How To Sell On Amazon In 2020: AUDIENCE & Great Physical Products

Hey, capitalists. Welcome to Capitalism tv. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Today we're going to talk about traffic and audience. Specifically. When it comes to launching or growing a business, especially if you sell physical products or anything on the Internet, it's more important than ever that you've got a group of people who are greedily wanting what you have to sell. It's when everything changes for you as a company, and we're going to dive into that in this video. Enjoy.

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Here on the YouTube channel, I talk about the word audience quite a bit. Audience, audience, audience, audience, audience, audience. When I say the word audience, what I really mean is traffic that you control. And when you're starting a business, it makes sense for you to build a business on Amazon or to sell information products through affiliates or to rank your websites on Google payments, because that's where all the traffic is. The time that you become a real business is when you start to control your own traffic. Otherwise, you are at the mercy of all of these other platforms. That's what an audience is. It's a group of buyers or eyeballs that you control. So you're not beholden to any other platform. One of the biggest frustrations that brands and physical product sellers struggle with is they're on Shopify or they're running Facebook ads, or they're on Amazon and. And they have nothing that they control. So they're always afraid that Facebook algorithm is going to make a change or Amazon's going to delete their reviews or they have a Shopify competitor come in. They have no control. Well, when you have an audience, a group of people who want your stuff, that's when you get out of that hole. I also want you to know that when we talk about audience building, a lot of entrepreneurs think that means having tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of viewers, but that's not the case. The truth is you only need a few hundred people paying attention for you to really move the needle. In my book, 12 months to 1 million, we talk about how to build up a small audience of a few hundred people that gives you that leverage to launch new products profitably. Because if you can get a few hundred people to buy your products at full price the day it launches, there's a good chance that that product has at least a shot at being successful. You're going to get reviews easier, you're going to have more people take upsells, you're going to have more goodwill on social media. You're going to more people referring your product to other people. So that's why it's so important to have a few people who are really excited about your brand or your business or your product. It doesn't require that you have an influencer. It doesn't require that you've got 10,000 followers, and it doesn't require you to be putting out a ton of content. What it does require is that you have a small group of people who are willing to support your business the day that it goes live. And if and when you do that, you'll have a huge advantage over all of your competitors. I made the majority of my wealth building a small company called Sheer Strength Labs, which was a performance company for people who work out. We sold pre workouts and we sold creatine. We sold all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately, after I sold that company, the company that acquired it was not able to keep up with the performance that we had. And one of my analyses from why they were not able to continue it was because they forgot about the audience and they started just going after the product and they just started trying to sell more and sell more. They forgot about that raving core group of fans that built up the company from the beginning. And that is the danger with a lot of big companies, where they forget about the person and the audience behind what is fueling it. And so they start extracting rather than serving their audience. But keep this in mind. That business, when I was at the helm, when my partner Matt and I were running it pretty much ourselves with a very small group of people, we never had an audience of more than five to 10,000 people. We had a small email list, we had a small Instagram following, a very, very small blog following. We did not have a huge audience, but we had enough to do damage. We had enough to where when we wanted to launch a new product, we could sell 500 to 1,000 units of that new product. It didn't require us to have a lot of followers. It just mattered how responsive they were. This is also the piece of feedback that I give people when they're working with influencers. It doesn't matter if that person has a million followers or 10,000 followers. What matters is the responsiveness of that audience. Influence is when you have a relationship with a core group of people that will listen to what you say. That's what's so important when it comes to audience building. My hope by telling you all of this and beating this idea to death is that it sets you free to go focus on the very small things that you think aren't worth your attention. But the truth is, they move mountains. When we sold Sheer Strength, we started that company with $600. We grew it to $16 million, and that was with a very small audience. Every single person matters. Every like, every comment, every email, every purchase matters. And if you go all in on that core group of people, it will serve you dividends for years to come without you having to produce a lot of content. It just matters that you've got a core group of people that love what you're up to now when building a business. I popularized this idea in 2014 when I released the presentation going from zero to $1 million a year on Amazon in 12 months or less. It was also the foundation of my book, 12 months to 1 million. And the strategy has not changed. The foundation of it has not changed. But there is one tweak to it. Here's a summary of that overall idea of going from zero to $1 million in 12 months or less.

