How I’ve Been Making Money With Shopify

Last updated on October 21st, 2021 at 12:17 pm

We’ve all been there.

You’re analyzing the shit out of the situation like your a detective at a crime scene.

What if the bullet came in from this angle? Why is that door handle crooked? Who left the sink running?

But instead of mulling over crime scene details your thoughts are more like this:

What should I devote my free time to? How am I going to finish this project? What if it doesn’t work? Who will be there to help me? How will I make money?

Analysis Paralysis

credit: transitionsparkcoaching.com

This indecision usually comes up in many parts of our lives and for good reason—without it we would go full force into many stupid ideas and make some shitty choices.

So it’s a good thing we stop to think about our decisions before we make them, but this can also be detrimental.

This indecision can be used subconsciously to keep you from pursuing your dreams and goals. It can be used to keep you tied up from taking action or making any real progress.

And that sucks.

We often do this because we’re afraid. We’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid of what our friends will think. We’re afraid of looking dumb.

We’re also downright lazy.

We’d all just rather sleep all day…

We choose to mull over what to do and continue to talk about it as if it is going to complete itself. In essence, talking about it keeps us from actually doing anything. Your brain has a nice little way of tricking itself into thinking that what you talk about doing is being accomplished. Sorry brain, you’re wrong.

We can tell ourselves that we need to read one more book or take this ONE course to get started. But in the end it’s all just a subconscious excuse for inaction.

So why am I bringing this up?

Well, because I think it’s something we all experience and there are ways to improve this type of behavior.

Awhile back, I believe in this post here, I talked about how my roommates and I had a big opportunity coming up and how excited I was to see what would happen. Basically, we had an opportunity to take over a friend’s supplement company and free reigns to do the marketing and a slice of any of the profits that came in.

Well guess what?

Nothing fucking happened. You know why?

Because nobody took any action. Sure there were some legitimate things we were waiting on but when it came down to it, week after week, I realized we weren’t closer to actually doing anything to move us forward.

We were always waiting on this thing or that email. We talked about it to death on how we could make it so great and in the end it was a dud. We DID try to make it work but the effort and the ownership mentality wasn’t there.

But this whole process led me to a realization…

Eventually, through the research that we were all doing trying to sell our buddy’s supplement, I figured out how I could do it on my own.

No, not build my own supplement (although that was also an idea we tossed around) but rather build my own eCommerce store.

I watched some tutorials and read some blog posts and all of a sudden… BAM! Everything clicked together for me. Between the experience doing copywriting, Facebook advertising, and the dabbling in website design, I had all the experience I needed to make this work on my own.

I didn’t need to hire an expensive developer, didn’t have to contact anyone with special knowledge or spend hundreds of dollars in upfront costs.

THIS WAS IT.

I finally found the model that I had been looking for. A passive income model that can be built from scratch, automated, and scaled to the tune of a 7 figure business.

My type of party!

The issue before was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Sounds confusing, right?

In other words, I didn’t know that there was a business model like this that could be created with a one man team. The process of creating an online store also encompassed many things that I already enjoyed, such as designing web pages, crafting product copy, and testing advertisements with Facebook and Instagram.

So, I felt like I found the missing link.

BUT, I was still at ground zero. Sure, I found this information and made all the connections in my mind on how I could build my own store and sell products online but there were so many things that I still needed to decide on.

What niche should I choose?

What should I call it?

What logo should I pick?

How will I do this?

Fuck, I got overwhelmed just thinking about all this.

BINGO!

That’s the fucking problem. Thinking about shit TOO MUCH. It becomes bigger in your head and before you know it you’re thinking “well it won’t work. It’s too much work. It’ll never work…”

This was a big realization for me. Right then and there I decided, “fuck it.”

I told myself I wouldn’t spend too much time over thinking any one part of the process.

Instead of gunning to succeed I was gunning to fail.

Niche? Ummm, rockclimbing, fitness, yoga… YOGA! Okay yoga it is.

Next step. Name. YogaChix… DiscountYogaStore… YogaStyle… Shit that’s taken. YogiLifestyle… Taken. YogiStyle. BOOM!

Logo. Okay, I’ve used Photoshop. Also found this legit site called Canva where you can do a bunch of cool design shit. Hey! I like designing shit! Bam, drafted up a logo for myself.

