what if I told you that for every $100 you make selling online you're giving away up to $60 or more to companies that couldn't care less about your success well today I'm going to talk about the elephant in the room that's crushing small business owners excessive Marketplace fees when you factor in all the fees from Amazon eBay Etsy Walmart or any Marketplace for that matter referral fees subscription costs advertising expenses Payment Processing charges and fulfillment fees quickly add up to a lot of money but what if you could eliminate most of these costs while still
maintaining or even growing your sales sound too good to be true well I've been doing this for 18 years now with my online store over at bumblebe lens.com even though I make multiple six figures selling my products on Amazon my e-commerce website generates 5x more money and the profit margins are much higher as well so in this video I'm going to show you one powerful strategy to break free from Marketplace dependence and feel the most effective way to advertise your own store profitably now I've been teaching e-commerce for over 14 years now and almost everyone
always ask me the exact same question hey Steve Amazon eBay Etsy and Walmart have all the customers and traffic so how can I possibly succeed on my own or they'll ask hey Steve I tried launching my own online store a while back and I couldn't generate any sales it is just not possible now first off marketplaces like Amazon Etsy and eBay do not have all the customers in fact the combined market share of Amazon Walmart eBay and Etsy in the United States e-commerce sector is around 50% which means half of the customers don't even shop
there and if you tried and failed at starting your own online store in the past don't blame Shopify I'll bet you $1,000 that the problem isn't the platform it's you but before we dive into that let's address the biggest concern that most people have about starting their own online store how do you drive traffic to your own website and one powerful option is meta ads now before you roll your eyes and say oh my God Steve running meta ads is complicated and expensive yada yada yada just hear me out Amazon Walmart and Etsy already force
you to use their ad platforms to generate sales so if you're going to learn how to advertise anyway why not drive that traffic to a site that you actually own with just meta ads alone you can easily scale an e-commerce business to seven figures and Beyond but there are some caveats in order to run meta ads profitably your products need to meet a few key criteria to even have a chance so first off your average order value should be at least $50 I've seen sellers make doe with less but it's going to be much harder
unless you can generate at least 50 bucks per sale second your gross margin should be at least 50% and ideally around 66% now this is probably going to rule out most drop shippers but honestly Drop Shipping isn't a good long longterm business model anyway now here's where most people get it wrong your mindset your goal with meta ads isn't to make a huge profit right away your goal is to break even yeah you heard that correctly break even now of course it's great if you can make money upfront but once your ads are breaking even
or better it actually makes sense to spend as much money as possible now why is that because at break even you're building a customer base you're growing your email list and generating repeat business business for free plus you're establishing a strong brand presence and your ads will have a halo effect on your organic Amazon sales now the second mindset shift you need to make is letting go of the Reigns and trusting meta to find your customers for you everything related to meta ads is now powered by Machine learning and artificial intelligence and the algorithm is
smarter than any human as a result the hardest part of running profitable meta ads today isn't learning how to run the ads it's understand understanding how to create good ad creatives so in this video I'm going to show you exactly how I create ads for my store bumblebe linden.com and walk you through my campaign structure step by step now if you ask anyone who runs Facebook ads today most of them will tell you that some of their highest converting ads are video testimonials from real people if you can get someone to record a highquality video
endorsing your product it will probably perform really well in an advertisement but here's the problem getting a customer record a highquality video that doesn't suck is extremely difficult for my store I have tried it all giving out free products gift cards discounts you name it in exchange for a video review and nine times out of 10 the videos are unusable most regular customers just aren't great on camera so the first thing I'm going to teach you is how to create Facebook ads using AI generated content creators all the people you see here on my screen
are individuals you can use with any script you create and the present your script just like a real spokesperson and just to be clear these are real people real actors the AI simply modifies what they say and depending on your script their expressions and mannerisms will adapt to match the message you want to convey before artificial intelligence you'd have to spend thousands of dollars hiring actors or influencers to do this but now an inexpensive tool can handle it for you at a fraction of the cost with professional quality right now I'm using a tool called
Arc ads to generate my user generate content ads and let me just play a couple for you right now and I'll let you be the judge my sister just became a mom and I wanted to get her something sentimental so I had her baby's birthday date embroidered on a handkerchief and when she opened it she said this is the sweetest thing I've ever gotten and what's cool is that she turned it into a cute baby Bonnet and keeps it in her baby's memory box thanks to B Be Lin for helping me create such a special
moment now if I didn't tell you this was AI generated would you have even known the best part is that you're not limited to just showing the person on screen the entire time you can do cuts add b-roll make various edits to keep the ad Dynamic and engaging there's a lot of flexibility with how you can structure and style your content now the main takeaway here is that you can create endless scripts and testimonial videos with virtually no effort no chasing customers for reviews no awkward videos you get professional quality content on demand now let
