Hello, everyone. Today, we have a very special interview with Patrick, a Facebook marketplace dropshipper who's had a lot of good success recently. And for those who don't know, the Facebook Marketplace is a great place for dropshippers today, because it's still an untapped marketplace, lots of profit to be had, and it's actually really easy to sell there. So let's begin. Hello, Patrick. Thanks for being here today. How are you? Hey, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad you're here. Please tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, where you live, and what you do for a living. I'm originally from Poland, but I currently live in Los Angeles in the United States. And what I do for a living, I work in marketing and real estate marketing, but I've discovered dropshipping last year, eBay dropshipping and then Facebook dropshipping. And that's what I'm doing kind of like on the side. Hopefully, maybe this will turn into like a bigger business. But that's what I do. And I also have a YouTube channel as well about dropshipping. But I would say that my day job is the marketing thing.  Okay. So you're working in marketing as a full-time job and you got your dropshipping as something that you're doing kind of as a side hustle to see, you know, check out the territory, see how it goes for you, and see if maybe one day you can turn it into your full-time income. I feel like I could make it a full-time income right now, because I'm doing okay, you know. However, my job pays well too. So I keep both options open, you know. But yeah, my dropshipping is on a pretty good level. I could probably ease off of it, leave off of it. But yeah, I keep both options open. Yeah. From experience, what most people do is those that were able to hit it as a full-time job, once you're making almost equal to what you're making on your full-time job, then it's a good time to maybe think about making that switch. Because usually at that point, you know, you can really start to scale your online business even three times or four times more than what it was. But that's something that I've seen that people have been doing. So I hope you make it to that stage. So my next question was, when did you discover dropshipping? But you just said that it was last year. So is that just Facebook marketplace dropshipping or other selling platforms too? To be honest with you, I knew about the dropshipping itself. I knew for a few years. I've done Shopify dropshipping in the past. I've tried all their online businesses in the past. So I knew about dropshipping for a long time. But the specific dropshipping that I'm talking about here is the retail dropshipping, which I assume, like, I'm sure you're doing it, or at least you've done it in the past. So I discovered retail dropshipping last year, and I discovered eBay dropshipping first. So, you know, I was browsing my Instagram feed and I saw someone posting something about eBay dropshipping. And then the next thing I know, I'm on YouTube watching millions of videos talking about it. You know, I started doing it. I put some random items. I went to Walmart.com, put some items on eBay. And within a few days, I sold one or two items. I sold with the loss. I lost money on it. But that's because I didn't really know how to calculate your break even correctly and your profits. Yes, exactly. Yes. Yes. That was the case. But, you know, once you learn everything, and then you try out and you discover what works well now, what are the prices, and you keep going. Facebook, oh, and Facebook dropshipping, this is something more recent. I would say I started this year. I think I started in January 2021. So, or maybe a little bit earlier than that, maybe like December, because I remember I was selling stuff for Christmas. So, I would say December, I think. That's the time I started. And yeah, Facebook has been really, really great. This is what I focus most of my time right now. It's most of the time I spend on Facebook, not eBay per se. But I have my eBay open, but Facebook is really great. And this is basically the most of my time right now. Nice. And I've personally been dropshipping for the last, I think, five years now. I'm still doing it up until today. But today, it's pretty much like 90% on automation. That's one of the things that I like about it the most. Facebook is not fully automated yet. I want to talk about that in a couple of minutes. But on my eBay account, it's automated. It's pretty much running by itself. I only spend, I think, maybe at tops an hour a day. But that's after you build up the base, and it's already working, and you've got a lot of feedbacks, and you got a good customer base, and it's pretty much running by itself at that point. I do believe that we're going to get to that with Facebook too. As you said, it's a very good platform. You started on December, which is, yeah. So, in the last six months, a lot of dropshippers have started figuring out about the Facebook marketplace. It's still very, very unsaturated. A lot of people have still not joined yet. So, anyone who still joins today is really enjoying the fruits. Another question I wanted to ask is if you're doing it as a side hustle, or if it's your main source of income today, but I know that it's a side hustle. Like I said, I know that you're doing a good job at it so far. I hope that you will be able to turn it into a full source of income soon, and also your YouTube channel. Yeah, sorry. I think my problem is I'm mentally not ready to fully switch. I have a lot of bills to pay, and I know what you mean. I'm still learning about the VA process. I hire a few guys from Fiverr to help me with dropshipping, to do product research, et cetera. I'm not fully automated. This is something that I struggle with. Yeah, it will come in time. Yeah, I'm sure that it's something that will come in time. I've seen it happen to quite a few dropshippers, to me also, I could say. But it is something that takes time. And for some people, it's not the perfect fit. Some people like having their day jobs and having it as a side hustle. And quite a lot of people have also turned it into their main source of income, which is actually also nice. We each have our own stories and our ways of dealing with things. People who usually have families, or people with lots of expenses, lots of bills, usually think twice before taking a risk, this kind of a risk. But you know what happens with people who also know how to take risks in this life? These are usually also the people that become huge and successful, but you also have the other side. So always think positive, think ahead, and see what's right for you. So another question I wanted to ask was, what actually brought you to Facebook Marketplace Dropshipping? You started with, I mean, you already have experience with eBay. You have experience with Shopify. And now you know that it's going to be all about Facebook Marketplace Dropshipping, and I'm guessing you put the other two things aside. So what actually brought you to, this is what you should be doing. This is the right platform. When you do eBay Dropshipping, Facebook is not that different. There are a few differences. Like for example, people are nicer on Facebook, because I think they see your face, and I think the customers are nicer to you. So I think that's one of the factors. But the process of like finding items, listing items is kind of similar. So if you're doing eBay or Amazon, I never tried Amazon, but I assume it's going to be similar. It's kind of similar process. Amazon is one of my favorites. Really? I never touched Amazon. I know much about it. Yeah, people are weary about them because retail and all of that. But if it works, it works, and it's been working for years. But yeah, go ahead. How long you've been doing it? For as long as I've been dropshipping, four or five years. They've been one of my main, yeah. Maybe I should tap the market too. Maybe. So you're talking about the people being nicer, right? But what made you want to still stay only on the Facebook marketplace? What made you decide that this is the one that you should be spending your time on? I was going to that. So when I started, I wasn't expecting to fully switch, or maybe not fully switch because I still do eBay, but focus majority of my time on Facebook. When I started, I just put a few items. I don't want to see if they're still, and I did sell them. But what really attracts me is when I see the fees. So on eBay, I pay about, I don't know, I think it's 18%, 19% of fees. Everything puts together. Yeah. If you're taking eBay's final value fees and PayPal's fees and the tax that you're paying your source when you're buying the product, yeah, you're getting to 20% easy break even. Right. So on Facebook, I go on Facebook, I only see 5%. 5%. That's right. And then there's a lot of people that, this is, I call it like a wild, wild West, because it's still like a new platform to drop ship on charter territory. Yeah. There's not much competition, low fees. I see way higher profit margins compared to like eBay. I decided it was an easy decision. I'm just going to focus most of my time on Facebook now since it's just better. You can make more money on it. So we got lower fees. We got a much higher chance of selling because not a lot of people are selling on the Facebook. I mean, a lot of people are selling, but not a lot of people are drop shipping on the Facebook marketplace. Exactly. So yeah, two big reasons why people need to join. And it's one of the things that I've been, product research is one of the things that really amazes me on the Facebook marketplace because you really don't need to know so much about product research. Not like you need to know on eBay or Shopify where it's really like hard core. You have to know exactly what you're selling. You know that if it's the market, you test it out so many things before until you find those ones that start selling. So it's not like that on the Facebook marketplace. Those are the reasons that brought you to the Facebook marketplace. And that makes sense. That's one of the biggest advantages that we really have there. So we know what brought you to it. How did you actually learn about it? Like, how did you know that it exists? I think I just watched YouTube and I found it, you know, I also, yeah. So it came from YouTube videos. Like you didn't just think about it one day. Hey, maybe I should try just like I've been doing on eBay and Shopify. Why don't I try it on the Facebook marketplace? I spoke to one of the big dropshippers on YouTube. He kind of convinced me to start doing it. So, and then I just watched you after that, after this conversation, I just watched YouTube videos and that's how I learned and I tried out. Yeah, most of the things I learned from YouTube. I also took the Facebook, not Facebook, eBay dropshipping course. So I learned from that as well. Was it helpful? Because there's so many courses out there. Yeah, it was very helpful. It helped a lot. I learned a lot from it. It was very, very, very useful. For free or did you pay? No, no, no, it was paid. Yeah, I paid for it. I wasn't yours because I think you guys have one too. Sorry, it wasn't yours. Yeah, I believe that everyone needs to learn how to do it from someone who's actually doing it and successful at it and not just people who are good at teaching but haven't actually done it because there's a lot of those too. So it's always good to learn from someone who's actually doing it and preferably from someone who's still doing it, not someone who quit because they did it, they quit because they weren't successful, but now they know how to teach. So yeah, it's always good to learn from the right sources and then the price doesn't matter as long as you're learning from the right source. For me, it was just enough to learn the basics and from there, how to create the account, how to link this with that and how to not get suspended and from there, it's yours. My biggest problem that helped me when I took that course was taxes. That was one big thing in customer service. You mean taxes that you have to pay to your country, like income taxes or taxes that you have to pay when buying the product from your source? I'm talking about sales tax and yeah, the income tax as well. Right, sales tax too. Right. Those are all questions that a lot of beginners have when starting on dropshipping, even on the Facebook marketplace and also on other selling channels. So we can just clear the air really quick.  