Winning the Online Business Game

 

Have you noticed that selling online is getting harder? As competition increases and buyers become more sophisticated, what can you do to stand out and be successful? In this episode Anton Kraly, an ecommerce business expert, will dive deep into the strategies you need right now if you’re going to rise to the top in your market and survive all of the new challenges on the horizon. If you sell anything online (or plan to), make sure to check out this episode!

 

Josh Fonger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Work the System podcast where we help entrepreneurs make more and work less using systems. And I’m your host Josh Fonger. And today we got a special guest Anton Kraly. Anton Kraly has been a serial entrepreneur for more than a decade finding success building and selling multiple seven figure bonuses. In 2013 he started dropship lifestyle to teach people how to create profitable e-commerce businesses by leveraging high ticket Drop shipping. Voted best e-commerce course by Shopify in 2018. Dropship Lifestyle is now the top online e-commerce coaching program and sell more than 10000 thousand students in 25 countries defined freedom through entrepreneurship. All Anton I’m excited to have you on the show today and really dive in deep. Before we do give us the backstory How did you get this line of work?

Anton Kraly: [00:00:48] Sure yeah. And thank you for having me on. Happy to be here and be sharing. But I started back in business when I first got out of school way back in 2006. I graduated from SUNY Albany Upstate New York and bought a business which was a delivery route for a bakery in Brooklyn. I’m from Long Island. So basically I bought the rights to drive into Brooklyn every day pick up boxes of cookies and then sell them to grocery stores around where I’m from. I bought that was only business I could afford back then all the money I had saved up working odd jobs and whatnot. Luckily a few probably a few months after I bought the business a book came out. The Four Hour Workweek that book introduced me to e-commerce discussed how you can make a store for twenty nine dollars and how you didn’t have to be technical and basically anybody could do it. So I built my first ever web site which was selling cookies to people that had moved out of New York and missed, missed New York bakeries. So that’s. That was like my foot in the door and found success with that realized if I could sell boxes of cookies online. Why can’t I sell bigger products and more expensive products. So very quickly started to try all different stores selling all different product types. And as things progressed they kind of just got more and more expensive to make. Not you know but. the highest order we ever got from one product was around $5000 typical average order value on one of our stores is about one thousand dollars. And I’ve been trying to get better at it ever since then but that’s that’s all I got into this.

Josh Fonger: [00:02:12] Wow very neat so that that book was gonna give you the confidence to go forward and make this.

Anton Kraly: [00:02:17] Yeah it’s cool because but before that I thought if you wanted to build a website you either had to be some genius that went to school for coding or you had to invest six figures with a company full of geniuses I went to school for coding and that was like This is something that really anybody can do if they if they want to play with it and figure it out, definitely.

Josh Fonger: [00:02:36] So how has e-commerce changed over the last 10 years because you’ve been in the game for a long time so that kind of cares is like what it used to be like what’s it like now and maybe where do you see it going? Because a lot of people in the audience have online companies or at least they have traditional business with an online aspect and hearing from you might be a good perspective.

