The Automated Amazon Business Model

Oh, hey, everybody. Welcome to Freedom Fastlink. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and on today's show, I'm going to be opening the doors a little bit to the business model that I follow most closely right now. Recently I was inspired to be a little bit more transparent into the journey of freedom that I've been on. And part of that journey is the income streams that I partake in. So I started doing something really interesting on the freedomfastlane.com blog and that was sharing income reports. And if you go over to freedomfastlane.com, you'll actually see a detailed report of the financial breakdown of all my different income streams, which is highly uncomfortable for me. It's putting myself out there a little bit. But I know that by sharing that, people are going to be able to see the steps that I take that grow things, the things that make significant impacts in my businesses and in my income streams. And if we're going to do that, then we might as well start talking about the business models that I follow. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before we get started, just know that I am going to be opening up a few coaching spots in the yearly group coaching class that I do called the Tribe, which is also the name of my high end mastermind. I hope at some point you'll go through both of them, you'll be part of the group coaching class and you'll be part of the high end mastermind at some point so we can work together on a little bit more of an intimate basis. Now I want to start off by talking a little bit about what has happened in the last year. If you follow freedomfastlane.com you may have heard this story once or twice where I used to be really big in, I guess the Internet marketing or make money online space. And I was involved in that crowd for about seven years until last year when I just hit this point where I felt absolutely zero satisfaction. And I had felt that way for a while, but I hit this wall where I did not want to get up one more day and talk about what I had been talking about. I felt absolutely no satisfaction in that. And so I realized one day, you know what? Freedom is in my own control. I can control my own life. If I'm not enjoying this, I'm just gonna choose differently. I'm gonna make a shift in my life. And I shut down that business and shut down all the places that we were, we were taking orders and I just stopped. I just had had enough. And I shut down that business, and I started some new businesses that I'm much more passionate about, following this new business model that has been really good to me. But before I do that, I want to make a confession to you. And that confession is that for a good portion of my life, I worried about money. And I don't mean just kind of thought about my finances and worried about them. I mean, laid in my bed, stared at the ceiling and worried about money. Even though I had plenty of money in the bank and plenty of money coming in, I worried about money. It seemed like there was never enough. All my bills were being paid. Nothing was technically wrong, but I worried and I felt like it wasn't enough. And in reflection of that time in my life, which is the state I was in when I was in that old business where I felt no satisfaction, I think the reason that I felt that way is because I was constantly in a mindset of going out and getting something where I felt like I had to go out and get money. I got up and ran my business because it made money. So I did it to get money instead of coming from a place of giving. You see, when we are in a state of not having, when we're in a state where we feel like we need to get something, we need to take something, that puts us in a state of lack because we're assuming we're telling our brain we don't have and we won't have until we get something. But that's just an illusion. When we're in a different state, when we're in that state of giving something, then we're telling ourselves that we already have something to give. In order to give something, you've got to have it first. In order to give love, you've got to feel love. In order to give money, you've got to have money in the first place. And when we're in a state of giving, it puts us in a much more abundant state. And this is why I shut down that old business, because I was constantly feeling this state of having to go out and get. Whereas now I do things like this podcast, and I do this purely out of a state of I feel like I'm giving. And this brings a tremendous amount of value to my life. And I say this before I start talking about the business that I am now in, because I want to point out the fact that if you are in a business or a job where you feel like you have to go out and get all of the time, I would venture to say that your chances of being successful, fully successful, financially, socially, in your happiness are very low. And that is not a type of success that I am interested in. I'm only in the type of success that makes me feel fulfilled and makes other people around me feel more fulfilled as well. And so I left that old industry and I shut everything down. And I realized as well as the fact that I was always in the state of trying to get something, that I had no long term strategy, I had no long term growth pattern. You see, wealth is not short term. Wealth is a long term journey that you constantly are refining throughout your life. It's not an overnight thing. Big leaps in success happen, but they're very rare. A