my first 30 days selling on Amazon

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I’ve come full circle on my Amazon journey after finding success with their Associates Program, as a Kindle author and am now selling my first private label product on Amazon (more on what that means in a moment).

In my very first 30 days of selling I hit $2,981.10 in sales (and that includes the early days where I was only doing two sales one day, then zero sales etc).

Let’s get to the video proof first and then answer some of the questions you are likely have about this.

Video Proof: My First 30 Days Selling On Amazon.com


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Why Did I Start Selling Physical Products On Amazon.com?

I have several people to thank for getting my product up and going on Amazon (in particular all of the folks from our private mastermind group) but the one friend in particular that inspired me to try this out I interviewed back on Podcast 17.

Long story short Brian had been building his online business for a lot less time than me and was making more money than me!

This may make some losers people jealous but whenever this happens it makes me pull up a chair and want to learn more.

Brian’s story is why I decided to try this out during my nights after I got done working on my primary business and when my wife was busy putting our twin babies to sleep.

Needless to say I’m happy with my decision to work on this instead of any number of time wasters I could have done instead.

How Did I Select My Product?

Brian learned how to sell on Amazon from a course called Amazing Selling Machine and so I learned from the exact same course. If it’s good enough for the guy making more money with less experience building online businesses than it’s certainly good enough for me right?

The course is 8 weeks long and there is also a live event (my recap from the last event here). The focus of the course covers start to finish everything you need to know to get started selling on Amazon. I simply followed the lessons available for members and – most importantly – took action. Surprise surprise I’ve found yet again that it does take work to earn money online.

Without getting into sharing copyrighted material from the course I can say that the course basically advises that you create your own private label products rather than go out and sell the same brand product as everyone else.

When you create your own brand you control 100% of the buy box on Amazon which for me means I don’t have to compete with any other sellers for my product.

The general strategy is to get started selling on an established marketplace like Amazon and then sell on your own website and other websites as well eventually.

For me I’ll stick with Amazon to start out until the order volume justifies the effort to move onto other platforms because again, this is something I only care to spend a minimal amount of time on for maximum returns.

My main product one mistake: I should have picked something more expensive.

Had I done that I would potentially be doing even more money in profit, but the best part about learning something new though is that when you’ve done it once it’s much easier to do it a second time with another product.

What Did You Do To Sell Your Product?

My simple strategy was to price my product a little lower than the competition to get some sales and start getting initial reviews faster. Sales and reviews then lead to ranking on Amazon for my target keywords and climbing ranks in my bestseller category. (Not really all that fancy I suppose).

If you need more help getting started out you can do things like offer deals on your products via any number of deal sites on the web, but I didn’t have to do that with this product.

I did run an Amazon sponsored ads campaign but the most I ever spent was about $5 a day and for 12 days I accidentally turned off the campaign by setting an end date by mistake (yah still new here).

Quite frankly I wish I sounded more impressive than it really was – sure there were some unique differentiating things I did to set my product apart from the competition but before that I just put in the work.

I did my research, picked high quality materials for my product, crafted a great product listing and went from there. I’ve got over a dozen product reviews (most are 5 stars) and I found that as my review count went up my sales went up as well (duh, I know right?).

There are a lot of fancy things you can do on the marketing front that I’ve learned, but my product is selling well enough now where I’m actually more concerned about running out of stock on my initial 500 unit order than I am about scaling out more sales right now.

If I were to do it over again I would have gone for at least 1,000 units initial order quantity because the millions of people on Amazon have to buy from someone right? Why not me?

My conversion rate has been over 20% on multiple days. (I’d love to have that with the software business I’m helping to build)

There’s more to it than that, but for this first product I didn’t have to do too much. Other members in our mastermind have done more advanced marketing strategies which I will employ in the future.

Am I Buying Low Priced Products And Reselling Them On Amazon For More Money?

No. I already answered this before, but I just want to make it clear. This is a fairly popular method people have been discussing where individuals basically go around to various stores and find items that are under priced when compared to what they will sell for on Amazon. They’ll buy these items and then resell them on Amazon.

Can you make money doing this?

Sure

Would I ever want to?

No. This sounds like a nightmare to me.

This may ruffle some feathers and if this is what you’re doing right now it may sound like I’m taking a dump on your parade but hold your angry comments for a moment and let me explain my reasoning.

For me, I only want to work on something that can scale.

If you’re running around to stores looking for deals on products to resell it is likely the most you can ever make is a low six figure income and you will struggle to ever grow beyond that. You’re also not building a business you can sell.

Who is going to buy your business which consists of you putting in hours to find products to resell and doing that work?

No one.