Anton Kraly: [00:02:57] Sure. So back then you know I figured out my first online business in a weekend and was able to make it work. And the reason I was able to make it work is because there was a lot less competition. So back then I had a Yahoo store and I ran Google AdWords and ten years ago, Google AdWords were a lot cheaper than they are now. With that being said you know in 10 years people are going to look back and say Wow 2019 and Adwords were so cheap. So there’s still you know you always want to be doing stuff while you can. But back then it was easier to get your foot in the door. You didn’t really need to do as much research you didn’t need to hire, a company to either train you or run your ads. Like I said you know I figured it out by clicking around on the computer and was able to do it profitably. So competition has picked up on on two sides of it. One on how many people are advertising the same product types and two on how many different brands there are making all these different things. So basically the main way things have evolved is you have to get better at what you do. There’s a few different areas in our business where we always look to get better. One of them is where we’re spending money and how we’re spending it. So trying to have our ads as efficient as possible in the beginning we were barely even tracking anything because it seems like overall if we spend more we need more. So we didn’t know what platform or what ad or what campaign was working. Now that’s you don’t want to do that. You want to know where every dollar goes and what that brings in or doesn’t. We also focus more and more on the products we’re selling and not just having great products but always having like the newest versions and the newest product lines. So let’s just say for example I sold outdoor furniture and I sold for 20 different outdoor furniture manufacturers, a big thing is lets you say every spring they release new product lines. We want to be the first one to make sure we have the new stuff. We want to make sure our product pages are the best out there. Some ways we do that are just by giving the customer or the visitor everything they need. So as many high quality images as we can get all the features all the specs all the information on shipping, returns, warranty. So trying to stay ahead of the game and then probably the biggest thing that’s changed beyond those is the lifetime value of a customer. So you know it used to be really just you know run ads. People come to your site try to get them to buy right away and they buy. OK. Great. If they come back that’s good. If not more people are coming anyway. But what we’ve been doing still for a long time now but probably the last five, six, seven years is focusing on when somebody comes through our doors. This is our Web site we are trying to build a relationship obviously by selling them stuff but also by becoming authorities in different spaces that we enter. So that means more content marketing that means more emails that aren’t purely promotional. That means more posts on social that are either trying to make the prospect laugh or give them some value. But just developing that more long term relationship.

Josh Fonger: [00:05:41] That’s really fascinating. I’ve been do business coaching for about 10 years now and I’ve got to see this this life cycle too and used to be all the online companies would skyrocket and these people who really know much about business were making a lot of money. I’ll would tell them you know it’s going to become more like it’s going to be professionalised like all it all the tricks and the secrets and the knowledge the training that these traditional biz owners have been learning over the last 100-200 years. It’s going to find its way over to online companies it’s not going to be so easy and it’s not like you’ve kind of echoing the same thing is that those who have invested in the right training like you offer the right skill sets are the ones that are lasting and those who just treat you like a hobby are getting into more and more trouble.

Anton Kraly: [00:06:24] And faster. So you said he even some of those companies that tried to shortcuts would maybe last for a few years and now it’s like some of that might pop up. But you know how it is now with having social media and just having all these different review sites like if you’re not running a legitimate business from the beginning you’re you don’t have a chance. So yeah you got to be in it for the right reasons. And if somebody you know especially if you’re a new business or even if you’re a traditional business that’s going online you really do have to focus on every time somebody gives you money by giving them the best experience possible because if you don’t I mean things spread really quickly in both ways. If. If you give someone a positive experience it’s easier than ever to get them to send you a video testimonial or images of the product you sent them or just some great piece of content you can use on their Web site. And it’s just as easy if not easier if you don’t give them a great experience to have them tell the whole world. So it works both ways.

Josh Fonger: [00:07:19] Yeah that’s that’s one thing that the Internet does is definitely it makes things more volatile and faster.

Anton Kraly: [00:07:26] Yes.

Josh Fonger: [00:07:27] That’s for sure. Well that’s interesting. So what do you see 10 years from now? So people have you know whether a traditional company or an online company. What what are some things that they should maybe be thinking about if they want to get online or stay online or the things that really they should be investing in?

Anton Kraly: [00:07:44] I think becoming more and more specialized. So after our first few years in business we kind of went that way of building stores and building brands around specific product types. So not just selling like one product but a product type. And then once we were in there once we prove the concept really focusing on positioning ourselves as the experts and as the authorities. So that’s it’s shown in many ways it’s shown in how our product pages look on the information that’s shared. It’s shown on content throughout the site whether that be in a buying guide or on the blog. Even the way that we position live chat for example let’s just say I was selling that outdoor furniture. It wouldn’t just say live chat it would say something like speak with an outdoor furniture specialist something like that. So when the person comes to you you know they’re most likely they’re there for a reason and you want your whole site to be themed around that. That’s a big reason why even companies like Amazon which if they’re allowed to I think they will try to eat the whole market and we’ll see if they get there. But that’s one reason why we’re able to be in business and really still thrive with companies like Amazon because if you go there and you want to call them and ask them I don’t know what kind of cushion you should get in your backyard in Florida that gets sun 300 days a year you’re not going to be getting that much specialized advice. But if you have the site that specializes in that type of thing you can not only have that on your Web site you can have that live chat. You can have that phone support and you can actually help people make more informed buying decisions. And I think that’s only going to be more and more necessary because really in the beginning we didn’t do much like that at all. We would always try to build up our products pages so that customers had the answers to what they thought they would ask. But now we take it a step further and we’re trying to proactively just provide useful and helpful information in as many places we can whether that be products pages, blog, buying guides, Facebook, YouTube, really anywhere it makes sense for the specific brands.

