Learn how to start selling on Amazon with these tips from Tiffany Estey and the Amazing Selling Machine (ASM).
Tiffany tells her success story and provides tips on how you can structure your Amazon business, schedule, and success to meet your personal goals. She explains the process of getting started selling physical products on Amazon, how to build a brand, using pay-per-click marketing, focusing on your goals, and using the ASM techniques to brand and market yourself.
Tiffany Estey went from barely making ends meet to running a successful Amazon business after taking the proven Amazon course—Amazing Selling Machine.
She was a pregnant single mother and was struggling to make ends meet. Her second child was due in January, and Tiffany knew she needed to make a change. She wanted to be home with her children, but also needed to pay the bills.
She got a laptop in November, took an ASM course, launched her first product, and made a sale within ten days. She now makes as much as $65k in a month.
Table of Contents:
Getting Started Through the Amazing Selling Machine
Building a Brand
Personal Goals
Using Amazon Sponsored Ads
Marketing Yourself
Single Mom Builds $750K Amazon Business and Something Else Even Cooler – Video Transcript
Because she was working another job, Tiffany started building her Amazon business whenever she had time, which was every single lunch break. She studied the Amazing Selling Machine course on her lunch break. She implemented it on her lunch break.
At first, she was skeptical that she would actually be successful, but she decided to put in the time and dedication to make it happen so she could live the life she wanted. Intensive focus was the key.
After taking the course, she started selling three or four products on Amazon, and sales built very slowly. She closely monitored sales, even checking while she was in labor. By the time her daughter was born, Tiffany was already making $300 per day.
When starting out, it is crucial to focus on selling as many units as possible. Sell them at a discounted rate, give them away with other purchases, do whatever it takes to get the product sold. This improves ranking and gets your company name out there.
Start with friends, family, and your social media. Get your name out there and get them to buy the product. Tiffany even gave out a lot of free product to people in her mom group just to get initial interest and positive reviews. This can sometimes mean losing a bit of money, but it is worth it in the long run.
Focus on providing perfect customer service. Do whatever it takes to make customers happy: provide discounts and refunds, respond to every bad review. That will lead to a loyal customer base.
An initial mistake many people make is trying to find a product that everyone will like, thinking this will mean more sales. However, although more people might see your product, that doesn’t mean they will buy it.
Instead, it is more effective to focus on a niche and have a specific audience in mind. Then, those people can find you easier and your conversion rate is higher.
When you are ready to grow your brand and launch a new product, make sure to appeal to your specific audience. Establish an email list and get your customers to subscribe. This makes it much easier to launch new products.
Initially, you will have to chase customers. But once they know and love your brand, they will only want to buy from you.
Once your brand is at this level, it basically runs itself.
Tiffany now really only focuses her efforts on pay-per-click. These are sponsored ads through Amazon, and is a built-in advertising system.
Pay-per-click is simple, automated audience targeting. You can set them up manually and target popular key words, or you can start off by running automated ads where Amazon figures out the key words.
At this point, Tiffany only has to check on pay-per-clicks monthly to make sure that she isn’t spending too much money on words that aren’t bringing in sales.
More than anything, Tiffany stresses that her main priority is spending time with her children, rather than putting all of her energy into her business.
Amazon makes this easy, as she doesn’t have to physically store or keep any of her inventory. In addition to that, Tiffany has an assistant that spends 30 minutes per day checking Amazon messages so that she can get back to customers.
While there are several methods to grow your business (such as Facebook’s targeted marketing), at this point, Tiffany is able to do the bare minimum to ensure that her business is successful.
Most importantly, know your goals and why you started your business in the first place.
In addition to making the business that she wanted, Tiffany extended the tips from ASM and applied them to her personal life.
Using social media and Youtube to document her weight loss journey, she expanded her brand from just physical goods to her lifestyle. She now has over 40k followers and 2 million views on her Youtube channel. She is now building a health and fitness brand.
Mike McClary: Hey, everyone. Mike McClary here with amazing.com with another live session. Welcome tot his call here. I’m excited to have everyone watching us again today. We have an awesome guest for you that I’m going to bring on in a few minutes here. She is an amazing mom, an awesome seller on Amazon, one of our super successful, Amazing Selling Machine members, and also has a really cool story about other things that have happened for her after she started building her own brands and selling on Amazon. However, before I bring Tiffany onto the call here, I want to remind everyone that if you enjoy this interview, we have several other interviews that we’ve done, and also several other training sessions that we’ve done right here on the amazing.com Facebook page. Feel free after this Facebook Live to check those out.
