Amazon FBA: All Your Questions Answered

I've made over $6 million selling on Amazon and in this video I'm going to answer every single question you have about how you can make money online by selling on Amazon FBA and my name is Travis I've been selling on Amazon for over eight years and I've helped thousands of people launch their own Amazon FBA business and I've helped people with every step of the journey starting with how to find a product to sell on Amazon all the way to how to find a manufacturer how to add their product listing had to sign up for an Amazon seller account all the way until a lot of these people are doing hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year in sales for instance one of the people I helped AJ he started out with zero in his first year he did over a half a million dollars in sales or another person Brent who's now doing over a million dollars a year in sales he is a first responder helicopter pilot he called me and he said hey I need help selling on Amazon he had not a lot of time because he had a full-time job and he also had two beautiful kids to raise but now as I mentioned he's done over a million dollar in sales in just his last year and in this video I'm going to answer the 20 most frequently asked questions and by answering these questions for you it's going to pretty much guarantee that you're going to be able to create your own passive income business people come to me all the time they ask me the same questions over and over again so I made this giant video for you so that you can get every single question that you have answered in just this one video first I'm going to answer the question of what Amazon FBA is for anyone out there that maybe doesn't know slash during this section I'm going to go into some more detail share some things that a lot of people don't know about Amazon FBA including like some hidden benefits after that I'm going to talk about how you can sell on Amazon in just five steps then I'm going to share with you the number one reason why people fail with Amazon in fact of the people that fail 99% of the people that fail on Amazon fail because of one of the reasons that I'll be talking about later in this video during that section so make sure you pay attention to this entire video and there will be time stamps down below you can jump to any question that you have but after I talk about why people fail with Amazon I'm going to explain the differences between Amazon FBA which stands for fulfilled by Amazon and fbm which stands for fulfilled by Merchant I'll also talk about which method you should use when selling on Amazon and the answer will depend on a couple different things that I'll talk about later after that I'm going to talk about the different ways that you can sell on Amazon including I'm going to share with you what my personal favorite way what I think the best way to make money on Amazon currently is after that we're going to talk about how much it will actually cost you to start your Amazon FBA business and I'm going to go over every single cost that you will have when starting your business I'll also talk about the different upfront fees when selling on Amazon but once you start selling there are a lot of little hidden fees that a lot of people don't talk about that you need to be aware of things like account fees and Pick and Pack fees referral fees and during this section I'm going to talk about how you can save money with all these different fees the next section of this video I'm going to answer the question people always ask me what is my favorite tool when selling on Amazon and I compiled a list of my top 10 tools if you are going to be selling on Amazon use these tools it's going to make your life so much easier and one of the tools I'll be talking about during this section of the video makes it so that you can easily find products to sell on Amazon if there's one secret for selling on Amazon it's using this tool that I'll be talking about during that section I'll also be sharing discount codes with a lot of these tools for you during that section and some of these tools are free so don't think that you have to pay a bunch of money for all this and one of the most important parts about my YouTube channel the reason I created this YouTube channel is I want to be 100% honest and transparent with you and so another question I get asked all the time is like what are the most common mistakes what are the biggest mistakes you've made that I've made selling on Amazon and I'm going to expose every single mistake I've ever made when selling on Amazon including a mistake that cost me over $110,000 and I've made a ton of massive mistakes but I like to think that I made these Amazon mistakes so that you don't have to I'm hoping that you can learn from my mistakes and honestly by watching this video if you plan on selling on Amazon and you watch this video I'm pretty much can guarantee that it's going to save you thousands of dollars because you're going to see the mistakes that I made and you're going to be able to avoid them another question that people always ask me is how do I find a product to sell on Amazon I'm going to I'm going to go in depth I'm going to show you exactly how you can find your own product I'm going to show you some free methods that you can use to find products to sell on Amazon I'll also tell you whether or not you need to pay for tools like helium 10 or jungle Scout another question that people always ask me is how do I find a manufacturer for my product because once people have an idea of what they want to sell on Amazon the next question is like okay cool now how do I find a manufacturer and I got you I have an entire section on step-by-step how you can find your own manufacturer for the product that you're going to be selling after that I'm going to show you how you can create the perfect Amazon listing because people always wonder like how important is your listing when you're selling on Amazon and spoiler it's very important it's very important that you spend a lot of time and energy making the perfect Amazon listing and I have a section in this video where we're going to go in depth about showing you how to create the perfect Amazon listing again there are time stamps down below feel free to skip around we're also going to talk about how to launch your product how to use Amazon PPC how to hire virtual assistance how you can beat burnout and even how you can get on Shark Tank I did a video where I auditioned for Shark Tank people always ask me about that and that's one of those things that a lot of people haven't it's one of my older videos and a lot of people haven't seen so make sure you grab a piece of paper a pen and let's start answering your questions and feel free to skip around during this video watch this video at 2x you can always slow down the speed whatever you need to do but I highly recommend watching this entire video but the first question people always have for me is what is Amazon FBA how does Amazon FBA work and before I get into that first video and I explain exactly what Amazon FBA is if you do want extra help in starting your Amazon FBA business I do have a coaching program and this program comes with a weekly Q&A call and when you join you also get access to over 200 of the most frequently asked questions so at any point if you join my coaching program anytime you have a question anytime you get stuck you're able to either ask myself or or one of my coaches for feedback on your exact specific problem we have a weekly Q&A call that you get to get on so if you want more information about that coaching program there is a link to that down below and I believe in this program so much that if you go through the program you follow all the steps and you don't have success I will personally refund 100% of your money and give you $1,000 out of my own pocket so it's a no-brainer if you're serious about selling on Amazon click on the link down below to learn more about that coaching program but now let's talk about what Amazon FBA is and in this next section I'm going to explain to you exactly what it is and how it can benefit you in just a few minutes Amazon FBA is a way for you to make money off of Amazon it's where you can sell a product on Amazon but Amazon will store your product in their warehouse and when you get an order Amazon will ship it out and Amazon is a trillion dooll company but most the sales most the items that are being sold on Amazon are not being sold by Amazon themselves they're being sold by thirdparty sellers these are people like me and you can easily become one of these as well third party sellers basically list their product on sale for Amazon then they get whatever products that they're going to be selling on Amazon they get those they send it to the Amazon warehouse and when Amazon gets to order Amazon will ship it out this also makes it so that your product that you're selling is prime eligible in Amazon FBA just means fulfilled by Amazon and it's a very simple process now you've probably seen how much money people are making off of Amazon you've probably seen it on on YouTube or on Instagram or heard stories about it now I want to be very clear is Amazon FBA a get-rich quick scheme no it's not are you going to become a millionaire overnight no probably not Amazon does take work but it's worth it it is the best way to start a legitimate business that I've ever found it makes it so much easier cuz Amazon already has the customers so there's already people looking to buy your product on top of that it takes out Amazon takes out the headache of having to ship the products which is a big pain in the butt and it takes out all the headache of storing your products as well the future of Amazon FBA is going to be creating your own product it's going to be taking either existing Amazon FBA products and making them better or it's going to be completely creating something from scratch something that did not exist you can take existing products but you need to make them better now one way you can make a product better is by creating a better brand around it but that's not always going to be enough think about how can you make this product how can you improve the product and there's a lot of things you can do one look at the three star two star one star reviews of an existing product and try to figure out how you can improve it but even better than that is try to figure out how can you make a product that does not yet exist how do you create something that you wish existed in the world and this is what I did and this is how I had success on Amazon now a bonus tip I'm going to be honest with you if you're just trying to do this to make money it's going to be harder I think the biggest opportunity on Amazon right now is creating a product that you're passionate about because if you're really passionate you really believe in the product you're trying to sell it's going to make this entire process easier now don't get me wrong even if you're not passionate about the product you're selling can you still make money on Amazon absolutely 2 months after I launched my product on Amazon I was making over $300 a day passive income and the key the thing that I did with my product and I think the future of Amazon FBA is I made a unique product and I branded it properly so I took existing products out there and I made a more premium version of that and I made branding that was also more premium the next most important question I get all the time is is it too late to sell on Amazon FBA in 2024 in 2025 what ever year it is people are constantly asking me and I've been selling on Amazon for around eight years now and every single year people have said it's too late Amazon FBA is over so in this next section I want to answer the question is it too late to sell on Amazon and the answer might surprise you because it's not all rainbows and sunshine and I'm going to tell you right now that it's not too late to sell on Amazon if you do it the right way if you follow the correct method for selling on Amazon and creating a product and this is something that I teach in depth in my Amazon FBA program again there's a link to that down below if you want to get on the wait list it's not open right now but I do open it up every couple months or so so link to that down below but now let's talk about is it too late to sell on Amazon Amazon FBA is not worth starting in 2024 if you're still trying to do old school private label or wholesale techniques and that's because there's over 9 million Amazon sellers with 4,000 new sellers joining every day and Amazon is getting really sad SAT but Amazon is a $ 1.6 trillion company that's not a million doll company that's not a billion doll company that's a$ 1.6 trillion company and Amazon makes up 50% of all e-commerce sales that happen here in the United States but still there are five reasons why many people think it's too late to sell on Amazon in 2024 Amazon is oversaturated China can steal your product the coming recession is going to kill all your sales plus two other massive reasons I'll reveal and if you are looking to start an Amazon FBA business you need to know how worried you should be about each of these different issues and I will tell you how concerned you should be about each of these on a scale from 1 to 10 and how you can still succeed on Amazon in 2024 because 66% of all the sales that happen on amazon.com's website are by thirdparty sellers that's people like you you and me selling our products on amazon.com and over 400,000 people have made at least $100,000 selling on Amazon but maybe the most important reason why I don't think it's too late to sell on Amazon is this one chart here and amazon.com was started in July 1994 for the first 3 years they only sold books on their website then they started to expand and started to sell CDs toys and electronics but it was n until the year 2000 that amazon.com started allowing thirdparty sellers that's people like you and me to start selling our products on their website and at this point they only had around 20 million customers coming to their website but since there was no one selling products on the website all you had to do was start an Amazon seller account put up any junk product and you would make a ton of money and so yes selling on Amazon has gotten harder but nowadays instead of there only being 20 million customers there's over 300 million customers with over 200 million Prime customers and even though there are 9 million Amazon sellers there's only about 2 million that are active Amazon sellers and of those 2 million active Amazon sellers only 1 million of them are in the United States but the most important reason why it's not too late to sell on Amazon is because every single year Amazon's revenue is growing in 2010 Amazon only did $34 billion in sales compare that to last year where they did over $700 billion in sales and this year where they're projected to do over $800 billion in sales and every single year their sales are going to be growing on top of that e-commerce which is people buying things online is growing every single year in 2022 e-commerce made up about 16% of all retail sales last year it was over 177% and this year it's projected to be almost 20% and it's going to continue to grow every single year so right now is the perfect time to start selling products online but I don't want you to take my word for it let's go over the most common concerns that people have with starting Amazon right now in 2024 and I'm going to rate them for you out of 10 how worried you should be as well as show you how you can avoid some of the common traps that people fall into when selling on Amazon the first reason why people say it's too late to sell on Amazon is because Amazon is oversaturated and we've talked about that a lot in this video as I've mentioned over 9 million sellers but there's only really 1 million active Sellers and considering that over 43% of all sellers have made at least $100,000 I don't really think that Amazon is oversaturated the problem is it's not that Amazon's oversaturated it's that certain products certain product categories are oversaturated and everyone's trying to sell the same thing and if everyone's zigging you need to zag and the way to do that is to find a unique product an interesting product that no one else is selling now you might might be wondering how do you find these products you need to understand that the key to success on Amazon is to understand that amazon.com is just a search engine that people go to and they type in what they want to buy if you can find out what people are typing into the search bar in Amazon you can find out what they want to buy and if you know what they want to buy you can sell them that exact same product for instance with my first real Amazon FBA passion product in my first year I did over $300,000 in sales over $120,000 in profit the next year I had a bunch of competitors come in and it actually increased my sales that next year I did over $400,000 in sales over $150,000 in profit and that's because when you're the first to Market when competitors come in they don't steal your market share they actually grow the entire pie my product was the first keto nut butter on Amazon and when other people started marketing their keto nut butters on Amazon it actually made it so that there was more customers and that everyone ended up winning the next fear people have when selling on Amazon is China and this is a 10 out of 10 thing that you should be concerned about but I'll share with you some tips on how you can get this down to a two out of 10 about how concerned you should be and the problem with China is if you have a successful product they will copy your product they will sell it for cheaper and sometimes your own manufacturer will even rip off your product idea and sell it on on Amazon for a discounted price making it so you will pretty much go out of business but there are solutions to stopping your manufacturer or anyone in China from copying your product the first option is to get a patent on your product and you can actually get a provisional patent which gives you protection for up to a year for just $75 another option is you can have your manufacturer sign in nnn an mnn stands for non-disclosure non-use and non circumvention this is basically like an NDA but ndas don't actually work in China where the nnn will effectively stop your manufacturer from copying your product you can even go as far as getting your product patented in China but the real secret here and the reason that in the long run China won't win is because you are better at branding and social media than China will ever be when you're selling your passion product on Amazon you will understand the market you'll understand the customers better than China will which means that you can create better branding and if you want to you can create better marketing using things like social media that'll promote your product so even though you should be worried about China when you're selling on Amazon if you follow all the steps I talk about you really shouldn't be that worried not to mention that you can use sites like thomasnet.com to find a manufacturer here in the United States but I know a lot of people are concerned that there's going to be a recession and that inflation is getting out of control and it's true the stock market was crashing crypto is crashing but a lot of those things are starting to rebound though according to experts we're still not out of the woods yet but one thing you should understand is that 50% of all Fortune 500 companies these are the 500 most successful companies in the world 50% of them were started during a recession so just because there's a recession doesn't mean that you can't start a successful business in fact when we look at how the stock market performs compared to how Amazon sales have been it doesn't matter whether it's good times or bad times Amazon sales have been going up every single year and that's because even if people are buying things less every year they're buying more and more things online so it ends up balancing out and making it so that right now is the perfect time to start selling your products online now inflation is a whole another thing shipping costs have been going up like crazy they're up 23% on top of that a lot of raw materials in Goods have been going up in price as well and this is one of the best parts about being a business owner because if you have a salary job and prices go up tough luck you're probably not going to get a raise but if you're a business owner and prices are going up guess what you get to also raise your prices which means that your profit margins are going to be about the same and this is why I always tell people it's better to be a business owner than work for a business and I would rate this a 5 out of 10 as far as concerned because there are certain categories that during a recession will go down in sales but there's certain products that you can sell that even during a recession people are still going to want to buy things like groceries or items for their babies or pets and during a recession people still want pleasure so they'll buy things like candy so if you really think that there's going to be a recession create products that will Thrive during a recession the truth about this is none of us actually know every single year people are saying the economy is going to collapse and then it continues to go up so don't focus on the worst case scenario that's what most people do they get stuck in analysis paralysis and they never actually start their online business because they're too afraid that it might fail and I understand that it's scary because there are a lot of costs involved and this is the fourth reason why a lot of people say that it's too late to sell on Amazon and yes when you're starting an Amazon business it does cost money and around 11% of people were able B to start on Amazon for less than $500 133% of people were able to start their Amazon business with between $500 to $1,000 15% were able to start it with between $1,000 to $2500 18% with between 2500 to 5,000 19% between 5,000 and 10,000 and around 22% of Amazon sellers started their business with more than $10,000 and when selling on Amazon not only do you have the startup cost you also have the 15% Amazon selling when you sell on Amazon's platform they charge you 15% of the total cost of your product as a fee though there is a trick you can use the brand referral program to get that percentage from 15% down to 5% there's also the optional Amazon FBA fee and the cost for the FBA fee depends on the size of your product it also covers the cost of postage a lot of people think that Amazon is ripping them off because they're charging so much money but let me tell you right now I used to send send all my products myself to customers and it was a lot of work plus you still had to pay for postage so yes even though Amazon does charge a fee for this it makes your life so much better I would send all my products directly from my manufacturer into the Amazon warehouse which meant that I didn't even need to live in the United States I actually spent the first few years of my Amazon business traveling the world living in a bunch of different locations I even with the money that I made for my Amazon business bought a beach house down in Mexico lived there for about 6 months and my business kept running and so overall I would give this concern of cost a rating of three out of 10 because a lot of people tell me Amazon is taking so much money but last year alone Amazon spent over $40 billion getting new customers so they spend a lot of money to get those customers they make it easy for you to sell on their website think about that 15% Amazon selling fee as a cost of marketing and trust me that's a lot less money than most people spend on their marketing the fifth comp common reason why people say it's too late to sell on Amazon is because it used to be easier and it's true 5 six seven years ago it was easier to sell on Amazon than it is now but 66% of Amazon sellers say that they wish they would have started sooner and every year for the last four years people have asked me this question is it too late to sell on Amazon and every year I say no get started now and most of those same people end up coming back to me the next year and say oh I wish I would have started last year what if about now now is it too late and the truth is it's not too late to start selling on Amazon but every single moment every single year that you wait to start your journey it's going to get a little bit harder and most people including myself struggle with analysis paralysis you hear about a great opportunity and you think to yourself oh this must be too good to be true so you wait and you analyze and you try to figure out do you want to jump into the deep end and I want to let you know that this mistake is costing you hundreds of thousands of doll I did this with my first Amazon FBA product I had the idea a year before I ever launched it and when I launched my product I made over $100,000 in profit in my first year which means that if I would have actually taken action and launched my product a year earlier I would have an extra $100,000 in my bank account today but I was scared because I didn't know if my product was going to be successful and I was so focused on the small amount of money that I had to spend to start my business and I was afraid that I was going to lose it that I didn't think about the possibility about how much money I could actually make and this is a common mistake that new Amazon sellers fall victim to so right now I want to help you to make sure that you don't make the same mistake most people are stuck in that analysis pris because they don't know the exact formula that they should use to launch a product other people are scared because they don't know anyone that's actually had success making money online and this is the three things that you need you need a step-by-step formula you need someone that's going to show you how to do it and you need a community of other people because you're going to have questions along the journey and you need to make sure that you have people that are there for you to answer your questions and as I mentioned the longer it takes you the more money that you're missing out on people say that Amazon FBA is dead but 43% of Amazon sellers make over $100,000 a year but you must choose the right way to sell or your entire business might fail there's five steps to selling on Amazon and the first step is to pick a model each of the different models for selling on Amazon has a pro and a con to it and by the end of this video you'll know exactly which model you should use then you'll pick a product and I'm going to share with you a free product research method that beats a lot of the paid Services out there step three is to create your listing and I'm going to share with you 10 different secrets on how to make a product listing on Amazon that people will want to buy and I'm going to share with you the biggest mistake that most Amazon sellers make and how to avoid it the next step is one of the most important steps and I want to share with you exactly what my product launch strategy was and I do something different than what anybody else out there is doing I call it a product launch group and using a product launch group is how I was able to get 75 reviews within the first few weeks and do $30,000 Revenue by my second month finally the last step is to keep selling and keep growing on Amazon and I have some really cool techniques I'll share with you on how to do that there's four different models for selling on Amazon Retail Arbitrage wholesale private label and creating your own product each of them have pros and cons Retail Arbitrage is where you go out you buy things that are on sale and you basically flip it on Amazon and make a little bit of a profit now the benefit of this is it's very easy to get started it doesn't take that much money to get started but the downside is it's not really a scalable business wholesale is where you go to manufacturers you buy things for wholesale prices and again you pretty much flip it on Amazon the benefit with this is It's relatively easy to get started and it takes less money than it does for private label or creating your own product the downside is there's nothing stopping the manufacturer from going directly onto Amazon there's also a good chance that you might have competitors into the market because there's no reason that that wholesaler couldn't sell to one of your competitors which makes it tough to create a sustainable business from this business model the next business model is private label and this is where you find products that people buy off Amazon and you basically create your own version of it you slap your private label onto an already existing product Pros of this is you can create a product and be the only one selling it but the downside is there's probably going to be a lot of other competitors that can do the same thing obviously they can't sell your brand of that product but they can sell their own brand so the moat around your Castle isn't that big and finally there's my favorite business model which is creating your own product this is what I do and this is what I teach you can take existing products and make them better or just create a product that does not yet exists in the world I'll talk about what my product is and my method for this in the next step but the pros of this is you're creating a better product or a product that does not yet exist which means you're creating a whole new category and you won't have any competitors it also means you'll have a bigger moat around your Castle because let's be honest if you have a cool enough product that's making sales eventually a competitor will come in but you do have a bigger moat around your Castle so it's going to be a little bit harder for them to copy your product than it would with a typical private label product once you pick your business model you need to find a product sell on Amazon now how you pick a product will be different depending on what business model you're using on Amazon if you're doing Retail Arbitrage basically you're going to want to look for something that's on sale that's cheap that you can make a profit on on Amazon it's pretty simple if you pick the wholesale business model what you're going to try to do is find a product that isn't already being sold on Amazon go to the manufacturer and ask to wholesale it and basically just sell it on Amazon if you're looking to private label ideally what you'd find is a product that has a lot of sales but a crappy listing you'd make your own version of this product and go on to make a much better listing and this is is all the secrets we're going to talk about in Step number three now to find a product if you want to save time there's jungle Scout and viral launch which will help you do product research or if you want to save money you can do it the manual way for free basically you can use the 999 technique or a free version of jungle Scout not a lot of people know about but now to my favorite way to select a product to sell on Amazon and that's to create your own product ideally what you do is scratch your own itch figure out a product that you wish existed in the world this is what I did with my product I was looking for a healthy fat on the-go snack and I couldn't find it so I created my own and to find out what my next product that I'd sell on Amazon I asked my product launch group what do they wish existed in the world or how could I make my product better and in step four we'll talk about a product launch Group which is the most powerful tool nobody is teaching nobody is talking about this means that even if you don't have any money you can sell on Amazon by crowdfunding your idea okay now that we have your product it's time to create your listing and I'm going to Rapid Fire teach you 10 different secrets to create a great listing the main image is the most important thing most beginners mess up you want to have as little white space around your image as possible it's also better to use a computer rendered image in my opinion than a real photo for your title you want to include keywords and talk about the benefits of your product same thing for the bullet points you want to also include keywords here and talk about the benefit of your product and why people should buy description is your last chance to convince people to buy your product so really hype it up and talk about the benefits make sure you're utilizing all nine images that Amazon allows you to have have you can do things like showing your product in use showing the benefits of your product and just showing your product from different angles the question and answer section is a chance for you to get rid of all the fears people might have about buying your product if you want to get people to buy more than one of your products you can use a coupon stack which gives discounts if people buy multiples if you have a trademark make sure that you get branded content which allows you to put images in your description should also add a video which is a chance for you to connect with your audience and really sell them on why your product is perfect adding a coupon code is a good way to make your product pop on the search results and make people feel like they're getting a good deal and finally there's reviews which may be the most important part of your product page you want to do whatever you can to get five stars but make sure you're within Amazon's terms of service now that your product page is dialed in it's time to get excited and it's time to launch your product now the key is to get as many sales as many reviews as fast as possible and there's a lot of different methods that people use to get sales and reviews right away but most of them stink what I recommend doing is using a product launch group and ideally you build your product launch Group 1 2 3 months before you launch your product in fact they help you make a better product when I was creating performance Nutter they helped me choose a logo they helped me with the design of my packaging they gave me insights that I never would have came up on my own so when I finally went to launch my product on Amazon they were happy to buy one they were happy to leave a review they shared it with their friends there's so many benefits to a product launch group they even help me come up with what my next flavor for performance n butter should be I simply did a poll in the Facebook launch group and I saw overwhelming results again if you want more information on how to create your own product launch group links down below there's two methods that I recommend to make sure that your sales on Amazon continue to grow the first one which is an insanely powerful tool is Amazon's PPC platform basically tell Amazon where you want your ads to show up and every time someone clicks on your ad you pay a little bit it's your goal to make sure that your ads are profitable but this is one of the easiest ways I've found to make money online period the other method for growing your sales is to drive external traffic to your product page you can drive traffic from Instagram Facebook YouTube anywhere you can think of where you can put a link you can drive external traffic and Amazon will reward you with more sales and putting your product higher up in the search results in my opinion by far the best way to make money online is to create and sell a passion product on Amazon now that you have an overview of the process let's go over the biggest mistakes that people make if you can avoid these mistakes you can pretty much guarantee success on Amazon there's five main reasons why 99% of people fail on Amazon and if you can avoid these five things you can pretty much guarantee your success on Amazon and I'm going to start with some of the more technical reasons why people fail but number four and number five are by far the biggest reasons why people fail once they get started with Amazon but number one let's start with the biggest reason why I think so many people fail on Amazon is they never get started now this might sound obvious but a lot of people get stuck in analysis paralysis I've even got stuck in analysis paralysis and I'm going to show you how to get out of that and why it's so important that you at least try especially if you're interested in Amazon and one of the biggest examples I have is a lot of people including myself are scared to make mistakes they're scared to lose money but I honestly believe if you do Amazon right it can be so profitable that it almost doesn't matter if you make some early mistakes for instance my product does about $10,000 a month profit and what that means is for every month I delayed launching my product it actually costs $10,000 so let's say I wanted to save $11,000 but it would take me an extra month to make a decision that was a waste of money so an example would be even if I made a ridiculous amount of mistakes let's say $30,000 worth of mistakes which would almost be impossible but in exchange I was able to get my product out 6 months earlier because you know I was doing things fast and I was actually trying I still would have made a profit of $30,000 as opposed to if I would have not if I would have waited and and waited those six months then I would have made Z so obviously $30,000 is better than $0 and a lot of people don't get started cuz they want to know how to do everything perfectly you're going to figure it out like once you get started you will figure it out as you go and don't get me wrong there are some really big technical mistakes that people make and I'm going to share all of them with you but the last thing I want to say on this is a lot of people I see they're not really sure how they want to make money online they're not really sure what the best route is so they try a little bit over here and a little bit over there and they're dabblers most people when it comes to making money are dabblers don't be one of those people you have to have laser focus you have to focus on this so for the next three to six months focus on this one way of making money do it like a 100% And then once you launch your product you're going to figure out how things go now there are two different Big Technical mistakes and one is selecting a bad product and then the other one is having a bad listing and I've done a lot of Consulting I've worked with a lot of people and these two mistakes are probably of the people that get started two of the biggest ones that people make and let's start with a bad product a a lot of people select a product to sell and from the start they've selected a terrible product it's a product that as soon as they show it to me I look at them and I say you're you're never going to have success with this for a few different reasons sometimes people pick products that are just way too competitive other times people just really don't understand how how their margins will work and all the costs associated with selling on Amazon but by far the most common problem I see is people are selling junk people are private labeling from Alibaba they're just taking you know standard private label products in their brand on it and maybe they're not even doing a good job on branding it which is another thing like if you think you can just take a product from Alibaba slap a sticker on it that's your brand and throw it on Amazon in 2020 2021 and Beyond but I think nowadays you need to have something special about your product something that makes it stand out from the competition and the more unique it is the more likely you are going to be to succeed don't get me wrong I think there is still opportunity to make money off private labeling it's just it's not what it used to be and so you're going to have to start thinking about how can you make your product stand out and maybe that is by just making a really killer brand maybe it is by you have a better way to get a ton of reviews maybe there's a lot of different little things but keep in mind the easier it is for you to do this the easier it's going to be for someone else to copy your product and and do it just as well if not better than you so the more unique you can make the product that you're selling the better but then there is an issue with that you want to make sure that your product's going to sell and I highly recommend before you sell a product on Amazon test it out start an Instagram start some kind of social media see if people are interested in your product there maybe even do what I did I did a Kickstarter I raised $155,000 for my product before I ever launched on Amazon and the whole point of doing this was to test the market see are people actually interested in this and my product was relatively unique so I had to like I couldn't just jungle Scout and and figure out what the sales numbers were for an existing product I had to actually test the market by doing a Kickstarter but in exchange that $115,000 helped me pay for my first production run but even if you have a perfect product you found the perfect product it's really an amazing product it shocks me how many people show me listings of their product and it's just terrible one of the first things you want to look at is keyword research really try to figure out what are people searching in Amazon to find your product like what are the perfect keywords that you want to rank for like that's the foundation and there are tools helium 10 jungle Scout that can help with this you don't need them but they can help you can also try using the Google Keyword tool it's it's not perfect but what it basically allows you to do is figure out what what is the search volume how many people are searching for certain keywords on Google so it's not how many people are searching for those keywords on Amazon but it can still be helpful some other ideas for doing keyword research is figure out what your competitors figure out what similar products what keywords are they going after look at their title look at their their bullet points everywhere maybe even talk to some customers find some people that would buy your product and ask them what would you search for in Amazon and keep asking them questions until you get every single keyword that you can think of then once you have these keywords and this is the next big mistake people make is in the title make sure you put those keywords in the title and now that might sound obvious but let me tell you this as well the closer to the front of the title they are the better also something very important is your title needs to be something that people want to click on when they're searching for those keywords your title needs to reflect what people are searching for a lot of people make the mistake of putting their brand at the beginning of their title nobody cares about your brand unless you are Nike or some majorly established brand but even then if you're Nike what what does Nike do they put the product first like what is the product now technically this might be against the rules for Amazon Amazon has weird rules on how you're supposed to format your title but I'm going to tell you from experience they don't really care that much as long as you're not being totally scammy about it so don't start with your brand think about what is the main keyword you're trying to go after and put that at the beginning of your title because think about this first off Amazon weighs that more heavily but from the user perspective if they're searching for rustic wooden table and the first three words of your product title are rustic wooden table then they know that it's a good match like if they have to search through your title to try to figure out what your product's about they're not going to be as interested in clicking it one of the big principles of online marketing is don't make your users think don't make other people think the more obvious things can be the more likely they are to purchase your product related to that is your main image your main image should be is clean is clear is big is possible you want to make sure there's not too much white space on the outside I see so many people do this you want to also make sure that your product image is going to pop remember that your product is going to be shown on a white background so as little white space as possible is going to help make your product pop and you want to make it very clear from your product image what is it don't show your branding and your logos like at least predominantly like that could be a small subset of it but that shouldn't be the main thing I've seen a lot of people that they have their their brand logo or the Box as the big thing and then the product really small nobody cares about what your box looks like I mean they do but that's not as important as what's inside the box it's the product that they're going to buy the third biggest thing is reviews so many people so many people come to me and they've got three reviews and they're like hey why is my product not selling I'm like it's got three reviews you can't find some people that can review your product now this is against terms and service but can't you find someone at your gym someone that maybe you're a coworker or or someone that that you know Loosely that can review your product I know a lot of people that do this and I've never seen anyone get in trouble Amazon can crack down on reviews in certain situations but honestly as long