Most likely you will pay taxes when you're purchasing the product. So you're going to pay $20 plus, let's say $1, $2 tax. And when a sale is made on eBay, for example, I'm not sure about Facebook, you can correct me now. But I know that eBay also collects a sales tax when the customer pays you. So the customer is paying you also the sales tax and eBay deducts it from you, the seller.  So you pay the supplier tax, the buyer pays you tax, which eBay deducted from you. And you have to pay your own income tax from the country that you reside in. You need to check with your local. I'm talking basically now to our viewers, not to you specifically. But anyone who's dropshipping needs to know that how you need to pay, if you need to pay, and how much you need to pay when it comes to income tax. It's no problem, I'm doing it, and tens of thousands of people are doing it. But then you go to your accountant and talk to them. Yeah, that's it. You just need an accountant, hire someone, pay him once a month, send them your income and outcome files, and they'll do the rest of the work for you. That's one thing that you should do when you start dropshipping. But besides that, don't worry about taxes. It's all being paid for when you're buying and when you're selling. Yeah, I feel like when you're starting out, just start out. Don't overthink. Don't think about taxes. But you do need to know your break even. I mean, people shouldn't start without knowing how much fees they're going to pay and how much they can profit from this product. So they won't make the mistake of losing on their first few orders like you had. And I also remember having a few of those scenarios in the beginning. Exactly, yes. You've been dropshipping on Facebook Marketplace for how long now? Since January. So it's about March, April, May. So it's about five, maybe even six months now. Yeah. And out of that half a year, what struggles do you remember having? What difficulties? What blocks did you have on the road along the way? Same problems that I had on eBay, which is product research. That's the big one. Finding items that sell. And customer service. I think those are the only two obstacles that really, really matter. I know some people struggle with having... Some people don't have the shipping option unlocked. That was the case for me for a little bit. I was waiting a long time to finally get approved. But once I get my second account approved as well, and they get the shipping option unlocked. But once you pass that time that Facebook finally gives you the shipping option unlocked. I guess finding items and the customer service handling people. But people are nicer on Facebook. So compared to eBay, for example.  They see a real person. So it's like a real human being. And the interaction all of a sudden becomes nicer, more polite. But I want to stop you right there because you talked a little bit about shipping options. And it's one of the questions that I wanted to ask later on. So we're just going to talk about it now. The shipping options is a problem for many, many people who want to drop ship on the Facebook marketplace. And I have noticed that a lot of people have been having this problem. So here, I also want to clear there a little bit. Right now at this point from what I have noticed, Facebook does not allow... They don't enable the shipping option for people who are living outside the US. And not just, but for now, people living outside the US, if you're logging into Facebook from a non-USIP or if you are logging in from a USIP, but the Facebook account was created, not when you were in the US. Or if you're not residing in the US and you don't have an old aged Facebook account, which was created in the US, you won't get shipping options. So Facebook will only give you an option to show your item to one specific city or state, and then a small radius on top of that. And if you're only going to get one state out of 50, then not many people are going to see your product and you're not going to be able to sell much. In the beginning, when you didn't see the shipping options and you do, and you are living in the US, you're from LA, the Facebook account was created from the US, but you still didn't see the shipping options in the beginning, right? Yes. Okay. And how old is your Facebook account? Very old. My main account, it's probably like 10, 11 years. So that's age. So what did you actually do to see the shipping options to have it enabled? Well, before I started doing Facebook dropshipping, I was selling locally. There was like another side hustle, I guess. I was selling items from like around the house. And I also was, I was ordering a lot of items in bulk from like a warehouse. And I was selling them to the local community to like, basically to people that live in a city. And I think that helped too, because that helped me to get more, what is it called? Feedback reputation? Because people are actually also giving you feedback as a seller on Facebook, and then they can see your seller feedback. Yes. So selling locally might have helped me. I'm not really sure. I know that a lot of people say that that does help. So maybe they helped me. But did you do anything? Any action? Any trigger that gave you the shipping options? Yeah, I think it did. It took me a while. It took a few months to sell on the market locally. But eventually I did get this option. So it just happened all of a sudden? You didn't reach out to Facebook or anything? No, yeah. But however, I have a second account, which is also aged. It's about like six years old. This account, and I didn't sell on it before. This account get the optional. Has the shipping option. Yeah, right. So yeah, right. So that's another thing. We can't really find out exactly what the trigger is and why some people have it, why some people don't. But if you do live in the US and you don't have the shipping options, you can also try just reaching out to Facebook, tell them that you are actually able to ship your products to any one of the 50 states and they'll open that option for you. Some accounts will automatically have it and some accounts won't have it. And in time they will have it like the example that we just heard. So yeah, so that's another thing that I wanted to talk about because that's another big issue that people are having. Why don't I have the shipping option and what can I do to see it? So we talked about some of the difficulties that you had. You talked about also about product research and customer service. So let's talk about that a little bit. When it comes to product research, how do you, I mean, how is it for you on the Facebook marketplace? And how do you compare it to product research on your other methods, on the other methods, on the other selling channels that you try to sell on eBay and Shopify? Okay. So with eBay, for example, there's a lot of tools and there are specific methods to it because I think it's easier to find products. There's a bunch of softwares that you can use. I use one to help me with product research. It's very useful. You can also try to look up other dropshippers. You can find other dropshippers by just typing, finding one item on Walmart, for example, and then putting it on eBay. We'll eventually find a dropshipper and then you can see what items he's selling and just trying to copy. And if he's selling it for a profit and if he is, then you know that you can get more products from him. But this is different from the Facebook marketplace because we can't really find other dropshippers and see their success because it just doesn't really exist yet. But you are still more successful at your dropshipping on the Facebook marketplace than, or it's easier selling on the Facebook marketplace than it is on other selling channels. That's right. But what I do, for example, I apply kind of the same rule from eBay to Facebook. I just look up for dropshippers on eBay and then I see what the items they're selling. If they're selling eBay, I spend my cell on Facebook. So I just go on Facebook and try to do that. Okay. Nice. So instead of, so the product research method is the same for you. You're doing the same thing that you did on eBay, except only now when you're listing the item, you're not listing it on eBay. You're just listing it on Facebook, but the product research method is the same. Yeah. Nice. Okay. That's also a nice method. I didn't think about that. What I noticed is with Facebook, it's hit and miss. Some items that sell like crazy on eBay doesn't necessarily mean they will sell really good on Facebook. Right. Yeah. I don't really understand how the algorithm works. It's also I've noticed sometimes I can list the same item twice. And one time I get like almost 100 views within the first hour. And then I list the same exact item, like say the next day or something. In the same category? In the same category? Same category, same pictures, same everything. And yeah, I'm not sure how it exactly works. I feel like within the first hour, they're just trying to push it to as many people as they can so they can figure out. Right. And eBay does the same. But if you did it with a second product, then it should have happened there too. So there's probably an algorithm thing going on there, just like you suggested. And it's the same thing also for eBay. You can import the same product in different variations, different colors. And one color is like really hitting it off and the rest of them is like nothing. So it's like either this color is really, really, really special or there's an algorithm thing going on here where it's random and you can't really put your finger on it. Yes. One thing that I could give us a tip here is, as you can see, not every product that sells on eBay sells on Facebook, but the product research method that you're using still works. You can also try things that are a lot more basic because not a lot of dropshippers are on Facebook right now. So you can try leaving eBay on the side, leave eBay for eBay. And when it comes to Facebook, just look for search for products that are simply selling, well, bestsellers on Walmart, bestsellers on Amazon, just take products from their bestsellers because those are products that have been proven to work. And at least for that selling platform, right? For that supplier or whatever. But that's something that's been working for us on our stores that we're running with our VAs. So that's another method. And it's a lot more simple. It's like, okay, this product is selling well, let's try. This product is selling well, let's try. And like you said, it's a hit and miss, but maybe you'll spend less time on product research this way and more time optimizing, analyzing, and scaling forward. So your main product research method is like you said, seeing what's going on in eBay and trying to convert that to the Facebook audience to get them to convert from Facebook. I do the same thing that you just described, too. I just go on Walmart, for example, and just pick the bestsellers that works as well. I mix the methods. Sometimes when I run out of the items on Walmart, the bestsellers, I have to figure out what else would sell. So I go on eBay and try to find all the drops, but I use both methods. And how many suppliers do you try to work with? How many suppliers do you mix in? I just use Walmart. Only Walmart? Yeah, I try different. I use Costway. I try Home Depot, but I just keep it to Walmart. I don't know. It makes stuff simpler and easier. So I know a lot of people who are working with Walmart, I've tried them out not so much, obviously not as much as you, but I would definitely, definitely, definitely recommend to add more suppliers to that list. You're already having success with one supplier, and you will definitely have with more. I'm sure of that. When it comes to Home Depot, that's a very specific niche for the home niche. So I'm not so sure about that, but try adding in more suppliers. I'm sure that you will see the results there. I know that you're used to Walmart, but sometimes you can get stuck.  