in today's video i'm just going to be going over some of the next steps that i'm taking in building my shopify store for selling low content books welcome to my channel my name is caroline and if you've been following along i have recently done a couple of videos where i'm building a shopify store to sell low content books on just to give a really quick background on this i sell low content books on amazon kdp and last year my account was accidentally deleted and although i did get it back it made me think about having multiple streams of income and not relying just on one platform just in case just in case the worst happens where for whatever reason i or we cannot sell on amazon kdp anymore so i've decided to set up a standalone online store so i'm not going to have the platform of kdp which already has built-in customers for me to promote my books to i'm going to be creating my own shopify store where i'm going to have to find customers myself but i'm excited and i'm looking forward to the challenge so so far i have done videos where i show setting up the shopify store and just doing that back end admin area setup and then my last video was how to connect shopify to lulu which is the print on demand supplier that i'm going to be using to create and ship my low content books and so now i'm just going to be doing some customizing i installed my theme in the last video too i used the debutify theme just the free version and so we're just going to go over what i'm going to be doing to customize the store and what i want it to look like so i have basically already created a logo and i just wanted to go for sort of like a red romantic type of font type of theme color branding that sort of thing in terms of a logo i generally just like font logos i don't like anything too complicated and anything that distracts from the name of the store i just personally think you should just have your logo very clear on what your store's called so as to not confuse anybody about where they are and so i've never used this theme before so i am sort of just finding my way as i go and trying to figure out where everything is for all the stuff that i want to customize so i just head over to the app which opens up in a new window so the debutify theme is under the apps section of shopify and then we can go to theme library just noticed there is an update available so i'm just going to do that first okay so i've updated the theme so now i've got the most current version and i've just clicked on the theme i've just installed and i'm just going to start customizing it now there's some parts of this video i may not talk over i might just record my screen and you can watch what i'm doing because like i say i haven't actually used this thing before so i'm just going to be doing a lot of clicking around trying to figure out where everything is and try to change the things i want to change if i do anything and i'm not talking about it as i'm doing it and you want to ask me any questions about how i did something just pop it down in the comments below and i'll try my best to answer so this is where you can change all the different pages within your site how you want it to look i'm just like i say trying to figure out where everything is and what all these things mean so sometimes the best thing is just to sit and go through every little section and see what options you have under each one and then you you'll be able to figure out where everything is and what you want to update so i'm just going to head over to the header here because i want to update the logo i'm probably going to want to delete some of those social media icons update the text that's in that announcement bar at the top update menus uh update those four sections the trust sort of sections there and that's probably all i get done today because i then need to start making some products actually upload into the store [Music] oh [Music] [Music] so here in the footer i found some of the things that i want to remove i want to remove the powered by shopify powered by debutify logos and things like that i'm going to remove that text that's next to my copyright notice [Music] i probably also want to remove the payment icons [Music] and i will want to remove those featured products there [Music] and i just want to change some of the wording to be a bit more what i like in terms of the types of language that's going to be used on the site for example i don't want to be talking about oh follow us and be our followers i want to create a community where people connect with each other or connect with us and not just be followers so i like to change that that kind of language [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] so now i'm looking for all the social media stuff to update i've removed some of the social media icons from the top because i'm not going to have all social media i have started adjusting some of the colors so i've changed that top bar and some of the buttons [Music] oh [Music] why are you keeping me [Music] hello [Music] now something i've noticed and that was just that age check that just popped up is because you get that free 14-day trial when you use the debutify theme or which includes all their apps all the apps are currently installed on my store so what i want to do is get rid of them because i'm not planning on paying for the paid version of the theme so i'm not going to have access to them so i don't want them on there i don't want to have access to them and then in when that trial runs out those i've spent time updating apps on things i'm not going to be using and i don't want an age check on my website anyway so i'm going to go looking for those apps and delete them all [Music] [Music] uh [Music] why are you keeping me [Music] oh [Music] and now i'm just adjusting some of the colors buttons texts and things like that [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] oh [Music] and the next thing i want to do is change these little trust sections i call them trust i don't even know what to call them but i just call them where you can start to build trust with your customers because when your store is new you don't have a lot of word of mouth you don't have a lot of reviews for people to go on things like this can help build trust and give them confidence in buying from you so offering things like returns solid customer support worldwide shipping if that's what you're doing it's good to have that displayed on your site to help build that confidence in the early days before you start getting all the reviews and stuff so i'm just going to start updating these change the icon colors and i might delete one because i feel like satisfaction guaranteed and 30 days returns is kind of the same thing because if you're not satisfied they want to know that they can return stuff and i want to try and make them a little bit more uniform i don't like how there's not the same amount of lines of text in them so all the buttons are in different they're not all aligned with each other in in the line which i just think doesn't look pleasing to the eye so i want to update those sorts of things so i've updated as much as i think i can update now without having any products on the store so the next steps are going to be deciding what products i want on the store and getting those made and uploading them so i can start playing around with the product pages and the cart pages and things like that and what i have also done as well is set up some social media accounts so i have decided that i'm going to be focusing on facebook having a facebook page and an instagram account there's a chance i might venture into tiktok but at this point i'm just doing facebook and instagram and i'll also probably be doing some stuff on pinterest so with social media especially at the beginning just try to pick one or two platforms don't try and do them all because we just will get so overwhelmed and trying to post in so many different places but feeling like i don't have enough time to do everything so i i think just pick one or two that you can focus on and devote quite a bit of time to if you build those up and