Episode #5 - How to get to £1,000 per month in profits

Hey.

Very, very warm welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work from anywhere in the world.

So we've spent a couple episodes talking about strategies, right? How do you actually go out there and find stuff to sell on your account? How do you make sure that stuff is going to be profitable for you? How do you make sure it's going to sell quickly? How do you know when you've got a hot seller on your hands? And what techniques and tools can you use to actually start building some real income using Amazon?

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We've talked about retail arbitrage and online arbitrage. So what I want to do in this episode really is go a little bit deeper into actually a more broad topic, which is building that income, right? How do you actually get from zero to a thousand pounds a month selling on Amazon? Okay, so, I mean, when I started my business, I remember how much I aspired to earn. A thousand pounds a month, to me, that was just like a crazy accomplishment, right, because I'd been working in a bar for so long for about two years, which felt like forever for me because, you know, I'd only been at uni for like three years. So two years working in a bar, to me just felt like forever. Felt like I'd already wasted two years of my life doing that and I really, really didn't enjoy it. And I was not even earning £1,000amonth there. So I thought to myself, if I could generate a thousand pounds a month and outside of a job, then it would be life changing. And to be honest with you, it really, really was. And when I actually managed it, I think I did it within two months of selling on Amazon, two or three months of selling on Amazon. And it was an incredible feeling, right? That, that to me was when I considered my business was actually going somewhere. And I know that a lot of people kind of feel the same way. Once they reach a thousand pounds a month, they feel that they have something that's actually beginning to work, right, that's a significant amount of profit. So today we're going to talk all about exactly how you can get there. What exact action steps can you take to get to that thousand pound mark, and what kind of mindset do you have to have to get to that mark? What concepts do you need to grasp to get there? And you know, what systems can you build in your business? To make sure that it's actually going to happen. So before we go any further, if you haven't already checked it out, I actually run a master class on this very topic and it happens pretty regularly. If you go to ecommercefreedom.com you'll see there's a banner at the top which will get you an invite to my free masterclass. You can actually click on that banner and you'll sign up and the whole thing is done online. Okay, so you just register for the master class and then you'll be added to the one that's happening next. You'll get a notification when it's starting and then you'll get to jump on and basically log in with me and you can learn all about how to put all this stuff together. Right. I was talking about a lot of techniques in this podcast and this masterclass basically allows you to put everything together. And I take you basically from knowing nothing to actually knowing everything you need to know to be able to build a thousand pound income every single month and beyond by starting an Amazon business. So I definitely recommend you do that. If you go to ecommercefreedom.com then you can click on that banner at the top and you'll be able to sign up for a master class. And you know, those things are really, really helpful. That's where people actually get really inspired to actually go out and take a load of action. So today we're going to go through exactly what it takes to get there. Okay. And one of the concepts I really like to hammer into people before they even start their Amazon journey, before they even buy their first piece of stock to sell in their account, is this okay? You need, in order to make a decent consistent income selling on Amazon, if you're doing arbitrage especially, you need a huge and varied inventory. Okay, so we're talking about building up a certain number of products on your account. You can't just be sending in random amounts of loads of different products. You need to start to build a huge and varied inventory. Inventory. So what does this mean exactly? Okay, so basically let's look at the huge part. Obviously you want to be selling as many products on your account as you possibly can, right? Because the more products you have, the more sales you're going to make. As long as you've obviously analyzed them all properly, you know they're going to sell quickly, you know they're going to make you a profit. The more you have, the better. Kind of goes without saying. And the varied part is what's really, really important. And this is what I really want you to grasp, okay? You can't just send in a thousand of the same product and expect your entire business to be a long lasting and consistent source of income for you. Okay? So if, let's just say you buy a thousand of the same type of Barbie doll, send it into your account, any number of things could happen to make your business tank effectively. By doing that, you have massively increase the risk. You've put all of your eggs in one basket, spent all of your capital on one particular product, sent it into your account. And what happens if somebody comes in with the same product and undercuts you and takes all of the sales away from you with a thousand units of stock and sells it for half your price?

