How I Made $6590 in just a FEW DAYS With Shopify & Instagram
How I Made $6590 in just a FEW DAYS With Shopify & Instagram
A Full Step-by-step Tutorial
I’m going to tell you a story about one of the first online business I started.
Let me summarize what I did:
I built a Shopify store, I searched for a supplier for my products via Alibaba, I contacted Instagram influencers, paid them to post stories with my products… and BOOM!
Sales were rolling in! Thousands of dollars in just 24 hours!
A few days later, I repeated the process… and BOOM! Success again!
Of course, it’s not all that simple, A LOT of work was put into this.
I’ll cover each step briefly.
1. Finding your product
We need to find “a winning product”.
The way that we’re going to do this, is by spying on the competition.
A step-by-step guide:
- Create a new Instagram account
- Go to YouTube and search for “make up routine” or “morning routine” or “dressing” or “outfit selection” or “make up tutorial” or “dressing organizer”… Preferably you should even search this in another language (use Google Translate to translate it to e.g. French, German, Italian, Spanish…).
Usually, in their video descriptions you can find links to their Instagram profiles.
- Go to their Instagram and see if they’ve posted any stories today. They need to be ACTIVE.
- If yes, follow them with your new Instagram profile.
Preferably, follow only girls that have 700k-3mil followers.
Next, go to “suggestions” (or “for you”) to see similar people. Follow them too if they meet this criteria.
Keep doing this until you follow like 20-30 (or more) girls.
Why girls — you may think?
Simple, because it’s statistically proven that women buy more online. Since our goal is to create a web shop and sell stuff, it makes sense that we sell to the target group that would be most likely to make a purchase.
The products
Once you’re following a bunch of these accounts — Every day, check their stories. See what they post.
Usually they will promote some products, provide some sort of discount code etc.
Write down the products they promote!
An example of my product list:
Why?!
Simple. Because these are products THAT SELL.
Influencers ask a lot of money (especially the big ones that we’ve been searching for here) — fees can go to thousands of dollars for just a shout-out.
If the product wouldn’t sell, then those companies wouldn’t pay the big bucks for promo’s… makes sense, right?
So, pick your “winning” product that you want to sell.
2. Finding a supplier
Go to Alibaba or AliExpress, and search for the product. Look for suppliers that have a good review and a lot of orders.
Contact the supplier directly, negotiate. Important things to ask:
- Do you order Express shipping? Via which company?
- is packaging included or is it extra?
- How is it shipped? Nice packaging?
- Where are you shipping from?
- What are your exact prices for this product?
- Which countries do you ship to? Focus on suppliers that support shipping to USA/Australia/New Zealand / UK
- Are you able to handle these orders? If yes, how many orders / day are you able to handle?
- What are your shipping times for each country?
- Do you offer some sort of discount if we take multiple orders at once?
- I noticed there are a few items not in stock. Will they come back in stock? If yes, when?
Example first mail
Dear Mr. Wang,
My name is Michael. I’m from Belgium and I’m looking for a bracelet manufacturer for my upcoming brand.
I am are looking for a premium look bracelet with custom logo, case and label if possible.
Yet another important question: Can you directly ship to our clients?
I’m looking forward to working with you.With kind regards,
Michael
3. Selling your product
Once you have your product and supplier, you can think about selling your product.
We’ll sell using Shopify.com.
Why Shopify?
Because it’s one of the biggest, best and easiest platforms.
Here’s a graph I found online:
Finding a product and building a web shop is easy, the hardest part is selling your stuff.
You can have the most beautiful web shop in the world, but if people can’t find it — and don’t visit it, it’s worthless.
Get a theme
There are some free and some paid Shopify themes out there. I have paid ones, but there are also some great free ones. I recommend just googling.
More important however, are the Shopify Apps!
Must-have Shopify apps!
- Hurrify — Countdown Timer
- Multi Currency Switcher
- Abandonment Cart Recovery
- Kit (chat)
- Loox — Photo Reviews
- Page speed optimizer by Booster Apps
- SMSBump Marketing & Automation
- Sweet Upsell
- Aftership OR 17track
Focus on your Product Page
Our marketing plan is to send people directly to your product page via Instagram-shoutouts.
Usually they’re not even going to the other pages, they’re just interested in that one single product that the influencer is promoting.
An example of a product page
Here’s the first part of a product page description.
Add more info like:
- Size guide
- Benefits
- Solution to your problem
- Cool features
- Save 20% when you buy more than 1
- Fast delivery
- etc…
Test, test, test!
This is crucial!!!!
In the next phase (promo), you are going to pay a lot of money to influencers!
SO, make 10000% sure that your shop, the check-out process, discount codes, whatever… is working perfectly!
- Test 10 times, let other people test!
- Test all your add-ons
- Test Upsell, downsell, cross-sell
- Test cart abandonment e-mails
- Test your checkout & payment
- Test EVERYTHING!
Make sure everything works 100%!
P.S. Get started with Shopify for free here.
