Can You Still Make Money on Amazon? Yes, Here's How (Using AI)...

hey everyone this is Stefan from Project Life Mastery and right now I'm being joined by Mike McClary and Matt Clark the co-creators of the amazing selling machine uh most of you guys already know Matt and Mike because they been on Project Life Mastery many times have done a lot of great content with them over the years about e-commerce and selling on Amazon and so I wanted to bring them back it's been a while um it's been a while since I've done videos talking about selling on Amazon and e-commerce uh and so I wanted to bring them on just to share the latest of what's going on on in this space what the opportunity is today and how you guys can get started if you want to uh start your own online business so Matt and Mike welcome thanks for being here thanks thanks for having us do you guys mind sharing just what's been going on in the e-commerce space I know you guys are both very involved in it and have been for many many years um what if you know what do you guys see today as the opportunity especially as you're still teaching people mentoring people coaching them to start their business um what are you guys seeing right now is one of the best ways for people to start their business whether it's on Amazon or just you know e-commerce in general um but yeah you guys mind sharing what the opportunity is today yeah so I mean the way I kind of see it is like we're kind of almost in this like fifth Evolution at least since I've been doing this stuff since I started my first e-commerce business like in 2009 and so back then it was like what I would almost consider Like A Drop Shipping model and so like that's how I started I was selling a bunch of other people's brands on my own site but there was like half these products nobody was selling them online so it was fine it's like I made my commissions and life was good but then I realized that you know that space started getting squeezed and there was like this bigger opportunity on Amazon because I did SEO and AdWords and stuff and it was working great but as Amazon was just crushing everybody so then I started selling on Amazon but nobody was really doing any marketing and so that early kind of marketing push on there worked really well and so um that's how we ended up launching amazing selling machine because you can almost go after any product put keywords in the title um and do really well and then as it kind of evolved you had to get more sophisticated on the marketing um there was some black hat stuff that didn't last very long Amazon kind of rooted all that stuff out so you just had to do a better sort of basic job of marketing so then like the space started evolving to the point where it was like okay if you wanted to do well for like a high value product you basically just had to dump a bunch of money in there and so that could mean you know 50 Grand 100 Grand or something like that to go after one of these like top tier sort of products and that's still a game some big Sellers play today because they have the funds to be able to do it um then started noticing this like combination of like Facebook ads plus Shopify and so like that was at the time where believe it or not it was only like five years ago where there was like far less people running Facebook ads especially for e-commerce and so you could basically just take this like infomercial kind of approach applying Facebook ads plus Shopify and crush it I I remember my wife buying this like razor from a Facebook ad she had never seen this kind of AD before so she just assumed that it was like a good trustworthy product she buys this like rose gold kind of razor and they was like 60 bucks and they position as like the world's greatest razor she buys it and like cuts her leg on the first time it's like complete garbage product like this product did not stick around but that kind of stuff you could get away with not that long ago because like that kind of advertising was so new for people like they didn't even realize it was an advertisement and so as a space sort of started evolving there then like I think the kind of phase we're in now is like you've got to have a high quality product some level of like differentiation and do all the basics really well and I know today we're going to talk quite a bit about artificial intelligence but like those tools have made all this easier because I mean there was um like the Clara which is a Payment Processing Company their CEO said something like you know AI can do the work of like 700 people like they're spending more on ads but they have way less marketing staff and so now you can basically like have the resources of 700 people to apply to do all those basic fundamental things like really well in e-commerce which is what it takes today and then still build a b big business with like basically no staff yeah that's awesome I'm really looking forward to talking to you about Ai and how that has changed the landscape and provided um easier opportunities for people but um yeah I can remember back in the day when I started as well and just now how you can use AI which we'll get into just to do a lot of this stuff for you is pretty amazing so um yeah excited to dive into that and then how about you Mike do you want to share just a little bit in just what you've seen uh how the opportunities changed and I guess you know one of the most common questions I get and I'm sure you guys get this too I've been getting this for years people always always want to know can you still make money on Amazon you know is it still worth selling on Amazon right and you guys know we got this you know five years ago 10 years ago you know people are always asking that every year and so um you know we both know the answer to that but I just love to hear just what you say to that yeah I think I mean the answer of course is absolutely if you can't then what are all these companies selling on Amazon doing they're not Charities giving away products they're all making money on Amazon so you absolutely can I think the way to look at at those you have to adjust your expectations somewhat because it is a bit more competitive um you know Amazon's fees have increased uh you have to advertise in order to really make it work because I think the last time I checked on page one of search results 16 out of 20 were ads versus the organic rankings and when we got going Stephan you know this everything was about trying to get up in the organic rankings how do you get product ranking for all these Search terms and the way that I like to look at this now is forget about ranking like take that stress off you forget about trying to go against these Powerhouse companies who have lots of money and just have a quality product out there and use some targeted advertising to start off getting sales small and move up incrementally and don't worry about having to make 300 sales over a five-day period in order to get ranked on position one for one speciic keywords those formulas don't work anymore and so don't even try to figure them out have a quality product and just know the game know what your costs are know what you limit your risk the way that you know we always believe people should you should never be going out there and spending more than you are able to and just know that you're going to have to do some marketing advertising in order to get to work but if you do it smartly you absolutely can make money on Amazon and it'll help by launching a multi Channel or Omni Channel business as well by not just spreading your risk but spreading your sales um don't limit yourself to one platform like Amazon start there but open yourself up to where there's lots of other sales coming from as well I love that I I'm curious uh just from your own experience working with so many people how many people would you say their