I would like to share with you how to make money on Amazon in 2019. I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Clark, the co-founder of Amazing.com and The Amazing Selling Machine (ASM). The Amazing Selling Machine is a training program and live event that teaches entrepreneurs how to build real, fast-growth businesses selling physical products by leveraging the power of Amazon.
I interviewed Matt back in 2013, when I was publishing eBooks on Amazon. Since then, Matt has built one of the most popular and successful business-oriented training programs ever created. He has impacted thousands of peoples' lives, who have now gone on to quit their 9-5 jobs and created the financial freedom they have always dreamed of.
Matt Clark continues to put out a high-quality product, year after year. His consistency and dedication to his customers and his product is amazing. His work has made a large impact in my life. Do you want to know how to make money on Amazon in 2019? If so, there is no better person to learn from than Matt Clark.
Watch the video below:
(Click here to watch on YouTube)
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Do you want to become a successful Amazon seller? CLICK HERE for access to my FREE Amazon training which will help you get started!
How did you get into selling on Amazon and eventually creating your program, The Amazing Selling Machine?
The past four years have flown by. When I was in college, I knew that I wanted to start my own business, but I didn't know what I was going to do. I worked in the investment banking industry for 7 months, but I soon became miserable. My Dad was running a medical business, so I started to help him with that.
During that time, I found that he was selling some very high-end health products, which back then, were only sold through doctors’ offices. They were legal, but I found out that these types of products weren’t being sold online. I wasn’t a programmer, nor was I savvy about selling online. I just dove in and started learning as much as possible.
Back then, if you wanted to sell physical products, it usually only occurred through setting up your own ecommerce website. I learned everything I could about Google Ads, because that was the main source of traffic, and then SEO, and then I started learning about Amazon. I started selling some of my products on there. I had six people in the Philippines working for six weeks, 8 hours a day, adding every product from my ecommerce store to Amazon. I went from selling 10 products to 11,000 products on Amazon.
I started getting orders coming in on Amazon, but when I would send them to the distributor, they kept saying that they were out of stock. Amazon doesn’t put up with poor customer service, so I had to take all of my products off their site, and started narrowing down how I could make Amazon work for me. Through a chance encounter, I met a guy that private labeled one of my top products. Soon thereafter, my margins shot up, and that’s when I really started learning how Amazon worked.
Can you tell us a little more about the concept of private labeling?
You can privateany product, but one of the easiest products to private label is a supplement. Let's take the most basic supplement on the planet – Vitamin C. The contents are the same across every supplier. There are a lot of manufacturers that will take the raw capsules and put them in bottles, with their brand name on the outside.
It's a way of saying, “Here is my brand name and my branding” (colors, logos, fonts). When you put the brand name on the bottle, now you have your own brand of that product. For example, if someone else is selling the same product for $4.99, but you add extra value through better marketing, customer service, guides, reports, etc., you can possibly sell the same product for $15.99. Now, you have better margins because you are playing a different game, by providing the highest value possible, whereas your competitors are providing the lowest cost possible.
How have opportunities on Amazon changed in the last few years?
Since we started teaching ASM, Amazon has doubled in size. If you look at it's growth rate, it’s insane. It grows at 20% a year, and multiple billions of dollars/year. It's doing things that no company in history as every done, especially for physical products. It’s making buying physical products so simple. This means the number of opportunities to sell on Amazon has grown exponentially.
Sales on Amazon's international platforms, Germany and Japan in particular, have picked up like crazy. We are so used to buying stuff on Amazon in the U.S. or Canada, we don’t realize that in Europe Amazon is still like it was here five years ago. One of our customers who took our course was making $40,000 euros last month, and now he’s making $80,000 euros/month, AND he’s only selling in Germany.
If you are into the online marketing world, online retail is still less than 30% of all physical retail, but Amazon’s actual percentage of online retail is getting bigger. The total pie is getting bigger, and Amazon's piece of the pie is increasing. They will soon be doing $500 billion in revenue, without doing anything innovative. It’s just the direction that the company is going.
What I love most about your training is that you teach people how to build a brand that will allow them to have a competitive advantage, long-term. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of building a brand?
When we first started teaching ASM, we advocated for Amazon, but at the end of the day, that mindset and approach isn’t what Amazon wants, and it’s for sure not what customers want. The reality is that you could be running your business on a beach in Thailand, but a real product will be landing on someone’s door step and they will be experiencing that product in real-time. The better that experience is, the better your business is going to be, long-term. We recommend that people focus on building a solid brand that people respect and want to buy more from because then everything is simpler.
