Scott: I am always fired up and ready to rock and roll, so let’s do this, John.

John: Scott’s the founder and host of The Amazing Seller Podcast, a top ranked business show, where he helps regular every day people start selling products that make money on Amazon. He generated over $300,000 in his first 12 months of starting his own Amazon business, and he’s now taught and inspired thousands of entrepreneurs through his take action approach. And Scott, I want you to take a quick minute and fill in some gaps in that intro and give us just a little glimpse into your personal life?

Scott: I've said once and I'll say it again, I'm a proud father of three beautiful children. I'm 44 years old, married to my wife Lisa for 22 years now. And I build a lifestyle first in businesses that support the lifestyle, that's pretty much me in a nutshell. I'm excited to be here again, John.

John: You have said it before, and for anybody that is a loyal listener of EOFire, Scott’s been with us on episode 1149, 1646, and now here we are chatting at 1674. And the reason why we're talking today actually is because I'm hug eon Amazon’s bandwagon. I mean, I have been for a really, really long time, but it's just getting so obvious to me that Jeff Bezos is literally going to stop at nothing short of world domination. I mean, I now I have six echos throughout my house, echo dots, they're literally everywhere.

In fact, I'm nervous to say a word that sounds like, I can't even say it right now because she’s in my room and she’ll ask me what I just said, and it will ruin this recording. So you know what I'm saying, they're everywhere, and where Amazon is going, it's just not stopping.

I'm continuously blown away with the amount of sales that the Freedom Journal and the Mastery Journal gets on Amazon every single day, because they're not coming from you, Fire Nation, as much as I love you guys, you're going to thefreedomjournal.com and the masteryjournal.com, which I love. The people that are coming to me from Amazon that are buying these journals, I'm talking to the tune of 20, 30, 50 a day, a day.

Scott: Crazy.

John: This is not my audience, so I'm getting exposure now Scott, to people that have never heard of me before that are now learning about EOFire through the pages of these journals and coming over to my brand now, and it's insane. It’s amazing. And Scott and I are actually currently working on a super secret project that may or may not launch, because it's just one of those things, but we're that fired up about what Amazon is doing and where it's going that we just can't stop thinking about things to do to promote Amazon.

In fact, this Thursday, May 25th at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, 6:00 p.m. Pacific, Scott and I are getting together, and we're going to be hosting a webinar for you Fire Nation, all about Amazon. And that's over at eofire.com/amazon. Head over there, sign up for this completely free master class on Amazon. We’ll be talking for the rest of this interview about Amazon, why it's awesome, how you can benefit from it.

You know how it can literally be either a side job for you, or a fulltime, or who knows what can come from this? But eofire.com/amazon is going to get you to a registration page. We're on Thursday, may 25th at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, 6:00 p.m. Pacific. You, Fire Nation, can join Scott and I for free as we drop value bombs about Amazon, and why, and how, you can literally become a location and financial independent entrepreneur from it. So Scott, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about why Amazon is still a great platform to launch products?

Scott: Well, I think we all know that we want to be able to get in front of customers, right? I mean, I think there's nothing better than getting in front of customers. Getting your site ranked and all that stuff on Google is great, but we don’t know that they're customers. And a lot of times on Google they're searching for like how to do this or how to do that. But we're talking about customers, people that are there for one reason.

Think about like the Home Shopping Network TV, people sit in front of the TV to buy things. And they're sitting there, their credit cards are on file with those people, but now Amazon has pretty much done that on steroids, it's like insane. So there's like over – the last I checked – over 250 million active credit cards.

John: Come on.

Scott: Probably a lot higher than that. Yeah, like insane. And we're talking like they're in a ton of different countries now and it's just insane, and the things that they're doing with drones and all kinds of cool things. But the thing that I really am most fired up about this, and again, I've been at this now for just over two years, is still it's a great vehicle for people that are stuck.

And they're thinking to themselves, and listening to your show, and other podcasts, and they’ve got all these different ideas, but they're like: I don't know how to set up a website, or I don't know how to get traffic, or I don't know how to build a funnel, or any of this stuff, like it's a great way to get in front of buyers, and they do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, so all you really need to understand is a market, and what products that market wants.

