Introduction

Hi everyone, my story is nothing too special, I'm just a guy who beat
the odds by simply being courageous, working smart & going for what I
love. I'm 23 years old, I own a total of 3 online businesses, I invest in
crypto and I trade the foreign exchange market. How did I get here?
Simple, I started my first business in grade 10, selling t-shirts at school
with my brand name on it. This failed for many reasons.

My first year out of high school, I got a job at a cafe near the CBD of
Pretoria in My plan was to use the money to fund my trading account
and I was determined,, although I was made to clean toilets, being
overworked and underpaid, I still persisted then eventually left the job
because my boss was taking huge advantage of me and it played with
my mental & physical health.

As the year went on, my debts got so big, I didn't know how I would
pay them back, but I kept learning, trying, failing, blowing accounts,
kept going. Finally in July 2020, my best friend introduced me to
Dropshipping (although I had already tried it before, and it didn’t work, I
decided to give it one last go.) I put everything I had mentally,
emotionally, physically, spiritually & financially into this next attempt and
I made sure to learn as much as I could to make the best store possible
and I did exactly that, and as they say the rest is history. Now I've
successfully built over 5 six-figure stores, my crypto portfolio keeps
growing, I have become a profitable trader & my new projects are
quickly growing because I can now properly fund them.

This was a very brief summary of my journey, but I felt the need to
include it as a form of inspiration to you, although it does not go into
detail about the many changes I've had to make over the past few
years if my life, just to get to where I am today. I had to work on my
mind, spirit and emotions everyday. The point is that this journey is an
everyday battle that I still fight, that's why I too am still learning, and
sharing my knowledge with you, so you don't make the same mistakes.

CONGRATULATIONS & THANK YOU

FOR INVESTING IN YOURSELF

Index
Step 1:
Understanding the Dropshipping
Business Model

Step 2: Product Selection & Analysis

Step 3: Setting Up Your Website/

Store

Step 4:
Ads Template & Format

Step 5:
Facebook & IG Ad Strategy

Step 6:
Back end systems & automation

Step 7: Custom Audience/ LAA

Step 1: Understanding the Dropshipping
Business Model
How dropshipping works:

#1 Find an online supplier who has the products you want to sell

#2 Show the supplier’s products with marked up prices on your website

and advertise them

#3 Receive direct payment from the customers who buy from your
website

#4 Redirect the orders to your suppliers and pay them their original
price. Keep the profits to yourself!

#5 Do nothing: the supplier will ship the order directly to your clients

#6 Repeat! Find more products and suppliers if you like, and enjoy
greater earnings!

Step 2: Product Selection & Analysis

Best Selling Niches 2023💡

1. Home & Living Products

2. Pets

3. Kitchen & Dining Products

4. Men’s Fashion & Accessories

5. Women’s Fashion & Accessories

6. Health & Beauty

7. Sports & Outdoor

8. Improvement Tools & Products

9. Jewellery & Watches

10. Art & Craft and Sewing

Research & Analysis Platform

- AliExpress Dropship Center

- Jungle Scout

- Spocket

- Helium 10

- CJ Dropshipping

- Alibaba

- Wish

- Etsy

- Google Trends

- Ecomhunt

- Kickstarter

What to dropship?
You can choose anything you like! The main idea is to sell the
products that are emotional, inspiring, unusual. This is how you will
motivate your store visitors to make impulse purchases. Here are
the product types we can recommend:

• Gadgets, devices & accessories

• Accessories for sports & outdoor activities

• Supplies for hobbies & crafts

• Clothes & fashion accessories

• Home gadgets, accessories & decor

Step 3: Setting Up Your Website/ Store

1. First Steps
-Create a new G-mail account (preferably with the name you will
use for your store)

-Signup to Shopify at www.shopify.com

-Think of a name for your store (think of what you're selling & make

sure it makes sense and is catchy or rolls easy off the tongue)

-Purchase a domain name once you've got your store name (eg.

www.gamanedcourse.co.za is a domain) I suggest you purchase if

off of Shopify rather than a third party provider.

-Sign-up to a payment gateway, my recommendations are :

Paystack; Payfast; 2checout & DLocal for SA based stores.

-After doing product research, select your first product/niche that

you want to build the store around. My suggestion to build a store
within a niche category, eg. making a sports category store and
focusing on the rugby niche.

-Once you have your niche, research which of your products are
selling the most, or use the data from your first few ads campaigns
to determine your store's winning products.

