Transcript:
I hereby introduce to you mr. Michael easy let’s get on to one or two final questions which is having got a product are having sourced the products how on earth do I launch it these days on Amazon now and I know that you saw the business while ago and they’re tactically there may be a couple of things you haven’t done the last few months but broadly speaking what is the right way to launch product on Amazon these days oh man so I’m gonna try and condense a very high-level concept that I exposed in the truth about business book that all of you by the way please don’t sell on Amazon or even think about it without reading this book seriously like this is 12 years of lessons that you can just cash in on and not have to deal with okay so alright how to sell it I’m gonna zoom way out because most people are zoomed too far young they’re gonna be like all you need to do this with like your the other keywords or you need to do that with the title like no zoom way out it was way more important so here’s the deal when you sell a product on the Amazon okay you’re not looking to sell just a product you’re looking to sell a product line okay so you have to have what I map out in here is called a value ladder essentially and one of the most mic drop concepts that I had just revealed actually a few months ago on a huge conference that I was speaking out with a bunch of entrepreneurs some of them Amazon’s like what you need to do you just stop making money off of just one product okay so in other words stop selling just one thing right so everybody else is trying to do that and that’s fine and dandy but like it then you just get in a pie price poor with everybody and it’s just not you’re not gonna win long term so what you need to do instead is you need to sell the thing that sells the thing okay and I trade a whole strategy I’ll give you a quick version of I show you the whole thing and the truth about business foot here’s deal instead of selling the thing trying to make all your money off of the thing sell the thing that sells the thing here’s an example of the amp doing this on Amazon you got a buddy named Dave Linden Bob he sells the thing that sells the thing wait wait makes way more money here’s how he’s got a and guys don’t like sell this stuff now that he sells but go do it in a different niche kick but he’s got a he sells matzo balls okay and then apparently that’s like I think it’s the bowl that you mash up the tea the matcha tea and before you make your tea okay I think that’s how it works um and so he sells those but that isn’t how he makes his money so that’s his thing that sells the thing all right so he sells those balls so that he can sell the next thing you need which is gonna mash up matcha tea in that bowl what he need you mean matcha tea so he sells matcha tea and so the bowls are his thing that sells his thing and I should have mentioned this earlier but one of the reasons I got into the past supplements was because it was a consumable product which means that people are gonna buy more of it they’re gonna keep buying it so we had about a third of our entire customers on average come back for more which means which is really good it means for every three customers you acquire you get another one for free that makes sense so it’s like a compounding thing over time so it’s the same thing with with my buddy Dave’s matcha tea he would sell the matcha tea and that pitch the percentage of people would like it and come back and buy more right he wouldn’t have to do anything just let them have it okay so here’s where it gets really cool he would sell the matcha bowls for get this like he would make no money on the matcha bowls okay so he would reduce his price of his matcha bowls to no margin for him he would break even on it which meant he would undercut everybody else selling matcha bowls why because they’re trying to make their money off the matcha bowls right so he would undercut him and then his people have bought his matcha bowls a percentage of them would buy the matcha tea which was his thing that sold the thing and he would make all his money on the matcha tea okay not the bowls so in other words how many of you think that you could sell a whole hell of a lot more matcha bowls if you cut the price down by half your margin out and everybody else is sitting there scratching their heads thinking how are you so near matcha bowls for that price I know what they cost you’re not making any money how are you doing this well play the game or get played I show you how to in the truth about business book I give you a little glimpse there so sell the thing that sells a thing but I have my pet supplements I did the same thing I had a little trial package Hey I sold for cost or our bread butter was selling our normal size one ounce and then getting people hooked on it and then in our insert we would let them know that they could buy a four ounce bulk version for basically 75% of the cost of buying so they it’s like buying three get one the fourth for free okay so like they could buy the book size for less and that was off Amazon because it was in the insert right so not only did I win by selling them a huge bottle of it I also got to cut Amazon out of the equation I got to keep a hundred percent of it because I sent them to my store and then the brilliance of that was it really felt like bulk because I didn’t put the label on the big bottle I was like hey we gotta keep cost too low as possible to just pass the savings on to you so I never had to have the expense of putting those labels on or putting those labels or whatever and people loved it okay so you get creative