as they're not sharing the same internet you log in to log into Seller Central it really shouldn't be a problem now a lot of people might disagree with me on this one so go for it at your own risk but if you can only get three people to review your product or four or five then honestly I wouldn't believe in that product and most customers feel the same way so you need to get a ton of reviews there's a lot different ways to do it my favorite way in the world to get a lot of reviews from day one it's how I got 75 reviews is a product launch group get a lot of people into a Facebook group it could be Instagram get a long email list get people really excited about your product before you ever launch it so that when you go to launch it you'll get a spike of sales from day one you'll get a spike of reviews from day one or it might take a few days for them to receive the product but from at least the first week Amazon's going to see this and it's going to shoot your ranking it's going to shoot your product to pay one maybe even the first result because it sees that all wow this product just came out and so many people have already bought it so many people have already left reviews so there's really no excuse not to be able to get reviews some other things I've seen people do is talk to maybe influencers in your space like go on Instagram or wherever YouTube and ask people ask those influencers to buy it and then reimburse them via venmo again technically against Amazon's terms of service but you know what's the the chance that Amazon could find out about it in worst case i' the worst worst case I've ever seen is if Amazon does find out about something like this they remove the review and that it's it would be very difficult for them to find out about it now again proceed at your own risk but this is a huge reason why people don't fail look the title the main image and the amount of reviews you have those are the three most important things other than of course selecting a good product those are the three most important things and if you can do those right people will click on your product and the chance that they will buy is really high Amazon's conversion ratees really high but to guarantee that you have a High conversion rate some other things you might want to consider are bullet points so what are the bullet points that represent your product now in these bullet points try to integrate your keywords but remember it's not don't write your bullet points for the search algorithm write them for the customer write them so that when customers look at your product page that they're like wow this is an amazing product make sure to highlight the benefits what are the benefits not the features what are the benefits of your product for instance this product like my product I might say it will give you energy all day long sustain longlasting energy the feature would be 19 G of fat 19 no one cares about 19 G of fat what they care about is that that 19 G of fat is going to lead into sustained long lasting energy so make sure you hit the bullet points make sure your bullet points stand out you can use things like 100% money back guarantee if they're not satisfied here's a hint all products on Amazon have 100% money back guarantee if they're not satisfied so by putting in that guarantee as one of your bullet points you're going to make customers feel more at ease to buy your product but here's the truth I I've had that on my product for a year I've only ever had one person say hey I wasn't satisfied with this I want my money back and honestly that person was a just kind of a scammer anyways he probably would have found some other way to get money it's very rare that people take you up on this guarantee but it makes them feel better about buying your product some other things to help sell your product are the other images this is probably the next most important thing is all the other images you want to show people what it's going to be like to own your product remember they're buying your product online they have no idea they never held it in their hands they don't know what it's going to be like you have to convince them so they can mentally in their head imagine what it would be like to own the product that you're selling and you do this through the other images again try to highlight the the benefits of your product show them what it would look like in the real world show real humans interacting with it show all the different benefits and try to try to highlight it in image form for instance for my product I tried to show people how you could eat this like all the different ways because that's a big question people have I try to show people like being active and fun recipes that they could make with it the last element that I see people making is a description you know descriptions aren't as important as everything else we've talked about but just put a little bit of effort into it you know maybe spend a few hours and think how can you make your description unique and stand out but 99% of people are going to be buying based on the main image the reviews and the title and maybe the bullet points or and the other images as well those five things are what 99% of people that's how they make their decision next time you're on Amazon try to figure out like why do you buy the products you buy for me I've noticed all these things reviews are so important the main images are so important like all these things determine which product I buy when I'm searching around on Amazon now the next two reasons I'm going to talk about are by far the biggest reasons why I see people fail on Amazon and really quick before before I jump into that I do want to note that there are other technical reasons why people fail such as Amazon PPC maybe their Amazon PPC is not dialed in but honestly if you have all the principles down you have a good product and you have a good listing you're going to have success with Amazon as long as you follow these these next two rules I'm going to talk about and one of the other reasons why I see so many people fail with Amazon it's honestly one of the reasons I haven't been as successful on Amazon as I probably should have been is fear fear cripples new Amazon FBA sellers for so many reasons and I see this so often in the comment section of my YouTube video so many people that have this negative mindset but the truth is I I've even been guilty of this at times and I've talked about this before on this channel but I've waited probably a year to launch my my second Amazon Faba product which is going to be a caca version of my original product and the reason that the reason I've been holding back for so long honestly was fear I was nervous I was going to waste money I was nervous that if it messed up and it didn't do well I'd look bad because I'm very public like I share everything and if you're new to the channel I share all my numbers I share my products I share everything so make sure to subscribe because I'm going to be releasing this cacao very soon and if I do mess up you'll be the first to know about it but if I do well obviously I'll teach you everything I know and all the tactics I learned to be successful with that product but recently on this channel I've been getting a lot more negativity a lot more negative comments a lot more haters and it it really hurts me because when I see that I know that those kind of people are are never going to succeed they're they're going to fail and I know that from firsthand experience because when you have that mindset of everything everyone's out to get you and everything's going against you it's almost guaranteed that you're going to fail and I'm going to talk about at the end of this video how to guarantee success but one of the biggest things is if in life you constantly think about wow like this is amazing that this happened because it's going to open up some other door if you have the theory that the entire universe is conspiring to help you achieve your dreams it's almost guaranteed that you're going to succeed and I want to point out something really quick if you're watching this video you're already successful like you've got running water you've got food for 99% of human history you're living in paradise and I want there's going to be some hard times with selling on Amazon which leads into the last point I want to talk about Amazon is not a get-rich quick scheme you're not going to become a millionaire overnight but it is the easiest way to make money online I've tried a lot of different ways to make money online in my opinion it's the easiest way to start a legitimate business that you could sell that you could go travel and be on vacation and it would still keep making money it's like one of the only ways I've found that actually works to make passive income and they say that four out of five businesses fail but this is another mindset shift I want you to have when I was quitting my corporate job it was about 7 years ago I had a corporate job I got really depressed I was hating life and I was going to do anything I could to quit so I could you know get my own freedom because the truth is in my opinion if you're in the corporate world if someone's telling you when to wake up when to go to work you're a slave and I wanted to get my freedom and when when I would tell people that when I would tell my co-workers that they would all say the same thing four out of five businesses fail and my response was cool I'll start five by the fifth one statistically I'm going to be successful and obviously I was joking by that but that's the kind of mindset I think you need to have to be successful on any kind of business because the truth is the first time you do something it very well might be successful but you know what the second time you're going to do it better the third time you're going to do it better if you keep going and you start five businesses one of those five would eventually be successful and let's talk about how to guarantee success on Amazon how to guarantee success on business and I I do have some principles I want to share with you that if you follow these I can guarantee that you'll be successful on Amazon but really quick before I do that I do want to ask a favor if in my future videos if you see people like leaving negative comments be nice to them but just let them know in in a nice of a way as you can that hey that's a a failure mindset like that's a negative mindset because I firmly believe when you are willing to waste your time to leave negative comments when you're willing to waste your time to try to put someone else down the chances of you being successful or I should say of that other person being successful are almost zero but if you're the kind of person that's willing to you know let people know and and be gentle and remind them about that and you're trying to build other people up the chances of you being successful are almost 100% because there's just this thing in your in your mind that switches when when you're trying to help other people it helps you be successful and that's I think one of the first principles if you want to guarantee success on Amazon you need to have a bigger purpose than just making money maybe maybe it's like you're trying to help the world out by releasing a really cool product or or maybe maybe the bigger purpose is you really are enjoying it you're really loving it but if your only goal is to purely just make the money it's going to to be hell it's going to be hard and the truth is if your only goal is just make money you're a slave again like you know I was a slave to the corporate world and then for the next five years I was a slave to myself I was a slave to my business but if you can have a bigger reason why you're trying to do it you will you'll be successful another thing is that starting a business on Amazon starting a business in general and again even though Amazon is way easier than typical businesses like brick and mortar business or any other business model I found it's like climbing to the top of Mount Everest it's not easy and you don't want to be the first one to try to do that you're not you're not the first one to try to do that so get a map get some kind of a map but one thing I would highly advise is get a mentor again if you're going to climb to the top of Mount Everest you might want to talk to someone that's done it before you might want to get some feedback along the way and related to that is you don't want to try to do this by yourself like you want a community around you my biggest success started happening when I started getting mentors and when I had started surrounding myself with a community of people that were all doing the same same thing and there's a lot of different ways to find a community there's a I have a Facebook group that's free that you can join you can do this kind of work on your own but I think the biggest way to guaranteed success on Amazon is to get a good map and I was too stubborn to do this I was by most my entire entrepreneurial career I thought I could do everything myself I wanted to be the first one to blaze the trail and that was so silly and one of my biggest regrets was not investing in in some kind of course like other people have already done it I should have learned from them again don't think that you need to necessarily invest in a course or spend a ton of money but what you should do is figure out someone else's method and just if it's your first time doing it copy it step by step and along the way maybe try to make it your own maybe try to make it better but for the most part you should follow the math and my last piece of advice for you is it's going to be a struggle but remember to enjoy it enjoy the journey at this point you're already doing better than 99% of the sellers on Amazon most people aren't watching videos like this they're not learning they're not educating themselves so many people just try to start selling Amazon without learning anything about it and spending the time to learn how to properly sell on Amazon is one of the best things that you can do with your time and that's one of the reasons why I always recommend people if you're serious about selling on Amazon join a course join a coaching program and as I mentioned I do have my own coaching program there's a link to that down below to get more information and my program comes with a 100% money back guarantee and if you don't make money using my method for selling on Amazon I will personally give you $1,000 again if you want more information about that there is a link down below but at this point you know about how to sell on Amazon you know that it's a good opportunity you have to decide do you want to do Amazon FBA or fbm and only one of these do I really strongly recommend but let's break down what the difference of these two are in the next section let's start with the pros of letting Amazon ship it for you so this is called FBA or fulfilled by Amazon and the first big Pro is you don't have to ship it yourself that's the whole point Amazon does all the Fulfillment for you now this isn't the only Pro but it's a pretty big one once your sales volume gets to be pretty high you're not going to want to package up each little individual item go to the Post Office and send it every day it's just a waste of your time the second Pro is you don't have to handle the returns when you're doing fulfilled by Merchant or fbm that means that every time there's a return you got to deal with it you got to handle all of that but if you're doing FBA Amazon takes care of all that for you you don't have to lift a finger the next Pro and maybe the biggest Pro out of all of these is you get more sales when you put your product as an FBA product it's Prime eligible that means that people that pay for the Prime Membership can get it within 2 days there's a lot of other benefits as well with it but it means ultimately you're going to get more sales and the theory goes that Amazon also promotes products that are prime eligible for a number of different reasons they know it's going to make customers happier and they make more money off of them now all this being said there are some benefits to doing fulfilled by Merchant the number one biggest Pro of doing fbm is you don't have to pay the fee Amazon does charge you to do FBA now in my opinion it's worth the money because you're going to have to pay shipping anyways and you're going to have to pay someone to pack it up and you're going to have to spend your time actually taking it to the post office but that is a pro if you're very price sensitive if you're if you're very conscious about how much money you're spending you might save a little bit of money by doing fulfilled by Merchant the next Pro is you can offer more options when you're doing FBA that means that you have to ship everything to the warehouse that means you have to guess how much you're going to sell ahead of time another Pro for fulfilled by Merchant is you can do made to order items and this is what we did at first with banware my the first company I created after quitting my corporate job we'd sell on Amazon I mean first we only sold on our website but then we did we sell on Amazon with fulfilled by Merchant and the reason like our thought process was first off we didn't know it was going to sell so we didn't want to create a bunch of some items and send it in but the next part is once someone would order it we would make it by hand so and then we'd fulfill it and you can't do this with FBA with FBA you have to make it and send it in now let's talk about the cons of FBA and fbm and there's some big cons so make sure you pay attention during this section the first con with FBA and we already talked about this is the higher fee I think it's well Justified both with b danare and my other main company performance Nut Butter I'm happy to pay the fee cuz I don't want to do the work of packaging it up and shipping it out the next con is they may lose or damage items once again this is okay though because if they damage an item or lose an item they will pay you for it full price so I don't really mind if they lose a few boxes of P&B and the last con the last downside of using fulfilled by Amazon is you really need to watch the inventory let me tell you a quick story when I first launched performance Nutter I sent in what I thought would be 6 months worth of inventory to Amazon turns out it's sold out in just 6 weeks and I had to kind of scramble to get some more units into Amazon because as a lot of my friends told me if you're out of stock for too long they'll ding you and your your sales rank will go down luckily I was only out of stock for a few days I was able to scramble and get more inventory in but the next 6 months I lived in fear of hope I'm going to have enough inventory I was constantly trying to play catchup so that is a downside of using FBA your sales might be so good that you have a hard time staying on top of refilling the inventory it's a good problem to have but there are some big Cons with fulfill by Merchant the first one is like I said you have to ship your own product and then the second one is you're not going to get as many sales so we talked about a lot of pros of FBA versus fbm so now let's decide which one is right for you and I'll give you some very specific formulas to help you decide if you're doing private labeling or if you're doing like I did creating a passion product with performance nut butter or like how I taught myri to do venoc cards then doing FBA is a no-brainer you only have one skew it's not that hard to track inventory and you're going to get way more Sales Plus you don't have to do with all the shipping but maybe you have a company more like my company B Dancewear where you have a ton of SKS and you're not sure which ones are going to sell you can always start off with fulfilled by Merchant and then move into FBA with certain select SKS that end up being your best sellers there's a bunch of other reasons you might might want to use FBA versus fbm but I think for 95% of the people watching this video FBA makes sense so at this point you have to decide how do you want to sell on Amazon we know that Amazon FBA is a good opportunity but warning not all ways of selling on Amazon are the same we're going to be talking about the four different ways that you can sell on Amazon this includes Retail Arbitrage wholesale private label and what I recommend doing which is creating your own passion product and there are pros and cons to all these methods like I'm going to go in depth we're going to talk about the pros and cons in the next section so that you can honestly decide which method is best for you selling on Amazon is a bit of a spectrum you have the resale online Arbitrage down here wholesaling on Amazon private labeling and finally in my opinion creating your own product now which one of these is right for you will depend on a few different things and we're going to go over the pros and cons of each of them let's start with the resale online Arbitrage pros and cons for those of you that don't know resale SL online Arbitrage is where you find something that you can buy for cheap maybe Walmart's having a big sale maybe there's a store that's going out of business you buy a lot of stuff and you resell it on Amazon this could also work if you can find a website that's selling something for really cheap and this is what online Arbitrage is and you can sell it for more on Amazon it's a easy way to get started and it's pretty much guaranteed money another Pro is it costs very little to get started the only startup cost is buying the product that you want to resell so if a store is going out a business and they have 50 units each for a dollar that you know you can sell for $10 it only costs you $50 to get started as a hypothetical situation now there is one big con with this method it's pretty much not scalable at all it takes you going out buying stuff and reselling it on Amazon and you constantly have to be hunting and finding new sales or new cheap opportunities that you can then go and resale so it's not scalable next up is wholesale and wholesale is where you find a company and you buy a lot of their product and you sell it on Amazon and you you make the difference in the price again a big Pro with this is it's easy to get started all you have to do is find someone that's willing to sell you at wholesale price which isn't that hard to do and then create the listing and start selling on Amazon another big Pro for this is it's somewhat predictable income once you've started purchasing from a wholesaler you know about how much you should buy you know how much you're going to sell compared to online Arbitrage or reselling which you really have no idea if you're going to find a good deal or not wholesale is pretty predictable way to make money online one of the big Cons with this method is it takes more money to get started with the resale online Arbitrage you can buy as little or as much as you want of a product with wholesale they're usually going to have higher minimums so it's going to take more money on your in because you have to buy the product send it into Amazon and then later you will make your money another con is the person that you're buying wholesale from can cut you off at any point maybe they decide that they want to start selling on Amazon or they just don't like you for whatever reason and so that's why it's only somewhat predictable income because at any point your supply chain could get completely disrupted the last big con is it's hard to sell off of Amazon you're not going to really be able to sell these products on your own website it only really works with Amazon and if Amazon kicks you off you're pretty much done next up is private labeling and private labeling is really hot right now a lot of people are talking about how to private label online and the basic version of what private labeling is is where you find a product you find a manufacturer and you put your own brand on it or your own label on it now private labeling itself is its own Spectrum but for the purposes of this video we're going to talk about private labeling in the way that most people talk about it where you find a product that already exists and you create your own version of it by putting your label on it now there's some big Pros with this there's also some cons the first pro with private labeling is it has the best margins out of any of the methods so far we've talked about which means for every $100 of sales you get you'll make you know $50 $60 you'll make the most money back which is a huge Pro the next Pro is your supplier can't just cut you off what I mean by this is if you find a manufacturer that will private label for you and for some reason they do cut you off you can probably go out and find a different manufacturer with wholesale if you're wholesaling a product and that supplier Cuts you off you're done because that's the sole supplier so private labeling is different in that regard and the last Pro is this method has the most predictable income out of anything we've talking about you know how much you're going to sell pretty regularly you'll get that data and then if something happens to your manufacturer you can switch to another one and you're pretty pretty set pretty predictable income with private labeling there are some big cons the first one is there's nothing special about you if you're just taking a typical product and putting your label on it then there's nothing stopping someone else from doing that same thing so if it's easy for you to get started that means it's easy for other people to get started as well it's also hard to sell off Amazon once again you're stuck with Amazon no one's going to buy cheap junk private label Products off of Amazon unless there's something really special about them unless you are do a really good job of creating a brand which means that if Amazon kicks you off the platform you're done your your source of income is completely gone and that's a big con for me and the last con is it does cost a decent amount of money to get started you're manufacturing a product the manufacturers usually are going to want a decent amount of money for your first production run the last method and my personal favorite way to sell on Amazon is creating your own product what I mean by this is not just taking what already is being sold on Amazon and slapping a label on it like private labeling is I mean creating something unique that doesn't yet exist in the world and this is not as hard as you think this is what I did for my company performance Nut Butter there's already other Nut Butter companies that existed but I tweaked a recipe made something unique and completely branded it different than any nut butter that was on there it's also how I taught my girlfriend to sell on Amazon with her company Veno cards which is basically wine flash cards which also did not exist on Amazon when we got started there are a bunch of Pros to this method but the first one is it has the best margins out of anything we've talked about and one of the reasons why it has the best margins is because your product is unique it's a premium product and you can charge more money for it it's not just a commodity product like a typical private label or wholesale product you can also create a brand around your product which means you'll get brand loyalty and you can do fun things like advertise on social media you can have an Instagram if you have your own brand and you can sell outside of Amazon you can create your own website using Shopify or whatever platform you prefer which means you're not totally reliant on Amazon if something happens to Amazon you'll have a backup plan and out of all the methods we've talked about so far this is going to be your most predictable income because you'll have a lot more repeat purchasers you'll have a lot more brand equity and you'll be able to sell off of Amazon as well so by far out of everything we've talked about this will be the most predictable way to make money and the last big Pro is you can crowdfund your first production run with typical private labeling you have to pay out of pocket for your first production run but if you're creating a unique product that doesn't yet exist you can use Kickstarter or Indiegogo and raise a bunch of money and then use that money to pay for your first production run now stop there is one big con about creating your own product and that is that it takes more creativity a lot of people struggle with how do you come up with an idea for creating your own unique product now I do have a lot of different methods on how to come up with an idea for a product but the first and maybe most important one is think about what do you wish existed in the world what do you what would you buy but it just doesn't exist yet and go create that and it doesn't have to be super complicated so let's talk about which one of these you should do in when you should do them but before we get into that let me tell you a quick story I had a corporate job it was absolutely a soul sucking corporate job and the reason for me was I just didn't care about the work I was doing so I ended up quitting that job about five six years ago and created my first online company was selling dance clothing but I just wasn't passionate about what we were selling dance clothing I had no interest in it it wasn't until I created my first Passion product performance Nut Butter where I really started making a ton of money online and it was because I really believed in what I was selling I was selling something unique I wasn't selling just another generic thing so yes I might be a little bit biased about what I think the best method to make money off Amazon is but that's because this is what's worked for me and it's worked much easier than anything else I've done that being said I do think that each of these different ways of selling on Amazon has their place for instance if you are really tight on cash and you need quick money then Retail Arbitrage might make more sense if you want to just dip your toe into the water then wholesaling on Amazon could work uh for me personally I think if you don't have a lot of creativity and can't think of a unique idea but you still want to try your hand at all the rest of the pieces and sell on Amazon then private labeling makes sense but if you want to create a real brand a real business then creating a product creating a passion product by far is the best way in my opinion to make money both on Amazon and off off Amazon just make money on the internet now we're going to talk about how much it actually is going to cost for you to start selling on Amazon how much it's going to cost you to start your first Amazon business it costs at least $3500 to start selling on Amazon if you're doing private labeling it'll cost you at least $2,700 to start selling on Amazon if you choose to do wholesale $200 if you're doing Retail Arbitrage and if you want to put in the hard work and create your own unique product you can start selling on Amazon for $0 we're going to break down Ariana's real numbers how much it actually cost her to start selling on Amazon we're going to share every single startup cost she had then we're going to break down exactly how much you should expect to spend to start selling on Amazon and go over the typical costs to start selling on Amazon and finally at the end of this video we're going to share the biggest things we wish we would have known when we started selling on Amazon so make sure you stick around till the end there's some big gems in there selling on Amazon is a no-brainer and that's what I taught Ariana to create a unique product and sell it on Amazon we're going to break down all the costs right now of how much it actually costs you to start selling on Amazon but this is Ariana being really vulnerable and really honest about a lot of different things the first cost when selling on Amazon is the $39.99 Amazon FBA fee it's a monthly fee and if you choose the Amazon FBA so that they take care of all the shipping for you that's just a monthly cost the another fee on top of that is a DBA you need to either do a DBA or an LLC or some kind of legal entity to be able to sell on Amazon and you chose a DBA how much did that cost that was about $150 and we went through Legal Zoom I believe so it's relatively easy process relatively cheap yeah I didn't have to do much on my end they pretty much took care of all of the legal parts of it and then you just paid that cost and it also allows you to open up a bank account the next fee is we this is an optional fee and some of the fees we're going to talk about are mandatory and some are optional one of the optional ones was to get a trademark so you trademarked your logo how much did that cost that was about about $225 and the good thing about trademarking is that later on you can get brand registry on Amazon so it's kind of legitimizing your business and gets more traction for customers to find it and it opens up a lot of different features for your listing it allows you to have enhanced brand content videos description points and all that another optional fee to consider around this time is hiring a lawyer to do your trademark but you don't need to do that it's very easy you did your own trademark very easy did yeah on my own and there are steps to follow online very self- safe explanatory the next fee to consider is hiring a designer now for most people hiring a designer it's only going to be maybe a 100 bucks maybe you only need to pay for a logo or pay for a little bit of different things to design like the box of your product but with Ariana since her product is venoc cards which is wine flashcards we actually spent a lot of money on a designer because your product has so much it's all design yeah that's the main focus of the product and the main selling point so that cost alone was $2,000 and so it sounds like a lot of money but keep in mind her product is basically just cardboard and Design Elements so it was worth it to spend that $2,000 absolutely the next fee you had is once you design especially a product like yours you want to hire someone to check it and you hired a smaller to check it how much did that cost yes that was $150 and again that's unique to my product I wanted to have correct wine facts and you can find Somali if you need one or any other help through upwork or Fiverr there are options I used upwork personally but yeah and it's also important to mention you can find a design through upwork 99 designs five are like all these different spots the next fee is once you have your product designed and you have everything ready to go you actually want to get a sample made and we had samples made in China and I think how much did it cost it was free for them to make the sample and how much was it for you to ship it over yeah that was about $50 if I wanted to get a blank box without any design on it and I think a little more if you wanted to have like the total final what that final product would look like so yeah they just sent a blank box with so you could see what the sizing would be but if you want to see what it actually looked like with the design I think it was going to be $350 quite a bit more so I skipped that part just for money purposes but the blank sample I highly recommend doing you can see in like in real time what it's going to look like and if you want to make any adjustment another cost to keep in mind if you're creating your own unique product to sell on Amazon or if you're doing private labeling is barcodes and there's a lot of different places online to get barcodes that aren't so legitimate you can save some money by going for some of the more shady options that may work but I recommend going with gs1 and getting the legitimate barcodes these are the UPC codes Amazon requires all products to have a UPC code and how much did that cost for you that was $250 and that gets you 10 barcodes once you've done all this work it's time for you to actually get your product manufactured and this is one of the first mistakes that we made with this product is we manufactured way too many units we decided to do 2,000 units and how much did it cost to manufacture those 2,000 units 2,000 units came out to $1,000 so it's a a lot of money and honestly we could have saved a lot of money on the initial startup cost for Amazon if we would have only done 300 units or 400 units we chose to do 2,000 units because as you produce more units you get a lower per unit cost so if we would have only done 400 units it might have cost $10 per unit but at 2,000 units it was around it cut it in half it was like $5 per unit and her product is shelf stable and we basically just stored the units in her parents garage and we know that she has the rest of her life to sell it so we were able to order more knowing that eventually will at least make the money back yes but why we don't recommend this is because if you order that many and you don't get a sample of what the design will look like you might run into mistakes so I personally had some spelling mistakes that I had to live with for two years before I could do another production R after I've sold all of my units so little things like that if they bother you or you want to make sure to per it as much as you can probably order less units and the only thing I would recommend is just to keep track of your inventory so that you know when to reorder and once you have your products manufactured especially if you're manufacturing them in China you have to ship them to the Amazon warehouse and you have two options you can either do sea shipping or air shipping and for most of the products we decided to do sea shipping how much did that cost that was about $1,400 and something to keep in mind if you are going to do c shipping is you have to pay for an annual Bond now you can get a onetime bond for around $100 we ended up buying the multiuse bond because we thought we might need it and that was around $400 I think so that's some other fees to keep in mind obviously you can see there's already lots of ways we could have saved money when starting on Amazon the next fee is once you have the products and you're ready to list them on Amazon you need photos for your Amazon listing specifically the main photo is the most important now we chose to do a computer rendering instead of taking photos like with a with a camera we did a photo rendering a 3D rendering of it and you want to talk a little bit about that yeah the reason that's important is because you won't get the best quality photos with your camera most of the time so having someone be able to Showcase what the product looks like up close there's no like blurriness or anything that cost about $100 to do ours and but yeah it looks much better on the listing and the good thing about it too is with a 3D rendering you can show angles and you can show things like we had the cards fanned out which to do that with a typical camera would have been pretty much possible but it is important to note that all the other side photos on the Amazon listing we just took ourselves we just used the camera we had our friends come over we showed the designs of the cards it was just that was all actually free yeah but the main image is what you should focus on that's what that's what's going to be drawing in customers so you want it to look as great as possible on top of all these other fees we've covered keep in mind there's always other random costs with starting a business and want to talk about some of the other random costs yeah so supplies any like typical office supplies can cost a lot any extra boxes or bubble wrap gas to go to the the the store like gas to go to the post office to ship your products into Amazon printing of barcodes all sorts of things so I would definitely budget around $200 it all depends on your product but definitely around 200 250 now one thing to keep in mind when Ariana was launching her product on Amazon is she actually did a Kickstarter and raised over $5,000 on a Kickstarter and took that money and used it to lower her cost to start on Amazon and I highly recommend if you're creating a unique product if you're doing something different than what else is already out there launch your product first as a Kickstarter and this does two things one it gives you a bunch of money to use towards your first production on and two it validates your idea because if you're not able to raise any money on a Kickstarter then you probably don't have that interesting or unique of a product but if you are able to raise money on a Kickstarter you know you've got a winning product so in total it costs around $112,000 once you add up all these expenses for Ariana to get started but something important to note about that is if we would have ordered less units if we would have found a cheaper designer if we would have not trademarked and if we would have found some different ways to cut some costs we could have actually started this company for under ,000 and that's the cool thing about launching a Kickstarter is it you can basically make it so you can start Amazon even if you have Z in the bank and it's important to keep in mind that Ariana's story of it costing $12 ,000 to start on Amazon is not typical I have a friend Troy that's a student in the passion product formula that started his Amazon business for $4,500 which is still kind of expensive but it's not crazy I have another friend Mina who started Amazon for $1,500 so even if you don't have a lot of money you can always do a Kickstarter there's always ways to save money but now I want to talk about how much you should expect to spend to start selling on Amazon and we're going to break down all the costs and try to give a little bit more realistic numbers now we're going to break down every single startup cost you should expect to spend on average when starting to sell on Amazon if you're doing private label or creating your own product it's going to be around $3,500 and the first fee we talked about is the Amazon FBA selling fee you want to upgrade to the professional selling plan because this allows you to do FBA this allows you to send product into Amazon's Warehouse it allows you to be eligible for Prime and it makes it so you can do a lot less work the next fee would be design and obviously Ariana spent around $2,000 on her design but typical private label products would be around $150 would you say much much lower another cost to expect is getting a sample and that can run you about $100 and keep in mind right now we're talking about mandatory fees there's also optional fees one optional fee that a lot of people choose to do is buying product research tools these are things like viral launch jungle Scout helium 10 but sometimes buying a product research tool can be very powerful the next fee that people should expect to spend when starting their company is for inventory now this fee is going to depend on how much your product costs to manufacture and it's going to depend on how many units you produce but for most people how much would you expect they should budget for this I would budget at least $2,000 and again like Travis said it depends on what your product is and how much you expect to sell and a typical for this example let's say $2,400 let's say you have a $6 product and you're doing 400 units obviously you can do less units but then you run the risk of running out of inventory and a $6 product is pretty middle of the road some products are going to be more expensive some products are going to be less expensive another optional cost is buying a course a lot of people decide to buy a course and it's going to run you around $1,000 what are your thoughts on this I think it can be very valuable especially if you're a beginner and needs some guidance along the way I think a course is great and she when she was starting she had a lot of my guidance and I highly recommend it when I first started selling on Amazon I did not buy course I don't think it's a mandatory thing this is completely optional the next mandatory fee you should expect to pay for when you start selling on Amazon is shipping your product from your manufacturer to the warehouse what are your thoughts on this how much should they budget for this it depends again on how many units you're ordering but I would say around $300 and there are going to be cost variations depending on air shipping versus CA shipping and for your first time doing it it might be worth it just to do air shipping because C- shipping could take four or five weeks you you have to deal with Customs you have to deal with buying the annual Bond you have to deal with all these different issues where air shipping takes like a few days to a week or so and you can select your carrier whatever you're comfortable with DHL FedEx there's a few other options as well I tend to go with DHL and if you decide to go with C- shipping one thing to keep in mind is you may want to hire a freight forwarder which Ariana did because they help out with all the different forms yes and especially when you're dealing with customs and things of that nature that can change a lot so they are up to dat with all of that making less work you so we'll put a freight forwarder in the optional category you don't really need to deal with this if you're doing air shipping because air shipping is pretty straightforward but if you do decide to go C- shipping it's something you may want to consider another optional fee related to that you may want to budget for if you're doing C- shipping is that $100 Bond so again