759: Zero to $20k/mo with the Amazon Influencer Program

23:49All right. So video one might be, Hey, like I'm unboxing this. Here's what comes in the box. It's starting it up. Here's what all the buttons do. It's pretty good. And then I'll do a second video. All right. Let's break down the features here. Here's how to actually use this. Here's what everything does. Then I might do a video three. All right. So this is actually the mistakes that I've made with this and how to avoid them. And so on video four, I might compare this one to a different air conditioner and so on and so on and so on. So you can kind of come at it from so many different angles. There's not, there's not like a one size fits all for these things.

24:19If I'm say going to my neighbor's house, I usually stick to the obvious stuff. Like here's what it looks like. Here's how big it is. Here's what it feels like. Here's what it smells like. Here's what it tastes like if it's food, because you can make videos for food, like all these really simple things on the fly. I will often carry around measuring tape with me. Let's say for clothing, for example, like I've done lots of videos for say women's dresses. I'm not a woman and I'm not wearing the dress. So what do I do? I literally, I just put the dress on the table and I pull out the measuring tape.

24:46Like, all right, they say it fits these sizes. Let's pull the measuring tape out. These are the exact dimensions. All right. And I might share like, this is my wife's dress. She weighs this much. This is her size. But let's pull out the measuring tape because that's what people are oftentimes looking for. They don't, if they're already on the Amazon listing, it's a little bit different than say a TikTok video where on TikTok, the person is looking, they're trying to watch their cute puppy videos. And I'm interrupting that puppy video to sell them a dress. They don't care about the dress. They want the puppies.

25:13On Amazon, they're already on the dress listing. They already want the dress. Yeah, it's high intent. Yeah, they are there to make this purchase. I am there to just confirm with them, yes, you're not crazy. This is a good purchase and it will fit your needs. And so I don't need to necessarily convince them of something crazy or go way in depth. You can, but that's not like a huge requirement. I'm just there to confirm that this is in fact the product that you're looking for and you're not crazy for wanting to buy this. And do you end with that call to action of go click buy now or something? Yeah, you're not really supposed to do like really hard call to actions at the end of Amazon videos.

25:51So I don't have like necessarily a set ending. I usually end with something like, all right, yeah, I've had it. I like it. If you want it, go ahead and grab it. But if not, there's plenty of great options out there. I don't even hard sell people on that. And I'm still making great money. Okay. I don't think there's like a perfect like formulaic type of ending that you need to use. Do you ever review products that you don't recommend? It's like, I'm probably not going to make any commission. I'm convincing somebody not to buy this thing. Yes. And six months ago, this was much better to do because you could get related sales.

26:26So the example I'll use, I had a fish tank for Betafish that looked really cool, but it was like this waterfall thing. It looked really cool. But each waterfall was like its own little section. And each section was like two inches by four inches. and the betta fish couldn't actually jump from one section to the next. It's like, this is like a two inch by four inch. This is horrible. No fish should live inside of this. And so I made the video and I kind of sandwiched it. So I start the video. It's like, all right, so this is what it looks like. Here's it all set up. We're going to get the measuring tape.

26:53You can see how big it is or just my hand. Like here's my hand. It's about two and a half hands across, one hand high, one hand deep, all this stuff like that. Show it in action. Here's the cool waterfall feature. Now, I do want to say we put a betta fish in here for a little bit. And honestly, I don't recommend this for actual betta fish because it's just too small. They need more space than this. You can see how small these individual things are. I don't really recommend this for betta fish. For us personally, we already bought it. So we actually put house plants in it now. And then I showed some like cuttings of some plants.

27:23Like, so this is a different use for it if you have this and still want it. And that video had so many likes. Like I was the number one video on that listing for like a year because everyone saw that I was like, finally, someone who's being honest with us. They're not just trying to like sell us and hype something up. They're being honest. So my video rose to the top and I made a lot of money on other fish tanks because as of six months ago, we got related sales. If they looked at my video and then bought a different fish tank, Amazon would be like, well, you influenced the purchase, so we'll give it to you.

27:54But now that only works for offsite videos. If I made a YouTube video about that fish tank and people bought a different fish tank, then I would still get a different credit. but for onsite people, they took that away from us in April. So it doesn't work as well. It's still kind of a, I do still think that there's benefits because I don't know about you, but if I'm trying to buy something, like I was just looking at a memory stick, I will often look at the one-star reviews to see what do they say. If I'm okay with what those people said is like the worst of the worst experiences, then I will still make my purchase.

28:27And so sometimes these like honesty videos do still sell well because the person watching it's like, well, you know what? I'm okay with torturing my betta fish or maybe I'm not getting this for a betta fish. Like I'm still okay with that. So I will still, or they think I'm wrong. Betta fish don't need that much space. This guy's making this up. They can disagree with me. So a lot of times people will watch the negatives and still buy it because they disagree. Got it. Okay. So yeah, I'm just trying to be honest and we're putting goodwill out into the world. I think that's okay. Even if there may not be a monetary incentive, it's got 3000 videos.

