In two folds, I’m a holder of both the good and bad news. Bad news first so, brace yourself. Are you ready to become a Smart dropshipper?
However bitter, let me break it to you; your advice, product, and e-mail list are no ones’ cup of tea-Regardless of the amount of time and effort you put into creating and marketing the best products, no one gives a hoot lest you do one thing
.
There is a fad for a great product or niche and actionable advice amongst folks; however, they want it to emanate from people whom they regard as smarter than them (your-not being smarter notwithstanding)-by IQ metrics smarter in this regard refers to intelligence.
After these, your hope-copter must be flying real low, right? But don’t lose hope already.
I got some good news on the flip side.
It is simple to become a “smart dropshipper”.
You’ll see it’s pretty straightforward as this post seek to demonstrate as much. To put it in another way, you do not have to be the genius Einsteins of this world.
Heck, not even a rocket scientist or an expert- though you can ride on folk’s assumption of being one.
In a short span of weeks, months, or even a year, you can scale up to be among the top 1% Dropshippers In your niche of choice.
But how, you ask?
How do you outsmart your competition and target audience?
How do you amass sufficient knowledge to be an authority in your niche?
How do you leverage this authority in being smarter, crafting convincing Ads that convert to sales?
And even the more important, how do you make it happen asap! This post is potent with answers to these questions, so stay with me.
Smart Dropshipper Strategy #1: Unearthing the Real Needs and Wants of Your Target Audience
First of all, the products you vend must solve the problems of your target audience. I mean, that’s the only way to make money in dropshipping business.
And therefore, you’ve got to understand the actual needs of your audience.
A smart Dropshipper knows their customers right off the bet, and with that insight, they offer valuable solutions that people buy.
Look at it this way.
Why would total strangers hand you their hard-earned money? Not unless you demonstrate to have a grasp of their problems, the roller-coaster of emotions they go through, and you have a compelling solution to better their lives.
You need to delve deeper and get a better feel and an understanding of the real fears, hopes, aspirations, wants, and needs of your audience, and to achieve this end, do the following.
Ask the Questions to Uncover the Real Needs of Your Audience.
The assumption is what all failed Dropshippers do, do not fall in the same trap. Your biases and assumptions aside, ask questions to discover things you had not known about your audience.
In the study of your prospects and answers you’re looking for, you’ll use the right tools, and platforms-we’ll take a look into these herein.
Once armed with the answers, you’re able to know what points to target, what problems your products solve, and how to convince people to buy from your Shopify store.
Finding the Most Common Questions Asked in Your Niche.
There are super tools such as AnswerThePublic, which lists all the questions your prospects ask about a topic or a product on the search engine.
Being in the know as regards these questions points you what exactly bothers your audience the most.
Just visit AnswerThePublic and search your primary keywords, and the tool avails to dozens of questions fetched from queries that relate to your topic asked by your prospects.
UseListen to Your Audience on Forums and Q&A Sites.
Forums and Q&A Sites are platforms in which you’ll find folks share problems, look for solutions, and cry out their hearts.
Do the listening, understand their need, and find a solution to their distress.
Finding a Dropshipping Niche using Quora
Quora is one of the best Q&A sites on earth, head over there; there are 100s of thousands of threads on literally any topic under the sun on Quora.
Search for your topic and browse the top threads to get a feel of your audience’s perspective.
A smart dropshipper must utilize Reddit.
Besides, Quora is another powerful social network-forum known as Reddit. It’s an insightful research goldmine for serious Drpshippers.
With Reddit, for instance, let’s say the niche in question is a hobby, and you seek to find out why people love it. You’ll find many threads addressing the various aspects of the hobby and why people love or hate it.
Research on Keywords
Using Google Search to find fora for your topi is smart Dropshipping. With the following search queries on Google, you can find any niche-specific for:
- [Niche Keyword]+Discussion
- [Nche Keyword]+Forum
- [Niche Keyword]+vbulletin
With amazing insights on your audience’s pain points abound on the forum, you shouldn’t shy from spending a couple of minutes on the discussion forum.
In the scenario, you have difficulty in finding a forum of interest, use FindaForum.net. It’s an engine wholly dedicated to forum sites.
Using the Emotional Searches in Finding Audience’s Craves.
Google search is essentially a window to the internet, and you can use it o gauge your audience’s feelings about a topic.
A close look at search queries such as “I hate back pain” reveals a plethora of sites with people describing how they intensely hate back pain, how it has wrecked their lives, and how they longed to change their condition.
So an image is painted of desperate people in need of help, and it’s safe to say they can readily pay anyone willing to make them feel better.
By merely using the search query, “I hate my weight” on any niche, you are likely to find an audience of such people.
It is one real query of real people, upon searching on it, you’ll find many variant first-hand accounts of people suffering from weight gain, reasons for hating it and a desire for things to change for them.
