How to Grow an E-Commerce Business with Fulfillment By Amazon Brands

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, land geek with your favorite niche real estate website thelandgeek.com and are you ready to stop trading time for money? Are you looking for the steps to launch, profit, grow, scale and sell an FBA brand in 2024 and beyond? Or how to grow an existing direct to consumer brand into almost automated income with fulfilled by Amazon? If so, then get ready for today's guest. This is a part two with my buddy Neil TWA with Voltage Digital Marketing. If you're not familiar with Neil, he's a big deal. He has since 2012 has built over 500 plus Amazon FBA E commerce businesses and his clients have been doing this. He shows people how to be omnichannel. I've got a buddy who's getting ready for a what, nine figure 10, eight figure exit.

Big exits big by nine figure if.

He gets up, pull off nine figure exit. So it's insane what Neil to is able to do. Neil, welcome.

Hey Mark, thanks for having me on.

Good. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so look, it's 2024 as of this recording, correct? What's this? What's the state of the market with E commerce? Why, why is this thing? I mean I've heard like TikTok, like what, what's, what's going on here?

Is it, is it a fad? Is E commerce a fad?

Is E commerce a fad?

I guess I'd ask the question in reverse. Is anybody listening to this call still buying products off Amazon? Because if you are, then it's probably not a fad. Products are not going away if you order two, three, four times a week. If you're an Amazon prime subscriber, if you've watched on anything on prime video or bought a download, then you know, E commerce isn't going away. Physical products and needs, children's boots, you know, getting your on demand subscribe and save showing up at your house every week for your favorite products and goods. E commerce is by no means going away. In fact, it's growing and evolving extremely fast. Especially with mobile devices now being the number one way people purchase online so they can purchase from anywhere. It used to be that you and I would have to sit down and go to the computer. You know, it was really hard to order first and it was like, hey, you can order on our computer. That's super cool. And you're like, well if I want something I gotta go to the computer or find a computer and then I can order something. But now you just throw up your phone and boop. In a couple of moments you are spending like crazy on places like Amazon and getting physical products delivered to your door in two days or less. So by that measure, no, by the economic standards, every year it is broke records. Amazon's prime holiday just broke more records, is the largest sales holiday it's ever had. So you tell me, is it, is it slowing down? It's.

Yeah, it's not slowing down.

It's not slowing down?

No, it's not slowing down.

There's a worldwide opportunity here and you know, everybody who is listening to this has some technical connectivity. They understand how to get a podcast, they know how to navigate the web and so many ways. Because we've reached that level of understanding in our brain, we think that everyone else gets it, but not everybody else gets it. In fact, the majority of people still don't get it. So there is still an evergreen blue sky opportunity for physical and private label product brand building. And there will be for another decade, easily. I've been at this for 12 years and through many changes in 12 years, including a pandemic situation that was unlike anything any business had faced before in America. And we went through that and literally in 2020, in the first quarter, we saw 10 years of growth in E commerce. It just went exponentially large. So as things change, you know, it's the second oldest profession in the world selling and buying physical products. And so that's not going away by any measure. Yeah.

And it used to be if you're going to sell a physical product, you'd have to have a storefront, you have to have inventory, you'd be, you'd be physically overwhelmed. I mean, I remember like back in the day, it's like I think I was selling T shirts in college and I'd have all these T shirts and boxes in my dorm and my roommate was annoyed and I'd be going door to door to the other people trying to, trying to make money as a college student. So when you say fulfilled by Amazon.

Sure.

What does that mean?

