Welcome to the first step of the 7-day crash course for dropship newbies!

By the end of this step you will be able to understand and do the following three things:

1. Understand the 6 fundamentals of creating and growing a profitable dropship niche store.
2. Understand why it's better and more profitable for you as a newbie to build a niche store instead of a mass market store.
3. Be ready to decide upon a niche of your own in preparation to advance to the 2nd step of this crash course.

Let's get started...

I have found that over the past 15 years of running successful and profitable online businesses that choosing the right niche is where everything with success starts.

It's the foundation.

Why? Because a choosing a winning niche helps you get clear about who you're going to help, with what, why and where the market is going, and how you see yourself actively building a profitable business.

Vision is everything. Without the vision of your business focus and how you are going to get started on the right and correct path, everything else crumbles. You'll be just spinning your wheels. Let's avoid that.

Instead, let's help you get on the right track. Let's get started with the 6 fundamentals of discovering a winning niche. Enjoy 🙂

6 Fundamentals of a profitable niche

Choosing the ideal profitable niche for you will comprise of researching and connecting the dots to the answers to the 6 fundamentals that you see in the diagram below:

The order that I follow when creating and choosing a profitable niche is as follows:

1: Personal Interest/Passion/Experience/Knowledge

There a lot of ways of making money. You want to build a dropship business though to make money because it probably sounds easier than other ways of making money, right?

I say, as long as it's legally and morally right, we should do whatever it takes to build a better life for ourselves. Agree?

The first step to discovering a winning and profitable niche for your business is to make sure you have a personal interest in the business.

I don't care what anyone else says, if you're not excited about helping your target audience get what they want by selling them what they need and want, you simply will not have the drive to build your business.

Make sense/

That's why getting started first with brainstorming ideas about industries, markets, products, etc you can see yourself being excited about selling that's key. That's the 1st step.

We need heart in our business before the brain should get involved with picking our niche.

What I mean by that is, take the time to identify business niche ideas you either have a passion for or can get excited about. Brainstorm from your heart at this point. Don't worry about all the other stuff. Just focus on writing down ideas that excite you. Make a list of at least 20 or more ideas.

Some of your exciting niche ideas could be inspired by products you have purchased in the past that you really love using, or products you would love to purchase.

Other niche ideas could include markets you would be excited about specializing in. For example, if you are interested in fitness, you could have a website/store that specializes in squat racks focused on people working out from home. That would be an example of what I call a "product niche."

An example of what I call an "experience niche" is specializing your website/store toward the end-in-mind objective or goal of helping a specific group of people with achieving a goal such as enjoying their traveling experiences. By sourcing all types of quality products aimed at helping travelers with enjoying their experience abroad alone or with family and friends, your store could be that niche site that helps those people.

Another example of a product niche could be based upon sources all types of varieties of magnets for kids or office or other uses. Seriously, there a ton of uses for magnets. All types of problems are out there that magnets solve.

A different type of experience based niche could be helping people grow health food on a budget.

There are literally thousands of possibilities.

Get the idea so far?

I like to play the game of thinking about what types of problems certain products solve for people when I look at them.

Try it!

Training your mind to think about what issues, goals, needs, problems, etc. products being sold out there solve will help you get better at choosing winning and profitable niches for your next business.

So product niches or experience based niches are both awesome. You get to choose. But again, base your decision upon your interest, enthusiasm, and yes even passion!

The more energy you have behind your niche ideas the greater force it will have to attract to a profitable demand as you research your market. More to come on that topic later in this course.

To continue on...it is also even more powerful for you when choosing an exciting niche for you when you have not only a high interest or passion in the topic, but also experience and knowledge.

Interest, knowledge and experience.

The power trio.

Those three things in combination give you an upper hand or advantage over someone else who only has an interest in the industry niche.

But when you combine the power of personal interest, knowledge and experience you have a great deal of fuel to rely on when launching and growing your business!

The more knowledge & experience you have in a given niche area the better you can potentially help your audience/customers solve their problems which leads to great profits for you!

So to recap, if you enjoy what you are doing then your business will do better. This point is fairly simple to understand but in application many people end up choosing a niche and leaving this one out because they get blinded by the money making potential only of the niche, or the low competition, etc. And then they find themselves with no business over the long-term.

Overall, the people who choose a niche they enjoy spending time in they do much better. It doesn't mean you have to always be insanely passionate about the niche, it just means you can see yourself enjoying the promotion of the products and actively building the. business along side with your customers.

2: Target Audience

Who do you want to help out there in the world? And what do you want to help them with? Making money is a bi-product of helping enough people each day get what they want.

To create and build a profitable dropship niche it's important to focus on helping hundreds of thousands to millions of people who have one thing in common get what they want.

For example, if you like playing soccer, there are millions of people also out there in the world who love playing soccer and/or watching it etc. Helping those people access and buy unique quality products is an example of one type of dropship niche store you could build.

Another example could be if you have a passion or interest in high end women's leather bags. Great! There are millions of women in the world who love high end leather bags for all types of purposes. That's a dropship niche.

You could build a dropship store targeting people who suffer with lung issues. Just think of all the amazing products and solutions you could present on your store to help those people? There are millions of people on the planet that suffer from lung issues. Why not focus on helping those people? You could if you have a the drive, the interest, even the passion to build a brand around that industry niche.

And the list can go on an on. There is plenty of opportunity.

3: Daily Demand

This fundamental means you need to choose products that frequently sell. If you want to make money every day it's important to sell products that people buy every day.

You're not usually going to have just one product that generates sales for you every day. There are exceptions for sure, but you will usually need to research and sell around 10 to 50 solid products that frequently sell. To do this you'll need to research proof that people are buying the products every day or week by looking at products reviews on selling platforms and competitor sites like Etsy.com, eBay.com, Amazon.com, etc.