In addition to the interviews, we also have some live workshops that myself and Matt Clarke and Jason Katzenback and Rich Henderson have hosted. We walk you through finding products on Amazon and suppliers, and how to get them made and shipped to you, and then how to launch those products on amazon.com. Feel free to check those videos out. In addition to that, we have a full four part video training series on amazingsellingmachine.com, where we go in depth. There’s four videos. The first one covers product selection, the next one covers finding your suppliers and having those product shipped to the United States, or wherever you’re selling. The third one covers how to launch and rank your products on Amazon. Then the fourth one covers how to automate and jumpstart this entire business.
Before I get to those videos, I will talk about them in a little more detail at the very end of this call. Before I do that, I want to bring on our guest, Tiffany. She’s an awesome person. I got a chance to meet her at one of our live events that we had. She’s done an amazing job of building her own brand, both her products on Amazon and building her self up as well. Tiffany, welcome to the call and thanks so much for joining us.
Tiffany: Thank you for having me.
Mike McClary: Awesome. Tiffany, you’re an Amazing Selling Machine member. I know that. When did you actually start selling your first products on Amazon?
Tiffany: I started in November of 2014. I was pretty close to the end of my pregnancy. My daughter was due in January, I knew that I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom or as close to it as I could be. I basically said, “From November until January is how long I had to somehow make a business for myself to be able to stay home with her.” I started in November. I asked for a laptop for my birthday, and got a laptop, and that day, I started working on it. My dad actually had purchased the ASM course. I was working for him. He wanted me to do his listings and things like that. In the meantime, I was using the training to start my own. November 20th, I started, and then I actually wrote down November 30th, I had my first organic sale. 10 days of just focus, focus, focus, focus. By the time the stuff got there, I actually made a sale 10 days after.
Mike McClary: That’s amazing. I was going to ask you what you were doing before, and you were giving birth. What was your life or career before selling on Amazon, then?
Tiffany: I had a little bit of a personal situation that landed me as a single mom. I was living in California and I had a job. I was working for the same company, believe it or not, as Athena and Ari. That’s how we all know each other. I was working at that company, came here to be with my family and stuff like that. I took a job in the meantime working for a telemarketing company. I was making bare minimum, 10, 12 dollars an hour, just enough to pay for my son to be in daycare and food. On my lunch breaks is when I was actually doing ASM.
Mike McClary: We’ve heard that story before. How many kids do you have?
Tiffany: Two.
Mike McClary: How old are they now?
Tiffany: Seven and three.
Mike McClary: That’s awesome. You were starting this off for your dad’s business, so you were working for him. Got your first sales within 10 days. Did you guys start with just one product or did you launch multiple products?
Tiffany: Oh, man. I don’t remember. I know it was multiple, not very many, especially now. I would probably say three or four.
Mike McClary: Excellent. You made your first organic sale within 10 days. That had to be pretty exciting to have that happen, right?
Tiffany: Definitely. I was the person who updated my seller app about every 30 seconds.
Mike McClary: Did you know right away that when you were doing this for your dad’s business, that you also wanted to do it for yourself as well?
Tiffany: Yeah. Actually before even my dad purchased it, when Phillip Jeffson introduced us to the course, I was very skeptical. I was like, “There’s no way.” When people were saying their volumes, there’s no way that’s possible that people could be making that much money. I was paying attention and I was really watching and I was following ASM on Facebook, and all social media. I was watching more people I knew, more people I knew, more people I knew successful. I was like, “This is my only shot. First of all, I know that it works. I have no doubt about that.” After seeing as many people as I knew successful, I knew it worked and it wasn’t a matter of that. It was only a matter of having the time and the dedication and making it happen.
Mike McClary: If you’re doing it over lunch time, you certainly have the dedication. I don’t know about the time. You guys started making a sale within a few weeks after getting a product live. Do you remember how long it took before things started taking off, where you realized, “Wow. This is more than just one sale. I’m making multiple sales a day”?