Yeah. In just simple terms, it is the done for you component of our business model because it is a logistics, warehousing, freight management, shipping, trucking, planes, infrastructure. The sixth largest logistics company in the world. They can move products and goods and services all over the world so fast and get things through you in two days or even in a Dropbox in an hour in a downtown city. In some of the major cities, it is basically the fulfillment end of serving physical products to the customer. Last mile delivery is what's referred to as. And because of that I don't have a warehouse, I don't have employees, I don't store products in my basement or my garage. I don't have a basement. So they wouldn't put them there anyways. And I don't store them somewhere else. They actually get stored in warehouses and infrastructure that is delivered by Amazon. So it really creates a whole systematic automation to the movement of products from my manufacturer all the way through to the consumer. Frees up my time to do what really you should be doing in business, which is developing your customer, developing relationships, building that brand and building that additional value that your customers expect from you from a, from a product or a physical product space as we do it. So it is just a giant machine, helps with the movement, the refunds, the processing of the payments. It takes care of so many things we don't have to worry about, including the website or other technical things we don't worry about as well. They take care of all that. So there's a cost to benefit ratio of doing that versus building your own website or going on shopify or doing this kind of stuff. And one of the biggest factors in all of that FBA system is the hundred to 200 million prime members who are hungry buyers buying thousands of dollars a year in products, sometimes a month in product with making it an absolute juggernaut. 5% of all retail sales now go on Amazon. 49% of all online sales in the United States are done on Amazon. For E commerce.

Yeah. So in every business there's some type of constraint. There's some hard piece to it. And what would you say is the big constraint in the beginning, the middle and as you mature in your E.

Commerce business, the first one, it really boggles everybody's mind is that what the heck do I actually sell? Like okay, I get it, is it infrastructure, people, products? But what would I actually sell somebody? And what do you sell? Can you tell me some ideas and I'll tell you a few ideas because they're already known to the public and I won't tell the other ones, but in essence we've got products as crazy as air mattresses, right? For people to put in their house or put in their guest house or whatever. We sell kitchen pans and home cooking supplies. We are going to be selling ice machines like Sonic ice machines and we're rolling out new lines of coffee makers and espresso machines. Pretty much we'll sell anything to anybody in a box as long as we know it's profitable. And with the economics of brand building and direct response marketing. We can basically capture that demand on Amazon for those existing products and present brands back to consumers who are already sitting there, who are eagerly waiting to get their espresso machine sent to them in two days or their burr grinder coffee maker at the end. It really gets down to profitability. So what we do is we challenge everybody, Mark, to sit down and in 21 days come up with 500 product ideas. And we give them a number of conditional statements and opportunities to look into their life and what we call their circle of confidence, which could be you, your wife, or significant other people in your sphere. Typically it's going to be women 27 to 40 who buy more than 80% of all online goods. And we say come up with all these ideas, just all of them, write them all down on a piece of paper and just as many as you can. And actually gets kind of fun. And people will do it and they'll do it with their families and they'll get their kids involved and they'll get their parents involved and friends involved. And people are like, yeah, what about this product? What about this product? They'll look at the last 90 days of products they bought on Amazon and say, can I sell any one of these products on Amazon? And there's a good chance you can, because more than 60%, by Amazon's own admission, are sold by third party sellers. So 60% of those products can be sold by somebody like you. And then what we have to do is in the second stage of that, identify after knowing the data is good, we got to go by the numbers, which means we have to make sure that the product manufactured, shipped, you know, brought onshore, or if it's already onshore in the United States, into Amazon's warehouses and available for sale gives us a unit of profit. Okay? Every unit has profit. And that net profit has to meet more than for us, $12 in net profit per unit. And if it matches those numbers through all the manufacturing, supply, logistics, warehousing and cost of goods landed on top of it, then we know that that product will be profitable in every unit sold. So then our goal is to sell more of them. And so the next thing that people get caught up on a little bit is, well, how do they brand it? Which is very difficult because we, to start off with, leverage Amazon's brand itself, which is take their brand authority and make it our own. Which is pretty cool, right? Because people trust Amazon and they don't always pay attention to the brand they're ordering until it shows up and they unbox it, right? So we can leverage that brand building authority until our brand gains some traction with the customers. Right? So that's a great way to get in there. And then there's just traffic. There's so many eyeballs in there. And one of the things people, you know, don't do successfully in their business or their local business or their online website is drive enough people of the right interest, the right aptitude, the right avatar who want to purchase those kinds of products and get them in front of their products. Eyeballs on the offer is what we refer to it as. And Amazon has that built into it. People don't go to Amazon to browse unless it's the first couple of days before Black Friday or the first couple of days before Christmas. At that point, maybe in the first couple of weeks they're browsing, they're looking and making their list and waiting for their gifts. And then all of a sudden it's like go time. And then they're click, click, click and click and then trying to get them all delivered before the holidays show up. So they do a little bit of browsing, but the rest of the year they're in buying mode all the time. That's why they went there, is to buy. And so it's a huge marketplace of buyers and there's a lot of traffic in there for people who are looking for specific product types. And so we just go in and analyze, okay, if there's a product we have in our idealist, and we've determined that it's profitable after doing the numbers. And we know we're going to leverage Amazon's brand, so no one's ever heard of it to go to market, which is okay. And then we know there's a traffic, a keyword traffic, and a volume of traffic that says maybe there's 15 million people a year. Well, Amazon tells us there's 15 million people a year searching for Amazon Burr grinders, okay. Or coffee grinders on Amazon. Excuse me. So with that, I know that I just need the percentage of that market share with my profit. You know, I need 1% of 15 million searches a year to move a lot of business. And where there's so much traffic on Amazon, so many sales, 8,600 units a minute on average. And that expands two to three times, up to five times during the holiday periods. There are products to be sold and made. And so the goal there is to, of course, build and brand and grow. So the gotchas and during those points are really not following the process. As I just explained it, not looking for the product, marrying the product and thinking that something's completely better all the time. Instead of just trying the market and asking, hey, do you like this product? They go, I wonder if the market likes this. And I should go, two years of, you know, research and find out if they like it. No, that's way too long. You should get in the market and find out if they actually like that product. Use that data to guide you to the next place. Because at the end of the day, it really gets down to understanding who I'm selling to and why, and how I'm selling it profitably and why they want that. What are like the major three questions they're asking. If I answer those questions in their mind, I can put anything in a box and sell it to them. At the end of the day, there are hundreds and hundreds of products selling 6, 7, 8, 9 figures in my own group. Within our client base, they're all products of all different kinds of shapes and sizes. We make great products, but we want to make sure we can sell them great too.

