How to start selling on Amazon Archives

Self-Employed Jobs: How to Be Your Own Boss in 2023

New year, new you? If you’re pursuing this ideal in terms of you’re career, take a look at these self-employed jobs.

While the saying’s become a meme, the arrival of a new year marks an excellent opportunity to take action on ways to improve yourself and achieve goals.

Since New Year’s resolutions are often made to solve problems, it would be no surprise if many make their resolution related to business. Over the past few years, volatility across a myriad of financial markets has created a chaotic situation where timing, vulnerability, and pure luck have significantly impacted the current and future outlook for millions around the globe.

The continual blows to global markets – the impact of COVID-19, inflation and rising interest rates, and energy vulnerability – have shifted the way we think about our decisions, especially regarding finances.

For this reason, many seek financial independence to end the stress and anxiety of economic vulnerability and start paving a greater path for themselves. Although everyone has individualized goals and purpose, the allure of being your own boss in 2023 is crystal clear for everyone.

No matter your motivation, there are plenty of ways to take control of your professional and economic situation. Below, we’ve highlighted a few popular self-employed jobs that allow you the opportunity to be your own boss in 2023.

Create an Amazon business

Chances are you’ve bought an item off Amazon before, but did you ever think about how it got on Amazon in the first place? Whether a name-brand item like an Apple Watch or Nintendo Switch or a generic product such as a phone charger or heated blanket, it’s on Amazon because someone took a business to Amazon or started their own online business.

And many don’t know just how easy starting your own Amazon business can be with the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program. Amazon uses its world-class logistics platform for FBA, making it as easy as ever to create and manage your online business. In this program, Amazon handles the logistics of your online business (storage, picking, shipping, delivery, etc.) in exchange for a fee, much of which is reliant on the success of your business.

To learn more about how to sell on Amazon, check out our step-by-step guide about how to sell on Amazon.

Find a product to sell, a supplier to make and ship it, and optimize your listing, advertising and overall offering to the best of your abilities to become one of the many who have made their entrepreneurial dreams come true thanks to Amazon and hard work.

Sign up today for our FREE How To Sell On Amazon course for beginners to start your new career on the right foot.

There are quite a few ways to make money on Amazon, so you can go all-in on Amazon or find your own Amazon FBA side hustle.

Freelance writing and editing

Do you have a way with words and find writing a strength? Turn your skills or passion for writing into a business with one of the most popular self-employed jobs from home (or the coffee shop), freelance writing and editing.

You can find hundreds of potential opportunities to bring home the dough by creating a profile on freelancing networks such as Fiverr and Upwork, which connects freelancers to businesses or people with projects.

With opportunities ranging from translations, articles and blog posts to proofreading and editing, it’s never been easier to flex your writing skills and expand your portfolio while bringing home some extra cash. Whether you aim to be a jack-of-all-trades or master a niche, there are plenty of self-employed jobs in the writing and editing world.

In addition to creating compelling written content, you’ll want to make sure your professionalism, communication, and ability to nail your deadlines are on-point to ensure happy customers so you can garner positive reviews to keep the projects coming.

Drive for a ride-sharing company

While it may blur the line of what constitutes being your own boss, driving for a ride-sharing app like Uber or Lyft is technically and legally considered self-employment. After all, these drivers are listed as independent contractors who get to set their own hours, create their work environment (within their vehicle, of course), and provide a direct service for a large market.

Similar to how Fiverr or Upwork connect clients with potential servicers, driving with Uber or Lyft connects drivers with passengers. This option can significantly appeal to those looking to make quick money without the dedication of long, set hours. While it lacks the more typical “sky is the limit” reward of entrepreneurship, this method certainly does have its perks.

At its core, anyone with a car that meets the minimum age requirement with at least one year of driving experience who can clear a background check can get started. At the very least, this self-employed job’s a great way to make a quick buck without a significant time commitment.

If this doesn’t scratch your entrepreneurial itch, it may be an effective method to bankroll your next money-making opportunity!

Create your own clothing shop

Whether you have the fashion design skills to make your own gear or an uncanny understanding of the trends, creating a clothing shop could be your calling.

For those with design skills, an abundance of online marketplaces exist to turn your ideas into a profitable business. From cutting-edge fashion designs to mastering a skill in clothing, such as tie-dying or bleaching, to creating graphics for a niche market, making your own clothing business can be quite profitable.

