How would it feel to make $1,000,000 on Amazon in only 9 months?

That’s exactly what Manny Coats did! While I was at the Amazing Selling Machine event this past year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Manny, who is the Founder of the AMPM Podcast.

Manny is a super successful Amazon seller, who made $1,000,000 on Amazon in his first year of business. Since then, he has gone on to create a software company, called Helium 10. This software suite contains over a dozen insanely powerful Amazon SEO tools that are designed to help Amazon sellers grow their online businesses.

If you have a desire to start selling on Amazon, Manny’s story will inspire you to do so. Are you ready to learn how you can make $1,000,000 on Amazon? This is an interview that you don’t want to miss!

Watch the video below:

(Click here to watch on YouTube)

[smart_track_player url=”https://www.buzzsprout.com/9299/719722-plm-577-1-000-000-on-amazon-in-only-9-months-insanely-powerful-tools-for-amazon-sellers.mp3″ background=”default” ]

Want to maximize the power of your Amazon product? CLICK HERE to get started with Helium 10! Use the code MASTERYFREE to get 10% off every month & 7 days FREE!

This page contains affiliate links. If you purchase a product through one of them, I will receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). I only ever endorse products that I have personally used and benefitted from personally. Thank you for your support!

How would making $1,000,000 on Amazon change your life?

Do you want to share with people a little bit about your story?

It's a long story. I started out in Finance and I hated it. The fun part of it was trying to break goals at the company, and I consistently did that. I was pretty valuable to the company, but at some point, I wanted to travel more and do things that I wouldn't be able to afford on the salary that I had with that particular business. I decided to go off on my own. This was back in the late 90s.

I started a physical products business related to working out. It was a protein powder company. At the same time, I also started TwistedHumor.com, which was a humor site, and back then it was super simple to get a website domain.

My protein company ended up failing, but TwistedHumor.com ended up becoming the largest humor site in the world for a couple of years, until the .com bubble burst.

I then went through a variety of online businesses, which eventually lead to mobile games a few years back. From there, the market started to get crazy competitive. You started to need really big budgets in order to compete with the big companies that were out there. I dabbled a little bit in Amazon, and I knew somebody who is now my business partner, who had also dabbled in it.

We tried it out, it did really well in the first two weeks, and then we said, “Let's go full speed with this.” In December of 2015, we started the AMPM Podcast, an Amazon FBA business, and then everything exploded from there.

When you first started on Amazon did you know what you were doing, or did you go through ASM initially?

Yes and no. My first product failed. I didn’t know what I was doing. The ASM course was closed, so I couldn't get into that. I decided to learn everything on my own. My first product was more of a passion product. It did okay. I ended up using that product as a test bed to test keyword strategies and different things, instead of using it on my main product.

To answer your question, there are two things that I came in with that gave me a really big advantage over other people. The first thing was that I had a software team in place, so I started creating tools that eventually became the software platform that we use now. The other thing was the keyword strategy that I was using on mobile games, which was very similar to Amazon.

With mobile games, you have your title, bullet points, descriptions, backend keywords, and then Amazon just takes it one step further.

With mobile, you have localization for like 20 different countries which with Amazon, unless you are selling in those countries, you don't need to do. I just applied that, and immediately I started to see insane rankings that my competitors were not seeing.

You mentioned that your first product failed. What mistakes did you make, and how did you prevent against that when you launched your second product?

With my first product, I was a newbie Amazon seller, so I was still learning how to write copy correctly. I was doing the keyword part pretty well, but I think what's really important with a listing is your imagery, and mine was okay. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. I could get people to come to my page, but I couldn't close them. The conversions weren't there, and people would see other products that had better imagery and better pricing than mine did.

Amazon also had a 3-foot drop test for every product, in order to make sure that they didn’t break if they dropped. I remember dropping my product and seeing pieces of it go everywhere. I had to redo everything before Amazon closed that product.

However, with my second product, I went all in with the photography, videos, and reviews. Everything was set up correctly.

Is there a certain criterion that you follow when you look at a product that you are going to launch on Amazon?

I do it a few different ways. I try not to get into a market where every single product has 5,000 reviews. I think that's setting yourself up for a really steep hill to climb. I'll look take a look at the top keywords, and if there is a product that I'm interested in, I'll figure out how many sales I think I need to get for a specific keyword in order to out-rank that product for that particular keyword phrase.

A lot of people think, “Oh man, I've got to outrank this product, in general.”

They go on a site like Jungle Scout to see how many sales a product has, and they soon realize that they can't compete with it. Well, if you want a piece of that pie, all you have to do is beat your competitors, using a pretty significant keyword phrase, and then get sales from that. You can still generate a 6-7-figure Amazon business based off of that strategy.

How do you typically launch your product on Amazon? Is there anything that you do in order to rank your product high, right off the gate?

There are legitimate services out there that you can use that will help you get your product ranked. People will say to us, “I get to the #1 spot and then I start falling”. If you are using services for a specific keyword, and you are in the #1 spot and are displacing everybody, ask yourself, “Who am I displacing, what does their main image look like, and what are their price points?”