So this is really a sort of a spreadsheet driven.

It's all data driven, all data driven, no emotions business. When emotions get caught up in that, that's when you start to fail. One of the major points of any one of those five steps is in which people get too emotionally caught up. They start making mountains out of molehills. They start putting bricks on a virtual wall, you know, that they've created. This is so hard. I can't figure out why this doesn't work. I ran into these troubles and they get a little despair. We call it the emotional cycle of change. Right? And they get a little bit into despair and it's okay. But if they can figure out how to keep the process going, if they can keep working the process, they will become successful. And it's the same process they take every person through. Identify a product, manufacture a product, sell a product. If I don't sell as much of that one, I try a different product. If I sell more of that one, I tweak and innovate it just a little bit. I don't need to invent. And I say, hey, what about this one? You liked the blue one. What about the red one? You like the 16 ounce? What about the 32 ounce? It's pretty much common sense when you think about it, right?

Right.

I introduce those products to them, they'll be like, oh, it was the red 32 ounce that I wanted. 100 units a day of well, there we go, 100 units a day of a product and I could take that product and turn that red, you know, 32 ounce into 10 other product types. I can create virtual bundles, I can create product bundles, I can go out wide on that product type and literally niche into there until I have 10, 20 SKUs like the person you mentioned earlier or our brands which are selling seven and eight and nine figures. That's it, you just go wide. We borrowed it from retail. It's like Apple. You've got an iPhone and iWatch and an iPad and all these other same product types. We simply borrow the same branding strategy from the major retailers and it works. You just gotta follow the process.

So I follow the process. Like for example, like I know Daniel, sure. I don't know if the guy works, maybe he works a couple hours a day. I'm not sure what he's doing all day, but he's kind of like, I don't do much. Once you identify your product, the system.

Goes to work for you.

The system goes to work for. What do you do?

