The Amazon Formula To Sell 8-Figures & Beyond with Jeff Lieber: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like No Straight Path. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active and we'll be breaking down the Amazon formula to sell eight figures and beyond. To drop these value bonds, I brought Jeff Lieber into EO Fire Studios. Jeff is the founder of an Amazon consulting agency, Turnkey Product Management. He's helped Amazon sellers grow to sell eight figures and beyond since 2014.

0:34He loves helping people achieve their goals. And Fire Nation, if you come up with a compliment to your product that is a must-have that's better than just creating a competing product. And great images, great sales copy video, and great customer reviews results in high conversion rates almost every time, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Jeff and our sponsors. One of my favorite conferences to attend each year is HubSpot's annual inbound conference and is coming up fast. Join us in Boston from September 5th to the 8th, 2023 for an event like no other.

1:11Inbound brings together leaders across the business space, including sales, marketing, customer success, and operations teams. The goal at Inbound to help you discover all the latest trends and tactics you can implement in your business right now. Learn, be inspired, and walk away with practical tips to help you tackle your next challenge, supercharge your sales and marketing and ignite your customer service. Inbound is featuring many must-see speakers this year, including Reese Witherspoon, Guy Raz, and Neil Patel, just to name a few. Whether you choose a general admission ticket or go the VIP route, you're sure to leave Boston feeling on fire.

1:50Visit inbound.com to get your tickets today. Jeff, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. Hey, what's up, Fire Nation? Yeah, my name is Jeff Lieber. And yeah, let's see. I guess back in 2014, kind of a funny story is I was working a nine to five job. And what happened was, is I was, you know, had that entrepreneurial bug. I'd been listening to podcasts like yours and other people. And I was, you know, looking at different business models. And then I stumbled upon the Amazon business model at that time. And I learned the steps to source a product.

2:32And you're choosing what product to get started with. And out of all the products in the world, I was thinking, what would be the coolest, sexiest product I could brag to my friends about? And of all the products under the sun, I chose to buy a 20-foot container of puppy pee pads for training dogs how to pee on a mat. And I spent almost like 70 % of my life savings, 15 grand at the time, on that container, wired it to China, had no idea the risks that were involved with that. And luckily, they did ship me a container of way too many puppy pads to sell. And it took me about a year to sell through that container.

3:10Thank goodness it worked out and survived. Well, if they were on the market a few months ago, I would have bought one because we do have a new puppy in our life. His name is Gus and we love him dearly. And he has needed some pee pads as he's learned how to get to house trains. But I'm happy to say we're past that stage for the most part now, knock on wood. But Fire Nation, as I shared in the introduction, we're talking about the Amazon formula to sell eight figures and beyond. So, I mean, you had that nine to five, Jeff, back in 2014. you decided to take the leap. So when exactly did you get started selling products on Amazon?

3:49I mean, I know you said you start with a puppy pad, so maybe move on to the next point from that. And how did that experience actually lead you to starting turnkey product management? Yeah. So the intention was not to start turnkey product management. That came a few years later. So luckily, like I said, that product ended up selling decently well, but I ended up launching additional pet products. And then my sister had an idea for a baby products brand. So we launched that. And my friend's dad had an idea with an awesome patented dog toy. So we launched that on Kickstarter and partnered up on that.

4:23And then so all of a sudden I was doing a ton of stuff. And then I had a few friends from college who had awesome products. They did, you know, sunglasses and launched on Kickstarter and were doing awesome on Shopify and sales channels like that. but they were struggling on Amazon and they saw me having success with a lame product like puppy pee pads and they're like why can't we do that so I ended up helping them and they just said can you just manage it for us can you just do it what we'll pay you and I was like sure and so that was really the first you know consulting client that I ever had but it was just a friend and it was fun you know working with them and ended up growing them to over six figures in their first year and then they referred a friend and they referred a friend and now I had you know five clients as well in addition to all the brands so needless to say I was almost envious of my previous nine to five job that I had quit because I couldn't do it all and I was like man why did I even quit I'm like so stressed out and overwhelmed and managing way too much stuff and so I just said what what really would make me the happiest and what am I the best at and that was selling on Amazon so what I did was decided to just sell my stakes out of all of my other companies in about nine month period.