And yes, you have to understand how to launch the product, which there is a process, which we're going to do that on the workshop. There's actually five phases, and we're going to cover each and every one of those. And I'll just go through them really quickly. It's really product research or market research, or both; it's really one into that phase one. And then from there it's the finding your supplier, finding your manufacturer, so that's number two.

And then from there three is your prelaunch, which is really, really important. And then from there it's the launch, because now we've got everything ready and everything set to go. We launch it and then in phase five we need to keep promoting it. We need to keep pushing it. And I want to kind of back to something that kind of happened to you, and it didn't happen by accident.

You’ve seen sales start to grow after the fact, right? You launched your Freedom Journal and the Mastery Journal, and you did that great. And you didn't even do it, where taking you – you didn't drive people to Amazon.

John: No.

Scott: Which if you did that, holy cow, like that would have just went insane. You did it on a Kickstarter, you know, you did all that, so that's awesome. You were able to do that, but you were still able to slowly get sales building in the background. And now that you’ve been doing for a little while, you're starting to get that momentum in there. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that it might be a slow start, but as you keep going and growing, that momentum is just going to keep picking up, especially if you have a great product.

I think we all have to say it has to be a good product, people have to want it, they have to need it. So I just love what you’ve done. And I remember, I think, talking to you, I think it was the last time or the time before and you were like sales are good, but they weren’t like blowing out of the water, but now all of a sudden they're starting to get blown out of the water because it's starting to build momentum.

And you starting to maybe – maybe you're starting to dial a little bit more pay per click, or maybe the word on the street is starting to spread. It's like you don’t know, but as that starts to go, then Amazon is going to start to give you some of their love inside of Amazon. You're going to start to show up with related products that are being purchased that you didn't even plan on, it just happens. So that's what I'm most fired up about though, John.

I mean, really just exposing this to people that think to themselves, listen, I'm not techy. I can't get started because I don't know how to build a list, or I don’t have time to do that, right? All you really have to understand and I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying another vehicle to get started, if you don't want to go through and build a website and get ranked, and SEO, and all that stuff, if you don’t want to do that, it's a great vehicle.

And the other thing I want to say is for people that are listening that are already selling digital products, you should definitely be doing exactly what John did, and launching something in the physical world, because it's a whole other market and whole other product, or even another piece of your funnel. I know Russell Bronson talks all about free plus shipping offers. Well, you can do this off of Amazon with that same product if you want to. So there are so many benefits to it.

And it’s funny I was at Rick Mority’s event not too long ago. It was in San Francisco. And I was there, and there was a veterinarian, who teaches surgery. And we're sitting there and we're talking, and he asked me what I did. And we got talking back and forth, and I said to him, do you sell any of the instruments, or do you sell any of the things that go into that surgery? And he’s like no, I just basically teach, you know digital, on video and stuff. And I'm like you really could tap into this.

And then boy, his mind blew up. He’s asking me tons of questions. He’s like so I can actually sell my own product and kind of call it my own and brand it my own? And I'm like, absolutely. So we kind of had a little side consultation, and it was just awesome. But I love being able to show people that they can do that in all different places wherever they are, right? It could be someone that’s brand spanking new and they're like I just don’t know what to do, this is great.

And if you're already up and running and you're selling digital products, and I know Rick Mority, if he’s listening, he probably is, he’s even said, he’s like, “Scott, I really want to get into the, man. It just seems like it's…,” because it is. It's a great opportunity. And it doesn’t mean you have to only do that. It just means that's it's a great vehicle to get in there and let Amazon do some of that heavy lifting for you.

John: And you're so right about the momentum and the thing with the Mastery Journal that just recently happened that I had no idea. Somebody actually in our Facebook group, in our Freedom and Mastery Journal Facebook group posted it and I was like, what? It got the number one new release in planning pads badge in Amazon. And then I went and looked, and like now those sales are increasing and the rank is increasing.

And it's just insane what that momentum can do once you get things going. And Amazon of course, it helps that the Freedom Journal has 340 five star reviews. And the Mastery Journal, which just launched is already nearing 40 reviews. You know, which are both high number for how long they’ve been in the system for.

Scott: Absolutely.

John: And that's incredible when you can just say: wow, this is people that are going and they're just saying: hey, I want a journal. And then you have these two journals that are very similar to each other, one to the left and one to the right, but one has 340 reviews, most of them five star, and the other has like 12, it's just not a comparison. And that's how people’s minds are being trained these days. And so this is the thing that you can do when you build great products.

And you understand the other side of the business, which both Scott and I have done, when building our brands through podcasting and through webinars and through websites, etc. So I'm fired up because again Fire Nation, this Thursday, May 25th at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, 6:00 p.m. Pacific, we're going to be getting into so much more depth than we can on this podcast interview, because there's going to be visuals.

There's going to be just an entire presentation that Scott’s put together. and actually the entire name of it is to the learn the exact steps that Scott used to choose and launch his first private label product on Amazon, and sell over $40,000 in just 90 days, this is the step by step. So we're going to be talking about how to pick a product that's already selling on Amazon that can be private labeled. How to source that product from China to find quality suppliers.

How to launch the product an actually get sales the day that it goes live. And then how to promote the product and get ranked for high converting keywords that are going to increase sales, these are all the things we're going to be talking about on this master class, Thursday, May 25th 3:00 p.m. Eastern, eofire.com/amazon will get you there. So Scott, let’s kind of now move through these five steps to launch your own product, starting with that product research. What do you want to talk about there?

Scott: Well, I think with the product research, it all comes down to – let me kind of go back to this though, because some people will say, and I hear this, you know. Well, there's people out there right now, including myself that's educating people on this topic. So isn't it over saturated? Isn't it too competitive? And that's a great question. And the answer is yes, it is if you're going to sell a garlic press, because that's all I ever talk about, right?

And people say: well, why isn’t it working, I'm selling garlic presses, or I'm selling maybe barbeque mitts or something. Like, all of these products that are out there that have been exposed, that have been kind of pounded to death, if you're going to go out and launch one of those, yes, it going to be saturated. But there's plenty, plenty of space and room out there, if you go after certain markets and products.

And I want to just stress this, when you're going – if you're going to launch products on Amazon, the one thing I will say is your number one thing that you need to understand and get good at it, and you need to do it over and over and over again, is product research. If you understand how it works, you're going to cut down the amount of risk, because you're going to be able to kind of see before you even decide to launch, if it's going to work or not. You have a better chance, anyway.

And I love using this – and I watch Shark Tank, and I know some people say it's staged and this and that, whatever. The bottom line is they always say: listen; is the product selling right now and what are your sales? And if someone says: no, but I've got people that are interested, and they said that they would love it, and this that and the other thing. And they go if you don’t have any sales, you haven’t proven the concept, we're not investing in that.

So what you can do is go to Amazon, see what's already selling, and then you can look at the reviews and see what people are saying they like and they don’t like. And then you can say I want to maybe launch this product because I already know it's validated and it's selling to this market. So I just think that people need to understand that is the number one thing that you need to understand.

And it's not going to work where it's just over night, you're just going to go out there and do it and it's going to be like great. You got to practice, it's like anything. If you're going to take up a sport, you got to work at it. And we are going to be showing you some different processes and stuff that you guys can do to actually do this, without even buying any tools if you don’t want to. You can just do this stuff.

And one of the simplest ways, and I just want to throw it out there, and I think everyone could do this even before we go on this workshop, is something that I call your touch list. Like, just think about things that you're touching, or write things down. I always tell people take a notepad and a pen, and write every single thing you touch on a daily basis and you’ll be blown away. And then maybe start thinking about your parents. Like, my father just had a hip replacement.

He’s in a different space than I am, right? So I'm like maybe there's stuff in that. Or maybe you're not excited about that and you're like: well, I don’t want to go into anything that I'm not really passionate about. Well, then what are you passionate about, or what your kids passionate about? I've got three kids, each one of those kids is into different things. I've got a 9-year-old, volleyball. I've got a son who is 19, basketball. I've got a daughter who is going to be getting married.

So I got things happening all over the place that I can dig into. And it's funny, I just found about three and a half months ago, a market that I wanted to get into. I partnered up with someone, and we're going into this market full throttle because we were using this thing in our life. And we liked it, and we enjoyed it, and we figured we could build a brand around it. So I just want to stress that what you're usually doing or you’re involved in, could really lead you to that market and those products.

But once you get to that point, then you have to understand what are the numbers I need to look at, what's the criteria? And that's what we're going to be covering on the workshop. But to kind of lead people through like the other phases, like phase one is really like the product research. We have to validate that the products are already selling. And the best way to do that is to look at Amazon and see what we can do there. And then from there we go into the finding your supplier.

So we have to go out there and we have to find a supplier. The best way to do this, and we've done this over and over and over again, and we're doing it right now in this brand new brand, is we go to Alibaba or AliExpress, preferably Alibaba because we're going to reach out to then a supplier or an agent, and then we're going to start that relationship. And I can't stress that enough, we want to create that relationship, and just start really digging into what we want.

And a lot of people say I want to find the product on Alibaba, not necessarily. If you're going to sell something in the kitchen space, but they don’t sell any – or you don’t see anything on Alibaba, contact someone that sells garlic presses and then that will lead you to the kitchen products. So I can't stress that enough either, like building those relationships with the suppliers just through Alibaba, you're not necessarily finding the product there, you're finding the agent there.

And then from there, we go into the prelaunch. The prelaunch is really getting yourself ready for the launch. And you need an optimized listing. And guys, if this sounds like we're throwing a lot at you, we are, but we're going to cover in detail on the workshop.

John: In detail, step by step.

Scott: It literally is.

John: In fact Scott, before we even move into prelaunch, I do want spend a little bit of time there. We're going to have to take a quick break. I got to thank my sponsors, which by the way randomly, Alibaba has become one of my sponsors, that's pretty cool.

Scott: Nice.

John: They're really understanding the podcasting space now. And they're really trying to get out here and understand the small business entrepreneur. It's kind of cool for me to realize that they understand, like where their future lies. It's with us, Fire Nation.

Scott: Absolutely.

John: And that's why Alibaba is sponsoring EOFire. So we’ll be right back after we thank our sponsors. So Scott, we're back. And again Fire Nation, if you're not fired up to join us this Thursday, May 25th at 3:00 p.m. EST, what do you get fired up about, because this is exciting stuff. This is so exciting that I'm thinking about spending my incredibly valuable time doing a project with Scott. Again, we're just talking about, it may or may not happen, but it's something that we're discussing because of the opportunities that lie here.

And wow, the learning, the exact steps that Scott used to choose and launch his first private label product on Amazon, and he sold over $40,000 in just 90 days. The step by step, all you need to do is just go to eofire.com/amazon, and we’ll be walking over all of this stuff for you, all of those bullet points I mentioned earlier. And now Scott, back to you and prelaunch.

Scott: Yeah, the prelaunch is really getting set up. It's like it sounds, we're getting ready for the big day. And the big day is sales. We got to understand something here; Amazon bases everything off of sales, like just about everything. Their thermometer is by sales. It's like they're going to give you more love, the more sales you get. And that includes ranking, ranking fir keywords and search terms. So in the prelaunch we're going to do two things. The first thing that we're going to do is we are – we're going to basically optimize our listing, which mean that we're going to get good images.

We're going to have a good title. We're going to have good bullet points, description. We're going to let Amazon know what our product’s about. It's like SEO in Google; it's the same thing in Amazon. We need to have descriptive text on our page, so this way here they know what our product is about. And then from there, once we get that stuff done, while we're still waiting, because we just ordered our product, we might have to wait 30 to 40 days to get our product.

So in that meantime, we're going to be doing this stuff in the background, so that's the first thing in prelaunch. The second part of that is we're going to build a launch list. Now, back in the day, we're talking like six to eight months ago, you used to be able to go out there to a service, where people would raise their hands that they would want to review products. Now there's some spammy ones out there and there was some good ones out there, and there's still some good ones out there, but they're not really review groups anymore.

It's like Slickdeals or a FatWallet. It's where you can go out there, give a discount on your product and people will buy it. But all that really is, is people that raised their hand. And they go hey; I would love to receive a discount on a product, that would be awesome. Like, that's it, that's what they're there for. What I like to do now, and this is where we've kind of changed things a little bit, is where we go out and we find our customers, and then we give away product, basically like a bundle, like something that's related to our product, in exchange for their email, and then we build a little launch list.

