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I know this is the kind of sequence of thoughts and questions going on in your mind right now: “Wait, wait… waaait! What are you talking about? You mean I can give things away but still earn money out of this gesture?! HOW?”
Don’t worry because that’s exactly what we’re going to discuss in this blog post.
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Join for $9 →This may seem like those types of offers that often sound too good to be true, but it isn’t really. In fact, I had similar thoughts when this method was introduced to me a few years ago. But today, I’m living proof — or more precisely my bank account is — that this actually works.
And, I’m not the only one smiling all the way to the bank courtesy of this method. There are hundreds of other people like you and I — most of whom were doubters like you and I in the beginning — who today can attest that the theory behind this tactic makes sense.
Between working on my podcast and living a kickass life, I set aside some time to set up this exact online money-making venture for my girlfriend. At first, we only wanted to try things out and see.
Right now, we can’t believe the kind of success we’ve been able to achieve!
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But why am I really sharing this with you? Because it’s a money-making method that can’t be saturated. The variety of combinations to exploit are virtually endless. We’re literally looking at a GOLDMINE!
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What You Need to Get Things Up & Running:
- A small startup capital
- A Facebook advertising plan
- An AliExpress account
- A Shopify account
THE SECRET!!
Even before we go further, let’s just drop the bombshell right away…
The secret here is that we won’t be any actual product in this venture. WE’LL ACTUALLY BE SELLING SHIPPING. Yes, you heard that right! We’re selling shipping to make money online!
WHAT TO DO:
First of all, sign up for an account with AliExpress (a member of the ALIBABA Group). Check out www.aliexpress.com and register. There’s also an app.
You’ll also need to find a product or two that you’ll be giving away. For now, we’ll just use a single product.
At this point, I’d like to also caution you not to get carried away and start attempting to advertise all kinds of stuff. That will come later.
I’ll also give you some tip on the sort of stuff you should be looking for: hobby-related and animal products. From research and experience, I know people are ultra-passionate about these kinds of things.
What about the price of the product?
Get products that you can purchase for between $1.00 and $5.00 with FREE shipping. This may sound a bit weird, but don’t worry, everything will make sense shortly.
Take photography for example. So, let’s go with that example for now.
With this, we can target lens caps, etc. More on this shortly.
Our next step will be to open a Shopify store. Though I strongly recommend this platform, you can choose to create your store on big Commerce Or use your own website.
If you want to use your own website, make sure you have some hosting. BlueHost is a great choice for that.
Also, choose a nice, easy-to-remember name for your Shopify store… something like “Jude’s Sale Shack”.
In the test I did, I simply added a single product. That was enough. We didn’t want our prospects to get distracted or confused. Obviously, the more detailed you make your shop, the more authentic it appears to them.
Don’t overthink it. All you need here is a simple logo and some products to promote. A few products you love.
THIS IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT…
Set up a reasonable shipping cost. Remember, this is how and where your money comes from. This is the source of the money we said we would be trying to make in this venture!
My recommendation is to try $9.95 or $14.95. You can test them both and see which one works best for your market.
So, how do we actually make the big bucks?
Now that you have a store and a product, it’s time to make money online. I am going to give you a super ninja trick.
Until I discovered this secret, my ads were not profitable and I was throwing money out the window.
The secret to actually make ton of money and run highly profitable ads, is to split test your ad images.
Alright what does that even mean, you must be wondering. It’s very simple, instead of running one single image, you run 10 – 20 or even 30 images to figure out which one works best.
“Is that really necessary?”, you might ask…
Hell yes! Changing the image has, in a lot of cases 5X and even 10X my results for some products.
But how do you create these variations if you suck at design, and if you don’t have time?
This was the exact problem I had until I found the guys at FBadsbooster.com
They take care of everything for me for the best price ever. I don’t ever run ads without using them now.
I save a lot of time, money and more importantly my campaigns make me an insane amount of money compared to when I was doing them myself.
You can find out more by clicking here: 6-figure ads done-4-you
This is UBER IMPORTANT: Don’t ever, under any circumstances, run ads without split testing multiple variations, because you are leaving money on the table!