Josh Fonger: [00:09:35] Sounds like a lot of work.

Anton Kraly: [00:09:36] It is, it is more work so that know how things change if it’s more work invested whereas it used to be just like Strictly and it still is a numbers game as far as like we want to like where we’re willing to invest X to make Y. Now it’s like we’re willing to invest X but instead of X going straight to google ads it’s like we’re going to put this percentage into Google ads we’re going to put this percentage into the person creating the content we’re going to put this percentage into maybe Facebook ads promoting the content and building the audience that way. So it does take more than it used to but that that’s one of the big ways that it has changed. Because if you’re not going to do it the truth is you know somebody else will. So it is up to you basically as a business owner like do you want to be the person that is kind of the authority again trying to claim that spot. Or just another store that someone might find and maybe will buy from. So those are some things as far as like the content side. There’s also a whole bunch of stuff that any online business should do on what I call the usability side and what I mean there is just making it as easy as possible for somebody to buy from you. You know there’s so many Web sites that people. Maybe as a business owner you maybe pay to have it built or you build it and you think like it looks great and it works great. But if you actually like watch what people do when they come to your website which we do we use a tool called a lucky orange. And it tracks people’s mice on the computer screens. You can see where they’re moving. A lot of times people will have like in their head or menu of their e-commerce store you know under their logo will be like a link to their Facebook and their Instagram and their YouTube it’s like you don’t want you to someone’s on your e-commerce store and they found you searching for an outdoor sofa. You don’t want them to click Facebook and then next thing they see a friend’s post. So you know trying to keep the process on the Web site as clean as possible. Some other things. Like I mentioned trying to give them all the things that they might need to know on the product page. So even like our shipping and returns policy, we have tapped product pages. So like a tap for description,a tab for shipping, a tab for returns, a tab for warranty, a tab for like free bonus gifts if we give them. So all things again to keep them where we want them and to where they probably want to be. And then even from there as far as usability thing how fast is the site loading. Because we all think like you know I on my home on my google fiber connection and I went to my Web site into loads fast but you have to think of the people that are on their cell phones on the train on the way to work and they click your ad and nothing happens for three seconds and they leave. So always making sure it’s optimized for speed again more work but so important. And then giving customers as many checkout options as possible whereas it used to be we would have you know the main credit card company is like yeah. We’ll take MasterCard, Visa, Amex, Discover; but now it’s like Yeah we’ll take Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, PayPal, PayPal credit, Corina for payment terms we’ll take you know we’ve taken bitcoin before we don’t feature that but we’ll take bitcoin, we’ll take Amazon Payments, we’ll take Apple Pay we’ll take Google pay. And the good thing about that. Definitely I could see how that would sound overwhelming if you don’t take any of that yet. The platform that we use for e-commerce stores is called Shopify. They have like eight hundred thousand stores on their platform now so they’re massive but they they basically make it as easy as clicking a couple buttons and you can accept all those payment options.

Josh Fonger: [00:12:44] So what is the. Because you mentioned failure and I’m seeing so many different opportunities for you to fail in this kind of business. Yeah it is the most common reason? So I mean I’ve got a client right now that sells covers for outdoor furniture and another client that is producing foot products, he’s a podiatrist like some kind of a foot lotion and got someone else’s private labeling fluids for cars like there’s a lot of different companies right now that do this kind of thing. What is what is the most likely warning sign that they’re going to fail and what what can you can head off before that happens?

