How Find Your Niche And Source Products To Sell Online

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welcome to another lesson as part of your free six day mini course what I’m going to do today is I’m going to show you how to find a niche and how to source products to sell online now the key thing to realize when you’re finding the right product to sell is that it’s an arat of process and what you absolutely don’t want to do is you don’t want to overthink things you don’t want to get stuck in the analysis phase for too long otherwise you’re never going to get started the other thing to keep in mind is that it’s not about hitting a homerun with your first product what you want to do is you want to find a product that will make enough money to suit your lifestyle and you might not find the best product on your first try but the key is to do the analysis and make sure that you can make a profit that the demand is there and a niche is not that competitive okay and so your goal is to find products that are enough demand to meet your income requirements so your niche should not be do competitive and it should not be saturated either and you also want to find products that are not readily available in brick-and-mortar stores because you don’t want people comparison shopping for your products now a common question I get asked is how can a small niche possibly win against larger stores like Walmart’s and targets and here’s the thing about these larger stores they have infrastructure and supply issues to deal with and in general it’s not economical for a target or a Walmart to carry a large quantity of goods unless there is significant demand and by significant demand I mean products that have a broad-based appeal and so you’ll notice that large stores like Walmart’s and targets they generally don’t carry a wide variety of very specific items so the big players like the Walmarts and the targets they focus on the hot mainstream products and it generally doesn’t make sense for them to focus on products that only apply to a smaller group of people and so you want to focus on a niche that applies to a smaller group of people that are not on the radar of a target or a Walmart okay and so here’s my recommended criteria when you’re looking for something to sell the product should not be fragile and easy to ship after all we’re running an e-commerce store here and we’re going to be shipping products via the mail and you don’t want them breaking in transit now the product should also not take up too much of his space because we’re dealing with physical products here the smaller your product is the easier it will be to handle now here’s an important thing the products inherent value should be ambiguous remember I told you to avoid products that are sold readily sold in brick-and-mortar stores the reason is because we don’t want people price shopping and as a result you want to avoid branded products because if there’s a brand associated with the product it’ll be easy to compare prices and once again you want to try to avoid products that you can easily drive to a store and find the product should also be timeless and not go obsolete I once had a student in my class who wanted to sell cell phone cases well guess up every six months and you cellphone comes out and the case goes obsolete and you don’t want to be left with inventory that you can’t sell as a result I recommend that you avoid electronics or anything that can possibly go obsolete over time now here’s the thing when you do find the right product you’ll know and here’s just a couple of examples of students in my class who found the right product and started making sales right away so Brandon he started an online store selling washer toss games online and after his launch with practically zero marketing his store immediately started making sales and he actually ended up making almost $2,800 within the first couple months didn’t spend any money on marketing the demand was there and he’s been making money ever since another soon my class Sean he started an online store selling leather working supplies he didn’t really spend money on marketing either and his store has managed to make six figures and a little over at one and a half years here’s the thing you’re not gonna find these leather working products in regular stores because it’s a very specific product that only applies to a small group of people but just because it applies to a small group of people doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t make a lot of money selling this and finally I have a student Carmen she lives in Australia she started an online store selling caftans and Resort where in Australia and the reason she kind of stumbled upon this niche is because she noticed that her market was not well served in her country and so she took full advantage launched a store and started making sales right away and today she makes six figures per year okay and so when it comes to finding products to sell online the first step is to get product ideas and kind of brains and then you want to determine whether those ideas can actually make any money and there’s a whole bunch of places to brainstorm products so here’s what I like to do and I’ll just give you a couple of examples here you can get products from bestseller lists on eBay you can look on Amazon you can use Pinterest you can look on etsy to get product ideas and then once you have