28:58Everything is five stars. you got to buy it now. It's like, no, that's also not realistic. I was going to ask, I'm on that still the Tony box listing, and it looks like some of the videos have kind of a medium custom thumbnail. A lot of them don't. Like, what's your take on you trying to get people's attention in that carousel and getting to click on yours? Yeah, I think that nobody knows. I don't even think Amazon knows. I think it's different than YouTube. I think YouTube, there is very clear and definitive data backing up like you need a good thumbnail to sort of stand out on YouTube. I think on Amazon, I think a lot of customers are not looking for those high production, high value things.

29:39Like if I'm looking for a Tony box, I don't care what some influencer has to say about it. I want to see what some random mom named Rachel has to say about it. And so I'm going to go click on this video because I just see a person who just like, oh, they look like me. They look like my wife. They look like someone who actually uses this, who's going to tell me some actual information about it and not someone who's just hyping it up and selling me. So for me, I might not click on that demank person, but I might click on the Abigail one because it looks like that's a person who's using this who likes it.

30:07So my personal strategy, it kind of depends on my feelings that day. If I'm just making one video for something, sometimes I will go heavy into the edited thumbnails. There's some thumbnails I'll never do, like the one with the arrow that says watch before you buy. I'm never going to do that because that's what everybody does. That does not stand out. And it also doesn't make you look like an honest customer. It's kind of the worst of both sides. If I'm going to do a thumbnail, I'm going to like use chat GPT and say, make this a really nice looking thumbnail that pops. And then it's going to look really nice.

30:36Or I'm not going to use any thumbnail at all. And there's I don't usually try to play in the middle ground. I try to take one of the two extremes. And I will sometimes even do both if I'm making multiple videos, because I want my own videos to stand out from my other videos. So it doesn't just look like the same guy who made five videos for the same thing. I want to show people like, hey, you want the high production value, click on this one. If you want the person who's just showing you, hey, I just bought this air conditioner. Here's how it works down south. It's hot in Florida. If you want that kind of video, click on that.

31:03Okay. Yeah. One of the tips that I got early on was include your hand in the thumbnail, maybe for a sense of scale or for a sense of personal touch. I don't know. I've gone back and forth with some of these. Yeah, I can see. I think some of the advice is advice for the sake of giving advice. It's all anecdotal, right? You got to have, you got to just put some stuff out there and see what works for you. Yeah. Are you syndicating these videos to YouTube? I imagine it'd be a pretty big review channel at this point. Yeah. So we use a tool, it's called Cha-Ching, which is so much better than anything else on the market.

31:41There's lots of tools that I use, but for cross-posting, nothing is anywhere close to what this does because it just works in the background. I've will in the background, like literally on this call, my laptop is running right now and it's downloading my videos from Amazon, adding descriptions, adding titles, changing thumbnails, all that stuff, adding my offsite affiliate links, and then uploading them on my behalf to YouTube, all hands off. So I let this run and it usually runs like 10 to 20 videos per day because I have a lot of videos. And so I'm uploading 10 to 20 videos over to YouTube every single day just by automatically cross posting.

32:18Do you see that has become a significant revenue stream? It's become a bit. And again, it kind of depends on your style. If you're doing these long form high edits, like you spent a bunch of research, and then you made an eight minute long video, you're gonna make a lot more money on YouTube than someone like me who's running around their neighbor's house and filming two minute videos of random high chairs and things like that. So for me, I'll see about a 5 % to 10 % income boost per month from off-site posting to YouTube. So not huge. It's not nothing. It's definitely worth automating since I can use an automated thing to just do this for me.

32:58But it's not a large bump. And this is including YouTube ad revenue. This is including brand deals that you get from YouTube because of this and all that. it's for most people, it's not going to be a large source of your income unless you focus on it. Yeah, right. Yeah, there would be I'm thinking more longer form, more highly produced like that. If somebody is looking for that product on YouTube specifically, that's kind of what they're expecting versus somebody scrolling the actual Amazon listing page, like hovering over the buy button and ready to go. The last thing I had on the video production side was any title best practices that you found again on this Tony box.

33:37It's kind of a variety. We love the Tony box too. You have to see what this thing can do. Review Tony box, audio player, starter set, Tony box to worth the hype, all caps. What have you found here? Yeah, this is a little anecdotal. Some friends of ours have tried to pull together a bunch of data, but even the data is it's hard to truly quantify and qualitative the data into like, like this causes that because there's just so many things that can affect it. I will do a few things. So I'll usually try to do like one word that's in all caps just so like there's something that kind of catches people eye.

