hi and welcome to my free six day minicourse on how to build a niche onlinestore now what I'm going to do today isI'm going to give you a very briefintroduction to e-commerce and talkabout all the different ecommercebusiness models that you can choose fromso what are you going to learn in this 6day mini course first of all you'regoing to learn how all the differentonline e-commerce business models workyou're going to learn how to find andevaluate profitable products to sellonline and how to find wholesale vendorswho will sell your product at costyou'll learn how to create a greatlooking website without any technicalexperience whatsoever and essentiallyI'm going to be teaching everything youneed to know to create a niche onlinestore including all the setup and how toaccept credit cards online now thiscourse is for you if you're a parent whowants to work from home in order tospend more time with your kids thiscourse is free if you want to replaceyour income and eventually quit your jobthis course is for you if you want aflexible schedule to do what you wantand spend more time with your loved onesand this course is also for you if youcurrently run a brick-and-mortar storeand you want to move the operationonline now it doesn't really matter ifyou don't currently have any products orservices to offer if you're not exactlysure what you want to sell onlinebecause I'm going to show you how tolaunch a profitable online store fromcomplete scratch and you don't need tohave any prior knowledge whatsoever sobefore we begin I thought I'd just takea little bit of time to talk about someof the students who have gone throughthis course who have gone on to runsuccessful online stores now thisparticular students standing is a singlemom and she actually launched her onlinestore in order to spend more time withher childand so she ended up launching get onrogue comm which is an online storeselling personalized bridesmaids robesand today she makes a healthy for figureper month salary running her store nowthis particular student Sean started anonline store called fine leather workingcalm which is an online store that sellsleather leather working supplies onlineand within 1.5 yearssean has managed to make over sixfigures with his online store andfinally this particular student run hestarted an online store sunny decalscalmselling fabric wall decals online andonce again Shawn makes a healthy fourfigure per month salary selling his ownbranded wall decals online so before webegin I just thought I'd take a coupleof minutes to tell you a little bitabout myself my name is Steve and I runthe popular blog my wife quit her jobcomm where I write about building wealthin entrepreneurship now I started thiswhole entrepreneurship thing back in2007 and I remember that you're verydistinctly because my wife and I we werestuck in a rut now we both workedfull-time and we were both making sixfigures but here's what our lifeconsisted of we would work our full-timejob we would come home we would eatdinner then we watch TV for a couplehours and then we'd go to sleep next daygo to work come home eat dinner watch TVgo to sleep and the cycle went on and onnow normally this wouldn't be so badexcept my wife just really hated her joband you know every single morning beforeshe went to work she would come up to mewith this really long face and she'd belike honey I'm off to the hellhole Icall my job now now if you could imaginesince I had to watch her do this everysingle day it was actually quitedepressing and deep down I knew that sheshould quit her job and I knew that weshould start our own business but wejust couldn't get the courage or findthe time to begin and then somethinghappened she became pregnant with ourfirst child and I remember that day verydistinctly when I saw the pregnancystick because I was super excited but Iwas scared at the same time and thereason is you know I knew this was theperfect excuse for my wife to quit herjob and take care of the kids full-timebut on the flip side we live in a veryexpensive area where you pretty muchhave to have two incomes in order to geta house in a good school district and Iwasn't really willing to sacrifice ourlifestyle and so what we ended up doingis we started brainstorming differentbusinesses that we could pursue and wekind of stumbled upon ecommerce and soin 2007 or online-store bumblebee linenscom was born and this in this store weended up selling wedding linens onlineeven though things started very slowlyfor the first couple months we actuallymanaged to make over six figures in ourfirst year of business which completelyreplaced my wife's salary and so weended up my wife quit her job for goodas soon as her maternity leave was overand she ended up just running ourbusiness from home while taking care ofthe kids so if you look at our livestoday and this is a picture of ourlovely family my wife is just so muchhappier now that she's running ourbusiness she earns a lot more money withour business than with her day job sheonly works a couple of hours each dayshe gets to stay at home the kids shehas a very flexible schedule and thebest part is that our business hascontinued to grow in the double andtriple digits ever since so that itactually blows all