me walk you through exactly how I create one of these ads and I'll give you a quick tour of the platform that I use and again it's called Arc ads and so far it's the most human-like AI tool that I've come across now before I even open Arc ads the first thing I do is come up with a script and there are two ways I approach this the first way is to go through my existing list of customer testimonials and turn those into a script this is usually where I start because these are the actual
words real customers have used to describe our products it's authentic and it res Ates with new audiences because it sounds genuine because it is genuine but what if you're a newer shop and you don't have many testimonials yet this is where my second method comes in I'll head over to the Facebook ads Library find a high converting video ad and just tweak the script to fit my own product in case you've never used the Facebook ads library before it is basically a free database of every single meta ad currently running around the world and it's
an absolute gold mine for ad inspiration so what I typically do is search for companies in my Niche look for a talking head video and study how they structure their message and then I modify it to fit my product's unique selling points and once I've got the script dialed in that's when I jump into Arc ads to bring it to life for example here's a talking head video from a jewelry company that sells keepsakes similar to my company now there's no point in me paying a content creator hundreds of dollars to create a video like
this it might flop and I don't want to throw money down on the drain but with Arc ads I can test the concept first using Ai and see how it performs without spending a lot of money so the first thing I do is screen record the video and have it transcribed then I cut and paste the transcript in the chat GPT upload my own photo of my own product and have ai adapt the script and once I've got a solid script I head over to Arc ads and pick an actor that matches my Target demographic
and this process is super easy all you got to do is hover your mouse over an actor and you'll instantly see and hear a voice sample to get a feel for how they'll present your ad now for my store most of my customers are women over the age of 35 so I usually select actors under the adult or senior categories and depending on what you sell you can also choose actors with specific accessories or in certain situations that fit your product and finally I just paste a script hit go and within about 30 minutes I've
got an AI generated video that looks and sounds like a real person here's an ad I created for my shop just the other day pretty amazing right now once you've generated three of these videos it's time to move on to the next step which is creating the actual meta ad when I run Facebook ads I use a strategy called the 322 method this means I test three creatives two descriptions and two headlines so if I were setting up a meta ad campaign I would upload the three videos I made with Arc ads write two different
product descriptions and create two different headlines then i' launch a campaign and let it run every week usually on a Monday I check the ad stats to see how things are performing if an ad is doing well I simply increase the budget by 20% to scale it if it's not performing I turn it off and start testing a new round of creatives it is a very straightforward strategy that is 100% doable even if you know nothing about advertising and if you're skeptical here's something that you need to fundamentally understand running Facebook ads is like panning
for gold you have to keep testing different creatives until you strike gold with messaging that converts and when you find that winning ad that's when you go all in and max out your ad spend now I know some of you guys are going to try this strategy and still struggle to make sales so let me give you some additional advice the number one reason most people can't generate sales with their online store comes down to one thing the lack of trust so before you spend a single Dollar on meta ads you need to make sure
your website is ready to convert traffic into customers now you don't need to be a web designer and your site doesn't have to look like some fancy modern Masterpiece okay I'll be the first to admit that bumblebe lin.com isn't the best looking site in the world but here's the key you need to reassure customers that if they place an order their experience will be just as reliable as shopping on Amazon here's how you build trust and it's simpler than you think first you must display key trust signals front and center on your website offer free
shipping and no house returns and make sure your contact information is easy to find your contact info should be readily accessible on every single page of your site because not having a phone number and physical address will cut your conversion rate in half and I'm not even exaggerating here now if you're hesitant about putting your personal cell number out there don't worry just sign up for a free virtual phone number with Google Voice but trust me no one's going to call you in the beginning and if you ever reach a point where you're getting too
many calls well congrats that means your store is doing well enough that you can afford to hire a customer service rep in the Philippines for around $400 a month now the next thing you must have on your website is social proof people are like Lemmings and they always follow the pack unless the customer knows that someone else has made a purchase before on your site they aren't going to buy either that means that you must have social proof on your website in the form of testimonials press mentions basically anything that shows that people are buying
from you now if you're a brand new site with no press or testimonials yet once again you can create testimonials using Arc ads. just script up what you want a customer to say about your product and have Arc ads generate a realistic testimonial until you have real testimonials of your own then place these testimonials on every single page of your site especially at points where you want a customer to take action like during checkout or an ad to cart now as with everything in life there's going to be a learning curve when it comes to
running ads for your own online store but let's be real here learning how to sell on Amazon has an equally steep learning curve so if you're going to invest time learning something why not spend it learning how to make sales on a platform that you actually own the best part is that these testimonial videos you are making with Arc ads could be posted on Tik Tok YouTube shorts and Instagram reals and over time some of them are bound to go viral now that you understand what it takes to generate sales with your own online store
make sure you watch this video here on exactly what I would do today if I were to start a Shopify store from complete scratch
