Zero To $1 Million On Amazon In 12 Months

So our next speaker is another great friend of ours. I'll read his little intro. So he sold millions of dollars online and got into Amazon along with ASM1, who's from ASM1 again? Yeah, he got in right when you all did before. He's been involved in online marketing and building businesses. He's one of those sort of prodigy stories that got started when he was in college and making money in his underwear in his dorm room, but got into selling physical products with ASM1. So not that long ago. Actually, he's grown his business to about $200,000 a month. He was featured back in January at the ASM event and was an absolute phenomenal speaker. And it was kind of funny because at first, like, I knew him personally, we went on a trip to Thailand for a couple weeks and it was this great time. But he was like, hey, I want to speak at the event. I was like, well, you know, I just don't know. I don't know. I've never seen you speak. And I was like, you know, very, very picky about who he let speak. But then, like, he kept pushing and pushing and pushing. I was like, okay, cool. But then he just blew everyone away. And then, you know, this time it was definitely a no brainer.

Actually. I remember sitting at your house, him asking and me saying, sure. And you're looking at me like.

Yep. And you could tell this guy wrote this part of the intro. It says he is the handsomest person person on stage by far.

So let's welcome to the stage, Mr. Ryan Moran.

Thank you. Actually, what happened was I said, do you guys need space? And they said, no, we're good on sound equipment.

I had to beg and claw my way in. It's good to be back. How we doing? Good.

Hey, where's the tribe?

I'm so proud of you guys. The tribe is a group. We've gone through ASM together three times now and the success stories have been absolutely incredible. Today what I want to do is I want to create a roadmap for 12 months of going from just starting out to getting to the one million dollar level.

Have you guys noticed that there every time a speaker comes up and you feel like there's all this stuff put on you, all of a sudden you feel like there's all this stuff you've got to do. You ever feel like this, the sense of overwhelm that happens? What I'd like to do is just create a roadmap of what I would consider the most important things for you to do. And if you just focus on these things, they will drive you forward to that million dollar level. So we can cut out all the noise, we can count the things that are bogging us down, and we can focus just on those things that are going to lead us to that level that I know we all want. Does that sound good? All right, that's what we're going to do. But first, I need to take a selfie.

Would you guys do me a favor and just act like you're cheering?

Thank you for that. You'll see that on Facebook later.

All right, so really briefly, a year and a half ago or so, I was very involved in the digital publishing arena. I was selling products about Internet marketing. And one day I woke up and I said, I cannot do this one more day. I don't know if you ever had that in your job or in a business that you've been in, but I had that where I said, I cannot do this one more day. That was about a year and a half ago, and it was right before Matt and I went on a trip to Thailand. And I just decided to shut everything down and focus exclusively on Amazon. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I shut everything down that was making money. And I decided I was going to go in a different direction. It was very scary. Today I've reached a level where I do 200, 250,000amonth. And my whole financial strategy is to make as much money online as possible so that I can invest that into other things. And I've always had this idea. I've always had this idea that a million dollars was like at a million dollars, I could invest that and be, I guess, set right. And we all have this reptilian brain that wants to keep us safe that says, what if it all goes away? Or.

What if all this competition shuts out my business? Or what if a big company comes in and I go out? We all have that. And as you reach higher levels, that voice just gets louder and it gets louder. 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. 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 becomes a million dollar business. There's three things that I want you to get. I know that about half the room, a little bit more than half the room is still in that place of maybe your inventory is on its way. You might make a sale here or there, but you're wondering, you're kind of scraping to go forward. I know that's where about half the room is. And I want you to keep these three things in mind. I wish somebody had told me these three things 13 months ago when I started my Amazon business. The first is that the longer vision of success that you can have, the more successful you will be if you think of something like the stock market. I was telling the story yesterday to the tribe that I have a friend of mine that I've been trying to get to invest. He makes a bunch of money, blows all of it. And I've been trying to get him to invest and he won't invest because he says, yeah, but the problem is if you invest in something, its value can go down 20, 20% the next day. And I say, but if we look at a longer time frame, if we look at a longer time frame, historically, things go up in value. So what lens are we looking at things? So if you've been in this for a month and you're frustrated at your success or lack of success, your time frame that you're looking at things for comparison is a little bit skewed. Now that's all our brains know how to do, is compare.

