Have you been hearing the word “Drop servicing” quite a lot of time this year? Want to know how to start one?
Drop Servicing is the new online business in town. I have started one myself. It looks quite simple and I believe it can get profitable over time.
So, Here, I explain what drop servicing is and how you can start a profitable drop servicing business in this comprehensive course.
Without further delay, let’s get started!
What is Drop Servicing?
Drop Servicing is a type of business model where you sell services on your website. But, you directly do not provide them yourself rather you hire a freelancer to do it for you. Once he finishes it, you send them over to your client.
Now, the profit comes when you sell your service for much higher money to your client than you pay a freelancer.
For Eg: Let’s say you sell logo designs for $70. A customer buys your service and he inputs some information regarding the logo. A logo design freelancer on Upwork costs around $30. You pay him and gives him the information needed. Once finished, you deliver them to your client and you get a profit of $40.
If you are quite new to Drop Servicing, you can hire a freelancer on Upwork to do the website creation and also give you some profitable niches.
Related Article – Drop Servicing Vs DropShipping? Which One’s Better?
How Much Does it Cost To Start This Business?
The cost of starting this business is actually very low. But it can increase if you are planning to market using ads.
So, the first thing will be to build a website and that might cost you around $2.95/month. After that, to drive in traffic to your website, You could manually message potential businesses or set up ads on Google which will cost you at least $10/day.
Once you start getting orders for your services, you could increase your advertising budget and scale up your business.
Related Article – Drop servicing without a Website – The Beginners Guide!
What Services Can You “Dropship”?
You can Drop service almost anything you want. But, you should always look out for the competition as well as the number of people searching for them.
If there are a lot of people providing the same service. You shouldn’t probably drop service that one. It’s better to look for low competitive and highly searched services on Google.
Services that are ordered by businesses tend to perform better than the ones ordered by individuals. So, Social media management, advertising services, etc perform better when compared with something like Resume writing, speech writing, etc.
Some good services to “Dropship” are:-
- Virtual Assistant
- Social Media Manager
- Storyboard
- Logo Animation
- Animated GIFs
- User Testing
- Lead Generation
- Voice-over
- Resume Writing
- Book trailers
The above services do get a decent amount of searches per month and you can easily get your ad on google for lesser money as the competition is low.
You can use the Google Keyword Planner for keyword research and competition analysis.
Related Article – 10 Best (HOT!) Drop Servicing Niches in 2021!
How Can You Start a Drop Servicing Business?
Here’s a step-by-step guide to starting this business.
Once you select a service, do the following:-
- Finding a Freelancer to do your Job
Find a good freelancer who can do the job for you. The best place to find one would be to go to Upwork.
- Building Your Website
In order to build your website, hosting and a domain are needed. You can get both of them together for as cheap as $2.95/month on Bluehost.
I recommend Bluehost because it has proven to be fast, reliable, and cheap.
P.S – Want a little more discount on Bluehost? Do the following – 1. When you reach the checkout page after selecting your plan, allow the page to load. 2. Then move your cursor to the top (over the chrome tabs). 3. A popup would appear that gives you a little more discount. Click on Claim savings and you could then buy it.
WordPress comes preinstalled on Bluehost and that’s exactly what we need. A couple of plugins needs to be installed so that we can design and accept payments on our website. So, for that, we install Elementor, Paypal, and WooCommerce.
If I start explaining Elementor and web designing, I might as well deviate from this topic. So here’s a video on how you can design your website without any coding skills.
Once you set up your website, you have to set up the payment system as well as a way to accept the order details from a client. This can be done quite easily with Paypal and a WordPress plugin.
First, install the Ninja forms plugin. Create a form using it and click on Publish after you finish. You will get a shortcode that can be used to embed this form onto a page.
So, create a page and then select a block and search for “shortcode”. Paste the code into the field.
Then, register for a Paypal account if you don’t have one, and then go to this link where you can create a Paypal Buy button. Click on “Buy now” from this page.
You will be redirected to a page like this.
Input the name of the service and the price. Then, under the advanced options, you will see a field to input the URL for a successful transaction and one for a failed transaction.
Copy the URL of the page that you just created and paste them to the success field. This will let us accept the order details from a client after they pay.
Now, if you want, you can also set up another page for failed transactions.
Great! You are almost done here! The final thing to set up now is our traffic source.