In addition to the money, creating something tangible and potentially seeing it out in the world can be an extremely rewarding feeling.

If you have more of a passion for fashion and are savvy about the markets, but perhaps lack the design skills, thrifting and reselling could be a hit for you. Setting up a resale shop on websites like Etsy and Shopify, or local marketplaces such as the Facebook Marketplace makes it convenient-as-can-be to make the most of your thrifting skills.

In the thrifting world, one man’s trash can truly be one man’s treasure.

If you’re a sneakerhead with an eye for which kicks go for the most, you can spot market inefficiencies by being a regular at thrift spots such as Goodwill and Plato’s Closet. Follow the trends and tastemakers to stay up-to-date on what’s hot and not and scout out your local and online stores for used gear, and you might be surprised at how well it can pay.

Either way, running your own clothing shop provides an excellent opportunity. It ranks as one of the most coveted self-employed jobs from home, especially as more online marketplaces continue to increase accessibility.

Selling Handmade Items

Yet another way you can craft an opportunity to be your own boss is by creating and selling handmade items. From carving wood to sculpting to knitting to creating unique pieces of art, this self-employed job lets you turn a hobby into cold hard cash.

On top of being an incredibly cool and useful skill, the intrinsic reward of visualizing and creating a good that people want never gets old. If you possess the materials needed for your items, selling made-by-hand goods can be one of many self-employed jobs from home that allow you to add to your bank account without leaving the house.

Amazon Handmade and Etsy shops have become increasingly popular in recent years, as people search for decorative art and handcrafted items in place of mass-produced goods from Walmart, Target, and other popular retailers. Whether your artisan skills are already top-notch or you are considering a new skill, being a quality craftsperson comes in handy for anyone who wants to be their own boss.

Conclusion: Self-Employed Jobs

Of course, the options above are just a few ideas for how to work for yourself. If you possess a very particular set of skills that can create value, there’s a way to capitalize on it. At the end of the day, it’s all about finding the method of money-making right for you.

When weighing out the optimal self-employed job for you, be sure to consider the time and money you’re willing to put into your operation. Also, think about your personal risk tolerance to ensure you can move forward in confidence with your chosen direction.

Like many New Year’s resolutions, the challenge isn’t starting, but sticking with it. Once you weigh the best self-employed job for you and your available resources, it’s easy to stick with it and create something long-lasting for yourself.

Congratulations on making it to the new year and we wish you the best of luck as you sift through self-employed jobs on your pursuit of financial freedom!

Buying an Amazon FBA Business: Guide To Due Diligence

Selling on Amazon has been one of the most popular routes to owning your own business in recent years. From your own living room, you can run a multi-million dollar business for a relatively small startup cost.

Starting an FBA storefront is relatively easy. Once you’ve created your Amazon Seller Central account and sorted out logistics, you can automate most processes. You then have to manage only customer service or PPC campaigns. This is your guide on Due Diligence before buying an Amazon FBA Business.

However, if you’re looking to accelerate your business’s growth and progress quickly along the entrepreneurial path, it might be in your best interests to buy an Amazon FBA business instead of starting one from scratch.

The Case for Buying an Amazon FBA Business over Building

Starting a successful FBA business requires an initial capital injection. As well as the right attitude and skill set, to ensure growth and sustainability.

More than 50% of FBA owners inject at least $1,000 into their business when starting it. While more than one in five owners inject over $10,000 in initial capital, according to one study. However, as you’d expect, it’s not necessarily a pay-to-win game. More FBA businesses in which the owners invested $500 or less were still active. In comparison, those in which the owners invested $10,000 or more are not.

A higher initial investment means you have more room to scale your business. It also means you have more moving parts to manage. However, once the business is optimizing, a highly lucrative investment is ran. Case in point: Wall Street investors and private equity firms have been acquiring mom-and-pop FBA stores in deal sizes totaling billions.

Brand aggregators pick up a variety of FBA brands because they recognize their potential to scale. What if you took a leaf out of brand aggregators’ books and bought a business instead of starting one yourself? You could also acquire an FBA business in a profitable niche. Then, you’re left without having to figure out product-market fit and risk investing capital in different ways. They may end up as sunk costs.

