Focus on learning, as opposed to executing
This is for the newbies, if you’re thinking about launching a store right now and you’re wondering what to do – the very best thing you can do right now is to learn how to dropship from aliexpress. With the current situation it’s understandable if you feel demotivated, however what you have on your hands now is time and you can use that time to learn skills that you really need to grow and scale a business later.
On the subject of learning, six-figure dropshipper Chris Wayne had this to say:
“Take this time to learn as much as you can about dropshipping, paid advertising and also best practices around store design and branding, because once all this passes you’ll be in a great position to hit the ground running.”
Yesterday, we received a great email from one of our clients, who has this phenomenal attitude and he was asking how he can use this time to explore opportunities that he maybe hasn’t considered before for his business. That leads me to the next thing that you can do to grow your business in this time:
Grow social media channels
Work on your organic social media channels, I’m talking Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook groups, tik-tok, whatever it is: These channels need a lot of time to nurture and grow properly. But the exciting thing is that if you’d put in that work, which you can do for free – you’ll have a large customer base to advertise to without spending a dime later on.
So if you haven’t already – take this time to establish and nurture social media channels for your business. If you’re very new, you can still take advantage of this tactic. What you can do is use social media to validate your business ideas.
Dropshippers Cory and Rodney did this, when they were asked by their clients: “is dropshipping dead in 2020?” – they created different Instagram accounts to see which Instagram accounts in different niches got the most engagement. This was a time-consuming process, but it costs them nothing but time. So, if you’re in the situation where you have the time at home and you want to put in the work to build a solid business later, consider this strategy.
Start email marketing
Another marketing strategy that we really urge you to explore is to set up email marketing campaigns. There’s tons of flows that you can automate that will nurture someone from a customer who just came to your site to browse to a repeat buyer.
Dropshippers overlook email marketing tactics, because it doesn’t have that kind of instantaneous data feedback loop that Facebook Ads have. However, email marketing is free and it’s so powerful.
Write blog posts and SEO-optimize your site
Another overlooked marketing tactic that you can do when you have time, but you aren’t able to fulfil orders is to write blog posts and SEO-optimize your site search. Engine optimization can bring a ton of traffic to your store, but a lot of dropshippers overlook this tactic. If you have the time – do the research now about how you can SEO-optimize your store and once you’ve made little tweaks get into blogging. Use blog content as a way to draw new visitors to your store for free.
Budget for your business
Finally our last tip is right now, if you can’t start spending money on ads – start saving money for ads. Maybe you already have some money and you can budget it away or maybe you would like to make a few more dollars on the side before you start launching your business. Remember that you can go on to sites like upwork and Fiverr and find creative ways to sell your services to make a few extra dollars, even during this time.
You can help transcribe videos into text, you can translate, you can do some graphic design just look for skills that you can use while you’re at home to make a few extra dollars, so you have a pool of money that you’re comfortable starting with when you’re ready to launch your business later.
All right now we’ve talked about what you can do on your business, I’d love to end with talking about the future. The dropshipping community is incredible, I read the emails and comments left to us all the time and it’s so cool when I see people supporting one another, even through times like this.
So please, continue to do that. You have no idea when you post about how you’re keeping your attitude up, how that affects other dropshippers who are feeling down. Share what you’re doing share how you’re feeling, we’re here for you all of us at SaleSource, as well as the community that reads our articles.
We’re going to try to get more and more insight especially from pro dropshippers about how to handle this situation, we’re going to post those insights on Instagram, because these tend to be little short bits of information that are super helpful but don’t really fit into a large blog post.