When we're evaluating anything, all our brains know how to do is compare what is successful. Somebody pull out successful out of their pocket. You can't do it. It's simply a measurement that your brain makes as a comparison to something else. They've actually done studies on happiness and they found that happiness is the difference between your expectation and your reality. It's just a comparison. And we're always doing this. And why are depression meds selling more than ever? Because we see what everybody else projects on Facebook 24 hours a day. We are constantly comparing. We are constantly comparing. And one of the dangers of coming to an event like this, coming to any marketing event, is comparing yourself to the person that you meet. That's doing really well. A speaker that you tell a story about that you think is doing really well, really, you're playing an unfair game. You are comparing your insides to their outsides and it's a dangerous game.

I say that all to say I've reached a certain level and I'm very happy with that. But problems don't go away when you get there. No one's problems ever go away. So if you can look through, if we can take that hero's journey and we can look through the problems and have a longer timeframe for success, the more successful you will be. And in my experience, from coaching many people going through this process, in my own experience, the timeline to being really full time, to being at the million dollar level of taking significant distributions from your company is about a year, sometimes less. If you're aggressive, it can be eight, 10 months, but you can factor about a year. That's the timeline of going from zero to a million dollars in most cases, give or take. But the more that you invest up front, the faster that curve is going to happen and the more successful you're going to be, the faster that path is going to be. Now, 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. I'm going to spend most of my time on stage one because I know that's where most of you are. This is your first three to four months after your first sale. So all the prep work that you do up to your first sale, the listing, getting your inventory, choosing your product, I consider that stage zero. When you make a sale, we're now in business. That's when we have data that we can compare. So your first three to four months after your first sale is this stage I call the grind. And it looks like this, this is how to know you're in the grind. If you're making less than 20 sales a day and you have less than 50 reviews, I'm of the opinion that if you are not yet at 20 sales a day.

And 50 reviews, all you need to focus on, all you need to focus on is getting to this level. We don't need to be worrying about second products. We don't need to be worrying about company branding. Again, my opinion that all you need to focus on is getting to this level. This is stage one. This is your first objective. And when you're in this stage, you're your only objective is to get moving, to get the ball rolling. One of our tribe members, his name is Ken. 30 days ago, we were on a Google hangout. We were talking about business and he was like, I got all this stuff, I feel like I gotta do. I don't know what's important. And he was just kind of expressing some frustration about being in that stuck pattern. We've got inventory, I'm not making sales, and I don't know what to do first in order to get things moving. So I gave him one assignment and I said, okay, next week when we have our next Google hangout, I want you to come back with five or ten reviews. I don't care what you do to get them. Knock on your neighbor's door, contact another ASM, or call your mom, talk to your dog. I don't care what it takes. Come back here in a week and have five to ten reviews. One month later, he comes back actually the following week, he's like, hey, I got my 5 or however many it was reviews, and I happen to be making sales every day as a result, too. Interesting. The next week he comes back, I'm like, he's like, I'm making like 8 to 10, 15 sales a day today. A month later is at 15 to 20 sales a day. All because we just cut out the noise and focused on sales and reviews, which, when you're in this initial stage, is all that matters. Nothing else is important except getting those sales and getting reviews. Are you guys familiar with the 8020 principle? It's this idea that 20% of our actions usually produce 80% of our results and everything else is pretty much noise. So here's a question. What is the 8020 principle for source of sales on Amazon? Where do most of your sales come from when you have an Amazon product?

Anyone.

Where you rank for keywords? So the majority of your traffic and sales come from in most cases. Now, I know there's one or two of you have put together a YouTube video and it went viral.

And now you're making a bunch of sales from one YouTube video. It doesn't happen most of the time. The 8020 on Amazon is where you rank for keywords. So what is the 8020 as far as where you rank for keywords?