On the flip side if you’re selling your own private label product and building a brand as you grow your sales you’re creating an asset that you can sell one day. One of the more experienced marketers in our private mastermind is in the process of doing that right now with one of his product lines.

That’s just not possible if you’re doing the resell game.

How Many Trips Did I Take To The Post Office?

Zero.

My product is made in China and in fact I pay a shipping company to deal with all of the customs work etc so that all I do is tell them where in China to pick up the product and then I simply get an email when the product arrives in the US. They then slap on some UPS labels where the cartons of products are sent off to various Amazon warehouses around the United States. Done.

What Is The Next Step For This Business?

My plan is to exclusively focus on products that can do around $10,000 a month in volume each (which would then each translate to several thousand dollars a month in profit as well). I’ll build those products up, market them well and then move onto the next one. The first time I was just trying to build a replicable process and eventually I can hire more team members to help manage and launch new products.

It might surprise you to hear this but a product doing $10,000 a month or more actually isn’t all that rare.

There are thousands of products doing that volume of sales (and I’m in the process of finishing off some software which will help find these products which will be made available to the next batch of students in our mastermind).

As I mentioned in my sales proof video at the time of recording in the last 7 days I was at around $1,500 in sales which puts me on track for ~$6,000+ in sales every 28 days and a few thousand in profit for just this one product.

I also don’t think I’ve reached the ceiling for this product either because every week since I started selling this product I’ve done more units than the previous week. This very well could eventually be a $10,000 a month product which would be great for my first pick.

I already have my second and third products picked out. After having done this once I can avoid some of the mistakes I made the first time.

I know this launch one at a time $10k product strategy will work because it’s exactly what I found time and time again from other sellers when I set out to research my first product.

I came across numerous sellers with collectively tens of thousands of reviews across their dozens to hundreds of different products. When I look these businesses up they’d have a full team of employees and it’s quite clear they followed the same path of doing one product at a time and then probably multiple new products at a time.

Would You Like To Learn More?

After hearing Brian’s story I partnered with him to form a private mastermind group and we offered access to our private mastermind along with several other exclusive bonuses we provided for people that joined the course we both learned from via our referral link.

The course will re-open again in October which will be our second and final time opening the mastermind in 2014.

For the first group of students clearly Brian was the main guy leading the group (along with many of his friends) but part of the draw of our group is that it’s smaller than most of the other affiliates that promote this course which lets us get to know the members more and answer more questions.

Another unique thing we do is share the actual products we’re building. Specifically I’ve been sharing this product that I’m selling now (and future products with this brand) with our members and discussing what I’ve found works and doesn’t work along the way. Brian is also working on a brand new line of products (also from China) to share with our mastermind as we go into the holiday 2014 season.

You can join the private mastermind waiting list here

In October we’re going to have a cap on the number of students we take on so that we can devote enough attention to helping each person get their product up and going.

For our next batch of students we should do even better because we’ve identified what trips up a lot of people and we’re working to eliminate those roadblocks in the supplemental training and extra bonuses we only provide.

We’re even renting out a venue for our own private one day meetup before the live event where we’re bringing several successful sellers in to share their strategies as well. More details on that to come in October though.

Altogether, I’m very happy I got an email from Brian when he found my blog on Google (yet another reason I love to blog) because this has been a fun side project that has very large potential.

August 28th update 9:30 PM:

Screenshot on August 28th at 930 PM

(Just 2 days after filming this video I’m now sitting at $1,821.42 in last 7 days. I may smash my $10k per month revenue goal faster than expected as long as stock doesn’t run out – boo yah.)

Sept 6th update 7:00 PM: Price Raising Strategy Results

5850 in past 30 days

New Video Stats

Here are some updated results from raising my price. I mentioned in the video that my strategy was to start with a low price to more quickly get reviews, keyword rankings, sales etc. It’s clearly worked as I’ve been able to earn significantly more profit as I’ve raised my price and I have a solid review base now (thanks largely in part to making a high quality product in the first place).

I still need to play with the numbers to find the best price for maximizing profits.

At this point now I can just fill re-orders and monitor the product. Next stage will be to do more products.

This one product should be able to get me close to $10k per month in revenue and several thousand a month in profit.

Hope you enjoyed this post and that you also understand how idiotic I’d have to be to broadcast my product to the thousands to tens of thousands of people that will eventually read this article. Besides, I do plenty of other public case studies on my blog as it is.

[yellowbox]BONUS: Click here to access your free video training on how to create a 6 figure plus Amazon FBA business in your spare time.
This step by step guide is the exact formula I’ve used to create my Amazon business[/yellowbox]

If you’re upset that I didn’t share my product with you then please request a refund for the amount of money you paid to read this by emailing comeonreally?[at]upfuel.com