A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of having a minimum viable product early on, and how all of my successful businesses were ultimately built around specific products.
Along those lines, I’ve been working recently on getting my e-book Music Studio Success up and running on Amazon.com, as well as tidying up pianoblog.com. Using Amazon to sell stuff is new to me, but with only a couple of weeks of tinkering, I’m starting to see that this is an incredibly powerful platform.
So yeah, I’m pretty revved up about the possibilities Amazon offers. What it all boils down to is this:
Amazon makes non-niche into niche again.
At the dawn of the internet, everything was a niche. If you got into online selling first, you had a huge default advantage. For instance, the guy who started Zappos.com literally took pictures at his local shoe store and posted them online. Imagine trying to start a multi-million dollar business that way today.
On the other hand, you probably could make a few bucks doing this on Amazon. The reason is that while Amazon is the largest store in the world, it’s only a fraction of the people on the internet. Even a huge market is narrowed in scope. On top of that everyone on Amazon knows they are in a “store” which means them at least slightly predisposed to buying, and eliminates some serious marketing headaches.
Now imagine adding your twist to a product and then marketing it to a niche within Amazon. You have quite a powerful platform at your disposal. And with the right keywords, you can get your products placed in front of some very eager customers.
Mix this with automatization and you have something potentially huge.
When I was younger I sold a houseful of kitchen-ware over E-bay. It was a learning experience and I made some good money, but it was also a total pain packaging and shipping all of that product.
In contrast, Amazon has its own in-house order fulfillment program. You can design a product, have it shipped directly from factory to Amazon, and spend all of your time perfecting your marketing and building a customer base.
Don’t want to fuss with a product? Go digital.
More than half of all amazon purchases are now on Kindle – and it’s embarrassingly easy to get published. I think this marks the end of high-priced ebooks, but it does mean you can make a small fortune on 99-cent or 1.99 downloads if you’re smart in your approach.
Take a keyword like “piano lessons”. According to merchantwords.com the estimated monthly search volume for this on Amazon is . . . and I was completely floored by this . . . 425,000 searches.
Now I’m not saying it’s easy to get to the top of that search – but I bet it’s a whole lot easier than getting to the top of it on Google. With that potential, you don’t need to make 10 bucks a pop on your book to make a nice steady stream of income.
At least that’s my theory. We’ll see how it plays out.
What do you think? Have you used Amazon.com to sell in the past? Do you have any advice for me and other readers?