we'll put that in the optional category but the next mandatory fee is getting a DBA or some kind of a legal entity which would be $150 so that's something that if you are going to be starting a legitimate business you do need so you can start a business bank account so you could open up a credit card in the business name and it's very helpful because it it allows Amazon to know that you're a legitimate company other mandatory fees that we talked about earlier is barcodes gs1 barcodes that's $250 and as always you should budget at least $100 in other random fees bringing the total mandatory cost to around $3,500 and again this is just an average this is just kind of what I've seen it could be more it could be less it depends but keep in mind there is some other optional fees that not a lot of people talk about and this is things like product giveaways when you first start your Amazon business a lot of people choose to give away free product in exchange for reviews now this is technically against the terms of service a lot of people do it anyways you don't need to do any product giveaways basically you can get the hype up about your product before you launch on Amazon you get a bunch of emails you get a big social media following you get a lot of people into a Facebook group and you hype up your product so that when you launch it from day day one people buy your product and they're so excited and they're so invested in your story that they will leave reviews without you having to give them a free product another optional cost is Amazon PPC which is basically marketing and advertisement I would budget around $1,000 for that and Amazon PPC is one of the best ways to Market your product it's some of the best Roi you can get on the internet you can also apply for a trademark which will give you access to enhanced brand content and that's around $225 this will also give you some protection on Amazon and off Amazon basically trademarking your logo so other people can't copy it and as we mentioned you don't need to hire a lawyer to to handle your trademark but that could cost if you want to hire a lawyer up to $1,000 please do not hire a lawyer to handle your trademark it is so straightforward that I don't think it's it's worth it to do it but that is completely up to you and in total if you include all the mandatory and optional fees for starting on Amazon you should expect to spend around $5,000 now again this is assuming you don't do a a Kickstarter because if you do a Kickstarter you can raise enough money where you can spend next to nothing to start your Amazon business and I highly recommend don't just private label a junk product create something unique something different which gives you access to be able to crowdfund your product one huge mistake that a lot of people make is they don't understand all the fees that are associated with selling on Amazon in this next section we're going to talk about all the fees all the hidden costs everything you should be aware of when selling on Amazon as well as how you can avoid some of these fees there's some secrets I'm going to share in this next section that's going to save you thousands of dollars so make sure you pay attention there's three big fees when selling on Amazon FBA the first is the Amazon referral fee and this is a flat percentage just to sell on the Amazon platform and this fee will depend on the price of your product for example if your product cost $27.99 you would pay a referral fee of $4.20 for every unit you sell the second is the Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee and this is the fee that you have to pay every time Amazon picks packs and ships your product from its Warehouse to your customer's door and this fee depends on the size and the weight of your product and this fee is typically going to cost you around $2.16 per unit all the way up to $568 per unit and I'll show you in depth later in this video exactly how you can calculate how much you will be paying for this fee as well as some secrets on how you can save a lot of money on this fee the third is the Amazon storage fee and this is the fee that you have to pay to store your inventory in Amazon's Warehouse there's also four other smaller Amazon FBA fees that no one talks about and I'm going to show you how to save money on all these different Amazon FBA fees with a few hacks that I've learned as well as show you in- depth how much each of these different Amazon FBA fees are going to cost you so that you're prepared to sell on Amazon and what I usually tell people is assume that you're going to spend 33% of your margin on your product cost 33% on Amazon FBA fees and the other 33% is your profit for example in the last 3 and half years of selling this product on Amazon I've done $1.2 million in sales and the first fee that I had to pay so that I could list my product on Amazon and make all these sales was $172,000 in Amazon referral fees I also had to pay over $150,000 in Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fees I also spent another $23,000 in other Amazon fees including storage fees and some other things will go into later in this video I also spent $319,000 on actually purchasing my product that I was selling on Amazon and another $30,000 on just other random business expenses and in total selling this one product on Amazon I did over $38,000 in profit over these last few years now let's break down all these different fees and show you exactly how much it's going to cost you to sell on Amazon as well as I'm going to show you a bunch of hacks on how you can save money on all these different fees the first small fee you're going to have to pay if you want to sell on Amazon is the Amazon account fee and there's two different options there's the individual selling plan and the professional selling plan now the the benefit of the individual selling plan is that it's free but every time you do sell an item on Amazon you have to pay a fee of 99 on the other hand the professional selling Plan cost $39.99 a month and you can sell unlimited products for free there are also a lot of benefits to having a professional selling plan you get access to Promotions reports and just a ton of other benefits but I'd recommend starting with the individual selling plan if you're planning on selling less than 40 items a month but once you plan to get serious about your Amazon business it's worth it to upgrade to the Amazon professional plan the next fee is the Amazon referral fee and it's a flat 15% fee just to sell on the Amazon platform but there is a trick that you can use to get that percentage down to 5% and I'm going to show you that hack in just a minute and whether you're using the Amazon FBA program or you're using fbm which is fulfilled by Merchant which means that you're actually packaging up the items yourself and shipping them out to your customer either way you're going to have to pay this 15% fee because this is the fee that allows you to list your product on Amazon and it allows you to get access to Amazon's million Prime customers now a lot of people get upset about this 15% fee and think that it's too high and that Amazon is taking too much of their earnings but I actually think that paying Amazon this fee is 100% worth it because they've spent billions of dollars marketing the website of Amazon they spent billions of dollars getting customers to their website and getting people to actually trust their website and by paying that relatively small fee of 15% gives you access to Millions upon millions of Amazon customers now compare that with if you were to start your own website you'd have to spend a lot of money in marketing just to get people to your website you'd also have to spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince people once they're on your website to trust your website and actually put their credit card information into your website Amazon already has built-in customers and built-in trust so in my opinion they've earned that 15% referral fee but here's a hack that you can use to get that referral fee down to 5% and that's by using the brand referral bonus program by signing up for this program you can create a special link that anytime you send a customer to your Amazon store Amazon will register it and realize that you actually sent the traffic there and they'll lower that percentage from 15% down to 5% which again it's 100% worth it just to pay this small 5% fee because the chance that someone's actually going to buy your product if it's on Amazon is a lot higher than if you were to send those same customers to your own website I have a lot more secrets I'm going to share with you throughout this video on how to save money on your Amazon FBA fees the next fee we're going to talk about is the Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee and again this is the fee for Amazon basically to pack up your item in the warehouse and ship it out to the customer it includes the postage and all the handling all the different salaries of the Amazon employees all that kind of stuff and this fee is going to depend on the size and weight of your product and generally speaking there's two different sizes there's small standard and there's large standard to be considered small standard on the longest side your package can't be longer than 15 in on the medium side it can't be longer than 12 in and on the smallest side it can't be longer than 75 in it also has to weigh under 1 PB on the other hand for large standard on the longest side it can't be over 18 in on the medium side it can't be longer than 14 in and on the shortest side it can't be longer than 8 in and it also has to weigh under 20 lb then depending on how much your product weighs you can calculate your fees for instance for small standard there'd be one fee if your product's under 6 o a different fee if your product's 6 o to 12 ooun and another fee if it's 12 O to 16 oz the same thing applies if your product is considered large standard there'd be different charges depending on how much your product weighs now I will show you a really simple way to calculate how much you're going to be paying in your Amazon FBA fees in just a minute but another thing to keep in mind is that this pricing tier applies to most products but you'll have a different pricing tier if you're in the category of apparel it costs around 30 to 40 cents more per item that Amazon chips for you if you're in the apparel category same thing if you're selling dangerous goods there is a different fee for that as well now for 98% of people they'll either be in the small standard or the large standard tier but there is also an oversized tier now an example of how much you would pay for your Amazon Pick and Pack fee is my product right here I have to pay a fee of $44.25 every time I get a sale so that Amazon can pick pack and ship out my product to the customer and that's because it's considered large standard and it weighs somewhere between 12 to 16 o on the other hand this product cocktail cards actually weighs over one pound it weighs between 1 to 2 lb and it's still considered large standard and we have to pay a fee of $4.95 for the Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee now a really simple way to figure out how much your Amazon FBA fees will be is to use this free Amazon FBA calculator and what you're going to do is find a product that's a similar size and dimension to your product put in your item price and click calculate and this will tell you how much your Amazon referral fee will be as well as how much your Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee will be it will even tell you how much your monthly storage cost per unit will be which is the next major fee that we're going to talk about and that is the Amazon storage fee and this is something that a lot of people forget about but it's very important because Amazon actually charges you every month that you have inventory in their warehouse and from January to September of every year they charge 70 cents per cubic foot worth of inventory that you have at the Amazon warehouse and from October to December they actually charge you $2 40 for every cubic foot worth of inventory that you have stored at their warehouse now the reason that they do this is from October to December you're going to be making a lot of money in Q4 sales people are buying things for the holidays and generally speaking people see a huge increase in sales during this month and so what happens is a lot of people want to send in a lot of products into Amazon's warehouse and to discourage people from sending in too much they raise the fee that they charge during this time and the way to calculate how much your Amazon FBA storage fees are going to be is to take the product that you're going to sell on Amazon measure the height the width and the depth of your product for example let's say we were selling a product that is 3 in by 4 in by 5 in that product would be 60 cubic in now Amazon as we mentioned charges 75 cents for every cubic foot now a cubic foot is 12 in x 12 in x 12 in or 1,728 cubic in so we'd simply divide the cubic inches of our product which is 60 cubic in divided by the cubic Ines of 1 foot which is 1,728 and multiply that by the 75 cents per cubic foot that Amazon charges and you can see that Amazon will charge us around 2.6 cents per unit per month that we have this stored so if we knew that we were going to store this product in Amazon for 4 months that' be 2.6 cents per month it's going to cost us around 10 cents in storage fees just to store this one product in Amazon's warehouse and of course remember that it would cost a little bit more if the was stored during the months of October through December now here's a way to save a lot of money and that's to avoid the long-term storage fee and if you keep inventory in their warehouse for longer than 365 days they're going to charge you $6.90 per cubic foot or 15 cents per item whichever number is greater now keep in mind the long-term storage fee only applies if you send a lot of inventory into the warehouse and that your products just aren't selling if for instance you were to send in a 100 units into the Amazon warehouse and you sold 50 of them in one month so you sent in another 100 and you sold another 50 the next month the clock has reset because your original inventory is gone and you're into the new inventory but on the other hand let's say you sent in 100 units into the warehouse and you were only selling about 10 a month then after 12 months you'd still have 20 units in there and they'll start tacking on those long-term storage fees and one hack that you can use to avoid long-term storage fees is watch your inventory and if you see it's not selling and you see it's getting close to that oneyear Mark ask Amazon to send you back your inventory even if that means that you're just going to package it up again and send it right back into the Amazon warehouse but ideally the best way to avoid long-term storage fees is to figure out exactly how much inventory you should send into Amazon and I go into depth about that and a bunch of other secrets for selling on Amazon in my free Amazon FBA course I'll put a link down below it is a ton of content a ton of valuable information if you're just starting on Amazon I highly recommend checking it out and now I'm going to get into the four Amazon FBA fees that no one talks about that you need to be aware of but before I do that make sure to subscribe because I have a ton of free content on this YouTube channel teaching you step- by-step how you can sell on Amazon I also share a lot of different real stories from Amazon sellers so hit that subscribe button and let's get into the first fee that no one talks about and that is the return fee we've already talked about every time Amazon ships a product to your customer they're going to charge you the Pick and Pack fee but if you're customer decides within 30 days that they want to return the product you have to pay another fee and this fee again depends on the size and the weight of the product that you're selling but this fee basically covers the cost of the return shipping and the processing in the Amazon warehouse and if your product is in good condition you can actually tell Amazon just to put it back into your inventory meaning that as soon as you get another order that same product will be shipped out to a new customer or you can ask Amazon to dispose of the product and that's going to cost around 50 cents per unit which is another fee that a lot of people don't consider but both these fees are relatively small and it's relatively uncommon depending on what kind of product that you're selling that you'll have to deal with these fees but it is something to keep in mind another optional fee and a way to save a lot of money is by avoiding the prepping fee when you send products into the Amazon warehouse every product that you send needs to have an FN skew barcode sticker on it now usually you can have your manufacturer put these stickers on the product for really inexpensive or you can even have your manufacturer print the barcode on the actual box of your product but if you don't do either one of those and you still want to send in products into Amazon what you need to do is either put on every single sticker on every single unit that you're sending in yourself or you can pay Amazon 30 cents per unit to put the FN skew sticker on the product now I don't recommend doing this just pay your manufacturer to do it or usually what I recommend is just print the actual barcode right on your product there's also other preparation that Amazon can do for you like putting your products in plastic bags but I don't recommend having Amazon do either one of those they're going to charge you between 50 cents to $2 to do things like this just read the requirements for your product and just make sure that it's prepped correctly now before I share with you some secrets that I've learned on how to save money on all these different Amazon FBA fees from my years of experience one other thing I do want to point out is there's always just a lot of other fees associated with selling on Amazon associated with starting any kind of business and these are things that you want to keep in mind for instance you might have to pay for a DBA or an LLC to actually start your business you might have to pay for a trademark or samples of the product that you're going to sell there's always little random fees that people generally don't consider I highly recommend checking out this video a link up here that I did talking about how much it actually costs to start selling on Amazon and you'll want to watch that video to make sure that there aren't some hidden fees that you haven't thought about but let's talk about how to save money and I've already mentioned a few you want to avoid long-term storage fees you want to use the brand referral bonus program to send traffic to to your listings so you can lower the referral fee from 15% down to 5% on all that traffic and all those sales that you generate on your own you also want to make sure you start with the individual selling account and only upgrade your account once you're ready to actually send inventory into Amazon and start selling a lot of people make the mistake of spending that $39.99 a month every single month and they're not even selling a product on Amazon they've just thought about starting to sell on Amazon but they're not even ready to send in their inventory yet you want to wait to upgrade until you're ready to actually start selling another thing that you'll want to do is make your product packaging smaller for instance I recently started selling jars of my product on Amazon now most people would probably sell a 16 o jar on Amazon of the product but I realized that I'd have to pay a lot more in fees so instead we made a smaller jar and made it under 10 ounces so we could save money on the Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fees another hack is if you're selling a low priced lightweight product you can use the Amazon FBA small and light program to save a lot of money and if your product qualifies you would pay reduced fees for example you might pay $216 per unit once your product is approved for the small andl program instead of $2.70 per unit that is a savings of 64 cents per unit and Troy did this with his product and was able to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars there's also a lot of other ways to save money on Amazon FBA fees like removing undeliverable products from the Amazon warehouse you'll also want to make sure that Amazon has the correct size of your product sometimes what they do is they put your product in a higher tier than it's supposed to be you want want to catch this as soon as possible and contact them and let them know that they made a mistake and sometimes they'll even reimburse you for the charges that they've been charging to you I know we're answering a lot of questions for you right now and you might have more questions that we're not answering again if you do have any questions that we're not answering first you can leave them in the comments down below but I highly recommend checking out the passion product formula course it's my coaching program click on the link down below for more information about that again we have a weekly Q&A call that you can jump on you can get live with myself or one of the coaches and ask all of your questions but now I want to share with you my top 10 tools that you should use when selling on Amazon now I do have discount codes for some of these tools but a couple of these tools gave me extra special discount codes and they told me you can't share this on YouTube you can only share this with people that are in your coaching program so for instance helium 10 is one of the tools I'll be talking about that tool I've got a great freaking deal I'm not even allowed to say what it is uh but when you join my coaching program it it is a better deal than I can give you on YouTube but even on YouTube I do have a coupon code but let's talk about the top 10 Amazon FBA tools right now the First Tool and one of the most popular tools for Amazon FBA is helium 10 and you hear about helium 10 all over the place and I do have to say it is really expensive at $97 I would not recommend it for everyone and in fact a lot of the features that helium 10 has you can get for free it's still a very valuable tool and I it's something that I would recommend for more professional sellers or maybe pay for it for a month or two when you're first starting out and what helium 10 is it's basically a suite of a bunch of different tools it has a product research tool it has a a keyword research tool it has a keyword tracking tool it has refund Genie which is a really cool thing I'll talk about in a second it's basically got all these different Tools in it you don't necessarily need this what I personally would do is if you're doing it if you're using it for product research I'd sign up for a month and then do your product research and you can cancel it the main thing I use it for actually is keyword research figuring out what keywords I want to Target and it also has the keyword tracking now the one reason it might be worth paying that $97 a month month after month is because of refund Genie and what refund Genie does is basically Amazon screws up a lot when someone returns an item of yours they're supposed to Amazon's supposed to give you some of your money back when they lose inventory on Amazon in the Amazon warehouse Amazon is supposed to give you money for that lost inventory and they don't always do this so what refund Genie does is it goes in and it looks for any kind of missing money the other thing the keyword tracker is another tool that I actually find very helpful because you can see are your different marketing efforts working obviously in Amazon you want to Target certain keywords for your product and the keyword tracker will let you know hey you know what last week you were ranked number five this week you're ranked number three whatever you're doing is working or maybe it's the opposite it lets you know that hey your rank's falling you need to pay a little bit more attention now as I mentioned I am going to be doing a video on why you don't necessarily need helium 10 and how to get a lot of the features for free and a lot of the different tools I'm going to be talking about on this list are things that you can get a a lesser version for free and the example I give is if you're building a house you can you don't need to necessarily use a hammer to hammer in the nails you can use a rock and if you're tight on cash use the rock don't go spend money on the hammer and one example of a free tool that does something very similar to what helium 10 does as far as keyword research is you can use Google Keyword Planner and the Google Keyword Planner will let you know the search volume for different keywords so helium 10 has very Advanced features that'll let you know people are searching a certain phrase keto butter the people are searching keto butter 20 people are searching that a month maybe that's a keyword you should Target and the Keyword Planner will also let you know but the difference is the Google Keyword Planner will let you know how much people are searching in Google where helium 10 will let you know how much people are searching in Amazon now these two numbers should be pretty close and this is why I'm saying it may be worth it to pay for helium 10 cuz it's going to give you more accurate better data but if you're tight on cash just use the Keyword Planner the Google Keyword Planner it is a free option and the same thing is true with the keyword tracker and refund Genie you can do everything that refund Genie does for you for free it's just going to take some manual effort on your part and if you're tight on cash you have a lot of time then spend your time doing that save the money and same thing the keyword tracker you can figure out keyword you're targeting and just every day open up an incognito tab in Google Chrome and search on Amazon for whatever keyword you're tracking and figure out what your rank is or the other option you can do that also might save some money is hire a virtual assistant to do these repetitive boring tasks for you so software like helium 10 can do these tasks but also if you're maybe a smaller seller and you don't have a lot of keywords that you're tracking hire a virtual assistant now hiring a virtual assistant was one of the best things I've ever done for my business it has literally tripled my productivity I did a video on how it tripled my productivity but when you hire someone else to do things for your business a lot of the the mundane boring things you can pass on to them in onlinejobs.ph allows you to hire virtual assistants in the Philippines for about2 to $3 an hour now I personally have four virtual assistants I have people that edit my videos I have people that handle my Amazon FBA I have people that reach out to influencers but if you really want to grow your business you are the bottleneck the amount of time that you can spend growing your business business is the bottleneck and the way to get around this is to hire more people also it just makes it more fun because honestly a lot of the tasks I give to my virtual assistants I find kind of boring because they're repetitive they're algorithmic and it's just not something I necessarily want to do so I'd recommend if you're looking to hire someone onlinejobs.ph is definitely it is $79 for a month but all you need is one month basically you sign up for a month and you post your job the next tool which is a free tool but it's extremely valuable is Google Docs and Google Sheets and if you're not using these two things you're crazy because I I know a lot of people still use Excel or Word documents don't do that the good thing about having Google Docs or Google Sheets is you can access it from your phone you can access it from the computer if you have virtual assistants or other people that you're working with you guys can all collaborate on the documents or the spreadsheets at the same time this is one of those free tools that realistically if it was $100 a month I would easily pay that for it some other productivity and tools for working with your virtual assistant include things things like last pass Dropbox slack and hubstaff and last pass is basically it stores all your different passwords I think you can get a free account but there's also a paid plan I I do have the paid plan I think it's like 12 bucks a year or something like that I'll put a link to it down below and what it allows you to do is allows you to save all your passwords on all the different websites and share them with other people in a way that they can't see what your passwords is basically it's an extension to the Chrome browser I think there's any different browser has it and you can share your passwords with your virtual assistant but they can't actually see what the password is and the reason this is valuable is if you ever want to fire a virtual assistant or if a virtual assistant ever quits you can easily delete them and they don't have access to any of your passwords you don't have to go through and change all your passwords the other reason it's really helpful is you can have stronger passwords because if you try to memorize your passwords to all the different websites out there it's almost impossible unless you use a very weak password which I do not recommend doing so last pass allows you to use stronger password passwords and the only password you have to remember is your password for last pass that's why it's called last pass another tool I found very helpful is Dropbox and Dropbox it allows me to work with my virtual assistants but it also just allows me to store a lot of stuff in a folder on my computer and if I ever get a new computer it's all stored in the cloud and so if I need to access it from my laptop or if I need to access it from my computer or if my virtual assistants need to access it it's one folder one drive that we can all share files on slack is one of those tools that I only recommend if you have more than one virtual or at least one virtual assistant or more and what it allows you to do is almost like a message board SL chat slail all combined in one and it's a lot more organized than just sending person like emails back and forth it allows you to have different channels so for instance for me I have a channel called thumbnails where my virtual assistants we we talk about our different thumbnails another one called uh videos where I basically we share all the editing for the videos another channel for performance Nut Butter another channel for different tasks that I give them it allows us to organize our conversation much more effectively and the last tool for virtual assistance I have for you is hubstaff and hubstaff allows you to track time of your virtual assistant and it takes random screenshots so you can actually check and make sure that they're they're actually doing their work and this I find very helpful because I pay my virtual assistant by the hour so if they work 40 hours they can track it in hubstaff and I can go in and I can check and make sure that they're actually on task the next tool is Shopify and if you're selling on Amazon Amazon can ban you at any point and you don't want to like go to zero overnight so having a Shopify store allows you to make first off some extra side income but also gives you a little bit of a safety net now you don't necessarily have to pay for Shopify Shopify is around $29 a month the other option you can do is use woocommerce which is technically free but with woocommerce you do have to pay for hosting and hosting is going to cost you three four $5 a month if you are going to go with woocommerce I recommend using site ground to do your hosting if you're not sure which one is right for you and you really want to scale your online store then Shopify is probably the better option but if you just want to have an online store and you just want to have the option and you're not as serious about it woocommerce is probably the better option man chat is another extremely powerful tool for Amazon and I think it it goes beyond just Amazon and what it is is a Facebook Messenger bot now this isn't something I have used yet but it's on my like very soon Todo list it's one of those things that I really I really want to get on and basically instead of capturing people's emails like the old school method of doing it is to get someone's email the new school way is to try to get them on Facebook messenger and get their message Facebook messaging detailed now it's not something I've done yet but what a lot of people on Amazon do is they have a product insert so they they do an offer in their packaging for Amazon saying hey you want to get something for free then sign up and and send me your your Facebook Messenger details using Manny chat now I'm not an expert on this I did do a collaboration video with Samar bra and I'll I'll link it down below as well talking in detail about man chat but trust me this is something that I personally want to learn a lot more about and I I'd recommend highly that you learn more about it as well we have two more tools left and these are two of the most powerful tools the next one is feedback genius when someone orders something from you on Amazon you should send a follow-up message either trying to create some kind of a connection Andor trying to get them to leave a review and feedback genius is a tool that I've been using for a long time to do this so when someone orders my product I send them a follow-up I think a few days later saying something to the effect of hey I hope everything was great blah blah blah blah trying to create some kind of a connection and then the next message I ask is hey could you could I ask you for a favor and the favor is to leave a review now this doesn't work as well as it used to work and I will say as well helium 10 does have this feature built into the suite of tools so if you are going to buy Helium 10 don't also buy feedback genius but feedback genius is a little bit cheaper than helium 10 if that's the only feature you want and the last tool and probably the tool I think people talk about more than any other tool is jungle Scout and jungle Scout is a product research tool it it has a lot of different functionality to it now the only tool in Jungle Scout that I personally would recommend that I personally think is actually super valuable is their supplier database so if you need to find a manufacturer for your product the jungle Scout supplier database can be very powerful now let's talk about the biggest mistakes I've made when selling on Amazon and these mistakes in total have cost me well over $100,000 don't waste $100,000 of your own money just watch this next section to learn all the mistes that I made if you can avoid these seven mistakes you can make an extra10 to $100,000 a year with Amazon FBA I've made almost every single mistake with Amazon FBA that you can make these mistakes have cost me tens of thousands of dollars you're going to learn how to avoid all these mistakes and save a lot of money let's start with number one and this is the biggest mistake I made and it is the most common mistake I see beginner Amazon sellers making and that's waiting every month you wait to start your business you're losing money for instance my first real real Amazon business made about $360,000 in Revenue in its first year or around $120,000 in profit once you subtract out all the expenses which is around $10,000 of profit per month so if I would have launched my business a month earlier I would have made an extra $10,000 if I would have launched my business a year earlier it would have been an extra $120,000 and the problem is people are so afraid of making mistakes that they delay the start of their business and the thing about Amazon is if you do it right it can be so profitable that it doesn't even really matter if you make mistakes for example let's say I was deciding between two different manufacturers and I took a month in deciding that I lost out on a potential profit of $10,000 so even if I picked the wrong manufacturer and the manufacturer I picked ended up costing me $5,000 and if I would have spent a month researching it I would have been able to figure that out it doesn't matter because I launched my business a month earlier which was $10,000 in profit subtract the $5,000 mistake and I still made $5,000 more than if I would have spent a month in analysis paralysis mode and eventually pick the correct manufacturer mistake number two is another mistake I made and probably the second most common mistake I see new Amazon sellers making and that's selling the wrong product the first e-commerce business I ever started was a dance clothing company and originally we were only selling our products on our own website when I saw the opportunity that is and was Amazon I started selling the products on Amazon and ended up making a decent amount of money but the problem is this wasn't the right kind of product to sell on Amazon for a number of reasons I'm going to give you a checklist on everything you should look at when deciding on what kind of product you're going to sell but one of them was it's a product that's so easy for Chinese manufacturers to copy pretty much exactly and sell for a lot cheaper on Amazon there was another reason that's even more important why this was a bad product to sell on Amazon that I'll get to in just a minute another product that was a mistake to sell on Amazon was jars of my product P&B and the reason that this was a mistake is because the jars were glass jars that would break during shipping on top of that the seal on the lid in the bottom wasn't tight enough and so sometimes the jars would leak because the jars were leaking I ended up having to throw away half of my production run had to throw away a th000 units of this product so I lost around5 or $6,000 of product that I had to throw away but the crazy thing about this is even though I threw away a th000 units I did a total production run of around 2,000 units and since I was able to sell the first, units for around $18 a piece after all the different Amazon FBA fees and everything with those first ,000 I made a profit of around 67,000 so even though I lost money on all that product I had to throw away in total I actually didn't lose any money by pursuing this product even though I made a major mistake and had a product that was leaking I still broke even and I learned a very valuable lesson so if you're selling an item on Amazon make sure that it's easy to ship that it's not going to break that it's not going to leak that it's going to be easy for Amazon to ship this product to your customers but a few things that you want to make sure that your product has when finding a product to sell on Amazon is is make sure that it's a product that you can sell for $15 or more at a minimum $15 the problem is if it's $15 or less you're going to have to pay all the Amazon fees all the shipping all the other stuff and it's very hard to find a profitable product under $15 you also ideally want to sell a product that's under 20 because if it's over 20 the shipping expenses the Amazon FBA fees start to get really high I also recommend selling a premium product you want your product to be the best product on the market because if your product's the best product on the market that means that you can charge the most which means more profit for you but in my opinion the most important thing to look for in a product that you're going to sell on Amazon and the reason why the first products I sold on Amazon kind of failed is I highly recommend selling a product that you're actually passionate about because if you're passionate about the product you understand the product and it's something that you would buy yourself it's going to be a lot easier to Market and here's the truth about starting an Amazon business it's hard there's ups and downs and when you're in the down phase if it's something that you're really excited about it's going to be lot easier to overcome those obstacles and get your product launched on Amazon the third mistake I made and a mistake that probably cost me over $100,000 is selling my products using fbm instead of FBA now the mistake that I made is for the first couple years that I was selling on Amazon we were doing fulfilled by Merchant because I had a warehouse for the dance clothing company and we already had people that could ship things out and I didn't want to pay the FBA fees I also didn't want to send product into the warehouse because I was nervous that they would charge storage fees and things like that and that was a huge mistake because the thing is when you send your products into the Amazon warehouse and you take advantage of the FBA program your products all become Prime eligible meaning that people that buy your products on Amazon can get that product shipped to them in 2 days and most people that shop on Amazon are Prime members and most people that are Prime members only want to buy Prime eligible products So eventually we stopped doing fbm and we switched over a lot of our products to FBA and our sales for those products increased by four to five times and the truth is the Amazon FBA fees were actually less than we were paying in postage so we actually saved money by switching to FBA mistake number four is manufacturing issues and I've lost a lot of money with different issues with manufacturing my product and working with manufacturers and I'm going to share all the most common ways that people end up running into issues with manufacturers and how you can avoid them for instance with P&B the first production run that my manufacturer did there was no tear Notch that cost me $2,000 cuz I had to hire people to come in and indiv ually cut tear notches on every single pouch they also sent me pouches that were leaking which meant I had to throw away a lot of my product and on top of that I had to hire people to come in and clean the other pouches I had another $5,000 I lost on The Leaky jars I also had the film that my product goes in damaged during shipping which cost me $2,000 I also picked a manufacturer that ended up having long lead times and I ended up running out of inventory and I lost out on around $5,000 in sales because my manufacturer was taking so long to manufacture my product but probably the biggest way that I lost out on a lot of money with the manufacturer is I got scammed by a manufacturer for $10,000 but keep in mind it's actually not that common for a manufacturer to scam someone and the manufacturer that scammed me was actually located in the United States now to their credit they didn't completely scam me in their eyes but what they did have is a long complicated contract and it turned out that there were some fees buried in that contract that they didn't really make that clear to me I even hired a lawyer to look over this contract and even the lawyer didn't see that this was a potential issue so some things to consider when finding a manufacturer is you want to make sure that they have simple pricing most manufacturers that you're going to work with they're going to tell you how much it's going to cost per unit I at one point picked a manufacturer that told me well it depends on how long it's going to take us to make this product we think it's going to take about a day but you pay per day and then later they said no it took like five days you're also going to want to find a manufacturer with as short of a lead time as possible because as soon as you see that you're about to run out of inventory you want to place an order and know that you can get it as quickly as possible mistake number five is inventory issues specifically at times I've ordered too much inventory and had to pay a lot of fees or on the other side I have not ordered enough inventory and lost out on a lot of sales and one of the big things is if you run out of inventory that's usually really bad Amazon's not happy if you run out of inventory and sometimes they can even Blacklist you or make it so you show up lower on the search results which leads to Less sales for your product now the first mistake I made in this category is ordering too much inventory ventory the bad thing about this is if you send in too much inventory into the Amazon warehouse you're having to pay storage fees every single month that your inventory is in their warehouse and those fees depend on a few factors but it costs around 75 cents per cubic foot per month that you have inventory in Amazon another thing that's very important that you want to watch out for is if you have inventory in the Amazon warehouse for too long you start getting long-term storage fees and these long-term storage fees are a lot more expensive we're talking around $6 per cubic foot now that only applies if you have the same products the actual same units in the Amazon warehouse for over a year if however let's say you sell out some of them and then you replace them and you keep selling out you will never incur that long-term storage fee it's only if you send in more units than you sell within that next year and I've spent a few thousand by mistake on these long-term storage fees what you want to do is if you see that you have product that's been in the Amazon warehouse for too long and you can easily check this in Amazon Seller Central you want to contact Amazon have them ship the products back to you and then