Most of the time, you are only one variation away from a winning ad that will make you ton of sales.
Below is a real life example of the difference an ad variation can make:
Results BEFORE using FBadsbooster
Results AFTER using FBadsbooster
Now that this has been established, here is what we are going to do:
We’ll use the Facebook platform to make our sales. Simply launch a Facebook page for your product. In our case, we’ll call it “Snap Bros”.
Next, you need to learn how to create a conversion pixel on the Shopify platform. Here is a resource that explains how it’s done (don’t worry it’s easy).
When kicking off your ad campaigns, you want to market yours as “conversions to website”.
Next, we want to pick our audience. Remember we chose fishing. Let’s pick our fishing audience:
- Male
- Age 20-50 years
- American
- Photography (nikkon D5300 | Olympus | Fujifilm)
I guess you get the general idea.
Now, let’s set up the actual ad. I’ll give you a good example of something I would have tested using FBadsbooster.com
That’s it for this section.
Again, if you don’t prefer Facebook, Instagram is also a good choice to help you make money. If you want to find out more about Instagram, check out this related resource where I show you how I make thousands of dollars every single month, on Instagram, without spending a dime on ads.
How to sell dropshipping products from aliexpress on Instagram without paying for ads
How to Scale Up Your Empire (Quick & Easy)
Start up by testing 10 ads variations (I would recommend 20 – 30). When you find a winner, disable the other ads and use the winner as the control ad (the reference).
Then ad new ad variations if possible to see if they will outperform the control ad.
Once you’ve found one that works for you, then you can scale up on that. Find similar items then use them as the foundation of your winning ad.
Ideally, you’d change the picture, use another similar product but still retain the ad headline, etc. Then rinse and do the same with your other niches.
Sending off your orders is as simple as A, B, C. Just copy the details from Shopify and then paste them. Quite easy, right?
The Path To Great Success
By now, you must be wondering how the whole thing works and how we can actually earn money with this method.
For example, if your shipping charges are $14.95, the receiver gets the free products but pays you for the shipping.
You’ll earn $14.95 in total. Deduct the conversion fee of, say, $2 as well as the price of the product of $1 and you remain with $11.15 in profits:
Now let’s do some basic math so that you understand the power of this method.
Let’s say that you are able to make 10 sales. Here is what you will pocket:
10 x 11.15 = $111.50
What if you were able to make 20 sales this time?
20 x 11.15 = $223.00
You can see the potential… Even if you made only $50 to $100 per day, that’s still some nice passive income that you can use to pay all your bills and overheads.
Just ask yourself what an extra $1,500 to $3,000 a month would mean for you in terms of freedom and peace of mind…
The secret to creating this passive income is split testing. This is the single best thing you can do. Again, I have seen cases where some of my ads performed 10 times better than others…
Had I ran one single ad, I would have made 10 times less money…
So whatever you do, please don’t just begin with a single ad and hope to earn lots of cash instantly.
Use at least 10 of them and allow them to run for about 2 days with a daily budget of $5 to $10 per ad.
If you don’t know how to create them, if you don’t have time, or you simply want professional to create winning ads for you that convert like gangbusters, then just head to https://fbasbooster.com and they will hook you up.
Advantages of this method
There’s a lot of money to be made with minimum risk and investment. As you can see in this example, your financial risk is almost zero. The product costs around a dollar AND you only buy the product AFTER being paid by your client.
In addition, it’s quite easy to upscale. You’re literally in control of how much you can sell and earn. If you want to scale this to the moon, you can create a large following on Instagram and then make sales for free without paying for ads.
How to maximize your profits (double your money)
The best way to double your money without spending any more money, or effort, is to create an upsell.
How and why will upsells allow you to double your money?
The answer is very simple: If you manage to get every user to pay you more money on average (without spending more on ads since you already have that person on your store), you double your profits.
Amazon is a great example of upsells. Let’s say that you are selling the lens caps for $14.95 which is the price of shipping. If you only had this product, this is all you would make.
