Today, I want to provide a quick update on what’s been happening in my business lately. Along the way, I hope to share a few things that can help you in your business as well.
Outside of business, I’ve had a lot going on including starting summer break with my kids and moving to a new house! However, I’ll do my best to keep the personal updates to a minimum.
In a nutshell, I would like to cover 3 main areas of my business right now: Amazon FBA, buying and growing existing websites, and partnering with other people.
So, let’s jump right into it!
Amazon FBA Update
I started selling physical products on Amazon just a little over a year ago. Since about March of last year, I have gone from selling just 1 product on Amazon to now 12 products. And I will have a few more products up in the next couple of months.
After seeing some early success with my products on Amazon through the end of last year, I decided to get aggressive with launching products this year. I wanted to identify and launch or be in the process of launching 15 new products by June 30th. I have come very close to hitting that goal. If you technically count the products that are in-production, I will hit that goal.
So, to say the least, I’ve pushed my chips in and gotten quite aggressive with selling on Amazon.
The results?
Well, since most of my products are pretty new, I haven’t seen a huge spike in sales in the early part of this year. However, the products ARE making sales and are profitable.
Here’s a screenshot of my sales from my Amazon FBA business:
(This is not net income. Net income is around 25% or so of that number.)
What have I done to achieve these results? Honestly, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything different than what I’ve already said or what Greg Mercer, Scott Voelker, Chris Guthrie, or many others teach.
I just find a product idea that I can improve upon and/or has weak competition. I verify that there is enough margin for me to make money. I launch the product and do some giveaways to get the reviews and salesrank to improve. Then I turn on some sponsored ads as needed.
That’s really about it.
Sure, there are lots of little strategies or details that you might need to learn as you go; however, you really can learn these through launching your first product.
So, I don’t have any new FBA tips to share today other than I definitely still believe in Amazon FBA and I’m still very actively launching and growing product listings.
I don’t provide any consulting or coaching for Amazon FBA; however, Scott Voelker does teach a training course…if you are interested in something like that.
Buying and Growing My Websites
I purchased a business off of Empire Flippers a few months ago that I believe has a lot of potential. The business is in the “music” niche and sells a physical product.
We’ve spent most of the last few months going through a rebranding effort and stocking up on inventory. And then of course we launched the physical product on Amazon, because it wasn’t being sold on Amazon yet.
The business is still about flat from where we purchased it (about $1,000 a month); however, we are developing some good relationships and I believe we will see some excellent growth in this business during the second half of the year.
I also still have several other affiliate sites that I tweak from time to time, but mostly I just enjoy a small passive income from these sites.
I’m bullish on buying websites or even starting websites from scratch. However, instead of building all my sites as my own little projects, I’ve started to “up my game” and partner with other people on most of my websites now.
I’ll explain that below.
Business Partners and Internships
In February of this year, I brought partners into my Long Tail Pro business. Since that time, I’ve decided to either invest in other online businesses or partner up on a few other businesses that I’m excited about.
In one of those business, we are working with interns to help us grow our websites by teaching them our strategies and having them work with us for a 4 week period.
Partnerships I’m Involved with Right Now
PicReel.com. I mentioned this in a podcast a couple of months ago. I’m primarily just a passive investor here. But I’m close enough to the management team that I do provide some advice and get to see up close the strategies for the business. The first full quarter results of my investment are not quite in yet, so I don’t have any numbers to share…but I’m quite optimistic.
Physical product partnership with Jake. As you may know, Jake Cain (Niche Site Project 3 coach) is my full-time employee. A few months ago he pitched me on a physical product idea and he asked me to partner with him. We are 50/50 partners on a couple of products…and they are selling REALLY well!
Here is a screenshot we took yesterday (July 12th, 2016)!
The “today” earnings was Amazon Prime Day so its higher than normal, but you can see the 30 day earnings is pretty good.
So, I get 50% of the profit from this business, and Jake gets the other half. And to clarify, this screenshot is in addition to the earnings in the FBA screenshot I shared above.
Authority Machine Partnership and Internships
Hayden Miyamoto, Scott Davis, and I currently make up the partners in this business. In a nutshell, we are buying sites, adding tons of content and links, and overall focusing on growing the sites as quickly as possible. We will likely sell the sites down the road.
We shared the results of our first site purchase in a blog post right here. In a matter of about 4 months, we have almost doubled the traffic to the site!
How do interns fit into this business?
So, here’s what’s going on behind the scenes. We are training interns how to do proper keyword research, how to create great content, and how to get high quality links. So, we recruit a team of interns to learn all our “insider tips” and let them get real world experience by working on one of our sites for a few weeks.
So, its really a win-win. Interns get a fast track learning experience and get hands on experience working with a successful team of entrepreneurs; in exchange, we get some content and links to our site.
In fact, we are starting another internship on July 20th. We are looking for several more interns to help us out with a new site.
You can work from anywhere and we give you an in-depth 4 week learning experience that you can take and apply directly to your own websites. We teach you the stuff that works, because we want to see our sites grow.
Apply Here to Become an Authority Machine Intern!
If accepted, you will be working on a website that we JUST purchased in the financial sector. The site has averaged over $15,000 a month for the past 12 months. Last month the site made $22k. So, if you want to see what a successful site looks like and what our strategies are to grow it…I hope you will consider joining the internship.
In Summary
Overall, I just wanted to provide an update and let you know that I’m still very actively involved in growing online businesses!
I’m enjoying some great results selling physical products on Amazon and I plan to continue growing that. In fact, I just shipped my first batch of product overseas to the UK. I’ve taken a successful seller in the US and sent it over to Europe to see how it will do there. That should go live in the next couple of weeks.
I’m also enjoying a few partnerships: software, Amazon FBA, and Authority Machine.
If you are at all interested in getting an inside look into how we operate at Authority Machine, go ahead and apply to become an intern right here.
And finally, I should mention that the students from Niche Site Project 3 are still busy building their sites. I hope to provide a June re-cap for NSP 3 in the next week or so. So, stay tuned.
If you have any comments or questions feel free to leave them below. Thanks!
The post July 2016 Business Update: Amazon FBA, Buying Websites, and Internships appeared first on Niche Pursuits.
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