Building an Unbreachable Moat for Your Online Business

What's up guys, Trevor here with eCommerce Paradise. Today I want to talk about how to build a moat around your online business.

If you're getting started with high-ticket dropshipping and you're not sure exactly which products to choose or how to get started, go check out my free niches list and mini course at eCommerceParadise.com slash free course. And if you want a done-for-you solution for high-ticket dropshipping, business startup, and launch, go check out my turnkey done-for-you offer at eCommerceParadise.com slash turnkey.

Alright guys, so when it comes to building an online business, it's a little bit more difficult to create an online moat sometimes just because it's easy to compete. It's really easy for competitors to jump in and just kind of steal what you're doing and run the same ads and marketing that you're doing and get the same sales. So I wanted to drop some easy wins, some quick wins today for you on how to build a moat around your business so it's harder for people to compete with you.

The first thing's first is get in early on a niche. So spot trends and try to start a business around a trend and get in early because the brands that start early in a niche that you'll work with, those are the brands that are going to be very hard to get later on for other online retailers. So if you're just going to stick with online retail dropshipping and you want to work with other brands, just definitely try to work with the top selling brands in any industry.

And you'll find that it's very difficult to get those top selling brands in the industry. So it's always better to hop on new trends and to build stores out in new trends as they're appearing. But another way you can do it is just by going and meeting those top brands in person, either at trade shows or at their offices and building rapport with them and building trust and getting accounts with them that way.

Or you can try to meet somebody who they trust already and are friendly with and build trust with that person and then use that person as a referral. Because if they like and know and trust that person and that person knows and likes and trusts you, then they're more likely to know, like, and trust you without having to meet you.

So just getting those top brands that are hard to get from any other normal online-only, drop shipper that doesn't actually have the means to go to the US to trade shows and meet these people in person and or just isn't as extroverted of a person as other people are, then it's going to be easier to win when you have relationships with those top selling suppliers. So definitely try to do that and try to look into that.

And the next thing is to get really good SEO rankings and organic rankings and get organic traffic. So once you have these top sellers to players that are hard to get, what you'll notice is that there's a lot less competition on those organic rankings. And so you can really go after organic traffic a lot stronger and see way better results. So the best ways to do that are to create really good, valuable content on your website first and foremost.

So I would focus first on the product descriptions, make those really good, keyword rich, keyword dense, and include multimedia, and have lots of user-generated content reviews and whatnot. Obviously have the best offer and a really good, fascinating website and all that. But yeah, then also I would create really good content on your collection pages, like buying guides with lots of internal links to products and other collections and blog posts. And then I would go and create blog posts.

I would target first and foremost branded keywords, so any keywords related to your brand and the products, like review keywords versus keywords, best keywords for those particular brands. And then I would go after generic traffic after that and target top of the funnel traffic with best category keywords and how-to keywords, informational keywords, things like that, and just do a ton of internal linking.

I would definitely use AI to write the content, but I would definitely customize it a little bit too. And what you should do is use an app called Link Whisper, and that app will help you do internal linking automatically with target keywords. But also you'll just want to make sure that you're adding in recommended products and recommended other blog posts to read and just help people to continue to go through your website after they're done reading any particular blog post.

But if you do all that, the next thing you should do is get external links to your website from other blogs and news sites and things like that. And the best way to do that is a thing called Parasite SEO, where you're actually going onto the big, high domain authority websites and posting best X for Y articles, usually category-based articles, or they can be brand-based as well. But usually they're going to be category-based. The ones with the top search traffic is the ones you want to go after.

And you want to definitely do it on a site that doesn't have any article for that particular keyword yet that's high domain authority because it's more likely that they're going to rank since they're such high domain authority for that keyword and so then you can include traffic to your product pages and your collection pages and whatnot within that article and get traffic back to your website that way. So that's a really good way to do it.

Another good way is to drive traffic through forum websites like Reddit, Quora, things like that just by answering questions and leaving links and doing the same sort of Parasite SEO articles. LinkedIn posts also work. So creating a LinkedIn company page and profile and whatnot and posting things for your website, that also helps a lot.

