From Zero to $1 Million in 12 months on Amazon in 2021

In 2013, I posted a video of me speaking on stage about building a million dollar Amazon based business in 12 months or less. That video has now been seen almost 2 million times at the time of this video. And a lot has happened and some things have changed since that video was posted. However, still to this day people tell me that that video absolutely changed their lives. Today I want to update you on some things that have changed since then because it's been a few years. Amazon is a different marketplace, the Internet is a different place. There are more opportunities today than existed back in 2013, 14 and 15. To kick things off, you should probably look at the central theme of that video which was building a million dollar business and how you build a million dollar business. So I want you to watch this clip that kind of encapsul central message of that original video about building a million dollar business in 12 months.

So I've always thought this million dollar level before I was at the million.

Dollar level was kind of this holy grail for me. If I got to that level, I.

Could invest that wisely because I know.

A thing or two of that and.

We can be set or whatever. Now that's all a fallacy, it's all in our brains. But still I kind of had this obsession with the million dollar level. And that's why I want to map out this plan for a million dollars in order to be at about a million dollars a year. If we break it down, it really only looks like for most of us, depending on your pricing, it only looks at about 100 to 150 sales a day. I don't know where you're at right now, but if you follow this plan, in my opinion, you'll be there very quickly.

That clip is perhaps the one thing that hasn't changed. Because regardless of what has happened in the Internet marketplace, math is still math. Four products that sell 25 sales a day is still 100 sales a day. And 100 sales a day at $30 is still a million dollar business. That hasn't changed. Getting there has changed. And the strategies and tactics to getting to that hundred sales a day need some updating. Originally, when I taught this method of building a seven figure business, it was very heavily waited on getting Amazon's algorithm to rank us. And at the time Amazon's algorithm was ranking according to total sales, it was just the quantity of sales that you could send to Amazon. Well, that's not the case anymore. So to catch you up to speed, here's me talking about what the strategy was at the Time in order to throw as many sales into the algorithm as possible.

My girlfriend has never written a press release or done a YouTube video, or done a blog post or emailed a blog owner or created a social media campaign or anything. All we did was just this giveaway. Just this product launch, gave away 100 units and went from obscurity to page two, page three, depending on the hour right now.

At the time, the strategy was to give away as many products as possible, even at a loss, in order to feed the Amazon algorithm and get you ranking for keywords. Amazon no longer gives as much weight to products that are given away, but even more importantly, they're not necessary. So for a while, several years, there was a trend to just give away as much product as possible, give away more than the next person in order to trick Amazon into ranking you higher. In order to win today, you have to drive real sales. That's sales that don't have significant discounts on them. Good news is that's more profitable to do because giving away products has costs and it was really expensive to do that when everybody else was using that strategy to give away hundreds, sometimes thousands of units. In order to rank.

Well today, it has to be a full price sale. So it's more profitable to do this, but it's just not necessary. There's other tools now that you can use in order to feed the Amazon algorithm. It just requires you to be more thoughtful in the process. The good news is you'll end up running a more profitable and more legitimate business.

I break the 12 month 1 million dollar plan into three phases. The grind, the growth and the gold. This hasn't changed since the original video. So let's watch the original clip of talking about that.

I've divided my plan into three stages. Stage one, I call the grind. This is where about half of you are. Where you're grinding for those first few sales. You're grinding for those first few reviews. Stage two, I call the growth and then the gold. In stage one.

Your entire objective is to develop your positioning for keywords on Amazon. You do this through sales and reviews. Everything else is extra, but these are the things you have to do.

I do it by spiking them with a launch and following up with those customers for reviews.

Stage two is rolling out as many products as you can comfortably handle, as long as they don't take away from your first product or your second product if you're at that stage. And stage three is to expand your customer value and to expand your customer loyalty and your branding in My opinion, this is where it all fits. If you're doing things out of order, that might be why you're feeling overwhelmed or frustrated. That might be why you're sitting stuck without seeing consistent traction or natural sales coming in because you're doing too many things at once.