34:13But then again, like if I'm doing multiple videos for something, I just try to change my video titles. So I don't think there's necessarily one perfect title. I think if you're sitting there for five minutes trying to think of a perfect title, you've lost. You've overthunk this. Stop overthinking it and just put something in there. just about every tool will give you like an automatic, like, oh, let's use AI to come up with a good title. That's usually fine. Amazon themselves will give you an AI generated title. And that is usually fine 90 % of the time. I might change a little bit here or there.

34:42Most of those videos look a little bit older. That Tony audio player, great for kids. That was probably generated by AI because the first letter of everything is capitalized except for four. And that's like very specifically grammatically correct for this, but it's not how people would actually type. That one appeals to me because the random spacing and formatting and like double exclamation, some of this stuff, like it makes my proofreading brain hurt a little bit. One thing that does stand out, Christie reviews, like this apostrophe bothers me, but this green checkmark, it looks like a verified checkmark.

35:18So I think that's kind of a cool little play that they've added to their just username, I assume. Yep. Yeah. Some people will add that. But we're all just kind of trying to stand out. And so if everyone starts adding checkboxes, then don't add a checkbox and then you'll stand out. If everyone's doing this, then don't do that and then you'll stand out. So we're always kind of adjusting. I've had symbols like the checkbox in my account before. I've taken them out. I put them back in. I've taken them out. We've done everything. I enjoy the experimentation of it. I don't think it will ever be a solved equation.

35:47It's something that you can kind of always tinker with and play with a little bit. And I have fun with that. That's fair. Talk to me about finding products to review. because it doesn't take long before you exhaust your Amazon order history, you exhaust what is available in your house, and you've got some really creative ways that you've found some tons of products to make videos for. Yeah, I would say the biggest roadblock that people get is the analysis paralysis, and then they just quit. The second biggest hurdle is this, I ran out of stuff to film, now what do I film? And I get it, but I almost always just push back on people initially, Like, no, you haven't.

36:23So like Nick, you said, how many videos did you have again? I think 60. Okay. I can see about 40 things in this image of you that you could take a video. You can take a video of the flower pot behind you. You can take a video of your snake plant. There's at least 10 books on your shelf that you could take a video of. The shelf itself, you could take a video of. Those closet doors probably have some hardware because it's like the folding door. So you can take a video for that closet door hardware. The shirt that you're wearing, the microphone in your picture. I could step to the side. There's more stuff back here.

36:53The purple light. There's more books down there. Like all of that stuff you can do videos for. Now, they're like, okay, should you go through your child's bookshelf and record every single children's book? Probably not. That's probably not really going to make you a whole lot of money. I think there's just so much more than people initially think. When I ask people like, oh, have you filmed your bathroom? It's like, oh, what's in like, yeah, I filmed my makeup. Like, no, no. Have you filmed your bathroom? Have you filmed every single sink? Have you filmed your toilet? Have you filmed your toilet seat?

37:22Have you filmed the little flange replacement thing? Because like every toilet uses these same parts. It's all the same. Have you filmed that yet? How about the grout that goes around your toilet so that you don't leak your toilet nasty stuff onto your floor? Have you filmed that yet? Like there's so much in your house that is a product on Amazon. You just don't think about it because I'm no longer holding the bottle of grout. Like I already used it around my toilet. It's already there. But oftentimes that's even better because if I'm buying grout, I don't care what it looks like in the bottle.

37:52Show me the toilet. Show me that it's still there three years later. So yeah, I think there's way more. I think that every house in America has 500 to 1 ,000 videos that you can do without breaking a sweat. There's just so much more. If you're serious about getting started with the Influencer Program, make sure to grab the free quick start guide I put together by hitting the link in the episode description, and I'll send that right over. I've got more with Nate in just a moment, including how to figure out what products you've actually got if that box is long gone. and more creative ways he finds stuff to film coming up right after this.

38:24We've been getting some work done around the house, and that involves calling different companies to get bids and feel them out. And it's wild seeing the spectrum of responses ranging from picking up right away to setting an appointment by text message to just a mystery voicemail box that maybe someone someday is going to check. But here's the thing. I kind of want to tell that last company about our partner, Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the business phone system built so you never miss a call. You can even set up an optional AI agent to pick up the phone, answer questions, and book appointments so you never miss a lead, even when you can't directly take that call.

39:00Quo also lets you keep your existing phone number, and all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place, in an app, on your phone, or computer, so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, they can see the full history, and they can respond fast. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash hustle. That's Quo, Q-U-O dot com slash hustle. Big parenting milestone for us this month. I finally set up investing accounts for the kids. It had been on the to-do list for a while, but it was a chance to talk about the power of compound interest and making money without working for it directly.