just send them right back into the Amazon warehouse that way you can avoid the long-term storage fee and the truth is the cost of the shipping back and forth is usually going to be less than the long-term storage fee would have been anyways so even though there's a little extra cost in the shipping you're going to save money in the long run I also had a product that I had to throw away a bunch of units because they expired it's actually this product right back here I ordered too much I didn't sell them fast enough and what ended up happening was I had to throw away a few hundred units but the interesting thing is again even though I made a mistake and ordered a little bit too much of this product I still ended up doing $80,000 in revenue from the production run of this product and once you subtract out all the fees and the startup cost I still made a profit of close to $10,000 even though I had to throw some away so it's another example of how you can make mistakes with Amazon and still end up making money so obviously it's bad if you order too much inventory but the other really common problem that people run into is they actually order two little inventory and the first time this happened to me was with my first Amazon product P&B it ended up selling way better than I thought it would have and I ended up selling out of all my inventory within about 2 months I thought that inventory was going to last me 6 months and selling out of all your inventory a lot faster than you think you were going to is a good problem to have but it's still a problem you see my product was out of stock for about a week and during that week I lost out on at least $3,000 with the sales but another example and an even bigger example of this is AJ and I partnered on this product called cocktail cards and he crushed it he did such an amazing job marketing this product that in his first month alone he ended up doing over $50,000 in sales and $20,000 in profit after you subtract all the expenses but the problem is he ended up running out of inventory in fact he's ran out of inventory multiple times and again that sounds really cool that the product sold faster than he thought it would but every time he runs out of inventory he ends up losing out on a ton of sales so you want to make sure that you order around 6 months worth of inventory because if you see that it's selling really fast you have enough time to go to your manufacturer and place another order but figuring out this number is a little bit more of a complicated topic we got two more common mistakes and stay with me because trust me I spent a lot of sleepless nights because of these mistakes and I'm going to show you how to avoid all of them mistake number six is issues working with Amazon and trust me anyone that's ever worked with Amazon ever sold something on Amazon knows that sometimes you can run into some issues especially if you don't read the terms of service if you don't know all the different rules and regulations but I'm going to break it down for you right here a very common issue that people have when selling on Amazon is that Amazon will overcharge them for all kinds of different fees storage fees FBA fees you name it you have to watch Amazon and I probably lost over $3,000 on Amazon overcharging me for fees now the good news is usually if you catch them overcharging you you can call them out and send them an email and they'll usually fix it for you but if you wait too long sometimes they won't reimburse you for the overcharge of fees and there are software programs that will go through your account and try to figure out where Amazon's overcharging you or where Amazon owes you money and handle it for you and sadly when I was first selling on Amazon I didn't know about these software programs so I ended up losing out on thousands of dollars of Amazon overcharging me you can use tools like helium 10's refund Genie but this tool and other tools like it go through your account and make sure that Amazon's not overcharging you another issue I had with Amazon is I sent them a pallet of my product into their warehouse and they claimed that they never got it they lost this pallette and they asked me for the BL which stands for bill of lading which is the piece of paper that the truck driver gives to you when he picks up the pallet from your warehouse now the problem is I actually wasn't there when the pallet was picked up I had someone else that was handling this for me because I was out of the country and sadly they weren't sure where they put this paper and this is a big warning anytime you have any kind of paper or receipt or anything like that for your business make sure that you keep it safe and I know that this sounds obvious but this is just a reminder that you want to keep every single scrap of paper that you ever get associated with your business and finally mistake number seven and this is probably the most expensive biggest mistake that I've ever made in my life at least when it comes to business in my first year selling this product on Amazon as I mentioned I did over $360,000 in sales $120,000 in profit but in my second year selling this exact same product I did over $400,000 in sales $150,000 in profit but something interesting happened by year three my sales actually went down I did around $200,000 in sales around $60,000 in profit the big question is why and the reason is I had always dreamed about making a $100,000 per year passive income because I figured if I could make $100,000 per year but I had the freedom to spend my time doing whatever I wanted to do I could travel and really enjoy life and after launching this product on Amazon I pretty much automated and systematized my entire business and as I said I did $120,000 in profit and even though I wasn't actively working my my business in my second year my profit actually went up so instead of working on my business and trying to increase my Revenue increase my profit every single year I coasted and I enjoyed life and that is the benefit of Amazon once you launch your product once you get the sales going and get everything automated you can spend your time traveling enjoying life and and doing whatever you want to do but the key thing here is eventually your sales are going to drop that's not going to last forever and for me it led to me having 3 years where on average I was making over $100,000 profit per year and I wasn't really having to work that hard but the truth is if I would have doubled down on my business I probably could have blown this up to a multi-million dollar company so even though I had a lot of success with this business it was kind of a failure because it could have been a lot bigger now let's talk about what I think are the seven secrets to success when selling on Amazon this next section I'm going to share with you all my top tips all the secrets people always are coming up to me like how do I have success on Amazon well I compiled it into this next video create a launch group before you even launch your product on Amazon this will blow up your sales from day one and get you a ton of reviews right away your product page needs to be optimized for sales I'm going to share with you 10 secrets on how to dramatically increase your product's conversion rate and I'm going to show you the number one mistake that beginners make when creating their product this one little secret of creating a coupon code can increase your sales by 50% if you do it correctly PPC is the secret that the professionals are using to get more sales and in my opinion this is the most powerful most profitable advertising tool in the world and I'll share with you these secrets on how to properly use Amazon's PPC platform the coupon stack is a ninja trick that will make your customers want to buy multiples of your product this will increase your sales which will increase your sales rank which will in turn get you even more sales the number six secret is you need to make your Amazon product stand out and this is the biggest mistake I see beginners making and this is why so many beginners fail at Amazon and I'm going to show you how to completely avoid this but by far the biggest secret to success on Amazon is picking the perfect product and at the end of this video I'm going to share with you exactly how I found my six-figure passive income product and I'm even going to share with you what my product is and by using this method you can get started selling on Amazon with almost no money and this is the biggest secret and by far the best way to make money online that I've ever found and I want to see you succeed in avoid all the pain I had to go through finding out these secrets so let's get started with number one which is one of the most important Secrets one of the most powerful tips nobody is talking about and that is a launch group a launch group is where you basically get a group of potential customers people that would potentially buy your product into a Facebook group it can also be on an Instagram page or an email list personally I recommend doing all of them but by putting people in a Facebook group it's very powerful this allows you to share your product get feedback on your product on your logo on your design every aspect of it so that when you do go to launch on Amazon the people in your launch group are going to feel invested in your product they're going to buy it on day one they're going to also be more likely to leave reviews Amazon will see this spike in sales these high quality reviews and they're going to know that you have a great product on top of that by leveraging the launch group you're going to make a better product cuz you're going to be showing them the design and they're going to be giving you real-time feedback so that when you do go to launch you're going to have an amazing product to sell but launching your product is only part of the battle you need to have an optimized product page you need to have a good title and you need to make sure it contains lots of keywords things that people would search for on Amazon to find your product but that's not enough you need to make sure that it's enticing to your customers as well you also get five bullet points and this is a chance for you to highlight the benefits of your product again make sure it contains lots of keywords that your customers might be searching for by putting keywords in the title in the bullet points Amazon knows what your product's about and it's more likely to rank you higher up in the search result the main image is probably the most important part of your product page and this is where most beginners make a mistake put as much energy and effort into making a good main images you can cuz this is what people look at before they click on your product I recommend using a highquality computer generated image and if you need a referral to someone you can join my Facebook group and I'm happy to share with you who I personally use this allows you to get the perfect picture and one more note about the main image is you want as little white space as possible you want your image to take up as much room as possible it'll make your product look bigger in the search results and pop more you also want to add as many other images as you possibly can your products from different angles and all the benefits all the ways to use your product this is important because not everyone's going to read your description or your bullet points so highlight the benefits of your product is best you can other than the title in the main image the review section is probably the next most important you need to do everything you can to get as many good reviews as possible if you haven't yet get a trademark as early as possible this will allow you to get brand registered in Amazon which will allow you to add branded content and this is just another chance for you to sell your product put images in there put nice descriptions and again use the section to convince potential customers to buy your product you can also add a video and this allows you to convey things you might not be able to in images and I also highly recommend putting yourself in the video letting people know that they're buying from a real person and you can use the questions and answerers section to alleviate any concerns potential customers might have about buying your product the Third Secret is to add a coupon code and this is a ninja hack I only recently found out about and it does a lot of amazing things the first thing it does is it makes your product stand out in the search results people are more likely to click on your product if it has a coupon code because that little green badge that says save 5 10 15% and then when people do click on your product they're more likely to convert into a a sale because they feel like they're getting a deal it's easy to set up a coupon code I'll put a link to a video Down Below on some more information on how to properly set up your coupon code PPC advertising with Amazon is extremely powerful extremely profitable and there's two main types there's sponsored products and there's sponsored Brands let's talk about sponsored products first within sponsored products you can either do product targeting or keyword targeting and keyword targeting is basically where you say I want to show my ad in the search results when people people type in certain keyword for instance you might tell Amazon every time someone types in peanut butter I want to show my ad and I'm willing to pay a dollar for every time someone clicks on my ad and goes to my product page now contrast that with product targeting which is where you tell Amazon which products that you want to show your add-on and it could be products that are competitors of yours or it could just be other products that you know that if someone buys that product they'd also be interested in your peanut butter now banner ads on the other hand is very similar to keyword targeting product ads but instead of just showing your product it's actually a complete Banner at the top of the search result with all these different types of campaigns they have manual bidding where you pick the keywords or the products that you want to Target but they also have a really Nifty feature called automatic targeting which you basically tell Amazon I'm willing to pay a dollar a click you do what you think's best and surprisingly that actually works really well Amazon actually does a really good job at finding you profitable traffic I have a complete video diving way deeper into PPC I'll link up here I'll put a link down below as well the coupon stack is another hack that my mentor actually taught me and the way it works is you basically give a discount anytime someone buys more than one of your product and what this does is it makes people want to buy more when you know you're going to save money there's a part of your brain that gets triggered and you say hm maybe I do need two of these or maybe I can give one to a friend again this is very powerful because Amazon sees that you're selling more which means that it's more likely to put you higher up in the search results which in turn means you're going to sell more products we're almost at what I consider the most important secret but this secret is still very important and that's that you need to make your product stand out this is why old school private labeling is dead no longer can you just take a boring product put it up on Amazon and expect to be a millionaire overnight you need to make your product stand out because if your product doesn't Stand Out nobody's going to click on it and if nobody clicks on it from the search results no one's going to buy your product I've already talked about a lot of ways to make your product stand out a good main image a good title lots of review use but by far the most important way to make your product Stand Out is secret number seven and that's to be selling the perfect product to me the perfect product to sell on Amazon is a product that you create it's got to be unique there's got to be something different about it ideally the product that you sell on Amazon would be a product that you are passionate about something that you really wish existed in the world this will make it so much easier to do every step of this now you might want to find a product to sell on Amazon but you don't have a lot of money and you're looking for a freeway way to find products to sell on Amazon in this next section I'm going to show you how you can find a profitable product to sell on Amazon without spending a dime on any of these tools I obviously go into more depth about how you can find products to sell on Amazon in my Amazon FBA program again there's a link to that down below in the description but let me show you a teaser of how you can find your own product to sell on Amazon in this next section right now so let's start with step one and that's find out what you want so what makes this different than what everyone else is doing is I want you to figure out something that you wish existed in the world a product that you would personally buy and then create that product and it doesn't have to be mind-blowing it doesn't have to be gamechanging for instance my passion product is performance Nut Butter it's a Mac Damia coconut cashew Blended Nut Butter it's not extremely crazy there was already nut Butters that existed but what I did is took my own blend my own formula it's a premium product I was looking for an allnatural high quality healthy fat snack and I couldn't find anything out there and so I thought to myself well if no one is currently making this I should make it and I should sell it so here's the key figure out what you would pay money for and then make that product now a lot of people get stuck on this and they think I don't have a good idea also keep track when you go to Amazon anytime you search for something if it doesn't come up that's an idea that's something that you were looking to purchase that didn't exist and remember if you were looking to buy something and it wasn't there there's probably a lot of of other people that were looking to buy that same thing that's like a big warning sign that you should turn this into a product step two is use the free tools and there's a lot of free product research tools jungle Scout and viral launch are great if you're just doing you know boring private label stuff it makes sense then but if you're creating your own product from scratch we have some pretty good free tools that you can use one of which is the free version of jungle Scout using the free version of jungle Scout you can find out how well any product on Amazon is selling basically all you do is you find a similar product to what you're going to be selling or something that's in the same Niche you get the bestselling rank put it into the jungle Scout tool and it'll tell you approximately how many units that specific product is selling so you know if your category if your Niche is one that people purchase a lot of online so this is a great way to do some product research validate your idea another method you can do another free method is the 999 trick basically any product on Amazon you go you add 999 of them to your cart and then Amazon will automatically tell you how much that seller actually has an inventory you could do this day by day by day and you can see how much that seller is actually selling now this method does have some issues it's not a perfect way to do it but it is an option another free product research tool is using the Google Keyword Planner you can use this to see how often people are searching keywords related to your product so for instance with performance Nut Butter I'd see how much people were searching healthy fat snacks keto snacks paleo snacks and I saw that okay there's a decent amount of Demand with venoc cards we looked at wine education wine flash cards wine hosting party kit anything like that and we saw that once again there's a decent amount of demand it basically tells you how often people are searching for whatever keywords you put there uh in Google and that lets you know the amount of demand and the last tool is the Google Trends tool and this will show you how often over time people are searching or Googling certain keywords so for instance with keto snack I saw that over time people have been searching it more and more often and that's a really good sign it lets you know that this is a trending topic and it's becoming it's snowballing it's becoming more and more powerful so I knew when I started performance nut butter that this was a trend this was something that was going to be growing over time but by far the most powerful product research tool that no one seems to be talking about on the Internet is step three and that's talk to real people everyone wants to just look at the data and just look at all the metrics and try to determine how to create a new product and that's a good way to get started but if you really want to get some valuable Insight on if you have a good idea or how to make your idea as good as possible talk to real people the way I recommend doing this and the way I did it for performance up butter is through what I call a product launch group basically what you do is you start a Facebook group you get all your friends and family in there of course but you also try to get soon to be customers in there you can use Instagram to do this you can capture emails you can do paid advertising there's a lot of different ways to do this but the end goal is not only to get people on an email list but also to get them in a Facebook group then what you do is you show people ideas for your product you show people logo designs you show people every aspect of your product you get feedback which will help you make as good of a product as possible but it also engages them the benefit of this is they feel like they created the product as well and they did they helped you create it and so when you go to launch it on Amazon you're going to get a ton of customers right away and those people are going to be dedicated to your product they're going to give you reviews as well which if you ever have sold anything on Amazon you know that getting a lot of sales and a lot of reviews right away is huge that will snowball to more and more success and your your sales metrics will just increase over time and now that I showed you a quick snippet about how to find your own products on Amazon for free let's talk about helium 10 vers jungle Scout because these tools can be very powerful now one thing I want to mention is in my coaching program in the link down below there is over a hundred step-by-step lessons showing you much more in depth about how to find products talking about helium 10 vers jungle Scout basically on my YouTube channel I share a lot of information a ton of information for free I go into way more depth in the coaching program but let's now talk about helium 10 vers jungle Scout which one you should use both these tools will help you find a product to sell on Amazon like this product that I found that's doing $60,000 in Revenue every single month and here's a secret you can actually find out how much any product on Amazon is making using jungle Scout or helium 10 but you can do this for free and here's the trick you go to the page of the product that you want to know how much it's making you scroll down to the bestselling rank number you're going to copy that and then you'll go over into the free jungle Scout sales estimator tool you're going to paste that number in you're going to select your Marketplace and what category the product's in and then it's going to tell you how many units per month that product is selling you're then going to take that number and multiply it by the cost of the product and you can see that this product is making over $60,000 in Revenue every single month and helium 10 actually has a free extension that you can click on for any product and it'll show you how much that product is making in sales per month another tool that you can get for free is the Amazon FBA fee calculator and this will tell you how much profit a product is making because just cuz that one product was making $60,000 in Revenue you have to remember when you're selling on Amazon revenue is not profit there's going to be costs for instance you're going to have to pay 15% for the Amazon selling fee you're also going to have to pay for the Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee and there's going to be other costs and there is a free tool the Amazon fee calculator that will do the math for you and show you how much profit any product on Amazon is actually making now both jungle Scout and helium 10 have a lot of other features in their paid plans but here's a trick that you can use to get a free helium 10 account if you go to the link down below for helium 10 you click on the link you click on get started today and you scroll all the way to the bottom you can actually click the button to get a free helium 10 account and I'll share more details about that free helium 10 account in just a minute but now let's get into the pros and the cons of jungle Scout versus helium 10 let's get started with the pros and the cons of helium 10 and one of the biggest pros of helium 10 is that it does have a free plan and using the free plan you can use a lot of the tools a lot of the features of the paid plans there is some restrictions but I actually had one student that was able to find a $100,000 per month product using the free plan so don't think that you need to pay for either one of these tools another Pro of helium 10 is that it does have a lot more tools and in my opinion better more in-depth tools than Jungle Scout including a keyword research tool called the magnet tool and the cerebro tool and what these tools do is they allow you to figure out exactly what people are searching for in Amazon and if you can figure out what people are searching for in Amazon you can figure out what kind of products to sell them and the magnet keyword tool allows you to put in what you think someone might be searching for and it'll tell you how many people per month are searching for that keyword phrase on top of that it's going to give you a list of a bunch of other related things and you're going to end up finding a bunch of different ideas for products and and keywords that you could add to your Amazon listing there's also the cerebro tool and this is a reverse Asin lookup what that means is you take the Asin which is the Amazon standard identification number and every product on Amazon has this you're going to copy this and you're going to put it into the cerebro tool and it's going to tell you exactly what people are searching for on Amazon before they find and buy this product and this allows you to look into your competitors and figure out exactly how they're making so much money there's other tools also like black box that will help you find a product as well as X-ray and a profitability calculator but one of my favorite tools that helium 10 has that jungle Scout does not have is the refund Genie and you need to be careful when you're selling on Amazon because at times Amazon will screw you over Amazon will not always send you the money that it owes you Amazon makes a lot of mistakes and it ends up costing you money and this refund Genie tool will go through and it'll figure out exactly how much money Amazon owes you and it'll do all the work and it'll get that money from Amazon there's also a ton of tools in helium 10 that's going to make it so that your Amazon listing is completely optimized and you know that it's very important if you want to have success on Amazon to get to the top of the search results and helium 10 has a ton of different tools that will help you to do exactly that another powerful tool that's only available on the Platinum plan or higher is AD toomic and this is a way to completely automate all your Amazon PPC and for those that don't know PPC stands for pay per click this is a way for you to advertise on Amazon where you pay every time someone clicks on your ad and this can be really tedious and this can take a lot of work and AD Tomic automates this entire process for you and jungle Scout does not have an equivalent tool to Atomic so this is a huge feature of helium 10 there's also an inventory protector tool and you know if you're selling on Amazon that you do not want to run out of inventory if you run out of inventory Amazon might Blacklist you because they're going to think that maybe you're not a reliable business that you're not actually a professional seller and this tool is going to help to make make sure that you never run out of inventory another Pro with helium 10 is they do offer monthly pricing or they offer discounted yearly pricing and even though I do recommend the yearly pricing if you know you're going to have this tool for a year or longer for most you out there if you're just starting out with Amazon and you're just looking to do some product research I'd recommend just sticking with the monthly plan but there are three different paid plans with helium 10 there's the starter the platinum in the diamond and for most beginners I actually recommend going with the Platinum plan though you can always try the starter plan the problem with the starter plan is it's a little bit Limited in its features and if you upgrade to platinum it unlocks everything and it's going to make it a lot faster for you to do product research and just use all the tools but one of my favorite Pros with helium 10 is they do offer a 7-Day money back period so I recommend if you're on the fence to sign up for helium 10 do all your product research and if you find a product in those seven days and you want to cancel it you can always cancel it but wait a minute jungle Scout also does have some pretty big pros and in my opinion the biggest Pro of jungle Scout is their supplier database tool this tool will allow you to figure out the manufacturer for your competitors so you can go on and pretty much any product on Amazon you can plug into this tool and this tool will tell you who your competitor or who any product on Amazon uses as a manufacturer this tool is Magic if you're stuck trying to figure out who you're going to use as your manufacturer this tool can be extremely powerful because not only can you go to your competitors you can go to products that are kind of similar to yours even if it's not directly a competitor put it in this tool contact that manufacturer and see if they can produce your product jungle Scout also does have some great keyword research tools and some great product research tools I will say in my opinion I like helium 10's keyword and product research tools a little bit better I think the data is a little bit better and there's more ways to filter the data but that being said jungle Scout is still a very powerful tool another Pro is that jungle Scout is actually per month a little bit less expensive than helium 10 and if you click on the link down below you can get 3 months of jungle Scout for $149 which if you divide it that's $49 a month and this plan is pretty much the same as helium 10's $79 per month plan but the problem of course is that you do have to buy 3 months up front so it is more expensive up front even though per month you're actually saving money another Pro for Jungle Scout is the customer service and the team are extremely friendly but I've also found that to be true with helium 10 and now let's get into the cons of helium 10 versus jungle Scout and pay attention because this is where things get really interesting the first real con of helium 10 is that it is more expensive than Jungle Scout not by a lot and I do think that it's worth it but it's something to be aware of another con with helium 10 is because they have so many tools and the tools have somewhat confusing names it can be a little bit hard for beginners to navigate and the last time I checked helium 10 does not have a really good mobile app so if you're doing a lot of work on mobile it's a little bit clunky in my opinion now for the Cons with the jungle Scout one of the first big cons is there's no free plan for you to try it out and see if it's a good fit for you another con is that it offers less features including it does not actually offer any features or tools to help you launch your Amazon product and if you've ever sold on Amazon you know how important it is to launch a product on Amazon when you launch a product on Amazon you want to try to get as many sales as possible from day one what this does is it lets Amazon know to put your Amazon listing at the top of the search results and on Amazon the products that are at the top of the search results get the most clicks followed by second place third place and fourth place and it's actually exponential so getting to the top of the search results is extremely important and in general the biggest con with jungle Scouts is I think the tools just aren't as accurate in their data and there's just not as many ways to filter the data as there is with helium 10 and before I announce the winner of which tool is best helium 10 or jungle Scout let me show you behind the scenes what it looks like if you decide to pay for these tools and let me show you all the different tools that come with both helium 10 and jungle Scout over here we're going to go one by one I'm going to explain what these tools do and as you can already see helium 10 has more tools than Jungle Scout does and with helium 10 the tools are organized in a few different categories product research these tools will all help you to find a product to sell on Amazon keyword research these tools will all help you to figure out what keywords you should put in your title and in your bullet point but here's a secret cerebro and magnet tool are actually how I do product research now these are the most powerful product research tools and most people aren't even using them there's also tools that will help you Market your product like ad toomic and Amazon attribution as well as tools that will help you optimize your listing there's also analytics tools things like a keyword tracker and operation tools things that will help you avoid hijackers and refund Genie plus the follow-up tool with jungle Scout things are organized by toolbox product research suppliers this will help you to find suppliers for your product keywords Marketing sales analytics and advertising so let's look at some of these different tools and I'll share with you what some of my favorite tools are with both helium 10 and jungle Scout but the first one we'll talk about is blackbox and blackbox is a product research tool this is going to help you to find products to sell on Amazon and the way that this works is you can put in criteria of the kind of product that you're looking for and this tool will tell you exactly what products you should sell for instance let's say that you want to make at least $10,000 per month you'd put $10,000 minimum per month that these products are making and let's say you want to find products that aren't that competitive so you want to say that they have under 400 reviews and you can even pick which category you want to sell in let's say you want to sell in baby for instance which is a pretty hot category to sell in you click search and this tool will give you hundreds of different products that meet your criteria and you can go through and you can figure out what kind of products you want to sell there's also the trendster tool which will tell you what are the hot trends for selling on Amazon another tool that I like to use is the cerebro tool and this is one of the most powerful tools that most people aren't using what you can do is you can go to Amazon find a product that you are curious about for instance let's look at cocktail cards here for those that don't know cocktail cards is one of the products that I sell I actually partnered with AJ on this product and AJ was a bartender he ended up losing his job during the pandemic he joined my Amazon FBA course and I saw that he had a passion for cocktails and I actually found this product using the next tool I'm going to be talking about which is the magnet tool but in his first year he did over a half a million dollars in sales on Amazon and so the way the cerebro tool works is if you go to any product on Amazon and you look for the as number and you can see the as number down here this is the Amazon standard identification number you take that and you can paste it into this cerebro tool and what this tool will do is it'll tell you the exact keywords that people are searching for in order to find and buy this product and you can see right here people are searching for recipe card deck recipe cards and other keywords like that this is a really powerful way for you to find products to sell on Amazon another tool that I recommend from Helium 10 is the magnet tool and this is how I found cocktail cards in the first place with this tool you can put in any keyword and it will tell you exactly how many searches per month that keyword is getting so for instance I see that cocktail cards is being searched over a thousand times per month and when you do that it'll also tell you other ideas of keywords for instance you can see that over 200 people a month are searching for easy cocktail recipe book and there's other things like that you can actually put this in order of search volume and we can see things like over 26,000 people per month are searching for card shuffler there's some other tools here that are also powerful like the Miss spellin nator and that's a tool that's going to help you to find common misspellings and put them in your backend keywords which is going to make it so you make more sales for your product there's Atomic which I mentioned earlier Amazon attribution which is going to help you figure out how your off Amazon advertising is leading to sales there's also portals which will help you build landing pages that'll allow you to collect emails and do things like that the next tools we're going to talk about are the listing optimization tools there's Frankenstein which is going to help you to process your keywords scribbles which is going to help you to optimize your listing in general an index Checker showing you how you index for different keywords so basically seeing what rank are you and are you actually showing up on Amazon search for your different keywords a listing analyzer and what you can do with this is you can put your product into the listing analyzer and it'll tell you how good your listing is you can also put in uh competitors and see how good they're doing so if we run the analysis here you can see it tells the sales for the last seven days in in addition to that it gives some historic data as well as giving the listing quality score and we're only getting a 7.5 so I see that there's room for improvement so this is a very powerful tool they even recently added an AI powered listing Optimizer this is something I've not used yet but it's pretty interesting some other tools in the analytics section is the keyword tracker which you can put in what keyword you want to rank for and it'll track week by week day by day and tell you where you're ranking for that there's the market tracker which will show you how you compare to your competitors Market tracker 360 which will actually give you some more new and improved competitor intelligence and there's a tool that'll help you to calculate your profits there's also all these operation tools there's refund Genie which I talked about earlier this is going to help you to get all that money that Amazon owes you there's the follow-up tool and this is an automated email tool so when someone buys a product from you you can automat Ally follow up with them and say hey make sure to leave us a review there's also some more advanced tools like the inventory management tool and the alerts tool which will keep hijackers off of your listing and you can see overall there is a ton of very powerful tools here but let's jump over to Jungle Scout and quickly look over all their tools there's the sales estimator tool and this is the same as the free tool the difference is if you pay you can use this multiple times a day with the free tool it actually caps you you can only use it so many times before it tells you hey n you're done there's also a listing grader which is very similar to the listing grader from Helium 10 except for as you can see this isn't nearly as powerful as the helium 10 one it doesn't give you as much insights as helium 10 does there's also a bunch of different product research tools there's the product database product tracker opportunity finder and all these tools are going to help you to find products category Trends now the most powerful tool with jungle Scout and the one reason why I would consider jungle Scout over helium 10 is the supplier database tool and I know some people that sign up for helium 10 and use all the product research tools all the different tools over there but then they come and they also sign up for Jungle Scout just because this supplier database tool is so powerful and I know I already explained this earlier but again you can put in your competitor and it'll tell you who the manufacturer is for that competitor there's also keywords tool and all these tools are going to help you to find the keywords that you want to use for your listing and let's take a look at keyword Scout when I click on this and I put in a key that I want to get more information about let's say cocktail cards and click search you can see that there's not as many filter possibilities with jungle Scout as there is with helium 10 if you count it there's about 11 different filters here and there's 14 different filters over here in addition to that with helium 10 there's over 1,400 keyword ideas that it gives you with jungle Scout it only gives you 49 keywords and if we look in the columns there's just not as many columns that you can filter with as there is with helium 10 there's just way more information with helium 10 with jungle Scout there's also some different marketing tools like promotions and review automation which is similar to what you get with helium 10 there's also some sales analytic data like profit overview p&l statements and there's some advertising functionality but it's just ad analytics they don't have the equivalent of atomic which will automate your Amazon PPC so now it's time to announce the winner of helium 10 versus jungle Scout and if you're deciding between these tools keep in mind that they both actually have a 7-Day money back guarantee period so you can try one tool out see if it works for you and if it doesn't you can try the other tool out and you can always go back to whichever one you think is best and keep in mind that you don't actually need to pay for either one of these tools I was able to find my first Amazon FBA passion product that made over a million dollars without using either one of these tools but if I had to go back and do it again I would 100% pick one of these tools pay for it because the thing about these and any tools is it's going to make your life easier the example I give is that you don't need a hammer if you're building a dogghouse you could always just use a rock and Hammer in those nails but if you're trying to build a mansion it might be worth investing in a tool it's going to make the entire process easier so many beginners make the mistake of thinking that early on in their business that spending money means that they're losing money but what I actually see is the opposite most the people that aren't willing to spend money on their business in the early days end up making mistakes that end up losing them thousands of dollars later down the line in their business drum roll please let's announce the winner of helium 10 vers jungle Scout and in my opinion I'd recommend that you sign up for helium 10 because it has way more tools than Jungle Scout and the tools are better the data is more accurate there's more way that you can filter the results and overall helium 10 is a better tool for beginners that being said there is nothing wrong with jungle Scout jungle Scout is still a great tool so at this point in the video you maybe already have an idea of what you want to sell on Amazon but it's time once you know what you want to sell to find a manufacturer that's actually going to be able to create the product so that you can create the product and send it into the Amazon warehouse in this next section I'm going to show you step byep how you can find your own manufacturer but again and I know I'm saying this a lot but in my Amazon FBA program we actually have templates of exactly what to send to manufacturers we have exact my exact conversation so you can see the back and forth that we have we have tools for how to negotiate with manufacturers but this next section is going to give you an overview of how you can find a manufacturer and honestly you don't need to join my coaching program you can just watch these free videos and it's probably going to give you enough information to get started the coaching program is really for people that are looking for some extra help some extra handholding and basically the coaching program is going to make it so that you have success faster that you make less mistakes and I think it's a no-brainer but let now let me show you how you can find your own manufacturer there's six steps to finding a manufacturer in getting your product made the first website that I recommend you going to is alibaba.com and Alibaba .