great book to read on this topic is the Slight Edge by Jeff Olson where he argues that success is the result small decisions that you make on a regular basis. You know, I was on Facebook earlier today and I saw a picture of somebody that I went to high school with and this person was very popular in high school and did very well with the opposite sex. And I haven't seen this person in years. And I saw a picture of them this morning on Facebook and they were about 40 pounds overweight. And I started to think about what has brought that person to that point in their life and me and my point in my life. And it's just the daily decisions that we make over and over and over again. And Jeff Olson in the Slight Edge says that they're easy decisions to make and they're easy decisions to not make. They're easy things to do and easy things to not do. But those small decisions that we make on a daily basis are really what determine our long term success. I say all of this as a preface to talking about the business that I'm in. Because if you think that you can go into something as a way to get money because you're just out to get as much as possible, or if you're in something for an overnight success and hoping that success comes right away, you are doomed to failure. There is a definite wealth mindset and there is a definite poverty mindset and they're very different. And if you don't keep long term growth in mind, and if you don't keep giving in mind, then no matter what business model I give you, there is a very small chance of being successful. On the other hand, if you come at something with a giving mentality and you have the idea in your mind of long term success, long term growth, with daily patterns and habits, then I could pretty much give you whatever business model you wanted and you would probably be successful. Just to remind you, I have a very specific overall financial strategy that works really well for me and it works like this. I make my money in my businesses, I invest that into other income streams and other businesses and then I live off that cash flow. Live off the cash flow that comes from those investments. That is my long term financial strategy and it's one that works and that I recommend other people follow. There is a sequence to this though. So if you're still in a job and you're not investing anything and you don't have a business, then this model, according to this model, I would recommend that if you're still in a job that you spend your expendable cash at the end of the month into building a business that will eventually replace that job and provide the income for you to invest in other businesses and other assets. If you don't have a business, then the one I'm going to talk about today might be one that is good for you. My business right now has its foundation on Amazon.com now I sell real physical products on Amazon.com it wasn't always that way. Those seven years that I was in the Internet marketing and make money online circle, I was selling digital products. And I still love that business model. And I learned a whole heap from that business model. But I found a lot of satisfaction in not doing that anymore and in selling physical products on Amazon. And there's a reason why I have a few criteria that I always have in mind before I start any business. First of all, it has to have the potential to make at least $10,000 a month. Second, I have to be able to run it anywhere I want. So I can be in Thailand or the Philippines or my home office. And I'm running it just as well no matter where I am. It also has to be scalable and it can be automated, meaning it doesn't require more hours of my time in order to make the same amount of money. I want to be able to work on it when I want to. And I want to be able to make monumental changes and a monumental difference in a short amount of time that aren't connected to the hours that I'm working. Because you can't get rich trading your hours for dollars. Even if you're making $1,000 an hour, you will not get rich trading your hours for dollars. And this business model meets all of those criteria. And the reason is because Amazon has a program called Fulfilled by Amazon or fba. And FBA is the program through Amazon where They fulfill everything. They fulfill all of the work that would traditionally be done in a physical products business. So they do all the packing and shipping, they do all of the customer returns, they do all the payment processing, they do everything. And the funny thing is, since people go to Amazon to buy things, they also refer all the customers. So all your work comes down to is making sure that you're providing good quality products and you're providing really good customer experiences and that you're marketing yourself so that you're continue to make a lot of sales. But all of the details, which I am not good at, all of the packing, payments, all the little details don't exist because Amazon does all that shipping, all of that storage, all the warehousing, everything. In fact, I never see my products, I never talk to my customers, I never do anything except market my products so that regular sales come in. When I was in Internet marketing full time, I paid for college doing search engine optimization where I got my websites to rank on Google and then I made money from the traffic that came from Google. Well, Amazon businesses are kind of like that because there's nothing to ship and nothing for you to sit in your house and create. There is only marketing yourself on