So that's another reason where you can actually find it through other suppliers. But I'm not talking about suppliers like AliExpress for Facebook, Marketplace, Dropshipping. That's something that doesn't work. And that's because Facebook wants you to ship out your product within two days. Correct me if I'm mistaken? Two or three, yeah. Two or three. Pretty fast, basically. Right. And we can get that from Chinese suppliers. And even when we know today that AliExpress has warehouses in the U.S., they still usually do not, sometimes they do, but most of the time they won't provide a tracking number within the first three days. And then the customers will start asking what's going on and they can leave you a bad review when Facebook sends a survey after your customers buy from you. And those are some really risky things that can really get your Facebook, Marketplace accounts suspended or put on hold. So one thing that we do need to keep in mind is suppliers with fast shipping times. And I'm sure that Walmart, I see that they have two-day deliveries for most of their products. So that's something that's not a problem there. What is your... I know that it's only been half a year, but I know that you are successful. I know that you're hitting those sales and profits. What is your average monthly revenue? On an average number, you don't have to be really exact that you're making from Facebook Marketplace dropshipping, but also compared to eBay and Shopify. I don't make much money on eBay these days. I used to, but since I switched most of my time to Facebook, this is where I get most of my income. But when you did use to dropship there? Right. So last month in April, I made $3,000 from both. And then taxes after fees, after everything. Oh, so in profit. Right. Yeah, just profit. But I would say, I think like $2,500 was basically Facebook, and then maybe even more, to be honest with you. I don't remember. Most of the meat is coming from Facebook. Yeah. That's where I focus most of my time. This month is not going that well, because I didn't spend that much time on product research. I focus on a little bit of different things. I relax a little bit more. But again, I'm trying slowly to get VA's to do this hard job for me. So hopefully I'll be able to scale it up. But yeah, last month, April was pretty good for me. And most of the income came from Facebook. Very nice. And did you ever have any trouble with Facebook transferring funds to your bank account, which happens a few days after the customers receive their products? Everything always went through successfully. There were never any problems. No, I never get any problems. I mean, Facebook has this thing that I believe they deliver funds within four business days or something like that. Yeah. After the customer received the actual product? Right. But sometimes, let's say, I don't have a tracking number time, because sometimes the supplier doesn't give the tracking number or time. And I have to... And Facebook supports FedEx, UPS, and USPS. Only those three shipping options. Yes. Yeah. Oh, that's another thing. Yeah, they don't support one track or laser ship or anything like that. So when you have a tracking number on time or when you have to, when you get a tracking number from those different shipping suppliers, I have to put a fake tracking number or I use a different tracking number from a different product and then just put it in. So when that happens, you can wait longer for the funds. It takes like 21 days to get your funds. You will get them, but they're just a longer period of time to get it. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, you just need to know that it's going to take a little bit longer than usual. Right. So I'll explain why this happens. When you're using either UPS, USPS, or FedEx, then Facebook can actually be able... Facebook can track the progress and they can see that it got delivered to the buyer and within a few days, the money will be in your bank account. But when you're using a fake tracking number or if you're just marking it as shipped, but nothing actually shipped out and simply enough, they cannot track it using the tracking number that you gave, then they're just going to wait 20, something like that 21 days and then they'll release the funds to your account as long as the customer didn't open a case that they didn't receive the item or something like that. And that's how Facebook keeps themselves safe too. So it makes sense. And we're happy to know that both ways work that if you don't upload a tracking number, then I don't know, something bad will happen to your account. Everything will be okay as long as your customers are receiving their products. And they're happy about it. The product is as described, arrived within the right time. But we don't want to take any risks. I mean, we should definitely supply those tracking numbers and try to even work with suppliers who can give us those UPS, USPS and FedEx tracking numbers if we can. It's only going to make our jobs that much easier. Okay. So we talked about some of the struggles. We talked about the suppliers that you're working with. How many listings do you have today on your Facebook Marketplace account? About 300. 300. Okay. So that's nice. That's a good number. And how many sales per day do you have with 300 listings? 15. On average. It's never the same, but on average. 15. And what is the profit margin for each product that you are adding? Oh, you're talking percentage-wise? Yeah. Percentage-wise, I would say it's 25%. That's the average. Okay. Dollar-wise, it depends on the item, because I sell items that some items are high end tickets. So they cost like $200 and some of them cost like, I don't know, 20 bucks. So the thing with the high end items is usually the percentage-wise, the profit margins are lower, but dollar-wise, they're higher. And the opposite with the cheaper items. With lower price tags. Yeah. You can sell it with the higher average percentage-wise, but usually you get just less dollars. Smaller dollar amounts at the end of the day. Yeah. I definitely know. I'm definitely familiar with that. So are you actually working with a, like when you're thinking how much you want to profit from an item that you're selling, are you thinking of it percentage-wise, or are you just thinking of fixed dollar amount? I'm just looking for items that will sell, and I don't really care how much. I tend to stay on the higher end. I tend to look for high end items because you just get more money. More profit per sell. Yeah. But I really don't think about it. I just try to find an item that will actually sell. That's the main goal. So you know you got your 5% and you know that you're going to sell it for a much higher price than that. With this method, you can't really know at the end of the day, unless you're keeping some kind of Excel sheet or something like that to know exactly how much you're profiting.  Otherwise, it's pretty much hard to tell. That's something that I feel like a lot of beginners struggle with and have problems. That's like my biggest tip. Start tracking your profits from the day one. It's going to help you for multiple reasons. You're going to know how much money you're making. You're going to know if you're losing money. You got to help you with taxes. You're going to keep track of the profits for tax purposes. So definitely start tracking that from the day one. Make a simple spreadsheet on Excel or use some software to do it. Definitely start doing it from the day one. For sure. I can definitely vouch for that tip. What about order fulfillment? Let's talk about that really quick. How are you fulfilling the orders that are coming in? So you get an email or you get a message from Facebook, an item sold. Boom. What's the next step? I try to do it right away if I can. Sometimes I can't. Sometimes I'm out or something or doing other stuff. But I try to do it as soon as I can. On the weekends, I just check once twice a day just to see how it goes and then do it within that time frame. But during the weekdays, I try to do it as soon as I can because I usually spend a lot of time in front of the computer. So I might as well just fill out the order. It gets hideous. It gets really... It can get time consuming. So if I get a lot of orders, I usually just wait till the end of the day. But if I don't get that many orders, I just try to do it as soon as I can. Yeah. That reminds me of my dropshipping journey about two years back, I think, before I began with automation. And I knew that it existed, but I didn't. I was having a hard time knowing who to trust and what to trust. And right now I'm controlling everything. And I like it this way, even though I'm very limited. And I cannot, you know, scale much, especially when you start hitting 10, 15 cells a day and up, it really starts to become time consuming, like you just explained it. And you're trying to think, okay, I need to find a time today to just take care of all these orders. So usually you leave it to the end because maybe you'll get some more orders. And then you have to fulfill them again. So you wait till like 8, 9, 10 p.m., fulfill the orders, watch TV and go to sleep. Yeah. I remember going through the same thing, you know, not on Facebook Marketplace, but we're going to get to automation too in just about a minute. What about, well, we talked about updating tracking information. So when you get an order, you know that you're going to fulfill it on the same day. You're not waiting to the day after, especially on the Facebook Marketplace, when you know that you only have two to three days to supply tracking information.  Like I need, this is another thing that I have to do. I have to take care of today. The more orders you have, the more, let's say, annoying it gets. I mean, it's annoying for the right reasons, right? You're making profit at the end of the day. So, you know, who are we to complain? But yeah, that's a good problem to have, you know, right? Right. We should only have these types of problems. So, and we talked a little bit about customer service. So you said that when someone has a problem, it's very easy to reach out to you, which is also much different than eBay and Shopify. A lot of customers on other selling platforms, usually they, some reach out, but most don't reach out. If there's a problem, they're going to open a case.  