and you create these things that sell the thing then all of a sudden takes the pressure off of having to make all the money from the thing directly and then you can go and win the game just like Amazon does just like Walmart does just like my cologne idea Wow amazing and what do you say just like Mike lied to you mmm I wouldn’t say I’m doing that very well yeah I’m beginning to learn the art of that I mean I meant early stages the sad thing is you know I’ve known about the theory of this is 2019 now I think I was first taught the theory of this stuff having a big back-end and and you know breaking even or even paying up front in 2007 sometimes that’s how long it takes to go from having a nice theory that you know is really cool and you see other people using it to actually implementing it so I’m kind of feeling both excited and a bit ashamed at the moment because I should know better I haven’t really been influencing this but to be fair again it’s a cultural thing isn’t it the culture of Amazon sellers because very reinforcing self reinforcing with that what will churning calls the Amazon echo chamber you know the podcasts of which I’m one I’m afraid blog posts Facebook groups I also have one you know that the masterminds that we chat to each other in we’re and I’m part of that as well but the truth is that there seems to be for some reason an obsession amongst Amazon sellers who otherwise you know I’m talking super smart people I’m not talking about newbies or people who don’t have analytical or business skills but there’s still an obsession with each product works in isolation to make a certain gross margin in and of itself and that’s all everyone obsesses with and I couldn’t agree more that actually if you could just change one thing about that it just means that everyone else is sitting there scratching their heads because you can’t reverse some of the you can’t reverse engineer the business model from a jungle Scout or helium tan or viral or whatever your favorite tool is just looking at the individual products and that immediately means that you’re screaming your business model from everybody else whereas everyone else’s business models basically transfer out to everyone else right and so I really think that smart I mean they tell me a bit more about the nuts and bolts of this I mean how did the numbers tend to stack up for you with the supplements always you know I guess with Dave you need to be careful with revealing stuff but how does that look in practice compared to a sort of product by products approach yeah that’s so it’s so did you bring it up because all the in here’s the thing guys are listening guys and girls are they’re like everybody no one talks about this like like it they don’t and it’s not your fault if you didn’t hear about this or if it’s like a huge light bulb moment like and this is just scratching the surface I’ll get the rest and the truth about business book but all those big box course sellers program sellers that teach you how to make billions on Amazon they don’t talk about this because they don’t do it right like they make this one-size-fits-all equation the Michael isn’t suggesting where it’s like they get you to believe you have to have this margin or don’t do it no that’s not how business works hey it’s math and it’s it’s like in the gel just give you the general rule okay on the math on the numbers on the front end whatever you’re like front end product is your thing that sells the thing that has to my rule is it has to break-even at least ideally you’re profitable a lot of times you can be profitable on the front but if you can acquire a customer essentially for free meaning you break even on it based off Dave spells as matcha balls that break even in these acquiring a customer for free then it’s just math and it’s a matter of converting as many of those people into the next thing as possible because the next thing is complete margin it’s complete profit for you okay because you’ve already spent the money to acquire them so there’s various ways you can get them to buy them you know the next thing but at the end of the day it’s a math equation it’s figured out okay I spent $0 to acquire this person as a customer because I broke even and then 25% of the people that bought this thing my thing that sells the thing my next thing that means that 25% of all people that come in and buy my thing are gonna buy my other thing where all my money’s made so that’s how you can forecast how much money are things gonna make and then you just work to deploy campaigns that get that conversion rate as high as possible so as many people as possible buying the next thing from the first thing okay so just generally speaking make little than no money on your front end thing so you can scale the heck out of that it’s got to be highly scalable by the way meaning you can get a lot of units of it you’re not going to break stuff if you you know keep selling a crap ton of them and then your next thing or your thing that sells that the thing that you’ve acquired a customer to then sell them the next thing that’s where all your margin is made hopefully out with the the gist of it yeah yeah and as I say it’s something that that in the information marketing world was was common even 12 years ago but for some reason that I’m sure that in the e-commerce it’s an absolute kind of mainstay of your thinking otherwise it would be totally broken economically it’s just Amazon kind of can work without that and therefore I guess we end up just because you can doesn’t mean you should right it’s because you can make money on individual products as mean that’s the best