In other words… if you get your facebook accounts banned or facebook dramatically changes the way they do business which makes it harder for us small guys, well then your Shopify days are numbered!

So my seedlings… (yep you are a seeding in this greenhouse bay bay), you ask what can you do to combat a world without Facebook ads? Well honestly that’s too dramatic, so let’s take a real-world example.

Some days facebook is doing updates or changing their algorithm and it’s too risky to run traffic that day. So these are the times where building a brand pays dividends. Why?

Well if you have great customer service, an email list, and a great offer, you can email that offer out to your list and make sales from your past customers or subscribers. You can also take that list and create custom audiences on different platforms for lookalikes and retargeting.

If you have Instagram you can buy a shoutout from an influencer (more on that in a future blog post). But essentially someone with a following will tell their followers to visit your page.

Now how exactly do you build a brand?

You go above and beyond to make sure the customer has an experience they never forget. Maybe an extra bonus they were not expecting, maybe a future discount, maybe a thank you card, the list goes on and on. But it’s the small things that make a difference.

For example, I bought a pair of shoes from Puca Shoes in Dubai. Not only did I get the shoes in 6 days but it also came with a branded drawstring bag for the shoes, a branded cell phone finger ring, branded socks, and a thank you letter from the owner.

Rest assured I’ll be buying from them again because they made the customer experience so memorable that I still remember each detail. I mean heck I still have them in my closet because the rep told me I was the first person in America to own a pair.

Sadly that’s one of the better things to happen in my life…

Till next time,

Mr. Seed Planter

The post Branding Your Way To Success appeared first on Nicholas Lal.

Well good luck, glad I could help… NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND.

Haha, if only it were that easy. The hard part is done… But the harder part begins.

What? Don’t you like the hard AND harder part? Did you think working for yourself would be easier than having a job? I hope you don’t think that way.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. When you decide to work for yourself, it should and will be the hardest thing you have ever done in your professional life, BUT the most rewarding if you actually put in the time and get results.

YES, one day you can start to automate things and be more hands off but that’s not how it starts. You need to know every facet of your business before you have someone else take over a task. Just ask yourself do guys like Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, Vince McMahon, Mark Cuban and others just become rich by letting other people run their businesses for them? Heck no, they might delegate tasks but they know every last thing that is going on in their companies.

Some people are better suited to be employees rather than entrepreneurs. So again, if you think this will be easy, keep your day job fella… or lass =)

NOW let’s talk TRAFFIC!

Traffic is the lifeblood of your business online. You need people to get to your store or listing in order for sales to occur.

Now there are two types of traffic: FREE and PAID.

Paid traffic examples are: FB Ads, Instagram, Google Ads/Shopping, Bing Ads, Media Buys

Free Traffic: YouTube, FB Groups, Blogs with SEO, Reddit/Articles, Forums, Viral Marketing

These are just some of the ideas that popped off in my head and there are several others.

Facebook Ads is still the King of eCom marketing, but it is getting very expensive now. Google shopping and Instagram shoutouts are starting to be a great supplemental income stream when FB Ads gets costly.

In coming articles, I want to break down each of these traffic sources in more depth. If you do a simple google search for free or paid traffic methods you will find a lot of great info. What I plan to do is show you how I use them in the context of eCom marketing.

Till then…

Keep planting those seeds and watering them daily…

In other words, keep learning and applying it =)

Mr. Seed Planter

The post Traffic Options for your eCom Store appeared first on Nicholas Lal.

What do all these names represent?

Places you can buy things, but for our purposes, places you can SELL THINGS.

I personally have sold on all 4 platforms.

I run a Shopify store with a partner which has done over $1 million in revenue in 2018.

I also take a lot of those products from the Shopify store and sell them on Etsy and eBay.

Etsy is great for people that love sentimental and/or personalized gifts. It actually does better for us revenue-wise than eBay. And it is integrated with Google Shopping.

Amazon is the place I LOVE to shop. Seriously I’ve had my Amazon account longer than some of you have been on this earth.

YEP! Back when it was just known as an online bookstore and Jeff Bezos had no net worth to speak of. That $300,000 loan his parents gave him sure paid off huh?! Anyways yep Mr. Seed Planter has been a fan of Amazon since he was just a college seedling trying to figure out the world.

I did do some Amazon drop shipping a few years ago and I made some money but the reality is Amazon frowns about drop shipping, and they have a lot of red tape to get through. It’s great as an income stream but no one should try and live off Amazon alone. Also the better and safer option there is to do Fulfillment by Amazon where you ship your products to them and they will handle the rest for you. It requires a lot of capital though so not newbie friendly.

Shopify is the best in my humble, but accurate, opinion. Why? Because it’s YOURS, you own it, you build it. It’s your asset to potentially sell at some point and there isn’t as many hoops and red tape to go through. Just follow Shopify and Stripe’s (if they are your merchant) simple rules and you will be fine in terms of compliance.

Now take some time and check out all the mentioned platforms because I will teach more on them individually as they are all still income streams that you can build and outsource.

Seed Planter Out!

The post E-Commerce Platform Overview appeared first on Nicholas Lal.

That totally reeks of awesomeness.

So let me help you out with some companies that have Shopify Apps.

Now some apps might be private so it won’t be visible in the App Store.

ViralStyle
TeeLaunch
CustomCat (paid service with tons of options)
Printful
Gooten
Shine On (jewelry)
GearBubble (paid service)
Print Tech (formerly Printex)
Scalable Press
CG Pro Prints (canvases and pictures)

There are some overseas as well but I wouldn’t recommend starting here:

PillowProfits (they do shoes among other cool things)
WCFulfillment (they do phone cases, wallets, and watches)

And there are a host of others in America and abroad. I will update this article as needed.

