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Dropshipping: Niche Selection, Domain Name Selection (Week 2 of the Dropship Partnership)

My biggest fear for this dropshipping partnership was trying to figure out ten separate niche ideas for each of the partners. It's hard enough selecting one niche to go into,  but trying to find ten ones ones, while making sure they didn't compete with the stores everyone already had seemed like it might take weeks to accomplish. Even though I was optimistic that we could do it quicker, just in case I set aside up to two full weeks for niche selection. The plan was, try to do it the optimized way first, then if it didn't work as a group, to meet with people one on one afterwards.

But the crazy thing is it all worked out, and it only took us three days! We somehow selected and vetted 10 unique niches that don't overlap with each others new or existing stores and just 72 hours. That means all 10 niches have enough potential suppliers where we have a good chance of getting approved and the competition is thin enough where we feel like we have a good chance of competing if not dominating. Then came choosing domain names which short, two word domain names ending in a dot com seem impossible to find available anymore. But we figured it out. Here's the full write up for week two of the dropshipping partnership.






Niche Selection



Our goals for niche selection was for everyone to have a unique market and not overlap with any of the 10 partners current or new stores. I think the fact that we all have a successful store on our own already made the entire process easier as pretty much everyone raised their hands when I asked "who thought their first niche sucked." It's a common trait to second guess your niche before you start making sales. The 7 people who raised their hands, including me, all thought our first niches were terrible, yet they ended up being both successful and profitable. 

Overcoming the mental hurdles of niche selection was what allowed us to all come up with a new niche within days instead of weeks this time around. We all had different processes for thinking up new niches, but for those who go stuck, we had them think about related products to things they already knew. We even compiled a list of 5,247 possible niches as a group and simply had a few of the guys go through that to get ideas before testing them to make sure they were viable. Anton's course is currently closed to new signups but we have to give him credit and we're using his techniques to find and test the niches before getting into them.

By the way, the cover photo above is one of the dropshipping partners, Alejandro giving a talk at the Nomad Coffee Club here in Chiang Mai. He shared his story on how he managed to start U.S. based dropshipping business even though he's a citizen of Peru. 





Domain Names



Our goal was to find short, two word domain names that weren't taken already. The thought sounded insane as normally it takes people weeks just to find one decent one, usually three words or longer, but we wanted to find ten! 

Even though pessimists say that it's impossible to find decent domain names it turns out that it's actually easier now to find them than when I started three years ago! When I first started, the only way to look for domains was to manually search them on godaddy and if you were smart, you would use an online thesaurus to think up creative names. Now there are tools use the Shopify Domain Names Generator that will automatically list thousands of available domain names containing your niche. This is a huge reason why I continue to use Shopify to build all of my online stores. 

To make it even easier and cheaper, here's a PDF with everything I use to build my stores along with discount coupons. By the way, just to show you how easy it is to find a short two word domain using tools, if you wanted to sell Swings or Swing Sets, you'd simply type that word in and get this:


Out of these I'd choose SwingsShop.com, SwingsWorld.com or SwingsStore.com


Demo Store



The task for everyone now is to build their demo stores so we can start calling suppliers and get accounts. The goal is to get them up and running this week so we can start calling before people start going on Thanksgiving vacation and before the Black Friday sales start.

Most people spend way too much time building their demo stores as it's an easy way to feel like you're doing something but in reality you're putting off the hard part which is actually picking up the phone and calling suppliers. This is why I'm only giving my partners three days to build their stores which include choosing and installing a theme, creating a logo, header image, about us page, contact us page, adding demo products, and setting up a passable store so we can start getting approved by suppliers. To make it easier to build the stores, a lot of what we're doing is outsourced to services like Fiverr, here's a complete list of what we use in this PDF. 

As an incentive to get through this as quickly as possible, I've created a contest where I'm giving the first three partners who make their first sales 1,000 baht ($29) each, and the first store to get to $1,000 in profit 3,000 baht. Even though the prize money isn't huge, I think it'll be fun and drive a bit of competition between the partners.


Camping in the mountains of Chiang Mai this weekend


Week 2 Wrapup



Overall I was super impressed with everyone's progress during week 2 of the partnership. As for the weekend activity, I invited everyone out camping up in the mountains but I think most people chose to work on their demo stores and avoid the rain. However a few of us did get to meetup to watch UFC 205 at the Irish Bar and see Conor McGregor whoop some ass again.

Stay tuned for week 3 which starts today! Our goals are to get the demo stores finished, and start calling suppliers ASAP. Don't' be surprised if each store gets enough to go live by the end of the week. That's the goal!

I hope these weekly shares help everyone get an idea of what's involved in accelerating a drop shipping store and allowing you to follow along with your own businesses. I know that Anton closed signups for new members, but don't worry it's only for a few weeks while he updates videos and adds new modules. Get on the waitlist and get emailed when it opens back up again if you're not already a member. If you already have access to the course, get your butt into gear and follow along live with the partners! It'll be fun to celebrate at the same time regardless if you're in Chiang Mai or building your store from home. If you already have one profitable store, go out and get your second! Get your second f#$king belt!





Update: Read all about Week 3 of the Dropship Partnership here.

Warm Regards,


Johnny FD


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Post a Comment

  1. Hey Johnny,

    Great to hear about the drop-shipping retreat and how things are moving along nicely!

    It took me way too long to get to this stage, due in part to using the creation of the store as a hiding place as you mentioned, but I've finally got to the stage where I'm hopefully just about to get approved with five suppliers at the same time (two corporations that own five brands).

    Using the fact that I have a potential customer already (with no advertising) helped move things along :).

    James

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey James, i'm glad you've caught up with us! Now it's the race to the first sale! Let me know how it goes!

      Delete

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