2. Product Page Checklist

Aside from the home page, the product page is arguably the most
important page and needs to really sell to the consumers. This list
consists of what a high converting product page should

have.

COPYWRITING : All the text within the product page

By doing market research & product research, you are capturing

the correct language used within this specific niche, this helps a lot
especially for niches with a passionate audience as it creates a
sense of familiarity.

Competitor research is also necessary for your advantage in

communicating your product to the public, as there may be some
angles your competitor used to market the product that you could
improve, or you could come up with a completely new angle that
they missed, eg. My competitor sells a grass trimmer with the
marketing angle that it is durable and reliable, my angle could be
that it gets the work done in half the time as other grass trimmers
and uses less electricity.

You also need to have product reviews on your page, reviews help
with trust and has been proven to drastically increase conversion
rates. Getting reviews comes with time as you sell your store, but
there are ways around this, if you are interested in how to import
reviews of products to Shopify, as your homework, go to YouTube
& search "How to import reviews to Shopify" usually the easiest to
import from is Ali Express

Think of bold catch phrases/ tag-lines to use throughout your page

in order to capture attention and show to the potential consumer
that your business takes time in entertaining their eyes.

Be concise in your writing, focus on putting straight-forward

information that the customer is looking for, there is no need for
backstories of the product or business, the buyer just wants to
know how and in how many ways this product can make their lives
easier.

Make sure to outline all the benefits that the consumer gets from

buying the product

Add extra info about shipping, frequently asked questions and

guarantees you may have for the products.

Make sure to make use of the highest quality images, this is

obviously for the trust factor and that no one trusts a site with bad
images.

3. Back-end Setups
Shopify gives you legal page templates, I suggest you use those
when starting out, just fill in the blanks or replace text with custom
text where prompted by Shopify.

Make sure to have a clean home page, contact us page, & track
order page.

Go to the Shopify apps store & get apps for these tasks : e-mail

marketing, by now you would possibly have an app for reviews, an

app for trust badges & an app to track finances or you could just
use excel for that.

Setup your Facebook/ Meta pixel by adding the facebook sales

channel from the Shopify apps store.

If you're not using a local supplier, also setup your supplier

integrations on your Shopify.

Shopify will allow you an extension on your trial period if you email

them asking for an extension as you are still working on your store

and would still love to build it and run it using Shopify.

Step 4: Ads Template & Format

- Picture(s)

- Video

Get studio style images

Get Lifestyle style images

Get creative images/ gifs/ videos

Have a nice logo

- Ads Description/ Copywriting

Step 5 : Facebook & IG Ad Strategy

1. Creating Ads & Building Testing Systems
In order to market your product you need to make use of ads, we
usually make use of video ads as statistically, they are the highest
converting forms of ads, now you can make these ads on your
own, (which is mostly what I do using an app named Canva or
Canva.com) or you could outsource ad creation to trusted
companies that I've used before like Viralecomads.com or
Bandsoffads.com. I urge you to learn & practice how to learn
making your own ads as it is a skill that will never leave you and it
will save you money in the beginning, you can start outsourcing ad
creation once you begin scaling your business.

You can also use influencers as a form of ads, by sending them the
product and having them make an unboxing video or a before &
after video etc. This helps with the trust factor in terms of
consumers buying your product because they trust the influencer
selling the product which automatically means they trust you. I will
teach you my 2 paid advertising methods with Facebook & IG,
whichever one you use is up to you to decide as a business owner
what would be best for you.

2. Instagram Ads Strategy

When I got into ecom, I started with IG ads, it was relatively the

easiest method for me at the time, but it had its own challenges,

when promoting on Instagram, you need to make sure you have

high quality, eye-catching ads & posts with well thought out copy

that will communicate your offer (eg. 50% off) and incite your

prospects into clicking the call-to-action (eg. Shop Now button).

Not only that, but you need to create a page & feed that looks
highly professional and trustworthy, my advice is to search for
other dropshipping/ e-com store accounts similar to yours and get
inspiration and ideas from their page layouts as well as follow
pages related to the content or products you want to sell, this
allows Instagram to categorise your business.

Once you've finished setting up the actual feed, made and set the
logo and name, and look of the page etc, follow these steps. There
will be changes and additions to your page as you move forward,
things like adding story highlights of product specials or customer
reviews are also key in the proceeding runnings of your business.

Step 1 : Create an Instagram account or use one you already have

and change it to a professional account in your settings.