And yeah, just generally building out social media links and connecting with people through social media and doing networking with other industry leaders in social media obviously will help in the long run as well. But all these things are kind of things that take a long time and take a lot of work to do.

So that's kind of why some businesses have a bigger moat around them than others, especially in the dropshipping world, is that they've put the time in and effort in to build these kinds of things out. Just try to create a system for it, every little thing, and focus on the most important stuff first.

I would definitely recommend getting a core list of really good, high best-selling suppliers, going after those, and then trying, once you get them, if you do get them, then just trying to spend as much of your time as possible on getting organic traffic and social traffic and backlinks and whatnot. Another quick win is when you do get suppliers on board, go check their website out and see if they have an authorized dealer page.

And see if you can get your site listed on their authorized dealer page. Because those backlinks that you get from suppliers are really strong backlinks. Google ranks those quite a bit higher when they see that top brands in the industry are ranking to you, to your website. That's obviously going to work a lot better. So I would definitely reach out to every supplier and ask them for a backlink from their authorized dealer page.

And then also just ask them to see if they're interested in any other type of collaborations with content marketing, whether it be guest posting or press releases or whatnot. You can do press releases when you get new supplier partnerships. That might help. Usually the news sites that press releases post to are high domain authority websites. And if you pay more, you'll get better websites that way as well.

And I would only do this with best-selling suppliers, like top main brands in the industry. But you can definitely do a press release and then link back to the top-selling product pages as well as the collection page for that brand, maybe some blog posts that feature it as well, and your homepage.

So yeah those are definitely a bunch of really good ways to do it another great way to build a moat around your business is to actually you know go and get the products that you're selling online and do reviews of them and maybe possibly assembly or installation videos as well because those types of videos on youtube do really well because it shows you personally actually you know. Assembling or touching or reviewing the product, using the product and talking about it.

And then people are going to watch that, obviously, and then it's going to drive traffic. Because people oftentimes, before they buy high-ticket products, they're going to search for reviews, and they don't just want to read a generic review from a website that obviously never used the product. They want to watch a video of the person actually using the product.

And it also helps because you can take that same video, embed it onto the product page, and it just keeps people on the product page longer. And if it's from the owner of the company or something like that, they're going to trust the company a lot more. So definitely doing something like that is going to help as well. And then also getting and using user-generated content in all of your ads, all of your marketing as much as possible is really going to help as well.

This is something I've always focused on. You can set up an automation using AfterShip and Klaviyo where you have to upgrade your AfterShip account. It's like $100 a month or something. But you can create an automation using AfterShip and Klaviyo to send out emails to customers as soon as the product is delivered to ask them if they're satisfied.

And then if they're satisfied, then you can send them a series of emails requesting reviews, specifically like a video review and with a kind of a script template for them to say it and then offer them a gift card in exchange for that, maybe like a hundred bucks or something towards the next order or just, you know, a hundred dollar gift card to use at your store.

And then what I would definitely do is upload a bunch of accessories from some like dropshipping portal like Spocket or something like that, or even Walmart works as well because they do dropshipping and make the listings generic. obviously don't use branded products but.

When you have a bunch of low-cost accessories that are relevant to your niche, people are more likely to see a $100 gift card as actually very valuable in your store because they can just go back and buy a bunch of cheap accessories that are actually useful for them. Give them incentive to make the review videos. But the videos really help a lot. You can also ask people just to take pictures of the product and maybe even take a selfie picture of them with the product, that kind of stuff.

You can do different tiers of gift cards for how valuable the content is, like a $100 gift card for a video or maybe $25 or $50 bucks just for a regular picture. You can also incentivize them to leave reviews because oftentimes people won't even leave reviews unless they're pissed off or something. So incentivize them to leave a positive review if they're happy or if they're just totally okay with the transaction. So it's a really good idea.

You can also use third-party platforms like Trustpilot, Better Business Bureau, although they do have a problem with incentivized reviews. So if they detect it, they're going to put a note on your profile. But if you pay them up front, And when you first create your profile, it's like $600 a year or something like that. They won't do any of that. So it's kind of like, they're not like a government business that regulates people.

They're a private business, but they are incentivized to downgrade businesses that don't pay them yearly if they do anything wrong. So it is a good idea if you think you'll be getting quite a bit of BBB reviews and stuff like that.