business model so we’re talking about the conversion so obviously a critical thing in that model if you’re breaking even so you’re essentially acquiring customers all you know qualified leads I suppose essentially if they’re playing you know profit upfront for free that’s great how do we can get those conversion rates up from that to the first profit point if you like the press profitable products what are the mechanisms that you recommend and that you’ve seen yeah they’re giving people from the first thing to the next example yeah so for us a little bit old-school so for us like one of the most valuable things was those product inserts so we would we would get a ton of business from that and we would get a lot of people to our our store not our Amazon site but our like Shopify store from that so now I’m not currently an Amazon seller so I’m not up on like what’s hip and working today kind of thing but back you know year and a half ago which isn’t that long we would we that was our biggest thing that cranked people over and one of the ways we did that or pulled that off was because we had premium premium packaging so we were premium product premium priced so we had premium packaging meaning we had an ami but we’ll be a little bottle that the supplement came in we would put it in a burlap sack little mini one okay and then we put that inside of a little jewelry box so it’s like imagine a little you know buy you buy something than from Amazon by the way and 99% of them the same exact supplement packaging would come just a little bottle maybe in a little plastic bag inside of a padded envelope that’s how it was show up ours came in a burlap sack inside of a very nice jewelry box with padding and then it was stick it was a had label a nice label on top and then it was stickered shop so it was literally like gift wrapped in other words and the main reason we did that just for premium presentation and it can be giftable but because then we could shove the insert inside and Amazon never knew about it so that was our big strategy I guess to pulling people up to the next thing yeah I mean sometimes the simplest things are the most effective I’m some of the most effective Amazon sellers I know in Britain that are scaling up to several million dollars from you know probably at least double the revenue and the time they’ve been the masterminds from 40 years ago now might be doubled it twice actually he and they’re doing a lot of the basics well I mean you know they really freaking play took brought in and some examples of their latest inserts which were a thing of beauty that had a lot of design a lot of strategic thinking around the positioning of their company has gone into everything they do including the copywriter that had a professional copywriter they’re thinking about their mission all of that the presentation the branding they put a lot of thought and codes for details but the underlying strategy was as get these people to become loyal to us and buy again and that’s kind of a very simple sort of line you know through line so a lot of what you’re saying is it’s just winning people and not just do that terrible upfront competition where it’s just you versus every other Amazon products out there and it’s purely on price because as you say that’s just a losing game so really really like that there’s so many other things we could discuss I just think that one other thing that we I’d like to just talk about this this is a very sort of 60,000 foot view kind of episode but that’s okay there’s plenty of specifics we’ve had before in since but I think sometimes that’s the valuable stuff talk about the making sense of numbers because a lot of this stuff that you’re talking about depends on being really on top of your number so really understanding them when you get a product and let’s say that you’re doing something a bit more sophisticated you’ve got a match a bowl and you’ve got your matching tee you’ve launched them and you’re looking at your numbers what sort of numbers do you think are really critical to look out and at what point the really $60,000 question on whatever it is is when do I kill a products versus keeping it going versus just kind of you know committing to it full sale that kind of question always the critical one awesome all right so obviously it kind of depends on your situation and where like what you’re trying to get out of your Amazon business but generally speaking if you use the thing that sells the thing strategy which I lay out on the truth about business book essentially it’s two things that really matter number one can you acquire customers with your front end product as profitably as possible or should me as at least break even or profitable okay so like that’s number one can you get a bunch of people in the door so if your front end thing is not selling your back end thing is not gonna sell most likely or it’s this model isn’t going to work so that’s the big thing is is your front end thing gonna take off like crazy okay and then that is essentially your critical number I talked about that in the book as well but that that’s like the thing that predicts the health of your business okay so if you get a bunch of sales on that product the rest of your business is probably gonna do well here’s the second critical thing is our people ascending from your front end product into your next product or the next one of your essentially back end product line and that number needs to get as high as possible as well the conversion rate so if people aren’t getting from your front front thing to the back thing that’s also a problem and if you obviously make steps and