Step 2 : Connect a facebook page to your instagram account, it's a

relatively easy process, you can go into the edit button on your
page and create a new Facebook page to connect after you've
connected your Facebook account. (if you run into any issues,
there are short and very helpful videos on youtube to help sort out
whatever problems may arise in this step).

Step 3 : Fill in all other details like your business contact info and

website, at this point your page should look professional and clean
with posts and everything it needs.

Step 4 : Go on Canva or whatever software/ app to make your Ads,

or use outsourced ad creation, post the ad on your feed as a post.
The best way to learn how to make ads is to learn from youtube or
watch the tutorials on Canva and then actually putting in the time
to practice and make ads, make sure to be creative and gather
inspiration.

Step 5 : Once you've made and posted your ad (I suggest you pick
3 of the best ads that you've made and post them all, this is so we
can do something called creative testing which is when we test
which creative/ad is performing the best.) If you've setup
everything correctly, you should see a button that says "Boost
Post" at the bottom right corner of your post, click it, and on to the
next step.

Step 6 : You will be redirected to a page with a 'Select a goal'

heading with 3 options, you want to choose the option 'More
website visits' and enter either your website link or the page on
your website with the product you're focusing on selling or
advertising so the prospect can land straight on that page.

Step 7 : The next page you are taken to is titled 'Define your
audience’ this is where you choose the targeting of your ads,
choose the ‘create your own' option and name your audience. In
the locations section, enter the 9 SA provinces individually, in the
interests section, enter keywords that would best describe the
people who would consume your product or services as well as
keywords best describing your product, you don't want to have
more than 3-5 keywords. The next section is 'Age and Gender'
generally you can keep it as is, but like to be realistic and narrow it
to 20 - 45.

Step 8 : This is where you enter your budget and duration, I would

suggest setting the duration to 'Run this ad until I pause it'

because that way Instagram's algorithm will properly deliver your
ads without the pressure of meeting a deadline, this will allow you
to find high quality prospects that are more likely to purchase. As
for the budget, you need to determine that according to the price
of your product. Your budget should be a third of your product's
selling price, eg.

Product = R600, my ad budget for this will be R200 daily (before

scaling as we are still in the testing phase)

It's a lot tougher to scale on Instagram as opposed to Facebook

because you don't really have access to all the data you need to

make the right changes in order to scale.

You need to be extra creative because IG is very strict on high

quality visual content, so in order for the algorithm to help get you

out there better, you need to have the best content and ads, but

this isn't too tough, as long as you work on your creative side daily

and brush up your content creator & social media management

skills, at some point this actually becomes a pro rather than a con.

There's slightly less people and younger people browsing IG than

Facebook, which means, that less people see your content and

within the lower number of people, many are younger and it's

harder to sell to the youth as chances are they don't have solid

sources of income.

If you have many products, determine the price range of your

products, if it is within a niche, this shouldn't be too hard, eg. your

products range from R999 - R 2499,99, add the highest and lowest

price together and divide it by 3 and that is your ads budget daily,

unless you're focused on selling one product within an array of

other products in your store, then that ad campaign's budget can
be determined by that singular product.

Step 9 : Once this is all done, you are taken to the review page to

review your information, if everything is correct, click on boost post

and instagram will put the post in review and get back to you on

whether it is approved for advertising or not.

If everything goes well, your ad should be approved and running

within 24 hours and all you have to do is wait for that first sale to
come in.

Pros of IG ads

1. It’s cheaper to advertise on IG than facebook due to the lower

volume of users and the fact that IG was not optimally built for

conversions but rather exposure.

2. It allows much better interaction with prospects and customers

and

allows you an easier customer service process.

3. IG pages don't get banned from advertising as much as

facebook

pages do, you will generally run into a lot less policy violations with

IG.

4. It is a much easier process to run ads on IG than Facebook and

within the last quarter sometimes you can't even tell the difference

because sales rocket in that quarter.

Cons of IG ads

1. It’s a lot tougher to scale on Instagram as opposed to Facebook

because you don't really have access to all the data you need to

make the right changes in order to scale.

2. You need to be extra creative because IG is very strict on high

quality visual content, so in order for the algorithm to help get you

out there better, you need to have the best content and ads, but

this isn't too tough, as long as you work on your creative side daily

and brush up your content creator & social media management

skills, at some point this actually becomes a pro rather than a con.

3. There’s slightly less people and younger people browsing IG

than Facebook, which means, that less people see your content
and within the lower number of people, many are younger and it's

harder to sell to the youth as chances are they don't have solid

sources of income.