5:36And solely went in all in on turnkey product management, you know, gave it an official name. And that was about three or four years ago and built a team, hired my sister, my cousin and a bunch of great, great people along the way. And now we're helping a lot of companies to scale their businesses on Amazon to seven and eight figures and beyond. Mine included Fire Nation. If you followed me for a little while, you knew that back in 2016, I launched the Freedom Journal on Kickstarter. It absolutely crushed it. We did$453 ,000 in just 33 days. Followed it up a year later with the Mastery Journal, did 280K.

6:12Followed it up a year later with the Podcast Journal, which we just went straight to Amazon on. And now I have the 100-Day Gold Journal as well. So I've been coming up with these great products and putting them out. But the reality is, I don't know how to maximize my sales on Amazon. and I'm doing a million other things. Like, you know, I'm writing a traditionally published book right now. I'm doing this podcast. I have affiliates, promotions, JVs, joint ventures, all this different jazz. I can't spend time like just becoming this Amazon master as well. So when Jeff came to me and said, dude, we can really light things up for you with your journal sales on Amazon because you're doing a lot of good things.

6:48But if we take those good things and make them great, your sales will go through the roof. So Jeff, why don't I hand it over to you for a second? because I know we have some specific numbers that I'm looking at right now that just make me smile with just happiness and joy. In just 60 days, talk to us about what you were able to do on Amazon with our journals. Yeah, so it's been awesome because I remember seeing your Kickstarter and your product launch a few years ago. And it's kind of funny that it came full circle and had the opportunity to help you optimize your listings and that you didn't have anybody helping you there.

7:22And so, yeah, so we came in And it's only been 60 days since we started, but we've already boosted your Amazon sales by 58%. And we've been managing your Amazon pay-per-click advertising campaigns. And we were able to bring your profitability and increase it by 32 % in the last 60 days. And then we overhauled. And you already had really strong listings, but you're missing a few critical things on there that could boost it. And we boosted your conversion rates by about 50 % on average across the three products and a lot of other benefits too. But yeah, to be honest, it's one of the fastest growing things in 60 days.

8:03Those are pretty great results. Normally it takes a little bit longer than that, but it's been awesome working with you guys. Well, it's been awesome. And this is the thing, Fire Nation, you need to realize about things like Amazon sales is it's compounding on top of itself. So now because we're getting more sales, Amazon's like, oh, wow, they're getting more sales. Like that's a good thing. And so we're getting more sales. So Amazon's featuring us more. We're moving up the rankings. We're getting more reviews because we're getting more sales. That's boosting our rankings. And so, you know, now we're like, you know, people also buy this and that.

8:32And of course, if someone buys a Freedom Journal, that next page says people also buy the Mastery Journal and the Podcast Journal. And so it's just having this massive, compounding, amazing effect that turned key product management. And of course, Jeff and his team, you know, have been able to just maximize for us. and it's been so awesome working with you guys. We could talk for literally hours about all the benefits that's come from just working with you for the last 60 days and find a issue. Like when you find people like Jeff and his company who literally more than pay for themselves with all the things that they've been doing and that massive increase in profitability, that's when you know you're having a massive win, win, win with everything involved.

9:12So it's pretty cool too. We're not gonna say the exact person because it's kind of a little bit of a secret, but you've advised and trained one of the sharks on Shark Tank. And we're talking their entire portfolio of companies on Amazon. So talk to us quickly about that. And then I want to do a deep dive specifically into your five-step formula. Yeah. Again, we just kind of got really fortunate and reached out to them at a time when we thought they could use some help and we tried to offer some value. And then that led one conversation to another and then a whole vetting process. And, you know, they take it very seriously when, you know, they're talking about so many different companies.