39:41I think what was most exciting for them was the concept of owning a small piece of a ton of different businesses and that a lot of the traffic on the road is people going to work for those companies doing their small part to make them a little bit richer. We also offered a very generous parental match to incentivize them to continue to fund their accounts. But this brings me to my favorite financial tool, Monarch. It's the easy to use financial dashboard to track your spending, savings, investments, and more all in one place. I love the net worth tracker and especially zooming out 6, 12, 24 months and seeing how much progress we've made.

40:17I want to invite you to write your own money story with Monarch. Use code SIDEHUSTLE at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just 50 bucks. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code SIDEHUSTLE. And do you have tools, like if you have no idea what this thing is, Like, okay, maybe the closet door hardware. It was like that when I moved in. It's like an AI reverse image. Like Amazon, what product is this? Find me something that's close and we'll say that's what it is. The best visual matcher tool is still Amazon itself. If you open up your shopping app, there's like the bar at the top where you can type something in, but there's a little picture of a camera in that bar.

40:59That is still the best visual matcher in existence. Okay. Just to be able to say, well, I can make a video of it, but then I got to match it to the product. Yeah. Yeah, and never make a video first. Like always have a product that you're making the video for. That's a mistake I've seen people make. But I do use a tool. It's called Multi-Influencer Pro, which is then able to picture scan stuff and tell me, do these things have creator connections campaigns? So like if I'm, say, renting an Airbnb and I've only got four hours to film or three hours or whatever it is, I can't film every doorknob and every piece of hardware and whatever.

41:35I need to sort of prioritize stuff. So I'll use that to do some visual scans. It's not quite as powerful and robust as the Amazon image scanner, but what it lacks in that, it makes up for in, it will show me these creator connections campaigns. And we haven't talked about that yet. Just briefly for the people unaware for the influencer program, I get paid by Amazon. It'll be like one or 2%. If I sell a doorknob, I'll make one or 2 % on that commission from Amazon. But if there is a creator connection, which is made by the brand that sells that doorknob handle, the creator connection campaign will pay me anywhere from 10 to 50%.

42:09So if there's like a 50 % campaign on doorknobs, as brands like, yeah, we really we're trying to be number one on Amazon, we're pushing our stuff. I'll get paid my 1 % from Amazon. And then I will also get paid 50 % from the brand through creator connection. And so that's become a huge part of our business is trying to find things that have creative connections on them. Okay, that is a way to earn more from the same effort. Basically, if I'm going to make this video, all else be an equal, I want to make it about the one that has a 10 % commission versus a 2 % commission. Yes. And sometimes this was, we did an episode with Jared from Niche Pursuits earlier, and he was almost exclusively focused on Creator Connections products.

42:49And he had this whole outreach script and research process, like, oh, this one has good sales velocity and low competition. So I'm going to outreach, they're going to send me this product. I'm going to review the thing. And you're getting product for free. It sounded smart, but it also sounded like high effort. Yeah, that is a way to scale. And it doesn't have to be super high effort, because there's lots of ways to automate the messaging and things like that. Again, like the tool that I was saying for scanning, I'm able to send infinite messages through an automation. So like, if I want to message 2000 brands a day and say, Hey, we saw your thing on creator connection, send it to us, we'll make a video, I'm able to do that.

43:26And I will usually get about a 10 % response rate. So if I send 2000 messages out, I'm going to be getting about 200 things, roughly seven days from now to my doorstep for free. So that is a way to scale. It does come with some fallbacks. So one, you can look up all the data in the world. Like, oh, this is great. It's selling really well. There's low competition. The problem is everyone else sees that same data and everyone else is going to be requesting the same things. If I put into my automation, and everyone's using these automations now. If I put in my automation, look for things that are selling 500 units a month with zero influencers and a 20 % creator connections campaign or higher.

44:00Okay, great. I found that. And then I get it for free. Well, so did 10 other people the same week. And so right today, it's great. Two weeks from now, not so great. So it is a way to scale. It's just getting a bunch of free stuff. It's the easiest thing to talk about on social media. It's the easiest thing to like post on Instagram. Like, hey, look at these 200 packages that just arrived at my doorstep for free. So it's very like exciting looking. And I think that generates a lot of hype. But for people that are like building large scale actual businesses from this, I think there's a lot of drawbacks.

44:31One, the thing with like a lot of other people are also doing the same thing. If they're sending me a free sample, they're probably willing to send you a free sample and 10 other people a free sample. You also run into issues like production time is significantly slower because you think, okay, it's not just a product. I have to go to my front door and it's in a box. I have to take it out of the box. I have to re-find what this product is, match it back up, put it in my space, do something with that box. Am I breaking this box down? Am I shredding it? Am I taking out to the garbage? If you're getting 200 packages a day, that is more, it's called like dunnage, the stuff that goes inside of boxes.