Take a look at how valuations for FBA businesses come about in this guide on Due Diligence for Amazon FBA Businesses. Then you have an idea about how much you should be paying for one.

How FBA Businesses are of Value

We won’t go into too much detail about how businesses are of value as we cover this in greater depth in another article.

Basically, an FBA business is valued by the following formula:

Valuation = 12-Month Average Monthly Net Profit x Multiple

The average monthly profit is set against a monthly multiple that takes into account several business performance factors. There is the age of the business, traffic diversity, number of SKUs, the presence of an email list, and more.

Before we dive further into what makes up the monthly multiple, it’s important to understand two things. One is why pricing periods are important and two is why this matters if buying an Amazon FBA business.

Pricing Windows

The number of months over which the average monthly profit calculates might seem like a small detail. Yet, it can reveal a lot about an FBA business.

A 12-month window is the gold standard because it gives the most holistic view of a business’s performance. You can see whether traffic and revenue are affected by seasonality or are quite steady throughout the year. A 12-month window also gives you more data to look at before deciding to purchase.

Some sellers may consider using a shorter pricing window. This reflects a recent increase in performance or because the business began making profit only recently.

Naturally, you want as much information about a business as possible before making any buying decision. A business might look like a great deal according to your criteria. If you’re a first-time buyer, we’d recommend looking at businesses that provide a 12-month average profit.

Now that we’ve explained the importance of the pricing window, we’ll review some things that make up a monthly multiple. As well as what to look out for when doing your due diligence.

Age of the FBA Business

Simply put, the older an FBA business is, the higher the multiple is likely to be.

An older FBA business indicates how resilient it is in the face of challenges. Such as finding product–market fit and establishing a foothold in the market. An older business also shows that it’s in a profitable niche selling in-demand products. Instead of riding the latest trends that may die off in a few months.

We recommend that you look for businesses at least two years old. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. Many FBA businesses won’t be profitable for several months after their Amazon storefront is first created. It also takes some time for operations to stabilize and to build up a solid brand.

The Number of Established Traffic Channels

An FBA business with greater traffic diversity will likely command a higher business multiple for two main reasons.

First, diversified traffic channels protect your business if your primary traffic channel is disrupted as a result of a change in search engine algorithms. This scenarios can happen from low experience in marketing and are trying to scale a business yourself. When you think you’ve cracked the advertising code and have great keywords, your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns could be suspended for a breach of the terms and conditions. Sales can then dry up if you can’t reach new customers.

By establishing different traffic channels for customers to find your products, you also broaden your brand awareness to include new audiences. Having a mix of paid and organic traffic sources is ideal because potential customers might not visit all channels on which your brand has a presence.

Another way to diversify your traffic is through omnichannel selling. Selling on e-commerce platforms outside of Amazon gives you access to audiences who may prefer Walmart or eBay for specific products. Suppose your product is in demand and your copywriting is solid. In that case, you should be able to establish a foothold in various online marketplaces and gain new customers through various traffic sources.

Customer Reviews and Ratings

The simplest way to measure a brand’s reputation is to look at the storefront’s customer reviews and product ratings. What’s great about Amazon is that with enough social proof of ratings and reviews, the marketplace could award your products with badges or labels that give them extra credibility.

An Amazon’s Choice badge means that a product’s shown to people looking at a category for the first time.

With enough sales and positive reviews, the product could also earn a Best-Seller badge, but this is harder to obtain because it requires many reviews and depends on other factors that affect Amazon’s A9 algorithm and Best-Seller Rank. The key takeaway is that an FBA business with an Amazon’s Choice badge, even without a Best-Seller badge, is a reputable brand in its niche.

Other ways to investigate brand strength include monitoring social mentions. You can get a general feel for how a brand is perceived based on who’s talking about it and recommending its products to their friends and family. These types of spontaneous posts or shoutouts can indicate how well-received a product or service is if you don’t want to rely only on reviews and ratings.

The Presence of an Email List

Photo by Maksim Goncharenok on Pexels.com

Email marketing creates another revenue stream, working as a traffic driver that exists outside of search engines.

A large email list is an addressable audience of subscribers interested in receiving content from the brand, including product reviews, recommendations, or launches, and could potentially become loyal customers.

Simply put, an email list can significantly boost an FBA business’s revenue.