Anton Kraly: [00:13:20] So like you said there’s a lot of different things though. There’s so many variables. One thing that I see frequently when people do come to me for advice is they’re trying to sell products that aren’t that expensive or that maybe are a little bit expensive but don’t have margins built in. So the thing with the way that I run stores now and I have since I got out of the cookie business is I focus on items that are typically at least two hundred dollars. Again ideally our average order value is a thousand dollars or more. And we also try to maintain a net profit of between 25 and 30 percent. And some people will hear that and they’ll think like OK if I find a company that makes a desk my cost of the desk should be 750 and I’ll sell it for a thousand and that’s not it. I say 25 percent the desk might be like four hundred and you sell it for a thousand and you offer free shipping that costs one hundred seventy five. And then you have one hundred left over for ads and your two point nine percent processing fee. So not having enough margin per sale I think is a is a killer because if you are not making money every time somebody checks out on your Web site like how are you going to afford to pay somebody to help you make great content and distribute it? How are you going to pay for ads. How are you going to get anybody to ever find you. So that’s a big thing especially now like where we’re at. And for anybody that’s been more into the e-commerce space already they’re probably aware that like drop shipping direct from China is a huge trend right now. That’s not something I do it’s not something I recommend because we sell product from China but we have them imported first. But most of the time when people are drop shipping straight from there they’re selling these inexpensive items maybe 20, 30, 40 dollar orders. They’re trying to pay Facebook for clicks and sales. And then again like maybe you get a sell for 40 bucks if your cost of goods sold is even 10. Shipping is another 10. Then you have 20 dollars that you have to make money from that you have to pay transaction fees from you have to pay for support. You know if you have an employee that you have to pay for ads it’s almost impossible. So I think the biggest thing is not actually being able to make money even when you’re getting sales.

Josh Fonger: [00:15:21] Yeah I think that’s a great point. For those who aren’t selling online. a lot my clients is will run through the numbers and they’re just not there’s not enough money there. And so maybe they’ve grown the business through word of mouth and referrals and just doing quality work and I say well you’re making OK money but you haven’t paid any sales team yet you haven’t paid any marketing and there’s no advertising rates. So the numbers are OK but all of this needs to be spent on that. There’s none of money there for you to actually make profit as well. So you have that equation already built and I like that that’s important.

Anton Kraly: [00:15:55] Yeah I know what people will say and to the like Oh I’ll make money when I scale when I sell a thousand units a day and it’s like if if you’ve ever sold a thousand units today you probably are aware of how many people it takes to to manage you know your inquiries and the phone calls and the live chats and the emails so yeah keep keep your margin. Make sure you can make money if your business takes off. I mean it sounds like common sense but I see it very often that people are already moving in a direction where they’re they’re starting to build something that there’s just the money, the money’s not there no matter what happens you can still save those businesses you could add in higher ticket products but do it sooner than later would be my advice.

Josh Fonger: [00:16:27] What what are your thoughts on loss leaders? So you you acquire the customer you sell them something and then they start to feel like you know you move to a different platform to then sell your higher margin items and get them within your world afterwards. That is a viable strategy?

Anton Kraly: [00:16:45] It is it’s not really what we do. I say I’ve seen it work and plenty of businesses. It doesn’t really make sense for a lot of ours if we have a product like that. We’ll go back to the outdoor stuff. So we’re going with. So let’s just say I had the outdoor furniture set and I sold the package and it was a sofa and two chairs and it was twenty five hundred dollars, maybe for that right. That would be hard to have you know an entry level product for that, right. But what I would do is if there were some less expensive products maybe like I don’t know a candle that kept away mosquitoes or some kind of like and spray for the fabric. I still do look for opportunities like that. But instead of trying to sell them first I give them away to people that buy from me. So say OK if you buy this from us we’re gonna ship you this protective spray we’re gonna ship you this scented mosquito repellent candle and whatever it is. So we try to incorporate stuff like that but more as an incentive to get people to choose us over our competition. Again our model is drop shipping and that means stuff that I sell there’s probably at a minimum four or five six other stores selling the same stuff.

Josh Fonger: [00:17:46] So get differentiate with the bonuses. What do you, what do you do about copycats or competition to do exactly the same thing as you? What are the key ways to differentiate in this kind of a business?