That's why I call it almost automated income. Because at the end of the day it's not fully passive. Nothing's truly fully passive at the end of the day. Someone somewhere has to keep their eyeballs on it. So it's not always 100% passive. But for the owner who does this the right way, you can actually decrease your time. Because systems of automation, tracking and management, even the marketing, the logistics is done by dashboards. As freight moves through logistic changes. You don't ever touch the product from the manufacturing all the way to Amazon to the customer, you don't touch the product. So you don't need to be sitting there unloading 40 foot containers or shipping product from your house. It's all automated in that way. And so it literally gets down to dashboards and blinky light software systems. Some of them are proprietary to voltage and some of them we've outsourced for the data. But when it gets done, it is literally running, you know, in metrics over 3, 5, 7 days. So you may not be doing anything once you do the upfront work for two or three days because there's nothing for you to do except to log in and make sure all systems are go and then you have the rest of your day to do something else. So at that point we can take a single operator who's been trained and they in our organization can run three to four businesses at growth with one operator. Right. Because all at that point it's just blinky lights, dashboards and metrics. It's data requirements and within data parameters, it's best practices and SOPs. And that operator can operate multiple businesses at growth and scale.

Amazing. So where do you see people making the biggest mistakes?

Where do people always make the biggest mistakes, Mark? When it comes to ideas and businesses and buying land or flipping real estate or doing E commerce, it's kind of the same across the board. It usually gets down to what? Expectations.

Expectations. Yeah.

Yeah. I want something in three to five minutes to fix this pain that I need fixed. I want something in at least three to five months to fix some pain or time or money return or cash on cash value or whatever it is I'm looking at from my. From my basis or I need it. You know, three or five years seems crazy. It's too long. Right. So they don't really pace themselves with a marathon mindset in business. They still think they're sprinting and they decide to get off the couch one day and go do the business. And they simply didn't give themselves enough wind. They don't have enough water. They're not taking the right amount of breaks. They're simply winding themselves until they feel like they can't do it anymore. Right, Right. If you pace your mind at a marathon level and you think three to five years, okay, I'm building an asset over three to five years, okay, then I will potentially live like no one else can live after that. Is that worth it to me to take the three to five years to do that? It was for Daniel. Right. Because at the end of four years, this year it's going to be 16 million in sales for him a year. So it's totally worth it for him to pace himself. Few people came behind him very same time of frame and who didn't make it and why did they not make it? Because they simply gave up. They simply gave up in the process. They got off the couch, they got winded, they got tired, they got a little emotionally concerned about the whole thing and they simply didn't follow the process. At the end of the day, you can lead a horse of water, but you can't make a drink. That's my country phrase, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. I can't make a drink. If you are prepared to realize, I mean, you go back in time, mark three to five years, how fast did the last three to five years go for you?

Yeah, a blink of an eye.

So fast. Right. Something you can't even imagine really, at this moment. If you look back and try to remember five years ago, it's pretty tough for you to figure out what was happening right down to the detail level. If you, if you can put your frame of mind around that, if you can think about it from the time, energy, attention and money that you're going to invoke in this process, that team effort, and you're saying, okay, in three to five years, could I create generational time and generational financial freedom in three to five years in any activity that I'm doing, is it worth my time and interest to involve myself in that activity? Okay, if I have knowledge in it, I may feel more confident up front that I can go faster or I need to leverage that knowledge. You either get it, gain it, or buy it, or build it, or solicit it from others, coaches and mentors, or who else you get it from in order to gain that confidence necessary for you to take it through that time frame. So really it just gets down to expectations, management, right, that I'm going to get off this thing. I am going to spend the next year training myself and my business to see the success so that by year two and three and four, I'm into success. If you can put yourself in that kind of right framework, you won't run out of gas, you run out of mental energy, you won't get, you know, sidetracked by life and family and kids and business and oh my gosh, who is becoming president and all the other crazy things that people worry about these days, right? You will get sidetracked by all of those things. And they're all sometimes very legitimate. Could be death, could be a change in life situation, could be a move, could be a financial slowdown, it could be a lot of other factors, but we've all faced them. I'm in this for 17 years, right? Look back 17 years and tell me how many crazy things have happened in economics and business in the last 17 years, right? A lot. So if you're willing to be agile, if you're willing to pivot, if you're willing to persevere, if you're willing to look at it as a three to five year plan with at least one year of full heads down training, I'm getting off the couch and every day I'm going to do something to make this thing work. It will actually get easier and easier as you go and it will create less time. But it's so much upside. Potential people don't grasp that on the expectation either. When I say the numbers I said a minute ago, I might as well have said a trillion dollars because people don't quite comprehend how much that actually is. What's the size of that number in reality? Right, it is the billions. What's a billion in reality? You know, most people are still grasping the idea of a million. And with that you just can't quite get your mind around the opportunity for one person to be setting on 50 acres in the country, running a multi figure business with 12 of these, plus 200 clients, you know, who went for a walk with my wife today for four, four miles out in the country like we do every day, did our podcast and hung out because operations is being handled.

