We have floods of killer techniques to get your passive income flowing. But you have to zero in on your market with the products you know they'll want before you can use those tools to their full potential.
Find the right product to market in the first place. Let me show you how in the next five steps.
Find a nerdy niche.
I don’t mean nerds in the sense that I go around shoving my customers into lockers. I mean find a sub product category that a group of people are crazy passionate about. Once you’re ready to pinpoint your target audience with an item they can’t live without, the more ‘sub’ you can go within that product category, the stronger your empire gets. This is how you find an Amazon product you can scale at massive levels.
Example: My business partner and I dove in headfirst, and found programmable baby bottle warmers as a product.
Where did we get that from? We started with home goods.
Who’s buying these home goods? Women.
What kind of women? Moms.
And not even all moms, moms with babies that still take a bottle. If you’re counting along, that’s three levels of refinement down from where we started. That’s the kind of digging you need to do to be successful on Amazon. Getting down into those sub categories means you’ll have fewer competitors. Once you know exactly who you want to buy your product, you’ll immediately be miles ahead of the sellers that only know that they want customers in general.
Find horrible listings.
Set aside your goodwill, get extra judgey, and find the ugliest, least appealing listings you possibly can. Low quality photos are a good indicator, especially if there’s only one. Look at their product description. Something that’s short, with no keywords or anything to really grab attention—that’s part of an ugly listing. If their product title is bland as well, that’s another major loss for them.
What do these ugly listings tell you? If there are a lot of them, and they’re actually doing some business despite looking like hot garbage, that means that this niche is just begging for your quality listings to take over those spots. Their losses equal your win.
Find massive demand (sales/day)
Hands down, the AmazeOwl software is responsible for making me money on Amazon more than any other software. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll see that I shout them out often, and it’s not because we have any kind of deal, it’s that they’re just that good. Type in your ideal product, and they’ll show you the storefronts you’re going to be trying to kick down the ranks—the ones that moving 15+ units per day. AmazeOwl will also show you your competition’s numbers: daily sales. If the number is high and the listings are ugly, that’s a prime example of an area you can dominate.
Find seasonal boosts (boosts ranking)
I’ll start this point backwards by telling you the tool to use before explaining the method. Keepa is a Google Chrome browser extension I highly encourage you to get. It tells you how many offers are on any given listing, what the prices are for sales on those listings, and what their Best Seller Ranking is. The lower a number the BSR is, the higher the sales (1 is at the top). High spikes indicate surges in sales. Launching your products during their high season surge is going to ensure you have the best launch possible.
Remember, every item is seasonal to some extent, even if it doesn’t seem like it on first glance. I sell a lot of coffee mugs. But even though people drink coffee year-round, sales peak during the winter due to more people wanting hot drinks and utilitarian Christmas gifts. Therefore, if you were launching a specialized coffee mug, the ideal time to do launch is when it starts getting cold. Faster sales mean higher ranks. Higher ranks mean you can keep riding a wave of profitability as your listing rises to the top of the search results. Believe me, you want that.
Find legal protection
I assume very few of you are already lawyers or equipped with the kind of time to learn the legalese on selling, product patents, legal protections, etc. That’s fine! It’s better for an entrepreneur to spend more time making listings profitable, so you can pay for the hours and expertise of others.
Drop all the main keywords for your new product idea into three sites to make sure you are not infringing on anyone--and you might be able to protect yourself with a patent if your product idea is unique enough: USPTO, Justia.com, and Google patents.
USPTO, the official US government list of patents, wordmarks, and other proprietary information that you can either search, to make certain you’re not opening yourself up to a future lawsuit, or register your own company, brands, and products with to keep your brand your brand.
Justia.com is a good resource for searching indexed brands. You can’t register anything through them, but they sometimes have information that’s either non-existent on or harder to find through the government’s database.
Google Patents is going to give you localized results on the same patents.
If you want to stay out of court, be thorough and go through all three of these sites. As long as you’ve put in the work, and your products are distinctive, riding some other brand’s coattails shouldn’t even cross your mind. Bonus: if a competitor sees ‘Patent Pending’ on your listing? They absolutely will cut and run, leaving you with fewer rivals to do battle with. This is a great way to put the fear of God into anyone that’s looking to cash in on your success.
If you’re strategically implementing these steps, you’re going to see the returns. Take your time—it’s unlikely you’re going to get these results in a single afternoon and see pay off. But if take the time, the rewards are going to come.
Learn more about how we at Just One Dime find incredible product opportunities at JOD.com/freedom.
