Week 1/4 Update

A week ago we began a big, month-long project for Praxis.  As I’ve mentioned in past blog posts, I chose to go the marketing route, and I decided the best way to develop these skills was to open and advertise a Shopify store.

I chose to sell warm women’s clothing and found a YouTube video with some excellent information for a beginner like myself.  However, I realized that there was an overabundance of information about dropshipping.  Everyone has a different opinion, and everyone has had different experiences. 

I could easily see myself potentially getting sucked into the bottomless pit that is research.  Since I only have a month to complete this project, I knew I needed some additional information.  

I remembered my Praxis class got to pick the brain of a Praxis alumnus, Olivia Donaldson, on our orientation Zoom call.  She had talked a bit about how she’d gotten into dropshipping and marketing.  Realizing she could be a valuable resource, I reached out to her and we met on a Zoom call.  I asked her plenty of questions, and she gave me a lot of interesting and valuable information about marketing tactics and testing ads.  

One of the things she told me to do when researching marketing, is to simply search for other Facebook ads in my niche and see which ones are performing well and which aren’t based on the number of shares, comments, and likes.  

Armed with new information and new confidence, I proceeded to open my Shopify store.  I called my store CoziGurls (CozyGirls is taken by some YouTubers) and stocked it with strictly warm clothing items for women.

I designed my store site, keeping it simple and clean.

I used the Shopify app Oberlo to find, edit, and import products to dropship.

Of course, there is still tons I have to learn.  I ordered a product for myself through my store to test how things run, and that proved to be very valuable since I ran into numerous issues I was not previously aware of on the sellers end.  As a buyer, however, it worked great.

Though I have a few more things to work on and tweak before I’m completely confident in my store and selling abilities, I can’t forget the main goal of this project: learn how to market through Facebook ads.

So I set up a Facebook page for CoziGurls and started going through some of the information on Facebook ads Praxis provides.  

I feel as though I have made both significant progress, and yet like I’ve barely begun.  I have three weeks left.  I’m going to spend the next two days working through the few roadblocks I’ve hit and making sure I have everything the way I want it to be, then I’m going to move on to the marketing part.  

Wish me luck!