- Driving Traffic
With Google Ads
We will use Google AdWords to drive traffic to our website. We won’t be using Facebook or Instagram ads simply because these services are mostly searched on Google.
So, AdWords basically places ads on the Google search engine. I recommend you spend at least $10 per day on ads, but if you can go a little bit higher, It would be great!
Here’s a small video on how you can set up a basic ad campaign on Adwords.
If you did select a service that businesses use like social media management, content writing, data entry, designing, etc, It will be really easy for you to get your first client.
However, it will take some time!
The way this works is by finding websites/online businesses that would potentially want the above-listed services. After we find them, we manually message them.
Now, this takes time!
Don’t expect that you will make some money right away after you send one or two emails.
a) Finding Potential Businesses
Finding businesses is a very easy process. There are a lot of web directories that list a lot of online businesses.
You just need to enter your niche and sometimes a place. This will bring a list of all businesses that reside in a particular area.
Some web directories that you could use are:-
Or you could find more web directories from here.
Let’s assume that you offer an instagram account management service. So you will need to find online businesses that do have a weak instagram profile.
Instagram is used by most online businesses right now. There’s a massive audience on Instagram and a strong profile can help a particular business in making money.
So, if you can find a medium business from the fashion industry, tech industry etc that has a weak profile, you could target them.
To find them, go to any of the web directories I listed above and choose an industry. Here I have used hotfrog.com and searched for “fashion accessories”.
I did find a medium-size business called “LaSleek Fashion”. There are a lot of businesses here and this is just one of them.
Since our service is Instagram management this particular business would need an Instagram profile. If it doesn’t have one, you could message them about how crucial it is to start an Instagram page for their business.
To check if the website has one, you could search google or you could find that somewhere on their website.
If you find their Instagram profile to be weak and doesn’t have much engagement, you could email them describing your service.
Do not direct message them through Instagram, it’s a bit unprofessional and if the account that you are using does not have much followers or engagement, they are obviously not going to trust you.
As you can see, “LaSleek Fashion” does have a very weak profile on Instagram. It does not have much engagement on their posts. So, this would be perfect!
b) Reaching out
To reach out to this business, you would need their email address. Some websites might list it on their about page or contact page.
But, if you couldn’t find them, use a tool like Hunter chrome extension.
Once you have their email address, just email them about your service.
I would really love to give you a template for this outreach. But, most of you guys would copy and paste the same thing in all their outreach emails. This is a big problem.
I have personally received outreach emails that look the same. If that happens, you will probably lose a lot of reputation and value.
But, here are some tips when you draft this email:-
- Start by introducing yourself (But don’t say you are a drop servicer)
- Explain what your service is.
- Explain why ordering your service is going to benefit them
- Demonstrate your credibility
- If you can, attach some work samples that you did in the past (use the same as your freelancers’ work samples)
- Do not make the email look like spam.
- Do not include any pricing info
- Draft an email not an “Essay”
- Chances are that they won’t reply. So, make sure you follow up again after 2 or 3 days.
You won’t get your first order right after you send 2 or 3 emails to different businesses, it will take time. So, make sure you stay confident and motivated.
- Receiving the Order and Delivering the Service.
When you get an order, get all the information you would need and then hire a freelancer to do the job at a cheaper rate.
Deliver the service to your client once he finishes.
And That’s all it takes!
Related Article – Drop Servicing Vs Affiliate Marketing: Which One Should You Go For?
Some Drawbacks and Advantages Of This Business Model
Drawbacks
- Delivery time can change. Not all freelancers can deliver in time. Sometimes, due to high demand, the delivery can be late. To cut back on this, you could add at least 2 days to the freelancers delivery time.
- Customer satisfaction is a top priority here. Outsource your service to good, reputed freelancer and you can minimize this problem too.
Advantages
- Drop servicing is pretty easy and do not need any skills.
- When compared with dropshipping, Drop servicing is a lot less risky because you won’t need to worry about returns, refunds, and product legitness.
Conclusion
Drop servicing is one of the emerging new online business models in 2020. But, It’s not all fruits and cakes. They do have their own limitations.
However, it’s easy to start and scale-up. More people are probably going to carry on this trend and make lots of money online. So, I suppose you better start one yourself and be the one that stands out.
So, That’s all for now. Hope you loved this article. Please comment down below if you have any queries.
Peace!