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You're never going to make any sales. Your business is going to tank. What if you analyzed it wrong and it wasn't selling as well as you thought it was? What if for some reason it's not making you as much profit as you thought it was going to? You've put all your eggs in one basket and basically it's just a bad idea. Okay? So what I recommend you do is you go very wide with your inventory. Okay? Rather than buying a thousand units of one particular product, you buy say, 20 different products and maybe five or 10 units of each. That way you've split all of your investments very, very wide. And you know, if one product just fails and some will fail, you'll have some product lines that just flopped. However, you'll have 19 other products that all have an equal chance of doing very well in your business. Okay? So this is really, really important. You want to build a huge and wide inventory. Once you've grasped this concept and you start building your business around this philosophy, you have a lot higher chance to actually get a lot of success and actually start seeing some consistent sales and really building up a great income. So in order to build this huge and wide inventory, you can combine the two methods of researching stock that we've already been through. Retail arbitrage and online arbitrage. Okay? You can use these methods to find stuff to sell on your account. And what you want to be doing as you're going through all of these products to sell is making sure you're analyzing everything properly. Okay? So analysis isn't just a case of, you know, running through a couple of checks on each product individually. You want to make sure that every single product that you analyze actually is a good fit for your business.

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So I recommend you, instead of having Any hard and fast rules to make sure things are a good fit for your business?

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As in, you wouldn't want to just say I'm only going to buy products between 10 and 20 pounds and give me a 30% return on investment.

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Because by doing that, you're going to miss out on a load of opportunities. Instead of having any hard and fast rules, you isolate every single product that could be a good fit for your business and analyze it in isolation. Okay, so let's just use an example. Let's say we stumbled across a LEGO set, okay, selling on Toys R Us. And, and you've used the FBA calculator to figure out it's going to make you a decent amount of profit. The best seller rating is around about 5,000 in toys and games. So it's nice and low. You know, it's going to be selling, but it's only making you £4 profit.

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If you had a hard and fast minimum return on investment that you wanted to make on a product, you might end up missing out on this particular product and it could actually be a really nice fit for your business.

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If you just completely say I'm not going anywhere under say £10 profit per item, you could miss out on an opportunity to have a product that is actually bringing you in extra profit. So what you have to do is look at all of the factors here. Let's just say, you know, you want to make a little bit more return on investment with products that you're buying. This one only makes you £4, so it's a little bit less than you'd like to make. Instead of completely obliterating the opportunity, you could just buy less of the item. Okay. Again, you could maybe stumble across a product that has a really, really bad bestseller rank. Let's say it's 80,000, right? You found a product that's got 80,000 bestseller rank in toys and games. You know, it's probably only going to sell once a week, but this product might be a really, really high profit product.

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Let's say you're going to make £50 every time it's sold. Well, you wouldn't have to stick to the 30,000 bestseller rating rule for this. Okay? I wouldn't even have that as a rule at all. In fact, in your business you're going to have loads and loads of different products with all varying best seller ratings and you will have analyzed each one in isolation.

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So if somebody's got a really, really slow bestseller rating, it indicates it's only going to Sell once a week or once every two weeks. Then instead of, you know, just discounting it completely, why not just buy less of the it? All right, because you could have a hundred products in your account, all different products, right? One of each, and each one of those products could have a bestseller rating that indicates it's only going to sell once a month. That's still 100 sales a month. Alright, so what I'm saying here is use the tools that you have to get an indication of whether a product is a good fit for your business. Don't make too many hard and fast rules and just analyze each product and each opportunity in isolation. If you haven't found anything that entire for say three day period of searching for products and you finally stumble across something, the return on investment isn't too great, the best seller rank isn't too great. Why not just buy a couple just to make sure you are sending something into your account. That's an example of analyzing an opportunity in isolation. You've had a bit of a drought, you couldn't find things. For some reason you just want to send something into your account. Makes more sense than being really hard and fast with your analysis. Also, one thing to do is really, really important in terms of mindset, is to not obsess over the details. Okay, so there's going to be a load of things thrown at you with Amazon, right? Loads and loads of things, new things that you need to learn. There's going to be loads of tools that you have to pick up on. There's going to be loads of rules that Amazon want you to abide by. You know, you're going to want to be maybe keeping track of all your numbers. Maybe you're going to want to build a really elaborate spreadsheet to track all your products and everything. I say, don't get too caught up on all of the things that aren't going to make you any money. Okay? So trying to find the best kind of tape to tape up your boxes with or trying to find the best tool to search for online arbitrage products or the best scanning app, or work out exactly to the penny how much profit you're making. I wouldn't worry about any of that stuff too much, okay? Just dive in there and you know, keep this simple. This is a very, very simple business. You're buying things for cheap, you're selling them for more expensive. Rather than obsessing over the details, just make sure you're taking actions that actually end up ensuring that you make sales and make profit. Put all of your energy into making sure your business is growing. And don't worry too much about the details. Take a few little bits of information I've given you on this podcast about retail arbitrage, online arbitrage, other techniques you can use to grow your business. And take a little bit of information and then take a lot of action. That's the secret. Success, okay? Obsessing over details like organizing your email inbox so everything's pretty and there's filters and everything is isn't going to make you any money. Neither is obsessing over which software is going to be the best for you. It doesn't matter. Anything will do. Just don't worry about the details. Focus on the things that are going to make you money and spend all of your time doing those things. And another point that you really need to take into consideration is that building solid systems in your business is really the most important part of ensuring you have a consistent and stable income. And a business that's growing, right? A business built on shaky foundations really isn't going to last very long at all. So the way to do this in an Amazon business is to be very, very consistent with the stock that you're sending into your account. Every single week, you should be sending at least one shipment of stuff into your account. Doesn't matter if it's come from retail arbitrage, doesn't matter if it's wholesale stuff, it doesn't matter if you've got it from online arbitrage. If it's private label stuff, whatever it is, every single week, make sure you're sending in something, okay? And this will ensure that, provided that you've analyzed things correctly, you'll be making more and more sales on your account.