Or if you end up getting issues with them, it's just to pay them and to negotiate them to take down any negative stuff about you. It's a good idea because they will do it if you pay them. But yeah, Trustpilot works as well. And JudgeMe is the reviews app that we use internally, but they also have a site where if you get a bunch of verified reviews that they'll list your company and all that, and you can get backlinks from them as well, which is cool.

Yeah, definitely. And also, by the way, Facebook pages work pretty well for getting reviews. So you can just incentivize people all along the way to leave your review on multiple platforms. And you just tell them, hey, we'll give you $10 per review for us on these five or 10 different platforms that we have. User-generated content is wonderful. Reviews on third-party platforms are wonderful for your business. People are going to search.

If you don't have any reviews on these third-party platforms, people are going to be suspicious. If you do, even if you have some negative reviews, if you have a lot of positive ones, it's going to outrank that. And they're still going to see that you have reviews, so that you're an established business, which is good. If you do get negative reviews on these platforms, you can respond to them. And you can also, if they're unfair, you can write to the review people and ask them to take it down.

But if they're fair, you can just respond to them and explain the reason why whatever happened happened. Usually it's about shipping damage or shipping out late, that kind of thing. So just explain the situation so that other people see that. Yeah. And so, you know, these are all some really good ways to build a boat around your business. And it really just comes down to scaling, scaling your store out in different ways.

And at the end of the day, also, just remember that you're always selling other people's brands. So no matter what, it's up to that brand, your business is relying on those other brands. So it's like, you know, if that brand runs out of inventory, you're kind of screwed. If for some reason, that brand decides to drop all online dealers and just sell direct to the consumers themselves, you're kind of screwed too. There's a lot of things that brands can do to ruin retailers' businesses,

unfortunately. And it just is what it is.

So long run, if you really want to build the biggest moat around your business, what you really should do is build your own brands. But obviously it takes upfront investment, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work. So you've really got to consider whether that's worth it for you or not. But you can build a brand around a really inexpensive product to get started at least.

And what I would just recommend doing is if you are going to do a brand, just focus on providing quality products, like really high quality products. So people are always going to associate your brand image and value with the quality of the products that they receive. So if you've got really good, high quality products, they're always going to remember that and they're more likely to buy again in the future and refer you to other people and talk about you with their friends.

So just try to think about brand building as a way to establish your brand and build a mode around your business. You can build separate brands outside your retail storefront or you can just build like a private label brand, just kind of like a grocery store kind of does. They take their top selling products and build their own sort of like private label brand and sell it for a little bit less. That's pretty common with retail as well. So just consider that and, you know...

There's many different options and ways you can scale these businesses. It really depends on you. Some scaling ways will provide you more money, whereas they will also sometimes make it more time-consuming and physical location-dependent.

For instance, another way to scale and build a moat is to actually buy inventory from your supplier, hold it in your own warehouse, so that when things go out of stock, like let's say in the holiday season, which is pretty common, you're still going to have stock, but your competitors won't, especially just the online dropshippers. They won't be able to access any inventory because you're the one that holds the inventory.

So things like that are just going to make it so that you can continue to do business while others can't. And it's just going to help you to establish a better brand image and things will ship out faster and things like that. But of course, you're going to need to get a warehouse, pay for insurance, pay for overhead, pay for employees, all that stuff. So that's got pros and cons as well.

If you just want to be location independent like me, work from home, work from coffee shops, and sort of just chill, probably going to be just focused on the online retail and affiliate marketing and online digital products and things like that, businesses, productized services, that kind of stuff. So just consider there's lots of ways you can scale a business. Another idea would be like a membership program. You can actually scale into a membership program with your store.

You can have like a $5 a month discount coupon membership program and make it so that every order that goes through your store, people get a $5 add-on to their order and just says, Hey, do you want to sign up for our membership program? And it's $5 a month, and they might say yes. And that way you'll build out, out of your maybe 20, 30, 100 customers a month, whatever you got going on, you might get half of them to sign up for this $5 a month membership.