Yeah, I mean that's, that is the dream of, of real business, is that it is. Yeah. It runs without you.

It runs to the independent level. I want it to be involved, like I still want to be involved to some level because I want to know how things are flowing and how money's moving and where people are out and has this, the product working and where's it all headed. But at the end of the day, you know, it's not digging ditches. I had a mentor when I was a young man, an older gentleman at our church who used to constantly remind me, well, at least it's not digging ditches. I mean, he used to say that until it burned it into my brain. Every time I complain about work, something I was doing, he's like, well at least you're not digging ditches. Last time I saw him, I'd come back from college for vacation. He was older, much older man at that point, 80s if I'm not mistaken. And I remember him telling me that as a very old man. Again, I was complaining about something about college or whatever. He's like, well at least you're not out digging ditches. And I'm like, yeah, you're right, there are worse things. And I had dug ditches as part of my life and I've been in freezing cold and done jobs that are very difficult outside, that are not fun. But at the end of the day, I think if you rationally understand the business model, if you realize that one person business model can build seven and eight figure companies with no employees. That's where we live now. And it is a fascinating time because literally only certain systems have caught up with us in the last three to five years. AI and technologies compressed time and made simple data gathering effects have now been done less with VAs and multiple people, down to just systems that compile data so an operator can look at it and just say, what is it? Telling me and where should it go and is it going, going the right direction. Compression times 2 to 3 day activities now go down to 2 to 3 hours. Photo shoots that used to be this huge photo shoot. We get one guy to go out and take a bunch of photos and then we're done and we take it all into AI and create all these really cool image structures for all of our products after that and never do it again because AI takes the whole thing. AI writes all the copy for us now. So once we give it an idea, a concept, a listing and target for a product, it goes in, it gives us all the value of the product, the avatar who would buy it, what are the pros and cons, the analysis of the reviews to tell us what idiosyncrasies of likes and dislikes people had within the reviews. And then we write the copy to the value statements and to the benefits. And it's extremely powerful. Right. So systems have grown into automations and best practices and now we call them standard operating procedures that allow this to move fast. So Daniel and I and people can, you know, do these businesses without spending more than five to 10 hours a week managing them. Incredible.

Incredible. I mean it's the best time ever to be an entrepreneur. It really is.

Oh dude, you slugged through this just like I did back in the day without the systems, without the marketing tools, without the opportunities. It is so much easier now than it was 10, 20 years ago. Really. People are complaining about the ability to make money or do something in this way and I'm like oh my gosh, I don't have enough time to keep up with the amount of opportunities there actually are. So I just hedged like good to great says into a hedgehog in E commerce and just have stayed in that vertical and created multiple brands within that vertical and softwares to support the vertical need for our business and then partnered with additional people to bring additional brands to market and leverage that time and asset component of it while leveraging cash and cash on cash value for the time in which we can do it. And then because we are the incubator and we are the acquisition, as clients come and work with us, we look to acquire them later on once they get above a million in ebitda. So we're the beginning and the end in our business model.

Yeah, I mean which is, which is fantastic that you already have a built in exit as you, as you build your, your E commerce E commerce brands, your empire. What is really interesting is I know we have a lot of listeners that are, you know, in the land business or they want to be in the land business or they're just affluent. Maybe they have infinite banking policies and they're listening to this and like, and, and they're saying, well, wouldn't it be great if Neil would just do this for me and I don't.

Want me to work 100 hours a week.

Yeah, yeah. I don't have to go through the brain damage of it. And he already knows what he's doing. Is there an opportunity to just partner with you? This done for you program?