And it's not always so practical and, you know, not so healthy for your seller account. If you got too much of that going on, but on Facebook marketplace, it's very easy for them to reach out. Usually they don't reach out to Facebook support. They usually just simply reach out, reach out to the seller. So like you said, they reach out to you. They can see who you are. They're more polite. So you're saying that handling customer service is just simply much easier on the Facebook marketplace. Yeah. I think people are more friendly. They are more understandable. Excuse me. When something goes down, when there's a problem, they usually react better compared to like eBay, for example. They're more understanding. Yeah. So it's, I like that. I like that aspect about Facebook that people are more easy going over there. Good. And that's a good thing to have.  And it's not easy when most of your customers are always mad all the time. I think you just need to put yourself in their shoes, you know, like try to think like, what are they thinking? You know, maybe they were expecting this item because it's a gift for someone's birthday or something.  So just try to think of them, try to help them out, you know, be helpful.  Right. Because at the end of the day, your customer, they paid you. They may not know that you're a drop shipper, but you need to handle this like the real business that it is because drop shipping at the end of the day, it's a business. Right. That's a little bit about customer service, which is something very, very, it's something that you really need to nail on your drop shipping business. It doesn't matter which selling platform you're selling on, but Facebook marketplace, you have to take care of customer service. And also you should know that after your customers receive their products, Facebook usually sends or not usually, they always send a survey to the customer and ask, you know, the buyer, how was your experience buying from Patrick? How fast was the shipping time? Is there anything you'd like to ask? And this is the long-term survivability of your Facebook marketplace drop shipping account. So customer service needs to be at the top of the list number one. After that product research and the rest of the things, if you ask me, because if you're here for the long term, customer service should always be number one. And I'm glad to hear that it's much easier, much, the customers are much more understanding on Facebook marketplace. Let's talk a little bit about softwares. What softwares, when we talked about customer service, you talked about not customer service product research, you said that you used some tools to help you with that. And what other softwares do you use when you are drop shipping on all of your selling channels? Yeah, I really just used two softwares. One is you guys out to the US. That's really helpful for eBay. It helps a lot with keeping your items, if their items are stuck and repricing and all of that. That's great. I love your program for that. Thank you. For Facebook. I'm also a customer of AutoDS, just so you know. I started working in AutoDS, but first I was a customer and even today I'm a customer. If I need help with something, I chat with their support like a regular customer. Nobody knows that I'm the content manager at AutoDS or any of that. And I like it this way because that way I can really check that the system is always working well and nobody's telling me anything because they know who I am or whatever. And that way I can really improve things. I've watched how this company grow in the last year and it's amazing. I really like what happened to you guys. And I'm glad that you're growing into more platform, you're expanding. So that's really great. So you used AutoDS a little bit for eBay and are you using it right now for Facebook? Yeah, I started using it for Facebook as well. So for the people who are watching, I actually spoke to AutoDS CEO, Leo, right? After talking to him, he kind of convinced me to start using it for Facebook because I wasn't using any software for Facebook before. When he showed me how it works, when she showed me what I can do with it, I started using it. And I like the fact that you get the emails with the repricing. It's kind of like a spreadsheet too because you can put all your items in your program and then you cannot track them. You can see what you have if they're out of stock. So I love that. But the thing that I love the most about Facebook is that it allows you to connect it. You can give it to your VA, the virtual assistant, and it can start listing items for you. It's not fully automated, but it's not fully automated. It's semi-automated. But it's safe. Yeah, it's semi-automated and it's safe because I don't want to share my Facebook account with someone that I don't know from a different country. Facebook definitely tracks that and definitely can bring you troubles with that. I would like to add to that the semi-automation that you see today. Well, I don't know if you know it because we haven't really updated anyone, but as soon as we found out about Facebook marketplace dropshipping, we got our developers on it right away to start figuring out a way to try to automate this as much as possible today. So the semi-automation today, I agree it's not the most practical way to have it and that's I'm going to get to the next point in about half a minute because of the price in stock monitoring where you're receiving email notifications, which is fine. It's better than nothing. So if one of the price changes or one of the stock changes, you're getting an email and you open that email and then you have the link to your source to see what product they're talking about, but you're getting that by adding a note on the product itself on the active listing. So you need to add a note with the URL, with the sources URL, enable price stock notifications and your email address, and then you're getting everything to your email. So if there's a price or stock change, you need to open the email, go to the, click on the link, see what product they're talking about, open that product on Facebook marketplace and change the price or stock accordingly. So all of that saves you, obviously it saves you time and also you can add the product by simply pasting it and the title moves to, the title gets imported to Facebook with all of the images, so you don't have to download that one by one. All of that is nice, but soon we're going to release the actual non-API version. Okay, so you already heard about it. So price and stock monitoring is going to be automated. The prices are going to change on your Facebook store. It's a non-API connection. So you can feel safe about that if you don't want the API connections. And it very much resembles the old non-API connection of eBay, where you need to have the extension it needs to be on, but it's always synchronizing with your stores and it's making the price and stock changes. So that's already another step up that we're going to release sometime soon. I heard about it and that's what really convinced me to you. That's what really sold me that feature. So that's coming and we're always working, like we're always working on, like, you know, we're never stopping, we never get to a point when we say, okay, we got everything we need. Now let's just sit back and relax. The developers are always working on the next thing. Facebook marketplace, if you ask me, it's going to continue getting bigger and bigger. We're only in the first six months of people actually trying it out and it's actually working quite well. So we're definitely going to keep our eyes more on that. But I'm glad to see that you're already into the system and that you are enjoying it. That's what I said. I've started with eBay and I've seen what you guys spend a year, just a year ago. And I've seen the grow. I've seen the changes. I've seen the improvements and I've seen that you guys actually listen to what people are telling you. So that's what sold me. That's why I like you guys. You know, there's a lot of software like this out there. Some want to be more advanced, some are less advanced, but what really sells me that like you guys listen, you guys grow and always improve and always gets better. I like all the things that you said because I'm not lying. I like all the things you said because all of the things that you said on all of your experience that you had on AutoDS is exactly the experience that I had, the things that I saw and the things that I told Lior about his system when I started talking with him. So it's nice to see that it's actually my experience is other people's experience. Yeah, I didn't get paid to say all of these guys. Honestly, you're coming from my heart. Thank you for clearing the air on that. Something else that I wanted to add. Oh, is there something that you wanted to add, by the way, before I move on to the next question? Software. So we talked about AutoDS. Yeah, I use one more software. I use, I don't know, ZIC Analytics for product research. So that's another one that I use. And those are the only two I use, with AutoDS and ZIC Analytics. Yeah, ZIC Analytics is also great by Nar Geva, also a great guy. He knows what he's doing. He did a really great job on that project and it's still running really, really well. It also helped me when I was more in the beginning of my journey, but I definitely remember using ZIC Analytics. It helped me get a good start on what products are actually selling for dropshippers and what categories you should be looking at and not just shoot for random products that some don't even relate to dropshipping at all. So it's definitely something that dropshippers need to use, especially those in the beginning that are not really familiar with the product line and all the right categories for dropshipping, which is not every category, but there is more than enough. And to learn them, starting with tools like ZIC definitely helps. So that's a little bit about the software. How high are you planning on scaling this business model? How high do you think you can make it? Keeping it as a side hustle, we're not talking about full-income source anymore. How high do you think you can go? I don't know what's the end goal here, but I don't really have an end goal, but I would like to scale it up for sure. My problem is, as I mentioned earlier, is trying to figure out hiring process with VA. I'm slowly getting there. I'm slowly trying to hiring people. I've had a few, they didn't really work out, but I found someone new. I want to see how it goes. If I see that this person can do it, maybe I'll grow even more and more. That's one of the great things about having a business. You're hiring workers. You're firing the first few until you both learn how to make it work. I definitely want to grow it. I definitely want to get bigger and as big as it can, maybe turn it into a full-time income. The VA is the way to go. The VA is definitely the way to go. Let me tell you, when I started dropshipping and I knew that I can scale my business even more with, let's say, I was already connected to AutoDS with price and stock monitoring, but I wasn't in order automation right away. That's one of the things that people were always telling me, listen, you have to do it. Once you do it, you won't be able to go back to the old method of doing it yourself, fulfilling each order by yourself. I was like, yeah, but what if there's mistakes and what if there are bugs and what if I can't find my money? I don't know. I kept finding every reason why not to. Once I actually did it, because I also felt like I had no choice because it was a bad era when Amazon was closing down accounts with gift card usage and all of that. I felt like I was getting lost and the only way to fulfill my