9:53And we were fortunate enough to be able to do a whole training series, like custom built for them. And now we're actually working with a handful of their companies on an ongoing basis as well. And it's been super fun to see, you know, how much we can grow them just like your company as well. You know, they're usually just like you. They're great at so many other things, like at product design and all this great stuff. But Amazon is sort of just like an afterthought for a lot of people. But the opportunity is so big. So it was really cool to be able to get to help them. That's awesome. And Fire Nation, when you're just willing to, number one, become an expert at something and become great at your craft and then go out there and offer your services, in some cases for free at the beginning, to really prove yourself.

10:37Because otherwise, why are they going to take a flyer on you if they don't know, like, and trust you yet? amazing things can happen. And think of the boost that Jeff and his entire company, Turnkey Product Management is going to get, you know, when he can say, just like he was able to say right now that, hey, I am literally working with the entire portfolio of companies from one of the sharks on Shark Tank. So super cool stuff. Let's now not wait any longer and dive into this five-step formula. So break this down for us, you know, maybe go through all five steps quickly, And then let's kind of circle back and go through each step one by one.

11:10Yeah, sounds good. So, I mean, at a high level, this is basically six years of trial and error on Amazon. You know, we've talked with over a thousand companies over the years, worked with hundreds, and we've seen a lot of companies scale really, really quickly and have great success. And we've seen a lot of companies that don't make it and fail or they just never get to that next level. And so we really boiled down, like, if you're doing these five steps, you're going to have success and growth on Amazon. So yeah, I can just jump into the quick step number one if you want. Let's jump in, brother.

11:45Yeah. So step one is basically you need to commit to dominating on Amazon. So believe it or not, not everyone actually sells on Amazon. If you have a physical product or a brand, especially like some of the Shark Tank companies, they were more focused on retail or some of the other aspects or Shopify. And that's awesome. And we definitely, lots of our best clients that we've ever had, they're multi-channel. They're not only on Amazon or only on one channel. But a lot of companies just don't realize how big the opportunity is on Amazon, especially with coronavirus, with COVID-19. With this pandemic, as you've probably seen, like shopping has changed forever, right?

12:24Like people try to avoid going to the stores and retail stores and grocery stores, if at all possible, unless you really need it. And Amazon has probably been one of the biggest beneficiaries of that so much of consumer shopping has shifted to amazon and i don't see that changing because now people have gotten to fully experience amazon prime and people just love and are devoted to to amazon and so you need to be there and you need to be maximizing that channel and um and a lot of people don't know like how big the opportunities are so one example i showed the Shark Tank's portfolio was I just picked a random product and, you know, there's softwares out there that you can look at the top revenues of an estimate.

13:08What are the revenues of the product selling? And resistance armbands, right? Those like home workout bands. There's nothing really too special about it. Just basically a piece of, you know, rubber. There's a company out there that's not a client of ours, but it's just called Fit Simplify. And it's a company that no one had ever heard of when I asked them on the call. My team hadn't heard of them. They're doing over 600 grand a month in revenue of just that one SKU. And that company has other products too. But there's nothing special about it. There's no patent. There's nothing unique. It's just, you know, they did a good job optimizing their Amazon page and getting reviews and doing the stuff that we'll talk about today.

13:47But 600 grand a month in revenue every month. And it's going to go up from there. That is nuts. I love that. So step one, in the books. Let's move on to step two. Yeah. So step two, we talked about building a brand. So I'm a huge, huge proponent of the model on Amazon that I think is a great model is you build a brand that serves one type of customer, one audience. So let's say you're selling yoga mats, for example. You really want to go all in and serve that customer in multiple ways. You don't just want to sell a yoga mat and maybe an iPhone case and spread yourself all over these niches, I'm a big proponent of let's build a brand around one customer and serve that customer in as many ways as possible so that you can launch two or three or five or 10 plus products that serve that customer.

14:38So yoga mats, yoga blocks, yoga towels, you could do yoga digital training courses, you could sell affiliate products, right? There's so many ways to serve that customer and that's going to, you know, give you so much more ability to like acquire those customers because your lifetime value of one customer. If you acquire them one time, but you have 10 products to sell them over the next couple of years, you can afford to pay a lot more money to acquire those customers through ads or marketing or however you want to do it and be profitable in the long run. So I'm a huge proponent of doing that.