All of those sites have reviews from people and the dates of purchase giving you the proof you need to know if the product in question is selling frequently.

4: Low Competition

Choosing the ideal profitable niche means there is also a fair amount of competition out there in the world. There should be people/companies out there already making great money in the niche you are considering. If there is no competition that is usually a bad thing for you because that it either means there is no one making money in that niche market, or the product you plan on selling is so new that no one knows anything about it.

Suffice it to say, deciding upon the ideal profitable niche for you should have some competitors out there. You should not be in the business of reinventing the wheel when you first start. Instead, jump in and sell products that other people are selling pending the other points of choosing an ideal niche that I'm teaching about today.

5: High Profitability

The  products you choose should have the potential of making you great money. What exactly is "great money" is really up to you though. Some people living in different places of the world might think $5 a day is great money. And in other places and mind-sets and personal goals great money might be a $52K or a million a year. Whatever the case is, the products you choose to sell should have a big enough profit margin in them to allow you to enjoy the good life, whatever that might mean to you.

6: Be Different

If there are 10 other people selling the same exact product you are online you need to present your product differently than theirs. You can do that by designing different images and display your product more professionally. You can be different by showing demo videos, or explaining the benefits of using the product, or offering services and solutions to your audience either in combination to their purchase or in bulk.

Whatever it is, make sure that the way you market is different and valuable to your audience. Give them a compelling reason as to WHY they should buy from you. Additionally, it's critical to sell products that not everyone else is selling, but yet people buy every day.

Being different is not just about what "different" things you can do for your customers, it's also about selling products that not everyone else is selling.

3 Action Steps to Choose Your Own Niche

Step 1: Brainstorm - take the time to list out as many product ideas you can comprising of products you like or have bought or want to buy that retail for around $150 or more.

I suggest doing what I do to achieve great success which is to sell high ticket dropship products you like that retail between $150 to $800 or more to give you a better profit margin).

If you're having a hard time coming up with ideas go over to Etsy.com, Amazon.com or ebay.com and look at the product categories or sold product listings to see what products have sold. The items that show "green" are the ones that have sold on eBay. Take a closer look at the details of the product that sold and write down the products that are selling almost every day.

Why do I start off first with selling high ticket products?

Ask yourself...What would you rather do?

1. Example A:  Sell 200 products at a $1 and make $100 profit?
2. Example B: Sell 1 product at $300 and make a $100 profit?
   • What requires more work and customer service? You're right, example A involves a lot more work and customer service headache. I would sell example B because I prefer to have more time freedom in my life. You choose. Make a list of the products you like and then move on and refine your selection.

Step 2: Research niche competitors - a real drop ship competitor in your niche is someone following the same exact model as you are and selling similar or the exact products you want to sell online. Your real online competitors will have no physical location and no warehouses.

Makes sense right? If someone is selling the same products you want to sell online but they don't have a warehouse of stored products themselves that would mean they are a competitor of yours because they are retailing products from a drop ship supplier themselves.

So the most important thing to keep in mind here is that if someone else online is selling the products you want to sell, you can too in most cases.

I call this approach "modeling after your niche competitors". In other words follow their example. Your competitors have already "vetted" the dropship suppliers for you.

Launching a drop ship business is much easier, faster and effective if you know 100% sure that someone else is doing it so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. If someone else online is having success selling the same products so can you!

By visiting Google.com/Shopping and then typing in the name of your niche drop ship product idea you can quickly discover competitors to research to potentially model after.

For example if I was interested in selling "solid wood coffee tables" I would go to Google.com/Shopping and type that search term into the search box and then sift through the first couple pages of the search results to find other websites selling the same products I am interested in.

I would then take it a step further and examine each competitor website to document the products retailing between $150 to $800. The reason for this is because people usually like to call in to speak with someone live to place their order for products retailing more than $800. If you enjoy being on the phone with people then selling $800 and higher products could be your thing. If you'd rather not deal with more customer service demand then I have found it's best to retail products within the $150 to $800 range. And the reason not to sell products around $150 or lower is because it takes just as much work to sell a $150 product than it does a $800 product. So you might as well make a great profit while you're retailing!

Step 3: Organize the results - once you brainstorm and find real competitor drop ship websites you can sift through the results and only keep the competitor websites on your list that have no physical location. As mentioned above, you only want to look at the websites that are drop shipping products themselves which means they don't have a warehouse of stored products. The suppliers would be doing that stuff. As long as I could find between 5 to 20 other competitor drop ship websites selling the same products I want to then I would consider this a good niche to choose for myself! From there you can work toward researching the suppliers those competitor websites are using, contact them and move forward building your business. I'll teach you more about how to research out drop ship suppliers later in Day 3 training!

That's it. Once you start implementing the steps above then you'll want to document your findings on a spreadsheet to keep track of your ideas. In my experience, the fasts way of choosing a profitable niche is to use the 4th strategy above, which is modeling after a niche competitor websites showing up in the paid ad spots with Google. If they are paying to advertise their drop ship business chances are they are making money with their business. If they are making money so can you. Make sense right.

Proper niche selection will make or break your business. So choose your ideal profitable niche using the 6 ideal niche guidelines and 3 niche discovery strategies to help you get started.

Looking for more advanced training? Try my Drop Ship Advanced course by going here.

All done? Here's what to do next....

Step 1

Post your most important question or favorite comment below.

Step 2

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Step 3

Click on the button below to advance to the next step OR simply check your email inbox tomorrow morning to access the next training in this 7-Day Crash Course for drop shippers!