Digital Dropshipping Domination Ebook by Tanner Planes for viralecom.com In 2021 I stopped dropshipping physical products from overseas. I had slim margins, sub-par product quality, and long shipping times which ultimately led to unhappy customers and issues like chargebacks and ad accounts getting disabled. I really wanted to start making some consistent profits with a similar model.. So I started incorporating digital products into my own wifi money arsenal. I started dropshipping digital products which is a type of e-commerce method where you sell a product that can be instantly delivered to your customer. Most times this costs you a one time fee and you resell it over and over. But what’s most important and the reason why we’re able to sell these products is because we are solving real life problems with digital solutions. Here’s the side by side. Digital Dropshipping ✅ Physical Dropshipping High Profit Margins Low Profit Margins Instant Order Fulfillment Long Shipping Times Easy Customer Support Upset Customers Easy To Automate Never-ending Issues Free Traffic Hacks Expensive Ad Testing Predictable Paid Ads Competitive Marketing ❌ So right now I’m going to show you the proven strategy behind a profitable digital dropshipping store and how you can replicate it and get yourself all setup. I promise, it’s not what you think… After going through this ebook you will know exactly what digital dropshipping is, how it works, what a store looks like, and how to get started right now by using my simple (not easy) strategy. BTW - Every day my personal brand makes anywhere from one to three thousand dollars where students pay me to help them implement and scale what I’m about to share with you. It is possible and it works. My name is Tanner Planes and if you’re reading this, I’m grateful. I was once a young kid trying to get rich and dropshipping seriously changed my life forever. Here is my journey so far in a simple timeline: 2017, dropshipping from aliexpress and found my first winning product 2020, dropshipping from a private supplier and had first six-figure months 2021, buying inventory and moving everything in-house 2022, putting full focus on dropshipping digital products In business there’s this saying that goes “you get to choose your battles”. From the moment I got my first customer complaint I realized I had chosen to fight a battle with faulty weapons and that eventually it would end. It’s kind of like having a toxic girlfriend that you just can’t seem to stop seeing because when things are good it’s GREAT but when things are bad it’s HORRIBLE. I kept dropshipping until I hit a major speedbump that ultimately led me to choose “new battles”. No, I didn’t jump ship from e-commerce and get into crypto or Amazon FBA. I decided to move into the next stage of my journey which aligned perfectly with my good friend, Ariel. Ariel had also faced the typical dropshipping issues himself and opened a domestic 3PL called ShipVelocity to avoid them. So I ordered inventory directly to him, and the rest is history. Honestly though, my physical e-commerce brands don’t pay me anything. We reinvest every penny due to the competitive nature of the market. Me taking money out right now would only hinder the potential growth we have. When I say we, I’m referring to my business partner who is an absolute stud. Since 2022 his efforts have allowed my main focus to remain on what I enjoy working on the most, digital product businesses. Part one Finding A Winning Product This first section is the biggest hurdle for most people, so I’m going to do my best to make it as simple as possible. This is how I used to start online businesses… This is how I start them now… The only difference in the two frameworks is that in the second one I’ve removed my overseas product supplier and changed that to a simple digital product. My products are instantly delivered to my customers, I don’t have to pay the supplier everytime I make a sale, and I don’t have to worry about keeping customers satisfied while they wait for a product to be delivered. Before we continue, I’d like to show you an example of a live digital dropshipping store. Check it out here: https://divinelyfeminine.co/products/secrets. This isn’t mine, but using the dropship.io spy tool we can see that they’ve generated nearly $25k in just the last seven days alone. This is their Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/divinelyfeminineofficial/ This is their current Meta ads: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/ Cool, right? A super simple shopify store selling super simple ebooks. That also happens to be on track to generating around $100k per month. Now this approach of dropshipping digital products might seem like alot right now but I promise it’s not as complex as some think it is. That’s because I’m using a strategy to sell digital products that not many people know about yet. In fact, most dropshippers have never even thought about selling digital products ever. The strategy here in simple: to buy the rights to an existing digital product online to resell as your own. This way you’re typically paying a small one-time fee for a product then you can resell it as my own and keep 100% of the sales. Now you may be wondering: - How do I know what to even sell? - Where do I find the products to sell? (PS - Every winning digital product ties back to one of these main pain point categories. Example: Divinely feminine solves the specific problem of women struggling to get men obsessed over them. The category is relationships.) Before we choose a product we need to choose a niche. Odds are, if you go on social media