One thing that has changed, however, is that we can move through the grind. That early part of the process where we have no momentum and we're just grinding our way to the first 25 sales. We, we can move through that much faster than we used to be able to do. Back then. It took months to kind of climb your way to the top in order to get enough exposure to get 25 sales a day. Now I have students who get 25 sales on our first day. So we can move through that early phase much faster when we do a few things first. Amazon pay per click is much more mature than it was back in 2014. So there's much more volume, there's much more exposure, and if you're willing to spend money on advertising, then you can get the exposure you need to get to 25 sales a day relatively quickly. Now, this costs money, of course, but no more money than it took to do giveaways a few years ago. So if you take that same budget and, and you put it into real advertising, well, guess what? Now you're getting real sales from real customers in the way that Amazon actually likes. So being aggressive with Amazon pay per click is one of the tools that you can use in order to juice up your sales as quickly as possible. However, there's another strategy that I like even better to use in the grind, and that is simply building or partnering with audiences. In 2014, audiences and influencers really weren't quite a thing. I mean, there was email lists and there were Facebook pages, all things that I talked about. But now there's so many more options. Instagram had not hit its full adoption, and TikTok wasn't a thing. And messenger wasn't a thing. And sponsoring other people's audiences weren't a thing. Advertising on podcasts wasn't a thing. YouTube ads were just new on the scene. So you can leverage all of those tools in order to get that initial takeoff during the grind that gets you to that 25 sales a day. And once you do that, then you simply repeat the process by adding additional products into the pipeline and then you have a seven figure business. Here's my favorite way to do it. And it's similar to what we talked about in the original video with a little bit of different nuance. Instead of running giveaway traffic like we did in 2014, I just like to build hot lists. So I advertise on Facebook or on YouTube or I just use my own personal network by posting content on social media. And I drive people back to an email capture page that simply puts people first in line in order to get my products. We teach this inside of the capitalism incubator and it helps people either grow their Kickstarter or grow their Amazon sales, or get sales on their website even before they have any product to sell. So when you're waiting for your product to be ready and it's on a boat somewhere on its way to Amazon or your fulfillment warehouse, the best thing you can do is stack the deck to be ready when your product is live to be able to take a sale. I think the best way to do that is to build an email list of people who get first access. They're first in line when your product is ready and you can drive traffic to that in a myriad of different ways. The easiest way is to document your own process, show yourself testing the product, show videos of you choosing which feature to go with. Post every review and every piece of feedback that you get. You don't need a lot of people in order to move the needle. You just need a small attentive group of people who believe in what you're doing. After launch, you can use some of the more modern marketing strategies to be able to continue that 25 sales a day. Once again, Amazon pay per click works really good here. But sponsoring influencers or advertising on podcasts, or running small YouTube or Facebook campaigns can continue the momentum and start to feed and build the snowball that continue to get reviews and carry your momentum to four products that sell 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. That's how you can get from the grind to the gold in less than 12 months, sometimes as little as three to six months. It just requires you to be prepared with that strategy going into the process.

The third thing that has changed since 2014 is that these are real businesses and they need to be treated like real businesses. It was okay from 2013 to 2015 to treat Amazon based businesses like a side hustle or just like a random thing where you were selling some random products. That's not the case anymore because now we have institutional investors coming in and buying up businesses. You, you have private equity groups who are buying up businesses. You have real established brands who are trying to figure out how to sell on Amazon. And just so you know, they're having a hard time competing with the small guys like you and me. So if you think about your business from the perspective of there are really rich people who want to buy this business one day you'll treat it with the respect that these types of projects deserve. Now this doesn't mean that you can't do it on the side or in your spare time. You still still can. It's just that the valuations on Amazon based businesses and Internet based businesses as a whole are through the roof. If 2020 taught us anything, it was that E commerce is now the expectation, not the extra. It is where all business is going and Amazon just happens to be the best playground for the new entrepreneur to get started. If you prioritize the customer experience, the quality product and good marketing, then there's no longer a need for you to focus on hacks and little things that we used to do to trick the algorithm. It's just not necessary anymore because Amazon now rewards legitimate sales and legitimate businesses which allows you to build something real rather than build a hacked together project like so many people doing back in 2014. If you want some help, the most accessible and affordable way that I can serve you on this journey is to just buy the book that was based on the original video with updated strategies for working in the modern marketing era. And so you can get this on Amazon, you can get it from the library. I don't care if you take it from your friend's house or torrent it. I don't care. Just if you want to do this. This is the playbook to be able to do this over the next 12 months. And if you want some extra help, subscribe to the channel. This is what I do. I help entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses that they can sell. And I have a ton of free resources over@capitalism.com start that's the best place to go to see our free stuff that will help you come up with the right idea, launch this thing and start to build the foundation of a seven figure business. It means the world to me that so many of you have been involved on this channel Channel and on that video specifically. It literally was a jumping point for my career. If you found value in this video, please turn the like button blue so that I can help more entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses that they can sell. Thank you. I appreciate you guys. I hope you enjoyed today's video. I'll see you next time.