A College Kid’s Guide To Starting A Successful E-Commerce Store And Making Some Money
Going to college can be expensive and if you don’t have enough money it will ending up getting you down. Everyone else will be out having fun and you won’t have the money to enjoy yourself. That’s OK for the first few weeks, but after a while you will end up driving yourself insane.
Go out and look for a job, but you can’t be guaranteed you will find one. Especially not in the current economic climate when everyone is struggling. You need to find a way to make money that doesn’t rely on anyone else: your own business.
The easiest way for a college kid to make money and potentially build a successful business is to start your own website. There’s thousands of things you can do, but an e-commerce store is a good way to start. You have unlimited access to the Internet at college and there’s lots of people you can ask for advice.
There’s probably not a better time to attempt it. Once you get it up and running you could easily make enough to have a good time, maybe more. But first you need to make sure you have the right tools for the job, so let’s go.
Grab a domain name and hosting
I’m already assuming you know what you want to sell. Once you have an idea of what the store is going to be about you should grab yourself a great domain name. Hopefully you find something that’s easy for people to remember.
Then you will need to get yourself some hosting. Don’t worry about how much it’s going to cost because you can actually find good hosting that costs less than $10 per month. You need both these things and you’re ready to move onto the next stage, which is putting your own store onto the Internet.
Get an e-commerce theme
Unless you want to pay a programmer to build an e-commerce store for you then do yourself a favor and buy an e-commerce WordPress theme. This is simply the easiest way to get started for anyone who knows nothing about building a website.
Sure, there’s going to be stuff you have to learn, but if you hope to pass college then something like this will be child’s play. When you have the theme set up on your hosting you should be ready to fill out your store with products.
Source your product
Unless you expect to jump on an airplane and head over to China you will need to find somewhere that you can source products from. You might as well use drop-shipping which means you don’t even need to stock the product yourself. I’m guessing your dorm room is small enough without having boxes reaching up to the ceiling.
Once you find products you wan to sell you can add them to your store and you’re ready to start making money. Remember and haggle with your supplier to get the best deal possible, so you earn more money per sale.
Sending them yourself
Sometimes you won’t be able to rely on drop-shipping. This could be because you actually make the products yourself or you can source them locally. That means you’re going to have to deal with sending the products by mail. You’ll need to find out everything you can so you get the best deal possible, because postage isn’t always as cheap as you might like.
When you find out how you can send products for cheap it means you can lower your prices and compete easier with things like paid traffic. You might also want to send letters to your customers to keep the relationship sweet. In that case you can use an online company to send out all the mail for you and you will save yourself some time.
Go out and find people
You might have everything ready to go, but because your store is online it means you don’t have anyone walking past it like a normal store. You actually need to go out and find people yourself. The easiest way to get people is by ranking for special keywords and increasing your position in the search engines.
You will need to learn about search engine optimization, and once you read up a bit you will need the Google Keyword Tool. This is a free tool that tells you what keywords to aim for and all that’s left is some hard work and sleepless nights.