45:06That's more dunnage than you will be able to put in your regular municipal trash. You have to find a solution for this. And that's all of that just adds into the time. So do I get free samples? Yeah, I got a couple of free samples today. Is that like a huge part of my business? Not really. Yeah. And so this would be on site as well. So if I got this watch strap for Apple Watch, 25 % commission. So if I got this and made a video about it, whether I just bought it or requested it for free, I still wouldn't have to drive my own traffic. They would just pay me instead of 2 % or whatever for electronics, they would pay me 25%.

45:42Exactly. Yep. Okay. Yeah. So you would just accept that and then send them a message, say, hey, I'm interested in filming this. Here's a little bit about me. If you want to send us a unit, send us a unit. Okay. Real quick for the people who are in Creator Connections wondering, all of Creator Connections will say they do not send a sample. that's just automatically put in there by Amazon. But you ignore that because it's not true. It's just an old antiquated sentence from Amazon that brands can't change. So request anything you want and about 10 % are gonna reach back to you and say, okay, great.

46:08One of the things that we did was start, we filmed some of the kids' larger Lego sets a few years ago. And then we would give them some of the commissions when those sold. And that was a lot of fun. And they would be like, oh, can we check, can we check the sales report like every month? And it's like, hey, we made 20 bucks. And so I was like, cool. I was like, time out. You just made passive income on the internet. You don't, you know, you're eight years old. You don't understand how cool this is. For sure. I think you went out and found other families with big Lego collections nearby. Can I give you a little bit of money and I'll come and film your collection?

46:43Exactly. We did the same thing as you. So we started with our kids. Like, hey, let's film your Lego sets. Cool. Oh, they're starting to sell. And me thinking, how can I scale this? thinks, how can I get access to lots more Lego sets? Let me go on Facebook. And I went on and I still have some here. I just had a stack of Starbucks gift cards. I went to Starbucks and I got like 20,$20 gift card things. And then I post on the neighborhood like, hey, who has the biggest Lego collection? I want to film some videos for Amazon showing off Lego sets and I just need access to Lego sets. So if you think you've got the biggest collection, let me know.

47:16I'll come to your house. I'll give you$20 of Starbucks money if you let me film at your house for an afternoon. And there was like 30 people in my neighborhood pages like, I've got the biggest set, come over to my house. And I went to a couple of these houses. And I mean, I kid you not, these people have entire like basements, wall to wall to wall, we're talking like a 20 by 20 foot room with shelving all through the middle. And every shelf is full. I'm just like, oh my gosh, I'm never gonna be able to complete all this. But yeah, I went to their house for like eight hours. I was there for probably initially three hours, told them, hey, this is so many sets, but I would love to come back.

47:55I'll give you another Starbucks gift card. Can I come back next weekend? Yeah, sure. Went back the next weekend, finished all the rest. I mean, hundreds of these Lego sets that I filmed. And this is just sort of part of that creative process because again, it kind of goes back to like, I just don't like doing what other people say when everyone says like, oh yeah, the way to do this is get a bunch of free samples. Like, well, that kind of works. I can do that. Or I can go to my neighbors and ask them if they have Lego sets that I can just film. Or I've asked neighbors like for exercise equipment, I might do an exercise comparison video and be like, hey, I have this treadmill.

48:27Does anyone have this other kind of branded treadmill? Someone was like, yeah. Hey, can I come over to your house and I'll bring over a Starbucks? I just need to film like a five minute video of it and I'm gonna compare it to mine and sort of show them. And then that would be one of the few videos that I would edit. And so I show my treadmill for two or three minutes. Here's all these features. I show their treadmill for two or three minutes. Here's all of those features. and then I sort of break out to the sort of the talking head. All right, so here are the differences between these two treadmills.

48:54This one has XYZ feature that this one lacks. That one has ZYA features that this one lacks. Get whichever one you think is best. And so that's sort of some of those other creative ways. We've gone to friends' houses to film everything. Like we're close with our neighbors. So when they went on vacation, I said, hey, I'll house sit for you if you just let me like film the stuff in your house. And they're like, yeah, of course, we don't care at all. So literally like I spent an entire week at the neighbor's house. every pot and pan that they had all their kids toys all their little tech gadgets their computers their webcams their home alarm systems like everything that they had even like the food in their pantry i was filming and i've made good money from all that stuff yeah it's like seeing the world through a product lens yeah i went to an amazon seller conference a while back and i went with a couple friends and this is when i was sort of transitioning into being the influencer and all during the conference, like my head is on a swivel.

