If you’re reading this right now, I’m assuming it’s because you’re looking to gain more freedom in your life.

Specifically, you’re looking how to get there sooner than later.

That’s exactly what I’m going to cover in this blog post.

If you haven’t been paying attention, we published a dropshipping book!

To help promote the drop ship book, I decided to create videos and host Instagram Lives and dive into some of the most precious dropshipping secrets.

Honestly, this book is full of exactly what we do to build highly profitable, semi-automated stores. It’s the way I've been doing since 2007– and the method still works today.

10 Secrets From My First Drop Ship Book

So in this blog post, I am going to take you through the 10 secrets from my dropshipping book. These are things that I wish I would have known when I first started my path to entrepreneurship through eCommerce.

Back when I was first looking to build a business that allowed me to have more freedom in my life...

I wanted more freedom in my life so I could take longer vacations, work from home, and could take a few days off to go to the other side of the world if I wanted to, right? I’m sure you can relate to that.

The things that I learned over more than a decade in dropshipping has allowed me to do that. Now, everyday I work on optimizing what it is we do in our businesses to allow more freedom. That's what, in my opinion, owning a business is all about.

In my dropshipping book, the first secret I reveal is that you will make more money dropshipping high-ticket products than you will with low-ticket products.

Listen, my company is called Drop Ship Lifestyle for a reason, right?

We build these businesses so we can have more freedom and create what type of lifestyle we want. If you want to be able to run a business that can make you the most amount of money for the smallest amount of input, then you will want to sell high-ticket products– not low-ticket products.

Typically, our average store order value is $1,000 or more. When I say high-ticket, I'm talking $200 or more. But whatever you do, you do not want to be selling things for $10.

Because what's going to happen? You're going to need so many sales in order to actually make good money. And if you get all those sales and you start making good money, then what's going to happen?

You're going to have a ton of customers and you're going to have a ton of emails, tracking numbers, returns, and follow-ups.  Then the whole business becomes something that you need a small team to actually keep a handle on.

I'm not saying you can't make money doing dropshipping low-ticket items. I'm saying that if you want to build a business that will give you the biggest upside for the smallest amount of input, then follow Dropshipping Secret #1.

If you rush the niche selection process, your chances of success are just going to drop dramatically.

Now when I'm saying niche selection, I'm talking about the product category that you're going to be selling in.

With us, when we're building new stores, so much of the actual work happens way before we make a Shopify account.

The work is in the research– and the research is before you choose your niche.

How to Brainstorm Dropshipping Niches

What I recommend you do is brainstorm a list of 50 possible niches. Then vet all of them to see which ones are actually good for dropshipping?

• Pricing: You want the price of your product to be at least $200
• Target Market: We are trying to sell the upper middle class because it’s the easiest to do.
• Brand Loyalty: You’re looking for a product that doesn’t have any.

We spend a lot of time doing research before we even think about building a store. Our method of testing isn't picking a random product, making a store, running ads, and seeing what happens.

Do the research up front and then get the rewards later.

When you're doing your research and you're finding other online stores that sell the products you want to sell, you're going to see that some of them have showrooms and some of them have warehouses.

If they have one or both of those, you should not consider them your future competitors.

If they sell the same type of thing you want to sell, but they have that physical store, they're most likely going to get different pricing tiers from the same brands than you would want.

What that means is there's not going to be a balance.

You want to find websites that do not have warehouses or showrooms. Those companies are your future competitors. Again, do not compete with offline retailers.

Dropshipping secret number four is if you pick the right niche, you can have more repeat customers and have less returns. This comes back to research.

When you’re researching, what you’re doing is looking into different niches and finding different brands that make the things you want to sell. Then, you’ll want to research these brand names.

What you're looking for is what have previous customers said about these brands? I'm not talking about your competitors, not the online retail stores. That's important too, but what I'm talking about is the actual brand names for which you'll be selling.

If you find, let's just say, 10 different brands, and you're googling all them and you're finding out everything you can. Then, you see that two of those brands have terrible reviews.

When you see a trend like this, well guess what? You do not want to sell for those brands.

If those brands and their poor reviews make up the majority of the niche you're researching, then you want to move on to another niche.

Again, what we're trying to do here when we build dropship stores using my system outlined in my dropshipping book, Drop Ship Secrets, is looking to get the most results with the smallest amount of input.

If you choose a niche that's prone to high return rates and unhappy customers and complaints, you're not going to be having a business that's fun to run. You're going to have a business that you're going to dread checking your email everyday.

Avoid that upfront by doing the research.

Dropshipping secret number five is you need a demo store before you start contacting suppliers. A demo store will look just like your actual store will look like, it'll be the same URL, except you won't have any products actually for sale.

So you'll make a logo, you'll upload your content pages, and you'll also upload a few demo products.

The reason you build a Shopify store first, is because when you're contacting suppliers, they are going to need to see your website before they approve you. The good ones will, at least.

So build the demo store first, it will reap all the rewards later on.

Dropshipping Secret number six is when you're contacting suppliers, you need to be professional and courteous. Above all else, do not refer to yourself as a dropshipper.

Dropshipping has a negative connotation associated with it. Mainly, because there's so many people that get into this business thinking its a quick way to get rich.

Suppliers know people will call them and not want anything besides have the opportunity to make a million bucks in the next two months without doing any work.

Obviously, these suppliers are not looking for this when looking for potential authorized retailers. They want you to sell their products. They want you to bring in all the sales you can, but more importantly, they want you to take care of the customers because when you are an authorized retailer and you're selling other people's stuff, you basically act as their second voice.