Tiffany: After our first organic sale, it wasn’t like, “Nothing happened.” It was maybe one the next day, maybe none the next day. One, then two, then zero, then one, one. Then it would hit a level, and then it would keep doing that, where it would maintain, drop, maintain, up. Then, I don’t remember exactly. I know in December I did pretty consistent. Even if it was small, it was still consistent. I do remember that by the time I was in labor, don’t judge me, I was checking my sales still. I was like, “This is the day I need to have good sales.” I was checking. By then, I was doing $327, I remember I did on the day I was in the labor, so the 26th of January. By then, $300 a day, not sure what that comes out to a month. My math is horrible, but that was my January.
Mike McClary: Wow. $300 a day is almost $10,000 a month. That’s pretty awesome after that short of time.
Tiffany: Yes.
Mike McClary: Was your dad excited about this too, I’m assuming?
Tiffany: Yes. Me and my dad and my brother were all doing it together. Always, “What are your sales at? What are your sales at?” It was really fun.
Mike McClary: Thinking back to then, what do you find was working for you back then? Were you focused on sponsored ads? On optimizing your listing? Good customer service? Do you remember the types of things you were doing?
Tiffany: Yeah. At that time, the name of the game was as many units as you could give away as possible. Whether you could get people to buy them at a discounted rate, whatever you could do. The more units that you could get your friends and family to buy, the better you would rank. That was really the thing, and finding any way to get your company name out. Even that one word would help you rank better on whatever it was. Even if they were discounted sales, if you gave them to your social media following or your friends or your family for 50% off, and maybe you didn’t make money, and maybe you even lost a dollar on the sale, just if you could get to that point and then watching how the rankings got better and it got easier and easier. I would say that.
Mike McClary: Awesome. I’m going to take a quick little pause there. We’ll explain a little bit more about what we’re talking about, giveaways. I want to welcome everyone again. If you’re just joining us, we’re already up to about 80 people on the call. The numbers continue to go up. Welcome to another Facebook Live. I’m Mike McClary. I’m here with Tiffany. An awesome person, mom, seller on Amazon, human being. We’re here sharing her story about how she got started on Amazon and what her life has been since then. If you don’t mind, please like and share this video. I’m going to do some shout outs. I see Elaine, Athena, you just mentioned her. She’s online. Caroline, Michael [inaudible 00:08:57]. Hey, Michael. Michael and I met in St. Lucia last year for the first time. What an awesome guy. John, Tavika, Bison, Shawn Miller. Hey, Shawn, what’s up? Tammy, Diago. So many people are online all giving you great shout outs, by the way too.
If you guys have any questions for Tiffany, feel free to ask them here under the video. In probably about 15, 20 minutes, feel free to hit it up with all kinds of questions that you might have. Post them here and we’ll get to them. Back to you, Tiffany. Like you had said, back then the name of the game was give away products. I’m imagining over the past couple years as you’ve grown your business, you’ve had to focus on other things as well. What do you think is working for you right now on selling your products?
Tiffany: As far as increasing sales?
Mike McClary: Yeah.
Tiffany: The main thing that I try to focus on, honestly, is pay-per-click. That’s Amazon’s pay-per-click. That changes on a daily basis. I try to at least once a month go in, and by now I have a lot of products, so it’s a little bit more challenging, but I do try once a month to go in there and check everything and make sure that spend is okay. Not spending too much for this one word. Sometimes they’ll spend money on words and not get any sales, so I’ll make sure those don’t go wild. All kinds of stuff like this. My main focus right now is pay-per-click. Honestly, my life is spent being a mom and doing my own social media for my other stuff, which you’re going to talk about. The time that goes into this is very, very minimal. That’s really one of the only thing that I do and it’s minimal hours.
Mike McClary: That was one of my questions for you, is how much time do you really put into this. I’m a father of two. I have a full-time wife that helps take care of the kids, and I still have no idea how you do what you’re doing. I feel like I’m crazy all the time. Hats off. Kudos to you for being able to run this business and raise two awesome young kids as well. One thing I want to point, and I’ll ask you this too. I didn’t get a chance to. You’re talking about pay-per-click, which is, we call it Amazon sponsored ads. It’s a built-in advertising system. Any seller selling products, Amazon can use it. You are pretty good at it. You’re able to do it in a short amount of time, but did you have any experience doing this before you started selling on Amazon?