they're running along really nicely you've got a good following and you're getting um good traffic from those social media accounts to your store then sure you can look at adding other social media platforms but just to start with pick one or two so i have set up an instagram account and a facebook page and the last thing i just wanted to show you is the idea the vision the vision that i have for this brand because i know when you talk about creating a shopify store to sell notebooks a lot of people are probably thinking well you know no books journals they're so cheap and on amazon they are you know when we're making low content books on amazon we're competing with so many other products in our niche in our category and we kind of have to put ourselves in alignment with what everyone one else is doing because if we price too low or too high we're pricing ourselves out of the market so we need to keep our prices in line with everybody else and and the reality is notebooks and journals on kdp and any other type of low content book on kdp do not have high prices and the reason one of the reasons i wanted to create my own shopify store is because i wanted to be able to create some more premium types of books higher quality which i can get through using lulu and some of these books do not have to be sold cheap and you can have a you know notebooks and journals are sort of notorious and coloring books and puzzle books and things notorious for having low profits on them and it's more about selling volume as opposed to making more per product but it can be done with notebooks and journals and so this i want to show you the idea that i have in mind for my brand and for my shopify store i'm not not copying either of these brands that i'm going to show you but i just want to show you that what is possible what's out there and what i would love to be able to build myself so the first brand that i really love looking at is called i'm going to say this wrong but happy air happier i think it's french paper peppy yeah anyway this brand here so this brand sells premium bespoke i guess notebooks diaries planners and things like that amongst other things but i'm not obviously going to be doing cards photo books and things like that or stationary but i'll show you their notebooks they do lined notebooks plain notebooks and they also do journals so look at the prices of these books they're selling notebooks which is just a line journal for nearly 47. this is australian dollars let me see if i can yeah let me change this to us so in us these notebooks are 27 so obviously they're higher quality than what we can print on kdp they're hardcover they do have the little you know fabric bookmark type of thing inside of them that is something we can't do on lulu but they're hardcover they probably have nice paper inside of them and they're selling for 27 that one's 32 so a lot more than what we can get on amazon so if we're making a book on kdp and it's costing us two or three dollars to make we're selling it for six or seven dollars and we're making maybe a two dollar to three dollar royalty on it these books they might cost a lot more to print they might cost us ten dollars to print on lulu but then we are potentially making 10 to 15 in royalty or it's not a royalty because it's not being sold in that sense but you're making a profit a lot more profit than what we could on kdp obviously the downside is we don't have access to traffic we have to find our own traffic but the potential to make a lot more by selling less is there when you have your own store so this is sort of the idea i've got in mind of creating premium higher quality books as can when we're comparing to the type of books we can sell on kdp now here's another one cgd london these guys are similar they sell planners journals i don't think they sell notebooks but if we take a look at their planners and journals they're selling these hard covers for 36.80 for 36.80 they have a lot less of a selections they've got a smaller amount of products to choose from but we can you can imagine how much profit they're going to be making per product sold compared to [Music] those cheaper books on kdp so i just think it's kind of not even comparable to what's what we can do on kdp if you're doing this as well and if you're going to be selling or if you already sell low content books on your own website maybe you are just going to do the same thing as kdp and sell books that aren't as higher quality in a sense in terms of not having hard covers not having the thicker paper inside and focusing more on volume then that's totally fine everyone's different it's whatever you want to focus on and there's two different routes that you can go when you create an online store you can create a brand that focuses on higher priced products with a higher profit margin but selling less of those products or you can focus on having products that have a lower profit margin but you sell more of them and at the end of the day we both end up with the same goal it's just a different way to get there so you just have to pick what's what's the best for you but i have been interested in creating some really high quality premium notebooks and journals for quite a while so i'm really excited and these are sort of like my inspiration in terms of how to build a brand and just going back here to this one to pep pepe pepia if there's any french people out there i'm sorry if we look at their social media if you're wondering whether they do well or not they you know it's all good and well having a website but do they actually sell take a look at their instagram account 321 000 followers they have built a massive social media presence so they've got that on instagram they've got 130 000 nearly 131 000 people following them on facebook and pinterest i think they do pretty good on here too yeah so i mean these figures on pinterest they don't really mean a lot but the higher the number the more traffic they are getting to their pins and so they have built a really great substantial following through social media and that's pretty much what we're going to have to do now obviously that takes time we're not going to spend a few weeks on social media and have a similar kind of following but that's going to be the key to how we find customers to our shopify store okay and then if we head over here i don't know if i've looked at these guys social media let's see what they're like so pretty good 183 000 followers on instagram so they're also just instagram facebook and pinterest so they've got great following on facebook too and pinterest great great amount of figures there too so yeah i just wanted to give you guys an idea of what my inspiration is behind creating this store and what i'm sort of working towards in the long term something like one of these two brands would be amazing if i could build up something similar to that so that's it for this video like i say next video is going to be focusing on creating some books and getting some products on the store so then i can start customizing the look of the store a little bit more i'm not going to spend too much time on that before starting to build up social media and stuff like that because i don't want to fall into the trap of just trying to sort of perfect the theme before i do anything i used to find i fell into that trap quite a lot where i i guess procrastinated by trying to make the look of my store or website perfect before sharing it with the world nowadays you know i'm not going to be getting a lot of traffic at the beginning anyway so let's just start getting social media out there start building the social media up and tweak the website as i go so yes if you're interested in following on with this series please make sure to subscribe if you don't already and if you are enjoying this series please let me know by giving it a thumbs up there's going to be a lot of videos coming up about this online store that i'm building and hopefully i can build something that we're all excited and proud about so yes if you did like this video please give it a thumbs up and i'll see you in the next video