49:46I'm recording the speaker system. I'm recording the lights. I'm recording. They were giving out these little like individual tea things. Like you would put this little like pyramid into your cup and it would make tea. And I scanned it and it existed on Amazon. It's like, sweet. Let me film this real fast. All right. I'm at a conference and they're giving these tea packets and these things are awesome. Look at how you can make this. It's so easy. And I was showing it like literally right there in the conference as I'm recording everything. So yeah, everywhere I'm going, my head is on a swivel. I'll go on dates with my wife like we'll we'll walk through the downtown farmer's market and I remember um sometimes the thing that the farmer's markets are selling are on Amazon it's rare but sometimes they are but oftentimes their machinery their stuff is there so like there was one that had a hand washing station where you would like pump it with your foot and there was like a big thing of water inside of it so you pump it with your foot yeah and then water would come out and they'd wash their hands I was like hey can I can I take a video of that I know this is a weird request sure yeah we don't care and so I did a video here's the hand here's how it works you pump your foot.

50:42There's, it's got a nice big reservoir in there. Do this. This is super handy. You can see we're at the farmer's market. Like this works in a real world scenario. Yeah. It's probably a high dollar item. A lot. Like I think I made over a hundred dollars in commissions from that hand washing thing. Cause like you think, okay, option a, I could buy this, bring it to my house and make a nice unboxing video where I unbox this hand washer. Okay. But what do customers want to see? They want to see it at the farmer's market because who is the client of this? It's people who go to farmer's markets who are trying to have these portable handwashing stations.

51:14Filming it there is the most natural environment possible. That is the most real world scenario. It is currently in use. So like some people are like, oh, but you don't own that. How much could you know? Like it doesn't matter really what I know. Can I show this in a natural environment and show it in use and all that? Now I'm going to give the caveat that Amazon does specifically say they want these items in their natural environments. They don't want you inside of stores. So don't go to like Target or Walmart and just start filming everything off the shelf, that's going to get you kicked off really, really fast because that is not that product's natural environment.

51:46Okay, okay. It was like, yeah, that's roundup on. Yes. And many people are like, that's the next, like, oh, if you go to the farmer's market, I could just go to Walmart. No, don't do that. That's a different beast. That is not the natural environment of a hand-washing station. You don't film that in the Walmart shelf. Okay. You can like rent Airbnbs. I mentioned that earlier. We've gone to model homes. There's a bunch of, we live in Florida. There's a bunch of new neighborhoods going up all around us, going to the model home. and just start, all right, here's the sink. Here's the fancy rain showerhead.

52:14Here's the security system. Here's the mini split AC system that the office is using. And like all of these things are in their natural places where they're actually being used. So those videos do well for us. You can order stuff online, obviously, like you're buying it yourself. One of our newest favorite ways of getting more videos for products is going to the Amazon discount bin stores. Just about every city has this. If you live in a medium-sized city in America, you're going to have an Amazon bin store if you just Google Maps that for yourself. And this is where people will buy like return pallets from Amazon for pennies on the dollar.

52:49And then they'll sell stuff. And usually it's like, OK, on Monday we restock. So Tuesday, everything is$12. And then Wednesday, everything is$10. And then Thursday, everything is$6. And so on. And it just makes its way down. And so you can go there and you can scan stuff with your app and you find something that works well. It's got low influencer count, maybe create a connection, high sales velocity. Boom, get it. Make a video for it when you get home. And it's just like you bought it online, but you're paying like$2 instead of$20 for it. So your risk is very low. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your break even point is a lot quicker.

53:20And you can also oftentimes resell that stuff. So it's like, man, even if I don't make money from this, I can make money flipping this on Facebook marketplace. So it's kind of becomes the business within the business. Same thing with selling your free samples. I am 100 % convinced that anyone can make a full time living. We're talking like 40, 50 ,000, like a teacher salary, 40,$50 ,000 a year. just reselling free samples that they request from brands. Like anyone can do that. You just have to have the time to list all this stuff on Marketplace and eBay and things like that to actually do it. But it's very lucrative just selling samples or selling stuff that you got at a super high discount.

53:54Yeah, we talked to one guy about he kind of had this triple, maybe it was a quadruple dip strategy where he's like, I'm getting the free thing. Sometimes the brand is even paying me for the review. I'm getting the commissions from the review. I'm putting it on YouTube. So I'm getting YouTube watch time ads plus offsite commissions. And then I can resell it at the end. And maybe I flip it or maybe I save up and do a whatnot live stream to get rid of all this inventory that I've collected. It's such a wild little sub economy. Yeah, I did that with air conditioners all summer. We were getting free air conditioners from brands.

54:29I was also buying air conditioners. And we're also getting air conditioners from these bin stores. And I do the video. I do big long form because now I have five that I can compare. So I would go to YouTube, do the big long form comparison, cross post that to Amazon, get my commissions there, get my creator connections commissions from the brands who sent me stuff for free. I'm getting paid by some of these brands on top of that. And then yes, reselling it. And even if I bought it full price, you can still resell an air conditioner for like 95 % MSRP if you're on Facebook marketplace. Okay. Do you have a story where one or two of the videos popped off and made$10 ,000 or something like that?