On a tactical level, say you sell one product on Amazon and it makes you $10,0000/month in profit. Then you want to launch a second product in a different niche. The problem is that you end up managing two brands, two email lists, two social media accounts, etc., so there is no leverage.
If you want to grow your business even more, Amazon will tell you what the next best product is to sell. You can then tap into all of your existing customers on social media, email, etc. and say, “Hey, I’ve got this other product that is great and you should buy it.” Ideally, they go buy your product, leave great reviews, and you can then apply the same marketing cycle to your next product, but make the results even more effective. That is the value of building a brand; it’s about leveraging.
Building a brand isn’t just about selling multiple products under the same name. You should be doing continuous product improvement. There are so many opportunities to make a slightly better product than the ones Amazon creates. It takes a lot of time and money, and it is beyond the scope of what we teach, but there are small things that you can do in order to make your products stand out. The value is that you will have happier customers, less refunds, and you will be able to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
How has your program, ASM, evolved and changed in the last 18 months?
Our philosophy with ASM has always been, “What can we do to get somebody who is starting from scratch, whereever they are, the best results possible with this program?” We strive to stay current, which is why we chose to close our doors for 18 months.
The business is changing on Amazon, so we needed to make sure that we were evolving as well. We didn’t have enough breathing room to fix anything, but when we did, we decided to re-do our entire strategy. I got so busy managing ASM that I had to get rid of my physical products business because I didn’t have the time to devote to it. I started working on a case study business, and analyzed how it worked from the ground up.
I began discovering some new things that are working very effectively. For example, I've realized the power of Facebook offers. The more you can align with what Amazon wants, and what customers want, the better your business will do.
We have some people that are doing $20-30 million/year on Amazon, and part of that is about playing the long game, so we are incorporating what is working RIGHT NOW, with regards to product selection. We have a better and more comprehensive strategy with regards to marketing.
Our goal is to teach people how to create multiple successful products in their Amazon businesses, and master things like product selection, package inserts, building an email list from day 1, evaluating samples, doing ads on Amazon, getting traffic outside of Amazon, etc. Our new program is laid out sequentially, and it is better than ever.
We also found out how important a community is to someone’s success. Oftentimes, you are building a business on your own and you don’t have a support system. You need a network that you can tap into for additional strategies and tactics. We know that there will be individual losses that happen in your business that we can’t predict.
We have people who we call, “the mentors”, who have done really well in their businesses after taking our ASM course, and who want to help people in the community. They are there to make sure that if you have any sort of issue in your business, they will help you resolve it. Things like account issues, supplier issues, marketing, product set-up, etc.
Another big thing we are doing with our new course is we are including a private resource vault, which is a collection of resources to speed up your success and remove any extra costs or time in running your business. For example, we provide you with our personal freight forwarder contacts so that things run more smoothly for you, photographer contacts to get great pictures of your products, etc. We also do weekly coaching calls so that you can get the best results possible with our program.
Any words of advice for someone that is thinking about taking a leap of faith and starting an Amazon business?
Like anything else in life, the big thing is taking the first step, and we try to make the first step as easy as possible, which is why we provide free Amazon training to get you started. At the end of the day, it’s about entrepreneurship. You have to take some level of risk. We do our job to minimize as much risk as we can.
A lot of people think that the risky thing is starting the business, but I think it’s about making your entire financial livelihood dependent on someone else. Yes, it can feel safe to have a 9-5 job, but on any day, your boss could wake up, decide on a new business strategy, and let you go, at a drop of a dime.
If you want freedom in your life, you need to learn how to run a business the right way. Ride on Amazon’s coat tails to get yourself started, because they have built-in traffic, built-in support and an infrastructure. We can still say, with no reservations, that if you are going to build a business an Amazon business is the one to build.
For someone that has zero experience, I see no other opportunity like it. You can build it as big as you want. We have the full spectrum, from people making $5-10,000/month to those that have sold their businesses for $10 million. It's the same model, it just depends on what you want at the end of the day. It’s the path to freedom and living whatever kind of life that you want, and this is the best opportunity in order to make it your reality.
I’m so grateful that I was able to share with you how to make money on Amazon in 2019. I hope Matt's story motivates you to build a successful Amazon business. Take advantage of his free Amazon training! It has changed the lives of so many people, including myself. In the words of Tony Gaskins Jr., “If you don't build your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.” Financial freedom is yours for the taking!
Do you want to become a successful Amazon seller? CLICK HERE for access to my FREE Amazon training which will help you get started!