first product um like how many people start with the product you know something less intimidating maybe something a little bit easier something within their budget something that um you know they feel like they can make some money from and gain experience with but then they eventually evolve that to like a second third you know kind of eventually start selling products that are maybe more profitable but more competitive how many people would you say um have you guys observed kind of start that path versus maybe they pick the very first product is the one that becomes like a multi-million dollar brand type of product like what would you say um it you know what kind of path would you say most people take I I would say it's definitely the majority that it's not the first product you know there's some cases where it's like I know one of our members he you know launched a product and I don't want to say like I don't know year later or something like that was doing like a million dollars a month like with his wor product but that's very rare like most people it's kind of like you got to get your feet wet like you do the best job you possibly can on your first product get that thing live keep improving it try to make it better but you learn so much in that process that sometimes like that product can still be like a good winner for you long term but a lot of times you end up finding like hey there's this bigger thing now that I know what I'm doing that I really understand this business that that ends up being like the big winner that kind of helps them build their you know bigger business um but it does happen but it's like I still think you do the best job you possibly can your first product while limiting your risk as much as possible so you can kind of learn for free essentially um and then go from there I mean that that's the path to do it got it and then good way looking at that might be how many people have their first job and retire with that first job nowadays doesn't happen or build their first company and that's the one that makes them Mega Rich um same is true with the products it just doesn't really happen that way usually yeah yeah for sure I mean that was my experience the same with Tatiana is you know you're kind of starting small at first and then you gain all this experience knowledge you kind of yeah you kind of learn what to do and you've go gone through that learning curve and then it opens up all these other opportunities that you never thought of before um but I think it's much easier for people to think about it that way rather than putting so much pressure on themselves that their first product has to be the one that's going to you know change their entire life and everything so um one thing I also want to ask you guys was uh you mentioned like what you guys have are teaching now and what you guys are doing has changed in the sense where you're not just exclusively selling on Amazon um what is that what does that look like you also mentioned you know marketing your product outside of Amazon like what would be the ideal path that someone takes like where would they start would they start just on Amazon and then eventually have built a brand that um has multiple different channels or um you know like maybe describe and lay out what that process would look like yes so I think the ideal scenario is kind of like what we experien like the business that I own with a business partner that um it's an e-commerce brand and we didn't sell on Shopify for the or we didn't sell on Amazon for the first year and a half um but today Amazon's a big part it's almost 30% of sales and it's actually our fastest growing Channel we've got like 14,000 subscribe and save customers on there like it's fantastic but the key is is that we built the thing um so that it it's a real brand that could be sold on basically any channel which allows us to have good margins on Amazon we're not competing on price we're not worried about all these games everyone else plays um we get a lot of brand traffic on there so it's very profitable and so it's almost like to me like building a business exclusively on Amazon today is almost like building a business exclusively on Walmart it's like I would never want to have my whole business dependent on selling in Walmart's retail stores because as soon as Walmart's like this fee goes up or you have to do this or you have to reduce your price it's like you've got no leverage versus if you have this brand that exists outside of there you can decide how you play that game over there I mean Nike is a perfect example they have this massive like hundred billion dollar brand and they at one point decided like we're not selling on Amazon anymore that's not what I recommend but they had the power to do that and it didn't really hurt their business at all and so I think that's the ideal scenario to work towards however you know we've got a lot of e e-commerce experience we do this a long time we know how all the pieces work and stuff for brand new people just starting out the goal is to eventually sell on Amazon to sell on uh Shopify and potentially other channels as well so in most cases we're going to recommend people actually do still start on Amazon just because it makes your life simpler it's like takes care of the Fulfillment side it takes care the payment processing side most of the customer service and you could still produce good sales and kind of build your base there and then eventually start expanding to we say Shopify but it's really just a shopping cart software that's you run on your own website it's really just selling on your own website Shopify just happens to be the shopping cart software so that's kind of the evolution that that we recommend for most people just starting out got it and I I think also that allows people to test their product too before they really go all in with it with Shopify and doing all this other marketing stuff so um okay now the other big question that people always ask is how do you find product opportunities uh now I know you guys have created a software called zoof that helps people do a lot of their product research um but I also know a lot of people now you can use AI to help with this do you guys mind sharing a little bit about what someone should look for in their first product um what makes up a great uh product that would be a winner for them and just you know what are these tools that are now available that can help people do that Matt why don't you start by talking about what people look for then I can take the AI part of that sure yeah and so I think um the way I see it is like you you you know we talked about interesting question you brought up before this which is like is the first product usually the big winner and it's like a lot of times no but it's like it could be and so you're still going to spend the same amount of time researching trying to figure out differentiation creating a brand creating a logo keywords all this kind of stuff so my take is and our take is that you might as well go after some that could at least mean something at the end of the day and so the kind of General Benchmark we're looking for is products that at least sell a million bucks a year and so it's like hey if things go well you could have a million dollar a year business with this one single product and that's going to be a lot easier than having like you know 10 or 20 products that all add to the same amount of money I mean I think the ideal business is being like a Red Bull with like one can size that does a billion dollars a year like that's fantastic and so our kind of General Benchmark for most people is like look for a product that sells at least a million bucks a year and there's different tools out there that you can kind of figure that out with um that's kind of step one and then step two is ideally find something you're actually personally interested in because that's going to make you kind of a test user of your product like our coffee for example our e-commerce thing I drink it we take it on vacations literally two of my parents are like paid subscribers of it we share with friends and family and so um that's a great position to be in because we're constantly testing our product and which is which is fantastic and we know what we like and don't like and so it also makes it more fun to build a business if it's actually something you use and enjoy so I would kind of like you're taking this big uh like I've calculated before it's something like 350 million products you could sell and you're just kind of narrowing it down because you can't choose all of them and then beyond that it's like then you start looking for okay within this Market that I actually enjoy of products that sell at least a million bucks a year then you start looking for ones that actually have good profit margins and so for us still it's like a selling price of say like between 20 20 bucks and 100 bucks is a good kind of range for finding products that are not so cheap you don't have any margin not too expensive it's too expensive to get started um so that range still kind of makes sense and then one of the other kind of remaining steps is to figure out how to differentiate it so like the manual way to do that like you said there's software tools and stuff but the manual way would be to look at the products that like meet all those criteria and then start digging through reviews like what do people like what do people not like could you make something better is there a feature you could emphasize is there a certain like underserved Market in there that's just kind of buying it because they don't have any other option um and then that's how you can have like a potential winning product like straight out of the gate got it and what and just uh before you go Mike what would you say is a good profit margin like what should someone uh generally look for starting out uh you know with the profit margin considering they might only be able to order you know so many units and not get the best prices yeah so my my stance has still been like from the beginning like I would say at least 4X markup on cost and so for example like our bags of coffee we buy for six or seven bucks depending on that and we sell them for 20 to 30 something like that and so that's that to me is about right and then once you kind of sell a unit of the product after discounts you pay for payment processing shipping cost of goods sold like our gross profit margin after all that is like 50% and for some businesses it's going to be higher we're selling like kind of a commodity it's like we have a niche within a commodity market so but 50% um after all those cost is good but like when you're looking at it from the beginning it's like okay can I buy this thing for five bucks and sell it for like 20 or 25 I think it's like a general rough range you're looking for got it awesome yeah then how about the AI do that yeah so there's there's lots of fun ways and you can see me like you know chomping at the bit to kind of like jump in talk about the AI stuff I I love doing this here uh one of course you know we we have zoof we're building lots of AI stuff into it uh one is a tool to actually go out there and weed through the millions of products and give you one that meets all the criteria we look for but uh if you don't have that I mean if you are a seller on Amazon one of the best tools and features that Amazon has come out with over the past three to five years out of all of them this one only came out a couple years ago is their product Explorer they're now giving us a lot of the data that we've never seen before so once you've been selling on Amazon for a while your brand registered you get access to this tool that will now go out there and analyze not just your product but also all the other products out on Amazon and it will give you comparative benchmarks about where you're at and where your competitors are at so what's your conversion rate what's their conversion rate what's their refund or return rate and what's yours uh how much traffic are they getting compared to yours it's an incredible amount of data that they're finally giving to that we never thought they would uh and so that is a great way for existing sellers to start looking for products maybe to add to their existing ones or just kind of compare where they're at is my product doing well compared to the competition because if you don't know the answer you don't really know Should I stick with this product or launch another one that will help you do that now how do you actually take all this data and figure out for you you what's the right product that's where AI comes in and that's where you can use tools like chat GPT or gemini or you know anthropics Claud all these different tools out there and you can give it an enormous amount of data and then what I like to do is give it something about you personally what do you do for a living what kind of family do you have what are your hobbies what's your budget and then it will go through that Myriad of data and find something that's good for you now you have to kind of like tell how to do all that um you know you could you could just say give me a product and sure would may not be great uh but if you give it some guidelines and one of the things that like we'll talk about a little later on they have these custom gpts where people like me who love AI can go in and custom program a prompt put it that way and give it like three pages of instructions what to do and if it takes all these guidelines or this framework with all this data it can come up with really great recommendations based upon the marketplace and you and your personal situation that's the power OFA that we're seeing right now that's amazing so are you generally using it to come up with ideas and then with those ideas you'll run it through a software like zoof or okay that's cool so first I if you don't have an idea I think that's where it's an incredible tool where I used to always think that like I can think of two or three good ideas for any topic but if you ask AI to give you five 10 I think Matt ask it for 100 ideas the other day it'll do that uh it'll give you more ideas than you could possibly think of so if you don't know where to start it will tell you oh here's some ideas where to start and then I mean that and that's great it's it's an awesome tool for that but what it really does what excels at is then analyzing all these different data points and pulling them together to give you an answer that's contextual to your situation that's what I really think that AI shines is being able to do that wow that's huge yeah for anyone that's watching or listening to this that um been selling on Amazon for a while I mean you guys know back in the day before this it's like looking around your house you know what could I sell it's walking through the store it's you know searching through Page after page on Amazon on bestseller list to you know try to write down ideas now you can just you know use AI to give you these ideas which is pretty amazing so that right there will save you hours or days or weeks yeah I haven't even tried it yet you could probably take like a picture of your home office and be like give me 50 ideas related to this I mean it's pretty crazy now yeah and especially that you can now you know uh like I I I I'm kind of like a beginner with a lot of the AI stuff but you know what you're describing you can give it so many prompts and so detailed and specific to really get um you know answers that yeah that maybe you just wouldn't be able to come up with on your own so um how about the differentiation aspect because I think that's one thing you know like what