There is. With an asterisk. Can I put an asterisk behind that? A caveat typically because I. Because of the. There are idiosyncrasies and intercomplexities, let's say to this model and there are places where you can make big mistakes. And as a business builder you kind of want to know where are my real gotchas at? Right. If I'm capitalizing inventory, I certainly want to make sure that it's going to sell and have a sell through rate that turns that capitalized inventory over a fast enough amount of time so that I can realize any cash in, cash out values. And I prefer personally to do that within 90 days or less. Right. If I'm going to order X amount of inventory, I would like to see it moved in 90 days. So every quarter by quarter there's X amount of inventory moving over and moving relatively fast in my business. But if I. If you don't understand that, if that didn't make any sense to you, what I just said, or at least you got the concept, these are things you should learn. Right. You invest in the knowing or you invest in what you know. So if you're going to invest in the knowing of E commerce, I prefer that people come and be trained for a year as a business builder. First they get into the detail and the weeds. They understand the brand, the business, the mechanisms and the components that actually do it. And then we have what's called voltage product partners. Okay. That is a ability for them to apply to become a partner with our business in which we actually help in a profit split. An actual business, a brand that is built out either off of something they started or something we create completely as a new vertical and we take full control, operational control, fiscal control, product manufacturing, delivery ongoing. It literally is mailbox money and passive income for the partner that works with us. But I prefer that they know enough to be dangerous about the business, the economics, the time frame and the money because it's not something that you just come in and say well I expect this to happen in two years. Well that's unrealistic. Right. That that'll get me sued out of business by the ftc. The end result is built. Real business building is a three, five, seven year endeavor. It takes in the physical product world it can take hundreds and thousands of dollars, maybe half a million to a million in three to five years to reach these kinds of goals. And you got to be willing to capitalize that kind of thing and understand the time in which money comes in and money goes out. You understand the revenue and the profitability, the manufacturing and the branding and if you just don't understand all that then this isn't a good fit. Right. So that's why I don't take people you know are directly into that program because it is too close to other types of business models that the rest of the, you know, government hates and I don't want to be anywhere near those because it is private label brand building and we do put an operating and sales agreement in place. It is a real business for us and our partners. We prefer be trained so that if something happens to us the whole business doesn't go to crap. Right, right. Because of the way that it works which is a true partnership endeavor. And so we take a limited group of people into that. I think we have about five right now that are working directly with us. A couple of them you might know. David Karcher and Eric Hudson are part of that.

Sure.

Where we're taking their brands out. Eric Hudson's got a tiger by the tail and one of the brands that we've got third product I think or second product we launched if I'm not mistaken has absolutely blown up. We've ordered four more SKUs. The inventory is now coming in, all the metrics proved. We have a 3 million dollar year brand right up to next year. So we're pretty excited about the way that one's working and that's under a product partnership with him in which we own part of the company. So that long winded answer to really just say I have a done for you with a caveat. I want people to be trained to learn how to do the business and really understand the model. I would not advise anybody just go buy an e commerce company or any kind of company for that matter if you have no operational knowledge or skill set of how it's ran. That's my personal belief. I've seen too many people buy companies with the idea it's going to become passive and they're going to put their cash to work and it all sounds really great until you don't know what the operator is doing. Until you don't know that they're lying to you because you don't understand the nuances in the business. And having done it long enough until you don't realize you can't make certain educated decisions without knowing how the business itself works. If that could be an H Vac company or an E commerce company, it just makes it sound real sexy to say I'll buy a company and it's passive income and they're going to operate it. That's why I'm paying for them. Well, I don't like that level of disconnect. I prefer to take more responsibility.

No, no, I, it's so good. It's such a, it's such a creative offer because you can, you, you learn E commerce, you've learned a skill, you have a trusted partner to operate it so you don't have to go through that type of brain damage and learning curve. But then you also, at the other end of it, three, five, seven years from now, you have a built in exit as you build that ebitda.

Correct.

Which is, which is fantastic as well. So.

Yep.

You know, it's a tremendous opportunity for the right person.

Well, it really is. And we get to that, you know, go ahead. I'm sorry. We get to that niche because it isn't for everybody at the end of the day.

Yeah. I mean, what should I ask you? I didn't ask you.

