Isaac Kuhlman and Kirsty Verity, two successful Amazon sellers with over $10 million in sales, share the top reasons why you’re struggling to grow your Amazon business and achieving the lifestyle you want. By avoiding these reasons, you’ll be able to make money on Amazon, stop working for someone else and have the lifestyle you desire.
You think you don’t deserve it. The fear of failing is a big obstacle when it comes to selling on Amazon. Stop believing that you don’t deserve the lifestyle you want – start believing that you can. You do deserve the best things for yourself in life.
Thinking it’s impossible to achieve because you have no plan to get there. The adage, “What’s the best way to eat an elephant? One bite at a time,” appies when wanting to sell on Amazon. You need to commit to a plan, so that you have steps to take each day to reach your goal.
You’re too comfortable to push yourself. You might have a great job with a great salary and you don’t necessarily need to start an Amazon business. But if you commit to yourself that this is the thing that you want to do, you can fulfill your dreams.
You can’t commit the time to fulfilling your dream. You tell yourself that when something happens, like your child graduates or you receive your pension, that’s when you’ll start. There’s no time like the present to living the life you deserve.
You know you will make it happen someday. Someday never comes. Take action today and follow the people who have had previous success, like Isaac and Kirsty.
You don’t think you have the talent or experience. You need to be willing to fail, willing to make adjustments and willing to continue to move forward. Perseverance overcomes experience or talent. A strong enough why will lead to success.
The only thing you’re confident about is that you don’t have confidence. Do small things everyday that will bring you closer to your goal. Commit to doing just 1% more every day for 30 days. In that time, you’ll drastically increase your output. This daily action will breed a result, which leads to confidence. Celebrate your little wins each day.
If you want to learn how you can take back control of your Amazon business and achieve the goals you desire, check out Amazing Accelerators, a course designed specifically for Amazing sellers to transform your business from floundering to prospering.
Do you remember that amazing feeling, that excitement of when you were first starting your business? That hope that it ignites in you. Of the freedom that you’re going to have when you have your own physical products business up and running.You’re going to be able to do the things that most excite you because finally, you’re going to be happy.
Along the way, challenges arrive. And when they do, it’s so easy to place blame. Blame on someone or something else, but what’s wrong with your business, it’s not some external factor. The source of your success or failure does not rely on being someone else, somewhere else. What I believe in my heart is that you need to take account for what you want.
The difference between running a business and leading a business is the vision. I believe that when you start leading your business and you have a passion behind said vision, that vision isn’t to be rich. That vision is because of what you want to achieve. You’ll have so much passion that you’ll look at those hurdles as nothing but just everyday, easy obstacles. Yeah, you got to deal with them, but you’re happy to jump right over them because your vision is way, way bigger.
To prove this, here are the top 3 reasons why businesses fail.
Starting a business for the wrong reason. If you’re not clear on your “why,” then it’s going to be almost impossible to follow through.
Lack of planning. This could be not understanding the product you’re selling, who the customers are or why they want to buy your product. Businesses succeed because it’s not about caring what the product is but who the customers are and why customers want the product. Knowing what to focus on is key.
Poor management. This includes lacked financial management, managing the plans, and bad hiring.
There are no excuses. Businesses that fail, the top three reasons are because of the business owner.
Your business and your life and going to overlap. Don’t lie to yourself and say, “No, they’re two different things.” You can’t be an evil business person, greedy for money and that not overlapping to your family life. If you’re not honest with yourself about what you want most in life, then how can you lead it? Because you’re going to be confused. You’re going to have no idea why you’re leading.
I believe that with every ounce of my soul that you can gain control of your business. You can feel energized because you’re in sync with the life that you enjoy living. But it all starts with deciding whether you want to continue running your life and running your business or leading it.
The world doesn’t need more runners. It needs more leaders. Leaders that will make an impact on this world. That are going to feed the poor, protect the weak, and love the unlovable. I beg each of you to take this to heart. I know I am not the only person that’s lost a child. But I’m the only person on this stage talking to you right now, so please listen to me. Don’t let it be something like that, that’s going to make you change. You have the power to decide to do that now and lead. You are capable of so much more than you think. You deserve a life that makes an impact on this world. And you can.
Don’t run a life full of regrets and doubts. Instead, lead your life. Lead your business. And let’s make a difference in this world.
