your research, evaluate the various options available and kick off.Previous chapter: Operating a dropshipping Business (chapter 7)
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