Anton Kraly: [00:17:59] Yeah. So the good thing is that the companies that we sell for let’s say you wanted to sell the same for the same companies you can. But the way it works is we have direct relationships with them. So that’s the way that will work with you as well. We don’t use any like middlemen or any fulfillment centers. If you found a supplier ABC and you wanted to sell their stuff you would find their Web site you would call them and say, Hi I’m calling from the store I want to sell your stuff and start that conversation. So the good thing is like the good brands the brands that care about their products also care about their retailers because that’s how they make money they focus on making great products and then having companies like ours bring them sales. So for like direct copycats that’s not really a thing if it is if somebody blatantly rips off anything unique that we’ve done then we would say hey supplier ABC you know this Web site has taken all this content and they would either give that company a warning and have them change it or they would just tell them they’re not authorized to sell the stuff anymore. So that’s stuff you have to worry about if you’re working with the right suppliers. With that being said if you wanted to sell the same products and make your own descriptions and make your own bonuses and do all that there’s nothing stopping you. So the way that we try to stand out kind of the things we’ve already talked about at points but having unique bonuses like that trying to give the user all the information they can have when they’re with us giving them all of those payment options so that you know if they wanted to use if they wanted to pay it off over six months interest free we’d make sure we’re providing that easily for them to make sure that if somebody calls us somebody answers the phone to answer any questions to make sure you know live chats are always open to make sure if somebody is on our products page for your outdoor set. One two three but maybe you know there’s something that people commonly say like oh I wish this was bigger than we say on that product page to like this. Make sure you check the dimensions here are only 80 inches long. You might be interested in sofa set you know four five six. So things like that just trying to be the best retailer and the way I think about it is same thing as like a traditional offline business. If you were shopping for outdoor furniture locally and you went into two different stores you know maybe one sales associate was so helpful guide you in the right direction. Just was there to facilitate the sale and you know. Like any other person you went in and they were just maybe trying to hard sell you on something like Oh I don’t know it’s just cheap now so just just you buy it like you can get it now and we’ll have shipped, like you go with the one that provided more value. So same mindset. It does vary industry to industry as far as what we’re offering but I really believe like whether like the brand. I should say that e-commerce company that offers the most value to the customer will win the majority of the time. That value could be in terms of content and advice or in terms of gifts or in terms of money off or whatever it is. But just find ways to provide more value than anybody else and you’ll get most of the sales.

Josh Fonger: [00:20:45] So what do the clients that you work with or coach what are the ones who are making millions of dollars do differently than the ones that just struggle and flounder and eventually fizzle out? What what are the kind of a big differentiator? Is it their mindset? Is it their niche they pick?

Anton Kraly: [00:21:03] The beginner level at the beginner level deferentially mindset. If someone’s brand new because a lot of it is relationships. So the supplier relationships getting approved sell certain product types getting good pricing terms. So if you’re afraid to pick up the phone and call different companies that’s a big sticking point for a lot of people just the mental block after that. Once people get past that they get the ball rolling. The thing I see very often is people kind of get comfortable. Right. So let’s just say somebody was there their first online business. They’re building a business maybe they’re doing 50 thousand dollars a month in sales after six months. Maybe they’re netting 20 percent so they’re making ten thousand dollars net profit a month on 50 k total. And they’re like this is amazing. And they are now in this cycle for a few months. And again they’re working few hours a day and they’re like This is perfect. And they stick there and they don’t want to spend more and they don’t want to do anything different. They feel like they have it all figured out when people get into that kind of rhythm. Eventually it will taper off. So a big thing again once the ball is rolling. You have to grow. So usually what that means is you have to spend more money. And again people find that really difficult. Now I don’t believe you should be going to your bank and saying hey I need some money to invest I believe you know take some money out of your profit put it back in. Yeah. If you get too comfortable with where you’re at eventually there’ll be nothing left. Your business will drop by 50 percent and you’ll just think like well I’m not doing anything different what happened. And it’s like yeah that’s exactly it. You’re not doing anything different so always focus on growth.

Josh Fonger: [00:22:34] Oh that’s that’s so true. I’ve seen that, I sure you have seen it more than I have and I see all the time. So what do you think about investors you people want people to invest more on specialization or diversification or what kind of what is your what is your tactics so you have let’s say you’re doing 10 grand a month for six months in a row profit. What should they do? Should they just keep putting more money in the same thing or diversify?