this channel, which is Amazon making money from the traffic and sales that come from this channel. You see dollars go in in the form of inventory and dollars come back to you in the form of sales. And I'm going to go over exactly how all of this works in this podcast. Right now there is kind of this wide open, this wide open west happening in Amazon because the collective awareness of how powerful this channel is isn't quite there yet. Since I'm a marketer and I spent seven to eight years as a marketer, I've gotten really good at maximizing this channel. So someone who has any marketing experience at all, or somebody who has a good mentor or has somebody teaching them these strategies can walk into almost any market on Amazon and just absolutely clean up. It's kind of like a few years ago when local businesses didn't know that they could rank on Google for something like Dentist in Boston. Before that existed, it was really easy to rank any local site you wanted for a search term like that. And then this industry popped up called local marketing, where people realized they could charge 3,5000 dollars a month charging these dentists and doctors and lawyers and whoever that fee in order to get them to rank on Google. Well, that's kind of what's happening right now on Amazon, where people who have any marketing chops at all can walk in and absolutely dominate any, any market. It doesn't matter how competitive it is. You can go in and you can sell a tremendous amount of product if you know anything about marketing, because most people on Amazon know absolutely nothing about Amazon. We'll go over a few tips. By the way, before I forget, I have a really nice breakdown of how all of this works in very deep, in a lot of detail, more detail than I'll go on on this show. At the freedomfastslane.com blog. It's at www.freedomfastlane.com amazonprofits www.freedomfastlane.com Amazonprofits I go into more detail then we'll go into on this show. So because of, I guess this perfect storm, the fact that there's really low competition on Amazon, the fact that it's really easy to get something up and moving using, fulfilled by Amazon and you can pretty much walk into any market you want and dominate if you know any marketing experience at all, if you have any marketing knowledge at all. It's a really, really good time to be in this business and I was thankful to get in early on this. But there's still actually a lot of opportunity here if you're willing to have a long term model in mind. So since all of this is in place, my work really comes down to I find good products available. I work out a deal with a manufacturer, which I'll tell you how to do and then have them shipped over straight to Amazon to Amazon's warehouse and then Amazon does all that fulfillment. So I spend most of my time thinking about how can I get more sales or how can I better serve the needs of my customers. While I'm not thinking about things like shipping, I'm not thinking about things like taking orders or processing orders. I'm thinking about how do I serve my customers more and how do I market myself more. So I roll out new products, I work on new marketing channels, I work on the customer experience. These are all things that are growth ideas. You don't have to worry about any of the details. I know so many business owners who spend most of their time thinking about the details of their business and they never think about growth because all of that's taken care of by Amazon. Following this model, you don't have to think about any of those details. All you have to think about is growth. And for that reason, a lot of people have been really successful with this model, myself included. I have a business that's less than a year old that is on pace this year to do well over a million dollars in sales following just the Amazon channel. We're working on other sales channels and other ways to grow this business too. But just from Amazon, we're looking at well over a million dollars in sales coming in. And that line of products right now only has two products. That is how big the channel on Amazon is. Especially if you go in with any sort of expertise or knowledge or any type of a shortcut, like you have a mentor or you have somebody teaching you this. It can be extremely profitable very quickly. But again, this is a long term, long term business, not a fly by night overnight success story. Okay, so here's how the strategy works. If you go to Amazon.com or even better yet, if you go to Google and you just search for best selling blank products on Amazon, you'll actually get a link on Amazon of all the best selling products in that category. So if you went to Google and you typed in best selling dog toys on Amazon, your first result would be a link on Amazon of all the best selling dog toys or pet products or baby products or whatever market you're somewhat interested in. You can actually see what all the best selling products are. There is your market research. That's really it. That's all you've got to know. What are the best selling products? Because I want to be selling products like that. I want to be selling more of the best selling products. So whatever market you're interested in, you can go over to Google and just type in best selling blank on Amazon and you can find a list of all of those best selling products. You can also just go to the categories on Amazon and you can look at the top 100 in any category. And if you're seeing something come up on a regular basis, if you're seeing the same