Learn a powerful creative first approach for e-commerce brands to scale efficiently, maximize return on ad spend and scale on Facebook. Get up to date training and unbelievable Amazon selling resources for $1 for the first 30 days with SellerPro.
Spy, Steal and Deploy. I was expecting when I put this name here, Spy, Steal and Deploy, that system to see more Amazon people come here and fill out the room. Spy and Steal, we all like that. There’s nothing shady, nothing illegal about this system. It’s a powerful creative first approach, that’s what I will talk about today is a powerful creative first approach for e-commerce brands to scale efficiently, maximize return on ad spend. That’s the ROAS, return on ad spend and scale on Facebook.
The three main points, I want to cover today is what’s new with Facebook? What’s changing, and how you can take advantage of it, how all of us can take advantage of it. And then why creative has become the main driver of performance on Facebook. It used to be targeting, now creative is becoming the king, and I’m going to talk about this. Then I’m going to show you a powerful system, which I call Spy, Steal, and Deploy. We use it all the time on how to crush your competitors and scale efficiently. This works best for e-commerce brands.
Over the last three, three and a half years, I’ve been privileged to work with some great brands, like multi-million, multi-billion dollar companies even. These brands are huge media buyers. Some were spending about 2 million a month on Facebook. I started from spending $100 on Facebook to go to and manage and spend about $2, $3 million a month on Facebook. That’s what we’ve been doing, but some of these are e-commerce brands, mobile gaming. That’s half of my portfolio. E-commerce brands another half of my portfolio, but also SAAS businesses, Amazon brands. If we zoom into the e-commerce part of the clients I worked with, they span over these categories: supplements, beauty, health and wellness, fashion, clothing, different categories.
Really what’s happening right now on Facebook is they’re simplifying the way ads run so that the idea is to level the game field between the huge media buyers people who are spending between $1 to $3 million a month and people who probably have a $1000 monthly budget to spend. Facebook is trying to level the game field for everyone so that it gets easy for people, for anyone to get there and be successful without having the skills and crazy strategies that everybody’s teaching. There’s $1000, $2000 coaches you use to buy to run ads successfully. Right now, Facebook is trying to simplify that, so it’s all good news.
Creative is right now the main driver of performance. Over the last 12 months, what has happened on Facebook is machine learning has drastically improved. The algorithms at Facebook have shifted towards; they’re getting more efficient. Right now, you can only drive 50 conversions, between 50 and 100 conversions to Facebook without even doing too much targeting, segmentation on placements, all kinds of crazy strategies.
The only thing, guys, you are in control, like all of us have control of is creative. Creative, the images, the videos, everything that we saw before that, this is what you have control of.
The second phase is my favorite. Here we get to analyze their creative. Steal. Who is familiar with this here? A lot of people know. That’s the ad library. Ad library was recently released by Facebook when they were in Congress about all the privacy issues. They provided this ad library, available for everyone. You don’t even have to be spending on Facebook to have access to this. You see the URL down below. The ad library gives transparency to everyone to get. You can type in Facebook page; if you know your competitor, you can type in their page there. It will look something like this.
Deploy. How to test creative, find your winners while preserving your budget. So if you don’t learn anything from a test, you have wasted money. If you don’t know how to test efficiently and learn, you have wasted money. This is the only way when you’re wasting money when you’re testing. If you test the right way and you don’t produce winners, you’re not wasting money, you learn. You fail. You learn that something is not working so now you have more chances to get the winner with your next round of testing.
You find the winner from this variation, and then you keep testing the text. You keep testing different text once you find that winner. Then you already have a solid creative that are performing great for you. You can scale it, and then you repeat the entire cycle. If this here was so fast at the end, you can find this entire training on seller pro. I have six courses over there. The sixth course is coming next month. So take a picture of that, seller pro. You can access this entire training there in much more detail. You can start rolling from there.
The lovely thing is with Amazon; you don’t need to have hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands. I know plenty of people who started with 700 bucks or something. Now we recommend more, and I think our golden rule we like to use is to have two and a half times the amount of capital you need. So if you put your first inventory order in, let’s say it costs 500 bucks, you want to have two and a half times that amount of capital to account for any contingencies.
#2: You have to have time.