Tiffany: No. Zero.
Mike McClary: That’s what I figured. Have you sold physical products before online?
Tiffany: Not online. In person.
Mike McClary: In person, okay. Again, Tiffany, myself included, never had a brand of products that sold online. Never did any pay-per-click for products online. You’re doing this in a little bit amount of time. That’s awesome. The other thing I want to talk about too, is that you have recently started expanding your products and your brand. Originally, when you sourced your first products with your dad’s business, did you follow the ASM criteria for those first products?
Tiffany: I want to say initially, no. I tried my best, but obviously, you learn a lot as time goes by. Looking back on it, no, but I tried. What I really realized was important for me, is that to not … This was my biggest mistake. To not try to take a product and aim it to everybody. The niche. It’s really, really important if you have something that you are selling that to one type of person. Here I go with my nose. One type of person. If you’re going to sell a pencil, for instance, that you’re not going to try to sell a pencil to everybody. You’re going to try to sell a pink pencil to a woman. It’s specific because then, those people can find you easier and then your conversion rate is higher.
Finding that out and doing that, which is actually one of the things I learned from my brother, is really what makes or breaks the situation, because yeah, you think that a lot more people will see it, and that’s true, but not a lot more people will buy it, and that’s what that lesson was.
Mike McClary: That’s awesome. You really learned to focus on your target audience to make sure you have the best product for them. That’s great advice right there. Do you have any idea how many products you guys are selling right now?
Tiffany: I have my own brand. My dad has his own brand. Just mine, I think skews-wise, because we have variations, is probably close to 30 to 40 by now.
Mike McClary: That’s a lot.
Tiffany: [inaudible 00:13:43]
Mike McClary: I know it sounds funny. I know people watching this video right now are probably wondering, “When you asked Tiffany how many products she has, why doesn’t she know right away?” I’m the same way. I couldn’t tell you exactly how many skews. Once you start launching and building a brand, you no longer keep track of exactly how many products. Is that right for you?
Tiffany: Exactly.
Mike McClary: You start focusing on the brand, you think of the brand, you don’t think of the product individually. That’s a great number to have. 20 to 30 is awesome. Let me ask you this, then. What’s your criteria? When do you feel like you’re ready to launch another product? Does it have to be a product jumps out at you or do you feel like you have your existing products to a certain point, where you can take on that additional work?
Tiffany: Right now, it’s more of when I have time because I can launch new products all the time, but when I get a chunk of time because focusing with the kids and school and when they’re off and this and all of that, I need a block of four or five hours where I can find a product, make sure that the search is volume is good, because at this point, it’s not find a product based on criteria. It’s find a product now that’s going to go with my line. If I have a line of all of this, a line of pencils, I’m not going to go try to find a line of cups or whatever it is. Right now, that’s what it is. Finding products that go well with my products. If it’s pencils and finding erasers or whatever in this situation.
That, after a certain point, almost limits you, but it’s okay because then you also get to focus more into the products that you have going. That’s where I’m at right now. I am actually in the middle of launching another product right now. I’m going through some stuff with Amazon and trying to get it there with the Hazmat and whatever.
Mike McClary: That’s a great point you bring up, because we teach on Amazing Selling Machine, or ASM, the shortened version of that, we teach a certain criteria for finding products, but really, that’s just to get you started. Later on, once you’re selling, you no longer have to fit yourself in that criteria. You’re able to find your own products that fit your own criteria. Is that right?
Tiffany: Yeah, because you have an audience. You built an audience of people who search for your brand, specifically. Now you get to sell it to them and not just Amazon.
Mike McClary: That’s another question I was going to ask you. Once you’ve built up your current customer base and you’re launching new products, is it easier now because you have existing customers to sell to?
Tiffany: Yeah. I haven’t done the job that I should have done on building them, but they still go to my website and subscribe. Obviously, if you chase them a little bit, they do a better job at doing that or product inserts or whatever you do to get them to go subscribe to your list. A lot of the customers that I have do tell me that they won’t use another product besides mine. Then I have that going for me as well. I don’t have to go chase them. They’re going to come to me regardless. That was the other thing that I actually didn’t answer your question in the beginning, what was the thing that you mainly did, and I said giveaways. It was really important to me that I had 100% customer service, that I did the very best that I humanly, possibly could do.
