so if you plan to make an online store find a great product and then just expect customers to show up you’re gonna be disappointed unfortunately that’s not how it works trust me i wish that was how online stores worked but it’s just not and so in this video i’m gonna show you eight proven ways to drive traffic to your online store and these are ways that we actually have a lot of experience with many of them we actually have tutorials on on this channel as well and these are going to help you to not only increase your profit margin and have a much better chance of a successful business but also and more importantly to avoid the rabbit hole of spending a lot of money on ads that don’t work and then send you down deeper into debt and all of a sudden you’re in a really bad situation so we really want to make sure you don’t end up in a bad situation so these eight techniques should give you a profitable outcome now with that being said we need to first figure out a little bit of math here you want to figure out what your costs are and what your margin is and really have a solid understanding of the numbers associated so not just how much you paying for raw materials how much are you selling for but you want to factor in what are the taxes what are the shipping costs what is the cost for your website what is the cost for all the other things that you have and then break that down to figure out how much it’s actually going to cost per product and what your profit really looks like and then on top of that you want to figure out so that that gap is potentially in the worst case scenario your marketing budget hopefully you don’t use all of that in your marketing budget or else you wouldn’t make money obviously we’re not in business for no reason we want to make money but the second thing we want to do here is figure out what kind of budget you have for marketing in general right what’s your overall budget to kind of experiment with because in the beginning if you do choose to run ads or any of the other techniques i’m going to show you which some of them do cost money you want to know how much money you have to spend so you don’t just keep throwing money down a well when something doesn’t work you want to figure out how much you have pace yourself and experiment with that and learn along the way i’ll explain and this will make more sense in just a minute but getting into the first one of these eight this one actually won’t cost you extra money and so if you watch the rest of this video and the next seven i talk about just don’t sound like something you want to do then you could do this one which is to use a third party the easiest way to get customers to you is by putting yourself on a platform where customers already are this would be something like amazon or ebay or etsy or any other platform that has a lot of customers already there now of course there are plenty of downsides with this right the reason people don’t do this is because there are much higher fees of course you do have to follow some certain rules.
and there there’s a lot more competition with that but like i said if you watch the rest of this video and decide that the other things are just not for you then using a third party might be the best option but considering that you want to start your own online store you want to build a website then the next seven are going to be for you and so the first of the next seven is going to be organic marketing and this is a long-term play but the key word here is organic meaning that it’s not going to cost you anything it doesn’t have to cost you anything it can cost you some production costs if you want to you know buy some equipment or hire somebody to do things and if you have the budget that’s great but if you’re working alone this can be one of the most powerful ways to scale up your business using organic channels and by this one of the big ones i have in mind is social media and youtube and i don’t mean just making instagram and post your products non-stop like a billboard i mean more so along the lines of if you’re selling for example let’s just say a cutting board a really nice cutting board maybe you make a little bit of a cooking channel and make some recipes and show people how to make some certain things and then in your videos you’re always featuring your cutting board you have it linked in every video and as you start to grow an audience people are going to like what they’re watching they’re going to see your cutting board in every video and keep in mind it costs you nothing to use your own cutting board and that way you’re going to be able to essentially mark it for free just by growing the audience but growing an audience is plenty of work and it does take a long time so like i said this is a long play but it’s something that when you’re getting started off i highly recommend at least considering it if not going all in on this because it can be a great way to gain a lot of traffic but the thing with this is sometimes the markets are a little bit saturated so for example if you are selling fitness bands like the little elastic bands for uh working out it’s gonna be really hard to make a fitness channel when there are so many other channels out there that are so focused on fitness so that brings us up to the next one on this list which is a product only sponsorship and so essentially this would be reaching out to creators on instagram on youtube on tick tock whatever really tick tock and youtube are probably better right now being more video focused but instagram is becoming more video focused as well so that might also work but essentially what you’re doing here is you want to find smaller creators ideally big ones would be great but they’re usually going to charge some money for that so smaller creators that you know they’re they’re starting to grow you see a lot of future with them and you can create a partnership now and just give them your product for free they’ll make videos about it they’ll use it in their videos and it’s a great way to get some organic marketing and so for example i have another channel on my own that is a tech review channel that’s like 350 000 subs and one of the things that i mean for example right here look at this this is something that a company sent to me i didn’t really have great decorations behind me they do a little teardown of smartphones this is an iphone 4. and so i thought it was really cool they sent it to me i put in the background i link to them it’s a great way for them to get a product only sponsorship so this is in every video and it’s linked in every video it costs them nothing but it’s cool because i wanted something in the background anyway they gave it to me and so if you find deals like that again like 350 000 subscribers is probably a little bit more than you’re gonna find for a new product but but considering you make like bracelets or something you can find somebody that has maybe one or two or three thousand subscribers and if they’re making a couple videos that do well it costs you very little to give them a product and if they show it in their video and they make any sales at all it’s already going to be worth it so there’s three methods i want to talk about and as a creator like i said i have other channels on my own and these are ones that work for me so all the times i’ve had like for example this.