We've studied a bunch of things on this. For a while we thought it was reviews. Reviews were the biggest thing for the algorithm, so that would be rankings. Then for a while I was convinced that it wasn't reviews, it was actually seller feedback. I was just convinced that that was the biggest thing in the algorithm. My opinion now, based on a lot more testing, is that the number one thing that determines where you rank on Amazon is actually the quantity of sales. I'm of his opinion now that the quantity of sales actually determines in the 8020 principle where you rank on Amazon for certain keywords.

So your goal in your first stage of business is to be able to generate enough sales to give Amazon's algorithm what it wants in order to rank you for keywords so that you have consistent sales. Does this make sense? This is the only thing that we need to worry about is giving the algorithm what it wants in order to get us up for the keywords that we're ranking for now, how do we do this if we're sitting on page 9 of Amazon for our target keywords, what do we do in order to get that process moving? I've narrowed it down to what I think are the three most important things and they are doing a product launch.

Getting reviews, having review systems in place, and Amazon pay per click. You can do other stuff if you want. In my opinion, these are the only three things you have to do. Like you've got to do these things if you want to give the algorithm what it needs in order to rank you for keywords. Everything else is nice, extra and stressful. In my opinion. I want to just focus on the things that are going to give me the most direct result. And I think you do too. And I've narrowed it down. I think these are the three things that you need to do. If we break this down into more specifics, who are the 25 people that you know that you can bug to death to leave a review and that relationship won't be hurt. There's your nucleus of reviews. Do a product launch, get those review systems in place and then put up Amazon pay per click. Those things.

In every case that I've tested it and my students have tested it, have gotten us to the level where we're now making consistent regular sales on Amazon. And it's a 30 to 60 day plan. And the amount of work that it takes, hours wise, is fairly low. It's you put the work in, the results show up. So how many of you, by the way, saw my presentation on doing a product launch on Facebook back in January?

So my goal in that was to show that if you build up an audience and you launch to that audience, that it can get you moving. It gets you from stage zero to moving. How it tended to be interpreted was if you make an I love something page on Facebook and get a bunch of likes, you'll be successful on Amazon. Not what I was going for, but we've proven the concept that if you can get a large amount of sales in a giveaway or a discount fashion, that it gets you from that stuck phase to that moving phase 100% of the time. Now, in a perfect world, they would be real, real buyers, if we might call them. But we found that a discounted or a free product sale feeds the algorithm almost as much as a natural sale. It's not just as good, but it's almost as good.

So we've come up with this idea, this theory, that if you can spike the algorithm, a whole bunch of sales in one time, in a short amount of time, then as a result, you'll rise in the rankings. If we can do it in a condensed time and spike the algorithm with sales, you can jump up in the rankings very quickly. And if you combine this with a super URL or one of those scripts out there that will put it through a specific keyword, then your results are magnified because then your specifically getting sales through that keyword. This is the rationale behind a product launch. This is why we do this. This is why we put so much emphasis on a product launch. Why inside the tribe and when I'm advising people, we put so much energy into doing a product launch and getting a condensed amount of sales into a small window, we spike the algorithm. Amazon takes you seriously and puts you higher in the rankings. Now, in one of my first products, in my yoga products business, we did this by building up a Facebook following. Like I talked about in January, we did this process and it worked beautifully. One of our tribe members, his name is Joe. Talk about him in a second. He shortcutted this process a little bit and just cut out all the prep work that I had been doing. And we found that we're able to do it. This is something you could go home and do in your hotel room later. And it looks like this. You make a squeeze page, advertising the product at a low cost.

You use Facebook ads to drive targeted traffic to the squeeze page and then you follow up those leads.

For reviews. So here's a case study. This is a business I'm helping my girlfriend build. And a year ago, I was not a cat person. Now I apparently am a crazy cat person. If you're a cat person, you are also crazy because I have met many of you.

I'm sorry, I was not a cat person at all a year ago. I thought they were the devil. And now I'm one of those annoying people that is showing people pictures of my girlfriend's cat.