If a customer wasn’t happy, I didn’t argue. I didn’t say, “But our product is this.” I have noticed this from other people that I’ve tried to help, is they want to say, “My product is really good.” It never matters. What matters is, that that customer walks away regardless of their experience happier than happy. If you have to give them an extra five dollars, whatever you have to do to make sure that customer is happy, that’s really important. Commenting back on their review if they leave you a negative review or for their feedback or anything I got. Making sure that every customer walks away happy so that they never go and tell other people, “Don’t get this product because I had this experience.” They’d go, “It didn’t work for me, but it could work for you.” You want every customer to be as happy as they could possibly be.
Mike McClary: That’s awesome advice. You mentioned customer service, and sometimes people freak out thinking, “I’m not going to start my own business just to answer the phone eight hours a day.” When you say customer service, how long does that really take you to do?
Tiffany: It’s extremely minimal. In the beginning, especially, it’s minutes a week.
Mike McClary: It really is. Amazon is doing practically all the work for you. They’re doing the storing your products, they’re packing them, shipping to customers. They take refunds for you, they take returns for you. What Tiffany’s talking about is going above and beyond and really making sure that her customers are happy.
Tiffany: Believe it or not, I don’t really get phone calls. I am really fortunate that I don’t have to deal with that as well. I know companies who would be doing this volume would be answering phone calls all day if it was outside of an Amazon business. I’m lucky that, to not even get a call or two a month.
Mike McClary: That’s awesome. I’m the same way. We get I would say, maybe one phone call every day, which is easy enough to call back. We have ours go to a voicemail service so that we don’t actually have to be there answering it. We just call them back once we have time to do that.
Tiffany: That’s awesome.
Mike McClary: Good feedback. Something else, Tiffany. One of the reasons … Not one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, but you have a really cool extra part of your story as well. I know that you started off with your dad, sales took off pretty well, you’ve built your own business, you’re doing extremely well. What is the most you’ve done in a month right now?
Tiffany: 65.
Mike McClary: You say that with like a, “Eh. 65.” That’s $65,000 in a month. That is fantastic. If you extrapolate that out, that’s well over $700,000 a year in sales you’re looking at. I’m assuming your profit margins are pretty good too.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Mike McClary: The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, is in addition to building your own physical products on Amazon, building your brand, you’ve also started marketing yourself as well. Is that right? Tell me a little bit about that. What happened to you in the past couple of years that’s been another change for you in your life?
Tiffany: Because of the whole emotional situation again, being a single parent after my daughter was born for the second time, after I had her, I had gained so much weight. I ended up at 230 pounds and I was really struggling. I’m like, “I have this awesome business and I’m doing these awesome things, and I have two kids, and I was able to do that, so why am I struggling so hard with myself? I should be happier, I should be feeling better.” I decided one day that I was going to lose my weight. I had been overweight my entire life, since I was seven years old. Bad diets, everything, and it never panned out.
I decided one day when I woke up in the morning, if I could do that, I can do this. If I can make that go right, I can myself go right. I started working out at home and changed my diet to a dairy-free and gluten-free lifestyle, and then I decided to document the whole thing. Obviously, when you’re doing ASM you think about these kinds of things anyways. “Let’s share this story with the world.” I decided to post my first day, my first workout on Instagram and I posted every day what I was doing. I got up to 1,000 followers or something like this in a year. Nothing big. It was really cool. A lot of people started their weight loss journeys and stuff because of me, and I was really excited about that.
Then, I went to the ASM live event. Oh, man. Not many people know this, if anybody, but i remember going after the event, and bawling my eyes out because I was like, “You know what? I don’t know what I’ve been doing.” Even though I related all of that to my Amazon business, I also related it to me and myself. There was another YouTuber on there. I don’t remember his name. The bald guy.
Mike McClary: Stefan.
Tiffany: Stefan. He was there, and he was talking about everything, and I’m like, “You know what? I need to be focusing.” He was like, “The hardest thing that you can do is build a brand. That’s the hardest thing that you can do. Build people who trust you, who love you, and who want to do what you have done.” That is the hardest part. If you have that, you have everything. Then I’m like, “What am I doing? I love my physical products business. I love it so much, and I’ve dedicated my life to it, but I accomplished something that I’ve been trying to accomplish my entire life. The whole world wants to know how. I need to focus and learn what I’ve learned at this ASM live event, to apply that to my Instagram life and my YouTube life, and this whole thing, that’s going to help so many people.”