15:12And one of the best examples of that was one of our clients called VitaCup Coffee. You may have seen them and they're in Target now and retail and they're crushing it now everywhere. But when they came to us, they were just starting out. They were doing seven grand a month on Amazon. They had just started and they were great at off Amazon stuff, not great at Amazon. And so we helped them basically optimize Amazon and help them come up with like what types of products would be great to complement and sell more different types of coffees and flavors and adding supplements to it. They grew from seven grand a month to 300 grand a month in just 180 days.

15:52It was insane. That's insane. And I just want to double down on this Fire Nation. Compliment, don't cannibalize. And I'm going to raise my hand right here. I mean, listen, when I launched the Mastery Journal, I launched it because I was like, this journal needs to be out there. I know that my audience needs to learn how to master productivity, discipline, and focus. I know that. But guess what happened? When I launched it, a lot of people were like, awesome, this looks great. Now, which one should I buy? The Freedom Journal or the Mastery Journal? and what was I doing? I was cannibalizing my sales because people were choosing one or the other.

16:24I mean, sure, some people were buying two, et cetera, but at the end of the day, if I had come up with a compliment to the Freedom Journal that was a must-have in addition to, it would have been so much better than just creating essentially a competing product. So, you know, my mistake, again, if I was working with, you know, turnkey product management back in 2017, I might have avoided that mistake. So something great to think about. I love all of that. And Fire Nation, we have steps three, four, and five as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. The Product Boss, hosted by Jacqueline Snyder and Mina Kunlo-CTEP, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

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18:16Increase customer satisfaction and sales with personalized shopping experiences today. Visit tidio.com slash fire and get an exclusive 20 % discount just for entrepreneurs on fire podcast listeners. That's T-I-D-I-O.com slash fire. Tidio.com slash fire. So Jeff, we're back and man, And we are just dropping value bomb after value bomb. I can't wait for the third step. Take it away. All right. So the third step is now you have to build a product listing page that has a high conversion rate, right? It has to be attractive to buyers. And we've literally, I mean, this topic, there's fundamentals to it, but there's also Amazon's always changing with the different opportunities you can do on your product page to boost conversion rate.

19:04like we so that's why like we literally do new episodes uh of of this all the time on on what the latest is on our on our podcast we have a podcast called playbook for amazon podcast so what works now may be out of date six months from now so make sure to stay up to date we have some clients that we have that have over a 40 conversion rate so that's that's like what's possible not everyone reaches that level but some of the fundamentals you need to have you need to have an amazing main product image in the upper left hand corner you've all seen that in the search results and then you have other image slots where you can make beautiful infographics and it's not that expensive to do a little photo shoot you know might cost a couple hundred bucks pay a graphic designer to edit those into nice infographics with text overlaid and you know you've seen those beautiful amazon pages on amazon before and you've probably seen some amazon pages that they only have one crappy image and nothing else.

19:58And you're like, what? Like, I think I want this product, but I'm not sure how it works, right? So you really need to put yourself in the customer's shoes so that if they just land on your product page, within five seconds, they should know exactly what your product does, what problem it solves, and whether it meets their needs so that they can just click add to cart and boom. So those are some of the key things. Another great thing you can do is, if you have the capability, is to add video to your Amazon product listing. You've probably started seeing video pop up more and more on Amazon. So like what we did with you, John, is we took your great Kickstarter video that you made, which was a great sales video selling your product, and we just simply cropped off the end that talked about Kickstarter, and we just changed it to Amazon.

20:40So it's like, it can literally be that simple. And that, I think, was one of the big factors that helped boost your conversion rate. So the key is you really need to have, I mean, there's a lot of things that go into it. We have a whole checklist that goes into it. We can give that to you guys. But for brevity, I won't go through every single thing that you need. But if you've got great images, great sales copy of video, and great customer reviews, that will result in a high conversion rate almost every single time. And that's the best way to do it. So Fire Nation, a lot of great things to learn here.