Okay, Facebook page. Good thing I’ve already been tinkering with my own FB page for the last 6 months. Boom done.

Okay, next up Shopify. Got my 14 free trial here. BAM it’s up, ready to GO!

I think you get the point.

Instead of taking hours to make EVERYTHING perfect, I broke down the entire project into little tasks that had to be completed in order for the whole thing to work. By doing this it became manageable and much less stressful.

After one week and many hours trying to work out the kinks, I had a fully functional, passive income, money making website in front of me.

Shit felt good.

I was like this guy

Sure it wasn’t incredibly sexy and it had some issues but the MAIN thing is that it worked.

I threw up some ads on Facebook and about a week later guess what happened?

Nothing. No sales. No Money. No nothing. It was a failure.

But that was my goal. Yeah, it was discouraging as fuck and I felt bummed because I thought this would really work (basically I pictured a waterfall of money flowing into my bank account) but it wasn’t enough to make me quit.

If you’ve read any of my blog you’ll see me preaching the importance of persistence and hard work as the only real way to achieve success.

So what did I do?

I scrapped the site and started over. Only this time, I learned from my mistakes and spent much more time on the things that I knew would be important going forward.

And it took me about half the time since I had become more efficient.

Had I not failed so quickly the first time around, I wouldn’t be able to go ahead full steam into the second attempt.

After more thorough research into the second niche and a more robust website design and Facebook page I was ready to get going.

I found some products that fit my niche, targeted the interest groups I had gathered with my research and let the ads run.

1 day passed. Nothing.

2 days passed. Nothing.

3 days passed. Nothing. Whoah, wait! I wake up to check my email and see this, “Congratulations on your first sale!”

I cannot describe to you how awesome that felt. No I didn’t become rich but I created something that ACTUALLY worked.

I turned a simple idea in my head into a tangible marketplace where someone was willing to take out their credit card and buy. If that isn’t exciting then I don’t know what is.

And days later, guess what happened? Nothing. For about 2 more months.

I spent many mornings, waking up to a fat “$0 in sales.”

I spent the entirety of May, June, and half of July constantly tweaking things on my site. I changed product descriptions, designs, colors, buttons. I tested different targeting, ad types, and photos on Facebook. Shit, if it was testable, I tested that shit!

I can’t tell you how frustrating and discouraging it is to continue working on something and see absolutely no results. Some days I’d get a random one off sale and that was what kept me going. I knew that I just hadn’t cracked the code yet. In other words, I knew I hadn’t found the right product for the right audience, but I knew that eventually it would work. The biggest thing was to not give up.

And good thing I didn’t. About midway through July I realized a trend among the people who were interacting with the ads and I switched up my targeting. BOOM! Sales started rolling in.

It’s great making money after working hard on something but I think what’s even more valuable is what I’ve learned over the last three months, working on this everyday.

I’ve learned how to start a business and I see how this can be transferred to so many different areas of business no matter what I end up doing down the road.

It’s taught me how to think about building a brand from the bottom up, how to market to different audiences, what product copy will increase conversions, website design, pricing strategies, and of course the amazing capabilities that Facebook offers as a marketing platform (If you’re a marketer and don’t know how to use Facebook in 2016, YOU’RE FUCKED. This thing is so damn powerful it’s scary).

So that’s what I’ve been up to.

If you’re looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is absolutely not for you.

In 3 months I’ve devoted countless hours testing every variable under the sun and spent more hours staring at my computer than I care to think about. It’s exhausting, but the fact that I don’t care how exhausting it is has made me realize that this is what I want to pursue for the time being.

In the end, my success (very minor success, but still success) comes down to one simple thing: taking action. There were 101 million reasons for me to delay starting this project but I took a hard look at myself and realized that these were all just poor excuses.

Stop being lazy. Stop being scared. Stop worrying what people will think.

Start taking action.

You want to see any type of results in your life? It’s never going to be perfect anyway you look at it. Your goal should be to fail and to fail quickly. That way you’re back at it again with some new knowledge on how to do it better the next time.

Embrace this mentality the next time you are thinking about a goal you want to achieve and see how it changes your results.

Instead of thinking about what the perfect gym routine is, the perfect number of minutes you need to run to burn the perfect of calories, or the perfect time to start learning a language. Just FUCKING do it!

Oh yea, I’m moving to Taiwan on August 31st. So that’ll be sweet.