An extensive email list is also a sign of brand strength, as customers are now more concerned with customer experience and brand innovation rather than depending on how long a brand has been around or how well established it is.

Even if the list isn’t monetized, it can be repurposed in several ways, such as by delivering helpful content or gathering customer feedback. Because an email list is so flexible, it can be a valuable asset for your business; if you have ideas for email marketing campaigns, buying a brand with an existing email list can save you the time of building one from scratch.

The Number of Products on the Storefront

Smaller businesses tend either to have many active products on their storefront or to be based around a select few products while they’re figuring out what works.

If you’re willing to work on a business and spend time optimizing it while you learn the ropes, having an overly large or minimal SKU range might not be as much of an issue.

However, if you’re looking for a hands-off operation, then you’ll want to buy an Amazon FBA business with a smaller SKU range. That way, you won’t need to spend as much time on upkeep, including optimizing each listing and checking that it’s still active.

For reference, we’ve seen institutional buyers like brand aggregators and private equity firms acquire seven-figure FBA businesses with 40 or fewer SKUs. These larger institutions have in-house teams that specialize in scaling FBA assets, so a smaller range of products is easier to work with.

If you see a business that meets all your other criteria but has a larger SKU range than you expected, you could hire virtual assistants (VAs) to whom you can delegate the time-consuming and repetitive tasks of product upkeep.

What to Look for in a Great Deal

Choosing which FBA business to buy can be tough, but it boils down to your personal goals and preferences.

Niche doesn’t matter, although home and pet care are two of the most popular choices due to the wide variety of subcategories you can choose within them.

To make your search easier and quicker, make a due diligence list to help discount unqualified businesses. A few initial things to include in the list are the size of your budget, how much time you want to spend working on your business, and how many products the business sells.

We covered some due diligence criteria above when discussing the factors that affect the monthly multiple. Other due diligence criteria may include how many people the business employs and whether it faces any pre-existing legal issues.

What your due diligence checklist eventually looks like comes down to what your goal is in buying an Amazon FBA business. If you want an entry point to e-commerce and running your own business, you may be looking to buy a five-figure or low six-figure business with a few SKUs in a niche you’re familiar with.

Depending on your budget, you might be looking to buy an FBA business with room to expand. One that hasn’t been fully optimized by the current owner due to time or capital constraints. Your criteria will be different from those of the buyer in the previous example. You might be looking for distressed assets with a negative trend in profits and traffic, but that are still profitable.

Figure out what your overall goal is. Once you’ve identified what the ideal FBA business looks like in your due diligence checklist, all that’s left to do is to find the best deal for you.

Where to Buy Suitable FBA Businesses

If you’re a first-time buyer, we recommend using a broker’s service. A private sale provides little to no protection for buyers and sellers. It could take you a long time to sift through before you find qualified businesses that pass your checklist.

Many buyers think they can negotiate a great deal and pay less than a business’s worthwhile also avoiding paying a broker’s fee.

Experienced buyers can achieve such results. However, it’s less likely and demands a lot of experience in the negotiating and M&A arena.

If you don’t have that much experience, you can visit a curated marketplace offered by brokers. There, you’ll find businesses that meet a minimum standard of quality and perform more or less as advertised. You’ll also receive support and advice from an experienced team of business analysts who can help you find the right business based on your needs. This is the end of our guide on Due Diligence before buying an Amazon FBA Business.

If you’re ready to kick-start your entrepreneurial journey in the FBA world, register on our marketplace for free.

3 Reasons to Start an Online Business with Amazon FBA During COVID-19

If you’ve been considering starting an eCommerce business, now is actually a great time to jump in. Of every single product sold online, over half of them are sold on Amazon. And thanks to their Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) program, you can run a physical products business without worrying about fulfillment or customer service.

Like almost every other element of our society, COVID-19 has affected Amazon. However, the eCommerce giant is taking big steps to ensure its third-party sellers (or, people like you) are still able to start and build profitable businesses from the comfort of their homes.

For you, that means there’s a great opportunity to launch products that meet growing demand while still obeying Stay-at-Home orders. Let’s walk through 3 reasons why it makes sense for you to start selling on Amazon during this time, plus what steps you can take to get started.

3 Reasons to Get Started with Amazon FBA

If we know one thing for sure, it’s that people will continue to purchase products online… now more than ever before. Here’s why it makes sense to meet that demand through Amazon FBA.

