For the longest time, I never cared about selling physical products on Amazon. Even though I have met dozens of successful entrepreneurs making over $50k a month selling products on Amazon.com, it was not enough for me to put any focus into it at the expense of other projects.

I look at Amazon as just a traffic medium when it comes to building an online ecommerce presence.

I just feel that there is a much bigger market outside of Amazon if you build your own ecommerce platform and drive paid traffic from places like Google Adwords and Facebook.

What makes Amazon an attractive place to sell your physical products is that they handle all the shipping, merchant processing, customer service and inventory management.

So that is a huge benefit in the sense that Amazon can be your one-stop shop for selling your physical goods.

It was only when one of my employees, David, had excess time that I told him to go through some Amazon training and see if we could make this business model work.

So I put him through the popular Amazing Selling Machine (ASM) training course and within the first week he had already selected a product to promote.

Baby bowls with suction cup bottoms.

We decided on the baby market because it is evergreen and appears to be a popular category on Amazon.com.

At the time of his research, there were two popular baby bowl products.

A single bowl set and a 3-bowl set.

The hardest part of the whole process was finding a reputable manufacturer in China to create quality bowls for a good price.

Most Chinese factories automatically assume that buyers from North America want the cheapest price, at the expense of the quality.

We explained to these Chinese factories that we were more concerned about quality and made sure that we got samples to test the quality of the bowls.

Most importantly, we wanted to test that the suction cups at the bottom of the bowls would hold firm on a flat surface.

The samples we received varied from very poor to really good quality.

The only big question we have was what bowl set we were going to sell: the single-bowl or the 3-bowl set?

In the end, we decided to order 500 of each and see what set would sell the fastest.

We quickly designed some really “ghetto” looking packaging and had the bowls shipped to Amazon.

Now, I wasn’t involved in the Amazon process at all.

David did everything including trying to get some sales using Amazon Sponsored Ads to drive traffic to our listings.

We started getting traction almost immediately with 7-8 bowl sales a day.

We ended up spending only about $20 on sponsored ads as we were getting most of the traction from the listing from natural Amazon traffic.

I found this very odd considering we had zero reviews.

We also discovered that the 3-bowl set was outselling the single bowl set by 5-to-1. (Guess what we will be focusing on?)

Now I am a big proponent of building an audience up first before launching any product because this can give you a lot of momentum.

We had already a rather large audience of mothers with children under the age of three, so we knew we could generate a lot of interest for our baby bowls.

We ran a “promo code” for our bowls and sent it out to our audience.

The response was unexpected.

Within the first one hour, we had given away 100 promo codes and within days generated over forty “5-star” reviews.

That was enough to propel our ranking on Amazon and start generating as much as $800 a day in sales.

This continued on and we soon realized we were going to run out of inventory on the 3-bowl set.

We jacked up the price on the 3-bowl set hoping to slow down sales, but it didn’t and we actually ended up with a fatter profit margin.

In the first 30 days (March 2015), we ended up grossing over $10,000 and could have easily done over $20,000 (in April) if we hadn’t run out of inventory on the 3-bowl set.

In the end, this is a good problem to have.

I found the whole process fascinating, namely because I didn’t do anything.

David, just did what the ASM course taught and implemented each step.

We are now looking to venture into other baby products and grow a line of baby products on Amazon and eventually build our own ecommerce store outside of Amazon.

Here is some takeaways we have learned so far from this experiment:

1. Having an existing audience is a great launching pad for your Amazon product.

2. Having a quality product will result in 5-star ratings, which will propel your sales.

3. Have really good pictures of your products and pay attention to your headline and description.

4. Sourcing from China can be a long process. Be patient. We used a sourcing agent, which can make a world of difference with regards to communication and saving on sample shipping costs.

Jason and Matt are reopening their Amazing Selling Machine (ASM) training and you can watch their first Amazon training video by clicking this link.

Comments?

Gauher Chaudhry

So you go out and buy $1,000 worth of advertising on Google Adwords, making sure that you are bidding on the most relevant keywords for your target market.

All the traffic comes flying in and you get dismal conversions resulting in a painful loss.

What do you do?

You blame the traffic source.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

If you are buying premium traffic from reputable sources like Google, Bing or Facebook, it is not the traffic that is the problem.

You see, buying traffic is pretty much a mechanical process. You zero in on your targeted keywords or interests to reach your intended market.

So if it’s not the traffic source, then what is it then?

It’s your marketing funnel.

I feel that this is the most misunderstood aspect of creating on online business.

I know this because I get dozens of emails from readers telling me they spent X dollars on traffic source X and made absolutely no money.

This can happen if you are buying traffic from second tier traffic sources (these are usually called traffic aggregators who pool multiple traffic sources), but if it is rock-solid traffic from a place like Google, the traffic source is not the issue.

Now there are a lot of great spy tools like SpyFu, iSpionage and Adbeat that allow you to find winning text ads and banners, but that is really just the first step in the marketing funnel.

You need to study and analyze the entire marketing funnels of your competitors if you want to understand the entire process of what really is working.

You need to know the:

* Ads
* Landing Pages
* Sales Letters
* Upsells
* Downsells
* Email Followups

If you enter any market with this knowledge in hand, you can dominate that market and your competitors within a short amount of time.