So I'm helping my girlfriend start this business. Her first product is a cat scratcher. So this is a brand new fresh case study. We finished this like eight or ten days ago. So the Meow Mommy Cat Scratcher, if you own a cat, if you're a crazy cat person, great cat scratcher. You can find it on Amazon. Search for cat scratcher.

The products. The Meow mommy cat scratcher two weeks ago was selling zero units. She had scraped together 10 to 15 reviews. It was buried in search land. A good day was if I got a text from her saying, I'm on page nine. Great. Okay, so what we did is we put together this product launch, we put together this squeeze page. This is the squeeze page that we put together. This is all in leadpages, by the way. There's no website for this company. There is just. I mean, this is just like the standard URL they give you in leadpages. It doesn't matter. Now. There's no magic to this copy. But there's a few things that we hit. The most important being this second paragraph that says, why are we giving these away for a dollar? Simple. We need reviews. So if you'll leave a review, you'll get the new Meow Mommy Cat scratcher for a dollar. Because we're pre framing them for the fact that we want to get a review later. So there's two objectives here. One, we want to spike the algorithm with sales. Second, we want to have a nucleus of people that we can follow up with in order to collect reviews. So this is the magic sales page. We put this together in like 10 minutes. It was no problem. It's the product image from Amazon and some copy that says, here's why we're doing a giveaway for a dollar. That's it. You can do this. You can do this in your hotel room later. This is the Facebook ad we used. Very simple. You don't need a copywriting course to write an ad that says, as part of our Amazon launch party, we're giving out 50 new cat scratchers for just a dollar. Same picture. That's the copy. How long do you think I took to write that copy?

And that was it. And we targeted, guess who we targeted on Facebook for this?

You guys are so smart. Cat owners. That was it. We kept this really, really simple. We wanted to give away 50 to 100 units at $1 so we could spike the algorithm and so we could have a Nucleus for reviews. And again, this is like 10 days ago. This is the thank you page for the squeeze page. Here's your coupon code and here's what you need to do. You're going to get an email. Here's the link where you can get it. That's a super URL. Put it in your cart and your coupon code.

Your total will be a dollar. And please note, in ordering your discounted cat scratcher, you agree to leave a review on Amazon within 30 days of purchase. Pretty simple. Again, about another 10 minutes. Here are the results. I was sitting in Vancouver with my girlfriend.

I put all this together. It was late at night, it was like 10:30 at night. I put it all together and I was like, okay, I'm gonna go read a book and go to bed. So I'm reading a book in a chair and she comes over and she says, oh, honey, look.

10 minutes had passed. She goes, there's been 13 orders. And I went, oh, shoot.

I was like, are you sure about that? She goes, and she goes, oh, no, I was wrong. There's 26 sales.

Okay, hit pause. So we hit pause. We started up the next day, they were gone. I mean, they're gone because you have a large audience through a very simple ad. By the way, the psychology of that ad, the reason I made that ad is because it says we're giving away 50 cat scratchers for a dollar. I didn't want anybody to click who didn't want a cat scratcher for a dollar. So I didn't want to like have any curiosity or humor. I just wanted only the people who were going to buy for a dollar to click on the link.

So they were pre framed going to the page. They basically agreed to leave a review. They got it. They were reminded that they were going to be asked to leave a review and went to bed. And 24 hours later we had given away 100 cat scratchers.

We peaked at 500 bestseller rank in pet supplies with basically 24 hours. Basically overnight we spiked the algorithm went from absolute obscurity to like no sales to having 100 sales in a very short window and going to 500 BSR and pet supplies. She this is. I made these slides a few days ago, but it was like 25 reviews a few days ago. I think it's up to 30 or 35 as a result. And those are still coming in because again, this is like 8 or 10 days ago and we've peaked. I checked this morning and I think we were, I think this listing was atop of page three. It moves every few hours because the algorithm's like, what the heck is going on? There's all this coming in. So we went from absolute obscurity to. And we spiked the algorithm and now we have reviews coming in. And reviews do play a role in the algorithm, but most importantly, reviews play a role in conversion rate, which increases sales, which is the biggest factor, I believe, when it comes to where you rank for keywords. So just by doing this.

