How to Plan & Start Your Own Dropshipping Company
For this month, I’ll be creating a dropshipping store (either a sports apparel shop, clothing, accessory, or self-care). My goal with this project is to utilize all the skills I’ve learned thus far in the program, learn a few new ones, and have a final project that covers sales, marketing, customer success, and operations. I want to test what I know, learn more, and challenge myself by throwing myself into the gauntlet.
The tech tools I’ll be utilizing (in no particular order of importance) are:
Ads
Evernote to take notes and have them in one place that’s easily accessible.
Google Docs to write blogs or for copywriting.
Google Sheets to document prices, dates, or customer data.
Mailchimp to either build the website, create a landing page, or create an email marketing campaign.
Survey Monkey to ask potential or actual customers about their experience with the shop, products, or company for improvement ideas.
Google Analytics or a different analytics tool to track website and customer traffic.
Zapier to automate the operations process and save me time and energy.
Honey (Google Chrome extension) to see and compare competitor prices.
Either Shopify, SquareSpace, or Wix to create my website.
SEO analyzers such as KWFinder.com or something else to make sure I’m using the proper words and terms so people can find my store.
Google Calendar to organize my schedule by Day, Week, and Month.
Trello for task management and organization.
And potentially add a chatbox to answer questions.
Here is the weekly breakdown of what I’m going to accomplish.
Week 1:
- Determine what products to sell.
- Find suppliers.
- Find competitor prices and determine my prices.
- Create my website/store.
- Write a blog post about myself, my product choices, and the goal for the store.
- Write a blog post explaining what I did, what I learned, any challenges I faced, and any changes I needed to make.
Goal: gather all background (operations) information, create a website, and have three posts (blog and vlog) showing what I did.
Week 2:
- Create a landing page.
- Link webpage to Google Analytics.
- Publish website.
- Create one advertisement (most likely Facebook or Instagram Ads).
- Start incorporating Zapier to automate my workload.
- Day 3 or 4 review traffic/analytical data.
- Create and send out email questionnaires.
- Write a blog post focusing on the products offered.
- Write a blog recapping the week (like week one).
- Record a Loom video to show what I did and how I did it.
Goal: create a landing page, create a Google Analytics account and link it to the website and marketing campaigns, create an advertisement, review analytical data, create and send survey questions, and have three posts (blog and vlog) showing what I did.
Week 3:
- Examine my data.
- Look over the market and my competitors.
- Analyze the questionnaire’s results.
- Implement any changes.
- Create two more Facebook and Instagram ads
- Determine if a chatbot will improve my website or not.
- Write another blog post about the products, company, myself, and my goal.
- Write a Week 3 recap blog.
- Record a Loom to show what I did and how I did it.
Goal: Learn to input, find, and analyze data quickly and proficiently and make the necessary adjustments. I want to become more efficient with Facebook, Instagram, and possibly Google Ads. I want to see things I missed in Week 2 and 3 and make corrections. My goal is to gain 15 email subscriptions and generate at least 5 sales.
Conclusion:
I’ll create all the operations for the shop, run the backend marketing processes (Facebook ads experiments, email marketing campaigns, and possibly flyers, over the course of the month). Though this product layout doesn’t include much sales, I’ll see if there are different ways to showcase my sales skills and traits. Also, I may make both a Facebook and Instagram page for the shop so I can advertise on their platforms.
All-in-all, my goals for the end of the month are to:
- Write 6 blog posts
- 3 weekly recaps, 3 product or company blogs
- Record 2 Loom videos
- Create ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google
- Become proficient with Google Analytics
- Learn Survey Monkey
- Create a real website that sells real products
- Find or create a new automation with Zapier to lighten my workload
Figure out:
- what works, what doesn’t
- what I got right and wrong
- How to implement changes
- Work faster and more efficiently.
Please join me on my project journey and see if I will make it out alive!