And you can consider more ways to provide more value. For instance, building out a subdomain website for a marketplace of some sort, or maybe a classifieds site, or even maybe a job posting site, or whatever your industry is, you can consider what the B2B opportunities are there, business-to-business opportunities, and build out membership WordPress sites out of that and then charge monthly or maybe even just run ads on them.

There's lots of different ways you can build communities and make money out of that and provide value in exchange, obviously. So I would just consider what kind of business model do you want to work towards? Do you want more of the lifestyle stuff, which is obviously less work, less time-consuming, more location-dependent freedom?

Or do you want to be more like, I want to just make a ton of money and I don't care how and I'm okay with building out tons of stores and whatnot or getting a huge warehouse? Office space, whatever. It's up to you which direction you want to go. But I would just recommend going in one of those directions, at least. Choosing the one you want to go in and just go for it because staying stagnant is also not that great. You're probably going to eventually begin to plateau.

Your sales will plateau and then decline after a while. So don't stay stagnant too long. Definitely work in one direction or another. Even if it's just simply like posting a bunch of content all the time and hiring VAs to do that for you and just getting really good organic rankings and working with top suppliers. That alone in itself will do really well for you.

If you just rely on ads and don't do much organic stuff, you're going to just find that over time, the ad costs are going to go up and that your organic rankings aren't going to go up. And it's just going to continue to cost you more for those sales. And your profit margins are going to suffer for that. And so you're not going to have as much money to just spend on growing your business. And obviously, hopefully you'll be able to still pay your personal expenses.

But the goal with this is you probably shouldn't spend so much money on ads. You should probably spend more money on content and spend more time on content so you get those organic rankings. That's going to help you more in the long run as opposed to just spending money on ads and just forgetting about everything else. So definitely don't just do the work that gets you to launch, but continue to do the work that will get you to scale and get you to sustainability and profitability.

All right, well, I hope you guys found this helpful. I do help businesses, e-commerce businesses, scale and become sustainable and profitable. I have a few different services that I offer, which the number one thing usually is the e-commerce SEO service. And that SEO service includes content, it includes backlinks, it includes, you know, like a daily check on your internal linking and your technical SEO and site speed, things like that.

So if you guys are interested, definitely go check out ecommerceparadise.com slash SEO for more info on that. I do also provide an ad management service, which includes setup and launch for an ad account, Google ads, Bing ads, Facebook ads. So if you guys are interested in getting help with ads and maybe you're like already doing a lot of SEO work and you want to scale with ads, that's fine too. Go check out ecommerceparadise.com slash ads for more info on that.

And also if you're interested in building like a team out and getting VAs and just don't know where to start with that, or you want help with it, I can help you to recruit, to hire, to train, and eventually scale your team out. Team building is a lot of work that I've done in the past. I've learned a lot. So if you want more help with that and information with that, go to ecommerceparadise.com slash VA, VA for virtual assistant.

All right. So the last thing that I can help you do is to actually sell your business. I've got a lot of experience. I've sold a bunch of stores before. I know it's required. I know what investors are looking for. If you want help with that, go to ecommerceparadise.com slash exit. If you want to basically have a nice big business exit, multiples can go anywhere between 20 to 30x monthly net profits.

The thing about dropshipping that's a little bit confusing sometimes is whether you should put all of your growth expenses into your bookkeeping sheet. And I recommend you do, but then you have a separate section for ad backs, what they call it, where you actually put the growth expenses as ad backs because those aren't and shouldn't be required to be in your profit and loss statement on a monthly basis because they're not ongoing expenses.

They're just one-time expenses for building the business. Anyway, so just a quick thought there, but go to ecommerceparadise.com for more information and you can schedule free consultation for all these services with me. Talk directly with me and get more information on that. All right, guys. Hope that you found that helpful.

If you are interested in joining our community of high-ticket dropshipping entrepreneurs, go check out my masterclass and mastermind group at ecommerceparadise.com slash masterclass it's a monthly membership and also has options for yearly and lifetime as well as done for you services and basically we have group chats as well as weekly and or monthly group coaching calls so you can get in on that and get some help and join the community ecommerceparadise.com slash masterclass

alright thanks so much guys make sure you subscribe, like and share and see you in the next one.