Will connect you with manufacturers overseas all you have to do is type in what you're looking for right here and click on search now I don't generally recommend getting food or consumable products manufactured overseas however for other types of products it makes a lot of sense to get it manufactured overseas because it's going to be a lot cheaper than having it made in the United States an example of the type of product that you should use Alibaba in order to find a manufa facturer is one like the one that Brent made and Brent created a product called sepro he came to me he said hey I'm a first responder helicopter pilot I've got two kids but I want to make more money I want to create an online business how do I do it and I told him to use this website alibaba.com and so what he did is he had this idea for his product seir proo and he went in here and he typed in a seir torch which is the type of product that he's selling and clicked on manufacturers clicked on search Alibaba will give you a list of a bunch of different manufacturers overseas that can make your product and one of the first things you want to look for is you want to make sure that the manufacturer you're going to work with is a verified supplier this means that Alibaba has sent a person to their manufacturing facility to verify that it's a legitimate company the next thing you're going to look at is the reviews this company has five reviews with a 4.2 star rating which means that maybe one person has had an issue with them but overall seems like they're a pretty reputable business they've had 15 orders with an 88% delivery time and an average response time of 9 hours so once you find a manufacturer that you think could make your product you're going to want to click on chat now or you can click on this button and send them a message telling them exactly what you want to order from there you'll have a back and forth conversation you'll ask them what is their which stands for minimum order quantity and most companies are going to have a minimum amount of product that you have to order around 300 to 500 is a pretty typical minimum order quantity and keep in mind what we're trying to do here is we're buying our products in bulk we're buying 300 500 at a time in order to get that discounted price we're then going to take those products and sell them on Amazon for an increase price so maybe we can order our product for $10 a unit and we can turn around and sell that exact same product for $60 a unit on Amazon one thing to keep in mind is that the more products that you order the bigger the discount you're going to get so instead of ordering 500 units if you order 2,000 units your price per unit's going to go down but yet you can still sell it for the same price on Amazon which means more profit for you now since with carnivore electrolytes I didn't want to get this product manufactured overseas I used a website called thomasnet.com and thomasnet.com is very similar except for it allows you to find manufacturers in the US and since I'm trying to create an electrolyte drink mix here I'm going to type that in and I'm going to click on search and we're going to get a list of a bunch of Manufacturers that can make that exact product in fact there's 68 different suppliers and so from here what I'm going to do is go through this list and find all the manufacturers that I want to work with and click on contact supplier and tell them about the product that we're trying to create however a pro tip is I wouldn't just recommend checking out thomasnet.com if you're looking to get products manufactured in the United States I'd also go to google.com and just type in exactly the same thing but then space manufacturer and you can see that there are a ton of people here custom supplement manufacturer electrolyte powders in stock beverage manufacturing drink formulation company our powder mixes there are pages in pages of different manufacturers that would be willing to work with you and all I recommend you do is send them a message letting them know about the type of product that you're looking to create and asking them some questions such as what is their minimum order quantity what is their price per unit and here's another Pro tip I don't think you should just ask about the minimum order quantity I think you should say what is your price if we order 500 units 2,000 units and 10,000 units that allows them to know that you're a serious business looking to buy at high volumes eventually but when you actually call someone it develops a lot stronger of a connection it makes you seem like a lot more serious of a potential client remember these manufacturers are busy they probably get a lot of messages and by picking up the phone and calling you seem like a more legitimate business the other benefit of calling is if they can't help you there's a higher probability that they can recommend someone that can help you and it allows you to rapidly ask other questions where if you send an email or a message and they say hey sorry we can't do this they're probably going to end the conversation there they're not really as invested in helping you find other people that can help you do manufacturing now some tips when contacting a manufacturer you want to sound like as legitimate of a business as as serious of as a potential customer as you can now I'm not saying to lie now some people do give the advice that you should say that hey I'm I'm part of a bigger company not call yourself the founder or CEO maybe call yourself the co which is chief operations officer or some other ideas is you could be the the chief purchasing agent or come up with whatever title you want now the benefit of this is it makes it seem like you're part of a larger company another big benefit when it comes to negotiation which I'll talk about in just a second it allows you to say hey that sounds like a great deal but my boss is saying no so then the person the manufacturer when they're negotiating with you they don't take things as personal I have had people tell me that when you say that hey my boss says it's not a good number that it's easier to negotiate with that because people don't take it as personal now that's up to you I've also had a lot of success by doing the opposite and calling up companies and say hey I'm the founder I'm super passionate I really want to get this thing started but truth is I'm somewhat new to this and asking for their help in educating me that's a double-edged sword I found that it helps because people they empathize and they they want to help me out as a beginner but they could also potentially take advantage of you another important thing to note is when you're first starting out you probably don't want to buy too much inventory so you may at some point in the conversation want to ask what is the minimum order quantity orq you'll see this a lot of times and that is what's the minimum that they're willing to sell you basically now I would not recommend opening a conversation with this because they're less likely to take you serious in fact again a lot of people say you should say hey I'm looking to order 50,000 units even if you're only looking to order 500 because it makes you seem more serious and then later on down the line you say you know what we could do a test run of those 500 units and this is a negotiation tactic cuz there is a chance that the manufacturer is going to say well for $50,000 it's a dollar a piece and then you say okay well let's just start out with 500 and and try to negotiate your way into getting that $1 per unit price that doesn't always work and in general I recommend ordering around 3 to six months worth of inventory figure out how much you think you're going to sell within that 3 to six month range and start with that as an order and there's a lot of reasons for this one of the reasons is if there is a problem with the order well at least you're not out too much money it's not that big of a deal also you need to store all that inventory somewhere if you order more than 3 to 6 months worth of inventory where are you going to store it and you might have to pay storage fees but you also don't want to order too little inventory if you only order one month's worth of inventory by the time you realize that you're selling out you'll have to place another order anyways and you might as well take advantage of a discount for buying lots of items and I haven't mentioned that yet but generally speaking the more you buy the lower per unit price you're going to get and this can make it so your business can be a lot more profitable if you can order a larger quantity of items I have three other quick things to keep in mind before we move on to the next step of this process the first is when whenever communicating whenever sending messages or emails with your manufacturer make sure to spell check to grammar check to make sure your email looks as professional as possible if you look like a beginner they're going to treat you like a beginner the second tip is make sure to establish a connection with them this is something I've historically been fairly bad at with my manufacturers a lot of people treat their manufacturer as just a business transaction but if you can somehow create a real relationship maybe send them a small gift not you know don't do this in a way that seems manipulative but once you've had your first successful production run send them a small gift a thank you something really heartfelt and that what that's going to do is it's going to be more likely that they're going to want to help you out in the future and then the third tip I have for you is the cheapest company isn't always the best part of the reason it took me a year and a half to get this product manufactured is my manufacturer that I was working with even though they were a really good deal and they produced pretty good products they were not organized and when I tried to create a new flavor they were just too disorganized to be able to do it they had a lot of different moving Parts a lot of other clients that they were prioritizing so I switched to someone that's slightly more expensive but they're a lot more professional and my hope is even though I'm going to be paying more money working with these people that the stress that I'm going to save because they're more professional is going to be worth it though I will talk about this later but so far it's been a really bumpy road even with the new manufacturer getting this product manufactured I've lost probably close to $155,000 in R&D and trying to get up been running with this this new manufacturer which I'll talk about all those issues later in this video the next step is to smash that like button by hitting the like button it lets YouTube and the algorithm know that this is a good video and the real next step is to design your product and I mean this in a lot of different ways first off you're going to have to design the dimensions you're going to have to design the look and feel of what you want but you're also going to want to design a logo in all the different graphical elements now the first step of this that people often get hung up on and they really shouldn't is how do they design their product do they have to hire a cad professional all these different things first thing I'd recommend is emailing messaging with the manufacturer and telling them in words maybe write out some sketches show them exactly what you want they can help you their entire business model is around helping you because they need to make it as easy as possible for people to work with them so what you can do is you can email them and say hey you've got this product on Alibaba that looks like this what I want to do is change the dimensions maybe make it a little bit longer maybe make it a little bit taller change some of the graphical elements tell your manufacturer exactly what you want now there is a chance that they're going to say hey that's outside of our realm of being able to to help you with this you need to go hire some kind of a cad designer or something like that and that's really easy to do you can go to Fiverr or upwork and you can find someone where you can tell them in plain old English exactly like what you're trying to do and they can help you out just keep in mind the manufacturers even if you're working with a Chinese manufactur they're really smart this is what they do for a living they can probably help you out chances are you won't need to go hire someone unless you're looking to do something extremely complex the next part of this is the design and logos of your product and do not skip on this this is an extremely important part that a lot of people forget about your logo is going to represent your company and ideally you're not just going to be selling on Amazon you're going to be selling on your own website and you're going to be promoting your product in social media so a logo is really important I personally recommend doing a 99 designs campaign or at least if you aren't going to do that hire someone on upwork now you can find people on Fiverr it's going to be a lot cheaper to get a logo off Fiverr but you usually get what you pay for in this scenario now the benefit of 99 designs if you're not familiar with it is that you run a contest and you have hundreds of different people you tell people you tell the designers exactly what you're looking for and you have hundreds of different designers submit logo ideas for your product based on what you're saying and you get to pick the winner and you pick a winner and then you say hey everyone these are the winners for the first round let's do a second round based on these designs and see if someone can come up with an even better logo and then you can do a second round there's different pricing models highly recommend using 99 designs if not you can go to upwork or even Fiverr same thing with the box design think about how Apple can charge so much more for their computers it's because every single part of the process feels like it was a lot of thought and attention was put into it including the Box people love this whole unboxing experience people love feeling like they're purchasing a premium product so put a lot of thought energy and attention into what your design of your actual product the box everything is going to look like and again even if you're not a creative person you can hire creative people to help you you can tell them the ideas the concepts that you have in mind you can tell them what kind of demographics your product is for obviously if it's more feminine you might want to do more of like the pink type colors if it's more masculine you might want to do more like the black masculine type colors and obviously there's a lot of different variations of this but find products that you like the way they look that you think you want your product to look very similar to and show that to a designer and they can help you create your own branding the next step is to get a sample sent to you and I highly recommend doing this I have in the past not done this and every time I've not gotten a sample it's come back to bite me in the butt so I highly recommend telling your manufacturer you want a sample now a lot of times they'll send you a sample for free you'll just have to pay shipping for instance I helped my girlfriend start this company it's called venoc cards and with this company they sent us a sample that was blank so we could at least see the dimensions and that was free to do and if we wanted to get a a sample with the actual the logo the design on all the different cards that was $300 we decided we didn't want to pay the $300 that we just wanted to get the regular sample and that was beneficial because we got to see the dimensions of it but we should have paid the $300 it turns out there were some tiny little mistakes that we would have caught if we would have just paid the $300 for the sample now how much it cost you to get one sample made from your manufacturer is going to depend wildly on a bunch of different variables sometimes they're not able to do one for that cheap it's going to cost a lot of money for instance I've lost about $115,000 in doing the R&D do just to get one sample of my product the new performance Nut Butter cacao and I am going to be doing an in-depth video about all the mistakes I've made in this last year and a half on trying to create this product now you can say the $115,000 I spent in R&D and getting this product developed and and switching to this new manufacturer you could say that's an investment and I do agree with you but here's the thing I want to be completely honest in this moment in time it feels like that money's lost I don't know yet if this product's going to be a success so obviously depending on your different product categories it's going to cost you a different amount for me for instance to get just the nut butter made in using their Machinery it cost around $600 but then to get it into the pouch because that takes a different set of machinery and to get the the design in the film it's way more expensive it's it's a few thousand dollars to get one unit of my product so ask from early on how much it's going to cost for you to get one sample and realize a sample doesn't necessarily have to be quote unquote your finished product realistically I could have got the nut butter product made and just tasted it and I know what I know what the pouches are already like I don't necessarily need the full finalized product to say yes but I decided to play it safe and and get the product made in the pouch so again I'm going to be talking about all the different mistakes I made how I lost $115,000 on this Amazon product so far in next week's video so make sure to subscribe but the next step is how to actually pay for your products because this is probably the scariest part of the entire thing because this is the part where you actually have to put your money on the line everything else we've talked about sure might cost a little bit of money here and there but usually to get your product manufacturer it's going to be a few thousand at least it could be more expensive if you have a more custom product and there is of course a chance that it could be slightly less for me personally the hardest part has always been when I have to send a wire when I have to actually send the money to the manufacturer because that is the that's the moment of truth that's the black and white moment of entering the cave and there's no turning back anymore and there's different ways to send money to your manufacturer historically for all my manufactur facturers I've done a wire transfer and a wire transfer to be honest with you is really scary because unlike a credit card transaction where you can call up the the bank and say hey uh that was fraud I want my money back with a wire transfer there's none of that once you send the wire even if you send it to the wrong person you accidentally put in the wrong bank account number it's gone forever and I personally use US Bank to send a wire it cost around I think $25 or so if it's domestic it's something like $75 to $95 to send a wire over to China and what you do you can either go into a bank and do this you also have to give them the routing number or the Swift number if it's an international bank account and again like I said it's scary because if if you accidentally mistype one of those numbers they can send it to the wrong person you're never getting that money back now a little bit safer way to do it is PayPal and I do know that some manufacturers accept Paypal some overseas manufacturers most of the ones I've worked with they don't want to deal with that because they know that if you send a PayPal transaction you can contact PayPal and say hey this was fraud and it's very hard for them to fight some manufacturers even do take credit card though that's pretty rare keep in mind when you pay with something with credit card there's a transaction fee that the the manufacturer would have to pay of around 3% so most manufacturers don't want to deal with that they want you to send a wire transfer and as I said this is the hardest part of manufacturing a product at least from an emotional standpoint it's scary when you have to send that money and know that it's not coming back unless your business is successful it's really hard and the reason I'm saying this is just to let you know that this is a common fear that a lot of people have and to be honest it's why in some ways I feel like I've lost $115,000 on this product even though logically I know this product's eventually going to be successful I'm going to make my money back and probably make a lot more money in this moment in time I don't know and it's terrifying and I'm just saying this to let you know that there probably is going to be that moment in manufacturing your product where you are terrified and that's okay but keep moving on keep going through it because once you send the wire something magical happens you have no choice but to make your business successful and that's a really powerful tool and that brings us to The Next Step which is actually getting your product shipped either to your Warehouse or the Amazon warehouse and this is another one of those things that a lot of people aren't sure how to do it seems really complicated and hard but it's actually extremely simple and there's different options obviously if you are ordering your products and you're getting them manufactured in China you can use DHL or FedEx to get your product shipped via air and that's going to be a lot faster it's only going to take a few days but it's going to be a lot more expensive the other option is you can do C- shipping which going to which is going to take about four to 6 weeks and that and it also has to go through customs it's going to be cheaper but you're also going to have to pay for an annual bond which is $100 if you want a single use Bond or $400 if you want a bond that'll last you for the entire year and the reason you do the $400 bond is if you're doing multiple uh multiple shipments from China then you can use that that multiple entry Bond and to be honest with all this I don't recommend dealing with this yourself I recommend finding and hiring a freight forwarder if you want to join my Facebook group then I do have a freight forward I can recommend to you but otherwise you can find a freight forward just Google it someone local in your area that you can talk to and they can help you find a a ship to to send your products on they can help you with the logistics from getting your product from the manufacturer's Warehouse to the ship dealing with Customs dealing with all that different all those different things and there is last I checked I think it's around like a 10 to 20% Duty from sending products from China to the US it depends on your your product category but keep that in mind it's not Manufacturing in China isn't as cheap as it once was because of the duty because of the shipping because of all those other costs sometimes Manufacturing in the US can be just as affordable depending on the different product category a lot of things are still much cheaper in China but that's something to keep in mind and if you do have a us-based manufacturer you're going to have to hire some kind of a shipping some kind of a trucking company and a lot of them they do what's called less than truckload LTL shipping which is usually a pallet two pallets something like that and that's going to cost it really depends on how far away you are if it's a 6-hour drive from you to your manufacturer it's going to be maybe 150 bucks to get a pallet shipped if it's a two-day drive maybe $300 depends on things like that and if you want to get LT shipments you can use freightquote.com you can also get truckload shipments or the other thing is if you're doing extremely small shipments you can ask your manufacturer to ship it to you or to Amazon using UPS FedEx USPS like all those different things now the last thing that a lot of people get hung up on is how do you actually send your products into the Amazon warehouse now I am planning on doing a separate video on this but it's extremely simple literally Amazon makes it as easy as possible for you basically you just have to follow a step-by-step thing where you put in the information and they'll send a truck to come to your house to pick up the pallet or or your Warehouse or wherever the pallet is of your items or if you're going to send in items that are just you know smaller than that it's basically just like fedexing a package to your friend the last thing and probably the most important thing as I said if you watch any part of this video this is going to be the most important part is the biggest mistakes I've made in how you can avoid these mistakes and I have to be honest I'm not the best Amazon FBA seller I'm not selling the most units but my focus is and how I want to help you out is every time I make a mistake to me it's a learning experience I used to get really upset I used to really beat myself up when I made a mistake that lost me money but now the way I look at it is when I make a mistake it's a learning experience that I get to share with you and my goal is not to be the Michael Jordan of Amazon FBA my goal isn't to be the best Amazon FBA seller out there my goal is to help other people create amazing passion products and sell them on Amazon sell them on their own website so that is my goal and with that in mind I've made a lot of freaking mistakes on Amazon I've made a lot of mistakes in manufacturing my product but one of the biggest mistakes I've made with a past product is that we ordered too much please be very mindful when you're ordering figure out how much you think you're going to sell per month and only purchase 3 to 6 months worth of inventory for this product venoc cards we probably should have ordered around 400 unit that would have probably cost us around $2,500 or something like that but instead I was cocky and I thought we could really blow up this company so we ended up ordering 2,000 units now most of those units are just sitting in Ariana's parents garage now that's not the end of the world the good thing about this product is it's shelf stable it's not like it's not like my product that could potentially go bad she has the rest of her life to sell those products but still it's an issue because that's money that we could have been using towards something else now the benefit of ordering a lot of products and the reason we did this is your price per unit's going to go way down so it makes it so that product's more profitable but still as I mentioned earlier we did make some mistakes on the cards that now we have to wait till we sell all 2,000 units before we get a chance to fix them the next big mistake that I made with my product performance Nutter is not making it clear with the manufacturer who's responsible when something goes wrong if a product is defective do I have to just take that as a loss or do they have to pay for it and with my my first manufacturer I worked with anytime there was an issue with the products I had to pay for it it was basically it was a loss and I just I just dealt with it to be honest the reason I did this is because I didn't have a backup manufacturer I felt like I was kind of backed into a corner I had no choice but to work with my manufacturer because what I'm trying to do with my product is very specific I need someone that's going to grind nut Butters and put them into a pouch and I couldn't find anyone else that was willing to work with me now that being said that's another tip is always try to find a backup manufacturer this is something I've seen a lot of people have issues with because China shut down a lot of their manufacturing and because people didn't have any kind of backup Source they were out of luck for a decent amount of time so always have a backup manufacturer as well before you launch on Amazon the next step is to create your listing and in this next section I'm going to show you exactly how you can create your listing for selling on Amazon now again we go into more depth about how to create a listing for your product on Amazon in my Amazon FBA program but next video it goes into some great information it tells you pretty much everything that you need to know if you do still have questions obviously feel free to leave it in the comments down below or join the program and you get access to those weekly Q&A calls as well as I show step by step for some of my products how I created the listing why I chose the keywords I chose why I created certain descriptions and why I chose certain images so it's a no-brainer so if you do get stuck on this next section feel free to join the coaching program to get unstuck basically but let's talk about how you can create your perfect Amazon product listing the first step to creating the perfect Amazon product listing is to add your product and once you add your product to Amazon you're going to have to add the main image and the main image is what shows up in the search results when people are actually searching for whatever your product is it's going to show up here in the search results and I'm going to show you how to make a main image that's going to make people want to click on your listing then talk about some of the side images here and these help you to sell your product when people are looking at your Amazon product page the main thing they're looking at is the main image the side images the reviews and the title so the next thing I'm going to talk about is how to create a title again when people are searching for your product on Amazon this is the next thing they see and we're going to talk about how to include Search terms keyword Search terms in your title in a way that's going to make not only the algorithm put you to the top of the search results but also make a title that's going to make people want to click on your listing after that we're going to talk about all the bullet points here because uh this is another way for you to sell your product when people are looking at your product listing they're going to look at the bullet points and you're going to want to convey the benefits of your product and I'll show you some Ninja hacks on how to do that but also you're going to want to make sure you add in the different keywords to your bullet points we'll talk about all this in depth later so if this is really fast don't worry about it we're going to go into more detail later and then we're also going to talk about the description for your product listing I'm also going to throw in some bonus things here that I don't see a lot of people talking about things like enhanced brand content this A+ content and some other tricks including like some tricks on the q&as on how to get more traffic how to get more sales to your product listing so let's get started the first step is to go here and click add a product now when you're adding your product if you already if you're selling a product that already exists you're going to search for the product that already exists on the Amazon platform but that's not what I recommend I personally don't recommend selling products that already exist on the Amazon platform that's wholesale that's Retail Arbitrage those aren't the models that I like to do I'm all about creating what I call a passion product and a passion product and private labeling either one of those you're going to have to click I'm adding a product not sold on Amazon and for anyone that doesn't know a passion product to me is a unique product something different something that's better than the competition ideally a product that you're passionate about and my product right here this is a product I've been selling for a while now it's a product that I'm passionate about but in today's video what I'm going to be showing you is stepbystep how I I'm creating a listing for a product I'm not even selling yet so this is the product that we're going to be adding to Amazon and some notes it doesn't have we don't have a lot of other images here but that's okay don't worry about that the first thing Amazon's going to ask you is to pick what your product category is going to be and this doesn't have to be perfect you can always change it later but what I recommend doing is just searching for your product in the search like something that you think similar to your product and picking that as your category if you're still unsure of what category your product should be you can look at similar products to yours and see what category they they make their product so for me my product is not a cashew butter it's actually a Macadamia coconut cashew butter with cacao added to it but this is the closest category so I'm just going to go ahead and click that and say that that's the category the next thing we're going to do is just fill out all this information I'm going to explain what this is we'll put a temporary product name and we'll just call it performance Nut Butter caca and we'll change that later obviously in just a minute I'm going to show you a more in-depth way on how to come up with the title and your product name is going to be the title for your product here the next thing we're going to look at is the brand name and I have another video where I've talked in depth about this but if you are brand registered you're going to be able to use whatever your brand registered name is if you're not brand registered go ahead and put in whatever your brand name is there for the manufacturer I'm going to put better Nut Butter which is my LLC company and then the unit count so my product comes in little pouches and there's 10 pouches in a box and each pouch is one ounce now one thing I didn't mention is this product ID and the product ID there's a few different ways you can do this but most people are going to use UPC codes and you can buy UPC codes from this GS 1 us.org or I don't recommend doing this but you can go to eBay and get them for a lot cheaper I've had some friends that have had success doing this but technically it's against the rules for Amazon Amazon wants you to buy the legit gs1 barcodes but those can be expensive these are around $250 for I think 10 of them or so where the barcodes from eBay are a lot cheaper but it's up to you if you want to do it the legitimate way or the kind of shady way but you'll select UPC code if you're not using UPC code there is is BN if you're if you're doing books and a few other values that you can use after that you're going to go over to the offer thing and you're going to have to select what you want your seller skew to be and you can put whatever you want this is an internal thing it's just for you so I could just put pnb caca box condition is probably going to be new if you're selling a new product and the price I'm going to put 27.99 and for the quantity so quantity if you're doing fulfilled by Merchant or saying that you're willing to ship it yourself put in the quantity that you have in your house now I don't recommend doing this I highly recommend doing fulfilled by Amazon and this is going to increase your sales this is how you get on Amazon Prime by far this is the way to do it so the next thing we're going to want to look at here is an image and you're going to want to add a main image for your product and for me I like using computer rendered images and what I mean by that is some people prefer to use photographs they prefer to do take an actual photograph with an old school camera but I don't think that's the best way to do it I think this computer rendered image is actually it looks more professional it looks a little bit more polished you can get angles and you can get things that you can't get with a typical camera let me give you an example of this my I actually helped my girlfriend create this product that's called venoc cards and this whole setup right here you see how we have all the cards fanned out we could do that potentially with an with a camera but it'd be a lot more complicated I think we got this image for maybe 50 bucks 100 bucks a computer rendered image and it looks from this point of view it looks like a real image of the product but it looks a lot more professional so I recommend getting computer rendered images at least for the main photo and another point that I want to add is you want as little white space on the edge of your photo as possible as you can see here I cropped it so that right at the edge of the product it's cropped and the reason for this is if there's a lot of white space your image is going to be really small it's going to be in the middle if there's less white space it's going to make your product image bigger and this is a big mistake I see a lot of people making another thing you want to do is you want to show not just your box not just the outside of the box but like what's on the inside you can see that we did that here where this package here they didn't really show it I mean their box is okay so they're they can get away with that cuz these cards will get you drunk that's pretty funny and that's that's you know that's not bad but a lot of times I see people showing just the outside of the box when people are actually buying the thing that's inside the Box another thing you're going to want to do is add all these side images all these other images and the way to do that is just go here and click upload and add more images so you can add quite a lot of images here it looks like you can add the main image in about eight IM eight side images and they've changed this every once in a while so you can have about nine photos total now I haven't done this yet for performance n butter cacao and I'll tell you there's a few different things that I'm looking to add I'm looking to add things like action shots showing people using it in action showing how the product can be used so my product is it's a nut butter prod product and you can eat it straight out of the pouch you can put it on toast you can blend it up with coffee or you can add it on top of your favorite dessert and also show it like okay this is how you rip it the whole point of adding all these side photos is to make people understand what it's going to be like to own your product that's the problem with buying things online is they can't hold it in their hand they can't decide like oh how much does this weigh what does this feel like so you need to replicate that experience with all these other images and you can see one thing I did here with this image is adding the nutrition facts what are the questions that people are going to have about your product and to be honest with you with my product right here I didn't do a great job but I do have a friend that he is a friend and Mentor that actually he does a really good job so his extra images he has things like this where it's like oh successfully funded on Kickstarter I really love this image it shows you how to use it you know step one two three he also talks about what's in the box so he shows the box and he shows what's inside of it okay one apparel unit two n2o Chargers all this different stuff so what I'd recommend doing is going and looking on Amazon for similar products to yours and see who does a really good job and replicate that and and do it better as much as possible the next key to a perfect Amazon product listing that's actually going to help you sell your product is the title and it's important to remember that at the end of the day Amazon is a search engine so for instance if someone search searches for wine flashcards that's exactly what my girlfriend's product is we want that product to show up to the top of the search results so how do you do this well first off something that I want to note is this right here these Search terms that people are searching for these are called keywords so you need to figure out what are the keywords people are searching for that when they find your product they're going to be like wow that's the perfect product product that's exactly what I want the way to do this is to use software and one software that I recommend is helium 10 and I'm going to do a video in a few weeks where I talk about how to actually do keyword research for your Amazon product listing so make sure to hit that subscribe button to get that but what I already did is I came up with a list of keywords that I thought people when they search they're going to want to find my product they're going to find my product and they're going to be happy about it keto nut butter that describes my product uh vegan friendly snack ketogenic snack cacao ma 100% cacao when people type in 100% cacao into the Amazon search engine I want my product to come up first so basically I looked up all these different keywords keywords that describe my product and at the same time keywords that in Amazon I want to rank at the top of the search results for and I crafted a title and the title that I came up with I'll show you right here is performance Nut Butter cacao Macadamia coconut cashew 100% cacao chocolate keto Nut Butter fat balb paleo vegan friendly plant-based and Whole 30 approved ketogenic snack now that's all right uh I did this right before the video it's not the best title as you as you could hear as I was reading it it's not very friendly it's not very human friendly but on the plus side it's stuffed full with a lot of keywords and Amazon determines how high up in the search results they're going to put your product based partially on your title and so if Amazon for instance sees oh wine tasting game they're more likely put Veno cards at the top of the search results when someone types in wine tasting game now another key is the closer to the front of your title your keywords are the more likely that Amazon's going to rank it higher up in the search results normally speaking I would not recommend using the brand name as the start of your title now I my title is not the best right now this is just a rough draft and that's a key part of this whole thing I want to let you know you can always go back and change it so I'm going to start with this as my title because I'm already selling a product on Amazon called performance n butter and I want to make sure I rank for my own keyword performance nut butter and a lot of people I know are going to be searching performance Nut Butter cacao because I'm doing an entire marketing campaign an entire like launch strategy campaign around performance n butter cacao and I have another video I'll link uh where I talk about my launch strategy but what you're going to do is once you've crafted your title go ahead and copy it go here and let's go back to the vital info and paste it in there now after this the next thing we need to talk about is the bullet points and this is something that a lot of people Overlook and one thing I like to do with the bullet points is for the first line I like to put it in all caps which makes it really attention grabbing and a big mistake I see a lot of people making with their bullet points is they talk about technical facts of their product they say oh 10 1 o pouches nobody cares about that talk about the benefits why do people want your product so one thing I did is delicious and satisfying fuels your power not your Cravings the reason for this is a lot of people are buying this product because they want something that's going to make them feel good make them feel stronger so I made it very clear it fuels your power not your Cravings another reason why another benefit of my product is it's 100% real 100% natural and I I do want to mention that I like whenever possible adding numbers because if you look at a big block of text the thing that really stands out is the numbers 100% real 100% natural so go through and try to think of why are people buying your product and try to elicit emotions in them people don't buy and despite what we think they don't buy for logical reasons people ultimately buy with a thing that's going to make them feel good or at least they think is going to make them feel good so really hit hard the emotions that they want to feel now one ninja hack is at the end your last bullet point make sure that you say 100% satisfaction guaranteed or have some kind of money back guarantee now here's the trick on Amazon everything has a 30-day money back guarantee if someone buys your product and they don't like it they're going to be able to get their money back within 30 days anyways so why not like hit them over the head and make it very obvious that if they buy your product it's not going to be a risky thing that they can buy your product and not have any fear and there's a lot of psychology behind this people are scared to buy things because you're spending your hard-earned money this is one of the reasons why with my Amazon course for the I have a 30-day trial I let people try it out for 30 days and if it's not right for them hey I'll give you all your money back but that's it's called a risk reversal because normally when people buy something all the risk is on them it's like ah I'm spending my money I'm taking this risky opportunity but what you're going to do in your bullet points is what's called a risk reversal and say no I'm the seller of this product I am the owner of this company I'm taking all the risk I believe in this product so much that if if you try it and for any reason you want your money back I'll give you your money back in a second so once you've written out all your bullet points which I've done here you're going to copy them and you're going to paste them into well actually here's a thing you're going to need to click the advanced view tab this is going to show you some more more things here and you're going to need to go into description and then under key product features this is the bullet points you're going to paste click add more and then go through and paste the rest your bullet points once you've done that it's time to start working on your description and the description there's two different types of descriptions that you can have you can have the enhanced brand content and you need to be brand registered to do that again I did a video about that I'll I'll link up here and it's all you to get brand registered is pretty easy you need to have a trademark though so if you don't have a trademark you're not going to be able to get brand registered but brand registry lets you have this A+ enhanced brand content which looks really cool it allows you to add images it allows you to do a lot of uh great stuff another thing by being brand registered it allows you to do is actually have a video on your page so I've got this video right here on my page so you want to try to get brand registered if you can in fact in my opinion the only reason to get a trademark is to get brand registry but if you're not able to do that you're going to be able to do a description like this and I recommend if you're going to do your description again talk about the benefits of your product the whole point of the description the whole point of your Amazon product listing is to convince people to buy your product so focus on the benefits and there's a lot of different strategies to do this I like this strategy of kind of a a main title and then little sub bullet points and what you can do is you can type out in a Word document what your description what you want it to look like now you do need to add some HTML but Amazon doesn't accept bold Bolding HTML they don't accept a lot of different things so what you're going to do is copy whatever you type out as your description go over to this site word html.com go ahead and paste it in and you can paste as plain text click on HTML and boom it'll format it for you properly so let's go back over here and we'll paste that in here now before I talk about some of the more advanced like ninja hacks one thing I do want to mention is variations and the way that variations work is if for instance you want to sell a lot of different colors then you're going to want to set up variations because you have the main product page but within that you have what's called child variations and all these different colors and I'll show you quickly how to set that up but most people aren't going to have to worry about this so let's say you wanted to have blue and then you wanted to have black red and so on you just click add variations and that way if you want to do different prices for each one you could do different prices but one thing to note is each one of these variations is going to need a different UPC code but this allows you to add variations if you feel like like that's something you need to do for your product again most people aren't going to have to deal with this for instance my product it's just one product it's just there there's no variations it's just a single product