Amazon orders is by using order automation, not using my own accounts. Once I started doing that, I thought that I was profiting well with gift cards because I was buying $100 gift cards and paying $75 for them. I thought that my profits were high then, but after I added in the order automation, I was just simply able to scale and get much more orders per day, and I was not touching them at all. I was really, really able to scale that way. That's just for order automation. I'm not talking about VA's who are adding the products for you, optimizing the titles and all of that. I was still doing all of that, but just the order automation did so much. I can only imagine when you get a VA that's actually doing the work well for you, how much you're actually going to benefit from that. I mean, you are definitely going to benefit from it and you won't be able to go back to doing it yourself after that. This is why I love talking to people like you because you guys motivate me. It's good to stay in touch with other dropshippers, especially the ones that are really successful because it makes you motivated. If you have a question, you can ask a question. I appreciate that advice. This is definitely something that I'm currently looking into it. Work slow and hard at it. It's like product research. You need to work slow and hard, and a VA, it's a real person at the end of the day. We're going to do a good job, make sure to give a little bonus and things like that. They'll want to give you more. Yeah. By the way, I don't know what you're looking for for VAs. There's many places to look for VAs like Fiverr and more places like that. We also have a post on our community page. We have hundreds of VAs who posted there, people who are VAs and people who are also looking for VAs. I'll send you the link after this interview. Post there that you're looking for VA and you'll get a lot of submissions. Thank you. Before we wrap this up, is there any tip that you would like to give to beginners? I'm talking really about people who are in the beginning of their journey and they're asking all of the questions that you asked in the beginning before you got started. Any real nice hard tips that you can give beginner dropshippers like we talked about customer service? I think about all the questions that you had in the beginning. We talked about customer service. We talked about taxes, which is two things that people usually ask a lot in the beginning. But if there's anything else that you can think of, anything that we didn't talk about, any tip that you would like to give beginners? I think just started. When I started out, I remember I had a lot of doubts. For example, I was wondering what's going to happen if I sell item on eBay and I use Walmart as a supplier and they get the box and it says Walmart. What are they going to think? Are they going to be mad? Yeah, so many questions about that from beginners. Yeah. Right. And then taxes, how I'm going to pay them or how I'm going to, how do I fulfill orders? How do I handle an angry customer? Those are doubts. You're going to have them and I still have them. You see I have doubts with the VA, for example. You're always going to have them, but just start, try it out. They're in the process. You're going to learn on their way and I think that's the biggest tip. Just start doing it. Just try it. You might lose money at the beginning. Hey, whatever. You lost a few bucks, but you learn how to do it. You learn what are the steps. So that would be the biggest tip I can give you. Another big tip I think I already mentioned is start keeping track of everything from the beginning. You can get a spreadsheet on Google or something or an Excel with the profits and items. You can use AutoDS to post items and track the list of your items and the links to your suppliers, as you said, in the notes. So that's another big tip. And in the new update, sorry for stopping you real quick, but in the new update that I just talked about, so we're already going to have the price and stock monitoring. And you won't have to go to the notes to get to your suppliers page. You can also, you know, one click from AutoDS to get to your suppliers. So we already fixed that. Order automation is something that has started working on, but that's going to, I don't know how much time that's going to take. Yeah, that's just something that I wanted to add regarding that. And regarding your first tip, I definitely agree that you need to dive in in order to see, you know, you have to get your hands dirty. You can just, you know, think about all the reasons why you shouldn't or all the questions that are blocking you from doing it.  You need to dive in and get to it, but you do need to have knowledge. I mean, don't get to a point where you're uploading a product itself and now you don't know what to do. So you need to learn about the basic steps, but then do go ahead and jump right in for sure. That's the best way to start. Okay, great tips. And I want to leave off just by saying that just for doing it, you know, for five, six months, you're already profiting around $2,500 to $3,000 a month. That's a dream for a lot of people who are in the beginning of their journey. A lot of people who are starting today, they don't mind to even make $1,000 profit within six months from now. So just, you know, where you get to the point where you're making $2.53 a month in clean profit, you know, after your expenses is great, it also shows the potential of the Facebook marketplace and what happens when you're going to add in more suppliers, what's going to happen once you add a good VA who knows how to take care of your tasks, pay him whatever he deserves, but you are still definitely going to enjoy, you know, the amount that you can make and how much you can scale further and further and further each month. So great tips. I enjoyed having this interview with this interview with you, Patrick. I hope it was beneficial for you too. I'm going to leave a link to your YouTube channel. So if you guys want more dropshipping tips, more dropshipping strategies, it's going to be right below this video for us. Don't forget to subscribe, you know, to share this video so that your friends and family can also learn about the amazing and wonderful world of dropshipping.  Just start doing it and keep listing, you know, keep listing. For sure. Don't be afraid to begin, guys. People do it every day and, you know, those who jump in are usually those that succeed at the end of the day. And we're always here. We're always going to give out, you know, more interviews, more videos, product findings, suppliers, marketplaces. We're always working more and more. And we're always listening to you guys. If you guys have any feedback, any features that you want to see on AutoDS, let us know. We will listen just as we've been doing for the last few years. And that's it. I really hope that you guys are going to start with this wonderful, wonderful platform. Patrick, thank you very much for being here with us today. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It was really nice. It was really nice to meet you. Thank you, you too. Bye-bye. Take care.


So today guys we will check out another weapon new to this DLC4 and this one is called the Major Kong. It's a new extremely powerful CLV Launcher and while guys I believe I can say for certain it's definitely the most powerful new weapon from the DLC4. How's it going guys my name is DPJ and if you enjoyed you'll stay here and would like to show you support, hitting that like button truly helps out and subscribe if you like what you see and want to see more. So if you guys want this weapon it's pretty simple leave a like on this video and drop a comment down below leaving your game tag on the platform you play on and also what anointment you'd like. I will send 5 people on each platform their choice of weapon so good. Lock. So this Major Kong as of right now I do believe is an exclusive drop from the last boss of this DLC the boss of Cycle Reaver. I mean I have played for numerous actually a few days now, found many places this DLC offers and I've only had it drop right here. So looking at this weapon you can see by those damage numbers this thing is a piece for sure. Within non elemental 2 times variants being the most powerful with up to 130k times 2 being the strongest I've seen at a level 65. Now I've seen this in incendiary and I've seen it in Crayol and I've also seen it with no elemental tool. If it drops off with all elements though as of right now I can't confirm it as it's early days people. So looking at this thing in action is quite clear the kind of weapon it is. Hold down that trigger release rockets which do have slow travel times and just wait and then just watch enemies melt. Now I used this on a build which wasn't set for launchers nor clv damage and it was still just utterly destroying enemies and buses and well I loved every second of it. Who'd have thought the best launchers going forward with the DLCs would be clv this definitely wasn't the case upon release. Now when these rockets hit that enemy they seem to create a pair of deadly tracking missiles too. And at first I didn't notice this but when using this against gigamind you can see them quite clearly. So yeah guys what we have here is truly a unique new launcher one I feel people are going to love. I know it's early days yet but I can't wait to see what you guys do with this thing. Now like I said I'm limited on PC as my stash is on console but this for sure will be a weapon I do farm that perfect rule for and it's a weapon I definitely recommend you guys go on and get in. The Major Kong is an absolute beast again as far as I'm aware this is exclusive to that psycho river who is the last boss at this DLC 4. Now with the DLC being basically brand new if you guys do want to join one of the best communities definitely check out my discord. We do open lobbies for every kind of weapon you can imagine including this one and future edits of it. My discord like I said can be found links within that video description but yeah guys this has been the Major Kong. An extremely powerful cov launcher one I do think will become quite quickly a fan favourite. And at note guys we have come to the end of the video if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out. If you're new around here and want to see more BR3 be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video upload can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button but guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one