You know, the kind of profile of a person that we look for. You're familiar with the disc assessment profile, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So we do a similar disc assessment profile for anybody who wants to apply to work with us. Right. It is application. I interview each person. I'm really looking for business builders who, you know, understand the upside, the potential are willing to take some active role at the beginning even though they know they can turn it more passive and create more automation. Even if we help them with an operator or we help operate it for them later on. Right. But I want them to take active understanding of that. And they typically are going to be similar to, you know, a profile of operator status if they're more high on the D and I, great, go do a podcast, go speak on stage, go, you know, be that person, be that influencer. But a typical great operator, a Daniel, an Eric, a David Reed. These guys are consummate ISCs. They're very strong, stable and conscientious by nature. Understand processes and methodologies. Daily, weekly, monthly tasks. Don't scare them because they just look for ways to optimize them and are very good in that kind of space. If they are in that nature in terms of their person, they will typically do very well with this. They will know that time and perseverance is just a part of the process. That you pivot when changes occur and you make adjustments as opposed to, oh my gosh, I can't believe this is happening to me. Again, you don't hear that come out of these people's mouths. They are like great. Problem solved. They are problem solvers by nature and because of that they make really great operators.

Amazing. Amazing how you know, when I'm on Amazon I'm looking through and scrolling through a product.

Yeah.

Let's say it's a vitamin and I see Amazon recommends.

Correct.

I always sort of buy. Oh well, that made it easy. I don't have to do any more research. Amazon recommends right on the. And it's usually like, you know, 4.5 or higher in ratings and lots of ratings.

Makes you feel good, right? I look guarantee on the box. It's like, what was that from a Callahan car parts? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Guarantee on that box.

You could guarantee on the box. I mean, is that something that you strive to get? Is there a way to get that? Is it important to get it or is it really just a mark thing that you know.

No, no, those are all like reinforcement collateral, if you will, that makes you feel fuzzy and warm and. But at the same time, you know, okay, well if I chose this, it said Amazon recommends it or even if it has the bestseller badge on it and I get it home and I'm just like, this isn't really my product. I don't, it doesn't make me feel right. I don't like it. I didn't jump faster and run higher and you know, do run faster, jump higher and so you're like back in the box it goes and return it to Amazon. You know, at the end of the day, whether you are influenced by badges and prices and other things, there's a mechanism by which you can get recompense. Right. You can deal with the problem. And that's one of the things about the Amazon system that creates this, you know, unique opportunity for brand authority is that, you know, if you choose to like those kinds of badges, you know, there are certain ways to get them, but then there are the algorithm and people driven aspect of that that you don't control. It's controlled by the Market, Right, Right. It's controlled by how many you sell, whether or not you get a bestseller badge. We don't look at those accolades and say, I can't sell the product or there's no opportunity or I want to get a bestseller Badger. I'm not successful as a mechanism of success because you can be what we call number two in the market, which is a guy who doesn't have the badge, but he swings in behind number two like a race car. Okay. And I'm just riding that guy's tail and I'm drifting off of him, and he's the one taking all the arrows and getting all the rocks. Right. And he's got the mega miles per gallon. I'm back here coasting along, and at some point, should opportunity or whatever make it a reality, I might slingshot past him because it makes sense to do that. But it's okay in our world to be number two. You can still make millions of dollars being a number two brand on Amazon and even competing with Amazon directly or major brands where you just slingshot in behind them, offer good innovations and value, even charge prices very close to theirs, and still drive millions of dollars in sales and profits.

Yeah, it's. It's so interesting. This. This whole world is incredible. My last question before we get to the tip of the week is, is it possible to, for example, like the dirt rich book that I have on Amazon, they buy it from Amazon. I don't get their email information. I can't market to them anymore.

How.

How would you recommend that they become my customer?

Yeah. So there's a lot of different ways to do that. In simple terms, if you're. It's a physical product, it's a book you're delivering, there should be something in the resources section and call to action within the book that brings them back to you.

Okay, got it.