2014, I gave this talk for the first time. It's been seen on YouTube 1.6, 1.7 million times. And today, what I'm going to give you is the updated path, the updated plan to 1 million. For those of you who raise your hand and said, I'm doing under a million right now, we're going to fix that. This has only been tested and proven a few hundred times. We break this process into three stages.

Stage one is about three months. I call this the grind. You are grinding your way to every sale, every follower, every eyeball so that they pay attention to you and the next three to five products that you will release. Your challenge in this phase of the process is that you are going to be tempted to think about products, not people. The thing that will keep you stuck during this grind phase is that you will want to think about, what do I sell, not who do I serve. You will make excuses like, I don't have an audience, I don't know who my person is. You will think, who buys this? Rather than who do I serve? You solve this immediately when you address these questions. Who's the person I'm targeting? Where are they trying to go, and what challenges do they face on the way? Your job, the way you get paid, is to look at who that person is, where they're going, and give them the products that they need to go on that journey. Yeah, but I sell knee sleeves. No, you don't. You help people get out of pain. Who's in pain?

That's where you start your second three months.

I call it the growth is where.

Things get good, maintain sales on product number one.

You do that by going all in.

On your audience and getting reviews. Notice I did not say anything about incentivizing reviews. I did not say anything about discounts.

It's going all in on the people.

That want your brand. That's how you scale. That's how you build. No one here follows a brand because they got cheap shit.

If you get people to buy into.

Your business and how you're showing up.

For them, you get reviews just by asking.

The last half of your year is when you cross the million. We call this the gold. This is your only job, is to release more products through the system. Stage one is proving the system. Two, optimizing the system. Three, deploying the system.

That's how you build a business. If you have a small collection of eyeballs that are listening to what you're up to, you can get to the million much faster. It also gives you more leeway in things like prices, reviews, algorithms, because if you've got a little bit of control with that group of people, then you're not as beholden to the changes that other companies make. And that's when you're really free. I want to show you a clip that I did with Courtney, who is somebody that I've invested in a business that I'm really excited about.

And.

And it's a brand that was all audience, did not have any platform at all, was not using Amazon or Shopify or anything. Well, all they did was audience and that gave her a lot of leeway in profit margin and the types of products that she was able to release. So watch this. You've done seven figures in sales just recently, right?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Cheers to that. Thanks. Cheers to that. And then has it mostly grown through word of mouth since then?

Yep.

I didn't start doing paid like digital marketing like Instagram and Facebook ads until end of July of 2019. So for a year and a half it grew completely just from total organic.

It's amazing. Mostly social media, you posting, some other people posting about you. And now you've run some ads. What type of ads are you running in?

Ads is such a weird thing for me because I hate how most companies do ads and I feel like most companies.

Most companies are terrible at it. Yeah.

And it's not authentic or genuine to me. So if I run an ad, it's on a post that I did showing, here's a tip on how to use it. Or like, how are you even looking? Like, what do you need help with? I hear A lot of. Here's two reasons why people are looking at my product. Which one do you fit in? And that's the video. That's the kind of content piece that goes out because people are just wanting to ingest and look. And the lurker. They're lurkers right now. And so for me, it's more of time. It's. This is welcoming. I'm here to help you, not to sell to you. So regardless of whether you buy from me or not, I will. Like, I spent 45 minutes on Facebook messenger with a woman this morning just helping her customer, like, helping her figure out how this will work into her day. And she turned the end of it. She's like, I'm so pumped. I love Primal. You're the best. And I think that's what helped me grow. And that's the differentiation point. It's not about tactics. It's be a human. Because every brand is pushing this. You know, they're pushing the same minimalistic and professional and polished look, and they just want to talk to someone. Like, talk to me about my life and my health, because I need this.

Basically, what I just heard you say was that most brands are focused on looking like a brand rather than serving people 100%, and you flipped it. I'm just gonna serve people.