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.

The cost was about $250 in advertising and we gave away 100 units. Now I know that's not cheap. I had to do some convincing to get her to agree to give away 100 units. But again, the more work that you put in up front, the faster your success curve will be.

If I could have convinced her, I would have given away 500 cat scratchers. So the more you can do up front, the faster your curve is going to be. But with just 100 units, we soared up the rankings. Our buddy in the tribe, Joe, was doing the same thing, doing zero sales, not showing up for anything. He did a 350 unit launch, surged up to page one very, very quickly. Two months later is doing 40 sales a day, 75 plus reviews and counting, is soaring up Amazon charts.

Flirting with number one in his category, all from basically just doing nothing but this, nothing but those three things. A launch, getting reviews, and Amazon ppc. Now following the launch, what does that look like after you've spiked the algorithm, what does it look like? Well, did it mean that we went from zero to a million dollar business overnight? No, we'll probably do another one in order to get onto page one. Kind of letting the dust settle right now, letting reviews come in. We'll probably do another one after a while to get onto page one to get those consistent 15 to 20 sales a day to get over what I call the hump.

And then we follow up with every customer for reviews with just either your autoresponder or through emailing them. I think my girlfriend is just using Amazon's emailing them manually, which, you know, I'd rather shove an ice pick under my toenail, but I think that's, that's what she's using right now. And you repeat this process until you're ranking high enough to get the natural sales to meet that 20 sales per day to get out of stage one.

This is the plan for this. This is the plan for all of my products is we just spike the algorithm. We give the algorithm what it wants to get to page one so we have natural sales coming in and then we move on to stage two.

Your review systems. I'm going to go through these quickly. One, are your email follow ups coming from either the ASM tool or Feedback Genius and I spoke on this in depth in January. The number one thing that has made a difference in our reviews, that has absolutely allowed us to toast our competitors, has been picking up the phone and calling people and saying these simple words, just calling to make sure your product arrived on time. Was it what you expected? Great. Can I send you a coupon for one of our future products? Awesome. I'm gonna send that over to you right now. Hey, by the way, can I leave a link for you to leave a review for us, Give your honest feedback because I really appreciate what we talked about today. They say yes, yes, yes and yes four times. And that's our process. I think when I started my business, my first product obviously had zero reviews. The number one person in our industry had 80 reviews. Today we have hundreds and hundreds of reviews. I think my first product now has just over 300 reviews and the competitor that was number one has like 105 reviews. And the only thing we're doing differently is, is we're calling our customers.

I get a lot of questions about Amazon PPC because that is the third component to what I consider being important in stage one. I say start Amazon PPC. As a rule of thumb, when you have about 15 reviews, less than 15 reviews, conversion rates are gonna be low. More than 15 reviews, you're delaying it too long. So I say when you have about 15 reviews, it's time to turn on Amazon PPC. And when you're in stage one, I say just be aggressive. Bid on the keywords that you want to rank for. Because what happens with Amazon ppc, it matters. As far as Amazon's algorithm, the only exception is if you're operating at a loss. If you're spending more on Amazon PPC as you're making in profit, then pause it, work on your listing and get more reviews, then come back to it. That's the third component to stage one. So for those of you who are in this phase of you have product, you're not sure what to do in order to get things moving so that you're getting those consistent sales every day. The only thing you've got to worry about is sales and reviews because that impacts your ranking and your ranking is what brings you natural sales for years to come. You can accomplish this very quickly by doing a launch by what I call spiking the algorithm. And again, there's multiple ways to do this. What's working well for us right now is the process we just talked about. But as long as you have a list of people that you can go to to do a large discount or giveaway that spikes the algorithm and accomplishes this process, and really repeat this process until you are ranking high enough to be getting 20 natural sales per day and about 50 reviews, does this simplify the process for when you're in this stage one? Does it make sense?