um and correct me if I'm wrong like originally what you guys teach is like find something that's already selling and then just try to do it a little bit different like you're not trying to invent a product or anything like that not trying to take a huge risk uh you want to know what's selling which you're describing doing you know looking at the numbers looking at the products that are doing over a million dollars Etc but that diff that differentiation piece I think is so critical that um oftentimes requires like a level of creativity on the the person's part to think about how it can be different and Matt you talked about looking at reviews and everything but is that something that AI can help uh do and um like Can it can you kind of set up a prompt to kind of look at just the market or the niche of a product and then look at um you know what's maybe lacking in that market or what's what are ways that you know you know ideas that can make a bit different than everything else Yeah we actually have a tool that we're going to give everyone for free that can do exactly that where it basically takes like a source product or or type of product and we'll tell you how to differentiate it by by B basically doing the same manual work of like looking at reviews what do people say they like what do people say they don't like and so that is 100% possible with AI but I think this is where you also see like the power of like good strategy combined with really powerful technology because like that's going to give you all that stuff and combining that with like what we know about differentiation like there's really a handful of ways you can do it you can make a product appeal to a certain demographic you can make it appeal to a certain age range within that demographic you can make a certain feature really stand out you can make it really healthy environmentally friendly like there's a handful of ways to differentiate like almost any product so then it's like okay you've got basic strategy combined with like AI doing all the manual work of analyzing tons and tons of reviews and it makes differentiation heck of a lot easier and more straightforward and less of this kind of like Mystic sort of art form you're kind of just like gambling on especially as as a new person got it yeah just on the topic of AI what are some other ways besides product research um that that you guys are using Ai and teaching people how to use AI I mean I'll give one example and then Mike's probably got more I mean we we've literally used it in our own e-commerce business to run an entire Market marketing campaign I mean everything from like the landing page to the graphics to 100% of the emails and we sold out like you know 400 units of this product within like one or two emails or something like that and it was all 100% done by Ai and so that's the thing where in the past you either would have written terrible emails terrible Landing Bas you don't know how to do it or you either had to have that experience or pay people a lot of money to do that stuff I mean there's I mean sure as you probably know I I think it's a little insane but some people that will charge like a hundred grand for a sales letter for a product um I don't think that's necessarily worth it but still like you imagine even if it's five grand and now you could probably create something that's in just as good in most cases for basically free in about 30 seconds and so can use it for basically like entire marketing campaigns and like we're actually doing this in our business but I'm sure Mike has a whole bunch of other ways yeah on the content side like Matt's already alluded to like you know you can create all the kinds of copy you want whether it's emails or landing page or a product page uh on the creative side as well you can take any product image now noway that you have and put it in any scenario because so back when you know we got started and even very recently one of the most cost prohibited and time perative things to do for your business was getting all these photographs like lifestyle photographs you know I sell camping lanterns and flashlights and I can't tell you how many times I had to like pay someone to go use my Lantern in the woods or on a beach or use a flashlight at night uh and it was just it's very time intensive to do that now you can take a product and put it into any scenario that you can think of and so before we had to wait and spend money to do that now instantaneously as soon as the idea Pops in your head or as soon as you ask a AI to give you an idea to pop in your head you can get another picture it's incredible on the photography side we're seeing it come out on the video side as well it's not quite there but it's getting really really close uh so for example uh Sora is coming out soon that will have some incredible videos up to a minute long that you can probably prompt and put into an advertising campaign uh and those are the exciting ones I'm going to talk about about two boring ways as well one would be supplier communication AI can really help you communicate with people who don't even necessarily speak your same language and make sure you do it in the right tone the right formality the right language level as well so that you have a real clear communication back and forth and also customer service if you don't know how to respond to a customer ask AI how to respond to it my son helps out my business and one day he couldn't get a hold of me I believe I was on a call with Matt might be a surprise but he had to respond to a customer and so we asked chat GPT how should respond to this customer and it pretty much told him here's like a polite respectful way to handle this angry customer it's incredible all the different ways you can use it in your business now yeah even I guess responding to reviews on Amazon so you got I guess could put in what the actual complaint or what it is and then have it formulate a really professional mature response to that um absolutely what about um so just things I think about would be um like the title of your product on Amazon your description bullet points and what about even keywords whether that's you know the best keywords to organically rank it but also keywords thinking of you know running ads and whatnot is that you know are you able to I guess pull data or identify what some of those keywords should be that you can optimize your product for using AI so one of the best ways to do this is to combine like Matt mentioned earlier as well combine AI with really really good experience in data and so now we have access to all the data that Amazon's giving us they give us every week a list of the most searched and click Search terms and a list of the top three products that were clicked and purchased an incredible amount of data but what do you do with it uh combining that with AI to tell you like here's my product go look at this data and tell me what Search terms should I go for which ones should I not go to because they're either not worth it or too competitive AI can do that and so help you come up with the right targeted Search terms for your bullets your description your title your ads it can do a ton of that uh very very well on the other side of that are the changes where all these companies who built tools entirely dependent upon Search terms and keywords are having to readjust because Amazon is trying to get away from that they're coming out with a brand new AI um that is called Cosmo um I can't even think of the name of it it's like Common Sense searching or something like that but it's meant to take Search terms pretty much out of the equation I don't think they'll get there right away because that's how we all look for products but their whole goal is to allow people to ask a question like my seven-year-old daughter is having a birthday party what could I possibly