It is fodder for understanding the pain points, fears, and with that insight, you can come up with a product to drop ship to your prospects.
There exist several other search queries that one can use to come up with a similar audience. For instance;
- “[Niche] ruined my life.”
- “I love [niche] because”
- “I wish [niche]”
Use Related Keywords to Understand Your Audience.
Chrome extension is known as Keywords Everywhere is a handy tool that you can use to tell you a great deal about your audience.
Here’s how it works; whenever you hit the search on Google, chrome extension churns out top related keywords and the other keywords searched by the very same people search.
Also shown is the monthly volume and the competition of the keywords, other closely related queries vital in uncovering details about your prospects.
Do you wonder how these metrics are of any use to you?
All these data gear to help you find answers and help identify and understand the customer’s state of mind for your dropshipping niche.
To help realize that end, there are other approaches, for example, you can find them in Ecomhunt.
With knowledge about your audience’s problems, you can provide them reliable solutions to alleviate their situation.
The next point offers to give a solution in the event you are out of depth in your dropshipping niche, so relax and sit tight.
Smart Dropshiper Strategy #2: Go Beyond Surface Level Knowledge In Your Niche.
Ok let’s face it, every Tom, Dick & Harry out there can create vague store about a product and share the same way everyone else does.
But you do not attract any customer that way, ok, you could get a handful of them not for long though.
For your store to become an authority to your audience, you’ve got to go beyond the surface knowledge and develop a deeper understanding of your niche.
Have a solid grasp of the core concepts of your niche or product.
Otherwise, your dropshipping strategy will struggle to convert to sales. And hey, you are not being asked to be a technical expert, don’t get it twisted.
If you keenly heed the tips I am about to share, you stand to have the edge over your competition and customers; you quickly become knowledgeable about your topic.
This way, as a smart Dropshipper, you able to create value for your audience, and in turn, you create an army of loyal customers.
Next is how you can pull this off:
Read the Best 3 Books In Your Topic
There’s a renowned author in Tim Ferris, and in his book The 4 Hour Work Week, he has a theory that if you read three best books on your topic, you become more knowledgeable about it than 99% of folks you know.
That’s a sensational bold claim but loaded with sense. In no way is the theory suggesting you’ll become an expert surgeon by reading three best surgery books.
However, you’ll gain more theoretical knowledge on surgery than most people except for professionals.
This principle lends you an edge over your competition and audience, to read the three best books, just search on google, google is your friend.
A search query like “best books on [Topic]” for instance gives a selection of great books.
But if picking the ones to read is a hard choice, use Amazon by using Ave to sort and Customer Reviews to choose top rated books on your topic.
If, for instance, you are dealing with a highly technical niche, you want to choose books meant for beginners and non-technical people to absorb as much content, take your time to understand the concepts shared, I suggest you do not want to rush this step.
Once you’re through with your reading, you sure will be way ahead of the curve of most people in your niche.
There is one hurdle with books; in specific industries, they become obsolete fast. Thankfully, there’re other ways to navigate around the problem, and that gets addressed in the next point.
Follow the Top Dropshipping Stores in Your Niche
Look, your competition is already doing the donkey work for you, and you do not have to reinvent the wheel.
It Kinda reminds me of the adage about keeping your friends closer and enemies even closer. Oops! Your competition isn’t necessarily your enemy per se, but you get the point.
Just follow top drop shippers, stores in your niche to learn tons about your product, audience, and the products that work for your clients.
What blogs give you is a tip of the iceberg in comparison to books from renowned authors, and therefore use blogs in addition to books you read.
That said, however, stores help in the understanding of the topic in smaller chunks of info.
Here’s what you may need to learn from your competition.
- ‘Products that often form the basis of discussion
- Products that get the most engagements-comments, shares, likes
- Jargon and specific industry terminologies that your competition use in their ads or creatives.
- Tools your competition use and recommend
- Structure of the creatives-text/visual, length, tone of voice et cetera
- Products that your competition promotes.
Finding the best dropshipping stores that align with your dropshipping model is straightforward; again, Google is your friend. Look it up.
A search for any of your main topic keywords results in the best sites in your niche because authority sites get correctly optimized for their keyword.
With Chrome extension’s Keyword Everywhere, you get to see a list of related keywords alongside search volumes.
Run a simple search query with the highest keyword volume to pin down sites with authority in your niche or search for the best blogs.
Using Buzzsumo
A search on BuzzSumo helps you to find the most popular posts in your niche.
With at least 10-12 blogs, sign up for their e-mail lists, read their most popular posts blogs to have a deeper grasp of your product.
If you have a full-time job and you get squeezed out for a time to read, there’s another way that forms the basis for the next point.