type of product, if you're seeing a rubber ducky come up in the best baby, best selling baby products, you know that rubber duckies are selling a lot on Amazon. So look for those trends, look for products that are coming up on a regular basis to see what is selling it in a high volume. Because if there are multiple products that are very similar selling in the top 100 on Amazon, that means that there's probably room for one more that's owned by you. There's another question to ask yourself as you're browsing through these categories and that is which of these products would be easy to produce. Now you are not going to be the one producing these and you don't need to worry right now about how they're going to get produced. What would be easy to produce? For example, a mouse pad, if those even exist anymore. A mouse pad would be much easier to produce than a computer, obviously. Right. I can't go out and have a MacBook Pro manufactured. I just can't. But I can have all kinds of mouse pads created. I also can have water bottles produced fairly easily. But it's hard for me to go out and produce an ipod or to produce a set of really heavy weight equipment. So some things are a lot easier to get manufactured than other things. And these are going to be your own products. You're not an affiliate for these or not somebody else's products. These will ultimately be your own products. So what would be easy for you to manufacture under a different brand? For example, one of my businesses is one of my smaller businesses following this business model is. But it is on Amazon. It's a yoga brand. It's called Zen Active Sports. Right now we specialize in yoga products, specifically yoga mats and yoga blocks. We followed this exact process. We found that some of the top sports equipment was in the yoga category. It's something that is a really big in demand market. So my partner Sean and I rolled out this business called Zen Active Sports where we produced high end yoga products. And you can see it, you can look on Amazon for them. I recommend you buy it. We have some of the best yoga products out there. But we followed this exact process and we just saw that yoga mats were selling in a high volume on Amazon. Then we did a poll on a yoga forum and to find out what type of yoga mat would be in the highest demand. Then we got that information, went over to a supplier and said, can you make this? They said yes. We asked what the price was, we compared it to what we knew we could sell it for on Amazon, which is easy to see because you just see what other people are selling their mats for and you're done. There's all of your market research and this applies to whatever market you're in. If you have a running company, if you're passionate about running and you sell things like arm bands that hold your ipod and sweatbands and you sell running shorts and you sell water bottles. That's a fantastic business because it's all easy to have supplied and you can just go over to the community, ask them what they want, then take it over to a supplier, get it made and it gets shipped right to Amazon. You don't have to see it, you don't have to store it, you don't have to do anything except make sure that the products are good. Which you can do by having them send you a sample and making sure that your marketing is good. Which is something that any good marketer like myself or someone else can teach you how to do. So there you can steal that idea if you would like it. So how do you get these products made? Well, it's actually a really simple process. There are suppliers all over the world who make these products and already have them done and can slap your brand name on them and send them to Amazon. And you now have your own line of whatever products you want. There are some really good resources out there for you to check out. And if you do nothing else as a result of listening to this show, do this one thing. Go over to Alibaba.com a L I B a B a dot com and just browse around. Alibaba is a website where a lot of suppliers go. Thousands and thousands of suppliers of any product you could possibly think of. They're there on the website and you can talk to them from all over the world. You can get proposals from them, you can get product samples from them. If you do nothing else, just go to Alibaba.com and browse. Your creative juices will just go crazy. Especially when you look at what you can get them for on Alibaba compared to what you can sell them for on a site like Amazon. It is crazy. Your brain will just expand and you'll have all of these ideas and that's a really good way for you to start. Get some creative juices flowing. When you're there though, be careful. Not all of the manufacturers are being honest. When they post their initial price, they will try to lead with a lower price in order to entice you in and then hit you with a real price later. So just be careful when you are on the site and just be. Just tread lightly while you're there. Don't fork out a lot of money until you start to get comfortable with that supplier. But we use Alibaba in our yoga business. I have many partners who use Alibaba. Just go there and browse and you'll get some really interesting ideas for a business that you might be interested in. And go look at some of the top selling products on Amazon. Take them over to Alibaba and you might even find some suppliers who are supplying the exact same product as what is selling really well on Amazon that has four and a half stars in their reviews. If you can