I focused and I focused and I focused, and I learned what I used at the live event for that, when I should’ve been doing it for my Amazon business. I am now up to almost 40,000 followers. I have almost two million views on my YouTube channel, of people who are changing their lives every day. “I’ve lost 40 pounds, I’ve lost 50 pounds, I’ve lost this. I’ve done this. My husband, we have a better relationship. My kids are doing better. We exercise now.” All of these things because of that. Now, they all ask me to write up what my diet is or how I did it. We wrote up, me and my boyfriend actually wrote up a meal plan because he’s a personal trainer. Then that is super successful as well. None of this, regardless of anything, would be possible without ASM.
You hear this all the time, and I know because people tell me on a daily basis. “I’ve lost so much weight it’s all because of you.” After you hear that 10 times a day, it’s like, “Yeah. It’s really amazing. Good job.” Seriously and truly, I wish I could make a video that you guys could see what my life was like. My family doesn’t even recognize the person who I have become. At the end of the day, it’s because of ASM. I was able to exercise, I was able to eat right, I was able to do all of these things because my business would allow me the time to do that at the same time of taking care of my kids.
Mike McClary: That’s amazing. Thank you for giving ASM some of the credit. You’ve done this all on your own. It’s amazing. We have so many people saying you look fantastic, by the way. Angie, Tavika, some other people. Marcie wants to know what is your Instagram account name so they can follow you.
Tiffany: My Adventure to Fit.
Mike McClary: My Adventure to Fit on Instagram. Absolutely follow Tiffany on there. You’ve done an amazing job growing yourself personally, growing your business. I have not heard many people say they’ve taken what they’ve learned as far as ASM and building a physical product and brand and changing their personal life the way that you have. It’s just amazing. You mentioned that you and your boyfriend, so sorry to all the people wondering if she’s single. She’s not. She has a boyfriend now. You and your boyfriend put together some eating plans that you’ve been following? You had mentioned, are you actually going to start taking what you know with ASM and launching those as products as well?
Tiffany: Yeah. I want to be able to launch apparel and stuff like this. Again, I don’t have to try to be quiet about it because I am a brand. When you’re a brand and people know you, you don’t compete, because people are coming for your stuff. Nike is not afraid of competitors or whatever. I’m going to do t-shirts and stuff like that. I’m going to be able to sell them on Amazon so people can get them in two days. I don’t have to ship them. As a mom of two kids, I don’t want to have to be packing up t-shirts all day and sending them out. Being able to send them to Amazon and having Amazon take care of it and do that and different things that can help you. I’d like to be able to create a fitness brand of some things that I have used personally in my journey, and do that as well. Again, my audience might be smaller, it might not be Amazon’s audience, but I will be able to sell my products without having to do all the shipping and everything like that.
Mike McClary: Awesome. For those of you who are just joining, we’ve easily surpassed the 100 viewer mark. We’ll get thousands of people watching this afterwards. For those of you who are joining, I’m on with Tiffany today, who is one of our successful ASM members of the thousands we have, who has an awesome personal story. Has taken what she’s learned as far as building a physical product brand and also building her own brand. Not only are you super successful, you’re changing lives with it too, which we love to hear about. That’s got to be really rewarding for you as well.
Tiffany: It is.
Mike McClary: We do have some questions other than people telling you how great you look. A few proposals. Also, we have Jay saying, “I want ASM eight.” Jay, feel free to check out amazingsellingmachine.com. I’m going to talk a little bit more about that later on, what you can get there for free. Free training to figure out if you want to be able to do what I’ve done and what Tiffany has done. We have lots of free training there to get you started, and then some ways to jumpstart that process. Some other questions for you too, Tiffany, if you don’t mind we’re going to ask. Let’s see. Mary is asking, “I’ve seen that you have to order products and stock it. Is this right or wrong?” I think they’re wondering if they are selling their products, do they have to keep that inventory themselves or does someone else do that for them?
Tiffany: Nope. You don’t have to keep anything. Amazon keeps everything. The only way you would be doing that is, if you decided to fulfill it yourself, which nobody wants to do because you’re not going to get as many sales. The name of the game is to have it filled by Amazon, and that’s the easiest way to do it.