buy for her instead of typing in what it is you want have a conversation and so the way that they're trying to get it to work is be very situational so that it'll understand your products like okay so do your products show any young kids in a birthday party in their other pictures do could people reference your bullet points and see where it might be good for a birthday party they're tring all this AI capability to completely redo the way that people search find and buy products on Amazon and I think that's going to be the biggest change that not only customers are going to face but sellers will be facing in the upcoming year as well yeah that's something I haven't put as much thought into you know um you know less people are going to be searching on Google Amazon Etc and they're going to be using AI to help recommend products to them um and then also I'm not sure with uh Alexa if Amazon has you know I know that was kind of One Direction that they're trying to go as well where people can use Alexa to you know order products or restock on products or whatever it is but I guess like that that's exciting part of the opportunity is seeing how e-commerce and just shopping in general online evolves and you know being a step ahead you know for that because yeah the days of just trying to optimize your product for keywords with search is going to be a very outdated approach you know over the next five five years or so um yeah what you kind of tend to find out when these like big changes happen you see like in every Market it's like you've got these big entrenched people and so before it was like big e-commerce businesses then all a sudden this Amazon thing happens none of them know what's going on but they've got all their processes and their team and everything like that with the like old school way of doing e-commerce and they're like caught sort of by surprise when this happens and you saw with Facebook with advertising all the big companies used to doing TV advertising you've got these like young hungry people that are just crushing it with like Facebook advertising I think we'll start seeing the same thing on Amazon it's like you've got these big amazon players a lot of them that we kind of helped get up there that have just they've got their way of doing things they've got their keyword based stuff they're musling their way to their top but when the whole landscape starts shifting like they're going to be like so entrenched in the way that things were that there's this like window of time where there's like big opportunity for like new people to jump in and do things a new way that the big people that have been there forever like they have no idea what's going on so it's cool time to be doing this yeah yeah everything gets disrupted right and and if you don't adapt then you're going to be left behind and and it provides a new opportunity for people to jump in take advantage of it and yeah so many people will be stuck in their ways of kind of how they used to do things and and they're not going to adapt to it and so I'd be curious how many people are really implementing a lot of this AI stuff and um that's where I think there's a great Advantage for a lot of people um that are getting started today that are watching this because because yeah you can learn some of these things that so many people are not going to know about that you can you know come into a certain Niche and and really um have a huge advantage over everyone else um yeah yeah I also want to ask you guys about sourcing products U just the process for that um I know alib Baba has been a big platform for that in sourcing from China but anything change in that regard and just uh you know what you guys recommend in terms of finding great suppliers and being able to manufacture products so I still think that you know when it comes to finding suppliers it hasn't changed the method for doing that hasn't changed as much you still for anything that goes in your body or on your body I tend to trust like domestic or us-based suppliers maybe European suppliers as well that's just the simplest way to do it there's no database or catalog yet a good one for suppliers uh in the US of products like that Google works great though um for doing that you just communicate back and forth with them on those when it comes to overseas Alibaba has really improved things I know people have complained about them in the past but uh I I've spent some time with them went to their event last year have worked with people on their team and every question they ask me is what can we do better to help solve problems what are the problems people are having how can we help them uh they've already gotten a lot of the Bad actors any suppliers you might be concerned just taking your money they have controls in place to get them out of there they have controls in placed where if you are worried about you spending money on a product and it never coming they become the escro provider they hold the money until that product has been delivered or meets your your you know whatever you agreed upon with supplier so they've done a lot of really good things uh they've also made searching easier it you can search by you can use your voice you can type things in they have a little assistant robot that pops up and he'll actually help you find things as well help you communicate with suppliers so as you can tell I have no vested interest in Alibaba I still love using them and I still use them today when I'm looking for new products that aren't from my current manufacturer still go to Alibaba still look for them and communicate on their platform and find products and I've been selling now for over 11 years awesome I also want to ask about this is always a common question I know you guys get a lot too is people want to know which Amazon platform they should sell on you know so typically the us being the big biggest one was most often recommended and I think you guys would also teach that okay if you're in Europe you know maybe you'll start in Europe um but uh what you know has has anything changed in that regard because you know people one barrier I think they always have is oh you know I don't live in the United States and so you know I live in Canada you know or I live in Australia or I live somewhere else um but they feel like maybe they can't sell in the US or they can't sell uh on any of the platforms which obviously you can um so what what do you guys recommend for someone getting started which Amazon country platform should they start with Mike you to take that yeah sure uh I still recommend the US and I think even two years ago Amazon had opened up to practically every country in the world there was a list I believe of nine countries out of the two to 300 that are recognized changes number all the time that the with the only countries that were not allowed to sell so there is no reason that if you live in any country outside of the US you still can't sell in us and you don't have to worry about shipping the products because you can use Amazon FBA to store and ship the products it can be a very simple business model selling on Amazon us uh no matter where you live if you do live and I would say the only two countries that I would even consider doing this would be Germany and the UK If you live there and if you know the market there and you know there's a big enough market there for your product I would consider starting there if you live there um all the other markets just aren't big enough even Canada hasn't really gotten that big Australia hasn't gotten that big uh the South American markets still very small so us first yeah maybe Germany and UK If you live there but you still have to understand your product in the market well and I'd say even for those countries like from what I can think of like probably at least two-thirds of the people that