a couple of ideas in mind you want to use a keyword tool like longtail Pro to figure out how many people are searching for that product and then kind of get an estimate of the amount of revenue that you can possibly make selling that product and then finally you can use a tool called Terapeak to validate and see how these items are actually selling on eBay don’t worry I’ll go over these tools and a little bit and tell you exactly what they do but first and foremost I want to show you how to brainstorm product ideas to sell online and one of these ways is to actually go on the best seller list on Amazon so all you got to do is Google Amazon bestsellers click on the link and Amazon here will tell you what the most popular products are in a given category so you can just click on a category and these are the hot items right now another way to do research is to go on Pinterest and what’s cool about Pinterest is that you can just type in a broad topic and it will give you a list of pretty pictures and you can kind of get ideas of what you might want to sell that way so for example I might type in travel gifts and it’ll show me a bunch of blog posts and other articles on travel gifts that you potentially might want to sell online Etsy is another great place to look you can just click on various categories and see what’s selling online and what’s nice about Etsy is if you click on the shop it will actually give you real sales data on what products that shop is actually been selling ok and so that’s just a couple of different ways to brainstorm products online for the purposes of today’s lesson I’ve already kind of hand-picked a product to kind of run through the entire process with you and the product that I chose to run through an entire example for you is a leg pillow ok and these leg pillows sell for between 20 and 30 dollars online and now I’m just going to run through a quick example to run through the demand and the profitability of selling leg pillows on so before I start the demo I want you to head over to my wife Twitter job calm and I want you to scroll down and I’m gonna show you how to use a tool called longtail Pro and if you actually want to follow along with this demo you’d actually click on this link and follow me step by step and I believe longtail Pro has a free trial so you can actually give this tool a try follow me side by side and decide later if you don’t want to use it any longer all right so let’s get started with the tutorial okay so this is what longtail Pro looks like as soon as you have an account and as soon as you log in so I’m just going to create a new campaign called leg pillows and I’m gonna type in leg pillows as my seat keyword now what longtail Pro does is it finds all the permutations of that keyword and it also tells me how many people are searching for that keyword on a monthly basis okay and as you can see here below I’m just gonna sort by volume here 2,900 people are searching for leg pillows every month and here’s what’s really cool about longtail Pro longtail Pro actually tells you how hard it is to rank that particular keyword term in search and that’s what this Casey score is okay and so in general the Casey store tells you how hard it is to rank that particular search term and search and it’s basically a number from one to hundred and anything in the low-30s is generally fairly easy to rank anything over forty is generally harder to rank and with this quick number you can easily determine whether it’s gonna be hard for you to rank your site in search should you decide to sell leg pillows online so as we can see here leg pillows gets 29 searches per month with a Casey of 35 which means it’s not going to be that difficult to actually rank this keyword term in search so once you’ve gotten the data from longtail Pro it’s time to do some analysis now we’ve already checked the frequency by which our products appeared in search it was 2900 searches per month then you want to assume a number for the click-through rate when someone does a search for leg pillow online what is the percentage of people that will actually click on the top link and search this number is actually 37% for the top link in search so we’re just going to assume 37% click there and the average online store has a conversion rate of between 1 and 3% so we’re just going to assume 2% as a conversion rate so if you do the math 2900 people search for the term leg pillow every single month the average selling price according to Amazon is on the order of 20 bucks so if you do the math 20 $20 times 29 hundred searches times 0.37 times 0.02 is five hundred and thirty-two dollars per month potential revenue off of just that one keyword and that’s what you need to realize that’s the revenue just associated with that single keyword doesn’t account for other search terms which might be permutations in that keyword and it also doesn’t account for other traffic sources online okay so that’s just a quick and dirty way to calculate revenue based on search demand using a tool like longtail Pro the next thing you want to do is you want to check to see how well these items are selling on other marketplaces like eBay so once again I want you to start at my wife query job com scroll down and click on this link Terapeak actually offers a free 7-day trial so if you want to sign up real quick and then you can follow along with me step by step in this tutorial so here’s what