so it's not a big deal and in fact generally speaking if you only have a few variations I'd almost rather I'd recommend doing it as different Complete product listing Pages now that's Up For Debate and there's different different things to consider for that another thing we didn't touch on in depth in this video that I do want to mention is the keywords and you can go into this you basically you want to find what you want to rank for in Amazon and paste it into this Search terms because this allows Amazon to know what keywords you think you should be ranking for and it I'm not saying it's going to rank you but it's going to take that into consideration and again I'll do a video in a few weeks talking in- depth about how to find Search terms for your product but now I want to talk about some of the the ninja hack features that not a lot of people are talking about and obviously I've already talked a little bit about enhanced brand content let's talk about how to get that set up and you'll go back to your Amazon Seller Central page and then you'll go up to advertising and A+ content and I'll do a much more in-depth video about that if that's something you guys are interested in but you'll start creating A+ content and it'll allow you to add this kind of amazing content another ninja hack when setting up your product listing is think about the questions and answers now I will be honest this is probably somewhat against terms of service so do it at your own risk but I know a lot of people that they'll have their friends ask questions like are are these Whole 30 compliant now I don't do this because I'm very public so I make sure not to do anything that would be a little bit Shady but you can have your friends ask questions and then answer them and that way anybody that that looks on your product listing and if they have a question about your product they'll go down here because you got to keep in mind most people on the internet love reading reviews they love reading the questions and answer sections but they're not going to ask the questions themselves so if from day one you have a bunch of questions answered already it'll help alleviate people's concern another little ninja hack is you can actually offer your product if they buy in bulk for a discount basically you go into advertising and then I believe you go into promotions and there's a few other steps to set that up now that you have your listing up the next step if you want to make sure that your listing doesn't get hijacked that there isn't any issues is you're going to want to register for brand registry and in this next video I'm going to show you how to register for brand Reg we're going to talk about something that has helped so many Amazon FBA sellers prevent their product from being changed or edited by other Amazon sellers now it doesn't guarantee that your product will not be sold by other Amazon sellers a lot of people think that that's not true but it does give you an extra level of protection from a lot of issues that people experience on Amazon Amazon created this a little while ago and it's called Amazon brand registry and it used to be a little bit easier to apply they've made it a little bit more complicated now you have to get a trademark before you apply for brand registry and there's some other little tips and tricks on how you will have to apply I'm talking about why you need brand registry how to apply for brand registry and what to do after you've been approved for brand registry some things to note is you can enroll multiple brands in brand registry and it doesn't have to be the same name that whatever your Amazon store name or your username is you can enroll a different brand names it doesn't matter about that a lot of different functions and features are not available unless you're in brand registry applying for brand registry is crucial if you're going to be selling on Amazon by having brand registry it makes it so that nobody can change or edit your product if you don't register your brand people can come in they can change your title they can change your bullet points your main image but the other thing that it does is it gives you access to enhanced brand content or A+ brand content so all these different things down here if you don't have brand registry you're not gonna you're just gonna have boring text but instead I am registered for brand registry so I'm able to use all this enhanced brand content I also get access to videos so I'm able to add a video to my listing the first step is to apply for brand registry and one shortcut to get there is if you go to inventory and upload manage videos there's other ways to get there it'll take you to this page and say hey do you want to register your brand and of course we do so we're going to click the get started button we'll click get started started again and this is a free process so here are the requirements you need to have a trademark so it needs to either be a text text based trademark or an image-based trademark you can go to the United States patent and trademark office and get a trademark and it's down at the te the te's form go through here and there's all the instructions right here it's it's pretty simple to do to get brand registry you're going to need a a trademark and then there's some other things that you're going to need to do here but let's go ahead and click enroll now so United States for me that's the marketplace we're going to enroll this brand into got to enroll a new brand now you're able to have more than one brand so if you're selling more than one brand on your account that's fine uh this is our first this is for this account this is the first brand so do your products and packaging have permanently a fixed brand name or logo yes on our packaging it's the logo do you intend to enroll more than 10 brands in brand registry no I don't and if at any time in the future this account ends up enrolling more Brands then I'll change that brand name to be registered is venoc cards select the trademark type now I always recommend doing an image trademark when if you're going to it's a lot harder to get a word Mark uh basically an image has a lot more complexity to it so you can pretty much trademark almost any logo now the word venoc cards we would not be able to get that as a text Mark because it's pretty generic but what's not generic is the way do we use those words in our logo so let's go here so now next you got to put the trademark number then select what Trademark Office uh for us it's going to be United States office and please provide a high quality image of your design or Mark so we just add that upload that in an image of that and then hit next all right so now that I have a lot of questions for you and this might get overwhelming but just stick with me it's going to make a lot of sense so the first question is do your products have UPC codes gtins one of those different things and the answer is probably yes and then you put in what category your product is for us it's going to be kitchen and dining next question is an optional one and if you have a website I recommend just putting whatever your website is right there does your brand have an existing seller or vendor relationship with Amazon uh we're we're a seller account you're probably a seller account I'm assuming most people are go ahead and put the seller email in here does your brand manufacture products well if you're making your own product the answer is yes does your brand sell the Distributors for us it's no we don't sell to anyone else that can sell for us right like we're the only basic basically what we're saying is we make the product and we're the only one that's going to be selling it so last is your brand license trademarks to others who manufacture products associated with your intellectual property no because we're not giving out our trademarks to anyone else like we don't license it if you're Disney for instance you might license your products to other people all right where are your Brands products manufactured you know what um for this I'm going to put United States and then submit application at this point I've submitted the application we're just going to wait I think it takes a few days before we hear from Amazon whether or not they've accepted our brand but once you do you can go into here and you can actually create some A+ content which is the enhanced brand content that I showed you earlier on your product page you can also go over to here and upload and manage videos which allows you to upload a video to your product page which is a great way to make your product stand out a a great way to explain a little bit more about your product than you can with just typical images I Al think it's a great way to create a connection with people that are going to be buying your product because if someone's deciding between two different identical products but one of them has a video and the founder is in the video and they're explaining how to use the product you know that they're going to go with the one with the the video in that a question I get all the time is all right how do I launch my product on Amazon and now I'm going to show you how step by step you can launch your product on Amazon this is one of the most important steps that a lot of people don't think about but from day one if you can get sales to your product on Amazon Amazon's going to see that and they're going to promote your product they're going to put it to the top of the search results which is going to result in more sales for you and this is such an important part so please if you have any questions on how to launch your brand or your product on Amazon watch this next section I want to share with you my launch strategy because what I'm doing is way different from what most people do when they're launching a product on Amazon there's five things that I'm going to be doing to launch this product and try to get it to page one from basically Bally day one of launching it so the first thing I want to make very clear is that most people do this wrong most of the Amazon gurus they haven't studied internet marketing properly they've studied how to launch on Amazon but what I'm going to teach you is how to actually launch a product and the same principles are true no matter if you're launching a product on Amazon if you're launching a course if you're doing a movie premiere if you're doing a book launch it doesn't matter because human psychology is the same no matter what type of a product you're launching and there's a few principles and one of the first things I want to make very clear is it's all about the buildup it's all about months before you launch the product it's about getting people interested in your idea uh then maybe a few weeks before letting them know when the launch date is and getting the hype up getting them excited so that when you finally do go to launch your product people are banging at your door banging on Amazon's door trying to go in and buy your product so really go from the point of view of how do you build up the hype think about like a movie launch think about if tomorrow the newest greatest Star Wars movie came out and no one knew about it and it was just kind of like an instant thing it would do well but it wouldn't do as well as it would if they did a whole long buildup so it's it's all about that buildup that's the first thing the second thing is a Facebook group what you need to do is you need to get a group of people you need to get a tribe of people that are going to go along the journey with you and the whole point of a Facebook group is to start getting raving fans before you ever launch on Amazon and the point of the Facebook group again is to help you design your product so you can ask them questions hey which logo do you like the best you can ask them questions of like what what should the packaging look like and they're going to give you answers they're going to help you out in so much more detail than you possibly think you can also send them for instance if it's a food product different samples to try and they'll help you to figure out like what your flavor should be but the key thing here is you're bringing them on along on the journey so that on the day that you go to launch it they're investing I've had so many people reach out to me and say hey I just launched a Kickstarter do you want to go support it and my thought is no I don't know anything about you I don't know anything about your struggles but if that same person would have told me three months ago I'm working on this thing and then two months later they're saying hey it's going to come out in a month and they brought me on by the time they finally launched I'd be excited for them I'd I'd want that product and here's another principle of human psychology is that we want things that we can't have and the whole point of the launch is letting people know it's going to be coming out soon you can't have it yet and then so by the time they finally can have it they're like yes please I want this so the Facebook group is a great way to do this another way to do this is in email list and an email list is one of those things you need to be doing again this is a core principle to internet marketing most Amazon gurus don't talk about because they're not maybe they're not familiar with how the rest of the internet works and so what you want to be doing is you want to have some kind of social media some kind of some kind of way to get people's attention and capture emails and you could do this on Instagram you can do this on YouTube you could do this by writing blog post you could go to all your friends and family get their emails but whatever you do get a lot of emails and what you're going to do is again leading up to the launch a month before uh a week before 5 days before the day of all that kind of stuff you're going to be releasing emails letting them know at the same time you should be posting to Instagram you should be posting to your Facebook grou group sharing it on your personal Facebook uh you could have a podcast or a YouTube channel whatever it is and another key here is you want as many touch points as possible because a potential customer when they go on the Instagram app you want them to see that your product launch is one week away like mine is like I posted my video a video I did on Instagram you want to post it to Facebook I did that as well whatever platform makes sense for you you want to let your customers know on as many of those platforms as possible that your products going to be coming out soon and this leads me to another thing I'm doing for the launch of my product I actually started a podcast which might sound crazy crazy to a lot of people out there you started a podcast to launch a product on Amazon again this is like one of those outside the box thinking things that if you're going to be launching on Amazon in 2020 and Beyond you need to be doing and so what I would recommend is doesn't have to be a podcast but the reason I did a podcast was not only so I could get listeners not only so I could get an audience and Market to them the reason I did it the bigger reason was to connect with influencers now imagine this imagine you send a cold email out to an influencer and say hey will you share a post about my product on your Instagram on your YouTube the answer is going to be no or it's going to be yeah for $1,000 now let's flip this what if instead you say hey you know what I bet you want to spread your message I bet you want to share with the world how amazing you are I'd love to interview you cuz you are so cool would you want to come on my podcast so you can spread your message the answer is more likely to be yes because there's something in it for them then after an hourlong conversation where you go in depth talking about how amazing they are at the end of that you say hey can I send you a free box so again you're doing something nice for them of my product and the answer is probably going to be yes like who says no to free stuff and then if they like your product and they think it's awesome of course they're going to post about it on their Instagram because you've developed a relationship with them and that brings me to number five which is influencers and one of the things I'm doing for the launch of performance upter caca is I'm sending out a bunch of free product to micro influencers these are people that are willing to do a post in exchange for a pre free product I'm not paying hang them these are people a lot of the people that I'm using are just people I contacted on Instagram just people I sent cold emails to Via YouTube obviously if you want to get higher level people you might want to try what I talked about before with the podcasting situation but this is something I'm doing I'm going to be sending out something like 85 boxes for free to influencers and I highly recommend if you're launching a product on Amazon the day that you launch it you should be having all those influencers post at the same day more or less the same time and another element that I was kind of alluding to earlier there needs to be some kind of scarcity with your launch and what I recommend doing is for the first week that you're launching a product discount it my product is normally going to be $27.99 for one week only it's $19.99 again this is the scarcity you want to help people realize this is a scarce opportunity and you want to let them know you're not going to be able to get this forever you better act quickly another important part about getting sales to your product is to use Amazon PPC and in this next section I'm going to show you how to set up Amazon PPC which stands for payperclick it's a way for you to advertise your product on Amazon as always this is a little bit of information I go into way more depth I show an exact case study in my coaching program link to that down below but now let me show you how to set up Amazon PPC there's five steps to setting up Amazon PPC and I'm going to show you how to do it in Just 4 minutes setting up Amazon PPC is easy and it's extremely powerful and the reason that Amazon p PC is so powerful is because when people are searching for things on Amazon you can show up right at the top of the search results and in fact sponsored products you can tell it's a it's a Amazon PPC product if it says sponsored on it sponsored products show up before the regular organic search results so this is an extremely powerful tool to increase your sales and there's five things that I'm going to go over the first thing we're going to talk about is setting up an automatic Campaign which is the easiest campaign to set up it's one of the most powerful one of the most profitable campaigns and it has some added bonuses then I'm going to talk about how to do keyword research because the way Amazon PPC works is people search for different keywords for instance performance Nutter would be the keyword someone is searching for then that triggers certain ads so when people search for this keyword it triggers my ads obviously there's other keywords as well that I Target and I show up for but you get to decide what keywords you want your product to show up for and you have to pay for it now keep that in mind every time someone clicks on an ad on Amazon PPC it charges the company a certain amount of money so if I were to click on this ad which I won't do it would charge this person probably a dollar or so just for me to see their product page so you pay every time that's why it's pay per click then the third thing I'm going to show you is how to set up keyword targeted ads so the automatic campaign just automatically targets different keywords that Amazon thinks that you'll make sales from but you can also Target specific keywords you can also do product targeting and product targeting campaigns are really powerful as well because they actually show up they make it so your product will show up down here in the sponsored products related to this item so if you want your product to show up on o your competitor's products this is a very powerful way to do it and then the last thing I'm going to talk about is negative keywords which is something that so many people forget about but if you don't add negative keywords you are wasting money so let's dive into it and start the clock the first thing you're going to do is go up here to campaign manager once you're in here you're going to click create campaign and the first campaign as I mentioned we're going to do is an automatic Campaign which is so easy to set up you're going to click sponsored products sponsored products is the easiest type of campaign to set up and honestly I think it's probably one of the most profitable one of the most powerful ones so you'll click continue because we're going to do sponsored products here and you'll name your campaign name it doesn't matter what you name it I'm just going to put P&B caca test one and we're going to do a daily budget I recommend starting with $10 to $20 let's put $20 you're going to want to make sure that it says automatic targeting we're going to go here we'll just do this test one doesn't matter and then you select what product you want to advertise for so this is my new product I just launched so I'm going to click that scroll down and you set what the default bit is every time someone clicks on your ad how much money do you want to do you want to spend and I could put 75 cents it suggests a bid of 177 I'd say you know start with maybe the suggested bid and then play with it now an advanced thing you can do as well is set bids by targeting group and there's all these different ways of targeting and you can get little information about all these but close match will automatically Target keywords that are close match loose match will automatically Target keywords that Amazon thinks is a loose match and you can set different bids but an even more powerful thing to do is set up different campaigns or different ad groups for each one of these so you can turn them off and turn them on so maybe this one I just want to Target compliments let's go 76 cents and launch the campaign and boom just like that we're done with the first step which is setting up an automatic campaign now I will obviously talk later about adding negative keywords which is very important but let's talk about how to do keyword research because obviously the automatic campaign is going to Target whatever keywords Amazon thinks is relevant but we don't want to just let Amazon decide what they think is relevant we want to Target certain keywords as well so how do you find these keywords well I'd recommend helium 10 or jungle Scout or if you don't want to pay for either one of those tools you don't have to you can use the Google Keyword Planner but once you've done keyword research and you have your keywords it's time to set up the next type of Campaign which is keyword targeted sponsored products so we're going to go create campaign again we'll click on sponsored products and again name it whatever you want test 1 two 3 daily budget of whatever you think the max that you want to spend per day while you're in the testing phase and here's the trick you're going to click manual targeting we don't want the automatic targeting for this campaign and another trick I didn't mention if you want to do keyword research you can actually let Amazon help you with the keyword research go in here again you can change the ad group name if you want for for just ease of use we're going to scroll down and Amazon actually recommends a bunch of different keywords so I might want to go macademia cashew butter boom that's a good one keto Nut Butter singles that's another good one but if for whatever reason Amazon doesn't recommend certain keywords that you think is good you can click enter list and you can paste a list of all the keywords that you want to Target for me I came up with this list we're going to click add keyword and one thing you're going to want to do is make sure you change the the bid that you're willing to pay so for this one every time someone searches for Nutter and they see my ad and they click on my ad I'd be paying on average about a155 and I can change that maybe I say wow that's way too much money you can adjust it here but once you've done that you can click launch campaign now something I didn't talk about is the difference between a broad match exact match and phrase match the last type of campaign we want to set up is product targeting which I showed you earlier a very powerful thing you allows you to show up in your competitor's product page basically and the way we're going to do that and you can use helium 10 and I believe jungle Scout also has a feature to help you find products to Target but Amazon itself will has a tool that'll allow you to do that I'll show you how to do this right now again we'll click on sponsored products type in the campaign name here set the daily budget let's say $20 manual targeting again we're going to skip this part here it's more advanced you don't really need to mess around with this too much uh you can you can add an ad group name if you want select the product we're still doing it for my new product the P&B caca and we're going to instead click product targeting and you can basically Target entire category so if I wanted to every single product that's in the cashew butter I could Target that if I wanted to or instead I could go after individual products and Amazon gives you a list of products that it thinks is relevant but you know some of these are not relevant in my opinion I I do see a competitor of mine I'm definitely going to Target them I'm going to go through and Target few other products that seem related to my product or as always you can enter a list if you have a list of asens and you can get those again by using helium 10 jungle Scout or just searching around on Amazon finding similar products you can put it in here and once you're done you can scroll down and again you can set how much you're willing to pay per click so every time someone sees your ad on a competitor's page and clicks on yours you can say I'm willing to pay 61 cents whatever it is once you're done with that you're going to hit launch campaign and now this last thing is one of the most important things that so many people forget about and especially with the automatic campaign but honestly I think with all types of campaigns you want to make sure that you're adding negative keywords and negative keywords basically says if someone searches for certain keywords I want my ad to show up as long as it doesn't include the negative keywords for instance I want my ad to show up for performance n butter because that's my brand name but if someone types in cheap performance Nut Butter I don't want my ad to show up because my product is not a cheap product so anyone looking for anything related to cheap they should not get to see my product so the way to add negative keywords is we're going to go in here click on the negative keywords for the campaign add negative keywords and just paste in a list I usually like to do negative phrase again though that's a topic for the detailed tutorial video I'll do on Tuesday add the keywords save and right there that's going to save you a lot of money make sure you do this for your automatic campaign absolutely in any keyword targeted campaign as well it's very helpful for and as far as how do you find the negative keywords again helium 10 jungle Scout or if you want to go the free route the Google Keyword Planner you can always use the Google Keyword Planner for a lot of this stuff but now I want to share with you my three top Amazon PPC tips and the first tip I have for you is add negative keywords I've seen so many people skip this step and so many people lose so much money and it hurts me when I see people running ads without the negative keywords because there's certain keywords that you know are not going to conver for you and you want to make sure you add those as negative keywords my second tip is just do it just set up at least the automatic campaign what that's going to do for you is it's going to allow you to start getting data the automatic campaign will be running and you'll see oh I got a sale from this keyword I got a sale from this keyword and once you get a sale from a certain keyword you can set up a new campaign Target it and basically know you can adjust how much you want to pay for that certain keyword because the automatic campaign doesn't allow you to do the fine tuning but once you find Winners certain keywords that you know sell take it out of the automatic campaign put it into its own keyword targeted campaign and then you can fine-tune exactly how much money you're willing to spend on that one of the most common questions I get is how do I hire a virtual assistant and if you have never hired a virtual assistant watch this next section because I'm going to show you step byep how you can hire someone in the Philippines for three four5 an hour and they can completely take over your business so that you don't have to do any work because what you do is you teach them everything that you're doing and then doing the work for you for about $3 to $5 an hour which means that your time's freed up to either grow your business or lay around on the beach whichever you prefer and to be honest I've done both I've had times where I want to grow my business and then other times where I just go travel for a few months and my business keeps running because I have virtual assistants that are running my business and it costs almost nothing I'm going to share with you step by step how to hire a virtual assistant and this is the biggest thing you can do for your business and the reason is I firmly believe hiring a virtual assistant doesn't just double your productivity it triples your productivity cuz right away when you hire an employee you get an extra 40 hours a week because that person is working on top of your 40 hours they're working 40 hours but it's more than just that because when you hire an assistant when you hire a virtual assistant or an employee you start looking at your business differently you start looking at what tasks do you need to be doing and you give anything you don't need to be doing to your assistant but what's going to happen when you start doing that is you're going to look at some of the tasks and you're going to realize that some of the tasks that you've been doing are a waste because in this scenario you're not if you're not even willing to give them to your assistant you're not willing to have someone that costs $2 to $3 an hour do the task and that's about how much an a virtual assistant in the Philippines going to cost so if you're not willing to pay someone $2 to $3 an hour to do a task the question is why are you doing it and the big thing about hiring an employee is it's going to make you look at your business from a systematic standpoint and you're going to stop doing all the boring things you're going to have someone else do all the boring things so you can do high leverage things so you can do creative things so you can do the things that you're really good at cuz I firmly believe you shouldn't waste your time doing things unless you are really really good at them pay other people to do the boring things that you don't like doing that you're probably not even that good at doing and one way I like to look at this is think to yourself how much is an hour of your time worth now minimum wage in the United States I think in La where I am is like $15 which is ridiculous right but if you can work a minimum wage job and make $15 an hour hour and you can hire a virtual assistant for let's say $3 an hour which is probably even a little bit expensive even if that virtual assistant takes 2 hours to do something that would take you one hour to do it's worth the money to pay them you pay them $6 you go work your minimum wage job and you'll be net positive so in the long run hiring a virtual assistant makes a lot of sense now for me personally I value my time extremely highly I charge $250 for a 1-hour Consulting session so for me if I hire a virtual assistant if a virtual assistant can even Save Me 1 hour of time a week I'm willing to pay $250 to that VA now obviously that's not usually how it works usually if I hire a virtual assistant they save me more than just one hour a week but you see like what I'm saying here now the other thing I want to point out is treat this video as if you just paid me $250 for a Consulting session because everything I'm about to share with you is the same exact stuff I've shared with people that have hired me for Consulting sessions before but you're getting it for free now a lot of times when people get stuff for free they don't value the material so I hope you treat this like you just spent $250 for it and of course share it with other people if you find this video valuable now let's talk about what kind of task can you give to a virtual assistant and the answer is almost anything especially anything that is repetitive or algorithmic so what do I mean by that if you find yourself doing something and it's the same thing every single time for instance maybe every time you write a blog post you you have to add some photos you have to do certain formatting that's something that can be given to a virtual assistant maybe it's emailing new clients here is actually one of my virtual assistants what he does on a day-to-day basis edit videos for the YouTube channel uh make thumbnails for those videos managing the vas and hiring vas posting articles on the website replying to uh emails from the effective e-commerce inbox editing podcasts and posting it on iTunes and on the website I also have other vas that do things like handle social media for me so I have one person that handles my Instagram I haven't for my main business I haven't touched my Instagram in a year and what she does is she finds people to do collaborations with she'll send out messages she'll also send out messages and give people free product and exchange for a photo so she'll find some influencer on Instagram say hey we'll give you a free product will you take a photo the influencer will send the photo to my virtual assistant my VA will then post that as an image on our Instagram my VA will also like comment and follow other Instagrams like do all this kind of stuff I also have assistants that reach out to potential people to be on my podcast reach out to for people to do collaborations with me on YouTube basically anything that I don't want to do or that can be like summed up like you can write out step-by-step instructions on how to do it I have someone else do that because my time is better spent on High level things for instance like making videos this is something that I think I'm relatively skilled at I'm not that skilled at video editing I think my video editor when he first started actually this is a funny story when my video editor first started he didn't know how to do any video editing at all he actually was working for me doing something differently and I taught him the basics of video editing I said okay start here end here throw in some graphics and over time now he's a better video editor than I am and that's an important thing is the people the the virtual assistants in the Philippines or wherever you're hiring an assistant they're very very smart people I think as business owners we have a tendency to think that oh you know no one is as smart as we are is no one no one can do whatever we're doing and that's just not true like obviously there's people that are better than you at just about everything you're doing now as a business owner your job is to do the highlevel decision-making deciding should we go this direction or should we go this direction like really big picture of thinking and then give out the orders to all your employees and telling them like what direction you're taking the company another question I get a lot is where to hire a virtual assistant from and my answer is onlinejobs.ph the reason for this is hiring an assistant in the Philippines is going to be extremely inexpensive it's going to be about $2 to $3 an hour to hire someone in the Philippines and that's actually good money for them like I I've talked to all my virtual assistants about this and they're very happy with the amount of money they make in the Philippines they also speak pretty good English from from a young age like in school and everything they're taught English and they they actually I think it's primarily what they speak and write in in the school system now their native language obviously is Tagalog but English they're amazing at it for all the different developing countries out there I'd say the Philippines is one of the best ones also the internet speed in the Philippines is very high a lot of developing countries their internet speed isn't that high it's not that reliable and I think one of the last reasons why I would recommend going to the Philippines is because from what I've seen Filipino workers are just very loyal they're they're not they're not out to to get you they're not like scammy like i' I've worked with some other different countries and i' I'd say that I just have this sense of in the Philippines my workers are like really like we're a team and they're really loyal and that's very important to me now some other places you can look at are upwork Fiverr I think free up is another one so upwork is going to be more expensive I haven't had very good success with that and the thing is upwork takes a percentage of all the different like if you hire someone they take a percentage of that person's salary so it's going to be more expensive with onlinejobs.ph it's I think it's $79 a month and you only need you only need to pay it for that one month well you have like well you're actually looking for someone once you find someone cancel your subscription but then you work directly with the the person you pay them directly like there's no middleman with upwork and free up and Fiverr uh you have to pay the website itself like up you have to pay upw work or fiver or or free up and then the next step would be that they they pay the employee so there's some extra costs for that I think upwork and Fiverr are good if you have a project that needs to get done so maybe you need a logo design or you have like a one-time thing but if you're looking for a repeat employee then onlinejobs.ph or free Up's another option so with free up it's more expensive but they help you find your virtual assistance I've never actually hired anyone from freep.com because it is a lot more expensive so I don't think you need it but if you want to guarantee that you're going to get someone really qualified then that is an option now one other option I didn't didn't mention is Craigslist you can always hire someone from Craigslist or any of the different online jobs boards I think you know monster.com wherever it is you doesn't have to be someone in the Philippines now if you want someone in the Philippines the options I gave are probably best but if you want to hire an American or a Canadian or some person you know in a different country then Craigslist or any of the other different like job boards could be a good option but honestly in my opinion unless you need an American to do what you're trying to do try doing the Philippines first it's a fifth of the price and what I've personally found is my Filipino workers have been more loyal more dedicated than a lot of the American workers I find a lot of the American workers I've hired have this little bit more of a sense of entitlement and they're doesn't seem like they're willing to work for their money quite as much as someone in the Philippines it doesn't mean as much to them I think in the Philippines they value a lot more uh the job that's just from my personal experience now obviously if you want to hire an American a lot of the different things I'm going to talk about a lot of the tools techniques will work for that but the step-by-step guide is going to be more geared towards hiring virtual assistants in the Philippines and no matter where you're going to hire your full-time virtual assistant or part-time virtual assistant there's basically five steps for starting the first step is to sign up for the platform in this case sign up for onlinejobs.ph and I believe they have a 30-day money back guarantee as well so if you don't end up liking the service you can always cancel it and get your money back the second step is to post your job so you're going to post a job on your website and one important thing is is when you post your job make your applicants jump through hoops so what I mean by this is first off have a title that's interesting uh enticing that makes people want to click on your job post but then once they get in there and read it you should have them jump through a few Hoops so they can apply for your job so what I usually like to do is the first thing is send me a message reply to this job post and change the title to I want to work for you and then in parenthesis I have them put my mom's name and I I give them a little bit of hint on how to find that but they have to do some research and figure out what my mom's name is the reason I do this is then I can only open up the message of the people that cared enough that were dedicated enough smart enough to be able to jump through that first hoop this is an element of Game Theory here is like all right if they're not willing to go through that little bit of a hoop then they're probably not going to be good for my job the next thing is I tell them to tell me like a few sentences why they would be good for this job and then I have some other Hoops that I make them jump through as well the thing is you want to make them qualify themselves before you even open their your their message before you give them any time the next thing after that is you're going to want to go through the candidates that you like and send them a sample job and now it's up to you if you want to pay them for this or not I usually don't pay them it's a very simple thing the the sample job that I have them do will take about 20 to 30 minutes it's going to be things like take a picture of do a screenshot of how fast your internet speed is take a picture of how much disc drive you have because in the past I've had a lot of video editors and our Dropbox is pretty big I want to know how much storage space they have on their computer I also will have them do things like if if I'm hiring someone for social media I'll say you know here's a little bit about our company I want you to come up with 15 hashtags that would be a good fit for my company also I want you to find five influencers that we should send free product to another question I'll ask is who are our top five competitors so for my main company performance up utter I asked them who are our top competitors in why and this is try to figure out how smart they are how much they understand our brand and if they say competitors that I don't consider like they're they're in a completely different market then I know maybe they don't fully understand but if they give me good reasons why there are competitors then I might re-evaluate them then of the people that do a good job on the sample project I interview them and let me just break down how this usually works usually if I post a job on onlinejobs.ph I'll get about a 100 applicants like no joke of those hundred people I'd say only about 70 people follow the first instruction to change the subject line so that goes down to 70 people and of the 70 people that change the subject line maybe only 30 people actually follow through and do exactly what I asked for then I send them a sample project to the 30 people and then maybe only six or seven people actually do the sample project and then out of those sample projects maybe like two or three are actually really good and the reason I do this is that way I can take a 100 applicants and figure out who's hungry for the job like who actually wants to do it who's smart enough to do it and obviously these numbers will vary depending on what position I'm trying to get filled and and a bunch of different things I I've had as many as 10 people that completed the sample project and actually did a really good job on it and then I interview all 10 of those people and again if you want to wait till after you interview them to give them a sample project you can do that I very much value my time so I want to filter out as much people as I can so that I only have people that are really dedicated and the reason I give the sample project early on is because in my opinion if you're not hungry enough for this job to do a 20 to 30 minute sample project then you're probably not a good fit and of course after I interview all the different people it's time to hire them now one other thing I've been starting to do and I'm very interested to start doing a little bit more is giving personality tests to my virtual assistant and there's the Myers Briggs personality test there's the big five personalities test there's the inogram personality test the strength finder personality test and a ton more but those first four are probably the the ones that I would most likely be to give my virtual assistant and again I'd probably have them at this point do that first and see are they going to mesh well with the team like are they is their personality a good fit for me for the team and you want to find someone that is loyal you want to find someone that their values align with your values and maybe find someone who their strength are your weaknesses and your weaknesses are their strengths that way they can do things that you can't do now early on I will say if this is the the first assistant you've ever hired you might want to find more of a generalist someone that can do a little bit of everything someone that's not necessarily a specialist at any one thing I'm at the point now where I have four virtual assistants and if I hire a new virtual assistant I want them to be the best at something very narrow for instance if I want to hire a virtual assistant I want to hire a video editor who's really good at video editing but in the past I didn't care so much about that I just wanted someone that was smart and loyal and was willing to learn new things and that was Dan who was one of my first virtual assistants he's good at a lot of different things and as I mentioned when I first hired him he didn't know how to do video editing but he was really good at at learning new things he was really good at taking Direction and now he is a better video editor than me and he edits almost all my videos so now I want to show you step by step with screen recording and everything how I hired a virtual assistant what the process looks like and after I show you that I'm going to show you some tips on how to interview a virtual assistant as well as answer all the frequently asked questions I get show you all the different tools I use when working with virtual assistant and a ton more as I mentioned the first step is to put up your job post and I have a ton of tips on how to do that so let's cut to a screen share and I'll show you step by step how to post your job as well as some tips to do it the first step to posting your job is you're going to have to get an account and as I said it is paid I usually just I would go with the pro account personally I do have the premium account because I do post a lot but for most people out there the pro account is fine but after you've done that after you've signed up you're going to go to the main part of your account and just click post a job now I created a step-by-step guide on how to hire a virtual assistant you can get that for free by clicking up over in the corner uh it and it's basically the document that I follow so obviously you know it has all the different steps and even has a sample job post which I'm going to straight up copy for the point of this so the title is going to be excellent English writer for social media coordination blah blah blah and then the description will be down below here and there's some things in my description that I did very much on purpose that I'd recommend you do as well so you'll notice obviously I talk about what kind of tasks they're going to be doing that I am looking for a full-time employee I also recommend if whenever possible get a full-time employee I have not had great success with part-time employees but if you can you only need them part-time then hey obviously you know do that I mentioned some of the perks and for me it's like you can work whenever you want you can work as much as you want and I'll pay you the more the more you work flexible vacation if you need time off off just let