Listen to The Top Podcasts on Your Dropshipping Niche.
What else measures up to the experience of learning you need to know about your niche while either driving to work or enjoy an evening stroll?
Podcasts and relevant podcasts for that matter does that for you.
So that you know, Podcasts are the contemporary world over. There are so many podcasts you can find on any topic.
Hit Google Podcasts or iTunes, and while there, make a habit of listening to the best shows on your topic.
Again, Podcasts are an addition to the books you have on your topic. With brushed technical knowledge on your niche, you can polish on your dropshipping understanding, but much on that process in detail in the following.
Smart Dropshipper Strategy #3: Learning Selling from the Best Dropshippers.
Ok, here I know I’m captain obvious, but you’ve got to hear me out on this.
There’s no way you can be a smart Dropshipper, not unless you possess some dropshipping skills.
If you choose a wrong Droppshipping approach, it’s kaput, your researched audience, and technical knowledge of niche notwithstanding You are a niche vendor, and yes, not Coca Cola.
You don’t have the means to run TV ads or massive promotional campaigns akin to those of big brands and hope customers come to you.
Some stores spend to the tune of $8 billion, or some even pay 30% of their total budget on marketing. Of course, you can’t compete with that; probably, you are living on the edge financially.’
Being smart dropshipper means that your dropshipping model runs on the principle of a direct targeted approach.
But precisely, what is directly targeted? It is a controlled approach that seeks to drive a specific action/response from your audience-Buy your product, avail discount, or recommend your store. It’s not just limited to engagement.
In this approach, it possible to make thrice (3) as much for every $1 spent on ads, and it measures every aspect about your audience, thus leveraging your future campaigns on improvement and optimization.
The targeted approach deploys both psychological and emotional triggers to create urgency and a well-defined CTA-call to action. It can be applied on different platforms using various tools-Facebook ads, Google ads, et cetera.
The tools might change, but the target approach in itself is not new, it has been around for centuries, and the top Dropshippers have always used it to achieve impressive results.
Smart Dropshippers Strategy #4: Understand The Basics Of Human Psychology to Persuade Your Audience.
Successful Dropshippers relies on the art of persuasion it means having a way with words to persuade folks into taking action, To execute it effectively, it takes an understanding of human psychology and knowing how to use different emotions get people to spend.
You see, 80% of human decisions base on emotions and how they feel at that moment, not on logic and reasons. And in light of this fact, it becomes clear why landing pages with count downs or e-mails with words such as “Discounts” or “Free” works impressively by triggering emotions and capturing attention.
To be a smarter dropshipper, it is critical to developing at least a basic understanding of human behavior, and human brains respond to different types of content.
Smart also needs you to be aware that one of the core principles of persuasions is to project product benefits as opposed to features.
Persuasive copy that primarily focuses on product features fails to trigger emotions in buyers and, therefore, rarely converts.
On the other hand, a benefit-driven copy gets people to dream about the ideal life and problems they can avoid. Effortlessly, the conversion rates soar.
It’s crucial to understand how you can translate the features and issues of your audience into benefits. Upon translation of features and problems into profits, you can then polish your dropshipping trade into a persuasive one.
Also, here is a great technique, a perfect example of how smart traders play tricks on their audience, and you may want to learn a thing or two then apply it in your niche.
Ordinarily, what would come to mind about a review that only sings praises about a product? Paid right? You wouldn’t trust it. No one does.
That said, it ought not to mean that your subsequent review should be a charge sheet against your product. The cornerstone of this trick is to employ the blemish effect-meaning in a list of positives you mention minor negatives.
It serves to make your product page or review credible. The thing is the human mind gets easily deceived.
Smart Dropshipper Strategy #5: Build Your Business Around Proven Systems and Data Instead Of Gimmicks
You can conquer 90% of your niche if you do one thing, yes, just one thing. How does that sound? Bold? Absolute right?
Ok, every business decision you make, every new product you create or add to your store, every commercial ad you run, and every Creative Ad you publish should always premise on hard solid data proof and proven case studies.
Toss guesswork, ditch gut feelings because these are but hallmarks of failed dropshipping businesses.
I mean, you can’t just sell a product just because you LIKE the product or you THINK it will convert into sales.
You can not use a headline for THINK it’s cool. Heck, why would anyone create a product just because they THINK it’s incredible. Smarter folks at some point stop caring about what they think.
You see, data tells you the trends’ communique, the ground reality. These are the underlying fundamental differences that set apart smart dropshippers from “wannabe experts” and “fake gurus.”
In this section, I’ll use stats from Sony to demonstrate how data-backed decisions can result in business success; Sony is a renowned household electronic maker, one of the biggest brands in the world.
Sony, at some point, had its online sales up by 20% owing to its tested banner ads. I’ll put it to you that the commercial ads did not use gut feeling; instead, the team trusted data to arrive at the final decision.