Anton Kraly: [00:22:58] Yeah the way that we typically do it is take like 10 percent of let’s just say I was going to spend 10 grand a month on ads. I would take one thousand of that and I would put it into something that we’re not. It’s not proven. Maybe we don’t even know anybody else that’s doing it. Nobody’s really talking about it. We haven’t tried it yet. So we take 90 percent into what is proven and then 10 percent kind of like experimental. If it doesn’t work at all then it’s fine. You know I was learning experience. If we break even then OK let’s try to improve it. Maybe it’s just you know that’s amazing from right away and we start to spend more. But that’s what I would recommend. And then that money that they’re reinvesting again most of it. I would want to see them put into what’s working. So if they’re running Google ads specifically most of what we do is called Google Shopping ads and if they’re doing that and that’s what’s bringing them forty thousand out of their 50 thousand. And you know take a risk again like people take risks in the beginning and then again they fall into that comfort zone and they think they don’t have to keep doing it. But that’s where I would say most of your money should be going back into don’t just double your budget the next month but maybe bump it up 20 percent. You know monitor the numbers see what happens in the next month you bump it up 20 percent again and just keep doing that and keep monitoring it until it doesn’t work anymore. Maybe you scale back and if you try something new. But that’s the way that we do it.

Josh Fonger: [00:24:10] Yeah listen I think that that’s the exact same thing for a traditional owner as well as that if you follow that works the owners job still is R&D, innovation; you have to always be looking at it. Once you stop doing that that’s when you’re going. You’re moving towards the death spiral that you could. You don’t see yet. And so that’s the critical thing especially the dynamic nature of online business as opposed to traditional. I mean you’ve got you’ve got to climb through those oil changes well there’s going to be oil changes for the foreseeable future but for these other industries they’re dynamic they’re moving. Well this is interesting. So so let’s say that you have a traditional business and I’m thinking of asking my wife. She’s going to get a haircut. The gals that she works with or she gets haircut with they’ve created a whole line of shampoos and all those hair stuff like. Premium organic. You know whatever. It’s like good stuff right. And they made it themselves. Would you recommend someone like that to say hey you know you’re selling this locally to the north Scottsdale. Would you recommend it as keep selling it locally. Just high margins high profit. No marketing expense no sales expense or would just say hey you know what. This is a really good product. You should probably just put a e-commerce store. So it’s something like that. Would you recommend they do that?

Anton Kraly: [00:25:25] I would. The way that I would recommend they do it. Being a they have the product already is building. First of all the brand website if they don’t have one already and that one could feature their products. You know tell the story and then also have a section where people can inquire about maybe selling it for them. So you know maybe somebody goes there. They get the product they love it. They tell their friends. Their friend has an online store and they want to sell it. So make it easy for people to find it that way and reach out if they want to resell. But what I would do if I was them or if I was trying to sell for them is I’d also build another Web site that was focused all around hair care. So I’m not sure like I know the different products that they use maybe different like blow dryers and curling irons and straightener and all of those. And then on that Web site I would try to find the brands that had the premium price ones and I would reach out to them and I would send calling from this website. I would love to sell your products. We know there great quality and I would try to get approved to sell for. Let’s just say the top 20 different expensive hair care products like the physical products and what I would do is establish these dropship relationships with them. And then I would have a Web site that sold all their products. And on that Web site I would really feature that brands of their own actual shampoo and conditioner and all that. So that does a couple of things. One is you’re able to make money by selling the best products in your industry already that people already want and then you’re getting the traffic from all of these brand names model numbers, SKU numbers of the best products. And then when they’re on your Web site you’re going to be having them. I opt into your email list byproducts you’re going to have them see sidebar the header and in all these spots on your Web site you can be having either promotions maybe giveaways just different ways to promote your own brand. So that works really really really well when you’re on the private label model. Again you wouldn’t make it like if if their hair product was called a like you know best hair care product. It wouldn’t be best hair care product dot com that had all these other brands than their thing they would have that Web site as a standalone and they’d have an entirely separate entity which was you know best hair care products dot com that again had everything else listed and had their brand in the mix. So the visitors of that Web site would not know that that company was the Web site would be indirectly promoting it. And again it’s a great way to capitalize on a bunch of other really highly search products especially if they are the best in your industry. You’re instantly associating yourself with all these other brands. So it’s a great way to jumpstart that.