Hello and welcome to session two of newsletters with ghost. I'm Taylor. This is pilot. Hey pilot How's it going? It's going pretty good. I am it's as we're recording this. It's a Friday afternoon. It's I'm gesturing my toy at my window cuz it's Sunday, but it I don't know if it's sunny by you It could be different there It's not sunny here It's sunny here. And and but we're here to talk about ghost some more today. So last session we talked about sort of We basically made the case like why use something like ghost for newsletters Why should you take ownership take control of that platform why we like it at reclaim Specifically because it's not the only self-hostable tool you could use for newsletters Obviously wordpress would be the other one wordpress plus some plugins basically And so we talked about why we really like ghost and think it's an elegant and honestly very inexpensive solution I don't know that we really got into the cost stuff But a lot of the newsletter plugins that you would need for wordpress have limit or subscriptions Yeah, there's subscription fees of some kind not all of them, but but many of them are like that Ghosts if you self-host it, you're really only paying for two things you're paying for the the server space right the hosting cost and On reclaim cloud. That's basically between 10 and 15 dollars. It's not very much money per month That's what we're seeing in terms of usage We're not gonna go really far into everything you can do in reclaim cloud today But we will install it and as part of that I'll kind of point out like oh And this is where you could look at that costs and and have a good idea of that There won't be any cost data because we're gonna install it on stream That is true But I'll show where you can you can look at that information basically And then the other thing That has a cost associated here is for the use of mailgun So mailgun is a separate service that ghost uses to send its emails So this is really important if you've ever done anything with email delivery in the self-hostable world It's kind of a nightmare. Honestly, it's it's not fun and that's honestly for some very good reasons so basically If you want to spin up a server and like have install some program on there that sends out email By default a lot of that stuff is gonna go to spam or in some cases if you don't do the right DNS work It's not even gonna get delivered But these are kind of more recent changes that have been happening with Google and Yahoo Emails, but they they have some restrictions on like look if you don't have this these types of DNS records set up for your domain We're just gonna throw the email out. We're not even gonna put it in spam. We're just gonna not deliver it and Mailgun basically takes care of all that for you and while you can, you know, send the email For like password resets on WordPress sites and Omega sites if you're hosting them with us and reclaim hosting The minute you send a large amount of email those services ramp up the rules even more So for the purposes of a newsletter some type of external email service is a requirement It's it's not really feasible to use Your own server or really even one of ours for large amounts of email to go out You're gonna get spam.  Yeah mail done gets around that basically Yeah, and in addition to that shared hosting servers really aren't Because they're shared they're really not built to send out large amounts of email from like one particular account Yeah, in fact, we don't even let you because we don't want our we don't want our servers to get blocked We have rate limits on how many emails you can send out in an hour so that It doesn't affect everybody who's using that particular server and this also applies to domain of one's own as well, so Yeah, so basically you need to use an external service for this type of stuff and Mailgun is a really good one Well, we will get in we're gonna Configure a domain in Mailgun from scratch today but Mailgun has they have some like enterprise prices listed on their website, but basically you'll just need to start an account for free and You will use their pay-as-you-go plan and the way it works is they charge you like a very tiny amount Per email. I don't actually remember what it is off the top of my head, but it's it's minuscule And then they don't send invoices they don't charge you unless you Use more than like one dollar a month And so that kind of equates to about about 600 to a thousand emails a month. I've actually read different different things Yeah, per month. So so for most people you're not gonna hit this limit at all If you have a newsletter that grows Your costs are probably gonna be one to two to three dollars a month. We're not talking very much money here if you also goes to frequency like how often do you send out your newsletter true yep, that's very true, you know Like we we definitely hit those here at reclaim like we have enough people and we use multiple Newsletters and stuff like that, but we're a business. So for the charge for For reliable email delivery for like what is essentially a couple dollars a month. It's kind of a no-brainer I think we also didn't hit that threshold for the first couple months of the roundup at least well Yeah, probably not the roundup itself. Although we use mailgun for a lot of things around. Yeah, that's true Yeah, we use it for Almost all of the email that you receive from us So there's plenty of things that we use mailgun for but but my point is mailgun is is a hard problem just sorry email is a hard problem to solve and Mailgun is a really good service to make that easier So We will set that up today too. So I'm gonna we're gonna kick it off because we actually have kind of a lot to do We wanted to cram all of the like weird technical stuff into one episode so that people could watch this and get a good sense of it Basically start to finish of what you'd have to do and We're gonna do that right now. So I'm logged into reclaim cloud and So this is this is the really step one is we need to install ghost So you'll make a reclaim cloud account if you didn't know the address is reclaim dot cloud Go set up a banner for you real quick one second. Yeah, and you're just gonna hit log in So I've already logged in of course and Once I've got an account. I'm gonna go to the marketplace and I'm gonna search for ghost And it'll come up here And so a couple things here we're gonna install ghosts, you know via the marketplace, which is our Basically, it's our automated installers for lots of apps When you make a reclaim cloud account if you don't have one already You do get a two week trial. So you can just try this You don't even have to add a payment method if you're a edu email if you don't have a edu email message our support or And and we can we can get your account in our system. We don't take sign-ups from like Gmail addresses But you trial for spam purposes Yeah, so you all you have to do though is put it in an email to us at our support and we'll show you how you can sign up We do take sign-ups from anybody, but but the public form only allows edu emails. So but Yeah, so from here and I should say and so you won't have to add a payment method during that time You can just try things out and see if it works for you So we're gonna go to the marketplace ghost And I'm gonna hit install and I can give my environment a name here This is gonna define the sort of temporary URL that we'll use ghost at before we map a real domain name to it later So I'll just call this my cool newsletter as is sort of my convention You can give it a display name. I'll just leave it at ghost. That's fine. Yeah This display name doesn't really matter. It's really just for your purposes What you want it to look like in the dashboard? And then finally, I'll pick a region. I could pick a lot of regions. I'll go with Canada because why not so hit install And this will take a few minutes So I am going to actually let this hang out right here and While this is installing we'll talk about sort of everything you'll need to make what we're doing today happen So you really only need three things you need a domain name That you're not already using for some other website, of course and this also could be a subdomain by the way This doesn't have to be a top-level domain We are gonna show a top-level domain today but it could also be a subdomain and you I'll talk about where the things would differ but The principal sound yeah, and now that I think about it there really isn't anything that would differ So I'm doing it this way because I've already set up mailgun on my top-level domain in my C-panel account, so I wanted to show this today, so I registered a fresh one But yeah, you'll need a domain name you can register one with us if you have a shared hosting account You can literally go into your cPanel and hit register a new domain I'll show you that in a sec But if you already have one registered somewhere else or you prefer to register your domain with a different registrar That's fine. You don't need to use our domain registration for that I'm of course gonna show ours today because that's what I have access to You will need a reclaim account cloud account, which is what I already said of course And then finally you will need to make a mailgun account which again mailgun accounts are Free and easy to make so literally just go to mailgun.com and hit get started for free so You I do I do believe you need to put a payment method on your mailgun account I don't think they let you sign up without one, but like I said unless you're sending a lot of email It's gonna cost you literally nothing so Yeah, so those are the three things you'll need today and we're gonna walk you through how we set all of this up So let's go check back and reclaim cloud. It looks like it's almost done. It's on its Yeah, this step takes just a few minutes, but there we go So It's not gonna be done for a while immediately. Yeah, your ghost application has been successfully deployed So this is a reclaim cloud letting you know it's saying hey, here's the URL of your ghost site I you can see I clicked on it and it's already it's not quite ready for me here But if I refresh there it is. Yes, what it looks like And if I go back here, it says hey if you want to change the domain name You'll need to point an a record at this IP address and then use a domain configuration add-on We're gonna do that in a little bit here and then I Can set up ghost by visiting this URL Let's actually do that to make my account because I don't have a way to log in yet So I'll give it a site title. I'm gonna call it my cool newsletter This is a very important step if you are setting up ghost do this immediately Yeah, you want to do this because if you're not the first person to happen to visit this URL someone else could set it up now Is that likely? Probably not because no one knows about it But just a good thing to keep in mind that you do have to set a password here. So, yeah I'm gonna use my reclaim email address and Set a password here. I don't think yeah, it's not gonna show it on screen. Cool. Nope. I need to set a Longer password Great. So I am now logged in now We're we'll return to ghost later, but I just wanted to make sure that I set a password Okay, so the next things we got to do here is we need to set up that Domain name, right? We don't we probably don't want our domain. Sorry our newsletter at, you know Reclaim.cloud you want to really for all the reasons we were talking about last time You also want to own the domain name that's attached to this thing in terms of ownership here That's gonna be important. So I'm gonna go to my cPanel account to do this I have already registered a domain name, but in In the case that you haven't you can just go to domains register top-level domain and follow the instructions here so you can Point a domain you've registered elsewhere if you want but otherwise you can click this button and it will take you out to our website where you can Pick out your domain name and and all that stuff And then you'll need to add it to cPanel. So basically I'll click here to go to the domain section of cPanel and I would hit create a new domain and I would type in whatever That domain name is here. I probably want to uncheck share document root Yeah, that's a great domain and then submit and what that's going to do if you register domain with us That's going to tell our system. Oh Let's attach that domain name to this cPanel account, which lets us do DNS stuff with it basically Again, I've already done that. So I'm actually not gonna hit submit here and if I go to my DNS zone editor I You can see I've got a handful of domain too many Domains in here not enough and my cool newsletter calm That's the domain. I registered for this today