1. It takes time to learn the process.

The journey of selling on Amazon involves quite a few steps. In order to get real results, it’s important that you’re informed of rookie mistakes and best practices along the way. For many of us, COVID-19 has provided some extra time at home. (If you’re an essential worker, we thank you for your service!).

A great way to spend that free time is to dive into learning what it takes to be successful as an Amazon FBA seller. In fact, we created a Free A-Z Amazon Course with two entrepreneurs who grew 7-figure FBA businesses from scratch in a few short years. They started in your shoes, learned the process, took action, and now provide for their families on their own terms. Check out the free course and see if Amazon FBA is a good fit for you.

2. There is increased demand.

With many states under strict Stay-at-Home orders, Americans (and people all over the world) are turning to Amazon to meet their physical product needs. At first, Amazon struggled to meet this increased demand. However, they have recently added 100,000 workers and plans to add 75,000 more, and now they are once again accepting all products – whether they’re essential or nonessential – into their FBA warehouses across the country.

Essential items are obviously seeing a dramatic increase in sales. But there are other products that are seeing positive movement, too. This includes home workout equipment, homeschooling activities, gardening products, and more. Now is the time to analyze which markets are being positively affected and which are hurting. A research tool like Market Intelligence shows you graphs of sales movement for individual products and across entire markets, so that you can make predictions about the future to determine which markets you may want to enter and which markets you want to steer clear of. Start your free trial to begin researching.

3. The supply chain is stabilizing.

The Coronavirus originated in China, which is where a majority of third-party Amazon sellers source their products. With China on lockdown earlier this year, most warehouses were unable to produce products. However, China has been stabilizing, and many manufacturers are back up and running… Many of them are even working overtime.

Once you decide on which product you want to sell (and remember, it’s crucial to get into a market with high opportunity and low competition), you’ll want to find a reliable manufacturer to produce it. By reaching out to suppliers on Alibaba, you can see which factories are fully operational and begin bringing your product to life.

How to Get Started with Your First Product

There are quite a few steps that go into this process, but we’re going to lay it all out for you. Afterall, it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into! At a high level, here’s the what it looks like to successfully launch a product on Amazon:

Research different markets
Pick a product with high opportunity and low competition
Find a few manufacturers who could produce the product
Order samples
Order inventory from the best manufacturer
Ship your inventory into Amazon warehouses
Create a listing optimized for SEO and conversions
Drive external traffic to the listing to boost your keyword rank
Run Amazon advertisements
Solicit reviews for social proof

Of course, there are steps within these steps. In order to feel confident in how you should move forward as you’re building your business, we highly recommend following a course. The best way to set yourself up for success is to follow in the footsteps of someone who has done what you’re trying to do. Like mentioned earlier, we put together a free Amazon course alongside two veteran sellers, and it will aid you along your entire journey.

You’ll find that your first step is to choose a product with high opportunity (or, one that will make you money) and low competition (or, one that you can become dominant with quickly). There are many methods of finding product ideas. You could browse Amazon to see what’s hot, or you could use software that identifies stand-out markets for you. For example, Product Discovery pinpoints markets that are ripe with opportunity now so that you can make the most out of an otherwise crummy situation.

Join the Amazon Seller Family

COVID-19 has certainly shifted the way we live and work, but it’s also opened opportunities for those that are bold enough to seize them. As someone who has been considering Amazon FBA, now is a great time to take action and get started. More and more Americans are shopping online. Amazon is reducing fees and making sure the infrastructure is strong. And with the internet at your disposal, you can learn what to do at every single step in your journey.

Feel free to join our Facebook community of thousands of Amazon sellers. You’ll find people just like you who are agile, resourceful, and ready to take on a challenge that will ultimately provide for them and their families. Here, you can make friends, keep up to date on the latest news, and be supported in your journey with Amazon FBA.

The team here at Viral Launch is dedicated to supporting you, whether it’s business as usual or not. Let us know how you plan to take advantage of the online revolution that COVID-19 has only accelerated. We’re pumped to equip you with everything you need to succeed!

How To Start Selling on Amazon: A Step-by-Step Guide

Amazon isn’t just a marketplace — it’s an epicenter of entrepreneurship. Since 2018, the company has controlled more than 49% of the U.S. e-commerce market, and this result is largely due to the third-party sellers who found success on the platform. In fact, Business Insider reports that third-party sellers now outsell Amazon itself on its own marketplace.