find that exact product and you just create your own version of it and you do your marketing better than the other person. You, you have a gold mine on your hands. That's because this is a really simple business model that allows you to only focus on those profit making decisions. So how much money does it take to start a business like this? Well, my first business, it costs us about 1000, maybe $1500 to get started. We started really, really small. We started with 100 units of our product which I think was like 500 bucks total. It was a $5 item which after labels and shipping and everything, I think our total cost in was about $1,200 or so. And we sold each of those units for between 20 and $30. So we had a 50% profit margin on those hundred first units. And we scratched our heads and went, we might have something here. And then we went out and ordered 500 and then 1000 and then 2000, then 5000 and it kept building from there. And now that business is on pace to do over a million dollars in sales this year just on Amazon. But we started really small, so you can be fairly conservative with your investment. But I wish I had invested more when I started. I would have had a faster momentum had I focused on more inventory to start and been a little bit more aggressive with my marketing. So I wish that I had invested between 2 and $5,000, but I only invested like $1,500 to start. That's what you can expect when you're starting a business. Is that 1,500 to, we'll say up to $5,000 depending on how comfortable you are. Now if you are not comfortable investing that amount of money, I would invite you to question why the amount of profit that exists in a business model like this compared to the low amount of investment is mind boggling. I cannot even believe that I have built a million dollar business on such a small initial investment. But that's exactly what has happened. Just as a result of the fact that all of those other things are taken care of, like shipping, like merchanting, like all of all of those little details are done, they're taken care of. And I can only focus on marketing and growth, which is really what all business owners should be thinking about in the first place.

This should sound pretty simple to you. When I first investigated this business model because a good friend of mine was doing really well with it. When I first started investigating this, I kind of scratched my head and said what am I missing? This seems so simple. I asked that to my friend and he said, look, there's problems in this business like there are with any business, you're going to have days where sales are slow, you're going to have pesky competitors. All that exists, just like any business. But you're right, this is a really, really simple business model. People always ask me, what is the potential profit with a business like this? And look, I don't know. I don't know what people are going to do with their business. I don't know how savvy they are or what they're going to do. But I have lots of friends, and I guess you could call them like business friends that follow this model. And I have seen such tremendous results from people who have done this. I do a yearly coaching group called the Tribe and we go through this process and we help people get their businesses set up and moving and making money. And I have one student, his name is Brian, who was an accountant for many years, I don't know how many years, like 154 years. And he was tired, he was burnt out. He was really tired of doing taxes for 154 years and he didn't want to be an accountant anymore. And he started this business. And today his business, which really is one product, is doing $250,000 a month. A month. He's doing more volume than I am. And he started as one of my students. I have this other student, his name is Todd. Todd had been following me for a long time and we actually met because he applied for a job and I didn't hire him. Maybe I should have in retrospect, but he started following my stuff after that. And as a result of going through this group coaching class and setting up this business model, he has built a business that is on its way to doing 250 to $300,000 this year. And he's got one product again. He's just getting started, he's just ramping things up. And Todd had read all the books, he had followed all the blogs, he had learned all the strategies that people who are thinking about starting a business normally go through. And he hadn't seen success until he started doing this model because he went all in on this business model and he saw success really early. I have one student, his name is Jordan, he's an 18 year old kid. He does this from his college dorm room, kind of like I did eight years ago. Oh my goodness, eight years ago. And Jordan, same thing, had read all the blogs, had been interested in entrepreneurship, started a small business. And he emailed me this morning and said he was on pace to do about $6,000 this month and he's just getting started. And I have stories like this over and over and over again. One of my students, Zach, who had tried a bunch of different business models and saw some success but was working all the time and was super stressed out and now started this business and is cutting off everything else because this business is doing so well for him and because it takes up so little of his time compared to the other businesses. This is all he wants to do and he actually feels good about this business because he's providing good quality products to customers