I know that live in those countries that sell quite a bit like 2third probably produce the majority of their in the US like they're from the UK they understand the UK they could sell in the UK every once in a while maybe onethird they'll be like crushing in the UK but I'd still say 2/3 like still do most of their volume in the US makes sense got it I want to transition talk a little bit about marketing um so what are you know someone's launched their product on Amazon or on Shopify what are some of the best ways they can Market their product and get sales yeah so it all starts at first with the product you know a lot of times like you can't like sell something that nobody wants to buy so it's like you got to sell something people actually want to buy and then have something that like I like to call it like the coffee shop test where it's like if you were in a coffee shop and there was like your ideal customer just sitting there like what would you tell them like why would you tell them to buy your product instead of everybody else's like there has to be a reason and that's like the whole differentiation thing and so you need like an answer for that and so that's kind of like your foundation and then like the next level of the foundation is really putting your best foot forward like going on a first date with somebody or something it's like you know you're going to have the best images you possibly can the best copy the best graphics and all that stuff is very easy now with with AI but you don't want to skip that step and so you want to have that step in place first because where we see a lot of people make mistake is they skip that step and they just start spending money on ads and it doesn't work out because it's not really a great experience for customers so you kind of do those steps and then if you're selling on Amazon especially but even maybe off of Amazon you're probably going to start with like a discounted price because if you think about it it's like okay you've got this cool brand cool product cool differentiation but people still have to give it a try and like on Amazon you'll have zero reviews to start and so now nowadays on Amazon like all the little games of like ways of getting reviews and stuff are like not worth it it's really just about like selling more volume with a good product and some percentage of those converted into reviews and so you want to start with a discounted price get some of those reviews flowing in usually with paid ads on Amazon or you can do organic content on some of the social media platforms and start like building that base up on Amazon and then over time start slowly raising up the price so that that's kind of in general the Amazon game and then at some point when you're ready to transition into selling on your own website we still recommend and this the way that we've done it with our own e-commerce business is like forget your homepage forget your homepage likely forget your product pages create one good long form sales page that really sells your product and then part of getting those early reviews with discounts is social proof on there is like one of the most valuable things you can do so that includes like star rating reviews image reviews like influencer just kind of holding up your product which which I say influencer but it can literally be friends or family that are just holding your product um if you can get a few video reviews like that's fantastic and so you have all that stuff on there and then cover your like bases on copyrighting which is like a whole different thing but AI helps a lot with that now and then really you're looking at Facebook and so Facebook now is fantastic because like with a Shopify store conversion tracking is very accurate and you can really just Target the broadest audience possible likely the entire country and then as long as you have good product good sales page then you can use AI to basically create all your ads then it's like you let the Facebook machine take over um it's like the first advertising platform I think Google and them are catching up now because they like didn't want Facebook to take all their money but it's the first advertising platform that I've ever seen that seems to like literally want you to make money because they realize if you make money then you spend more money with them and so they've kind of made that leap and so it's made that process much easier got it and are there any other ways that um people have been having success like uh advertising you know there any um like free organic you know methods or uh how about with influencers as well because I know I think even Amazon has influencers now uh where they uh promote products you know um on Amazon and and things like that yeah so so a lot of the social media channels have come up with their own influencer program so Amazon has theirs uh it hasn't taken off awesomely yet only because those influencers don't get a big percentage right and that's because they're pretty much Affiliates right now our Associates uh and so Amazon's trying to incentivize them more they recognize that and they're trying to increase that more and so I see that program really taking off some time in the next six to 12 months as well uh Tik Tok also has a great influencer program and also we we've seen this like from experience from people who sell on there even though Tik Tok influencers make money when they sell products on Tik Tok like through Tik Tok shop most people still go to Amazon they'll see a product on Tik Tok and still go to Amazon and the beauty of that is that is almost free traffic Amazon and that extra organic or guess external traffic does help you on the search results on uh on Amazon as well um and then the other way like Matt and I talk about the all the time as well anywhere you can get free traffic get it posting on Facebook LinkedIn Pinterest Tik Tok YouTube shorts Instagram reels Facebook reels go get free traffic there is never a place you can't go and get free traffic if you just put a little bit of time in and all that little traffic by itself manag to make a lot by add it up the traffic turns into sales and those factors of external traffic when they get to Amazon do help you rank got it love it love it um okay I got a few more questions before we wrap up uh you know you guys have been teaching this for a long time I know you guys are creating a new program a new amazing cell machine which a lot of people will be excited about um you want to share a little bit about what you guys you know what that new program is going to entail and and specifically I guess with AI is a big piece that you guys are teaching now but um you guys are going to be releasing this uh you guys also have a free training as well which I'm going to make sure I link to in the description uh for those that are listening uh to this you can go to projectlifemastery.com ASM um so maybe talk about that too what's what's this free training that you guys are doing and what's the new ASM about for sure yeah so uh starting very soon we're releasing a free training which is basically four free videos and so we kind of cover like way more in depth than we can go to sort of with this interview but we cover how this whole business model Works how AI fits in we give away actually two tools like 100% for free one is a custom GPT that might kind of uh briefly mentioned as a feature and that's a tool that we've built to help you basically find products figure out how to differentiate them and build a brand all within about 30 seconds like it's pretty insane so that's like 100% free with the first video and then with the second video we give away a tool that's like a little bit deeper on the differentiation side that's also just 100% free we just want people to like see the power of this technology um but the videos basically teach you how this