This is the 80, 20. This is the 20% of things that we found make the biggest impact. Again, you can do other stuff, but this is the stuff that has made the biggest impact in our business. In all of my businesses, all of my products, when it comes to getting to that level where there are consistent sales and for most people I talk to at 20 sales a day, if you're making about 10 bucks profit, that's pretty good to start a business, especially 30 to 60 days after you began it. Now, if you're in stage one and you're not yet making consistent sales, you don't have a good nucleus of reviews.

You have heard everything you need to hear. Go do. You can do this tomorrow, you can do this tonight in your hotel room. Everything else I'm going to talk about is for entertainment purposes only.

Because if anything I say, if anything anyone on the stage says this weekend adds to the noise and the stress of you implementing, don't add it to your process.

New stuff is great when it's relevant, when it makes a direct impact in your business. So file it away for later, write it down, but don't bring it into your action plan until it's relevant for your business. So many times I see new entrepreneurs seeing that they have a new hot idea and then they get this idea and they feel like they've got to do it all at once. No, you don't have to do anything that is not relevant to the stage of business that you're currently in. So if you're not in stage two or three, if you're not beyond 20 sales a day and about 50 reviews, then all of this is just nice for those of you who are beyond this, this might be impactful for you, but what I'd really like for you to get is just to see where, again, in my opinion, where the hierarchy of importance is. Because if we're talking about stuff that you're doing right now, but you're not at that level, just worry about it later, Worry about it when it's relevant for your business. So you know you're in stage two when you're doing about 20 to 50 natural sales per day and have more than 50 reviews. Now you have graduated. Now we can do more stuff if we want to do more stuff.

Anybody ever read the book Ready, Fire, Aim? Fantastic book. He basically breaks down his four stages of business. I condensed them a bit. But we agree that number one is creating a channel of consistent sales. We have that. It's called Amazon.com and if you're ranking for keywords, there's your channel. Stage two is duplicate the process with new products.

So stage two is rolling out new products. Once you're at the level of doing 20 to 50 sales per day, about 50 reviews, we duplicate this process. Now, I get this question a lot. When is a good idea for me to think about a second product? The answer is this. You roll out a second product when you can easily duplicate the process without.

Detracting from what you're currently doing or destroying your cash reserves. That's the simple answer. That's when you roll out your second product, when it doesn't take away from what you're currently doing. If you haven't reached what I call stage 2 with product 1, don't roll out product 2. Follow the process to get consistent natural sales, and then we'll roll out product number two.

And the launch process for product number two is largely the same. It's almost exactly the same. But some interesting things happened when I started rolling out multiple products. My first product ever. Again, over a year ago, we hit number one in our category with about 30 sales per day. Pretty small market. If you're number one doing 30 sales a day, you're in a pretty small market. I was actually surprised by this. We're like, okay, I guess this market caps out at about 30 sales a day. So then we released product number two, and we worked it for a few months. We got it to be number one in our category, and it hit number one at about 50 sales a day. So in our mind, we're like, okay, in this market, about 40 sales a day is what we're going to cap out on for each product. So in Order to get to the million dollar level, we're gonna need to get about four products, each doing about 40 sales. All right, cool. We do this. We got our plan now. Well, an interesting thing happened.

When we had product number two hit number one, sales of product number one doubled.

And then.

When those sales doubled, sales of product number two doubled. Kind of an interesting thing which we thought the market capped out at 30 sales a day. Why did it go to 60 sales a day plus not doing anything different?

So what we thought would be Something that did 50 or 75 sales a day jumped up to over 150 sales a day when we rolled out the second product. I'm going to explain why this is in a second, but this is why I say if you invest more up front, the faster your success curve going to be. Because the faster you can get through stage one, the faster you can get to that 20 natural sales a day and 50 reviews, the faster you can get to this process where two plus two equals 50, where you bring in a second product. And now we have a monumental increase in our business. Here's what happened. Here's why rolling out the second product made such a big difference. First. First, there was crossover sales. People who bought product number one bought product number two and vice versa. People naturally found the second product and then they went and they liked it. They bought the first product. There's also just. It was faster to rank because we had seller feedback. We had a nucleus of reviews to go to. You also have this fancy thing at checkout that says customers who bought this product also liked this product. So we had people adding it to their cart when they were buying one of our other products. And we just had an existing customer base that we could go to for launch. So just as a result of rolling out the second product, we had a monumental increase in business. In fact, we hit the million dollar level, the hundred thousand dollar a month level, with just these two products because they were so synergistic and they fed one another. Here's some of the things that you need to keep in mind for your second product. One, only release products that your existing customer base wants to buy.

I need to emphasize this. It would be a mistake to roll out a cat scratcher and then roll out a supplement. Unless that supplement made cat people less crazy. That would work.

But otherwise it would not be a fit. It's a cat scratcher. We'll probably do some sort of cat feeder next.

So do not try to do two separate businesses at once. What does your customer base want to Buy next. That is the first question to rolling out a second product. It's also okay at this point to go after a bigger market. If you've been a little bit afraid of going into a market where there's a lot of competition, do it with your second or third product instead. Reason for that is because you have more seller feedback. You have a nucleus of reviews, you understand the process, you have cash flow coming in so you can put them into marketing. So that's when you can go after a more competitive market. If you were a little bit too afraid to go after something more competitive your first time around.

And of course your best customers, the people who email you and say how great your first product is, they that's your review base for product number two. Some other points for stage two, once you're making consistent sales and you have your reviews, you're rolling out a second product. Your other points look like this. Bring your customer service in house, meaning you have a person, either, I mean someone part time or full time that reports to you that does your customer service. I disagree with some people on this topic. I am very, very protective on the front lines of my customers because reviews are the lifeblood of our business. So if someone does something poor on a phone call and you can't monitor that, that can hurt, can really hurt. So I say in stage two, it's time to bring customer service in house to someone that you trust that reports to you.

And we've seen a monumental, monumental increase, a difference in just the quality of the person that we hire for this. We moved over from outsourcing this to someone overseas who is still reporting to us full time for us, but was overseas to a stay at home mom here in the States. Our reviews went up 500%. 500%.

It's amazing.

I also think it's at this point that it's necessary to have a company website. Notice I don't have this in stage one. All I care about in stage one is getting quick sales and reviews. It's all I care about. I worry about branding and websites and social media stuff. Once I have consistent sales, it doesn't matter to me until there's consistent sales. So it's at this point that it makes sense for you to put up a company website or improve the one that you have if you think that it's a little bit lacking or too simple. Also, the one other thing that I might suggest in stage two is creating a combined discount at checkout. So if someone buys multiple products from you, they'll get a 10% discount and that's listed on your Amazon listing. That in my mind is the only other thing that I might throw into stage two. So stage one is get moving, get sales, spike the algorithm. Get to the point where you're getting natural sales and follow up with those customers for reviews. That's your first three months in business. When you're making 20 plus sales naturally a day and have 50 reviews or more, your objective is to release new products.

Stage three. And again, I think this is the only thing you need to do until you're at the target that you need in order to have $100,000 badge. I think that's the only things you need to do in order to get to that level. It's at this point. And again, if you are not in stage three, you can ignore everything I'm about to say.

In stage three. I call it the gold. Because this is when I think it is okay to pay yourself if you can delay taking money out of the company.

If you can delay putting yourself on payroll until you are in this stage. This stage being that you have two to four products each selling 30 to 50 units a day. If you can put it off until this point, if you invest that up front, the faster the million dollar business is going to come. So realistically.

I advise you to start taking money out of your business if you can delay it. Once you're in this stage.

You'Re delaying a little bit of gratification for a much bigger business. A lot faster, a lot bigger pool of resources for you to use for launches, for marketing.

There's three parts to stage three. This is really solidifying your business. You now have multiple products. You're at the level now where you're making the money, monthly sales necessary in order to have a projected million dollar business.

This is, by the way, the only reason I'm including all of this in stage three is so you can see where it fits into the process. This is where it's okay to go back and say, okay, maybe we can customize our product and have different sizes and colors and stuff, have different buying options for people. This is also when I think it's necessary to start thinking about customer data collection and think about new additional traffic channels. Again, I'm only including this so you can see where it falls in the process.

