Starting Over with $1,000 & NO Connections!

Putting the time, effort, and money needed into building your site will make your business look and feel professional. In return, this will translate into sales and profit once you get up and running.

Set Up Your Business

The next thing you need to do is spend about $100 to register your LLC. To do this, all you need to do is go online and register. You’ll also want to register for a free EIN number. Even though your business might be small now, it’s going to grow and eventually snowball into something huge. So it’s better to be prepared from the very beginning.

It might be tempting to save that $100 and work as a sole proprietor. But you need to keep in mind that this is a long-term business, and treat every decision and investment related to it as such. Not to mention, switching from operating as a sole proprietor to an LLC would mean having to change information with your vendors and suppliers. Which would cause you major headaches in the future.

Find Suppliers and Upload Products

The idea of finding suppliers can be daunting. The good news is, it doesn’t cost any money at all. The only thing you need to do is reach out to suppliers by simply calling them and explaining why they should work with you and your business. If you’re uncertain on how to go about this, there are plenty of resources available at www.dropshipwebinar.com.

Once you’ve found your suppliers, you need to start uploading products onto your site. Once your budget increases, you can outsource this laborious task, but for now you’ll need to do it yourself.

However, let’s say you have 3,000 products to upload—there’s no way you can do that in a month and turn a profit. You need to be realistic and focus on uploading a select number of products that are actually going to sell and make you money. To do this, you should ask your suppliers what their top-selling items are and limit your initial uploading to these items.

An 80/20 approach works well here, so rather than uploading 3,000 products, you can start with 200, which is totally doable. As time goes on, you can always circle back and start chipping away at the remaining 2,800 products.

Generate Traffic

The next important step is optimizing your product pages to start generating a profit. At this point, you’ve only spent about $200, so you have plenty of money left to devote to this process.

To start, you should set up a Google Shopping campaign using the alpha-beta campaign structure and set a budget of $30 per day. Then, set up a Facebook campaign for dynamic remarketing ads with a $5 per day budget. With your remaining $800 budget, this will give you 23 days of paid traffic (if you never make a sale, which you will). You should also take advantage of the free ad credits you’ll receive from various sites.

The strategy here is to spend less money per day than you would if you had a bigger budget so that you can run your ads for longer and then collect (and act on) data. You need to run these ads for long enough to see what works. Once you start making sales, you can reinvest that money into more ads, and watch your business blossom.

Grow Your Business

It’s no secret that the way to increase your budget is to make more money through sales. What you might not realize is that you can make this happen faster by using Craigslist. Here’s how: