Show notes for this episode:

 

 

 

 

 

Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. So you might notice that audio sounds slightly different today. I'm actually sitting outside in a park, next to the sea, near a bridge here in Stockholm. So you might hear a few sounds - I think that's a train over to my right. You might have some people walking past and stuff today. That’s the reason why, cause I'm outside.

 

I've been thinking about what to talk about on today's episode. And I had something, I had a topic I really wanted to discuss, which I might end up doing on a future episode, which was the concept of competition on Amazon and how everyone worries about it. But really, you know, it's just so asinine and I was going to approve and talk about why competition on Amazon really isn't a problem. Just time and time and time again, it's been proven that it's not a problem.

 

I think I might talk about that next week, but today, as I was out and about trying to find a spot to sit down and record this podcast, I realized that a much bigger, more powerful lesson emerged for me that you've probably experienced before in your life, the lesson that you will probably need to learn at some point as well. I thought I'd talk about that instead.

 

So why am I out and about today? Why am I not inside with my microphone where I usually record the podcast? Why did I decide to leave and record a podcast outside? Well, number one, it's 29 degrees Celsius today, and my apartment is about two floors up, no, sorry, four floors up. It's boiling hot. I mean, we've got a fan and everything and you know, that helps, but I don't know, man, it's just too hot in there.

 

So I thought to myself, well, instead of sitting inside - and when I record the podcast, I’d have to close the window, right, because we live in quite a busy street so there's always sirens and cars going by outdoors; I would have to close the window and it would just get hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter - so I thought, well, to make things easier, why don't I go out and about find a nice place to sit outside and just record the podcast there?

 

Well, I actually left the house at, I believe it was about 3:40 and set out to try and find a place to record the podcast. I was looking around for somewhere and I walked out my apartment across the road and then realized, oh, actually it's going to be hot outside. I need to get some water.

 

So I got some water from the shop and then walked down this path, which leads to the sea, which is like right next to my apartment. It's not like a beach or anything, but Stockholm is made up of like loads and loads of islands. So there's just parks and water everywhere.

 

Anyway, walked down this path to the sea and sooner or later I realized that while I was walking along the water, there was going to be absolutely nowhere suitable for me to record this podcast. It was too noisy or it was too crowded or I felt like I'd be disturbing someone. People sunbathing and stuff, jumping in the water, relaxing. I didn't want to be talking quite loud right next to them, quite obnoxiously. Also, it's kind of difficult to focus when there's loads of people around.

 

I wanted to find somewhere quiet and it just wasn't happening. So I kept walking about and I walked all the way around the sea shore, and walked up the path next to a bridge and just kept looking for places. And by this point it was like half an hour has gone by. And I was like, man, it feels like this is slightly wasted expedition.

 

And then I found a scooter and I jumped on the scooter and started riding around Stockholm, trying to look for a spot. Now it's a 4:50. So it's been about an hour, and I finally found a place to sit down and record the episode. It took me an hour to find somewhere to sit down and actually make this episode for you.

 

By this point we’re about five minutes into the episode. You're probably thinking, what are you telling me this for? How is this relevant to building an Amazon business? You’re just ranting, have you gone insane, have you got sun stroke?

 

First of all, I think I do have a bit of sunstroke, but aside from that, there is a point to this and what the point is, it's easy to spend a lot of time and a lot of energy trying to find the most efficient, easy way to do something.

 

Sometimes we end up going round and round at the houses, quite literally in my case to get a task done, whether it's through outsourcing, whether it's through sort of gritting your teeth and just cranking on with the work, you know, in some non-efficient way.

 

It's very easy to be unbelievably inefficient when you're trying to get stuff done. Sometimes the easiest way to get a task done is just to sit down and get on with it, and the answer is right there in front of you.

 

I think if I had just closed the window and just accepted I was going to be a little bit hot for, say, 20 minutes while recording a podcast, it would have been way easier, way less frustrating and way more efficient than going outside and trying to find a place to do the podcast. In fact, I wasted an hour.

 

I was calculating the other day the tasks that I do. When I'm really focused on the task, create some kind of promotion, some kind of product launch or something like that, I calculated how much money I actually make each hour. And it came to something like 1400 pounds in profit per hour. Well, maybe not profit, but post tax income, all right. 1400 pounds of post-tax income after VAT, after estimated refunds.

 

So what that means is after all of this messing around, trying to find a spot to sit down, rather than just sitting down in my apartment accepting I'm going to be a little bit hot for a while, or maybe just recording the podcast with the window open and just saying that there's going to be background noise, sorry. I basically cost myself 1400 pounds and wasted a load of time.

 

Now, it's not the end of the world. Cause you know, it actually was quite fun riding around like this huge bridge that goes over the water, which I was riding over on a scooter with a bunch of cyclists who were commuting and you know what? That was fun. So it was not like it was complete waste of time, but the point still stands. Like there's usually a very, very easy, efficient way of doing something standing right in front of you.

 

For example, let's bring this back to the Amazon business. Every month on average, I release a PDF full of products for people to launch on Amazon. Every month I do this. So my virtual assistants are the ones who researched them, they spent eight hours a day researching these products. And on average they find two products a day. So four hours goes into finding every product.

 

From each one of those products I put maybe one out of every 40 onto a short list. And they’re the products that are the best of the ones they find. And then I cherry pick the very best ones out of that shortlist. And either I launch them myself if they fit within my brands, or I pass them to clients, or I put them on one of those lists.

 

You might've been looking for a product for a long time. You might spend a little bit of time every day looking for products, you might have bought software to find products, you might be buying courses and stuff to learn how to find products. And that's good. And you should learn how to do this stuff. But sometimes the easiest way to get a task done is staring you in the face. Because I launch a PDF with tons of products that are perfectly good to sell on your account every month.

 

Funny thing is, I actually have a couple of clients who regularly take a product from one of these public PDFs that I release and they just launch it. They don't doubt whether the product will sell. They don't worry that loads of people are going to be seeing the same product. They're not concerned with all that.

 

They know that these products have had a lot of research and time and energy put into them. Otherwise they wouldn't be on the list. And they trust me. So they launch the products.

 

I had a client just last week who sent me a screenshot of a ton of sales he'd made by selling steel wool, wire wool, which is one of the products on the public PDF that 70 people see every single day and that I use as a lead magnet.

 

70 people see that product every day and yet the niche is still not very competitive. Why? Because people see these products, that doesn't mean they're going to take any action. Right?

 

You'd be surprised the amount of people who see these products and these opportunities and do nothing. It's pretty staggering, actually. I'll be willing to bet the person who is my client who launched that wire wool was probably one of the only people to launch it. Probably was the only person who saw it who actually launched it.

 

He’s made a ton of sales. So which things do you need to get done in your business over the next week, over the next month, that do have an easy solution? Is there a solution staring you in the face that could make things way easier? It's always a good question to ask yourself.

 

One second. There's a couple of people walking past. It's quite funny. Some Swedes are really, really quiet. In fact, most Swedes are really quiet, but you get the occasional one who's completely the exception to the rule and is just really noisy. It's brilliant.

 

Anyway, have a think about it. Is there a problem you need to fix in your business where the answer is staring you in the face? Do you need to keep looking for products, or could you just pick one from a list that you've seen and test it and see how it goes?

 

It's going to apply to so many areas of your life as well. Sometimes the easy answer, the one staring you right in the face, is the one to go with.

 

Cool. Well, I hope today's episode has been helpful. I'm glad I finally got to record it. If you want to, go to ecommercefreedom.com and there's a load of links for you to help you out. There's, like I mentioned, a PDF list of products you can grab.

 

If you want, at the top of the page, there's an Amazon Accelerator call. You can book with me personally, get some of your questions answered, and we can build your plan to hit your goals. So do that if you want. And I'll catch you on next week's episode.