This approach reflects a certain mindset of successful smarter folks have. They rely on research, robust data trends, a clear understanding of their audience’s needs, suffice knowledge as regards their industry, thus creating low risk and high impact persuasion commercials.
In the internet marketing domain, this mindset bolsters the smarter Dropshippers to come up with products that are successful even before their launch.
Why is that?
Because here, the businesses based on proven systems and robust data, not short-term tact, temporary loophole, or the so-called secret. Decisions are premised on what the data say about customers and not what they want their customers to do.
There’s a famous quote by Steve Jobs, one of the greatest minds in the world. The quote rings true and cements the advocacy herein on Dropshippingit any day. It’s important to remember this whenever you come up with a new product niche idea,
Promoting a product merely because you like it or ABC experts recommend is a recipe for disaster.
You do not choose a product then go out looking for customers, it’s always the other way around.
You find a problem, research the hell out of your audience, figure out their needs, wants, fears, and aspirations.
Then you create a product that aligns your research. Nothing is complicated about marketing.
You’ve got to put the needs of your customers first and use data to make an informed decision. The rest will take care of itself.
So, What Does a Smart Dropshipper Look Like
Short height, some fat guy with long hair, rounded glasses, and big brains! Nah, that looks like we’re talking some superficial bull-poop, mad, huh.
The posits of this article converge on the description of smart dropshipper to be ordinary people, like you and me, and the next person.
But somewhat their content gets shared, their landing page does convert and boy their products sell like hot potatoes, like hot cake, and folks come back to thank them after handing their money, you can’t make this stuff up.
What makes smarter Dropshippers stand apart their competition is that they have a basic understanding of things that most struggling dropshippers never quite works out. With that, we can sum up their traits in the following points.
They Know Expertise is a Thing of Relativity
Unlike reluctant, unsure, and unsuccessful Dropshippers, they appreciate that they do not have to know everything to become experts in their niche.
They hold that expertise is a relative term thing-You’s an expert to anyone who does not know a thing about a topic as much as you do.
Another way to put it is that you need your audience to consider you an expert.
You just need to know more than them. Not everybody, only your audience. That is the difference between a Smart dropshipper and the average dropshippers.
They are long-life learners
The more you share content with your audience, and the more they become knowledgeable, the less they’ll depend on you for information.
And the day they know as much as you do, you’ll cease being an expert to them. And take it from me, they’ll not listen to you anymore, won’t take you seriously and won’t buy from you.
And therefore, that means one thing, you’ve got to keep upgrading your level of knowledge to stay ahead. That’s what Smart dropshipper does. And that’s why they remain relevant.
They Play with Emotions
Though not in the wrong way. Prof Gerald Zaltsman of Harvard holds that 95% of sales follow subconscious decisions.
Smart dropshippers understand human psychology, and they leverage on that to drive sales.
They Don’t Care What People Think.
They care more about their audience’s needs and never afraid of being judged, see they appreciate that they can never make everyone happy-and neither should you even try that ever.
I can’t say this loud enough; you can’t please everyone. And thus, successful Dropshippers only preoccupied with their audience, its needs, and how to profit from solving them. To them, everything else is a distraction.
Are You Smart Dropshipper In A World Full Of Dumbos?
The content of this post is nothing close to rocket science. However, it requires work and commitment-which you are willing to do, but the hoi polloi aren’t.
Research on the audience takes time, reading the best books in niches takes time, and equally becoming the a Smart dropshipper takes time as well. And this is why 99% of Dropshippers never bother to work it out.
But if you are willing to soil your hands, you’re sure to not only get ahead of the curve, but you’ll figure out that success isn’t wrapped in secrets, gimmicks, loopholes, and tricks.
Read Also:
- How To Drive Free Traffic To Your Shopify Store In 2021
- Getting Stripe For Non Us Citizens Vs UK Stripe Account 2021
- Exclusive Facebook Ads To Increasing Your Conversion (2021)
- Discover Top 7 Websites To Make $100 Per Day In 2021
- How Affiliate Marketing Accelerates Shopify Sales By 659%
Success is a result of adhering to proven systems, research, and education that have been in place for centuries. It’s the same principles the smart have used over the years, and the best still use even today.
It’s the same fundamental processes with great potential to reveal everything you ever need to know about niche and target audience to sell to them.
It’s entirely up to you to become one of these smart folks who win and change lives for the better.
Or you simply end up as one of million wannabes continually looking for shortcuts and end up wasting years of their lives and with thousands of bucks with zilch, nada to show for it.
Do you really want to be a Smart dropshipper
So, what is it going to be? Smart Dropshippers or Dumbos?
Sign up on Shopify for 90 Days Free Trial