3. Facebook ads strategy

Facebook Ad Optimisation:

Ad Delivery

• Conversions – Facebook analyses those users who have

converted (for this purpose you should instal FB Pixel on the
website and set up conversion targets – buying, adding to cart,
etc.). Then, it shows your ad to those who are more likely to buy
your product according to FB. This option in Facebook ad set
optimisation is available only if you have accumulated sufficient
conversion statistics.

• Landing Page Views – Facebook will show your ad to those who

are more likely to click on a link in the ad and go to your website.

• Link clicks – optimisation for the audience that will click on your
ad

• Daily Unique Reach – optimisation for demonstrations; in this

case one person is going to see an ad no more than once.

• Impressions – optimisation for the maximum number of your ad

demonstrations (and specifically, the same person may see an ad
several times a day). This scenario is perfectly suitable for new
advertising campaigns (after that you may move to Optimization for
Conversions or Link clicks)

How to achieve best ad delivery?

First, test different ad creatives in order to understand which of

them have greater potential in terms of engagement using PPE
campaigns. Next, choose the most efficient ad creatives and
launch campaigns with conversions. And meanwhile, the best
performing ads in PPE campaign still left to collect likes, views,
comments and shares.

Next, launch conversion campaign based on result of PPE

performing campaign. Target at least 5 interests, create
corresponding adsets with at least one video ad targeted at one
interest. Target countries USA, CA, UK, NZ and AU. Pick broad
interest of at least 20M people. Then set budget for each adset to
half of the product’s price but not less than $10. For example, if the
product cost is $50, the daily budget of each adset should at least
be $25.

Collect Demographic Data:

Let campaign run for 2- 3 days, then analyse the data and
duplicate performing ad & kill the non-performing one.

CHECK THE FACEBOOK ADS MODULE

IN YOUR PACKAGE.

Since facebook is a bit of a broader

subject, I've put it in a separate ebook

within this course package.

Step 6 : BACKEND SYSTEMS & AUTOMATIONS

1.Order Fulfilment
This is the part that will determine the longevity of your business, if
you work on your systems daily, you shouldn't experience things
like backlogs or frequent chargebacks from customers.

My suggestion from the jump is to create a system of everyday

order fulfilment or on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays if you're
using a local supplier and shipping out yourself, if not, integrate a
supplier like Zendrop into your Shopify, when having third party
fulfilment processes check up on your order fulfilment processes
daily to catch on errors early handle them before scaling.

If using a local supplier, you can ship your products out via Aramex

countrywide for R100 and it is delivered to your customer's door,

you can go to any PicknPay or Checkers or Engen Gas station and
purchase the Aramex pack as well as drop it off once you've filled
in all customer details online, just follow the instructions given
within the pack. Make sure to build a relationship with your
supplier, whether local or international, this way is always the best
way to do business in terms of transparency and honesty and it
also makes it easier to keep track of inventory.

2. Accounting
To properly run a business in the long run and even yourself as a
person, you need to keep track of your financials, for this, you can
get a third party app like Ordermetric or Beprofit installed on your
Shopify, or you can get an outsourced accounting software like
Quickbooks or Xero, but these are for once you've got some skin in
the game, when starting out I suggest you create a simple balance
sheet on Excel where your income, expenses and other costs will
be put, to maintain order, I suggest you make it a habit to update
this sheet daily so you can actually keep track of how the business
is doing. Once you have a thriving business, it would probably be a
good idea to hire a bookkeeper accountant and tax specialist
because we do not want to get on the wrong side of financial law.

Cash Flow :
It would be best to have access to a credit card to pay for the ads
& other business expenses, reasons being, your payment gateway/
processor will only send out your funds after about 2-3 business
days after you've made a sale, in order to keep the business going
you need a cash flow and not only that, if you take on credit and
pay it within the required time, you’re actually building a credit
score for yourself to be able to invest using credit later on in life,
and it's always good to have the financial sector trust you and your
business. Nonetheless, if you don't qualify for a credit card, it's
okay, I had to do everything cash when I started out, which is
harder, but I guess it teaches stricter budgeting, just make sure you
don't go in over your head, that' why you MUST keep a balance of
all your transactions.

3. Customer Support
This is probably the most important factor that determines the
amount of success a business will have, make sure customers can
always reach you through multiple channels. Shopify has an app
called Shopify login where your customers can chat to you via the
online chat embedded on your Shopify store. Shopify also gives
you a professional email like '[email protected]' which routes
emails to your main email automatically, this makes the business
look trustworthy which is a very important factor in sales. Make
sure you are always available to get back to customers via socials
too, at first you can do all this alone but as your business grows it
will serve you well to automate responses to general questions as
well as get a social media manager or customer support agent for
customer support.

