494: The Blueprint For Making $100K+ With A Shopify Store – Family First Friday

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In this episode, I’m going to provide you with the blueprint that all successful Shopify stores follow to make seven, eight, and even nine figures with their online store. It is a blueprint that when executed properly, almost guarantees success. What’s up everyone. You are listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, where I teach you how to make money online by exploring different tools, strategies, and understand how to leverage human psychology to grow your sales. Welcome to a special segment of the show called Family First Fridays.

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where I’m going solo to give you my thoughts on how to make money without sacrificing your lifestyle. Now, if you haven’t picked up my book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and get over $690 in free bonuses. Now, first off, can you believe that I’ve interviewed over 450 successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce for the last nine years? In fact, this podcast is currently the number 14 podcast in all of Apple in the marketing category.

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Now through a combination of running my own seven figure e-commerce store, interviewing other successful e-commerce store owners on this podcast and running my annual e-commerce conference, The Seller Summit, I put together a family first Friday episode today that will teach you what it takes to be successful in e-commerce. And I’m going to start with possibly the most important attribute of all. Now I’ve been teaching e-commerce for over 12 years now, and I often get asked the same questions over and over again.

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after a student first launches their website. What’s up Steve? Just launched and I’m getting some traffic but no sales. What am I doing wrong? And when I take a look at their website, I almost always see the same mistake. Now what do you think is the number one reason why most people don’t make any sales with their online store? Well, it’s because of a lack of trust. It’s because the website is not designed for conversions. But here’s the thing, you don’t need to be a website designer.

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nor does your website even have to aesthetically look that great. It just needs to reassure the customer that if an order is placed, that it will be handled with the utmost of care. Now over the years, Amazon has trained customers to look for two things when shopping online, free shipping and no hassle returns. Now everybody already knows who Amazon is, but when a new visitor lands on your brand new website, they have no idea who you are. As a result, you have to prove to the customer

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that you can handle an order as quickly and as efficiently as Amazon, and that you are a trustworthy site. So how do you do this? Well, step one is to show off front and center that you offer free shipping and no hassle returns and add your contact info on your website. This information should be readily accessible on every single page of your website. Now, most people who are brand new to e-commerce or who are running an online store as a side hustle are often hesitant to include a phone number and an address.

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but not having a phone number or an address will basically cut your conversion rate by half. Just go to Google Voice and sign up for a free phone number. And trust me, no one is going to call you in the beginning. And if you’re getting too many calls, well, that means your store is already successful and you can probably afford to hire a customer service agent in the Philippines for about $400 a month. Now, if you can’t answer the phone, just leave a message that says, all the customer service reps are busy right now. If you need an answer right away,

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emailing us or texting us is the fastest way to get an answer. Otherwise, just please leave a message and we’ll call you back. By the way, if you are enjoying this podcast episode so far, make sure you sign up for my free six day e-commerce mini course over at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. And trust me, this mini course is better than most paid e-commerce courses on the internet. Now the next thing that you must have on your website is social proof. People are like lemmings and they always follow the pack. Unless a customer knows

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that someone else has made a purchase before on your site, they’re probably not gonna buy either. This reminds me of the story about how my buddy in high school couldn’t get any girls to pay attention to him until he was seen photographed next to a beautiful girl. Now didn’t matter this girl was his cousin, but because he was seen around someone good looking, it actually made him more desirable. Anyway, I digress. People are like lemmings. And you have to have social proof on your website in the form of testimonials, press mentions, anything.

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If you are a brand new site with no press or testimonials yet, just ask your friends to review your product and then post their testimonials on your website. And once you start getting real testimonials, you can replace them. And to make these testimonials even more effective, use a photo or a video. Just make sure you place these testimonials on every single page on your site, especially at points where you want a customer to take action during checkout or an add to cart. Also, if your products are brand new and have never been purchased before.

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Make sure you hide the fact that your product has zero reviews and don’t display share accounts until you’ve reached critical mass. Otherwise, a lemming might see the lack of reviews as a reason not to make a purchase. After all, if a product has no reviews, well that means no one’s buying it. And in many ways, e-commerce is like a popularity contest, so just make your website come across as popular, even if it isn’t really popular just yet. You also must put together a compelling about us page.

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Now Amazon doesn’t need an About Us page because they’re Amazon. But almost every stranger who visits your site will want to know who is behind the business. On your About Us page, make sure you post a photo of yourself and get personal. Tell the story about why you started your e-commerce store and what your unique value propositions are. And many people are more than willing to support a small business online. On our website, we post a picture of my wife and tell the story about why we started our business, followed by our strongest value propositions.