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So this is a system, right? What is a system? Broken down very simply, it's something that happens repeatedly to achieve a desired result, right? So for example, a farmer, every single, I don't know when farm, I don't know anything about farming, but at some point in the year, they will plant seeds, okay? After raking the dirt or whatever they do, right? Every single year, they'll prepare the dirt, prepare the earth, then they'll plant the seeds, and then it comes to harvest time, they'll harvest the crops. Okay? So a farmer has a system that happens all year round. Different times in the year, different things happen to ensure desired result, which is the fact that they have produce to sell on if one of those things in that system goes wrong, if his combine harvester breaks or if he runs out of Seed, then his business is going to collapse, right? And it's the same with us. If we have shaky systems in our business, if we start flaking off and only sending in shipments when we feel like it every three weeks and then two weeks and then once a month, our business is just going to fall down and we're not going to be making any profit. So build systems into your business, make them solid, right? Say to yourself, I'm going to be disciplined and spend two hours a day researching stock. Sometimes you'll find nothing, sometimes you'll find loads of stuff. But throughout the course of a month or two months or six months, you'll find loads and loads of products. Have loads and loads of stuff in your inventory selling consistently and your business will, will be solid. It's all down to the systems. You build it. As you grow your business, you can actually start to make these systems a lot more pleasurable. For example, you can hire a VA to do systems for you, right? They can do the two hours or three hours or five hours a day of research on your behalf and you won't have to, right? And then the systems will be even more solid and you'll just be there tweaking them. But whatever it is, you have to have systems. If you don't have systems, you don't have a business. You just have a hobby, something that spits out money at you randomly. You want consistent sales, you want consistent income. So systems are the absolute key. So these are the basic principles of building up a consistent income. Sooner or later, after a little bit of action that you take in your business, you will get to £1,000amonth. If you keep reinvesting your stock, if you keep building systems, keep consistent, keep looking for opportunities all over the Internet. Being as consistent as you can and motivated to actually grow your business, you'll get to a thousand pounds month in profit, right? So if you want to look at this in a little bit more detail, if you want like a more structured way with, you know, visual examples, I can actually show you on a video, on a presentation, then I really recommend you join my master class. Okay? It's running periodically. Every so often there's one you can join. And if you go to ecommercefreedom.com you'll see the banner at the top and you can actually click on that banner and it will take you to the registration page. For my next masterclass, you can sign up for that and you'll be shown a step by step process of everything you need to know to make a thousand pounds a month profit selling on Amazon. And actually I go through exactly how to get there within 90 days. We go through how to build your business, how other people have done it in exactly the same way. We go through a formula I've created for actually getting to that thousand pounds a month, what actions you need to take for the next few weeks and a lot of detail. I'll give you visual examples of how to use the tools, more concepts to take in and there's also a lot of question and answers going on as well, which is really helpful if you've got anything specific you want to ask. So definitely go check out the masterclass ecommercefreedom.com click on the banner at the top. I can't wait to see you on there. It's gonna be really, really beneficial for you. So I really hope you enjoyed this episode, had a lot of fun making it for your love, passing on this stuff, guys, because it's just so life changing. You've never heard of it before, never had a way of actually creating yourself freedom, creating yourself income, then this stuff is really, really exciting. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on with me today and I can't wait to speak to you in the next episode. Whatever you do, keep believing. Take care and I'll see you in the next episode.