If you give a customer a bad experience, it will reflect on your supplier.

When you're reaching out to suppliers, make sure you come across as professional. Make sure your website's built.

Don't just say, "Hey, do you dropship products?"

Instead say, "Hey, I'm calling from mystore.com, I would love to speak to the person in charge of opening online retail accounts," and take it from there.

Be professional. If you're not, you have no chance of working with the suppliers that you can actually make money with.

Dropshipping Secret number seven is instead of just increasing how many buyers you have on your website, you can increase how frequently they buy from you. So we do a lot of things that I call lead value optimization.

In my coaching program, I go deep into lead value optimization. I explain how you can take a normal visitor and make them worth 20, or 30, or 40% more than they would be if they just came to your store and bought.

So we do this through all different things:

• Up-selling
• Cross-selling
• Down-selling
• Affiliate offers
• Information products
• Intangible up-sells. 

These tactics can, on average, increase your lead value by 30%. Which means even if you have a store right now and you're making X amount of sales, you don't just need more customers.

That's lead value optimization. It's huge and in my dropshipping book, I have a whole chapter dedicated to this strategy.

The reason I think people don't do it as much as they should is because they're making money anyway and they're happy, but listen, why not make more?

Especially as things get more competitive, you want an edge and lead value optimization is just that. Everything I teach in Drop Ship Lifestyle gives a massive advantage over the majority of your competitors.

Dropshipping Secret number eight is you do not need all the traffic in the world, you just need the right traffic.

It doesn't matter how much traffic it is. It matters who those people are. If you have targeted traffic, if you're getting people that actually want your stuff to hit your website, there's no reason why you shouldn't be converting at 2.5% or higher. That means for every 100 people that visit, 2.5 of them place orders.

A lot of things that we focus on to make sure our traffic is the best traffic, is using different ad campaigns that only appear when people are searching for the exact thing we're selling.

We're trying to optimize everything in our businesses and we’re trying to get the most value from what we do. To do that with traffic, it's about trying to get the highest quality traffic that you can get because they are most likely to buy.

To be honest, how much traffic you get to your website every month, that's an ego thing. That's a number, like a vanity metric, that doesn't matter.

What matters is who are those people, what type of traffic are they, and are they going to buy from you? 

Dropshipping Secret number nine is if you're smart with how you set up your ads, it won't break the bank. In fact, you can actually get a lot of sales very early on. Of course, I can't make any income claims, so there's my disclaimer.

What I will say is if you have the smallest of ad budgets, you can use that to get these super targeted searches and have these people find you.

When you first start out, you have $100 free credit from Google Ads. You have $15 to $20 that you can invest into traffic into Facebook Ads for remarketing, and with that, there is no reason why you shouldn't get at least one high-ticket sale that should net you at least $300.

It’s very, very easy to get big returns early on. And the reason is because we are not trying to do this broad game.

If somebody searched “desk”, then guess what? I would need a big ad budget to spend and get so many clicks before somebody would convert. However, because we're going for these super-targeted search terms, you don't need all the traffic in the world and you don't need a huge ad budget.

If you set it up right, you could be profitable from very, very early on. Most people that visit your site, if they're going to buy, they'll typically buy within two to three days, so there's not some huge wait period.

Finally, Dropshipping Secret number 10 is the average profit margin with our stores is about 25%. And that's net profit.

People always show these screenshots of, "Oh, I do $100,000 in sales a month," which is great.  When you see that, just know that that is top line revenue. That's the total number that comes in.

From there, when you subtract expenses like product costs, shipping, ads, merchant fees, Shopify fees, app fees, and if you follow the Drop Ship Lifestyle system, you can expect to average about 25%.

So if you do $100,000 in sales a month, you can expect to keep about $25,000. Which is amazing! Of course... you could scale from there and go back from there.

The beauty of this business model is you control your expenses. You control what you pay for ads. You control, you know, how many apps you use. You control what people you hire and what VAs you have and what their salaries are. 

So it's really up to you for how much money you want to spend.

If you're not good with ads, if you don't have a system to follow, then you could lose money. You could spend a million dollars on ads that go for the wrong keywords and you could never be profitable because those people aren't ready to buy.

So if you do this right, if you follow a proven system, if you actually follow what I teach for ads and you treat this like a real business, you could do what we do and average about 25% net on sales.

Again, that's not a given, it's not just going to happen, but it will if you're one of the better dropshippers. And to do that, again, you need to be good with ads because that's going to be the bulk of your expenses.

Wrapping Up

I hope you found that valuable. That was 10 different secrets from my first dropship book, Drop Ship Secrets, which has a lot more. It is 143 pages full of lessons I've learned over the past decade plus in this business.

I wrote it for everybody that's interested in my coaching program, Drop Ship Lifestyle, which typically sells between like $3-5,000. I wrote this for the people that are like, "You know what, I can't afford that right now.”

This isn’t like other dropshipping books. I want this dropshipping book to be a way for you to read and internalize these concepts, for you to put it into action, and for you to build a real business.

In my opinion, if you want more freedom in your life, entrepreneurship is the way to get there. My method at Drop Ship Lifestyle is the best system I've ever seen for creating real wealth online through a lifestyle business.

If you're reading this and you're already a member of my coaching program, I still think you should get this dropship book. It's a great, additional resource, something you can keep on your desk. It’s something that'll probably open your eyes to some concepts maybe you glanced over or never originally took in enough.

As always, if you got value, please leave a comment below, let me know!