Because if you're worried about this stuff now, I say is it relevant to immediately impact your business? If not, you might want to put it on the shelf when you're in stage three. So what I mean by product Customization. I was asked the question.

Last round, when do you think about rolling out different sizes, different colors, different flavors for a product? If it's a consumable? And I say here, I say in stage three. So I have a business that's in yoga. It's called Zen Active Sports. Our first product was a yoga mat. We polled our audience. The most popular color for a yoga mat was black.

So we only rolled out a black yoga mat. That was it. And we went back and forth and said, do we roll out red? Do we roll out pink? Do we roll out green? The answer is no, not until we're in this stage. Because now we're just delaying sales.

So all this product customization goes here.

Oh, this also is relevant to your packaging. If you're thinking about, I will roll out fancy packaging. When do I do all this stuff? That sounds nice.

Is it impacting your bottom line when you're in stage one? No. Does it impact your bottom line when you're in stage two? Maybe this much. Can it make a difference when you're past all of that and now you're ready for it? Yes. This is where it falls into the process. This is also where you can start thinking about things like customer data collection. These are things like inserts in your packaging that send people to squeeze pages so you get their email address. The reason for that, and we just started doing this. My business is 13 months old. We started doing this three months ago because we're in stage three. And also my business is 13 months old. We've been selling hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for several months. Just put ourselves on payroll two months ago. I'm just saying that to be realistic about. We wanted to have certain cash reserves. We wanted to have certain momentum before we started paying ourselves. We waited until stage three. The reason why customer data is in important in this stage is because then you can do things like follow up for other products and have crossover. Now, why do I wait here? Why do I wait until stage three for this? Because collecting the email address and promoting other products doesn't really make sense if you don't have other products to promote in the first place. So I'm not all that worried now. Again, some people will disagree with me, but I'm not all that worried about following up with our customers and having them ready to promote other products until we have other products to promote, because it doesn't immediately impact the business. It doesn't immediately drive a difference in sales.

This is also where I start to think about connecting them to Other branding places, like a Facebook page, like a Twitter page. Because in three places, that's when you're psychologically bonded to someone. Psychologically, you're bonded to somebody. When you go on three dates with them or if you see them in three different places. If you only see someone at work, they're a work buddy. If you go out for a drink, it's a work buddy that you sometimes go to get a drink with. They come over on Sunday to watch football and they're a work buddy that you sometimes drink with. Now they're a friend because you've seen them in three places. So this is the place where we, in this part of our business, this is where we start to think about where do we get them connected to other places. And we go for three. They bought from us on Amazon, we get their email address, they get us to like a page on Facebook. By the way, reminder, if any of this is adding to the noise of what immediately impacts your business, you can stop listening to me because this is stage three. This is where it fits in. This is also where I have 10 seconds left, so I'll go through this quickly. This is also where it's okay to think about other traffic channels, press releases now because we have other products to talk about that are new, that are press worthy. Now why do I wait here to look at other traffic channels? Well, you guys may have heard that it costs seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to market to your existing customers. And on Amazon, we don't really get to control that process because we don't get to control the upsell process until we have multiple products. Once we have multiple products. Stage two, that is when our customer value goes up enough because people buy other products. People buy multiple products at a time. People will add your subsequent products to their cart at checkout. Now we have multiple products, so our customer value is bigger than now. It makes sense for us to spend some resources on things like search engine optimization or things like building up content on your website or things like Google AdWords that now it makes sense in my mind, in my opinion. Now it makes sense for us to spend some money on outside traffic because we have an increase in customer value. Now it makes sense for us to do this. So let's recap the three stages. 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.

My name is Ryan Daniel moran. My website's freedomfastlane.com we were hacked in the last 24 hours, so it might be down right now. So if there's a link out of place, please don't shoot me. I have a podcast on itunes called Freedom Fastlane, and just like your Amazon products, I live and die by reviews on itunes. So you can leave a review for me on itunes. Thanks so much for having me.