Terapeak looks like as soon as you log in and what I’m going to do is I’m going to go under research and product research I’m gonna type in leg pillow and what terapy does it is a tool that scrapes all the ebay completed listings and it tells you how much of that product is being sold in any given time period on ebay Terapeak is actually an authorized partner of ebay and it has real sales data off the completed listings on ebay ok so I’m just gonna set this to a 30-day period here and what Terapeak is telling me is that ebay sold over 26,000 dollars worth of leg pillows last month and here’s the key metric here the celery the seller rate is the percentage chance of a listing actually resulting in a completed sale and then generally I like to see a selten rate of over 30% in this case leg pillows has a sell-through rate of 40 8.85% which basically means if you were to list a leg pillow on eBay there’d be a forty eight point eight five percent chance that it would result in a completed sale so as you can see here because Terapeak is giving you real sales data off of ebay we know that there’s plenty of demand for these leg pillows because they sold over 26 thousand dollars worth of merchandise in the last month okay and so in a subsequent lecture I’ll go over a couple of other tools that you can use to brainstorm engaged Amanda beyou products but for now start with Terapeak and longtail Pro now the next step is to actually go out and find out how much profit you can actually make selling one of these leg pillows so one tool that I like to use is Alibaba and what Alibaba is it is a search engine for Chinese manufacturers and by doing just a quick search you can get an idea of how much money you can make selling these pillows so all I did is I checked in leg pillow on Alibaba and it brings up a bunch of vendors who sell leg pillows so if we go to amazon.com you’ll notice that these leg pillows let’s look at this looks like this looks like the best-selling leg pillow out there and if you look at the picture here you’ll notice that it looks a lot like this one or this one or this one and you’ll notice that on Alibaba they’re charging only between three dollars and 37 cents to five dollars and seventy seven cents apiece and if you just kind of take a number in between that means they’re probably spending around $4 per piece to acquire one of these pillows whereas an Amazon these pillows are actually selling for twenty three dollars now keep in mind you still have to ship the goods from China to your warehouse in the US or wherever you reside and that’s going to cost money so just as a conservative estimate let’s say we tack thirty percent on top of the cost from the manufacturer so that leaves us at around five or six dollars if we were to source something for five or six dollars and sell it for twenty three dollars that is a pretty good margin and a pretty good profit potential on these leg pillows okay and so that’s just a quick and dirty way that I kind of estimate profitability and how I find vendors to source the products that I actually want to sell online okay and here’s the thing when it comes to sourcing products you actually don’t have to import your overseas but what you’ll find is that because the labor is so much less expensive over in China and some of the Asian countries it’s generally going to be cheaper to get your products from overseas however that doesn’t mean that you have to source your products from over there you can just as easily find vendors in the US and here’s some just some pros and cons between sourcing internationally versus domestically in general if you source something domestically the manufacturing costs are going to be much higher because the cost of labor is higher but on the flip side if you source domestically the minimum order quantity that you actually have to purchase will be lower and it’s just gonna be a lot easier to contact vendors there’s gonna be no cultural barriers you don’t have to ship something by boat or by plane from somewhere really far away the lead times for manufacturing gonna be a lot less and if you find something in your home country drop shipping might be an option oftentimes you can make an arrangement with the vendor so that you take orders and the vendor actually shifts the product to the end customer but if you do decide to source internationally you will absolutely get the best price for your products the only downside is you’re gonna have to order in higher order quantities you have to ship the product from overseas which has longer lead times and it’s gonna be more expensive to ship over there and also since you’re gonna be dealing with factories just the time to produce the item will be that much longer as well so you really need to plan ahead if you decide to source from overseas now if you want to find vendors within the US I recommend a tool called reference USA basically it is a database of every single US vendor and this tool is actually for free and can actually only be accessed at your local library so if you’re interested in looking for vendors in the US heading out to your library and look for reference USA there’s also a couple of other sites wholesale central is actually a website directory of trade shows in the US worldwide brands is actually a great directory to find drop shippers online and in terms of overseas vendors I already showed you how to use Alibaba another way to