Mike McClary: Yep, absolutely. Amazon does all that for you. They do all the customer service too. You pay them a small amount to do that, but it is really worth it. Let’s see. David Kazakov is asking, “How do you check FDA certificates from suppliers are legitimate, and does Amazon have a list of products that need to be FDA approved?” Do you have to deal with any kind of FDA approval?
Tiffany: Mm-mm (negative).
Mike McClary: What we’d recommend, David, is don’t start off with a product that requires FDA approval. You can, but I always like choosing the path of least resistance. As a matter of fact, on amazingsellingmachine.com, under our training video one, which again I’ll get to that after this. I’m probably getting ahead of myself here. We give you a list of product categories that are the easiest to start with, so they don’t require you to go out there and get FDA certification or to deal with that. Start off with something simple, and then once you know what you’re doing, you can expand your personal brand and yourself later on.
Tiffany: [inaudible 00:28:24]
Mike McClary: Sana has a question for you. “Is it okay if you don’t have your own website when you launch your first product?”
Tiffany: Yeah. I didn’t do that until months in.
Mike McClary: Definitely. You don’t need to have that. Later on, you can launch that. I don’t know about you, Tiffany. We get 95% of our sales, if not more, on Amazon. How about you?
Tiffany: Oh, I would say 99.
Mike McClary: Excellent. Mary’s asking also, “In order to find those customers for your giveaways, it takes a long time. Was it hard for you to find customers to give away your products to?”
Tiffany: In the beginning, I used my mom groups that I was in. I basically contacted the admin of the group and say, “I’m giving away products for free,” or whatever it is, “For two dollars for the lower price items. Is there any way I could promote this in your group?” They pretty much always said yeah. Then I did that. My products were geared towards moms, so that’s what worked for me.
Mike McClary: Awesome. Also, we have Facebook now. Facebook is unbelievable for finding people with detailed targeting that you want. Let me ask you this, Tiffany, have you started doing a lot of Facebook advertising yet?
Tiffany: No. Right now, I’m really not doing anything besides pay-per-click. I did actually try it, though, for the purpose of giveaways to promote it at a good discount. It was very fruitful, so I definitely recommend doing that.
Mike McClary: Are you going to the live event?
Tiffany: I don’t know.
Mike McClary: That’s okay. Next time I see you, we’ll talk about Facebook advertising. We get a ton of sales off of Facebook advertising. When Tiffany said she’s not doing a lot, I don’t look at that as a negative thing. I look at that as a whole other world of potential that she has for growing her business.
Tiffany: I basically tell people, I’ve scraped into one percent of ASM of what I’ve learned and what there is. I am picking the lowest hanging fruit. If I focused the way other people focus on ASM and did put the hours in on a regular day to do that, I would have a whole different game. I prefer being a mom to my children. That’s my goal right now. When they’re a little bit older and in school and stuff like that, then I will focus. Yes, I do realize I’m sitting on a gold mine.
Mike McClary: That’s awesome. What a great testimonial to how different people with different goals can run this business. If you want to do millions a year, some people do millions a month. There’s the potential out there. If you want to keep your lifestyle and focus on what’s really important to you like your kids, you can do that as well. For your Amazon business, how much time do you think you spend a week on the Amazon business right now, Tiffany?
Tiffany: I have an assistant that I have. She puts in pretty much a half an hour a day just doing the Amazon messages. They have to be answered within 24 hours, and I don’t want that obligation. If my kid has a fever or I have to do this or that, I will probably forget it. She works a half an hour a day. That’s the majority of what happens. Then, I will go in there and check things every other day and make sure my listings are up and everything is good, nothing crazy is happening. No emails from Amazon and stuff like that. Just a few minutes a day. Then I try on the first of each month, to spend about two or three hours to do my pay-per-click. Embarrassingly little amount of time and I hate to say this, and I feel stupid a little bit, but again, I choose to be a stay-at-home mom.
Mike McClary: Don’t feel stupid. I think that’s amazing. It really is. One more question. Did you source your products from the U.S. or from overseas?
Tiffany: United States.
Mike McClary: United States. Okay. Awesome. Have you considered or is it just not a need to even find products overseas yet?
