By Eric Smith

A few months ago I never dreamed that I would be working for myself bringing in $30,000 a month. If you aren't familiar with me or Niche Scraper, I follow a business plan called dropshipping, which simply means I have an online store selling goods without ever touching the product. I simply give the customer's order to a manufacturer on AliExpress.com and they send them the product. Here is my month-by-month progress, detailing how I went from making $0 to $30k a month!

January - $643

I had no idea what I was doing. I heard about dropshipping on Reddit and decided to try it. After about a week of research I opened up a niche store on Shopify. Initially I did a free + shipping offer on a baseball cap and I got some decent sales but lost money because of ad spend. Was using Facebook ads only at the time.

February - $3,000

After running the free + shipping offer, people started buying other things on my store. It became clear to me what items people wanted, so I ran single image ads to them and this greatly boosted sales. I also began doing work on SEO this month. That included writing small blog articles, rewriting product descriptions, etc.

March - $6,900

My SEO from the prior work started to pick up so I began getting free traffic from Google searches which increased sales. I also started and Instagram page to build an audience related to my niche that I occasionally promote products to. Doing this ended up helping a lot later because people now purchase from word of mouth.

April - $13,200

I was able to double my revenue during this month. My previous job was working as a programmer, so I wrote a complex web crawler that search the web to find me winning products (NicheScraper.com). Saved me tons of time and allowed me to test a lot more products. I found some new winners this way which increased sales. I also began running re-targeting facebook campaigns at this point and learning more about effective advertising.

May - $18,400

I added an upsell app to my store which increased my average order value from $20 to $45. I also discovered a new "sub-niche" for my store when browsing results from my web scraper bot. This allowed me to target a whole new audience and product more sales.

June - $15,800

Sales decreased a little bit this month. This was largely because I had recently moved and didn't have a ton of free time to work on the business. Things like being slow to answer customers, not optimizing ads, etc. can all add up to a revenue loss! Totally my fault.

Now - $29,300

My best month yet! After a loss of revenue in June, I decided to crack down. I scaled all my Facebook ads up a ton and it didn't end up hurting my conversion cost. I also found another "sub-niche" that contained multiple winning products. I think my lesson here was that I was previously too scared to mess with my winning ads, which included scaling. It obviously worked out in my favor when I decided to get out of my comfort zone!

Key Takeaways:

1. Focus on multiple sources of revenue. I have a lot of sales coming from places like Pinterest, Google searches, my Instagram account, etc. Try not to get caught up in only doing Facebook ads.
2. If you have a skill, use it. Anything you can do that others can't will get you ahead of everyone else who's doing the same thing. In my case, I'm a programmer and was able to create the product finding bot.
3. Find winning products. 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your products! This means you need to find that handful of best sellers that you can rely on to bring you sustainable income. Test, test and test some more. Browse other successful stores to see what they sell.
4. Don't be lazy. It takes hard work and thinking outside of the box! You saw what happened in June when I slacked off. Keep pushing forward and the results will be endless. I could easily maintain the business spending 15 minutes a day on it, but it took a lot of hours to get there.

I hope this helps! 🙂