Enjoy!

Mr. Seed Planter

The post List of Recommended POD Companies appeared first on Nicholas Lal.

I made this video last year for a group I was helping out, so in the next few months I will update a new video with any latest changes to the Shopify platform but this will get you started.

If you have any questions you can either leave them here on the website or in the YouTube comments section and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

Starting planting seeds and making your life greener!

Mr. Seed Planter

The post How To Set Up Your Shopify Store appeared first on Nicholas Lal.

But of course you have some self-esteem left so you aren’t going to ask HIM what he is doing, so you venture off to google to see what this “Shopify” thing is that the douche canoe is printing money with. And you run into an article like this fantabulous one you are reading!

Well, I hate to break it to you, but I’m not that different than your old pal. I barely graduated high school, I didn’t finish college, BUT I did not cheat on exams… I just didn’t show up. With that said I’ve created several successful business ventures online. However, none have reached the mind-boggling numbers that e-commerce has. And when I say e-commerce that includes things such as eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify. We will get into all those separately in other articles but right now I want to talk about what type of e-commerce methodology to use, not necessarily the platform.

Well… one of the first questions you’re going to be asking yourself when starting your own store is what will you sell and where will you get your products from. Then you’ll decide if you want to source the products from overseas and have those vendors ship them directly to your customer. That would be called drop shipping and it is very lucrative with astronomical profit margins. The other option is if you want to use a Print-on-Demand (POD) company. It is in essence still drop shipping but more automated and hands off. More on POD in a bit.

When I first started selling on my own website back in 2015 I did it all wrong, but e-com was so profitable with such limited competition that people were doing it wrong and still making boatloads of money. We were sourcing products from China via a website called Aliexpress which is the sister company to Alibaba. Now there are no rules in China, they will create products you can’t imagine and that they have no legal rights to make (aka trademark infringement). It was truly the Wild Wild West, and back then Facebook hadn’t cracked down on this practice. Eventually, they caught up and people were getting their Facebook ads accounts disabled (more on Facebook ads in another article) and their Shopify merchant accounts suspended for selling products that they shouldn’t be selling. Star Wars lightsabers come to mind! I probably hit a nerve with some of the e-com vets out there. Ah, the good old days. We were buying them for $10 and selling them for $50+ The suppliers couldn’t even keep them in stock the way people were selling them. Yes, we even kept some at home to have duels in the street… don’t judge.

Well, when Facebook cracked down that was an awakening for many people. We all realized there was plenty of money to be made online, money that could take a common person into having an uncommon life, but it needed to be done ethically. Now there is nothing wrong with sourcing products from China, HOWEVER, you need to make sure it’s a non-trademarked product. But you still have to deal with longer shipping times and customers that may not be happy that their product came from China. Until you have built enough capital to buy products in bulk, or white label your own product and have it shipped to the US to be fulfilled, you don’t have many options. So that is when competition and the marketplace in the US really started opening up to this concept called “Print on Demand”.

Print on Demand is essentially a methodology where a company has a product line that you can advertise in your store with your own designs and they will print it for you and ship it to your customers AFTER you have received payment. Are you following me? No inventory. You can essentially run a store and pack it full of products that don’t exist until after the order is made and paid for.

The key benefit to POD is no inventory, less overhead, not having to fulfill your own orders, and not having to collect the money then write a check to your vendor before they make the products. Another big factor is most POD companies are based in the US. Faster shipping, happier customers, and easier tracking. All those factors lead to less money out of pocket, more money in your pocket, less manual work, and my favorite… MORE AUTOMATION!

Now you don’t necessarily have to choose between POD and drop shipping. Both are viable and a matter of preference, some people have stores incorporating both. But for someone new to e-com, with a limited budget, POD is a no-brainer and it has been that way since the first mainstream POD company TeeSpring. They would let you design your own shirts and you would advertise your link, people would see the shirt, make an order on the TeeSpring website and you’d get your share of the profits. But that became very saturated very quickly and tons of other companies started popping up left and right. There is still plenty of money to be made in t-shirts but you need to have a killer design and target the right audience.

Nowadays you have companies that have gone well beyond t-shirts. You have mugs, jewelry, wallets, phone cases, shoes, watches, and even more obscure items. And rather than sell your products on another company’s website and grow their brand (not to mention gives traffic YOU paid for access to browse competitors products simply by going back to the website’s homepage… YUCK) you can open your own store with your own domain name on services like Shopify and have these applications from different POD companies integrate with your store. They still let you design your items, but now you import it to your store (branding your business rather than theirs) while they automatically fulfill your orders and debit the differences from your sales. Total streamlined AUTOMATION! If you haven’t caught on yet, I love automation. It goes back to my days as a software engineer. Yep, I used to live the cubicle life! Shout out to all the peeps still trying to bust out! Hey if Andy Dufresne can tunnel out of a prison cell in 20 years… damn Shawshank Redemption was a great movie right?!

Well, I hate to abruptly end this article but the Seed Planter doesn’t want to plant too many seeds in one article or you’ll have roots growing out of your head.

But if I have caught your attention and you are interested in learning more about starting your own e-commerce store click here to check out my ebook titled “Bedroom Bucks… How I Made 6-Figure Income and a 7-Figure Store Inside My 4 Walls”. Technically I have more than 4 walls because I have a bay window. You don’t care… do you?

Seed Planter Out!

The post Dropship vs POD: Where To Start Your E-Com Career appeared first on Nicholas Lal.