Tiffany: I feel like I didn’t do a good enough job paying attention to the ASM course where it says about how to do all of that. To be completely honest with you, I did not graduate high school. I’m not the smartest when it comes to a lot of these things. Hate to say it, but I’m not exactly sure about communicating with them and stuff like that, so again, if I paid attention in the ASM course, I would know how to do it, but I’m a little shy to talk to people in China. I don’t really know what to say and stuff like that. I am going to go there.
Mike McClary: I think that’s so endearing. You are a lot smarter than you like this of yourself. You’re amazing. Lots of people on here are saying the exact same thing as well. Last thing is, Kavika wants you to sell him that pencil that you actually used as an example. Maybe Kavika, if you follow her … One more time. What’s your Instagram account?
Tiffany: My Adventure to Fit.
Mike McClary: My Adventure to Fitness. Maybe you can convince-
Tiffany: To Fit.
Mike McClary: Give away that as a prize. Last question, I’ll let you answer this one too before we close this off. Favorite Phillip is asking, “Are the pay-per-click you’re talking about on Amazon anything similar to Google Ads?”
Tiffany: No. It’s Amazon own advertising. I haven’t reached into Google Ads yet.
Mike McClary: It’s a lot simpler. I have used Google Ads, Favorite. The Amazon system is so much simpler. Literally, if you want to, you can use what’s called automatic target. Do you guys use automatic targeting also right now?
Tiffany: Yeah. I do both. There’s no “you guys.” It’s just me.
Mike McClary: You guys. I keep saying that. I figure your kids will be brought into the business at some point. It’s very simple. You can set them up manually when you target the keywords, Favorite, or you can start off. What we do and what Tiffany does, use both. Run some automated ads where Amazon figures out the keywords, and then you also focus on the keywords you know works for you. All right. That’s it for the questions. I think we covered most of them. We got to move along here. Tiffany, I want to thank you once again for being on the call. You’re awesome, you’re amazing, your story is great. As everyone here is saying, you look fabulous, so you absolutely have done an awesome job on your own personal self and brand too. Thanks again for joining us today.
Tiffany: Thank you for having me.
Mike McClary: Anyone else watching, if you guys want to learn more about how I got started, how Tiffany got started selling on Amazon and it definitely has changed her life, feel free to check out amazingsellingmachine.com. We have four absolutely free training videos on there, like I mentioned before. The first one is going to talk about how easy it is to get your own account set up and how to find products to sell on Amazon that you can private label for yourself. We even give you a list of 100 hot product opportunities just to show you how easy it is to find products to sell. The second training video talks about finding suppliers for those products. It’s no good if you find a great product, but you have to go out in your basement and build that product. We don’t want you doing that. We want you finding someone else to make those products for you. You can do it like Tiffany does in the United States, you can find suppliers, or you can find products being made overseas. We show you how to do that.
In the third video, we show you how to launch those products on Amazon and get them ranking in the top pages on Amazon, so people that already going, a million people a month, go to Amazon looking for products. We’re going to show you how to get your products out there in front of those buyers so that you can keep start making sales from day one. Then the fourth video shows you how to really automate and jumpstart this entire business to get selling up as quickly as possible. Feel free to check that out. Also, you do have the option to join the Amazing Selling Machine. It’s the course that we have. The full blown eight week course. It’s all covered on there as well. The free training, it’s absolutely the way I say it. It’s completely free. If you want to take it to the next level and join our community, where myself and Matt and Jason and Rich Henderson and Tiffany live and thrive and get to know each other, feel free to join them as well. Check it out at last. I highly recommend you do that. Go there.
Also, if you want to check out more interviews like this one with other people … I know Tiffany knows Angie. We’ve had her on these calls before too. We’ve had Eric Tui on these calls. Several other people like that. They’re friends of ours, friends of Tiffany’s. We’ve all met at live events or masterminds. Feel free to check out the other interviews right here on the amazing.com Facebook page as well. That’s all we have for today. I want to thank Tiffany once again. Awesome to see you again. I know you won’t be making it to our next live event, which is Seller Con in April, but hopefully I’ll see you soon at some other event. Thanks so much. Mike McClary here from Amazing Selling Machine, and I want to thank everyone for joining us today. Tiffany, thank you, and we hope to …
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