of our day jump incomes out of the water today okay and sothat's just a little bit about myentrepreneurship story and I thought I'dalso talk a little bit about myphilosophy for entrepreneurship that I'mgoing to be talking about in this coursefirst of all this six-day mini course isnot a get-rich-quick scheme and it's notabout starting a large company like anAmazon of Facebook or Google it's notabout working 100-hour weeks to makemoney it's mainly about creating abusiness that suits your lifestyle it'sabout creating a business that willallow you to spend time doing thingsthat you love or hanging out with thosepeople that you love and it's basicallya business that increases theflexibility of your lifestyle allows youto set your own schedule and I know ifthat for my wife and I we started ourbusiness so that we could spend moretime with our family and so that's kindof the objective of this course now ifyou are unfamiliar with selling online Ithought I'd just go over some of theadvantages of creating an online storeas opposed to a physical store so forone thing you do not have to bephysically present to make money byusing a computer server who runs yourwebsite your computer can take ordersfor you essentially while you sleep andone of the best parts of having a serverrun your company is that there's verylittle overhead to maintain a websiteand most of the software is actuallyalready written for you all you have todo is customize the website to yourspecific business and you actually haveall you have to do really is load upyour products onto your online storewebsite so with that in mind one of themost common questions that I do getasked is why should I go through allthis trouble of starting my own websitewhen I simply can sell an Amazon Etsy orebay and I have a couple of responsesthat I'm very passionate about this thecompanies like eBay Etsy and Amazon theyreally don't have your interest in linetheir primary concern is their owngrowth in their own stock price they canraise prices at any time they can changetheir policies at any time they canactually change their algorithm to makeyour business harder to find so you getless sales at a moment's notice andoftentimes these sites you know they'rejust very vanilla shopping websites theydon't provide any sort of designflexibility and if you ever shopped oneBay Etsy or Amazon you'll notice thatall the listings on their store they allfollow a similar template and as aresult it's very hard for your businessto stand out amongst the rest of thepack and the fact that every listinglooks the same it actually also hidesyour brandeveryone who shops on Amazon for examplethinks that they're buying from Amazonand not from your online store and soyou're not really building up a brand byselling on these platforms and the worstpart is they charge a percentage of yoursales a significant portion at that eBayfor example it takes between eleven andfifteen percent of your revenue Amazontakes fifteen percent of your revenuesright off the bat and the fact thatthey're taking such a large percentagemakes it that much harder for you tomake money in the long run coupled withthe fact that they could change theirpolicies at any time raise their pricesand put you out of business so that iswhy you need to own your own website youdon't want your business to be at themercy of someone else you want completedesign flexibility to express yourpersonality and your business in orderto stand out from your competitors andmost importantly you want to be incontrol of your own destiny you want toestablish your own brand and essentiallyfuture-proof your business and that'sone of the reasons why you need to ownyour own branded website in the long runnow a lot of people who want to starttheir own business they're kind ofafraid to begin because of the mediamainly have you ever heard the media saythat9 out of 10 businesses fail now this isactually very common saying and I reallyhate to sing with the passion because Ihonestly feel that none of those 10people they start their businesseswithout knowing what to do and I'm afirm believer that if you know whatyou're doing and you have the rightmentor to teach you your chances forsuccess are going to be drasticallyincreased okay so today I thought I'dfirst start out by dispelling some ofthese common myths to make you feel morecomfortable about wanting to start yourown business so the first myth of courseis starting a business is too risky wellwhat if I told you that my wife and Istarted our online store on the sidewhile both working full-time jobsessentially by doing this we had zerorisk because we were collecting ourpaychecks while we were working on ourbusiness and as a result we risked nextto nothing to start our business wedidn't have to pay for a programmerthere were no real development costs wedid everything on the side and soeverything was pretty chill granted ittook a little bit longer but we hadpeace of mind every step of the way aswe were starting our business anothermyth is that starting a business issimply just going to cost too much moneyand just speaking from experience mywife and I started our online storespending only six hundred and twentynine dollars in the main cost of thatsix hundred and twenty