who are buying from Amazon and they're doing all the work. Now, I don't mean to sell you on this business model. You can go into whatever business you want to go into. This just happens to be what has done really well for me in the last year and what I plan on going into full force moving forward. I've pretty much shut down everything except for this specific business model and this is how I have fulfilled that first part of my wealth triad where I make my money in my businesses, specifically online businesses that follow a specific criteria which we went over. I invest that money into things like real estate and other businesses and then I invest that money into dividend paying stock. That's my wealth triad. That is how I'm building long term wealth and this is the business that has kind of been the catalyst for that success for me and how I've built a million dollar business in under a year. If this is something that you're interested in diving more into, I am opening up spots inside of the tribe to go through this training and to help start your business the right way and grow it over the next six to 12 months to something that you'll look back on and go, I cannot believe how different my life is as a result of building this business. I can't believe I've done this and it won't happen overnight, it's not going to happen next week or two weeks from now, but a year from now. If you go through this business model, you will come out and go, I cannot believe all that I've accomplished in the last year. My life is so different and that's exactly what I do now, where I can't believe that less than a year ago I cut off an old business and built something that is far bigger than what I was building, what I thought was going to be my path to freedom. I can't believe all that has happened in the last year. And that group coaching class starts in May of 2014. And if you're listening to this, after May of 2014, don't worry. I hope we'll have the class again. But you can find out all the details@freedomfastlane.com or you can simply message me on Facebook and ask me a question about it. You can find me at facebook.com ryandaniel moran or facebook.com freedom fastlane and by the way, you don't pay me anything for the group coaching class. It's actually a free bonus for going through some Amazon training called Amazing Selling Machine which is put on by the two people who mentored me into this business who are also really good friends of mine. It's the friend that I mentioned earlier who is making a lot of money in this business model and mentored me. They have a training program on this and as a free bonus for taking their training, I put on this group coaching where we meet once a week and we even get together in person one time and we work on your business specifically. So if this is a business model that you're interested in, you may want to consider joining this group coaching class and you can find all the details on freedomfastlane.com and be on the lookout for announcements to join that group coaching class. Listen, if you get nothing else from this call, I want to go over a couple things to remember. One, you're in a business. You are after a Freedom lifestyle to serve your life. So be very selective and be very strategic about the types of businesses that you pursue. For me, it has to be something that I can run from anywhere in the world. It has to be something that can make at least $10,000 a month, preferably a million dollars a year or more. It has to be something that is not connected to my time. It has to be something that I can automate. These are all the criteria that I have for going into a business and I ask you what is your criteria? If you don't have that criteria, it's time to get really clear on what that is. Otherwise you can be a feather in the wind blowing whichever way something sounds good or something that will make money. Going after a business with the idea of I've just got to get money doesn't work. Going into something with spirit specific criterion saying I'm going to give something to the marketplace that always works and I would encourage you to get clear on that criteria. And hey, go over to Alibaba.com and just play around and see what is there. It'll spark a whole lot of creative ideas for you and feel free to consider this group coaching class. There'll be specific details at the blog@freedomfastlane.com I am so incredibly thankful that I discovered this business model. I'm so incredibly thankful for all that has happened in my life in the last year as a result of cutting off what wasn't serving me and going after something that I was much more passionate about. And if there is something in your life that you feel like is holding you back, if there is something that is preventing you from living a truly extraordinary life, just remember that you are always choosing. You are always choosing the things that are in your life. When you wake up next to that person, you are choosing that person. When you go to work in the morning, you are choosing that job. And if something is not satisfactory to you, just choose differently. It is just a choice. It is as simple as a choice. You have the ability to create your life and I encourage you to be very strategic in what you choose. Because as far as I know, we only get to do this life one time. And I hope that it's extraordinary for you. As always, thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane. You can learn more@freedomfastlane.com and I'll chat with you on the next episode.