Now picture this:
What if you added a photography backpack to your product catalogue for example? And every person who purchases the lens is presented with this offer?
If you know anything about photography, and if you have travelled a bit, you know that these people ALWAYS walk around with a huge back where they put their lenses and accessories…
Not everybody is going to take you up on that offer, but a large percentage of these people will. This is a must for photographers, so you know that it’s going to sell.
You could price it at $29 and make an additional $21 – $17 from the same person without spending any more money on ads.
So, all of a sudden, you are not pocketing $11.50 profit anymore. You can now make up to $32.50 profit. In this case you would triple your money on those sales.
On average, you would double your revenue (since only a percentage of your clients will purchase the upsell).
No extra money spent and a lot more money made! Cool right?
If you want to get started with this method, it’s simple: The very first step is for you to claim your Shopify 14-day FREE trial and start building a money making store.
The biggest money opportunity on your store
In order to take advantage of this opportunity, you need to understand a crucial fact: On average, 80% of the people who add an item to their shopping cart, will abandon it without paying.
This applies to any business, any site in any industry. There are hundreds of reasons why people would abandon their cart, and, surprisingly enough, “I don’t want it anymore” is very low in that list.
Reasons could be:
- User is on his/her phone and wants to do it from desktop
- Baby started crying
- Squirell on a tree
- Computer reboots
- Want to save it for later
- Etc…
So technically, you have a pool of people who are very interested, because they took the time to add the product in the cart, that need very little convincing to give you their money…
Even when people are leaving their checkout halfway, still they leave you with their email! That’s a valuable asset right there that you can turn into money.
How? You may ask.
Put them on your email list. Personally, I use convertkit to send out email promotions to these hot leads.
Because they are hot and highly targeted, I earn lots money from emails that most people, who don’t know this secret, are leaving on the table.
It’s a strategy that has worked very well for me. What’s more, Get convertkit can easily be integrated with Shopify.
Creating a Responsive Profitable Email List
If I didn’t build a customer base, my Shopify stores wouldn’t be earning the kind of money they do today. What I do is create a formidable customer base from my store then go on to do product launches. That improves my store revenue a lot.
While it takes time to build all of this up, once I’m done I can literally make money on autopilot.
Many people seem to think that all you need to do is begin an ad campaign and you have come up with a nice stream of passive income.
BUT that isn’t the case really…
Although this was easier back when I first began, you should be creating a customer base and better yet re-targeting them.
We’ll talk about re-targeting soon, to finish this list building section off I just want to say that you need to get yourself a good email marketing program.
You need to get those valuable emails off Shopify and into your email management program like yesterday!
You need to be doing more promotion of products to make more money. Trust me, you’ll see those profits rise and it’ll all make sense then!
Why Make A Small Profit When You Can Make A Huge Profit?
The idea here is that it takes the same amount of effort to sell a $10 product than selling a $49 dollar product. So why wouldn’t you go for the latter? Same effort and 5x more money.
In additional, having a better margin gives you more flexibility and wiggle room with your ads.
Indeed, you can afford to spend a little bit more on ads and still make far more money that if you were selling that $10 product.
If you apply everything we have discussed so far AND sell a more expensive product, you’ll soon begin to see nice profits.
Let me quickly recap what we have seen so far:
- Create your Shopify Store and claim your 14-day FREE trial
- Split test variations using https://fbasbooster.com
- Create upsells to double your profits
- Build an email list with convertkit and email people who abandoned their cart
- Sell a product for a better margin
Are you wondering if this stuff sustainable?
Sure it is. If you put in the right amount of time and work, you can make some good money online using this method for many years to come. Actually, it’s one of the most sought-after ways to generate passive income for many people.
Oberlo Made Things Much Easier for Us!
Oberlo is an app that semi-automates the whole drop-shipping process. It can help you to speed things up real quick.
Back when I first began making money from Shopify, nothing like this existed. We had to do everything manually!
Did I also say it’s absolutely free?!
So, if you haven’t heard of Oberlo yet or, better still, tried it yet, then you need to because it makes the entire Shopify experience a less stressful affair.