nine dollars wasa digital camera and a computer and therest of it about three hundred dollarswas what we spent on our initialinventory for our online store butrealistically speaking you couldactually get started for as little asfive dollars a month and the best partis that the overhead for maintaining anonline store is actually extremely lownow if you look at our business a dayeven if sales were to grind to a halt itwould only cost us about $80 a month tomaintain our store which would allow usto weather any sort of downturn in thelong run now one of the myths also isthat people think that starting anonline store they actually have to carryinventory but one of the business modelsI'm going to talk about in a little bitis called drop shipping where youactually don't have to carry inventoryat all you simply take orders on yourwebsite and then the vendor is actuallyresponsible for shipping the product tothe end customernow one of the other myths that Iconstantly hear about is that starting awebsite is too hard if you're not techsavvy now back when my wife and Istarted it was much harder than it wastodayand honestly today starting an onlinestore is so much easier than it was backin the past you absolutely do not needany technical knowledge to begin and thebest part is all the software is writtenfor you now you basically have twooptions one you can actually find a webhost and install a shopping cartyourself and all the shopping cartsoftware is free because of open sourceopen source essentially means is thatthe software is free and the source codeis essentially given out and maintainedby the community so Linux is an exampleof open source software and there's awhole bunch of open source shopping cartflop platforms out there for you tochoose for free that are very robust nowif you don't want to deal with theserver or installing software and oranything along those lines there areactually companies out there likeShopify or big commerce that willessentially do everything for you andthose are called fully hosted platformsif you ever used one of these platformsthey actually allow you to design yourwebsite very easily and some of themeven offer a drag-and-drop interfacewith which you can just customize yourstore very graphically which makes itvery simple to get started now my minicourse is going to present you with allthe different options for launching youronline store website depending on yourtechnical skill and depending what youwant to do I've done all the shoppingcart research for you all you got to dois do a self assessment of what you wantto spend your time doing and then pickthe appropriate platform for you oneother complaint that I also commonlyhear is that I don't have enough time tostart business well if you look at mylife I have two kids I still work afull-time job I run a blog I run anonline store I run an online storecourse and I also run a podcast andthose of you know me know that I'm notSupermanand in fact I'm quite lazy for exampleif I'm sitting on the couch watching TVand the remote is not next to me there'sno way in hell I'm getting up to get theremote I'm going to watch the samechannel for a long time so the keythat I found being a lazy person myselfis to actually break tasks down intovery small pieces that can beaccomplished in 20 or 30 minutes do alittle bit each day make working on yourbusiness part of your routine and thinkin the long term now if you look at mye-commerce course todayit currently has over 200 plus videosspanning over 60 hours of material andno there's no way in hell I could havedone all that in one sitting I did itgradually over time across several yearsI basically just worked a little bit onit every single day and before you knowitI had all this material to present tothe class now one of the key things tokeep in mind when it comes to time ifyou can't wait for that big block oftime in order to begin it doesn't existbreak the problem into small manageablechunks and then set aside a specifictime every day to work on your businessit doesn't have to be a long time Irecommend just working on working onyour business for five hours a weekthat's really all you need at thebeginning and once you do launch youronline business I can't tell you howexhilarating it feels I still rememberthe joy of getting that first sale inour online store I still rememberstocking the customers who came on ourwebsite to to see how they navigated ouronline store I remember all the highs ofwe got a hold flood of customers Iremember the lows when we first launchedand we didn't have that many customersbut basically every single sale that wedid achieve I felt the tremendous senseof pride and accomplishment because Iwas my own boss I got to set my scheduleI got to call the shots and the bestpart is is that our business providedfinancial security that no one couldactually ever take away from us okay sohopefully with that I've gotten you alittle bit excited about starting yourown online store now I'm going to switchgears a little bit and talk about thespecific online store models that youcan choose from so I mentioned thisearlier but one of the business modelsis called drop shipping and the way dropshipping works is that you put up yourown website and you take