A bonus, an offer. Go to this website, get additional resources to complement your book. In our instance, it is. There's a software that they can get for a free trial if they come through the resources. There are other resources and things that are targeted in there that end up back to us. Additional presentations and videos and trainings that are all recommended in the book. So we sell the physical book and it brands itself backwards to us. Right. And people will come to us and say, hey, I read this book. I got this resource. We also do books slightly differently. So if you had a land geek book and you wanted to go sell a shovel, because that's the first thing that came to my mind when I Thought of land and you want to sell a good $49 shovel because it's the best shovel ever. Well, ever. You could literally bundle that book with the shovel and give it away for free because you're also selling it on Amazon and if you sell it for $29 on Amazon, then you give away that $29 retail value free with the shovel and you can create a great bundle value opportunity where they could go buy the book or they could go buy the book and the shovel and you can combine that into marketing that leads backwards in your packaging, marketing inserts, etc QR codes and things that show up when they get the shovel, they bring them right back into your marketing funnel and voluntarily get the information from them through those channels. So you are in compliance with Amazon's terms of service. You can't take it and you can't go gather it indirectly and market to them because you said they bought it from Amazon. But if you gather it from them, you can gather quite a bit of information and use that in your direct to consumer marketing or back on Amazon for additional products. And you can bundle a whole set of tools around land and around farming and about homesteading that are all about landing. And oh, by the way, since you love land, homestead, farming, etc. Why don't you go own some more, Grab the book. Go learn to become a passive land geek. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I mean just, I'm just thinking out loud, but if I'm building my brand and I have this back end.

Yep.

Would it be more profitable then to then direct that customer through email marketing, direct to consumer marketing, maybe text messaging them. They come through my funnel and then I say, hey, go to my Shopify site.

All the Land Geek sponsored products for people who are land geeks.

Yeah. And so then I'm not. My margins are higher, I would imagine.

No, not necessarily. If you. Not necessarily. Right. So you have to remember there's an organic ecosystem built into Amazon that you have to pay for or go get on other channels. So you would have to go entice Google and Bing and Yahoo to bring organic traffic to your Shopify store or you're gonna have to pay media marketing, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera to get that in. And those cost per clicks over there and traffic are gonna be costly as well. Okay. Right. The benefit I like on the Amazon side by combining product or digital or virtual bundles in this way is there's a whole organic system of 200 million buyers going there every day like they're there to buy. They're always there. And most of our product businesses on Amazon will see 60 to 80% organic sales and 20 to 30% pay per click traffic on Amazon to acquire that customer. So we pay for traffic on Amazon through marketing, but the majority comes from organic sales and that's what our balance of profitability comes from. Everything is focused on getting to the point where we are attracting as much organic traffic from the Amazon engine as possible and then adding on PPC marketing to like gas on fire. From there I can see those brands become very profitable like Daniel's and David LeBlanc and like ours because we have so much organic traffic and it's setting right there for physical product buyers. I don't have to go get it. The eyeballs are already there. I just go put my product in front of them and say, hey, what about this one?

Amazing. Amazing. Well, it's always, it's always great having this conversation with Neil and I always feel smarter as well.

So that's very kind of you.

As great as your mentorship has been, I do have to ask you for one more tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the auto passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives.

Yeah. Go to voltage DM.com free-book free book and you'll enter 10 codes over there. We're going to have that set up, says Land Geek. That'll be your code. The first 10 people that go there will get a free copy of this book. It will teach you the strategies, principles of using your IBC policies, other finances, et cetera, to deploy into E commerce, to make up the money aspect of the team. And if that's of interest to you, and you might want to deploy some additional profits into another revenue channel into virtual real estate instead of the physical real estate you're in right now, then this book might be your opportunity.

I love it. Almost automated income with FBA and teaching you how to buy back your time with your family, build empire tire and build that dream lifestyle. Amazing. And again, my tip of the week is going to be not, not as generous because I'm not giving away a free book. But learn more. Go to voltage DM.com I now have links to both in the Show Notes Voltage DM.com Neil Twa Are we good?

We're good man. Thank you so much. It's been an honor.

Thank you. And I just want to remind the listeners this podcast has been sponsored by flight school. So go to thelandgeek.com forward/training and learn how the next 16 weeks can transform your life. Start building that passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents. I know you're thinking, what about that tuition? It ain't going to cost you nothing. Guaranteed you're going to make it back in 180 days or less. Just show us you did the work. Learn more go to landgeek.com forward/training Neil thanks again. Let freedom Ring.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com training let freedom ring.