find overseas vendors is to go to some of the trade shows that are over there like the Canton Fair or the Global Sources summit that are in Hong Kong and China respectively now here’s a picture of me at the Canton Fair and if you can I highly advise that you actually make the to China because it makes things so much easier the Canton Fair is where thousands of Chinese vendors kind of aggregate and you can easily just go through it’s like a shopping mall you go through and you can talk to each vendor and instantly have access to a bunch of different products to source for your online store all in one place and here’s just an idea of what it looks like I snapped this picture kind of high up from the fair the fair is organized in booths and basically once you’re there you just go from booth to booth and if you find something that you like you just say hey I’d like to source that can you please tell me what the cost is going to be and the minimum order quantity and you just go from there okay and so that’s just a high-level overview on how to find products to sell online how to evaluate the product to see how much money you can actually make on there you can figure out how much that product is actually selling by using Terapeak to figure out how much of that products being sold by eBay and then finally I showed you various ways in places to actually source that product online and I keep in mind that I offer a class that actually goes over all these steps in depth at profitable online store comm now if you decide to join my class and if you’d like t’what i’ve presented so far it’s actually in your best interest to not have a niche before you join because what I found is that a lot of people join my class they have these preconceived notions of what to sell and oftentimes the products that students want to sell are either too competitive or they don’t have enough demand but if you do sign up you will learn how to find the right niche and how to find the right product to sell and actually a significant portion of my class is dedicated towards this because unless you have something to sell you can’t really get started and as an extra value added to students I actually offered to evaluate a student’s product niche and give them my opinion before they get started and that often times gives a student extra peace of mind before they begin I’ll show you how to source your products whether it be through drop shipping through domestic wholesale or importing from China I’ll walk you through the entire process then I’ll show you how to set up your own branded website remember the end goal here is to start a long term business in order to do that you really need to establish a brand keep in mind that you don’t need any technical knowledge at all to start your own website or just your own online store also you teach you how to leverage marketplaces like Amazon now for the purposes of the class I usually have students validate their products on Amazon and eBay to make sure that it’s going to sell before they start their online stores but I’ve had cases where students during the validation phase have made six figures right off the bat because Amazon’s marketplace is so large and then finally I’ll show you how to get traffic to your own site optimize it for convergence and generate your own sales and I will hold your hand through this entire process now if you’re interested in signing up I can honestly say that this class is the most comprehensive ecommerce course on the market there’s a library of over 300 videos that cover every single aspect of starting an online store and as a value-add I give live lectures every single week we can actually ask me questions in real time now keep in mind that starting your own business is not going to be a black-and-white affair you’re going to have questions that are going to be very specific to your business and I will actually answer them live in real time once a week now I can’t possibly know everything about e-commerce so periodically I’ll invite guest experts to come on the show so for example I had Spencer Hawes the creator of longtail Pro come in to talk about SEO I’ve had Zack Smith coming to talk about Kickstarter I’ve had various Amazon experts come in to talk about Amazon I’ve had lawyers to come in to talk about the legal aspects of starting an online store basically all these resources are available at your disposal as soon as you sign up now I remember when my wife and I started our online store is actually quite a lonely process and so as a result I have Facebook groups and I have a forum where you can actually interact with other like-minded students now at this point I have thousands of students in the class and you can easily find other students to kind of bounce your ideas off of and hold each other accountable now in terms of the class I just want to let you know that I’ve run it for fun I’m not out here to nickel and dime you so as a result there’s no upsells whatsoever as soon as you join the class it’s just one single fee for lifetime membership I really enjoy teaching their students and it really shows in the way I run the class and then finally whenever you have any arbitrary questions I offer 24/7 email support anytime you have a question you can email me and I’ll respond within for two 48 hours anyway I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I hope to see you on the inside in my full-blown course