I'm just here to help you. I'm not here to sell to you. If you want to buy from me, Target. Totally cool if you don't, or, like, great if you don't. No, no problem, dude.

I just. I'm. I'm so happy to hear you say that. Yeah, all that goodwill that Courtney built up with her customers and her followers was a leverage point for her to get to that million faster without being an Amazon expert or a Facebook ads expert or an expert in anything except what her customer wanted. And that was what enticed me to reach out to her and express interest in investing. Because when you've got that piece dialed in, everything else becomes a lot easier. Now, of course, the question from here is, well, how do you do that? How do you build up that core group? It starts by having a great product. It starts by having the product that serves the person that it is that's buying it. So if you're selling physical products on Amazon, for example, it requires you to be insanely curious about why that person chose your product or over someone else's product. It requires you to listen to the market feedback and read reviews of your competitors and of your own product, rather than just trying to get more to cover up your product inefficiencies. I know a lot of physical product sellers who are just trying to add more reviews to disguise their broken product, rather than having a great product that naturally attracts a lot of reviews. Guess what? When you focus on what people really want, you've got a company that you can effort.

Effortlessly. I can't even say the word without effort.

I sometimes hold workshops at my home for tribe members or for members going through our training, eight figure exits. And my buddy Max, who is also a business partner of mine, comes in and shares his strategy for connecting with the person behind the purchase. Here is a clip of him sharing how he discovers who is behind the purchase.

I would say that you build brands for, you know, your ideal customer, the avatar, and you market to segments so you're really focused on just that one version of your ideal customer. But as you get bigger, as your resources expand, as your team expands, as your audience expands, right, you can start to figure out like, okay, what are the different versions of this person that I can, you know, hit with us? Lead with a different pain point, essentially from the second they wake up to the second they go to sleep, right? What does that day look like? And then what is the role that your product plays, right? Or that your brand can play in the course of that day, realistically? Like, everybody has goals, right? They're not just trying to get through their day and just get to bed again, right? They're building to something, right? They're building a family, they're building a career, they're building a business, they're, you know, building a body or a lifestyle or something like that. Everybody's building something. What are they building, right? What is the vision, vision for that look like? And what is the relationship with your product category, right? Again, it's easy when it's something like sleep or skin care or something like that, where you're like, you know, what's your relationship with your appearance, right? How you look and all that kind of stuff. And these are questions that, you know, we're going to sit here and I want to go through and kind of like a theoretical exercise, but I highly encourage you to have a conversation with your customers, right? I wouldn't have been able to do that work on the bath bombs if I hadn't had those conversations and heard the emotion in their voice as they describe what their day looks like. These conversations, again, are more about what can I play into, what's available to me from a product development standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, where I'm going to add value to this person's life and make them feel better about themselves and make that good day feel more achievable.

What a concept talking to your customers. If you are in this only for the money, then you are going to resist all of the work that it requires to serve your customer. The weird thing about this is if you serve the customer, you get the money. But if you are after the money and you forget the customer, you don't get either one. One of the most commonly asked questions I'm asked is what product do I sell? An easier question to answer is what person do I want to serve? And when you know that, it's really easy to identify what products you're going to sell to that person. And it also makes it easier for you to speak to that person, to target that person, to think about how would we serve that person in new and creative ways that nobody has ever done before. That's when you get to have a real business. If you are starting your journey and you want to do this the right way, or if you're running a business and you're having a hard time scaling past seven figures and you want to build a seven figure business that you can sell, we do that inside of the tribe. The tribe is kind of an incubator where we teach this stuff, we coach this stuff, and we help people build businesses that they can sell. So you can click this link right here. It's capitalism.com tribe and that will take you over to more information about what we do for entrepreneurs who are building something they can sell. Hope you found value in this video. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And as a capitalist, I just want to again thank you for being one of those greedy entrepreneurs who wants to make a difference in your life and your family and the world. How dare you. You're part of a community here@capitalism.com we exist to empower those weird ones to go create change in the world. So thank you for being one of them. We're very proud to have you as part of your journey. Thanks for watching.