However, Amazon is just a vehicle — and not a guarantee. When you’re first getting started, learning everything you need to know to be a successful Amazon seller can be overwhelming. What kind of account should you choose? What products should you sell? Which research tools and marketing best practices should you use to gain the biggest competitive advantage?

This learning curve does seem overwhelming at first, but we can break things up for you. Use this guide as a reference to better understand every step toward becoming a successful Amazon seller.

Step 1: Become an Individual or Professional Seller

The first step in becoming an Amazon seller is determining which type of account will best meet your needs: individual or professional. Both types of Amazon seller accounts come with different costs and advantages. So before choosing and registering your account on Amazon Seller Central, take the time to research both types of accounts carefully.

Individual Amazon Seller Account

An individual account might be the best type of seller account on Amazon for beginners — at least until you get a good inventory flow going. As an individual seller, you’ll pay a 99-cent fee for every item you sell on up to 40 items per month. You won’t have to pay a monthly subscription fee, so you have a better chance of making a higher profit on each item you sell.

Even if you plan on becoming a professional and selling more than 40 items a month, you might still want to choose the individual seller option at first. This will help you get started and used to the system as your inventory is prepared and shipped. If you have more than 40 items, you can change your type of seller account on Amazon’s account-settings dashboard before the items arrive.

Professional Amazon Seller Account

If you already have your inventory prepared and ready to go and it equals more than 40 items, you can choose to sign up for a professional seller account. Having a pro account means you don’t have to pay a fee for each item (unless your product is in a category that carries a minimum referral fee). If the item’s standard fee is lower than this referral fee, you’ll have to pay the minimum for that category.

As a professional seller, you have to register as a business. You’ll also have several perks that help enhance your products’ positioning; you can offer free gift wrap with your items, for example, and avoid shipping rates on almost everything except media. Having a pro account means you’ll pay a flat rate of $39.99 a month, but because you sell more than 40 items, you’ll pay less per item than you would as an individual seller.

Once you select the Amazon seller account you want to start with, you can input your business, contact, banking, and tax information into Amazon Seller Central and register the account. Congratulations — you’re officially an Amazon seller! Now, you can decide what to sell.

Step 2: Choose the Best Products to Sell

Researching the best type of seller account on Amazon is fairly straightforward. Read about the costs and advantages, compare them to your immediate and short-term business plans, and fill out your information. Deciding what you want to sell, however, is a bit more complex.

Don’t just rely on guesswork here; you have plenty of options and tools to find a good product, validate its potential in any market, and research its popularity using keywords.

3 Tips Before Selecting A Product to Invest In

1. Use a product finder to narrow things down. Many entrepreneurs who choose to start selling on Amazon’s marketplace don’t do it out of a desire to sell a single product. In fact, it’s common to go through every step of setting up an account without having any exact idea of what you want to sell! The next step, then, is to use our Amazon Product Finder tool to narrow it down.

Using the tool, product discovery on Amazon can be as niche as you want it to be. Want to sell electronics in a low-competition market? Is your goal to make at least $30,000 in profit? Using the right set of descriptive keywords, you can put the product discovery tool to work to find and compile a list of products that match your queries.

2. Get some intel on the state of the market. Consumers search for products on Amazon almost exactly how they search on a major search engine, like Google. This provides invaluable data to help you research and validate your product’s chances on the market. Examples include price margins, revenue potential, sources of competition, and more.

Gather that intel by plugging your product into our Amazon Product Research tool and diving into past performance of similar products; average revenue spreads and historical market trends can help you determine how likely it is that your product meets your goals. Get the full picture before you make a final decision on what product to sell.

3. Take a scientific approach to keyword research. As you research products and markets, keywords represent one of the most important sets of data you can utilize. Consumers use keywords to find what they want on Amazon, so keyword research can help you determine consumer demand. Our Amazon Keyword Research Tool helps you track the most relevant SEO activity for your product.

One last thing to consider…

Keep in mind that consumers search for products using a wide variety of terms. The tool’s Market Relevancy Calculation filter helps you choose relevant keywords that fall between high search volume and low to moderate competition (typically, items with at least 10,000 searches/month).

