Top 4 reasons why starting a online business beats starting a brick and mortar business…

So recently I seen a statistic about the fail rate of small online businesses and the stat was compaired to the fail rate of starting a brick and mortar business and even though both the numbers are high, the argument was that you’d be better off going to a business school and learning how to start a corperation or brick and mortar business than to utilize the internet and starting a online business. Although I disagree with the statistic I’d like to point out why I don’t agree and give 4 plausable reasons why starting a online business would be a safer bet than starting a business the traditional route. Check out the statisitc by Forbes before reading if you’d like to! Let’s begin.

 

 1. The internet is the new wave

As social media and the power of the internet continues to grow and become more mature, we have the power to guide people’s attention to stores, offers, products, etc… All from the comfort of our home. With the internet and the endless amount of possiblities that it provides us, we cut out most of the tradtional ways of learning and can learn straight from the horses mouth about any skill we want to learn about. No degree is required to start an online business, so you’re not wasting four years of time learning information that hasn’t updated from a professor that hasn’t practiced what they’ve taught.

Now yes, 80% of new businesses(brick and mortar) fail within the first 5 years so when you compare the stats together you would think that brick and mortar businesses would be a better and safer bet to go into, but you have to think about some outside factors that most businesses classes or colleges won’t teach you. How would you start a brick and mortar business? Well first you would have to take some business classes in order to know the ends and outs of why they’re created. When I took some I realized a few things, there’s way too many factors of starting one like for instance:

• Are you starting it by yourself or partnering with people
• What’s the business plan/blueprint you’re going to be using
• Business loans
• Picking buildings
• Hiring employees
• Legal list(contracts, lawyers, etc)

There’s a shit load of factors you have to consider before even starting a business the traditional way, can it be done? Absolutely, but it will take longer while for it to actually come to life and that’s why not many people will do it.

 

2. Smaller risk

Now to go ahead a debunk that statisitc a bit further, the reason why small online businesses are being created at a higher rate and why traditional businesses aren’t being created as much is pretty much one thing… Risk. The average cost to start a business back in the day was around $150,000-$300,000 and thats before even turning a profit. In this day and age with platfroms such as Shopify, Woocommerce, and Amazon you can literally start a online business for less than $30 dollars. So obviously more people are going to start online businesses even if most people who start one don’t even take it seriously( just for shits and giggles).

Now let me ask you a question. Which loss would you rather take? Losing a few hundred to thousand dollars on a small online business or losing 4 years of time, hundreds of thousands that’ll you’ll have to pay the bank back, risk messing up your credit and putting yourself in debt? Me personally I wouldn’t mind losing a few hundred compare to what you could lose if your business fails on that scale. Remember, it’s not the smartest people who make it in this world, it’s the people who can adapt to change. So when these businesses schools and classes aren’t updating their methods on how to create a business for this day and age you’ll literally be setting yourself up for failure and on a greater scale.

 

3. Location neutral

Now one thing that puts online businesses on top of the hill is that where ever there is internet connection you can work. So that means at home, traveling, hotels, beaches, etc… Where ever you go your business goes. In this day and age we are always on the move and there’s nothing more restricting than having a source of income that you can’t take with you. You would have to prioritize your trips and outings accordingly so when you do leave you can have an idea on how your business is doing. Now you could just hire someone to look over your stuff, but me personally it would be more setteling to have full control of my business anywhere I go wether I’m on a vacation or not. I believe having a online business gives you the freedom to set your own hours and set a schedule that can work with your lifestyle and with a brick and mortar business you’d actually be putting 40 more hours than normal employees that work normal 40 hours a week.

 

4. You can create muliple businesses in a short amount of time

Now this is a factor that actaully brings my point home. One thing about starting online businesses is that once 1 business goes up and starts generating you great amounts of money, you now have the skill to start another 1 and another 1. Remember the average millionaire has 7 streams of income. With brick and mortar businesses, more people rely on that 1 business to take off and rely on that one source of income. Nothing too bad about that, but as we look at dying brick and mortar businesses/department stores such as Sears, Toys-R-Us, etc… Yeah they made millions, but it’s not about how much you make it’s about how much you can keep. They’ve lost millions and closed hundreds of stores all because times have changed and E-com giants such as Amazon and Shopify have blown the competition out the water.

So even if you had 7 online businesses and 4 failed, you’d still have 3 to fall back on and you have the knowledge, skills, and capital to create more streams and that’ll put you ahead of most business grads who went to school that learned a whole dated way of doing something instead of adapting to the change which is the internet. So in conclusion with these points, don’t let that statisitc scare you because at first glance with those numbers it would seem to be safer to start a business the traditional way, but when you factor in all of the risk, cost, restrictions, and the drawbacks of starting a business that way, you see that starting a business with the internet in this new age will cut 85-90% of that headache and have a quicker return on investment, creating your financial freedom.

Key tips you need to know when starting a shopify store…

So today is going to be completely different. I know for the most part I give affiliate marketing advice when it comes to this content. But remember, before I was doing affiliate marketing I was building shopify stores. I’m sure some of y ‘all reading this have probably been on the same boat or you’re thinking about stepping inside the world of E-com in order to 10x your income already. So with that being said I’m going to be going over a couple key tips you’ll need to know when creating your first store. I hope you’re ready because this will be a basic guide you can follow to give you a sense of direction.