If your product is there and you asked ten people, “Would you buy this product over the other 15 products on the first page?” and they say, “No, I would buy this one because it is $10 cheaper or because of this image”, then you are going to fall down in the ranks.

When you are launching your product, you need to make sure that your price point is going to be as good or better than the other people on that page.

I always do a giveaway as well. For keyword phrases, I'll pick the top 10 and figure out how many I need to give away. Then I'll do an 80-90% discount, where I will give away enough units during one week in order to actually rank to the #1 or #2 spot for that keyword phrase. To get to #1, you have to be out-selling everyone for a keyword phrase.

A great side effect of it all is that you will oftentimes get the best seller badge from Amazon for that particular product if you are driving enough traffic to Amazon.

Sometimes you'll even get the Amazon choice badge for that specific keyword phrase, so either one of those gives you that super social proof from Amazon that tells consumers that your product must be really good if it's Amazon’s choice.

People think, “Wow, Amazon is saying that this should be the product that I buy on the search term.” A lot of people think it's per product, but it's per keyword phrase for the Amazon choice badge. If you get those, your sales will jump through the roof.

You mentioned that you guys develop software. I know that one is called Helium 10. Can you share with people a little bit about that software and how it helps Amazon sellers?

Helium 10 started from our mobile site. Alongside some developers, we created some tools that I wanted, that I didn't see on the market. Or, if they were on the market, they didn't do what I wanted.

I think a lot of people do this now. They will get a keyword tool and then they need an optimization tool and something that tracks, and then they need a hijacker tool, and they end up jumping all over the place.

I said, “I want one place where I can do everything, and if I do keyword research and I click a button, it then moves into some kind of keyword clean-up tool, and then I click a button and it moves everything into an optimization tool for Amazon, specifically.”

We created that and because we have the podcast, people kept asking, “What tools do you use?” I would recommend other tools, but I would also say that we use our own, and eventually, we found that a lot of people wanted our tools.

We didn't know that our podcast would grow to the size that it has today. We worked on our business for 6 months, released it, and it's been on the market for one year now and is available to everybody. We've got 10 tools in there currently and it's growing.

What would you say are some of the top tools that people can use?

About half of the tools that we offer are free. Scribbles is is an Amazon keyword listing optimization tool that assists Amazon sellers with adding more valuable keywords to product titles, descriptions, and more. When you use this tool, you can be sure that you’ve optimized everything.

We have a keyword research tool called Magnet, and one of our most popular tools is called Refund Genie. If you are already selling on Amazon, you know that Amazon loses products, and they don't tell you about it unless you dig deep into your reports.

With our tool, it is free to check and see how much money that Amazon owes you. Then, if you want to have a system in place that creates the files, our tool does it for you automatically. Some people get back $20-30,000 dollars back from Amazon.

It sounds like you guys really focus on optimization. Can you talk about why this is so important?

We have a tool that was created specifically for this, called 5K Checker because that's how many characters Amazon gives you on the back-end for your keywords. I tell everybody that at least once a month, you need to run something similar to our tool.

Basically, grab all of your backend keywords and check it against your Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN).

Our tool does this automatically. It does 4 hours worth of work in seconds. Don't forget to do the front-end as well. A lot of people don't do this. They will check and see if they are indexed by their title and their bullet points, and then in the next month, Amazon will change something, and they will no longer be indexed.

See if you are de-indexed for specific keywords because Amazon will de-index you for stuff. You may notice that a search phrase that is super awesome is not even showing up on Amazon. For example, you could take that and move it from your description to your bullet points.

It's a constant game of tweaking things and making them better. If you do this, you will see your sales either stay steady or continue to grow.

Do you have any final advice for someone who wants to grow an Amazon business?

You don't need the perfect product to start. I didn't have one, and you also don't have to be passionate about the product at the onset. If you are passionate about it, that's cool because you will know about it. However, it's not necessary.

Just launch, get going, and don't go too wide at the onset. That was one of my problems after my first failed product. If you have one product, you only have to deal with one of everything. When you have 4-5 products, you have to deal with way too many things. It multiplies your work tenfold.

If you are just starting out it could become a nightmare, especially if you are working on your business part-time and are in the process of transitioning from your day-job to your full-time Amazon business.

Start with one product, learn the process, and figure out how things work. You can read all about how to build an Amazon business, but until you actually do it and make the mistakes you don't know.

This is how Manny made $1,000,000 on Amazon in only 9 months!

I hope his story has inspired you to start building an Amazon business. If you have the desire to create financial freedom for yourself, there is no better place than Amazon to get started.

I encourage you to check out Manny's website, Helium 10, where you can find all of his insanely powerful tools for Amazon sellers. Manny and his team have graciously put together a bonus for my audience. If you head on over to their website and type in the coupon code, MASTERY, you will get a 10% discount on their products!

Take action and start creating a business that will give you a freedom lifestyle, where you can be your own boss, travel the world and, spend more time doing the things that you are passionate about with the people that you love. Are you ready to build the foundation for an online business that could transform your entire life?

Want to maximize the power of your Amazon product? CLICK HERE to get started with Helium 10! Use the code MASTERYFREE to get 10% off every month & 7 days FREE!