55:06Do you have any outsized success stories you can think of? My pop-off videos are less frequent than others. And I think that this wraps back into my general strategy where for the most part, I'm not doing these really in-depth long form videos. I feel like most people who have those pop-up videos, they'll make say, like I've made 3 ,000, maybe they've made 1 ,000 videos or 500 videos. And then like five of those are making them 80 % of their profits. For me, that's kind of like high risk, because as soon as they're out of the carousel, or as soon as something changes, then all that effort they made into that long form video is gone.

55:42It's not really performing. And I try to think like, okay, if I can, let's say me and you are competing on something. And you're like, Oh, I'm going to do some some editing on this, I'm going to spend some time on it. Maybe you spend 30 minutes making your video. And it's not even like too crazy, but you spend 30 minutes from start to finish. And I spend five minutes from start to finish. Well, that means that I can actually make six videos in the same amount of time that you made your one. And is your one video performing 600 % better than one of my videos? Or are all of my videos, like yours is probably performing somewhat better, maybe 20%, 50%, maybe 100 % better, but probably not 600 % better because I'm making six videos in the same amount of time you made one.

56:25Do I have a couple outliers? Yeah, absolutely. And some of those are the long form videos. And usually these are things that I bought. So like we have a shed out back. I did a nice long form video with that. Me and my kid built it together. I've got a, at the time he was six. So I recorded the video like, hey, can you build this with a six year old? Here's the pros, here's the cons. I'm gonna show you all the instructions. And it's like a 12 minute video. And I did a time lapse through the whole thing. It took me like six hours to build this thing because he kept unbuilding it in front of me. But I recorded the whole thing and time-lapsed it and I'd have stuff like, oh, here's what you should do and here's my six-year-old being unhelpful and don't do that.

56:56And that one performed quite well. I made a couple thousand dollars from that. But I think on average, most of my videos are good solid base hits rather than having like a couple home runs that carry everything. Maybe 30 % of my videos are making me like 70 % of my profits instead of 5 % of my videos making 90 % of my profits that I feel like a lot of people are in. Okay, yeah. aiming for consistency, volume, base sets versus high production, unless you just, you know, you kind of have that YouTube gene and you really want to make a high production quality type of thing. And we found, or you found, that there is some element of recency in the algorithm, or even if the carousel is full, there's already five or six videos up there, adding a new one to the mix, don't be discouraged by that.

57:43But if you can add something new to the mix, all of a sudden it's like, well, here's the recent review. And maybe Amazon wants to show that and test it out. Yeah, 100%. I mean, if I see five or six videos, that is not a full carousel. That is easy competition. Ponybox listing, hold up. Okay, that probably has like 4000 influencer on it. That one, will I film it as a beginner? I did because I was good practice. Will I film it now? Probably not. Because it's like, what's the point? Even if I make it into the carousel, I'm not staying up there. I'm going to get kicked out soon. So it's probably not really worth my time.

58:13And this is multi influencer pro is kind of telling you? Yeah, that's the tool that I use for everything. It does everything. I've tried all of the tools out there. There are other popular tools or things like viral review, things like oink, things like fluencer fruit. I prefer multi influencer pro. It does everything that all those other people do. Plus it has that app, which none of the others do. And that's what I appreciate about it. But that shows me how many influencers so I can see if I scan the Tony box, okay, does this have like 10 influencers or 10 ,000 influencers. If it's 10 ,000, I'm probably skipping it to do something else.

58:43Yeah. What's it surprised you the most along the way? I think it's just how lucrative for how simple of a thing this is. You have to put in effort, but I am not like a professional YouTube review person who has all this equipment and stuff. Like I've built my stuff out over the years, but for someone who just runs around their neighbor's house with their phones, like, Hey, can I take a video of all your Legos? the fact that I can make$20 ,000 a month literally doing that is bonkers to me till I mean, I'm getting most of my family members are getting into this now. I'm trying to get all my neighbors into it.

59:21Do you find that it stacks month after month? Or is there kind of like a decay? Like, that's what I've found. Like some of these videos kind of fall off over the course of years. Yeah. So your direct question, yes, there is sort of a decay. I am happy. My results are actually significantly higher than this, but I'm happy if I make$1 per month per video. So if I'm running around a house and it takes me, let's say 10 minutes to make a video, which would be a very long time. All right, I've got my mason jar cup. I scan it. That's 10 seconds. I film a video for it. That's maybe two minutes. I think of a title and maybe take a thumbnail like, okay, maybe that's another minute right there.