you’ll see you’re already interested in some winning niches. What type of content do you follow? Gym content? Dating content? Video editing content? Programming content? Mindset content? Productivity content? These are all niches that have problems which can be solved with digital products. Truth be told It’s a lot easier to build and scale a digital dropshipping store when you’re at least somewhat interested in the niche you’ve chosen. If you have absolutely zero interest it will make this process miserable. Why? Because digital dropshipping is all about solving a specific problem for a specific group of people. If you hate the idea of helping 65+ year old women learn how to Facetime their grandkids then don’t get into that niche. If you don’t mind the idea of helping under 30 professionals increase their productivity through a digital planner, you’re onto something. Just like this store here which is generating around $3,000 per week at the time of writing this. Your goal right now should be to choose a pain point niche and to start looking around for existing digital product stores. Since middle school I’ve been using social media so I’ve fortunately built what I consider a “sixth sense” to use these platforms to my advantage. I often use TikTok to research pain point categories. I’ll start with a simple search using a keyword and that will show me all current viral videos related to that term. Productivity, health, etcetera. In this example, by searching “Health” we can see and consider the above video topics as more specific niches compared to just health itself. From the six video thumbnails I see stretching, recipes, mental health, or gut health are all options. For context, if I sell a “Health guide”, it’s not going to sell. Zero sales. Nothing. It’s too general and when something is for everybody it’s attractive to nobody. Instead what I could do is take an idea such as gut health and turn it into the “30-Day Gut Health Challenge” as my first project. When doing your research here, dive deep into finding products that are already being sold either by creators or anonymous brands. I do this as my way of validating a market before spending all the time and effort without knowing if there’s actually a demand for what I want to sell. Example: I recently heard about a popular niche for selling digital products. I found multiple example stores already making sales with it, one doing upwards of $40k per month, and that was all the validation I needed. ChatGPT can be helpful for research as well. I don’t use it often though, honestly. Dropship.io has a product research tool that has an option to see digital items. If you do use this, make sure to sort the search results by digital product because if not it’ll also include physical products. This tool isn’t perfect but I’ve found some gems! This is also the tool you can use to track shopify store’s revenue. Once you gather some ideas, run them through google trends to compare the interest. Just make sure to generalize the words you’re inputting. Now onto the product specifically. What’s cool is that every product you sell can be marketed in new ways. So if you choose the gut health niche and sell a 30-day challenge, but it’s not converting.. That’s the bad news. The good news is that whatever content you are selling as a digital product can have its “wrapping paper” changed to potentially convert better. Wrapping paper is simply the exterior of a digital and how it is presented to potential customers. What I recommend to beginners is to start with a simple self-paced product. This will be something that your customer can instantly download and use once they purchase. Most of the time this is going to be a version of an eBook or template. Remember - the more painful the problem your product solves the more you can charge. The catch here is that we don’t actually “find” a winning product and just sell it. We identify a problem that can be solved with a digital solution and turn that into an actual product. Before getting your product, there’s one problem I see beginners make often. They choose something like “wealth” as their category and then want to sell a product on “how to get wealthy”. It won’t work because there’s no clear vehicle (solution) that a potential customer can see. How are they going to go from not wealthy to wealthy? What’s the vehicle taking them from point A to point B? In this case, it would have to be some type of money making or investment related solution. Example: “How to land your first $100k/year job in cybersecurity without a degree”. You see how specific this stuff can get? Now here are the ways to actually make your product to sell. 1. You can make it yourself (least likelihood unless it’s your personal brand) 2. You can hire a freelancer (I do this personally for the most part) 3. You can purchase PLR content (Most budget effective) All three options are great. Just keep in mind the experience of your customers. I’m often asked “How many pages should my book be?” and the answer is always the same. Just make sure that whatever you’re promising to deliver with your product is what you deliver in your product. Don’t skip any steps or anything. Sell a genuinely good product or you won’t be able to scale. How do you know if a product is good? Your first customers will tell you and from there you can revise before scaling. P.S. Create more perceived value for your product by making it more visually appealing. Example: Text on a plain google doc with no cover vs text on an ebook template from canva with a nice cover. Part two Building An Automated Online Store I’m not an expert in building websites by any means, but this part isn’t as hard. As long as you consider yourself tech savvy you can do this without external help. Here’s how to create a one product digital store on Shopify. 