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Now once you feel like your website is ready to go, do yourself a favor and pay $25 to run a poll on PickFu. PickFu is a service that allows you to poll 50 people about their opinions for only 50 bucks. And the only reason I said 25 is because there’s a 50 % coupon in the show notes below. Anyway, all you have to do is create a poll that asks the following. Assuming you like the product sold on this website, would you shop here? Do you trust the store and would you make a purchase? If not, please explain why.

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And if yes, what do you like about the site? And within 20 minutes, you’ll get real feedback from real people that is 100 % unbiased. I ran a poll about three or four weeks ago, and I just wanted to highlight what one person had to say about my website over at bumblebeelinens.com. I’d shopped this store, and I like how upfront the website is about numerous things, like the kinds of payments it accepts, the headline that shows the number of hours, as well as shipping offers and the return policy. And that’s before I even searched around the site.

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Contact info, hours, and free shipping. Having all this info on every page matters. Now the next step to seven figure success is having a way to bring customers back to your store. In other words, you must have a way to collect emails and phone numbers on your site. Now if you look at my online store over at Bumble Bee Linen’s, I have a pop-up that collects emails by inviting people to spin a Wheel of Fortune to win valuable prizes in our store. Everybody loves games, especially games that seem like gambling.

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So they enter their email to spin the wheel. Every spot on the wheel is a winner. And when they win their prize, they must claim it by sending a text. Here’s what’s ingenious. The redemption link automatically opens up the customer’s messaging app with a pre-populated message. And all they have to do is hit send to get the prize. Now using this method, I now have the customer’s email and phone number, and I can email or text them about special offers and promotions. Here’s the thing about email and text.

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A customer might not be ready to buy from your store right this second, but by emailing them on a regular basis, when they are finally ready to buy, they will shop at your store. Email and SMS is also a great way to bring an existing customer back to your site for subsequent purchases. For example, with our online store, I have a system set up that automatically emails a customer related products depending on what they bought. For example, if they buy a lace handkerchief from our store, my email system recognizes this

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and automatically sends them related products for purchase. And these automated systems can be easily implemented by Klaviyo for email and Postscript for SMS. Now for most online stores, email should represent at least 25 % of your revenue for your e-commerce business. And for some stores, email can make up as much as 50 % of their annual revenue. For my store over at bumblebeelinens.com, email represents about 30%. But make note, you must have a trustworthy website

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and have email and SMS set up before you even think about driving traffic to your site. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time, and you’ll be emailing me wondering why your store is not generating any sales. Now, the final prong to run a successful e-commerce store is traffic, and this is where it really depends on what you sell. If you sell a product that many people are actively searching for, then search engine optimization and Google Ads is probably going to be an excellent traffic source for you. Determine whether your products have good search volume

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you need to use a keyword tool like Ahrefs. Ahrefs is a tool that tells you exactly what people are searching for and how many searches are being conducted per month. For example, over 38,000 people search for handkerchiefs every month. And I bet you were probably thinking to yourself, who the hell buys handkerchiefs these days? But we run a seven figure store that sells them, so there’s clearly a market. Now, if your product gets a lot of search volume, you’ll want to use Ahrefs to help find out the exact keyword phrases that people are searching for

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and use them in the titles and meta descriptions for the pages on your website. Also, you’ll probably want to start a blog. Why is a blog important? It’s because Google needs words and content in order to understand how to index your site. Most online stores don’t have that much content, so having a blog will allow you to attract organic traffic to your site. My store generates roughly 25 % of sales for organic search, and I rank for practically every handkerchief search term online.

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For more information about how rank an online store in search, just check out my YouTube channel or my blog. I got lots of resources there. Now, if your product is not well searched, then you’ll probably have to resort to social media to promote your website. For example, my buddy Eric Bandholz, a beard brand, makes almost 50 % of his revenue by driving traffic to his site from YouTube. My student Angela runs a jewelry store called Azura Jewelry and generates most of her sales from Instagram and TikTok.

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Running a successful social media platform for your online store is all about understanding who your target customer is and posting on a regular basis. Most social media experts will never admit this, but social media is a numbers game. In order to be successful, you must post often and consistently. And my friends who run successful Instagram accounts post seven times a day. I have one friend who makes millions from Facebook posts and she posts 24 times a day. It’s gonna be a slog.

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but you got to do whatever it takes. Almost every successful e-commerce store runs paid advertising also in some shape or form, but here’s what they won’t tell you. New customer acquisition through paid advertising is an extremely expensive way to acquire a customer. In order scale, you often have to break even and rely on repeat business and email to generate the majority of your profit. And that’s why having a solid retention strategy in place with email and SMS is so important. For our store,

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A repeat customer rate is only 12 % because we’re in the wedding industry, but that 12 % generates over 36 % of our annual revenue. Repeat business is the lifeblood of every successful e-commerce store. So there you have it. If you can implement these three things successfully, you’re pretty much guaranteed to run at least a million dollar Shopify store.