So what is shopify for people who don’t know? It’s a platform that entreprenuers and business owners can utilize to sale anything online. Some of the biggest stores which you’ve probably heard of at least a good 4-5 times, Kylie’s cosmetics(Just crossed over a billion dollars in sales), Fashion Nova, Mvmnt watches, etc… Each of these stores utilized the internet and now are killing the competition! However we aren’t here to talk about these stores, but how you can start one.

So just like affiliate marketing you need to think about these few things;

• Picking a niche
• Picking a product
• Setting up your store front and social medias
• Marketing

I’ll go over one by one and go more into depth on why you need to focus on these key factors in order to have a successful shopify store. DISCLAIMER, although shopify isn’t expensive to start, I strongly advise you to already have some capital upfront to invest in this. At least $500-$1,000 if you want a better chance of hitting success sooner off the jump.

 

Picking a niche…

So this isn’t like affiliate marketing where you can just pick out of the top three niches(health, relationship, and make money online) and be good right off the jump, you’re going to have to take careful research upfront on the niches that are killing it and the ones that aren’t really that popular what so ever. What you want to first want to do is find out what people love the most and see if there’s a niche out there for it.

Example, dogs… I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love dogs more specifically puppies. If you go on Instagram or Facebook pages and search puppy pages, most of them have millions of followers, likes and views. That is an example of a good and long lasting niche. You could jump in that niche or many others that involve animals or anything else you would like to do. An example of a bad niche to go into is like going into like bugs. A lot of people hate bugs so why try to start a bug E-com store? Won’t be getting a lot of sales, very little to be honest.

Picking a niche in the beginning is crucial because if you pick the wrong one you’re going to be wasting a lot of money and believe me that’s something you don’t want to do. It happened to me a few times and each time sucked more than the other time. If you need a guide on how to pick the right niche, I suggest looking in Google Trends when doing some niche studying. You can type in a niche you might be interested and it’ll show you a graph if it’s popular or not and what states is the niche popular in.

 

Picking a product…

This is more for my future dropshippers. When it comes to picking a product it’s always good to pay attention to trends around you. What styles and cool gadgets are people utilizing? If you can catch the trend before it blows up, you’ll be banking in big bucks and on top of that you’ll be the main go to store to buy said product. Now I know, most of you don’t have that ability to see out trends before they happend. I use to be the same way, but with anything you’re going to have to practice to develop that 6th sense to use it.

So here’s what you do if you’re just starting and have no idea what product to sell. First off identify what season it is. I know that sounds weird, but most people buy certain things depending on the season. So for example you could sell sunglasses because spring and summer are arriving. After you identify the season, then go to Google Trends and type in products that identify with that season and see what’s popular or what’s about to take off. Remember ever year certain products have a sudden spike in demand due to the need of them, prime example if you go to google trends and type in sunglasses you’ll see there’s been a recent spike in demand.

So after you’ve identified your product and you see it’s trending or it’s getting ready to spike then you must see if there’s an audience for that product to be sold to. There’s nothing more wrong than having the right audience with the wrong product or the right product with the wrong audience. I did shopify for now two years and I can definietly tell you, that it is a pain in the ass when you make the mistake numerous times. Don’t worry your first few times you’ll make that mistake as well, but stick with it and you’ll get through it.

 

Setting you store front and social medias…

Simplistic wins the race. My biggest lesson in my time doing shopify is keep this shit simple. Keep it super simple. Before I go into why I’ll give you a brief story on why I should of done this and it costed me all of my money. So I just got off work from Ups and ya boy wasn’t making much already($75-$150 a week). We worked a super week and I ended up making round $250 dollars the most I’ve made ever at that job. I had a general store and I thought my webisite was the shit to be honest. Fast foward I spend $220 dollars on 4 instagram influencers and for two days I had got over 1,000 visitors, but only 1 sale… I damn neared cried my eyes out.

I said that to say this, keep your store as plain as possible. All white background with a touch of color. Don’t put too many pictures or products on your store because most people’s attention span isn’t that high(about 5 seconds). Study the big stores that I mentioned earlier in this blog and you’ll see what I mean. Simple, not in your face, effective store. Same with your social medias, have a facebook fan page and add manager(for a pixel to track your customers) and have an Instagram to utilize these major social media platforms.

 

Marketing…

This will make or break your store. It doesn’t matter how good or shit your product is, if you can’t market it to your audience. That’s why you right now could take a t-shirt and maybe 1 person will buy it from you, but somebody more seasoned in marketing can take that same shirt and make $1,000,000 million dollars from it. You have to one know your audience and tailor your marketing around them. If you’re audience is more for younger adults than use tatics young adults would respond to and vise versa for the older generation.

If you don’t know how to market, don’t worry it’s all good it just means you’ll have to research ways on learning how to market and do it more effectively as well. Check out Legendary Marketer’s 15 day business builder program and it’ll take you through 15 days of marketing content so you’ll be sharp and ready when you get ready to start your business. After you go through the 15 day period come back to your store and utilize what you’ve learned so you can have a sense of direction of where you’re going.

Once you’ve got your marketing down to the T than you can literally take any product and sell it. Remember when you don’t have to be in the sales room to be the best salesmen. Some people have never did any type of sales job in there life, but thanks to the internet all you have to do is learn the knowledge and take what you’ve learned and excute it. Once you’ve followed all of these keys and put them to use, you will kill it in your shopify store. Now I can go into a lot more details, but tonight i’m just giving you the basics.