1. Create a Shopify account 2. Login and go to ‘Products’ on the left side 3. Click ‘Add product’ on the top right 4. Enter your product title. Example: 30-Day Gut Health Challenge 5. Enter the description as three bullet points that interest a buyer. 🍏 📖 💡 Example: Quick & Effective: Gut rejuvenation in 30 days. Daily Guide: Dietary tweaks and mindfulness. Holistic Benefits: Energy, skin, mood boost. 6. Use Canva.com or https://placeit.net/book-mockup-generator to create an ebook mockup to add as your product image 7. Set your product’s price in the pricing section (Charge based on the level of the problem you’re solving) 8. In the ‘inventory’ section, make sure it’s set to “Don’t track inventory” 9. In the ‘shipping’ section, make sure the box that says “This product requires shipping” isn’t checked. 10. Click save The good thing about digital dropshipping is that you don’t have to work with any suppliers or ship anything. Basically once you make a sale your customer will get their product immediately. Here’s how to automate that process. The first thing you want to do is make sure you have your digital product saved on your computer as a PDF if it’s an ebook. Then go to the Shopify app store and install the app called “Easy Digital Products”. Once installed, navigate to the app from your Shopify dashboard. You’ll see on the left side a tab that says “Apps”. Once you open the app you’ll see a button that says “Create Digital Product”. Then when you click that, select the product listing you created earlier. After that you will upload the digital file for your product (this is what customers will receive upon purchase). Make sure to save it. Now whenever someone purchases your digital product, you don’t have to manually email files to each customer. This app will generate a download link immediately after checkout and also will email the link to them for convenience. Here’s an example of what it will look like for your customers on the thank you page. Last piece to take care of on the backend for your store is by heading over to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Checkout’ and then scroll down until you see ‘Order processing’. Then change the settings to automatically fulfill and archive every order. The app above will deliver the products to our customers, but this is how we will see on our shopify dashboard that orders are actually fulfilled. Now that the backend is taken care of, let's talk about the frontend. You could in theory just use a free theme and have one product page on there. It works, like it does for this store here (close to $1,500 in sales in the last week). Personally though I like to use the app GemPages to customize the structure and build a “one page funnel”. It converts better and is also what we use for every client store we build. Here’s a quick framework I made to showcase how we structure each store. It’s basically one long product page and it’s also used as your homepage, ensuring everything points back to your offer. Images you will use in section 4 & 5 can be mockups or related images. 1. Normal navigation / logo area 2. Custom banner to state the ideal outcome customers will receive 3. Product page with benefits and one CTA button direct to checkout 4. Section to touch on the pain points of our customers 5. Another CTA focusing on the ideal outcome for our customers 6. Technical breakdown of the actual product itself 7. Product page section again with a CTA button 8. Reviews 9. Frequently asked questions 10. Normal footer Part three Taking Advantage Of Zero-Cost Marketing Organic marketing is one of the most tedious but effective long term plays you can make for your store. It compounds over time if you know how to do it the right way and if you’re a beginner not wanting to not spend money on ads yet, you can start here to get your first traffic and sales. In the early stages of starting a new digital dropshipping store there’s two main purposes of posting organic content: 1. To test potential ad creatives for free 2. To build a community of repeat viewers I think of it as simply warming up future sales by posting on TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, and YouTube Shorts. When you start a new store, start posting one time per day across these platforms. By the way, YouTube shorts have surprisingly been yielding good views overall since I started posting them for a new store. Here’s my current winning blueprint for making organic content for a new digital dropshipping store: 1. The first thing I do is find existing viral videos in my niche and take note of the hooks. Use and develop that “sixth sense”.. It pays well. An example I see from the image below is “Top 5 foods to avoid for good gut health”. 