you spend time and you deploy campaigns the best you can you get people to ascend to the back but they’re just simply not then maybe that’s not going to work you have to plug in a different product to the back end or you may have to make a change or you might have to you know try something else but those are the two big things to watch for in terms of numbers and just kind of generally speaking I mean you should be able to do a lot of volume on your front end product so like depending on what what niche you’re in that might mean 10 a day I mean a hundred a day whatever that looks like but then the back end of it we really want to see unless it’s like consumable or something or a high ticket or something but you want to see 10 to 25% that’s where you want to be okay and if you can’t get there then keep working to try and get there and if you still can’t get there then it might have ramps and make a change great I’m making as ever detailed show now so folks if you want to get this show notes go to amazing FBA comm /blog which is the blog for the amazing FBA podcast now over 350 episodes and Counting and you’re making a ton of notes here of course if you’re looking for written notes I guess I’m writing furiously and trying to capture all the value we’re discussing here I’m really enjoying the conversation cuz I like the strategy level stuff because honestly my view is that that’s there’s a few reasons why it’s cool but one of them is you get sick of talking about Amazon and nice touches myself I that’s very day say me but guess what if everyone else is talking about it everyone else is doing it and it’s easy to copy that right where is this stuff even if somebody’s talking about it and they’re implementing it you can’t just tell by running junghwa’s count on their listings you can’t reverse engineer this stuff without knowing pretty much everything about some use business so I really love that from the defensibility point of view but in the end you know what we’ve got a few basic concepts but I’d love to hear a bit more about your book so first of all tell us how we get hold of it because you’ve been teasing the book the way through very smarts you’re a super salesman just like the copywriter you are and rightly so because it sounds like it’s got very cool stuff in it so how do we get hold of this amazing book yeah so unlike a lot of other stuff my other stuff as you probably know all right I know you know is really expensive so I used to sell I I have still do but I sell books for hundreds or thousands of dollars per copy because they’re that valuable this book is different I’ve made it so that kind of more my legacy I want everybody to have a copy so the last person that read it I kid you not they just tagged me in the or they messaged me this yesterday and they said that it literally changed their DNA they said that’s how important this book was for them in their business and I thought that was really cool so if that’s something you think that might be a good idea for you you want more of this than then I would highly recommend getting a copy of the truth about business book and Michael’s gonna have a link for you but here’s the good news I made it so that everyone can get it so most of my books are always hundreds or thousands as I’ve said per copy this book I’ve made a digital version for $1 literally okay so that’s what Michael and I aren’t getting rich off yet we just want to help you so the digital version for a dollar you can get started melee or there’s the bundle which has the audio plus physical plus digital rushed shipping for only 27 bucks again we don’t make money off this bad boy you will and with that being said Michael we’ll have a link for you and when you see what I put on page 37 little bit naughty I hope that’s okay but it’s gonna really blow you away thought this was good we’re just getting started so I highly recommend getting it if you don’t hate money if you don’t hate really good stuff excellent that’s what I love about you dating your like chain Sheamus is probably the word shameless salesman but I mean shameless is good why be ashamed of something that is good and certainly today’s conversation just gives a flavor of the the breadth of experience that you have to draw on I mean I think the fact that you’ve done lots of different business models means you’re not obsessed with any single one I think that’s really helpful and I love the blind bullet you know see what’s on page 37 I’ve trained up my VA to do blind bullets you know the three shocking reasons why you shouldn’t just get people to click it’s all good fun and it’s all part of the game and the enjoyment I think of business I think it’s so important to enjoy business and to have an X Factor that other people don’t and I think you really exemplify both things so Dana great to have you back on the show really looking forward to reading a book I’ve heard little bits of ear heard the audiobook I tried to listen to a bit before I came on as certainly was very intriguing what I heard but but I’m looking forward to finishing it now and discovering just that the truth about business and by the way if you want to get a copy folks as Dana said it’s very cheap products compared to everything else that Dennison normally offered so it’s not going to make either of us rich but you can go to amazing FBA calm for such truth I’ll put a link there to whichever appropriate places you can get it from and you can pick it up there so Dana just remains for me to say thanks so much for coming on to share the truth about business with the amazing FBA audience
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