me know talk about all the different benefits of working with me because in a job post it's a two-way street you don't want to just talk about what you want from them you want to talk about what you can offer them so I did a little about me section and then here is the most critical point to apply to the job I say you got to change the subject line and I want you to change it to I want to work for you and put the name of my mom who's also a co-owner of one of my first companies then I have some further instructions saying you know write a few sentences on whyd be a good fit for this position and then I do some little other small things like what talk about an article you've written before come up with the description for this photo for my from my Instagram the whole point of this is to filter out people that are just automatically posting or that are bad I want to make sure that I only spend time contacting people that are a good fit for my job so that's why I have them jump through all these hoops for the wage SL salary put whatever you're willing to spend and remember uh for the Philippines $450 a month is a lot of money and I put 450 to 750 because I am looking for an excellent English speaker writer someone that I don't need to check up on a lot and for me that's worth a a lot of money as I mentioned I do full-time and then the last thing is you're going to go through all these skills and just check all the different skills you want for instance English writing is important to me so I'm going to check that skill and I'm going to go through and and check all the other skills I want for this position to have then just click post job and for there it's just a waiting game and you're going to get a ton of messages in your inbox so the truth is after you post your job on onlinejobs.ph or any of the different sites you're going to have to wait 24 hours for the messages to come in remember they're on a different time zone so you're not going to get the messages right away usually it's been about 24 hours since I posted my job on onlinejobs.ph now I want to see how many applicants to my jobs how many messages I've got in the first 24 hours since last night I've gotten 25 messages so that's 25 people that applied within 24 hours which is really cool and what's even better is all these people are pretty qualified because they all followed my uh directions for for the most part um this person well yeah they all pretty much followed my directions and change the subject line which means that they're not just spamming they're not just sending out a ton of applications so these are 25 people that are pretty decent and follow the directions now some people take what I said a little too literally they they kept the quotation marks in there um which is a little bit of a red flag but I'll read I'll still read their application and see if it makes sense so at this stage what I do is I go through and just one by one read what they wrote see if they're a good fit and if they're not a good fit I delete them um so right off the bat I know this person availability 20 hours a week I'm looking for a full-time person but I'll message them and see hey I'm I'm looking for a full-time person are you willing to do it so now I'll read the messages see if they're a good fit and like I said if they're not a good fit I delete them if they are a good fit I'll send them a message so I'm going to go through really quickly and read all these messages and see who's a good fit this point I'm left with about 10 applicants so from the initial uh 25 or so there's about 10 people that I actually think are good a few of them these two people I had questions they they don't I don't in their profile it said that they wanted to work 20 hours a week I'm looking for someone full-time um so I'm not sure if that's a good fit but at this point now that I've got it narrowed down to the people I want I start the ones that I'm going to message uh with the The Next Step what I do is I go over to the how to hire a virtual assistant the guide that I talked about earlier you can get for free there's a link down below and email the applicants that you like that's step three I'm going to go down here and I have this new and improved Skype message um and part of what it says to do here is you take this sheet open it up and this is going to be so that they can book uh book a time with me so you'll see take the sheet open it up in Google Docs and make a copy and then copy this message well change it up however you need to obviously this message is more for me and then go over here and you send it but um before you send it you need to change this link to this link just change the date actually and there's and there's really two parts of this email one is having them book an interview time um but the other one is this sample project so I'm giving them a sample project before I interview them so I'm I'm guaranteeing I'm telling them that I want to interview you you seem good enough but then I give them this sample project which says you know please email me at this certain email um take screenshots you know do all this different stuff and and basically what it does is it tests them to see if they're going to be a good fit for for my company company now obviously if you're doing this sample project on your own you're going to want to make your own sample project and switch out the link but for me this works so I'm going to go ahead and send this message let me just copy it make sure I have the correct message copy it send I'm going to send that message to all the different applicants and that's it now I sent all those messages I should be in the next few days getting sample projects back from these applicants I should probably get more applicants within the next 24 hours coming in as well and I'll just do that same process I'm planning on doing my interviews on Friday so by the end of this week I should know who I'm going to be hiring so yesterday Wednesday I did get a few more applications uh for the online you know virtual assistant position but honestly yesterday I didn't have that productive a day or at least it didn't feel like that to me I worked on the Sops because when you hire a new VA you got to train them and I don't want to have to keep training new vas over and over again so I created a Google doc with all the steps to do all the different things that we do also so far three people have submitted their sample project and I'll show you what the sample project looks like and today's the day I'm doing all the interviews for the VA so I'm only going to be interviewing the vas that actually submitted the the sample task that I gave them and out of I think the 15 or so vas that scheduled an interview only six or so actually submitted the sample project uh one of them actually did a really bad job on the sample project and I'll probably won't even interview that person I'll probably just email them and let them know not going to interview you but today I'm going to show you what kind of questions you should ask a VA when interviewing them and I'll show you some of like my top top secret questions and as always if you want to get access to those questions you can get the VA you know success pack VA hiring pack whatever I call it uh I'll put a link up here down below but I've got interviews scheduled most the day today I got some other tasks that I'm going to do as well uh but I'll show you some Snippets of some of the interviews question for you if you could have a conversation with anybody alive or dead who would it be and why so where do you see yourself like in 5 years like what do you want to do like what's your goal 5 years from now 10 years from now like what do you see yourself doing for work or do you want to still be working then where did you learn English I mean obviously in the school system there's English but your English seems to be a little bit better than most people's English what's your what's your goal uh in life like really now that I'm done with my interviews it's time to figure out who I want to hire and ultimately hire them and I'll I'll show you some quick clips of what it's like their first day on the job and some of my comments on how I like to introduce V and start working with them I'll be doing that Sunday night my time because that's Monday morning their time ultimately I ended up hiring three new virtual assistants but uh one of them when I gave him the task he was a little bit overwhelmed and really I was unsure if I wanted to hire him anyways and so he he quit basically right away uh so I ended up hiring two new virtual assistants uh one to replace my old VA which is going to part-time and the new one like I had wanted to this entire process has made me realize that I need to work on my Sops I need to work on the whole workflow of what happens when I hire a virtual assistant overall though I think hiring these new virtual assistance is going to be one of the best things I could possibly do I'm really excited I already have a hundred different ideas of all the different tasks I can give these vas uh so I'm excited for that I recently flew out to the Philippines to meet with my virtual assistants and I I flew out my virtual assistant that's been with me the longest Dan to palan which is a beautiful beach city it's Porto Princessa specifically is where we went to and I'm going to show you a little bit of that city as well as tell you some of the common questions I ask during interviews when it comes time to interview your VA there is a few different questions I recommend asking what is their internet speed what part of the Philippines do they live in this will also tell you how good their internet connection is in the Philippines a lot of times the internet will go out that's a big question to ask some other questions that are obvious or like prior experience but one of the most important questions I like to ask is if there's anyone throughout history that you can meet who would it be and why and the reason for this is I want to see how well the virtual assistants can think on their toes some other questions you should ask is why do they want to work for you I think a lot of people skip this question but it's important why do they want to do this job for you is it something they're passionate about and a similar related question to that is what do they want to be doing 5 years from now like what is their 5year goal and as much as I hated this question in the corporate world I Now understand why they ask it it's important to see does your job offer align with what they want to be doing in the future because if it doesn't they're not going to be as passionate about it they're not going to be as interested in doing it like I think I said before I do have a complete step-by-step how to guide up here and down below in the e-commerce success pack there is step-by-step how to hire a virtual assistant including all the questions I ask during interviews all the email templates job templates everything I use and you can get that for free by clicking up here or down below in the e-commerce success pack now some tips for interviewing virtual assistants is one always use video chat you always want to do a video chat via Skype and there's a few reasons for this one you want to prove that they are who they actually say they are but more importantly you want to prove that their internet speed is good because if they can't even do a video chat then something's fishy in my opinion in general too the first time you meet with someone you want to do that video that face to face so you can get a gut level feeling is this a good person to hire or not I usually try to interview all the different applicants on the same day this just makes it simpler for me one of the things I'll do is I'll have them schedule themselves so I'll say hey here's the time slot and part of the reason I do that too is to let them know you're not the only person applying for this job so take this seriously and and please show up on time and all that kind of stuff now I want to share with you some of the biggest tips and tricks I've learned with working with virtual assistants and having success and one of the first things is once you hire your virtual assistant you should give them what I call the day one sheet is basically step by step like what should they be doing on their first day cuz a lot of times you can imagine like on your first job it's kind of stressful it's kind of confusing like what am I supposed to do now on the first day of working with me I have very specific things things like sign up for last pass and and install it uh set up Dropbox a bunch of other things and you can check out the sheet down below for all that information and from day one you should try to set up standard operating procedure so an sop is how do you guys do things so for instance you're going to give your Vaas tasks maybe it's going to be to edit videos and you're going to want to give step-by-step instructions so the first thing you do is take the video files and and start a new folder and have your virtual assistant as you give them task have them write out step by step how to do this and the reason for this is if your virtual assistant gets sick or leaves or you fire them or for any reason you need to replace them it's going to make it very easy for you to replace them but it also makes their job easier because they know exactly what they're supposed to be doing step by step and as your organization grows as you grow as an individual in a company you're going to have those standard operating procedures and it's going to be very easy you're not going to be as worried if if one of your assistants gets sick or if something happens like that another thing I recommend is doing weekly meetings so I meet with all my vas once a week and we all meet at 5:00 p.m PST which is a good time for them and it's a good time for me and we all meet together as a team now I used to do individual meetings with each one but honestly like I mentioned earlier I really highly value my time so even if I don't love wasting people's time obviously but even if like I just need to talk to one of my vas and the other three ones are listening it's still just easier because I know that every week at 5:00 p.m.

PST we're meeting together but there is something nice about getting all our the entire team together as well now during these meetings there's a few things we do you don't have to do this but I like to start off the meetings with asking everybody what was the best part of your last week like what was the best thing you did and what's one thing you'd want to improve and also share and the reason I do this is so we can all get to know each other on a little bit deeper of a level maybe I find out that you know one of my vas one thing they're trying to improve is they're trying to eat healthier and we can support each other then we have a scoreboard and this is another tip is we have a scoreboard of different objectives different goals and I asked them to tell me for instance how many videos did you edit last week how many followers on Instagram did we get how many collaborations on Instagram that we do every single one of my assistants has some kind of number and we track that number week after week and if I see that hey wait a minute how come we're only getting 10 new followers on Instagram I know something's going wrong and we can try to figure out what's going on now maybe it is Instagram's just not doing as well for some random reason or maybe that means that I need to look a little bit closer at my virtual assistant and potentially even fire them if they're really slacking off another thing we talk about on the weekly meeting is bonuses so what I personally like to do and again you don't have to do this this is totally optional is I like to have some kind of a team bonus so we're all trying to strive towards some goal so one of the goals I had that we hit and I ended up giving all my virtual assistants A month's salary because we hit this goal is I wanted to start getting on average 2,000 views within the first week of releasing a YouTube video at the time when I set this goal I was only getting 200 views on average and within about 4 months went from 200 views within the first week to 2,000 views which honestly is a really big deal for me it's it means a lot to it helped make me a lot more money and I want to spread that with my team and I think it motivated my team as well cuz we were all were dedicated towards the same goal now I want to get into the tools that I use in just a second but the last tip and trick I have is if possible meet them in person I met two of my virtual assistants a few months ago I flew out to manella to meet them and it really helped like solidify our bond it helped me get to know them better it also it was kind of nice to go to the Philippines to go to Manila and to actually explore the city and I'm going to share some of that footage with you later in this video as well but if you can meet someone in person there's just the connection's a lot stronger another thing that you could think about is if you and your team do really well maybe having Retreats maybe flying all of them out one of my goals is to fly all my team out to Bali at some point and we'll all hang out together or to do a retreat somewhere in Asia and get together as a team and set new goals and new priorities and just because your assistant is a virtual assistant doesn't mean they have to be forever maybe that could be a fun goal for you as well is to have this goal to go out there and meet them in person the first tool I have with you which I've already talked about is onlinejobs.ph and they are not paying me to make this video though I do get a kickback if you use my link to sign up so please if you're enjoying this video use my link to sign up if you do decide to go with them but obviously there's other options out there as well but I think this is before I was even on YouTube before I was doing any of this stuff I used and I hired my first virtual assistant from onlinejobs.ph and I've had a ton of success and I've been very happy with them now that being said I have hired some virtual assistants that just didn't work out and I can talk about that later in this video but onlinejobs.ph is by far the most important tool for working with virtual assistant the next one is hubstaff so I use Hub staff to track the time that my virtual assistants work for me so they'll say hey I worked for 20 hours a week now some people will just trust their virtual assistants I'm maybe a little bit more cynical and this tool is really nice because as soon as one of the assistant starts work they'll hit the start button and when they're done or taking a break they'll hit stop now one important thing about this tool is it'll take random screenshots of your virtual assistant screen so you can make sure that they're actually doing what they were supposed to do now I did at one point hire a virtual assistant and I caught them charging time to me while they were working for someone else and I saw that they were doing this multiple times and I have a zero tolerance policy for that and I tell my virtual assistants from the beginning that's stealing from me if I catch you charging time and you're not working for me that's the same as stealing money out of my wallet it's I'm not going to give you a warning you're automatically fired now if I think maybe it was a mistake sure obviously I'd give them a warning in this case I knew it was not a mistake and hub staff helped me out a lot now for me personally I do not check the screenshots that often the only time I ever check screenshots personally is if I give a task to a VA and let's say I think the task should take 10 hours and they took 40 hours to complete it I'll go check the screenshots and say why did this take so long now usually what ends up happening is I check the screenshots and I say myself oh actually that that task was more complicated than I thought sometimes I catch them doing things wrong like they're not doing it in the right way and I explain to them hey there's an easier way to do this and obviously sometimes I catch them messing around doing work that's not related to what we're doing so hubstaff I think it's about five bucks a month for one VA 15 bucks a month for three vas I've got a 10% discount link down below 100% worth it it also makes it very easy cuz it's black and white on how much you should pay your vas cuz they say I work 40 hours and you can prove it in the thing that they actually worked as long as they said but basically what I do is I tell my virtual assistants how much they make per hour and if they want to work more hours they'll make more money if they want to work Less hours they can make less money the next tool is last pass and last pass is crucial when working with virtual assistants it allows you to share passwords with your assistant but the passwords are encrypted so they're not able to steal your password and if you ever need to fire your virtual assistant all you have to do is uncheck them from last pass and they lose access to everything and the reason this is so amazing is because you can give them passwords to things that are very sensitive and as soon as you know if if you for some reason stop trusting them within one click you can get rid of them from access to everything now in the past if you wanted to give them access to 10 different things you'd have to go in and change all 10 of those passwords and that could be very timec consuming and annoying for you so last pass is a great way to give access to all your different like passwords to your virtual assistant without having to worry whether or not you can trust them PayPal is another tool I use and PayPal is how I personally pay all my virtual assistants it makes it very easy and there is a $5 transaction fee and I personally just pay for that so you know if I owe my virtual assistant $300 it's going to end up costing me $35 but they lose a little bit of money in the conversion to PHP as well that's the the Filipino Peso but overall PayPal is a a great tool Dropbox is another tool and I use drop when trying to share larger files especially with my video editors because I will sync all the different video files I'll just put them in Dropbox my video editors will get them I also use Dropbox to give new tasks to my virtual assistants or at least I used to mostly in the past I don't do this quite as much as I used to but basically I have a screen recorder set up so if I'm going to give a new task to my assistant I'll screen record myself doing it first showing them how to do it and then when I stop the screen recording it goes into Dropbox and then it syncs into my va's dropox box folder they can watch it and then they can go do the task however when sharing documents like Word documents or Excel documents things like that I don't like to use dropbox because there's a lot of issues that can come like maybe if two of you guys if you and your VA or editing at the same time it won't work what I do instead is use Google Docs and Google Sheets and Google Docs and Google Sheets is the best tool out of all these tools in my opinion and it's free another tool that I use that's very important very helpful is slack and slack is one of those things if you've never used before at first it doesn't seem like it would be that helpful like when I first heard about it I didn't think that this was something I need but now that I've been using it for a while it is amazingly helpful I highly recommend checking it out and trying it out even if you don't think at first glance that it sounds like it's something that would be helpful trust me it is so the way slack works is it's almost like a giant chat room that you and your virtual assistant or your virtual assistant team can use and it's very very if you have a team of people and the reason for that is you can have conversations with multiple teammates they can all put in information and one of the features of slack that's so helpful is there's different channels and the different channels are about like different topics and you can do direct messages just with specific assistants of yours or specific people that are in slack or you can have a channel where multiple people can go so an example of this would be I have a channel for my thumbnails and what I do is in the channel thumbnails I'll put a comment and I'll I'll start a thread in there and it might be titled how to hire a virtual assistant so there'll be a thread for this video thumbnail for instance and within there me and my virtual assistants will reply back and forth and they'll show me the first version of a thumbnail and then I'll say no no no make these changes and they'll make the changes and so on and so on and that way it allows me to organize I might have five different thumbnails five different videos that I'm doing thumbnails for but each one has its different area versus having to send out emails and having to do reply all and all this kind of stuff and I have a lot of different channels I have another Channel we review the videos and same idea I put a comment and we review each individual video another another one actually a very important channel for me is the tasks channel so there's one channel where I will give tasks to my virtual my different virtual assistants and the way I do this is I'll say at Dan here is a P2 task and I give all my tasks a priority system p 0 P1 P2 and P3 and that basically allows them to know how long they have to get it done like what is the priority of this task uh P0 being the highest priority like it needs to get done immediately and P3 means take your time there's no rush on this so I'll say at Dan P zero priority or P let's say a P2 priority which means you have one week to get it done and then I'll explain the task now the next tip for Dan is if you can get that task done within 24 hours basically by my next business day if you can get this task done all he has to do is get the task done and reply there saying hey I got it done but if if it's going to take him more than 24 hours to get the task done he adds it to Asuna so Asuna is a project management system and there's auna and there's also Trello both these are pretty similar but I highly recommend using one of them and why it's so helpful is you give your assistants tasks and they put it in there and it allows you to track like what is the status of this task and that way there's a centralized location where every time you give your assistant a task they can you can go check and say hey what's the status on this and this is so important I constantly have ideas for new tasks for my virtual assistants and if I if we didn't have some way to track it I'd forget what task I give to them and so this is a way for me to track it and make sure that they're accountable so this brings me to the rules with working with virtual assistants and one of the first rules is you need to have some kind of a hierarchy some kind of a ranking system on how important different tasks are and for me daily tasks are always pretty much always most important uh but then there's a p0o task P1 P2 and P3 p0o task means do this immediately the first thing you do when you start working I want you to work on this it's so important P1 means you have 24 hours to do it uh daily tasks for me I'll explain that in a second but daily task means they need to get done every day no matter what uh pretty much no matter what unless I give you a p0o task or a P1 task those take priority over the daily task but otherwise daily tasks need to get done P2 and P3 task for me a p a P2 task means you have one week to get it done and a P3 task means means you have about a month to get it done honestly P3 tasks are just basically take as much time as you need like once you get everything else done that's important here's a task that it's when I have ideas that like one day I would like to do this thing but it's not a priority those are P3 tasks and another rule for working with virtual assistants another tip another trick basically is have what I call catchall tasks and a catchall task is once your vas are done with everything else you want to give them a task that they'll never really ever be to get done so this will help you out because one of my biggest fears when I first hired a virtual assistant is what if they run out of work and like they're just sitting there charging me money and they're not doing anything so an example of a catchall task would be go on to Google go on to Yelp find every single small gym in the United States and get the the name of the gym the email get the website get the phone number and the reason I collect this information for my main company performance nut butter is because we send out emails to this company we'll send out emails to small gyms and we'll Spotlight them on uh our blog we'll do an interview with them put it on our blog and this is a task that my virtual assistant does basically if my VA runs out of everything else to do we start this thing and it's a marketing thing and for me it's worth it it's definitely something that we make money from but at the same time it's there's usually other tasks that are more important and just to give you a quick example of this task basically my virtual assistant will email the gym saying hey do you want to inter you want to be spotlighted on our blog and it's free marketing for them so most of the time they'll respond yes to my virtual assistant and then my virtual assistant will send them over the questions they'll respond with the answers to the question my virtual assistant will write an email or write an article post it on our website format it do all that kind of stuff then email the gym again saying hey it's live here's a link to it do you mind sharing it with everyone the the gym will share it with all their their customers because it looks good on them it's it's like hey guys we were featured in this blog the customers will go to our website and will'll check out our website and maybe they buy stuff or maybe they just realize you know that this product out there exists so it's a way for us to Market our product and it's 100% done by my virtual assistant and this is an example of a catchall task in me now I could hire a virtual assistant just to do this but it's not super high priority I do also want to mention the daily task so that's another tip trick for working with your virtual assistant is they should have daily tasks what are the things that you are doing every day what are the things you're doing every day that you need to be doing that are repetitive that are boring that are just something that you could train someone else to do an example of this might be dealing with customer service for performance Nut Butter customer service emails 99% of them are completely repetitive basically it's not worth my time to respond if someone says hey I don't like um I don't like performance notter I want a refund I let my virtual assistant handle it I don't need to I don't need to go deal with that because it's the same thing over and over again another daily task might be following liking and commenting people on Instagram it's pretty boring it's pretty repetitive my assistant can do that that's not something I need to do there's a number of different daily tasks but I would highly recommend having repeat tasks that your virtual assistant is going to be doing every day and as I mentioned for me I find that those should take priority over almost all tasks except for the P0 and the P1 tasks and when your virtual assistant is first starting out with you if you if this is your first time hiring a virtual assistant I highly recommend having them send you an email every single day say three different things what I did today so they'll email you saying what they did what issues they ran into and any way that you can help them out so a typical email might be like today I worked on articles for the blog I worked on thumbnails one issue I ran into is uh someone asked this question that I didn't know how to answer how can you help me out uh answer this question and so this way you know every single day what your assistant is doing and if they run into an issue you know about it cuz a lot of virtual assistants I've found a lot of people in general they kind of want to sweep problems under the rug but this kind of forces them to say hey here's an issue I ran into let's try to figure it out together and it also forces them to ask for your help a lot of times assistant people in general especially people in the Philippines they don't want to ask for help it's kind of almost I think embarrassing in their culture I could be wrong on this but there's some element of like oh man there's a problem I don't want to talk about it and this is a good way for every day for you to check in with them and see what kind of issues they're having another tip and trick I learned is anytime you email your virtual assistant you want them to respond you should have them respond within 24 hours so if I give a task to my virtual assistant either in a sauna or via email I want them to respond to me saying noted just saying that they got it and now a funny thing about in the Philippines they're going to call you sir or or ma'am uh so usually when I send an email out to my my assistants they'll say noted sir and it just allows me to know that they receive the email the reason I came up with this rule is because in the past I would email my assistants a week would go by and I'm like hey how come that thing never got done and they' just be like oh I forgot about it so this is a way for you to guarantee that they know about it and because if you email them and they don't respond you can say hey what happened why didn't you ever respond to this email now here's one of the most important tips tricks and one of the most important rules for working with virtual assistant is you need to have some kind of a strike system you need to have some kind of methodology where you know when it's time to fire a virtual assistant cuz at some point if you work with virtual assistants long enough you may have to fire someone and the way mine works is there's five strikes and you're out and that's it's very lenient and it's five strikes within one month but some of the strikes are pretty easy to get for instance if I send you an email and you don't respond within 24 hours that's a strike now obviously it's five strikes so there there there's room for you to learn there same thing if I give you a p0o task and you don't do it within 24 hours or a P1 task you don't do within 24 hours that's a strike uh if you don't do your daily task that's a strike and and like I said five strikes within one month and sometimes if it's a brand new virtual assistant maybe I'll I'll say hey I'm going to I'm not going to fire you right away but it is one of those things that if I see them repeatedly doing it again and again it's time that they get fired and you do need some kind of system in place so that it's black and white whether you should fire someone and then obviously if they break the rules and you still want to keep them you can make an exception you can say hey it's an exception just this one time all the rules I have for working with virtual assistants and this is what I give this is one of the things I give my assistant from day one so they know very clearly what to expect out of working with me and I have them read that cuz I'm like look if you these are the things that I've learned I've been working with virtual assistants for probably like four years now and these are the things I've learned like some of the biggest pain points for me and one of the biggest pain points for me is when I give tasks and they don't get done and that really annoys me so the strike system is a way for me to say hey here's a punishment you get a strike and don't do it again now it's not a severe punishment I'm not docking their pay or anything like that though that is one thing you could do you could say if you get five strikes I dock you your pay if that happens two months or three months in a row or whatever I fire I fire you you can come up with your own system but this is the system I use so now I want to answer some of the most frequently asked questions then I'm going to show you a full length interview where I actually interview a virtual assistant so you can see what my my style is like then I'm going to ask some uh questions to my virtual assistant as I mentioned I flew to the Philippines and I was asking my virtual assistant questions some things like how do you feel feel about the money you make you know is it enough money basically and he answered very honestly uh I also asked him what do you think when you see me spending $100 a night on a hotel and that's like a week's worth of salary for for my virtual assistant that's a week's worth of salary and just some other like random interesting questions also asked him what is it like to live in manella what's your favorite food and at the very end of this video I'll give you a little bit of a tour of manella a little bit of a tour of the Philippines in general from my my trip out there one of the first questions I get asked as is how much do should you pay a virtual assistant and my typical answer is around $2 to $3 an hour realistically I think $2 to $5 an hour if you want to get someone that's very skilled very specialized at a certain thing it might be closer to that $4 to $5 a range if you're looking for someone that's just going to be doing boring repetitive things where you can clearly Define what the task is and it's just hey I want you like I mentioned before I want you to go find every single gym within the United States and get the the name of their website the name of the company their email and their phone number that's something pretty pretty repetitive and boring that's going to be closer to that $2 range if you can get lucky you might even be able to find someone for a $150 $1.75 that would do tasks like that and there's there's an interesting thing the more money you spend the higher chance you're going to have someone of really high quality and I recommend taking the time to find someone of find a rock star don't settle with someone that's you think's mediocre now there's two different ways to do this one thing is if you use my system for hiring a virtual assistant you can for sure find a bargain priced person that's going to be a rockstar that's going to be absolutely amazing it might take a little bit more time especially if you're looking for the bargain price but if you use the system and you're willing to pay a little bit more you'll find it within a week you'll find a virtual assistant I'd say expect to take one to two weeks to find your assistant if you really want to be specific and you really want to take a long time to find someone really amazing you can do that at a bargain I generally like in my early days I'd spend longer looking for someone and make sure I found the right fit at a bargain price where now I don't mind spending a little bit more money cuz my time's so valuable I don't want to spend a lot of time looking for the perfect person at a a discounted rate I'd rather spend a little bit more money know that I'm getting someone that's not going to leave me leave my company for a different job so if you're looking for a really good English speaker it might be$ three four $5 an hour uh if you're looking for someone to do higher level things might be closer to that $5 an hour but generally if this is the first virtual assistant you've ever hired you're looking for someone that's like a generalist think about $2 to $3 an hour range and the way another question I get is how do I pay my virtual assistance and I'll I'll talk about two things the quick answer is Paypal but um generally speaking I tell my virtual assistants you make x amount of money per month and then I divide it by 173 hours because that's the typical number of hours in a working month so let's just give a really quick example $350 a month is the salary divide that by 173 it's approximately $2 an hour and though I have my virtual assistants they get paid per hour so if they want to work 80 hours a week they can make $160 a week if they only want to if there's some weeks where they can only work 20 hours a week I pay them less and I think that's fair the more you work the more money you should make the less you work the less money you should make now I'll also talk about actually I forgot to mention this in my notes I'll talk about bonuses and all that kind of stuff as well in a second but one of the big things is I have my virtual assistants send me an email on the 1st and the 15th of every month saying how many hours they've work worked in that last period of time and I have them calculate for me how much I should pay them then I have them send me a bill in PayPal now I don't check this all the time I usually like I've built enough trust with my virtual assistants that I don't feel the need to check it all the time though I'm going to be changing that I'm going to have one of my assistants start checking the other assistants to make sure that there's no funny business going on um and then in PayPal there's a $5 fee you don't have to use PayPal I find PayPal to be the easiest in the past I used a company called Ria RI a that was the first thing I ever used it's like a wire transfer service but PayPal is a lot easier I would I would require if I were you I'd require your assistance to go through PayPal because it's just they send me the invoice and it's a click of a button I just click pay I think confirm and it's it's done it's nice and easy one thing that you should keep in mind as well is there's something called the 13th month so at the end of the year you're supposed to pay I think it's right before Christmas or something like that you're supposed to pay one month's worth of salary to your virtual assistant now it's up to you you can negotiate with your assistant whether or not you want to do this uh I don't pay for instance for sick days I I very much you get paid when you work you can take time off if you want to please let me know ahead of time and that's up to you but in my opinion six day six days don't make sense because if you're not getting worked done for me I don't think uh you should get paid that's I think that's fair but again negotiate with your virtual assistant everyone is different in this I also get asked a lot how many hours per week does my virtual assistant work work for me and I as I said I have four virtual assistants they're all for full-time I only personally recommend hiring full-time well that's not true I I recommend hiring full-time assistants but if you only need someone for 10 hours a week start with 10 hours a week if you only need 20 hours a week start with 20 hours a week but the reason I like a full-time assistant and I actually tell my assistants that I don't want you working for anyone else except for me if you need more money work more hours and the reason for that is I want them fully focused and all their attention on this one business if your assistant is working two different jobs if they're kind of hedging their bet that means they're not fully in the door if they're half in half out the door they're just not as dedicated to your business and I don't want to deal with it I want someone that they feel the obligation to be fully invested and fully present and also I noticed myself if I have multiple projects I'm spread too thin and same thing goes with my my assistants my my employees I don't want them spread too thin I don't want them like I tell them hey this needs to get done within 24 hours they have another boss that says no this task needs to get done within 24 hours and then they have to decide between the two of us so I tell my virtual assistants I only want to hire you if you're full-time and I want you to be dedicated but if you're nervous if this is the first time you've ever hir hired a virtual assistant you can find someone that can do 10 hours a week and you know maybe they have kids that they're taking care of and they only have 10 hours a week or maybe they do have other jobs another issue people ask me a lot is how do you track their time and how do you trust them obviously I use Hub staff to track their time very black and white very binary and as far as trust I don't think you need to have a lot of trust because with Hub staff it takes the random screenshots and you can check in on them and if they do screw up you can fire them I mean it's it's emotionally it might be difficult but it's very easy to fire someone and even emotionally it's a little bit easier to fire someone in the Philippines to be honest that you've never actually met in person than it is like I've had both in-person employees in the United States and virtual assistants and it's a lot easier to fire a virtual assistant now don't get me wrong I still I never want to do it but I've had virtual assistants that have acted up and and like I mentioned someone cheated out of money they were charging time when they shouldn't have and as soon as I caught them I'm like you're done like fired there's there's no emotional attachment there that being said generally speaking I completely trust my virtual assistants my main assistant Dan I would I would trust him with my bank account like he's that like he's built up that much trust with me over time so it's up to you but using hubstaff I don't think you need to have a ton of trust and speaking of trust as far as giving your virtual assistant passwords I would highly highly recommend last pass I think it's like 13 bucks or 12 bucks a year and it allows you to give all your virtual assistants passwords and uh the family plan the way it basically works is you have all your passwords and it saves it for you in the Chrome browser and then you can set your virtual assistants to have a separate login and they put the plugin they put the they log into their plugin on their browser and it automatically fills in the password field and they can't see your assistants can't see the password so that way if you ever have to fire a virtual assistant all you have to do is delete them from last past you don't have to to go through and change all your passwords cuz for instance I give my assistants access to my Instagram to my email to my website to affiliate accounts like all these different things and if I were to fire them normally like in the old days I'd have to change 20 different passwords which is a huge pain in the ass but now with last pass I just click one button I delete them from my last pass account and they lose access to everything I also already mentioned somewhat how to give your virtual assistants tasks you can either send them an email you can in aana I have the task Channel and you can write out the steps for the task or if it's something a little bit more complicated you can do a screen recording and then sync it with Dropbox so they can watch it now when I first started I would only give my virtual assistants tasks by doing the screen recording thing because to be honest I didn't trust them enough nowadays I trust them a lot more I might say more General like I won't it used to be that I'd only give them step-by-step instructions saying do this then do this then do this or now I might say hey let's start an affiliate program uh do some research figure out how to start an affiliate program and contact you know I I'll give them more General outlines not as step by step and I don't mind writing it out and then the benefit of being able to write it out is that you can be on your laptop at a coffee shop where screen recordings you need to be somewhere where it's okay you can get the volume the audio and all that kind of stuff I also get asked a lot about what hours do your virtual assistants work and for me personally I tell them work whenever you want I don't care if you want to work 4 hours a day and Monday through Sunday you can do that if you want to work work um nighttime your time daytime your time it doesn't matter now some people I've talked to some of my friends they actually make their virtual assistants stay up at night and work the the same time as like American time zones I don't have them do I I want them part of the I might not pay as much as some people but I try to be a better Boss by saying work when you want where you want like I don't even care now you don't you could be a little bit more strict that's completely up to you but I generally speaking say let them work on the time frame that they're that's up to them now one of the things I have started to do is I asked them to give me a schedule about what time are you going to be working every day that way are they working from 9:00 a.m.