2. Next I look for the actual content that matches that hook specifically. Following the above example it would be identifying those five foods to avoid for good gut health and explaining why to avoid them. 3. Then all you have to do is match your hook with your value and you will attract an audience of your exact ideal customer. People who are interested in programming AI tools probably aren’t going to be watching a lot of gut health videos. Now lately I haven’t been using call to actions in my videos for brand new accounts. Instead I focus on making high quality videos that cut off right after the value content is delivered. That way I’m simply increasing the likelihood of a video going viral. The more watch time the better. These platforms want to retain a viewer for as long as possible. You can make these videos anonymously using footage across the internet, you can make these videos yourself, or hire a creator to make them. The app “CapCut” is great for editing videos on mobile. Don’t be afraid to make long videos either. Also don’t gatekeep information or strategies. It won’t make people look for your products. Instead provide value and people will look for more. You’re finding something that’s already working and doing it even better. One rule I like to follow is that each video I post has to be focused on breaking an objection for why my ideal customer wouldn’t purchase my product. Using the example of the gut health challenge, some potential objections could be: - People don’t know they have gut health problems People don’t know what causes gut health problems - People don’t know what gut health is People think you need a doctor and medicine to fix it People don’t know how to solve it at home Organic content is just a way to attract future buyers and test ad creatives at the sake of free content platforms that you’d be stupid to not take advantage of. Over time it can pay you dividends. Most won’t stay consistent with it though and instead become reliant on a single reputation and traffic source such as Meta Ads. P.S. When starting an account from complete scratch I don’t hide my offer completely. I put the link in bio on my Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook page. On TikTok you can’t add the link until 1,000 followers so until then I connect my ”. IG and use a CTA in the bio such as “Get the 30-Day Challenge on IG! ↗️ Here’s what to look for when you’re starting out: Videos that get significantly more views than others. Then you want to break down those videos and determine why and do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t. Then you can start adding call to actions to the end of those videos and start running them as paid ads as I’ll show you in the next part. Part four Running Paid Ads To Test I use Meta ads as my primary paid traffic source and here’s the testing strategy I like to use for digital products. This is the simplest testing structure in the book. I’ve done it for years and it’s always performed the best for me because there’s no bias in the spending. What that means is that I know that my daily budget on each ad-set is going directly to its own ad creative. Not splitting the budget between multiple at once. Time to set up: 10 to 15 minutes Objective: Identify ad creatives that generate sales Rules: Turn off ad-set once it hits break even point without a sale Keep in mind, the number of ad-sets is irrelevant because this is a campaign where you’re testing creatives. Every new ad-set means a new ad-creative whether it’s an image or video. For video ads, start by adding call to actions to the end of your most popular organic videos. Later on you may get into UGC style videos like on the ads library link I showed you for the example store in part one. For image ads, I use a simple framework that includes a mockup image and main benefits of the product. The following example is a quick mimic I made: I start with a mockup from a resource like placeit.net or mediamodifier.com. Then I go on canva and make the actual ads themselves. Ideally you want to make the fonts and colors match more of what your store and product represent. When you launch ads create four very different versions of this because when you run ads there will be one or two of them that perform better than the others. Then what you will do is make minor variations of the performers. For example, if I ran this image as an ad and it was profitable I’d make variations changing the benefits, the icons, the colors, and the mockup. Maybe even try adding the price or an incentive to increase conversions. Video ad examples: Goal = To find ad creatives that make sales consistently and be able to spend more money on them profitably. Now I figured I’d share a strategy I’ve been using for writing my ad copy. It’s literally either this or a super simple one liner and link to the store. One liners have worked better for me volume wise but I’ll share this anyways. (Pain point) ↓ (Solution) ↓ (Breakdown) ↓ (Solution 2) ↓ (Technical Solution) ↓ (Call To Action) Example: Dropshipping doesn’t have to be complicated.. With Online Income Revolution, you will learn how to sell digital products instead of physical ones using a simple 7 day step-by-step guide where you’ll: - Open a store Choose a niche Create a product Setup branding Automate the store Market to make sales 🤑 Introducing the Online Income Revolution guide, teaching you exactly how to utilize the next gen business model! For only $X, this guide is available for download immediately after purchase, and is filled with pages of step-by-step value. Download the guide here 👉🏼(link) Part five Next Steps At the end of the day, consistency wins. Most people won’t follow through because it’s foreign to them. Few will follow through and get a result from this. I hope that’s you and I hope I’ve made this read worth your time. To learn more, just head over to my Instagram @DigitalDropshippers and check out my content. And if you have any questions, shoot me a message! Final P.S. - The goal is not just to sell a low ticket product forever. After 100 sales or so you can survey the customers with an incentive they would like (ex: starbucks gift card to the first 10 people who complete it) and figure out what problems they are experiencing in your niche. Then you can provide more solutions at higher price points and continue to scale your store.
