On Feb 3rd, 2016 at 3:15pm MT, my new eCommerce venture went live. Less than an hour later, we’d made our first sale. A whopping $5.75.
By the time I woke up this morning, we’d made another sale of $15.75.
Going from launch to revenue in such a short period of time was really fun, and quite exciting.
If you think having your own eCommerce business would be terrific, read on and I’ll share some more of the back story on what led me to this.
How I Got Started Online
Way back in 2004, my first attempt at building an online business saw me importing fashion jewelry from China and selling it on eBay.
Back then, I could buy a product for $1 and sell it for $10. The business was launched in August (while I was still CEO of Dyrand) and every month we doubled our sales. In December, we sold about $3-4K worth of product. Suffice to say, I thought I’d found the perfect business!
Then in January, sales dropped off a cliff so I shuttered the business to focus all my energy on growing Dyrand, which, at the time, was only 3 years old and not yet profitable. In 2008, I sold Dyrand for $1.2M, so focusing on it was, in hindsight, a good idea. (Though, had I shuttered Dyrand and focused on my eCommerce business, I might have done even better!)
What Are You Going To Sell?
When creating your online business, you need to decide what kind of business you are going to be in.
Are you going to offer a service of some kind (I own Groove Digital Marketing), sell information products, sell physical products, or build a software company?
In my case, I have thus far had success with services (Groove) and information products (Bright Ideas) because neither one of them requires a lot of start up capital. They do, however, require a high level of expertise, which makes these kind of businesses hard to start for people that don’t (yet) have a specialty of some kind.
In the table below is a very brief summary of what I feel are some of the main pros and cons that you should consider when selecting your business model. (I’ve purposely left software out because it’s so out of reach for most new entrepreneurs.)
My eCommerce Venture
One of the keys with any business is being able to acquire customers profitably. If you choose to sell on Amazon, you don’t have to spend money directly on customer acquisition. Instead, it comes out of the proceeds of the sale. Plus, Amazon will do the fulfillment for you.
A friend of mine, Spencer Haws is selling on Amazon and his business is growing very quickly. In his latest blog post, Spencer wrote how he sold over $60,000 worth of his products on Amazon in December 2015.
My venture doesn’t (yet) sell on Amazon. Instead, I’m using a very specific Facebook marketing strategy that I learned from Mike Cooch.
Mike is a very bright guy and he actually offers a course and a mastermind group that I am a part of, and it’s worth every penny. You can learn more about his course here (not an affiliate link). Unlike most gurus, Mike is walking his talk. His eCommerce venture is doing millions a year.
The Appeal of eCommerce in 2016
Since my days of selling fashion jewelry back in 2004, there have been some pretty significant changes in the landscape.
- Facebook has become the #1 B2C direct marketing platform in the world
- Thanks to the web, sourcing products from China has never been easier (in ’04 I had to fly there to find products)
- Amazon has become a huge marketplace for anyone to sell almost anything, without ever having to touch the product (Amazon warehouses, packs, and ships for you)
- Building an online store has never been easier (Shopify, and the like…)
- People are now very comfortable shopping online
In aggregate, these changes have made it insanely easy for anyone to launch their own online business.
In my case, I did some research on Amazon to find a product that met my checklist. I then purchased Click Funnels (affiliate link) to make it insanely easy to create a marketing funnel for the product(s) I’m testing.
As soon as the funnel was ready (Mike’s course will teach you EXACTLY how to do this), I used Ad Espresso (not affiliate link) to create my Facebook ad campaign. (Mike’s course will also teach you how to advertise on Facebook).
Less than an hour later, I’d made my first sale. From here on, it’s all about testing product offers, then optimizing my funnels and Facebook advertising campaigns.
And, as you’d guess, I have plenty of things to learn!
By the way, in my opinion, for most new entrepreneurs, selling physical products makes a LOT more sense than trying to selling information products, largely because anyone can source a physical product, whereas very few new entrepreneurs have the skills to create an information product. Plus, physical products are exponentially easier to sell because people can see exactly what they are buying.
What’s Next?
You probably aren’t going to see me writing a ton of blog posts here on BI about my eCommerce business in the near future, nor do I offer a training course of any kind. In fact, I may never offer one (hence my pointing you to Mike’s course).
Like Mike, I plan to grow this into a multi-million dollar business and suspect that I will have a blast doing it.
Along the way, you can expect me to share short updates on my Facebook page, so if keeping tabs on what I’m doing is of interest to you, you might want to go and like the Bright Ideas page if you haven’t done so already. If you have questions, please post them to the comments on my Facebook post.
I will likely share some additional insights with my subscriber list, so if you want that, just opt in using the link below.
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