To 5:00 p.m. every day their time 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day their time that way I know that if I go online at certain times there were there's likely to be some overlap now usually they're working most the time that they're working is while I'm sleeping but 7:00 at night for instance or 5:00 at night we can get together and I don't know if I've already mentioned this but I'll mention it again one thing for instance is 5:00 every Monday we have that weekly meeting and so I know 5:00 that day that's like the only time I ever make them show up at a certain time the rest of it it's up to them but I ask them to post their schedule in slack I have a channel called schedule I think it is and it basically every day I want them to post in there what times they're they're planning on working that day just in case another assistant needs to get a hold of them and have some kind of conversation with them or if I need to get a hold of them and have a Skype conversation with them I can and the last question I get often is about raises how often should you give your virtual assistant raises now I'm not an expert at this I think maybe every 6 months to a year you should re-evaluate with your different assistants see how good of a job they're doing but you can always surprise them like if you have an assistant that's doing really amazing then you can surprise them and give them a little bit of a a raise if you see that they basically ask yourself how much am I paying this person is are they worth that much or are they worth more how sad would you be if they left you I you know what and I've had some assistants where if they left me I could have cared less and i' I've had and I currently have some assistants where if they left me it'd be really sad so do your own research and do what feels good for you at this point you're a millionaire you're making a ton of money with your business or you're not yet but one thing that is really interesting that a lot of people might be wondering is how do you audition for a show like Shark Tank and I auditioned for Shark Tank I got in a couple rounds I ended up getting cut but I'm going to show you the process if you want to get on Shark Tank of how to do it I actually flew to Miami I auditioned and this is a vlog Style video I don't really do a lot of Vlog Style videos but this is one of the the First videos I did that was more interactive more Vlog style so right now I'm going to show you how you can audition for Shark Tank and an important thing to keep in mind is all the products that are on Shark Tank those are always passion products people that are on the Shark Tank show what are they selling they're selling a product that they're passionate about and that's what I teach in my program that's why I called it the passion product formula if you really to have success if you want to get on Shark Tank you need to create a passion product but let me show you right now how I auditioned for Shark Tank and how you can too today we're going to Miami to audition for shark tank and I'm going to be auditioning for my company performance nut butter and I'll be auditioning for venoc cards and in this video I want to show you exactly what it's like how you get on the show every step of the audition and um hopefully we'll show you some tips and tricks I did a lot of research for how to get on Shark Tank so let's get into the tactics so there's a few steps to getting on Shark Tank the first one and what we're doing today is going to Miami and auditioning now you don't have to go to Miami to do it they do auditioning they do tryouts all over the country uh you can go to their website I'll put a link down below for the list of all the bless you thank you for all the different tryouts uh there was one in LA but I'm going to be in the Philippines going to meet my virtual assistant I wasn't able to make that that's why we decided to go to Miami and Miami's yeah Miami is also just a fun vacation I actually right after I quit my corporate job I live there for a few few months like right when I was starting my first online business so and I haven't been back since uh I've since I first moved there so this is kind of like a big deal for me there's a lot I'll tell the rest of the story about that there's a lot of story behind why Miami all that kind of stuff but anyways back to back to Shark Tank so the first step is auditioning and you can go there's a lot of different auditions you can also just submit submit an email uh when you go to the audition you need to make sure you got to print out the paperwork there's some paperwork that you're going to have to submit and during the audition you have a one minute pitch I'm might share my one minute pitch we both have we both prepared one minute pitches for them they'll then ask you a few questions and you know you just have a conversation of why you're a good fit for Shark Tank and if they accept you within 2 weeks they give you a call and they basically say hey good job you know you made it past the first round the second round from what I've heard you have to submit a video you have to submit a video in of like why you'd be a good fit for Shark Tank and then from there there's a few more rounds that I haven't really heard too much of uh but in this video we're going to document the whole process document our trip what it's actually like to audition so so you know before you go exactly what you're going to be facing all the different tips and tricks right now we're going to LAX going to get on a plane and uh you know the next time you see us we'll probably be on the plane or in Miami so see you then the security was pretty easy we actually I've never had such an easy time going through security pretty much nobody was in line I guess Monday afternoon is the time to come uh so we're about to get on a flight it's about a 5H hour flight from LA to Miami and I really actually enjoy getting on flights I kind of use it as a time to relax watch some movies and I end up doing some my best thinking I end up planning out a lot of time the next month the next few months the next few years that being said today I need to work on some Sops for my virtual assistants remember from last week I just hired two new virtual assistants to work on performance nut butter and they don't really know what they're supposed to be doing so I need to make that a little bit more clear Ariana is upset with me currently though we got into Miami and checked into our hotel last night the Shark Tank audition is tomorrow and today we're mostly going to be sightseeing in Miami but before we do any sightseeing in Miami we're going to go get breakfast and fill out the Shark Tank application so I'll go over with you what some of the questions are but I do like looking at the application I do have one big secret one thing that I think will give us a much higher chance of getting on the show sh what the technique is later in the video but I think it could be huge it could be something that'll differentiate both of us and make us stand out a little bit so this is our hotel room it's not not the nicest but uh it's in a great location so not only is it really close to the Shark Tank auditions which is important cuz tomorrow we're going to be getting up at 6:00 in the morning but it's also over here uh let's see you got a great view of the river over by Miami but I just kind of rolled with it I've been recently saying over and over again that the entire universe is inspiring to help me achieve my goals this is a quote I got from the book The Alchemist where basically it says when you set a goal the entire universe conspires to help you achieve it because to me the two separate beds although it's a little you know weird cuz we usually do sleep in the same bed maybe it means that I'll get a little bit nicer of a sleep uh before before the Shark Tank audition and the waking up at 6:00 in the morning usually that would really upset me but you know what we're going to have to wake up tomorrow at 6:00 in the morning so maybe this is the way of the universe kind of resetting my biological clock anyways let's go get breakfast can fill out the Shark Tank application and then I'll share with you all the different secrets for filling out the application and how to make yourself stand out and we'll start getting into some of the action on the application itself it ask a lot of the questions you would expect describe your product in detail what's the valuation like how much are you willing to give up for what percentage is your company what the money would go towards how much you made in the last year how much you're planning on making in the this upcoming year how much you're plan planning in the next year I think those two questions are probably two of the hardest now one key thing to keep in mind when you're filling out this application is this is a pitch this is a sales pitch so try to phrase everything in a way that makes your business sound good makes it sound like theyd want you on Shark Tank uh for instance how much money have you invested in your company is one of the questions they ask and so instead of just saying $30,000 I said $30,000 I cash out my 401k I put all my savings into this company and I say all that just to kind of amp up the story just so they know how serious I am how much I've put into this company so if you're filling out an application like this you want to make yourself stand out and make sure every single answer gives them a reason to put you on the show so another one of the the tactics we're going to use to hopefully stand out when we're applying for Shark Tank is this is the Shark Tank application packet we decided to print it on resume paper which you know when they have a stack full of white applications hopefully this one will stand out other than getting the application the only thing I need to do today is practice my speak and again the speech is supposed to be a one minute pitch trying to get on the show and uh there's some tips that I'll share with you tomorrow on how to make a good pitch and I did do a lot of research on how to give a good pitch to beond Shark Tank and there's two main elements your pitch needs to have and I'll share what those two tips are tomorrow but other than that today the only things I have left to do is practice the pitch over and over again and we're going to go to Miami Beach right now and then later today we're going to go to Little Havana and enjoy the night before the big day tomorrow [Music] so we came over just to check out where the Shark Tank auditions are and there's already a line and it's you know the night before 7:00 so we're going to have to get up really early to make sure we get a spot it's 4:30 in the morning the day of the Shark Tank audition and we're going to go head over there in a second I actually woke up at 3: in the morning uh and keep in mind we're from the West Coast we're from California so 3:00 in the morning Miami time is actually midnight so I basically woke up at midnight uh but I was so excited I was just doing my speech my you know Audition one minute speech over and over again in my head and so we're going to go over get in line for Shark Tank the process is basically they start Hing out wristbands around 9 which means you have to wait in line for 4 and 1 half hours before they even start Hing out the wristbands once you get a wristband you're allowed to go home uh go get some breakfast if you want and then you come back later for the pitch so I'm very excited and I'm obviously going to show you step by- step exactly what it's like to audition for shark tank and Ariana's right over here and she's going to be pitching venoc cards we were practicing a lot last night so anyways we got to get going so we can go wait in line luckily it's only a 2-minute walk from our hotel to the line where the Shark Tank is actually auditions are taking place thanks to Ariana booking a good hotel so let's head out [Music] so it's 4:30 in the morning and there's actually not that many people in line we probably could have slept in a little bit which is what some people told me but uh I was too excited anyways and I wanted to be one of the first people to audition so that's another tip in Hollywood they say you either want to be the first to audition or the last audition because the way the human mind works is if you're somewhere in the middle you get kind of Clump together people remember oh yeah you were one of the first people I auditioned and they also remember oh yeah um that was like the last person I auditioned but if you're in the middle it kind of gets clumped another big thing is you don't want to go right before lunch you either want to go early in the morning or you want to go right after lunch there was a study done in Israel about people about prisoners getting Paro and they found that judges were least likely to give Paro at least likely to approve someone before lunch because they were hungry they were annoyed they weren't willing to take a chance I'm willing about the same thing is true with shark tank so let me go show you what the line looks like right now once again it's not that long and the waiting will begin so it's 8:30 the line's gotten a lot longer I'm going to show you about how long the line's getting some of the people at the end may not end up being able to get in may not end up being able to pitch but I guess we'll see so we both just finished our pitch and I know I made some mistakes there's some things that I would do differently if I would do it over again but babe what things would you do differently if you were to pitch again you this whole process again I thought it went really well um one thing that I would maybe do differently if I had to go through it again hopefully not um is that I would maybe talk more about the questions that or about the answers that I want them to know so yeah so maybe tell them a little bit more about what I want to do with the money even though she didn't ask me that question I could have maybe Incorporated that so that she knows that even though my CES are a little low right now just because I a new business I still have plans moving forward so right no I I so that's something I did but I could have done a better job at I had some bullet points I wanted to hit for instance I wanted to hit the fact it didn't really fit into my speech but I wanted to hit the fact that I have a YouTube channel full of entrepreneurs that I want to help Inspire and that didn't fit into my speech but when later he was asking me some random question I said I think he asked me uh do you do this full time I'm like yeah well I also have a YouTube channel and he's like who you have a YouTube channel too he found that really interesting yeah um I don't know what else is there anything else you would do differently um I mean maybe a little more enthusiasm though I felt like I did that but I think I'm just trying to like break apart every little part of it now where I don't think maybe that's I don't need more enthusiasm but I guess it wouldn't hurt having more yeah I'm really glad that we got to be one of the first people to audition and now we have the rest of the day to enjoy so let's go enjoy the rest of the day the plan for the rest of the day is first we're going to go to k chapas which is this place when I lived here I absolutely loved they actually moved locations but it's the best Venezuelan South American food I've ever had super good uh after we do that probably going to take a nap at some point and then plan is we're probably going to celebrate Valentine's Day today cuz we'll be flying tomorrow during Valentine's Day so we're probably looking at going to some nice restaurant maybe a Cuban restaurant maybe get some Mojitos salsa dancing hopefully or who knows we might be too tired to do any of that so we're going to do our best to make it a fun night go somewh cool for some drinks something but let's explore some more of Miami there's two important parts to your pitch the first thing that every pitch needs to have is a good product and obviously Shark Tank only accepts companies with good products so the second half the second secret to a really good pitch and Mindy which is the head casting director talked about this is a secret that I'll I'll tell you tomorrow but first today we're going to go spend some time exploring Miami get some Cuban food but I'll see you tomorrow to explain that big secret that really makes a good pitch what shark tank is really looking for but first a little bit of time in Miami the second secret to pitching to be on Shark Tank is the story so it's half about the product but it's half about the story in fact the story might be even more important you have to remember shark tank is a TV show it's all about the story when it comes to television shows it's all about hooking the audience in so when you're pitching to be on Shark Tank you need to tell your story but the the big thing I learned from this is to enjoy the journey and the first few years of my entrepreneurial career I did not enjoy the journey and this phrase enjoy the journey has a lot of different meanings to me and one of the big things was when I was quitting my job when I was quitting my corporate job a lot of people told me to enjoy the journey I even got a handwritten like goodbye note basically saying to enjoy the journey and this phrase enjoy the journey was just so beautiful there was like a glow every time I'd hear it there was like a glow around this phrase and this phrase reminds me of the hero's journey and Joseph Campbell talks about this this is the monomyth this is basically what every story every movie you watch is based around it's the hero goes out uh gets called to Adventure doesn't want to go initially eventually goes on this adventure this is what the painting I painted that painting as a reminder of this phrase enjoy the journey and when you're watching a movie you know that the hero you know that the main character wants to achieve some goal but you don't think to yourself well I'm going to wait till he achieves that goal or she achieves that goal before I'm going to enjoy the movie no you enjoy en the entire movie you enjoy every scene every aspect and when there's a challenge when there's conflict in the movie you're excited so this idea of getting on Shark Tank the odds of me getting on Shark Tank are very small 35,000 people apply every year 100 people are accepted that's one in 350 people that's like if you rolled three dice that each had seven sides hypothetically getting a 777 that's you have to be very lucky to get on Shark Tank does that mean you shouldn't apply no not at all you should definitely apply and that's where this phrase enjoy the journey comes from if you are interested in going out for Shark Tank try it out enjoy the experience it's I had an amazing time in Miami this next section is one of the most important parts of the section this is a video I made that barely got any views but it was such a good video it was so important but yet not a lot of people watched it because uh a lot of people come to my channel to learn about Amazon FBA they don't care about more philosophical things but an issue that kills a lot of entrepreneurs is burnout a lot I I've experienced a ton of burnout in my life and I've learned how to overcome burnout and in this next video I'm going to show you I actually went to a yoga retreat I think for like 10 days to learn about burnout and to you know heal myself if you will and in this next section it's more of a vlog style where I go to this Yoga Retreat and I think about burnout and I think about how to overcome it there's one reason that you're burn burnt out and if you fix this you'll never be burnt out again burnout kills entrepreneurs when I first quit my corporate job I was constantly burned out I constantly wasn't working at my full potential and it took me 6 years to figure out what the answer is to burnout how to avoid it and how to be working at your full potential and I'm here in the Philippines I'm actually visiting my virtual assistant and the other reason I'm here is to do a 10day long yoga retreat which is something I dreamed about back when I had a corporate job so let's get into into the [Music] [Music] tactics 10 days later there's one reason that you're burnt out and if you fix this you'll never be burnt out again the reason you're burnt out is because you're not listen listening to yourself you're probably pushing too hard at times when your body like when your brain just says I really want to take a break now again the key to fixing this is learning to listen to yourself and trust me I'm someone that's had a very hard time doing this I'm someone that always thought you know I don't care about the the inner child I don't care about how I feel I need to get stuff done I need to push myself and I need to accomplish goals and if you're burnt out or if you have that repeated cycle of burnout which I've experienced in my life it's probably because like I said you're not listening to what you deep down want and maybe deep down you're saying hey I just need to take a break I need to go for a walk but instead of listening to that little voice in you you're just shutting it up and you're continuing to work so let me give you some tactical tips I got 12 different tips on how you can actually learn to listen to yourself and I've spent the last 10 days at this Yoga Retreat and yoga retreats and meditation Retreats are perfect for helping you listen to like your deep down Inner Cell so what I'm going to do is I'm going to share what the daily routine at this Yoga Retreat is so that you can replicate it at home or you can take whatever tips and tactics you want so that you can listen to yourself and so you can avoid burn up so again there are 12 tips I'm going to share with you on how to listen to yourself and after I do that I'm going to talk about part two because just cuz you listen to yourself that's not enough there's a second part that is very important to this that I learned on this Yoga Retreat and it's the biggest takeaway I took from this Yoga Retreat so even if you're never going to go to a yoga retreat let me share all the tips and tactics that I learned at The Retreat I usually start the morning with a walk down to the beach the beach is just right down over that way and taking a walk is a great way to check in with yourself get away from work move your body and just see how you're feeling and kind of get distracted for a second and see you know what what do I need deep down inside a way to listen to yourself so let's go in I'll give you a quick tour the next thing I'll do is come in here and make some tea and for me at least sitting in the morning sipping some tea and it could be coffee for you is another good way to just take a moment to take a break to relax to kind of engage some kind of a a sensation after that and the next thing the next tactic you can use to beat burnout is I'll go over and I'll meditate over here in the the garden I'll show you so this is a great spot to come and meditate and if you've done any research on how to avoid burnout you've probably come across meditation now meditation I think is is just one tool it's a tool for kind of sitting in silence and connecting with like your breath connecting with something a little bit deeper and really like I said listening taking a chance to listen to yourself listen to what thoughts come up what kind of things come up when you're not distracted by technology distracted by a bunch of other things so I think meditation can be very powerful but again is it's just a tool and it does help me a lot with silence and if you are someone that experiences burnout definitely try it out so after meditation and maybe later I'll show some of the garden over here after meditation we go up top for yoga in the mornings and again yoga is just a another tool you can use to kind of check into your body and and how it's feeling and I know in Western Society we often think that everything that's going on all the different distractions are all in our mind uh but sometimes you can find they manifest in your body as well and and by moving your body and getting some energy flowing into it I know I sound like a total hippie right now it actually can really help avoid burnout and maybe you notice something so let me give you a tangible example maybe you notice that your shoulders are really tight and whatever and if you keep ignoring that eventually that could lead to burnout but by doing yoga or and all yoga is is a conscious way of moving around there's other things you could do maybe ecstatic dance whatever uh but by doing this you know where there's tension in your body and you can kind of actively let it go before it becomes a really big problem before you get to the point of burnout one of the most powerful tools against beating burnout is really being grateful for what you have and how amazing like all the little small things if you're able to watch this video you've got a lot to be grateful for and I think it's just reminding yourselves in the morning so before each meal here we go around and we talk about like what we're grateful for and I find in my life when I do that I'm much much happier so if you're feeling burnout come on maybe take a second you know maybe go for a walk maybe do all that other stuff but write down what are you grateful for and then write down like over and over again every morning I'm really grateful for this but it's not enough just to you know write it down and think about it you have to feel it which is something that's been you know very hard for me in the past but take a moment and think about just like how grateful you are deep down and I think if you do that uh it's a lot easier to beat burnout and and so it's cool cuz at this Yoga Retreat we're staying in all these like little Huts uh mine is right over there I don't know if you can see it with the sun in the back so one important thing to note is all these different tips all these different tactics it's also about how you do them if you noticed I was kind of running around I was kind of frantic in the last six bullet points and that kind of led to the mentality I think they can lead to burnout so make sure that what you're doing you're enjoying it that you're actually doing something not not frantically like not not holding on too tightly make sure to breathe while you're doing all these different tips and make sure if you go for a walk you're not walking you know with the purpose of I'm going to cure burnout because that won't happen you need to go for a walk with the point of enjoying the walk itself the seventh tactic I have for you is eat something healthy if you're eating junk food your your level of energy is just going to be really low your likelihood of burning out is going to be really high here at the yogur retreat I've gotten I'm very skinny it's cuz I've done 10 days of a raw vegan diet but in my opinion I don't usually eat raw vegan diets I think just you know you know what's healthy is you know what good quality food is just put that into your body number eight I recommend taking some time to yourself so I'm going to take you over to the library and one of the ways you can take time to yourself is to read something and it's up to you if you want to read fiction non-fiction whatever this has been one of my favorite activities while I'm here here is just taking time to read which is something I don't do enough of back home and when I do go back home I plan on doing a lot more of number nine is exercise and this is something that I think a lot of people do but it's also how you do it if you are starting to feel burnt out a really good way I think to get some insight is talking on Wednesdays here at this yoga retreat they have a silent day and it's crazy how loud the voice in your head gets so all the whole day you're silent and you do what they call a coconut fat you can only eat coconuts all day and during that day I didn't talk to anyone and right around 2 or 3:00 the voice in my head got really loud and it's it was really easy to start downward spiraling and what I mean by that is I started thinking about how I'm not happy about this in my life I'm not happy about that and it just kind of the negative thought turned to a negative thought turned to a negative thought and it made me realize how powerful and how helpful it is to have people to talk to because when the next day when I did talk I found that I was able to get out a lot of those negative ideas a lot easier than within my own head now on Wednesday I was able to kind of eventually turn it into positive thoughts but that being said I think a major way to prevent and beat burnout is talk with other people talk about the issues that are going on in your head in real life and they might be able to provide Solutions or if nothing else provide some comfort one of the unique things they do here at Baja kipi is something called called inner dance and I didn't have any idea like when I signed up for this Yoga Retreat I didn't know what that meant and basically what it is is laying down listening to music and letting your subconscious kind of like take over and I think that's a really good tactic for beating burnout and I'll just call that relaxing and however you relax is great as long as you do it from a place of Consciousness like if you just zone out and watch TV it's probably not really helping you beat burnout but if you can lay down and listen to music or even eat food and just really do it consciously that's going to help you a lot and one of the big things I took away from this Retreat is that when I am eating food I want to chew the food I want to chew it put down my fork and swallow the current bite before I even think about the next bite when I am listening to music I really get into the music and this is one of the things I will take back home with me is this idea of inner dance and maybe once a week or every so often just laying down listening some really good music and letting go completely so however you relax it's a great way to beat burnout the last part of the day and how we end every day here probably how you end every day too is a good night's sleep so make sure you have practices and this is something I struggle with and I'm trying to do a better job at make sure you have practices so that when you do go to bed you know your environment is clean and that you get a good night's sleep there's a second part to stopping burnout and this is something that I really struggled with for the last 6 years since since I quit my corporate job since I started doing the entrepreneur thing I've done a very bad job at this and that's loving yourself and I know that sounds really weird and hippie whatever but for the last 6 years I grinded and I would even if I was in pain even if my back hurt whatever I would sit in that chair and I would do work and it didn't matter and deep down the reason why is I didn't give myself enough love so let me break down with this means cuz I think this is again something that you hear hippie people talk about and you're like what does that mean so what that means to me is think about if you had someone in your life that you absolutely love like unconditional love and they said hey my back really hurts and I just my I'm not thinking clearly um do I need to keep working you'd say no hey go take a break go take a walk go to the beach go you know get some exercise in but we don't do that to ourselves a lot of times a lot of times to ourselves we say keep working you know we crack the whip and we say keep going and I think part of the reason reason why we do this is not trusting again this is another thing that I feel like you hear the hippies talking about all the time and and let me break down what this means if you deeply trust that once you go take that walk once you take that break and come back to your work you'll actually be more productive if you really believe that which is kind of obvious when you think about it you're going to go take that break there's so many times where I'm pushing and grinding or at least in the past I've grinded and I'm just not getting any anywhere I spend hours like working on something and I don't get anywhere I go take a walk or I go to the beach or do whatever and I come back and I easily complete the task I did and this is the secret to success that nobody's talking about no when to push yourself but at the same time know when it's time to take a break and the only way you can do that is by like I said listening to yourself and then loving yourself and loving yourself in a way that says hey if I need to take a break go do it and I trust that when I get back the work is going to get done and it's probably going to even be easier so I'm going to leave you with one last thought and during one of the sessions here uh that they call Inner dance which is basically laying down listening to music and kind of letting your brain relax I replayed the last six seven years of struggling as an entrepreneur and all the pain I caused myself it was it was extremely painful to kind of like remember all the the hard times but in that session what I realized is that's part of the journey that's part of it so no matter what stage you're at the last thing I want to leave you with no matter what stage of the journey you're at whether you're at the struggle stage or whether you're at what I think I'm at right now which is kind of reaping the rewards the harvesting stage remember to enjoy the journey so you're one of the few people that actually watched this entire video and congratulations and as they thank you I have a free eight hour step-by-step Amazon course that you can get just by clicking on this video right here if you haven't watched this video yet click on this video right now watch it it's a free course this I could charge $1,000 for this course but I'm going to give it to you for free all you got to do is Click right here it's a free YouTube video so click on that video I'll see you in the next video and thanks for watching