Josh Fonger: [00:27:52] Interesting. And also I think the idea that I kind of in the beginning is if you are a developer of a high quality product let’s say you’ve got a physical business and created a product. I’m thinking that my podiatrist does get the special look doesn’t mean you have to build all this stuff you might just need to set up relationships for someone else to build that stuff for you. You keep doing your core business and the online but it’s going to get built on the side. Just collect a percentage and keep it simple because it is getting more and more complicated. Sounds like by the by the month. Now one of the things you mentioned it was about brand positioning. So my clients I work with who kind of sell commodity products on the fact that they you know maybe the big differentiating between them and someone else is just their brand the perceived value of the brand even if everything else is the same. I know an element of that is you know possibly celebrity aspect of celebrity endorsement. You ever work in those situations where they might not yet.

Anton Kraly: [00:28:51] Not not not no big names or anything like that. Call it influencer marketing or whatnot. Since the beginning we’ve been always reaching out to different publications whether that be blogs or YouTube channels or just you know podcasts, content Web sites, and looking for opportunities to collaborate. A lot of the time it’s through traditional blogs like other people’s lives that have followings where we’re either paying for a sponsored post we’re giving them a product that they’re giving away to their audience in exchange for an article but there is just so much value in that in multiple ways. Like you’ll get the direct sales and direct referrals. But the biggest thing that we get from it even more than initial bump is the long term effect in terms of how Google sees our sites. And obviously that’s building more and more links to us and these links are coming from some of the biggest sites in our different industries. So that’s like a bonus if that was all we got. It would be worth it.

Josh Fonger: [00:29:46] WOW! Yeah, well so there’s the SEO aspect of well as well. So this kind of guy got two other big questions and then we’ll wrap up. You know you have to get going. So I’ve got 13 year old, I’ve got I’ve got three boys. My oldest is now kind of getting planting the seeds about starting online company. If you drop shipping business and he’s reading a few books on it just read the book Ask and Choose by Ryan Levesque pronounce his last name wrong. What what would you be. Over the recommended patience be for. For listening to this and maybe they want to get their kids involved or they want to start aside hustle aside business, or what, what are the steps they should go through? And how do they choose it to get started?

Anton Kraly: [00:30:27] Yeah and I think it’s a great business for anyone of any age but what’s good about it. For someone younger as you don’t need a lot of money. Like even when I started when I was twenty one my first business cost me twenty nine dollars. That was the cash investment and I got one hundred dollar voucher for Google ads and that’s how my paid ad started. So I think you know a great thing is a lot of it is just learning a lot of it is doing what I would recommend first anybody starting is try to find something where you could find products that already have good reviews. I don’t think anybody should drop shipped from China so don’t look into that model. You get away from that. Again childish playing a good products. I come from China. We sell a lot of them but you don’t want that long shipping time. You don’t want unhappy customers so try to find things people already like that are in stock and warehouses in the States if that’s where you doing in business. If you’re doing business in Australia look for suppliers in Australia. If you’re in the UK look for suppliers the UK just makes the whole business run a lot more smooth. Again when you’re first starting maybe take that hundred dollars. Google still gives you to start spend ten dollars a day for ten days and by then if you don’t have a sale you should still have a bunch of data that you can make better decisions on. I also would say focus on the more expensive products because it makes everything else easier. You don’t have to sell a lot to make even a side income. You don’t. You can have a sale every few days and actually have a pretty big business. So something more expensive. Again quality products start small and put in time rather than money is you can learn it yourself.

Josh Fonger: [00:31:55] What scares you about the future of this? I mean what is what is the that’s the end game. Because there is worldwide competition now everyone has access to the Internet so people are willing to work for three bucks an hour whereas people in the US need to actually make a living. And there’s also the fact that it could be big companies who consolidate. I don’t screw it up on Amazon could essentially pick off all the winners and just private label or buy the model make their own versions of every single thing that sells. So what where do you see maybe of a positive outlook or what do you see 10 years from now. We have this thing really you know the Internet kind of equalizes the whole world?