Now, you have a validated product and a healthy stack of keyword research in hand. You’re almost ready to put that research to the test! Circle back to the Amazon Product Research tool and strategize how you can use those keywords to maximum effect. That strategy will be important for optimizing your competitive advantage once you launch your product.

Step 3: Give Your Product a Competitive Edge

Knowing how to optimize your Amazon listing is a crucial skill. But it involves more than just finding a good product and compiling a list of keywords. What you do with your intel — and how that compares to your competition’s efforts — matters most. Avoid getting stuck after launch by making the most of our Competitor Intelligence tool for carefully placing PPC ads.

Using the Competitor Intelligence Tool

As a novice Amazon Seller, you can’t expect to enter the marketplace and immediately jump ahead of the competition. However, you can gauge how top-sellers reach and maintain their positions right off the bat — simply compare their listings with yours in our Competitor Intelligence tool. Instead of blindly building your strategy, you can gain actionable intel on how to successfully optimize your Amazon listings.

Because Competitor Intelligence provides real-time insights, you can compare your listing to top-performing competitors on a daily or hourly basis. Be sure to gain insight into not only the listing’s keywords but how competitors interact with the market as a whole. As Amazon’s market grows increasingly crowded, that insight will be more valuable in helping your product rise to the top.

Using the Right Amazon PPC Ads

PPC ads are essential to online marketing, and Amazon’s marketplace is no exception. By using different types of Amazon ads, you can pay to sponsor your product, a specific brand of products, or an entire display of similar products. 1 in 10 product pages on Amazon are sponsored, so you’ll leave out an important part of optimization if you ignore PPC ads.

However, simply investing all of your money in ads isn’t a good optimization strategy. PPC ads won’t generate much return on your investment for products that you’ve just launched. When establishing yourself as a seller and your product as a quality item, consider PPC ads as investments toward growth. Analyze your competitors’ sponsored activity and use it to design a PPC budget you’re comfortable with.

The different types of Amazon ads that are available — along with the access to quality data and research our tools can give you — will make it much easier to build and keep your competitive edge. Take advantage of it all, and you can go from novice to pro Amazon seller in no time.

Follow-Up Tips to Boost Your Sales Faster

After reading our overview on how to start selling on Amazon, you should feel more confident in your ability to succeed. Still, the science of Amazon’s conversion-rate optimization — essentially turning more visitors into buyers — is a tricky and unpredictable one.

6 tips to broaden your reach and boost sales faster after launching

1. Use a tool for keyword research. The only real way to take a scientific approach to keyword research is to use an appropriate tool. A robust tool will show you the most popular keywords currently, break down the histories of their search queries, and provide the most relevant keyword variations.

2. Speak the way your customers do. To get the best results from your keyword research, you should use as many high-quality keywords as you can. However, these keywords will only be useful if they match the terms customers use. Be sure to use the same language they do in their searches to describe your products.

3. Put every listing in the right categories. On Amazon, you don’t just use keywords to differentiate your product; you also assign it to categories and subcategories with similar items. Researching your competitors’ listings will help you find the categories that will give your product the highest visibility.

4. Draw attention with quality photos. Nobody will pay attention to your product for its description alone. Without attractive, high-quality photos, buyers will likely scroll past your listing without ever even noticing it. If you don’t have great photos yet, check out our gallery of image resources to find some for your product.

5. Identify the sweet spot for pricing. With many different ways to optimize your listing, it’s easy to forget the impact pricing will have on its performance. Avoid pricing your product too low or too high by thoroughly researching the price margins of similar high-performing products.

6. Use Amazon’s terms of service to guide everything. Amazon’s terms of service give you plenty of ways to optimize your listings as you please, but they’re strict about certain practices. Any violations can prove costly, so be sure to refer back to the terms when devising any strategy.

Overview

Amazon’s marketplace is the most popular and active one in the world. The ability to get started easily and have access to every tool you’ll need to succeed is a big part of that. Don’t underestimate the importance of research and preparation, and remember the more data you obtain, the greater insight you’ll have into any market you launch a product in.
From setting up the right account to choosing the perfect product or devising a savvy optimization strategy, it pays to be thorough.

At Viral Launch, our mission is to help you do that with research and analysis tools designed specifically for Amazon sellers. To learn more about how to start selling on Amazon, enroll in our free course today!