whole business model works from like how does what what are the basic principles of making this business succeed today how do you find a product how do you find suppliers how do you launch your product how do you Market the thing and then what does your whole blueprint look like to go from basically starting from zero with the end goal of building like a million dollar plus a year business which is kind of the Target that we kind of shoot for when we're designing training and all that kind of stuff and so whenever video 4 releases that'll be people's sort of opportunity if they want to go deeper with us us then we have a whole program that's technically asm5 but it's amazing selling machine we're calling it the AI Advantage because it is not just kind of like fairy dusting with AI stuff in there to make it sound cool it's literally now for this business kind of essential but at least extremely powerful and so it's basically an eight module program that walks you through everything from start to finish I mean literally every step of this thing Mike and I are doing screen recordings and so that the idea and the whole sort of way that ASM has produced so much success in the past is it's like a paint by numbers approach and so it's like watch this video do the step watch this video do the step watch this video do the step so by the time it's over you literally have a business built even if you have zero experience whatsoever so we have an eight module training program there we're doing weekly coaching calls with us um we also have software tools that you get access to and we're even doing a live event because when we were kind of mapping this thing out like where is the value in this program like the the online training it kind of like gives you the fundamentals and show you how to build a business the coaching allows you to ask questions and fill in those gaps and holes and solve problems the software kind of automates and speeds things up but then there's like something with entrepreneurship I know Stephan I'm 100% sure you probably agree with this but being successful as an entrepreneur is like at least 80% psychology I mean you can learn all the tactics and all that stuff it's fantastic but you need that sort of like hunger and drive and sort of ability to persist and so that's where we find the live event so hopefully you know it's not you don't have to go but we include it for free with everyone who's signing up because we see the power in that because that allows you to meet us in person allows you to meet alumni of this program who built incredible businesses in person so then you're like oh like I'm not just watching videos like this is a real thing and so we include that that's about six months later or so um so yeah all that's kind of included in this program I love that yeah you guys are really providing everything someone needs to get started with this and and to create a lot of success and um you know most people know I've been working with you guys for many many many years and one thing always loved is just how committed you guys are to always make always improving things like you're always you know the 15th iteration of ASM just always making it better and better and better for people to learn the latest of what's working and uh the event that you guys do uh has been really instrumental and I think my success and also Tatiana especially because as you said like when you come to an event it it becomes real like it just you're when you're actually seeing other people not just up on stage but all the people that you're sitting next to you and they're around you and everyone you know gets it they're selling on Amazon and um they have that same passion and everything and just transfers to you and it and you leave the event I think with the biggest thing which is just more belief you know more belief confidence and excitement to grow your business and your brand uh versus I know one challenge many people have is they don't know anyone in their real life who are building a business you know building an online business is still kind of one of those mystical things that uh most average people might not believe is an actual reality that someone can create Financial Freedom and passive income and all this success with an internet business and so that's one of the challenges I think people have when they're in their day-to-day life is they don't know anyone that's actually doing this maybe their friends and their family doubt them and don't believe in them uh but when you're a part of a program like what you guys teach you get so much confidence and belief as you're going through it uh but when you actually go to the event and everything too and I think with the the live calls that you guys are doing it feels like you're a part of this community where you're doing this together and everyone's you very generous to help and support each other too and sharing what's working for them and um this is a really cool thing to be a part of and I think that's one thing that's missing for a lot of people that are a bit of Lone wolves that are trying to build their business on their own um it's very difficult I think and obviously some people can still create success that way but I know for myself and Tatiana and I think so many other people having everything that you guys are providing and and the confidence that you give people based on the years of experience that you guys are sharing just really helps someone uh when they're brand new to this never been an entrepreneur never sold anything online um I think that's a really valuable thing that you guys are providing and so um again for those of you that are watching or listening to this I'll throw a link in the the description or go to www. projectlifemastery.com ASM get the free training check it out everything they do is really high quality and you'll definitely leave learning a lot and especially take advantage of the free tools that they put together for you guys um but the last question I have for you guys is you know what advice would you give just to a beginner and if you can kind of imagine I know it's been a long time for all of us that we've been in this position but if you could think back to you know when you guys were you know working at a job uh you know money can be tight you know you're only making a certain amount of money from that job um you know your hours are generally consumed you know 40 hours a week with that job but there's a part of you that wants that freedom you know you want to build an online business and you're kind of learning about it in those stages and everything it's very exciting you know what advice you know you know Matt you talked about the mindset that's a really important piece of it but um what advice would you give to someone who's a beginner in that position where they're at a job maybe they don't like their job they're not making as much as they want they don't have the freedom that they want but they want to go in this direction what advice would you give to someone like that yeah I mean I think the for me like my path was and I still think it's the best way is like learn as much as you freaking can and so I know there's like try to quotes like leaders or readers and that sort of thing but it's like I think regardless of how you learn like getting that information because there's other people that have already figured out what you want to do and so find those people and find out how they did what you want to do and just basically copy what they did or try to learn from them directly if possible so I think learning as much as possible is always going to be a key part of getting to the next stage of growth and then I think related to that it's like you got to do something with the information and so you got to actually take action like as much as possible and so and I think that