Also, because I have been working with Shopify for a while, I became a partner and I can set up stores FOR FREE (during development) for other people — WITH a premium theme (which includes a lot of usually paid features). Feel free to reach out to me should you be interested.
4. Finding influencers
Like I’ve said before, we’re going to use influencers to promote our store.
Basically we’re going to do the same thing as before — searching for influencers based on a few criteria/requirements:
- Female influencers with between 10k —150k followers (because they don’t ask that much money, which is ideal to start)
- Accounts must be focused on lifestyle / fashion (no naked models or something like that, because those usually have the wrong audience)
- Accounts must be active (story posts & normal posts often)
- Accounts must be from USA/UK/AUSTRALIA/CANADA/New Zealand
- Engagement rate must be higher than 3% (= how many people react to their posts — the higher the better), this can be checked via www.socialblade.com
Make a list based on these criteria
An example:
Some tips in finding influencers:
- Search terms like “beauty, fashion, make up, make up tutorial, morning beauty routine, (there are thousands you can use)… etc” on YouTube & go from YouTube to Instagram account.
- Use the “dropdown” button in Instagram to find similar accounts.
For example, the following profile is OKAY, but not that good. You’d pay her a bit less.
5. Negotiating a deal
Once you have your list, you can start sending out emails.
Hi there
My name is Michael & I’ve been following your IG account for a while.
I was wondering if you would be interested in helping me get my brand xxxx started.
It’s a webshop focused on warm & cozy winter clothing. At the moment, we are promoting a awesome wool hoodie & nice thick wool pants.
To start, I’d like to try promoting the hoodie via some Instagram stories & we were hoping to work together with you, it would be amazing if you could help us promote it!
Let me know what you think, really looking forward to it!
This is just an example, please edit it & make it better before send this out to everyone on your list.
Sending 2 follow-up mails
Most influencers don’t immediately reply, just it can’t hurt to send a follow-up mail.
In this mail, you can for example say that you’re currently running a promo and that you’d really love to work with her.
Wait for a reply, and then ask questions.
Questions for Negotiating a price
Based on the following info, you can decide how much you’re willing to pay the influencer for the shout-out (the Instagram story).
Could you send over some screenshots of one of your recent stories with:
- The number of views (not the impressions).
- Community statistics: age, % men and % women & countries
- Number of swipe-ups (actions taken) on that a recent story
Thank you very much for your time and we are looking forward to working with you.
Pricing tips:
I’ve made a small table displaying the average price range for paid posts, relative to how many followers they have:
P.S. It’s true that you’ll have to make an investment. It’s a risk — because… what if you pay this influencer $1000, and you only get $300 sales?
However, if you do your homework well, this won’t happen.
6. The actual promo
Once you’ve settled on a price, give some instructions (you can also do this while negotiating.
An example instruction mail that I used to send:
Hi there
For the upcoming promotion, we have created a short script that you could use + your own personal touch of course, which is why we & your followers love you! 😊
Story 1: Post a video/photo, while you’re chilling, being ‘really cosy’. You can include a question / vote, like “who else loves these chill / relax moments?”
- With the question/vote, we create some engagement to start with
- Don’t mention the item yet, this is just “being authentic”
Story 2: Show a video of you wearing the clothing and mention the awesome things about it
- It’s like a big comfy wearable blanket
- Has elastic sleeves
- You can cover yourself (and your legs) with it when sitting in the sofa
- It’s so nice, warm, cozy
- Extremely soft
- You could include a vote like this also:
Story 3: A video in which you say something like:
Well, I got good news for you guys!
I’m actually working together with this company, and because I’m working with them, I got something special: a 30% discount for you guys and even 20% EXTRA discount if you get another one!
There is also free delivery right now.
Story 4:
Include Swipe-up link: https://yourshopifystore.com/THEPRODUCT
Mention again that we’re currently having an online ONLY 24h sale, which is actually exclusive to your following only.
7. KA-CHING!
If all goes well, you’ll see your Shopify app go crazy right after the promo has launched.
Hopefully you’ll be able to see something like me:
8. Automation
Before finishing this post, I need to add a few words about automation.
This “building an influencer list” and “mailing with influencers” is very time-consuming.
Did I tell you it was easy? No.
If you want this (or ANY) business to be successful, you need to put in the time — and a lot of time.
However, you can outsource a bunch of things to a Virtual Assistant:
- Building influencer lists
- Sending out mails (via templates that you made)
- Replying to mails (via templates that you made)
- Customer support answering (because customers will send you emails about their products etc) → Very important
You can find Virtual assistants on Fiverr.
Summarized
There are millions of ways to make money, and this is one of them.
By combining Shopify together with a social media tool, you have unlimited potential.
- Find a “winning product”
- Build a Shopify Store
- Pay for Instagram shoutouts
- Get orders within a timeframe of 24 hours (duration of an IG story)
- Export the orders to Excel/CSV & send them to your supplier
- Supplier fulfils every order, ships it & adds tracking info
- You (or your VA) handle(s) support
- Keep repeating the process
And that’s how you make thousands of dollars in just a few days.
Want to learn more?
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