orders butinstead of having to pack and ship theorder yourself the vendor is actuallyresponsible for shipping the product tothecustomer and so what happens is you takean order and usually you'll fight off anemail to the vendor and then they'llactually ship to ship the product to theend customer as if they were your storeso the end customer doesn't know aboutthe vendor at all for all intents andpurposes the customer thinks that theymade the purchase from you this iscalled drop shipping and one of theadvantages is that you don't have tocarry inventory and it makes yourbusiness very scalable because as theorders come in you don't have to do thelegwork of shipping and packing orderssomeone else is doing that for you okaythe downside of course is that themargins are going to be a lot lower themargins for job shipping typically areon the order of ten to thirty percentand oftentimes the vendor will chargeyou a drop shipping fee on a per orderbasis as well now one of the otherbusiness models is the traditional modelwhich is where you sell other people'sgoods while carrying your own inventoryokay and one of the advantages ofcarrying your own inventory is that yourprofit margins are a lot higher they'retypically going to be on the order of50% which will allow you to make a lotmore money per sale than with dropshipping but of course on the flip sideyou do have to store your product andyou do have to ship it to the endcustomer but there are a bunch ofthird-party fulfillment houses out therethat you can use to actually act kind oflike a drop shipper for you the nextbusiness model is where you actuallysell your own branded products and thisis essentially where you go out and youbuild products on your own put your ownbrand on it and then sell it as your ownnow a lot of people are intimidated bythis tip but it's actually not thatdifficult to do typically what you cando is you don't really have to inventyour own products you can actually haveexisting products manufactured put yourown brand on them and sell them as yourown and this practice is actually calledwhite labeling another thing that youwould also do is you can take anexisting product make a couple of slighttweaks to it have it made put your ownbrand on it and then sell it as your ownand of course when you're selling yourown products under your own brand theprofit margins are going to be a lothigher often as high as 90% or more okayand finally the final business model Iwant to talk about is selling as anaffiliatethe way affiliate marketing works is youhave a website and you actually refer acustomer to another business where theyactually make a purchase on the otherbusiness's website and essentially whenthat happens when you refer a customerover you actually get a cut of the saleand one of the advantages with affiliatemarketing is one when someone signs upon a referral from you you don't evenhave to support the customer afteryou've referred the sale your job isdone all you do is collect the money andmaking it the simplest business modelecommerce business model to pursue butof course on the flip side the profitmargins are the lowest among all thedifferent types of e-commerce models outthere now if I were to put all thesedifferent models on a nice table andkind of measure the effort level versusthe probability dropshipping would rankkind of on on the order of seven out often in terms of effort level but interms of profitability it would be onthe order of three out of ten becausethe margins aren't that great if youopen a traditional store with inventorythe efforts going to be a little highersince you have to pack and ship ordersin addition in addition to customersupport but the profitability is goingto be much higher I rated it a seven outof ten because your margins are going tobe on the order of 50% if you sell yourown goods under your own brand theeffort level is that much higher becauseyou have to manufacture your own goodsand you have to worry about thelogistics of buying products and higherbulk but the profitability is off thecharts as I mentioned before oftentimesthe margins are going to be 90% or morewhich will allow you to ramp up yourprofits that much fasterand finally affiliate sales model iskind of on the other end of the spectrumit's the easiest model to pursue but theprofitability is also the lowest as wellwhen you're making between five and tenpercent per sale with affiliatemarketing you got to make a whole bunchof sales you got to have a whole bunchof traffic going to your site in orderto make significant money with theaffiliate marketing so that's the end ofthis first lesson I hope it gave you anice overview of all the differentbusiness models that you can pursue andjust remember this is actually step zeroof your six-day mini course in thesubsequent lessons I'm going to show youhow to research a profitable niche howto find vendors to sell you products atI'm going to show you how to launch yourown brand website using open sourcesoftware and I'm going to teach you howto accept credit cards onlineessentially everything you need tolaunch an online store from completescratch so stay tuned for the followinglessons and I hope you enjoyed thelesson
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