Step 7: Custom Audience/ LAA

Create Lookalike Audience:
Create custom audience consisting of users who watched 95% of
the video ads over the last 7 days. These data come from all the
videos that advertise one particular product. To make this work, we
need at least 2,000 users. Depending on your budget, 3-7 days is
usually enough to collect the data.

If have more than 2,000 users who seem interested in the product,
create a lookalike Facebook audience and break it down into six
audience size segments: 1%, 1-2%, 2-3%, 3-4%, 4-5% and 5-6%.

Launch Conversion campaign for Lookalike. Run 2-3 days then

check result. Turn off non performing ad and duplicate or increase
budget for the performing ad.

Create Lookalike Audience Based On (Recommended)

• 95% VV7 (95% video views, 7 days): users who watched 95% of
our video posts over the last 7 days

• 75% VV7 (75% video views, 7 days): users who watched 75% of
our video posts over the last 7 days; used for long videos

• WV 7 (website visitors, 7 days): users who visited the website

over the last 7 days no matter how long they stayed

• VC 7 (view content, 7 days): users who visited the website over

the last 7 days; it’s different from the previous segment in that
these users spent more time there

• VTS 25/10/5 7 (visitors by time spent, top 25, 7 days): top 25/10/5
users who stayed on the site longer than anyone else over the last
7 days

• ATC 7 (add to cart, 7 days): site visitors who added the product to
the shopping cart over the last 7 days

• IC 7 (initiate checkout, 7 days): site visitors who initiated the

checkout process over the last 7 days

• PUR 7 (purchase, 7 days): site visitors who purchase the product

over the last 7 days.

Below are some examples of Automated Rules which you may

customize and use for your campaigns:

• Turn off the ads automatically if CTR is lower than 1%

• Turn off the ads automatically if CPC is higher than $2

• Turn off the ads automatically if Frequency (average amount of ad

demonstrations to one person) is greater than 2

• Enhance the ad group budget by 10%, if cost per result is lower

than $5

• Reduce the ad group budget by 10%, if cost per result is higher

than $7

Retargeting
Create conversion campaign for Retargeting. Target those visited
your website but only add to cart without checkout or make any
purchase for the last 14 days or 30 days for example.

Retargeting or remarketing using discount code, vouchers,

bundle..etc.

Split Testing
A/B Testing, a powerful method that allows you to compare
different versions of a product page against each other to
understand what makes the ideal product.

When split test is launched, traffic is split 50/50 if you test 2

products against each other (Eg. 50% of users will see your original
product, 50% will land on its variant). Or if you compare 4
products, each variant will get 25% of traffic.

Bonus Tips
List of most profitable niches with low competition for
2023!
1. Teeth whitening

2. Anti-snoring products

3. Nail extensions

4. Fake lashes

5. Hair clips

6. Hair extensions and wigs

7. Yoga mats

8. Shapewear

9. Activewear

10. Swimsuits

11. Reusable bags

12. Water bottles

13. Doormats

14. LED strip lights

15. Bookends

16. Sofa beds

17. Air fryers

18. Wireless earbuds

19. Phone tripods

20. Wearable devices

21. Phone cases

22. Car phone holders

23. Pet food

12 best drop shipping suppliers in South Africa

Thirdwavedistribution.co.za

Mensrepublic.co.za

Calasca.com
 Planet54.com

Gadgetgyz

Neatfreak.co.za

Shopstar.co.za

Thescents.co.za

Dropstore.co.za

wheelatrend.co.za

Cosmicpets.co.za

Marijuanasa

Underrated Marketing Platforms 2023

• Pinterest

• Snapchat

• Twitter

• TikTok

• Classified Ads

• Email Marketing

• Blogging

• Google Ads

I WOULD LIKE TO CONGRATULATE YOU YET AGAIN FOR FIRSTLY INVESTING IN

YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND SECONDLY IF YOU GOT THIS FAR IN THE COURSE, IT'S
NOT EASY TO TAKE A CHANCE ON YOURSELF BUT YOU DID, NOW ALL THAT'S
LEFT TO DO IS TRUST IN YOURSELF & BELIEVE THAT ALL YOUR DREAMS AND
GOALS WILL COME TO PASS.