Use retargeting to further boost your profits
This really is the crème de la crème when it comes to Facebook ads and you should be doing it!
What you want to do here is make sure your Facebook pixel is installed then build a custom audience right from the product link you’re advertising. You can use the Pixel Helper extension to double-check everything before you continue.
If I was selling a set of lenses for camera, for instance, then I’d create a custom audience from the traffic of people that have visited that photography product page. I’d then advertise back to them with probably a discount or something else that will get them to take action.
You see the kind of potential here?
This is warm traffic that’s already landing on your item so we know they have at least some interest in it. You can make some good number of sales with a high-conversions rate.
Guess what? You also get super low-cost ads when you re-target! Expect to see up to 40% or even 60% cheaper ads when you run your retargeting campaign successfully.
Here is what you could do:
- send them a reminder that says: “Hey bob, forgot something? For your convenience we have saved your order for you”
- THEN and only then, offer them a 10% discount. Most people just assume that the order wasn’t placed because of the price and sacrifice a sizable percentage right of the bat. Don’t be that person, if they haven’t come back after the first reminder, then start teasing them with a discount.
Building Your Own Solid Online Brand
This is something that has been able to change a lot in this method. I still use a general online store to test products but if you’re really looking to make good money, then you have to think about the branding.
Once I’ve found a winning product, I create a branded Shopify store around its niche. So let’s say we’ve a winning product and we fill the new online store out with it plus related products.
We’ll then give it a good branded name and advertise it hard to build on the brand. Branded niche stores do a lot better than general stores. However, general stores are good for testing.
Could you imagine launching a store each time you wanted to test any of your products?
That would be very expensive!
I remember when I first began this method, I could use general stores for nearly everything. Now, I still can but things have become harder to cultivate trust with my customers this way.
Want to get started today and start making money with dropshipping WITHOUT investing ton of money? Then Pick up your FREE Shopify Trial now!
Keep in mind that we may receive commissions when you click our links and make purchases. However, this does not impact our reviews and comparisons. We try our best to keep things fair and balanced, in order to help you make the best choice for you
Why Giving Things Away Built My Business
Free sounds like the opposite of a business model, until you realize the free thing is the business model. I gave away DVDs from a closet back in 2003, and every product I have launched since has led with something valuable and free, because attention and trust are the two things you cannot buy back later. The giveaway is the front door, the offer is the room behind it. I break down this exact strategy on my growth hacking series and on my Freedom by Choice podcast. The data backs it: the HubSpot blog tracks how lead magnets and free tools drive qualified pipeline, and the Zapier blog shows how automating the delivery scales it without more work.
Proof point: one free giveaway I automated once has quietly collected leads for years, turning a single afternoon of setup into a channel that still pays.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you actually earn money by giving away free products online in 2026?
Yes, giving away free products still produces revenue when the freebie is the front of a clear funnel. The free item builds an email list, qualifies buyers, and warms them toward a paid offer worth ten to fifty times the freebie cost. My MyLegionSecrets list ships roughly 85,000 daily emails fed by free downloads that funnel into paid courses.
Why does giving away free products attract more customers than paid products?
Free products eliminate the friction of pulling out a credit card during discovery, which expands the top of your funnel ten to thirty times. People who would never buy a cold offer happily take a free guide, lead magnet, or trial. Once you have their email and trust, converting them later becomes a normal conversation, not cold outreach.
What free product strategies generate the most revenue for online businesses?
Three free product strategies move the needle hardest. A short downloadable resource that solves one specific problem in fifteen minutes. A seven day email mini course that teaches a small win daily. A free tool or template that becomes part of the buyer workflow. The free tool tends to produce the highest customer lifetime value over twelve months.
How do you turn free product giveaways into actual paid sales consistently?
Build a five step automation behind every free product. Send the freebie immediately. Send a story email on day one. Send a teaching email on day three. Pitch a low ticket offer on day five. Pitch your main offer on day seven. That sequence runs forever, converts five to ten percent of subscribers, and turns giveaways into revenue.
About the Author
Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.
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