and if I go to manage there's a ton of Records in here already and that's because I added this to cPanel and what I'm gonna want to do is change the a record because It's already set up to go to my reclaim hosting cPanel I want to change it because I want to have it go to to ghost instead So I'm gonna hit edit here basically Saying look here for information about this domain and then when you go look here It says actually go to this specific other place Yeah, and it says if you want to change the main name point in a record at that IP So I'm gonna copy that by the way, you'll get a copy of this emailed to you too So if you dismiss this it's not gone forever and I'm gonna go here paste in that IP it gave me and hit save And theoretically you could do zone records like mail and DKM and SPF and all those types of things in here But Milgan's gonna let you not do that instead Yeah, yeah Milgan's gonna tell me what we need to do here basically Milgan's really great about walking us through this process Just like this is trying to do the same. The other thing I'll mention here is we have a guide here Covering a lot of the things we're gonna talk about today. So if you click on this, it'll take you out now Now I have this open twice, of course All right And it'll talk about how to install ghost how to set up your account in ghost how to do some things like update ghost later and set up mail and Change domain name which we're gonna do in just a second all kinds of things are available here Which is gonna be handy for for you. So Okay, so I Can close this now and now that I've mapped that domain name in DNS. Let me double-check did I hit submit? Yes, I did. Yep. That's the name I'm gonna copy this domain name again Now I just need to tell ghost what domain name. It's gonna be Expecting basically so I'm gonna hit this add-on button here under the environment for my ghost This little bit smaller And I'm gonna hit domain configuration and change and That says hey, please specify the new domain name should already have an a record pointed there Which is what we just did. Whoops. I put the wrong thing in there. So that's my cool news letter comm I'm I gotta say I'm shocked that my cool newsletter comm was not already registered. I know I am shocked I'm keeping this. I don't have newsletter content But I think I need to come up with something so Yeah What it this is what is the world coming to that such Com of all things like like like like my cool newsletter. Ninja sure I go through I look up the list of Domain extensions and it always makes me laugh, you know, you can get dot. Yeah, I Did not know that but it makes sense. I I don't know if I have it right now But I at one point I had Jaden coffee and I was like, I guess I need to start roasting coffee beans now like And I never did and I think I let it lapse but yeah, there's so many amazing top-level domain names All right, so I've done the domain configuration now Like I said, this is gonna tell ghost. Hey, you are at this new domain name now It's also going to issue a let's encrypt cert. So I am going to go to the new URL Michael newsletter comm and there we go fast. It put the cert on real quick It does it immediately when you tell it to apply. It's going to instantly Restart ghost and issue a search. So I'm Yeah, and by immediately I mean it takes like 30 seconds, but we were talking so It finished and now let's log back into ghost. Just make sure that's working still. So And there we go. So I'm in ghost So from here was we've mapped a domain we've installed ghost we've mapped the domain name now comes the Mail gun stuff. So I've already got mail gun open and I'm signed in over here in this tab And I am already using mail. Well, I don't actually use mail gun much In fact, you can see that I've sent zero email in the last month via mail gun or yeah in the last month But I do have it to kind of mess around with it set up on a domain already So I'm gonna need to set up another domain in mail gun But the instructions are gonna be the same even if this is your first one So I'm gonna go to sending and then hit add new domain And then I'm gonna put my domain name in there, which is of course my cool newsletter calm And it's gonna ask what region so if you want your email to be sent from the EU you can select that Otherwise, it's us. Those are really the only two regions. They have So you have to pick one and then you just you can leave the IP assignment. There's only one option anyway so and Then I'll hit add domain Okay, and so it's gonna say hey, you need to verify your DNM your domain So go to your DNS provider to that you use to manage my cool newsletter calm and add the following DNS records, so we're gonna need to Put in an SPF record. In fact, there probably is one already, but we're gonna have to modify it we're gonna need to put in a dekin dekin record and Mx records and a C name record so all of this we're gonna have to put in so I am going to Go back to my DNA of my C panel here and Actually, I should copy this so it says hey, you need an SPF record for my cool newsletter calm I'm gonna copy this value here and Then I'm actually just gonna find one in the list that's already here and edit it and that you can see here is an SPF record And so I'm gonna actually edit this paste it in We're gonna do dekin next and as you can see here it actually there's a dekin already as well. Yeah So I'll do the same thing So it says hey, you need to do dekin record. I am going to hit copy there Oh and actually I'm realizing I think it's a little bit different. So it's smtp.domainkey Yeah, that's the same. So alright, so I'm actually gonna leave the the one that's there alone So let me let me do this so The annoying thing about dekin and and all this stuff is it says hey make this record But it actually doesn't really give you a lot of instructions on what these are. These are all text records there are Many different types of DNS records the main ones you see are a which is for IP addresses mx which is for Receiving email We're talking about sending email right now C name which is you can kind of think of it like redirects from one domain to another sort of And text records which are used for all kinds of things. So I'm gonna make a new text record for my dekin and I'm gonna paste in the the The host name that it gave me here and I'm going to now copy this enter this value part Put that in on the record side And there you go Okay, so that one's in now too And then I'm gonna have to put in mx records. So These so these are these probably exist as well. So I could go in here and that's definitely Yeah, so I'm gonna go in and change this one. I think you can keep priority though. Oh Yeah, it's actually says the priority should be 10 I actually am not a hundred percent sure that that matters But I'm gonna I'm gonna follow their advice. Yeah, they're the they're the experts. Yes, certainly So that's one mx record, but I need to make two so I am also going to go in and Copy this one and I'm gonna go to the top again and make the mx record like this and This one also it said to put in 10 and the domain name on the other side Yeah, and I think that changing the priority on that so for modifying the one that already exists I think changing the priority matters just so that they're not like competing with each other So that they're same priority I think in this case because they're given the same priority they're actually are competing It's sort of like oh you can just try whichever one basically and mail gun wants you to do that for the purposes of Like load balancing on their servers. Okay, I I don't know that for sure by the way But that's my understanding is if you have DNS records with the same priority your It depends on the system and by the system. We're talking like your operating system And all these things but they will basically choose at random. They'll be like cool a or b But of course nothing is random and computing. So anyway So anyway, I just I just don't understand email, but yeah, it's all right Me neither. All right, and then the final one is You there is a tracking component email gun where it can keep track of who's opened emails And who's hit unsubscribe links and things like that. You don't actually have to set this up We will for the purposes of this but It says hey, why don't you set up a new sub host name called the email dot my cool newsletter comm and Put a C name to mail gun org. So we'll do that So I'm gonna do a C name I'm gonna paste in the host name. I'm gonna go back here grab the value This is a lot easier by the way if you actually open these things side-by-side but for the purposes of recording I didn't want to do it that way. Yeah, but I would recommend just open these things next to each other Okay So now this is Whoops, so I'm gonna be completely transparent and honest with everyone here We may have to do some editing magic because sometimes DNS records take time to propagate So I'm going to hit submit on this But it's very possible that We'll see we'll have to wait. Yeah, so it better not be 24 to 48 hours because as you said we are recording on this on a Friday So well, we can always come back and look at it later, too. That's true So it looks like these are all verified. This one says ready to activate I'm not actually a hundred percent sure this Okay, so Okay, so I can activate this one by hitting Yeah, this feels exactly like, you know, 15 minutes ago. We were like, oh wait. No, that's weird Fresh like 15 minutes ago. We were like, oh, you know ghost isn't gonna be ready yet and then it immediately became ready Yeah, you know The DNS can take a little while Okay, so I'm not really sure what was up with them with mail gun on there With that refresh error, but I'm gonna go back to domain settings and then DNS records And we are all set now. So we've got Yes, so we've got SPF de kim mx and C name all set up here now we are gonna need two more things So and I'm gonna say if you're watching this, I know like the the mail setup is Kind of a pain here But this the nice thing about this is something you really like to do once and then it's done and mail gun does walk you through All of it. So and it's it's also we've been doing this for probably 20 minutes of this But infinitely better than just being in a You know longer spiral of emails not working. Why isn't it working? How do I make it work? Which is what happens? Later if you skip all these steps Yep. All right. So finally, we're gonna also need to go to SMTP credentials and So there there are SMTP credentials here already And we can either reset these I'm actually gonna make new ones for the purposes of using ghost in particular So I'm gonna hit add new and it's gonna say cool. What do you want the login? Slash email address to be and how do you want to create the password? And so I'm gonna call this one I Don't know it could be whatever you want here. It could be newsletter. It could be ghosts I'm gonna put ghost in for the login And then I'll let it do the creation method automatically. It's just gonna generate a password for me It says hey a new password has been created for ghost at my cool newsletter calm click copy So I'm gonna do that and I'm actually gonna go over to my notes over here. We're gonna copy this long long Password it generated don't worry. I will Sorry get rid of too many tabs open Don't worry. I will Get rid of this by the time you're watching this. I'm also gonna grab the login and The last things we'll need here is it's we're gonna need this SMTP address and then the port 25 things like that So, yeah, I might as well I guess 25 Great So now we need to tell Oh, I'm missing one more step. Okay, that's SMTP That's