You have to spend a consistent amount, as much as possible. We recommend at least an hour a day if possible, but if you can’t do that, if you find every few days you can only fit in a couple of hours, that’s fine,
Also, you want to be focused during that time. Shut off all your distractions, shut off your phone, don’t be on Facebook, all those kind of things. Focus on growing your business during that time, because you will find the black hole of time happens, and if you only have an hour, it goes by quick, so make sure you’re focusing it as much as possible. Alright, number three.
#3: One product at a time.
It’s probably the best advice we can give, and we get that question all the time, because people are eager, and I get it, I get it. You want to ensure your greatest chance of success, but that is actually by doing one step at a time and one product at a time so that you do things properly. If you’re trying to do five products at the same time when you’re still learning the ropes, trying to figure out all the stuff there is to learn on Amazon; you’re probably going to do five products quite poorly, unfortunately.
#4: Make sure your product’s in demand, and don’t get sucked into following a passion.
Just because you’re really passionate about a product, you really think oh my goodness, this product is going to be the best seller in the world, if you go on Amazon and you see nobody else is even buying a product like that, you can’t find any products like that, don’t start with a product like that.
#5: Marketing.
We know Facebook ads and all these social media platforms, any advertising, is always evolving and changing, and you have to recognize that it’s going to be part of your life. In the old days, we could find products, throw them up on Amazon, and they would do well. Does that still happen? Sure, but it’s an anomaly, I wouldn’t expect that.
#6: Know your math.
I’m talking about knowing your profit, your return on investment, your inventory cost, your shipping cost, and learn to use spreadsheets. Learn to use just basic free ones, like Google Spreadsheet where you learn your math. So vital, the people that succeed on Amazon, they know their numbers.
#7: Mindset.
If you don’t have the right attitude, don’t expect good results. We’ve talked about this before. When we both started these businesses, we’re doing other things, and we’re just squeaking the time, but we had that right mindset. We knew we weren’t going to fail because we were going to put the right effort and the right attitude towards it, and you have to ignore what other people say.
We’re going to teach you exactly why focusing on more than one product at a time could be deadly for your business and the three questions you want to ask yourself to know if you can handle selling more than one product at a time.
#1: Are you a beginner, or are you an established seller?
Because if you’re a beginner, you know, your priority is to learn Amazon. There’s a lot of things that come when you’re learning the platform, you’re trying to understand how Amazon works, all the tools Amazon has, and you will find that it’s overwhelming at first. You start missing things and, you know, there’s a lot of terms of services with Amazon as well that you have to be on top of, so if you’re trying to learn this as a beginner, starting with more than one product? That’s a considerable risk.
You need to understand what it is you’re learning, and your priority is getting your product up and selling, and once you get it selling and start to get it established, well, then you get to another level.
It’s a relatively simple business model. Especially with Amazon FBA, they make things so much easier, they take a lot of the equation, versus in the old days, pre Amazon FBA, and you need to give yourself the time to learn these things and adjust and learn the ropes, and that’s why you start with one product, to learn the ropes. Once you start getting better then you can do all kinds of crazy stuff, but until then keep it simple.
#2: What are your budget and capital?
Because you don’t want to tie everything up, because then you have no room for marketing, and the other end of that is inventory, because what happens if you run out of inventory?
Bad things happen, your rankings plummet, and it’s harder to get back to where you were, so you lose traction, it’s like one step forward, two steps backward.
Another thing to think about too is if you’re brand new you’re going to do your best to estimate things like shipping. You’re going to do your best to estimate packaging and all those little things that go into making your listing, photos; you name it. So it’s best to give yourselves a little bit of padding.
#3: How much time do you truly have to focus on this?
Because time is money, time is a resource, you’ve got the money resource, and you’ve got the time resource. Some people have more time than money; some people have more money than time. Chances are if you’re starting this business, you’re probably someone that has a little bit of time, you’re probably working a job trying to get something going, you know, and we all did that.
I remember, what I used to have to do is I’d wait until my family was in bed and then I’d get back up out of bed and work a couple of hours. You try to get that time in there, and you need to be as focused during that time as possible. You want to make sure you shut off all distractions. And if you’re sitting there trying to manage multiple products while trying to learn the new platform, trying to set up marketing for different products, trying to do all of these things, and it’s divided over multiple products, you’re not going to be effective.