Anton Kraly: [00:32:31] Yeah. So it’s tough because like 10 years ago if I would I made a guess where things would be now I’d be so off what I’d say is I do think you’re going to need to always get better so anybody that stops trying to learn or that stops investing again for me it’s like 10 percent of our resources whether that’s money or our team or everything. So I always try to learn something new see where it takes you. I don’t know which thing will work and which wont. That’s why it’s like experimental so always be learning because we don’t know what’s going to work yet. And the biggest elephant in the room type thing would be Amazon and what I’ll say about them right now where we’re at is. Luckily for us we do sell expensive products we sell large products and a lot of the stuff we sell is not Amazon friendly. At this point. Reason being because they’re fees for big items and heavy items. If you wanted to have them in Amazon’s warehouse is just it’s not economical or wouldn’t make sense. So it’s not there yet. So I’m sure again if Jeff Bezos has his way he’ll figure it out and they’ll take everything. I think the government probably will break that up before it gets to that point because it’s maybe five years down the road if I had to guess. If the government doesn’t break it up and again they figure it out in the way that it’s cost effective then maybe we have to figure out a way to either work with Amazon or you know find something else unique that we could do. I don’t think Amazon’s ever gonna be offering that expertise that type of customer service simply because of the amount of people they have buying from them every second. So you know focusing on that like we are now hoping that Amazon doesn’t try to eat the big heavy expensive item business anytime soon.

Josh Fonger: [00:34:07] That’s good. Very interesting. So what’s one thing at home that you want to leave the audience with. Question I have not asked you that you think really audience hear?

Anton Kraly: [00:34:15] Yes. So if you’re listening to this and you have a traditional business I think getting online might sound intimidating or maybe even you might think it’s not worthwhile. But there is a ton of opportunity like we talked about in the beginning. You know people say all you got started 10 years ago you were so lucky people in 10 years would be saying that about now. So just you know you could hire somebody you can get a consultant you could hire an employee. People could figure this out. And it’s well worth the resources. Also like we talked about briefly with that hair example of selling other people’s products maybe that’s something you never thought about before. But my advice would be do that on a whole new business a whole new website and incorporate your either product labels products where your. Manufacturer whatever it is. Bring them on to that. It’ll get you more traffic. You’ll be able to direct everyone to your stuff. And like we’ve been talking about things the Internet happened so fast that it could be very realistic to say that in three months six months maybe even a year if it takes a while to get things going. It could totally change your business so start start making that push. It’s well worth it.

Josh Fonger: [00:35:17] Yeah definitely definitely. So where where can they find you Anton if they want more information or they want help with their with their e-commerce store?

Anton Kraly: [00:35:24] Yeah. Dropship lifestyle dot com would be the best if you go there. I’ve been publishing a new video there pretty much every week for the past like five years and I have a podcast that e-commerce lifestyle dot.com. If you’re interested any of the programs. Yep just go to dropship lifestyle dot com and you’ll see everything listed there as well.

Josh Fonger: [00:35:41] Ok very good. Well Anton I appreciate you, to thank you and I appreciate you taking the time today with this. With all this information. As always a whole page full of notes here it shows with my son about what he should do with his business and of course shares with my consulting clients and thanks everyone for tuning in today to today’s podcast is live podcast. Tune-in next week. We’re going to be interviewing another business expert like Anton or one of my previous clients in talking about a tool a technique a skill that they have so that you can make more and work less. And also we’re doing a special giveaway right now. We’re going to be giving away one of Sam Carpenter’s books. My business partner, Worked the System, right there behind me. If you’re watching the video we’re giving away a signed copy next week based on the comments from you so share the biggest win. Biggest takeaway The biggest tip that you learn from this podcast. Any platform that you’re on whether it iTunes, YouTube, it’s on our Web site or are you listening or watching this leave us a comment. Take a screenshot send it to info at work the system dot com and then you’ll be in the running for the free book. All right buddy I’ll catch you next week.

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