I know this because we do this same exercise with our competitors in particular markets and simply improve the marketing funnel.

Trust me, it is much cheaper to go through your competitors’ entire marketing funnels, buying all their upsells and downsells, and staying on their email follow up sequence to see what else they market.

The alternative is to spend a lot more money through trial and error, struggling to develop your own winning marketing funnel.

This can get very expensive.

Once you have an optimized marketing funnel that is profitable, this will allow you to buy more traffic from more sources.

The business with the largest life-time customer value will always win because they will always be able to buy more traffic then their competitors.

Study the funnels of your competitors.

Swipe, clone and deploy with your own sales hook and watch your online sales skyrocket.

Comments?

Cheers
Gauher Chaudhry

With 2015 in full swing, I made a personal promise to myself that I would make this the most productive year of my Internet Marketing career. Ok, ok.. I know that I think that every year.

But this year I made a commitment that I would see this goal to the end.

Here are my top 10 productivity hacks that I have used to better use my time in my online business.

1. Priority List

Every day I have a new “to-do” list. In fact, I have been using a daily to-do list for the last few years.

But I am a MASSIVE to-do list cheater.

I like to list the easiest and quickest tasks first. Even though they used to give me a sense of accomplishment when I completed them, who am I really kidding?

The quickest and easiest tasks generally have very little effect on the progress of my business and was just an excuse for me to avoid doing the harder stuff that would lead to bigger gains in my business.

I now have a priority list, where the tasks are listed in order of importance. Even if I only get one task on the list done for that day, at least I will have the satisfaction knowing that it will have the biggest impact.

2. Skype-aholics Anonymous

I now shut off my Skype on purpose for one hour in the mornings. It was routine for my Skype to sound like an alarm clock around the 9:00 am mark when all of my connections are coming online to chat and worse, waste my time.

3. Email Overload

When the year started, I made it a goal to unsubscribe from one marketers list every single day for the first two weeks.

I now get much less email and have gotten over the “did I miss something happening in the IM world” syndrome.

4. Delegate

I’m a control freak. Their is a high chance that you are too. Get over it. Delegate or you will find yourself stuck in a job rather than having fun building your business.

5. Exercise

I also have started exercising more regularly and find that it is a perfect escape from the computer. I no longer deal with a sore back or look in the mirror thinking, “wow, that is the body of an IM marketer.”

6. Outsource

You got to love FIverr and Elance.

7. Multi-Tasking

I now download a vast majority of audio trainings onto my iPhone and listen to them while I’m exercising.

This way, I’m killing two birds with one stone.

8. Enounce

Enounce.com is a major time saver. If you are listening to training MP3s or watching training videos online, you can speed them up with this software tool.

Imagine being able to go through 6 hours of Facebook training in just 3. 🙂

9. Cleaner Desk

I make sure that my desk is cleared off before I hit the sack each night. I find myself more motivated to work in the morning when there is no clutter sitting in front of me.

10. Get Up Earlier

I now get up about 30 minutes earlier each day. This extra 30 minutes make a huge difference because I find I am more productive in the mornings.

Now, I can’t say for sure if getting up earlier has made a big difference. Namely because my wife and I are into Prison Break series now, so I have been going to bed a little later. 😉

So these are the top ten changes I have made at the start of 2015 and have already seen progress.

What about you? What items would you add to this list that has worked for you?

Comment below.

Gauher Chaudhry

Seems my last post generated a lot of feedback, so I figured I would shoot this short video to address some of the comments.

I just deleted a little over 8,000 subscribers to just one of my email lists.

Why?

Because according to my Aweber stats, they hadn’t opened up an email from me in the last two years.

To me, it became pointless to have these subscribers on my list if they were not opening my emails anymore.

I have a aggressive goal of trying to get a 20% open rate on the emails I send out and if I can’t hit that number, I start looking to clean up that list by removing dead emails.

In fact, I am getting ready to delete another 5,000 subscribers who have not opened up an email from for a long time.

I don’t need to rub my ego by having a massive email list because it is pointless if people are not reading my emails.

There are generally three (3) key metrics that impact your email marketing campaigns.

1. The “From” field
2. The “Subject Line”
3. The “Body” copy

The name in the “from” field will dictate whether a reader will see your email of value or importance.

The “subject line” will dictate your open rate.

The “body” copy will dictate whether the reader clicks through any links in your email.

If certain readers are not opening my emails over a two year period, there can only be two reasons.

1. My emails are going to their junk/spam folder and they are never seeing it.

2. As soon as they see my name in the from field, this disengage because I have lost that relationship.

The reality is, if you build email lists for marketing purposes, a subscriber (lead) has a certain life span.

It is “dog eat dog world” and with people suffering from information overload every single day, it is tough to stay on everyone’s radar.

I made a last ditch effort by emailing these subscribers and asking them to resubscribe.

The results from those 8,000+ emails sent:

64 opens
12 clicks
3 resubscribes

Enough said.

This validated my conclusion that this part of this list was indeed “dead.”

Not only will this increase the open rate on this list (which I am certain that sophisticated email providers like Gmail monitor), it will save me money at Aweber.

In fact, I will now make it a priority to clean up each of my lists at the beginning of each new year.

How often do you clean up your email lists?

Comment below.