59:57And then I post it and maybe my internet is slow and there's another couple minutes. So it's like maybe 10 minutes. Okay. Well, that means I can make six of these per hour. You can make so much money in such a short amount of time if you are just happy with $1 per month per video. And that is lower than the average people. When we've polled people, the average sort of beginner to mid-level person is usually making about$1.50 to$2.50 per video per month. Plenty of your videos are going to make$0 a month. A couple of them will make maybe$10 a month. A few of them will make maybe$100 a month. And that's sort of the nature of the beast.

1:00:33Yeah, that was kind of the question. Well, you can keep feeding it and keep giving yourself a raise every month, adding that dollar per month per day with some fall off, or you can kind of let it ride. We're thinking in contrast to, again, the Facebook content monetization program, like you got to post 10 times a day every day and it's social media. So once it's done, it's done. And it's like 24 hours, maybe over. And this, it's got a much longer shelf life to kind of ride out after you produce each one. Yeah, everyone I've talked to about this where they're like, ah, my sales are going down. I used to make$1 ,000 a month and now I'm only making$100 a month.

1:01:09It's like, okay, well, what have you done in the last year? Well, nothing. I haven't posted any videos. You're telling me you made$100 this month and you haven't gone to your job in over a year? Like, are you kidding me? That's incredible. And when you break down the time, so like you said, you had 60 videos. When you start thinking about like, how much time did I invest into those 60 videos? What did they pay me back then? Obviously, it was a lot more and then a little bit less and a little bit less. And right now you're not making much, but it's still some. When you combine all of that and you divide that by however many hours it took you to make your however many videos it was, like what's your hourly wage?

1:01:47It's probably really stinking high. And so for me, that's always like, yeah, you should get back into this. Yes, the program is not as easy as it used to be, but no one should expect to be making 10 grand a month for doing zero work. That's that's not how life works. All right. Well, Nate, you've got me fired up to go film some more videos, re-energized for the Influencer Program, and I know a lot of listeners will be as well. What's next for you? Where do you want to take this thing? I feel like this is a gold rush right now with AI coming up like man in 10 years I don't even know if doctors and pilots will exist in 10 years like I have no idea what the world is going to look like and who all is going to be replaced so for me right now let me make as much money as I possibly can in as short amount of time as I can so for me and my business it's pedal to the metal let's see if we can do 30 grand let's see if we can do 40 with Q4 coming up around the corner I'm pretty confident that we can hit 40 to 50 ,000 in a month.

1:02:40I know people who are doing like 50 to 70 a month right now. Wow. So I know the potential is there. And these are your average people. It's not like some famous YouTube or anything like that. These are normal everyday people like you and me. Yeah. We're just posting a bunch of videos on site. So I know that the potential is there. I know it's possible. So if I can get there. Awesome. I'm trying to sort of add some safety nets in place, like, okay, well, if Amazon, let's say shuts me down, I would like to have a YouTube going where I can get some affiliate money from there. I've been doing some coaching with people.

1:03:13Now I'm just helping to teach other people how to do this. So that's sort of adding a little safety net. I don't ever want that to replace what I'm currently doing, but I would like sort of a baseline like, okay, if everything hits the fan, I can still pay my mortgage. Because when you have those safety nets, that's when you can just go crazy, go to the moon and really see how far you can take a side hustle like this. Yeah, absolutely. Get while the getting is good. And it sounds like it has been very good to you. Nate, this has been awesome. The Amazon Influencer Hub is a school community that Nate has started.

1:03:44You can also find them at the Hustle Buddies group on Facebook, facebook.com slash groups slash hustle buddies. We will link all of that up in the show notes for this episode. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Man, guys, It doesn't matter what kind of side hustle you're trying to do. Stop overthinking it. Stop listening to all the noise. Turn off all the extra stuff. A lot of times you get analysis paralysis because you just get all these ideas and then you don't actually do anything. So just start doing something. If it's the influencer program, just start making your videos.

1:04:13Stop trying to learn how to make a perfect video. Don't learn how to make a perfect title. That stuff will come with practice. Just go out there and do it. If it's a different side hustle, same thing. Just do the Nike version. Just do it. Just do it. Stop overthinking it. The 2020 number one tip for the sake of a trip down memory lane was take 100 % responsibility, something I still like and resonate with. We're trying to instill that in the kids a little bit more than maybe they would like, but very good number one tips through the years there. If you want to download the Amazon Influencer Quick Start Guide that I put together as kind of an outline from Nate's tips in this call, you can download that at the show notes for this episode.

1:04:53That's your free listener bonus. Just hit the link in the episode description and it'll get you right over there. Big thanks to Nate for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. Fire off that text message. Let them know, hey, you gotta check this out. You won't believe the way this guy is making money.

1:05:21Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.