21:15And yes, that video, I've actually gotten comments from people that say, wow, I just really enjoyed watching that video first and maybe understand the product. So just things like this, this is working right now. And I love how Jeff did say, hey, asterisk, like this may not be working in six months. So that's why you want to keep up with Jeff. And of course, with Turnkey product management and what they're recommending at the current moment in time to get the latest and the greatest. So what is that fourth step? Cool. So once you have a great optimized listing, the next step is you need traffic, right where the customer is going to come from and so really the at the end of the day I mean I could talk for hours on this but at the end of the day I would say you need to do two things number one is send at least one outside traffic source to your Amazon listing and then number two is send Amazon advertising PPC traffic to your listing and you just keep doing that until Amazon starts rewarding you with free exposure they're going to boost you up to the top of page one when people are searching for productivity planner, right?

22:18We want you on the top of page one, John, and that's what our goal is going to be. And that's what you really need to do. So when we talk about outside traffic, it can be anything. It depends whatever your assets are. If you have an email list, social media, if you have connections with influencers, paid traffic, free traffic, it doesn't matter what the source is, just pick one that's in your real house and go for it and send some traffic to Amazon. So that's point number one. And then the second piece is what's called sending Amazon PPC advertising traffic. And this is a really, really big topic.

22:55I can't go super in depth into it. But a lot of you, you know, when you search on Amazon, let's say you're searching for, you know, daily planner, productivity planner, right? There's millions of people searching for that all the time on Amazon. Well, most people searching for that, they don't actually have a brand in mind, right? Like even myself, when I go search there, I'm like, yeah, whatever Amazon puts in front of me, I'm just going to trust that. And if it looks good and it's got good reviews, I'm going to buy it. And what most people don't know is that about half of the search results on Amazon are actually ads.

23:29Those are not organic products. Those are actually ads. People are paying maybe 10 cents or 30 cents per click. Every time you click on that, you're being charge that, but it might result in a sale. It will a lot of the time because people are looking for a productivity planner like yours. And so that's why we were able to improve the profitability of your ad campaigns because we just targeted really, really laser targeted terms that we knew your product would be a great fit for those keywords. And it's been amazing. And so that's how your profitability was able to go up 32 % in just a couple of months.

24:05And that's the end of the day, Fire Nation. How is your profitability stacking up? Because there's a lot of people on Amazon that are like, I did$20 million in Amazon sales last year, and their net profit was like$16 ,000. So they did all that work for tiny profit margins. And that's what I loved about Jeff is he's really figured out for us in our business, hey, how do we utilize the advertising? How do we utilize updating and doing different things like coupons and adding videos and doing all these things to maximize profit? Overall sales are great and gross revenues great, but profit is key.

24:41And I love how they focus on that. So fifth and final step, Jeff. Yeah. So the fifth step is you want to build a team of experts to help make all this happen, right? Amazon in and of itself is a good amount of work. And to do it the right way, you do need a team. You don't need to have 15 employees or something like that. So I just want to cover like what are the key roles that you need to fill? And it could be possible you have one person that can do two or three of these, right? Okay, so expert number one that I highly suggest you have is an Amazon advertising expert, right? Someone to manage those Amazon PPC ads that I just talked about.

25:20There's also a whole other Amazon ad platform called Amazon DSP ads. We manage that for our clients as well. But you need to have someone doing that because spending money on Amazon ads, it can be the fastest way to lose a bunch of money or the fastest way to make a bunch of money, depending on who's managing it for you. Expert number two is what we call an Amazon account listing health expert. And that's because sometimes crap happens when you're on Amazon. Sometimes your product listing will go down. Your images will disappear from time to time. You'll lose the buy box. So stuff happens and you need to have like softwares in place and people in place, you know, that's watching that and helping fix those issues when they happen.

26:03They don't happen every day, but when they happen, you want to catch it fast and fix it. Expert number three is you want to have an awesome customer service rep. And this is because, you know, in the beginning you can have you can do it yourself if you're the business owner. but I highly recommend that you, this is one of the first things you offload off of your plate because you need a great customer service experience to get five-star reviews. You want happy customers on Amazon or you're not going to last very long. And you can hire a part-time person, you know, even overseas for, you know, very, very affordable costs.