one's kind of counterbalanced by like really the third and final one which is you know I guess it's kind of a fancy term but look for like asymmetric risk reward meaning that like big payoff little risk and so if you look at entrepreneurs like sometimes you think they're like these crazy people that just took massive risk like there's like a story of like Richard Branson where somehow he got on the hook for like billions of dollars worth of planes but like the real story was is that like he could actually return all those planes and it'd be out like $10 million which is a lot of money but for him at that stage it was not that big of amount of money and so it looked like he was taking this massive risk but it really wasn't but it had the potential to completely transform his company and so I think for us that's why we like this particular kind of business because you can risk a little bit amount of money but you could literally build a business that's a million dollars 1010 million a hundred million I mean really the sky is the limit and so I think as long as you're taking smart risks and you're learning as much as possible and taking tons of action it's like there's no way you're going to fail it's it may take a few months it may take six months it may take a year but it's like as long as you keep those three things in mind you're pretty much guaranteed to succeed love it yeah you know and I could go through a bunch of technical things but we'll uh we we'll go through some of those in the training we'll like you know teach some actual real world steps you can take to find a product get it going for me uh BS down to one thing and that's kind of like believe that this can be done there's lots of people out there that have done this and you're going to face throughout your day lots of people who doubt you can do this and that's because they don't think they can do it and they don't want to think someone else can do what they can't do so believe you can do this and one thing that's always helped me and helped me when I got started 11 years ago uh visualize what you want your life to be like as if it's already happened uh for anyone who's kind of went through like you know seen programs on that there's a lot of power into having a really deep imagination or feeling that you've already accomplished something and so if you can do that and imagine what your life's going to be like not if it makes this possible but when it does that will help you uh get there in the end you'll start reprogramming your brain to actually start working towards success um that's what I like to do believe and visualize what it's going to be like that'll help you get there I love it one last question is what would you say motivated you guys the most to go in this direction because obviously someone that does make the decision to take that leap of faith to go into the unknown you know the hero's journey and there's all these challenges I'm sure that everyone's going to face when you go from being an employee to now being an entrepreneur and uh you have to go through all the learning and all that stuff that Matt described and there's obviously at times might be disappointment and mistakes and failures but generally there's a why a purpose a reason a motivation that people have um to to go in that direction to leave their job and you know you know everyone's telling them it's not going to work and everything but they go for it what would you say for you guys uh was that driving motivation that uh embarked you on this journey I I think I was like for whatever reason like never built to work for somebody else it's like I was very motivated I guess at least after I got in a lot of trouble when I was a kid but at some point beyond that point I was like very motivated I had two parents that were entrepreneurs I feel like for various kind of reasons I always kind of felt like an outsider as a kid and so I realized at some point like I was never built to work like a corporate job like I tried it multiple times and like really just one job out of college and only made it seven months and I was just so unmotivated like I was like I don't feel like I'm an unmotivated person but at this job I'm just like I'm just going to collect my paycheck and do the least out of work possible um and so but then when as soon as I started running my own thing I worked way more but it was like it never felt like work and then for me at some point where I think things really shift is where being an entrepreneur being financially independent is no longer just something you want it's like part of your identity then like at that point like there is no failure like there's just stuff works stuff doesn't work and you just like keep going there's never like a going back it's like that's not an option so I think at that point is where like everything changes and it's like you're always going to have ups and downs like you mentioned um but there's really only one path forward and there's like to me no better way to live a life like I couldn't imagine having like a two week vacation or not being able to like you know we're here in Colorado now not being able to take like tues days in the winter off to go skiing just because like there's nobody out there like having a normal job would just be extremely unappealing at this point yeah for me um it's kind of a typical story of you know for my family um I can think back to when I was working this corporate gig where I was driving through traffic from I'm on the Illinois side of St Louis and driving all the way across the city I went through three traffic jams every morning then three traffic jams of the way home I was spending all my time either in traffic or in the office traveled for that job and I wasn't spending any time with my young kids and I wanted to be able to spend more time with them and that's why I decided something had to change and luckily uh however it came me to be I found this program at the right time and it changed my life forever and now I still work because I love what I do I joke to Matt Matt three to five years I'm going to retire and I've been saying that for the past five 10 years because I love what I do I work from home this my home office my kids are here right now um and so anytime that I want to go hang out or go on a walk or go on a trip I can do those things all because of me taking that leap in a decision 11 12 years ago I love it yeah thank you guys for sharing that I think it's really in inspiring for people that you know are just starting their journey to think when you guys think back of when you know you guys started and what that motivation was and I'm sure you know you're incredibly grateful and blessed to be in this position that you made that decision and um everyone has their own reasons and I want to encourage anyone watching listening you know that's something that speaks to you something deep down inside yourself that you have to find what that reason is I know for me at one stage is reading the 4our work week and I was like I want that you know I want the the Financial Freedom that provides and so everyone has uh something different that will really Inspire them so thank you guys so much for your time always always appreciate it and uh thank you guys for watching and listening and again check out the free training that they have I'll link it below and uh look forward to see you guys start your journey with Matt and Mike uh through the amazing cell machine all right take care thank you thank you

Channel: Project Life Mastery

Views: 2,655

Keywords: stefan james, project life mastery, amazing selling machine, make money on amazon, amazon fba, amazon seller, matt clark, mike mcclary, ecommerce, amazon AI, sell on amazon, entrepreneur, asm

Id: eyzhnlshbvE

Length: 52min 42sec (3162 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2024