And then from there, we can then launch our product and get sales on day one when we're in the launch phase. Now, if you don’t want to do that right off the bat, you could always reach out to influencers. There's influencers out there that you can pay $100.00, $200.00, whatever, find them on YouTube, find them on Instagram. And then basically just say would you just let your list know about my thing, and then they’ll do that. our goal is to just get some sales in the door.

And when we're doing this, we're not necessarily going after products either that are selling 100 a day. We're talking only like 10 or 15 units a day. Again, going back to we want low competition products, with low reviews, so we don’t have to go out there and be so competitive. And all we need to get off the bat is like ten sales a day for maybe five days. And that's really easy to do if you have your own launch list it's easy. If you want to go out to influencers, it's not that hard either.

So that's the prelaunch. And then we move into the launch, and then that's like press go, let’s do it. Let’s contact our launch partners. Let’s make sure our listing is optimized and then we are off to the races, then we start getting some sales. And literally from that point on, we just did this John, like a week ago, with a brand new product. And we had a launch list, and we launched it. We sold 154 units in five days.

And we went from zero on the map of Amazon, to our BSR, which is a bestseller rank, which that kind of gives you how you're doing to 800 in a top level category, which is insane, yeah. So it was awesome, right? We started ranking for keywords. We're already on page one for some of our long tail keywords. We're on page two for some of our main keywords already. And that is just in a week’s time. So this stuff does work guys, you just have to go out there and apply it, and go through these five phases, which we're going to cover.

And so then once we launched, that's really all you're doing. You know, alongside the launch, we're going to be doing phase five, which is then we're going to turn on sponsor product ads. That's where we’re going to do pay per click, and that's Amazon’s pay per click, by the way. So what better way to promote your product, but to customers that are on Amazon.

John: Boom.

Scott: So then we can start to dial that in, and that's really the fifth phase. And obviously you don’t have time to go on to that. We’ll go into that a little bit on the workshop, but that's a whole other animal. But to get it started, to get the launch started, I'm going to give you guys a couple of quick start strategies on the workshop, on how we can do this and start getting – you know, getting sales, but not just sales, but getting the data.

Because when we're in this phase as well, we want to start to collect the data of our search terms that our customers are searching, because Amazon gives us that data, and I'll show you guys that on the workshop. So that's pretty much the five phases, John.

John: Well, Scott, we're already into the 24 minute mark, which is crazy, because I feel like this has just flown by. But what I would love you to do as we wrap up, give us maybe one, maybe two myths that we can just debunk right now that's probably holding Fire Nation back from really going forward with something like this?

Scott: I think one is that I need a ton of money to get started on this, like I need like thousands upon thousands of dollars. Realistically, most people start with probably about $2,500. And to some people they're like: whoa, I don’t want to put that much out. You don’t have to even put that much out if you don’t want to, but that's normally like the average start point. But I've also seen people start with as little as $500.00, and then they just, you know, they do a test run.

They simply do a test run of maybe a 100 units, and they see if they sell. If they do, then they just keep scaling up. So that's one big, big myth. And then the other one, I think, is where people think that it's too saturated, it's too competitive. I don’t want to get involved in this thing because there are just so many people doing Amazon right now. And the big thing there is, is there might be a lot of people interested in it, there might be a lot of people starting it, but what happens is, is if they don’t see success right out of the gate, they bail on it.

And then from there you have a product that just sits there, and then they either liquidate it and they get out of the game. So to me it's like, it's not over saturated, it's not too competitive, if you know how to go out there and find good markets, good products, and be able to go through this five phase process. So that is like the two biggest ones, I would say. But the other last thing I would say is for people think that they have to be techy, like they have to have all this tech background, you don’t.

It's literally like they lead you right through it when you're setting this stuff up. And after you go through the five phases, you’ll also have a really good roadmap to get everything set up.

John: Fire Nation, eofire.com/amazon will take you directly to the link, where you can sign up for this free master class taking place Thursday, May 25th 3:00 p.m. Eastern, 6:00 p.m. Pacific. We're going to be talking about how to pick product that's already selling on Amazon that can be private labeled. How to source from China and other quality suppliers. How to launch and get sales the day it goes live. How to promote and get a rank for high converting keywords that will increase sales and so much more.

So I will see you there, eofire.com/amazon. Scott, thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

Scott: Thanks again, John.