308 How to Get Started on Amazon - a podcast by Michael Veazey

I had a returning mentoring client recently. My client, Mr. X, has had a good year with business last year. It is a brick and mortar business that relies on him, as he sells his services as opposed to a physical product. He likes the clients, but it is a lot of work, and he doesn’t want to scale it.





During sessions with clients:

We put down concrete goals at the end of each and every session



3 goals are the ideal number, according to a book I read about the importance of setting 3 goals per year



To learn more, check out the Facebook group.

LESSONS

Lesson 1 Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Your existing business may be an EXCELLENT starting point for your Amazon/physical products business.



* What aspects of your existing business do you love?

* And what can you expand on as the core starting point for your Amazon business?



You can change aspects of your business, but you don’t have to change everything.



For example: If you don’t like shipping your own products, look at the economics of it and see if you can do it on FBA, (fulfilled by Amazon).



Don’t run away from your current job. You can treat your ecommerce, and specifically, Amazon, business as a new wing of an existing business.



* This gives you more credibility for customers and suppliers



Lesson 2 Don’t ignore the expertise you’ve built up in your industry

Just because you don’t enjoy serving a particular set of clients in a certain way, doesn’t mean you should ignore the expertise you’ve built up. You can just find a better way to serve them that may free your time up



* Mr. X already had a set of paying clients. He just needed to find out what their problems were, and what they need.



By starting from your expertise, you can be guided to a product that you can sell, because you know the exact problem your product is there to solve.



* If you want to go into the physical product space, serve the same kind of person and drill deep into their needs, and go fill that need.

* And if you’ve been serving a type of person in your business for years, you really understand them.



Once you develop a product, you then have the perfect group to test that product, and you can ask them for feedback to see if it solves their problem.

Lesson 3 Start with anything you have!

Throughout the mentoring session with Mr. X, it turned out he already had products. They needed a bit of tweaking, but they were mostly ready to sell. These were information products in the form of training videos and books.



* These can easily become Amazon products.

* eBooks become Kindle books.



Selling these products is money he wouldn’t have had otherwise, and it’s also a way to get familiar with Amazon and bring in potential customers.



* You can get their details on Amazon and contact them off of Amazon



Don’t overlook things you’ve already got.

Lesson 4 ALWAYS start from or find a Competitive Advantage

The easiest way to get ahead of the competition is to understand a very specific person and pain VERY well indeed.



Looking purely based on numbers SEEMS easier, but in my experience, it rarely leads to a real business.



* Carve out a niche, and find the gap between supply and demand and fulfill that demand

* Best way to find that is to understand a particular kind of customer

* It’s much better to grow out of what you know, and then you’ve got a better chance at finding a great set of products to build a sustainable business from which you can create a valuable business.



As they say in the USA “The riches are in the niches...

Further episodes of Amazing FBA Amazon and ECommerce Podcast, for Amazon Private Label Sellers, Shopify, Magento or Woocommerce business owners, and other e-commerce sellers and digital entrepreneurs.

Further podcasts by Michael Veazey

Website of Michael Veazey