the credentials that ghost is going to use to send things like password resets and those types of emails Finally, we have to make an API key and mail gun and this is what ghost is going to use to send your actual newsletters out There is a entire Blog post they have which of course I literally just closed for some reason there we go about The difference between these things I will link to this in in discord But if you're curious about like, why do I have to set up? Well, first of all, like, why do I have to use mail gun and ghost explains why that basically? That's what they support for newsletter stuff And they actually go in and technically details of like, oh well Do I have to use mail gun for things that aren't newsletters like password resets and the answer to that is no You can use any SMTP service Well, I in my opinion and our opinion at reclaim is if you're gonna set up a newsletter and therefore need to use mail gun You might as well use the same email service for your password reset type emails as well That's called transactional email is those one to one very low volume Type emails and bulk emails are I'm sending out my newsletter to everybody kind of stuff Okay, so finally, let's create that API key that we're gonna need and So I went to sending API keys again. This is under sending domain settings and I Let's call this my cool newsletter comm Give it that description It's gonna say great. Here's your API key. It's it's only in display at once So you may need to make sure to copy this I'm also gonna grab this and And label that one. Yeah. Oh Interesting it. Oh, it's not the same. I was gonna say it's the same. It just it's similar Yeah, it's structure. Yeah. All right. It was like that's weird. Why would it be the same? All right? So I get it done here And by the way, if you ever do if you forget to copy it or lose it for some reason You can only just delete this and create a new one or you can create as many as you want I believe so you can use them for all kinds of things here. Alright, so now we need to go through and set up the actual Ghost part so we're we're done setting up the mail gun account kind of thing so I'm gonna go back to my reclaimed cloud dashboard and I'm gonna use the add-ons and I already have it open But for the purposes of watching this I'm gonna do this again The add-ons here are little like scripts and helpers that we make And you can find them by clicking on this little icon here under your environment. You made a bunch of them I mean to be clear, we didn't make all of them Some of them are made by virtuoso the company that makes this platform that is reclaimed cloud But I've made a few of them all of these ghost ones. I've made so yes You also made the ghost installer. Yes. Yeah And I'm pretty proud of it because we do really want The ghost installer itself is I think pretty simple to use. It's it's literally a single click so and Before that it was not It used to be kind of hard to get ghost working on our platforms before this so I will mention here too. We're not gonna use it today, but you can also update ghosts So if you're on, you know some older version you install it a few months ago And you want to update it literally just hit that update button and it will get you up to date We just installed it so no need to run updates right now. But yeah okay, so I'm gonna go in here and go to mail setup and It's gonna have a handful of little settings here This is a good time to check out that article because we have all of these laid out for you So you're gonna use the from address and the Username password from mail gun these are actually gonna be the same And then you can set a port and SMTP and all that kind of stuff and the host so I'm gonna go back to where I kept track of some of the stuff. This is my login and from address So I'm gonna put this in here. Sorry username and from address I'm gonna get my password I'm gonna get my host which is SMTP dot mail gun org and I'm gonna get my port which was just 25 but If I go back to this tab here They were you can you can choose, you know, is there any particular benefit or distinction to picking one of the other two or not not that I'm aware of there is Um There there could be reasons on different server setups Why you may want to use a different port? But on reclaim cloud if you're falling along with our instructions, it doesn't there's no reason to use One over the other so That's good, and then we're gonna put in SMTP and Whoops and SMTP again, and I'm gonna hit apply It is going to basically input those settings into ghost and then restart ghost great so now I have basically the Password the transactional email not newsletter email, but transactional email is now set up so I can go to my cool newsletter comm slash ghost and I could log out and And you know Set up my actual like do a password reset things like that. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna get there in a second I don't want to do that just yet because I also want to set up my newsletter email while we're in here basically So for setting up the newsletter email once you sign back into ghost and In case you forgot it's basically whatever Domain name you have slash ghost.  Let me zoom in to this settings icon and Over on the sidebar We're gonna go all the way down to the email newsletter section and then mail gun settings and says hey the mail gun API is Used for bulk email newsletter delivery And if you click this why is this required by the way, this gets you to that article And so I can hit edit and I'm gonna go in here and pick my mail gun region Which for the domain I set up is us and the the mail gun domain again, so this is The this domain up here is where it is. So my cool newsletter comm and then finally I'm gonna get that API key Created, so let me copy that too and hit save and it says great mail gun is set up So That's it. That's all of the steps Yeah, that is absolutely all of the steps that we need to To set up for getting all of this stuff configured Now we are actually going to log into ghost and and do things with it, you know, look at themes look at how do I set up? Subscribers how do I write posts all of that kind of stuff? I'm gonna do next time but Really wanted to have a dedicated sort of technical setup Video so I'm gonna be honest pilot this went smoother than I expected and this went faster than I expected So we're gonna we're gonna have this recession in it just under 40 minutes, which is actually kind of cool And if but if you have any questions or or challenges with any of this, you know Definitely post in the discord because we can Help you work through them and hopefully other folks can learn from whatever questions you have because there is a lot of moving parts here and of course we demonstrated one way to do this in terms of Hosting ghost on reekling cloud and using cPanel for your domain name But if you're using a different DNS tool, maybe you've registered your domain with like namecheap or somebody If you're gonna look a little bit different, right? Yeah, if for example, you registered my cool newsletter dot yacht You did not do it through reclaim and so you're gonna have to do that somewhere else. Yeah, I mean hop on that because That sounds like a lucrative newsletter by the way I Do not think it would be cost effective just from domain registration costs alone. I don't remember I remember looking up dot boat and there's no reason why dot boat and dot yacht would have the same Pricing but dot boat was like $10,000 a year. Oh my god. Well now I need to find out Welcome to Namecheap doesn't like that. Yeah, try dot boat try dot boat Welcome to our well in not every register register our supports all of these it could just be that namecheap doesn't do that particular one But whatever it's fine I wouldn't be surprised though. Like you said a lot of the most Weird fanciest ones are pretty expensive. So yeah, yeah But you know yacht enthusiasts, maybe you could charge for your newsletter I don't know. I assume yacht people have lots of money, right? So Anyway, um I I hope this was helpful in getting kind of a good start to finish overview of how do I register domain? map a domain install ghost in uh setup mail gun Do the dns stuff with mail gun? Um, and uh, we'll see everyone next time See you next time. Bye


I hope you enjoyed the first week of Denial 101X. This week, we examined the science of science denial, in order to understand what's driving the political and social controversy about climate change. First, we looked at the scientific consensus. We saw that there's a consensus of evidence. Many independent human fingerprints all point to a single consistent conclusion. Humans are causing global warming. Now, my apologies that I went through all the fingerprints so quickly. But don't worry, we'll be returning to the different human fingerprints in Week 3 and digging much deeper, so stay tuned.  There's no controversy in the scientific community about climate change. So why is there so much political controversy? We looked at some of the dragons of inaction, the psychological barriers to climate action. One of the most significant dragons of inaction is political ideology. Often when people don't like the solutions to climate change, such as increased government regulation, they reject the science of climate change in order to avoid those solutions which threaten their values. Understanding why people deny science is important. Equally important is understanding how they deny science. No matter which topic you're looking at, science denial shares the same five characteristics. Fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories. A useful acronym to help you remember them is FLIC. You'll need FLIC next week as we look at some of the myths casting doubt on the basic reality of global warming. Kevin Cowton in England will explain the challenges of building a temperature record. He'll visit the snow at the University of Ottawa as Robert Way debunks some of the myths about the cryosphere. And in the US, Keir Shaneerman will look at sea level rise, while Peter Jacobs explores the difference between climate change and global warming. For each myth, we'll explain the science and will also identify the characteristic of denial in each myth. This is crucial to understanding how each myth distorts the science and how this relates to the psychology we've learned this week. Over the course of Denial 101x, you'll learn and practice the tools to identify and refute new myths, whether they relate to climate or other areas of science. Lastly, while developing this MOOC, I had the privilege of interviewing many of the world's leading scientists who are researching the physical science of our climate or the social science of how we react to climate change. Be sure to check out our interviews. The short highlight videos are must see, but I also highly recommend the full interviews with each scientist. They offer fascinating insights into their experiences and research into climate change. Next week's interviews are equally exciting as we speak to Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia as well as many of the world's leading glaciologists. Plus, you'll see something I'm sure a few of you have never seen before, permafrost surfing. We hope you enjoyed your first week in Denial 101x. We'd love you to share what you've learned so far, the questions you have and your first thoughts about next week's topic, the many indicators of global warming on the weekly wrap up discussion forum. Sharing your thoughts and interacting with your fellow students is a great way to continue learning beyond the lectures and we look forward to seeing you in week two.