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Before the live hangout do me a favor.

I did an interview with a guy named Raul, who I think personifies the opportunity of Amazon so perfectly. Listen to this interview right now... you can even follow along with the transcript while the interview plays.

 

Audio Transcripts

JASON:

Wil told me -- and I thought this was the coolest thing ever. He says to me that when you started this program -- and you started back in October of 2013; correct?

RAUL:

That's correct.

JASON:

He says to me that the original goal -- and I know this might sound silly to anybody listening to this later -- if I understand correctly, was $500 a month. That's what you originally started with, kind of an aim of 500 net profit; is that right?

RAUL:

That's right. There's a story behind that. Here's the thing. I love internet marketing, and I've sure been a fan of your products for a while and many other people's I try. I just haven't been able to fulfill the expectation of some of my attempts online before. My wife was getting to the point where she was impatient with me. She lost faith in me, basically. So I asked myself how much would it take a month for me to win her back over to know that whatever passion I have, I can really make work. That number was $500 a month. If I can make $500 a month, then my wife would get behind me on something that I'm so passionate about. But my true number to me, personally, was if I can make 1,000 a month, even 1,500 a month, that's going to pay a few bills, Jason. That really would make a difference in my life. The first step was to gain my wife's confidence back in me, and that was $500 a month.

JASON:

Love it.

RAUL:

Never done that before.

JASON:

You know, I love that because it's exactly what we kind of preach here. It's not as flashy as a bigger number, but I like where you got the number from, where you said "How can I show my wife that I'm not just crazy here buying up these products with nothing to show for it." $500 was the original goal; right? You started in October 2013. Just for context, how long have you been doing internet marketing previous to this? When did you start?

RAUL:

Really, I'd say I've been trying for about three years, on and off three years.

JASON:

Perfect. Then you started in October. Now, when you first started with ASM, when you signed up, how long did it take you to get your product listed online, first of all, on Amazon?

RAUL:

Well, actually, we were in Austin at the event when I got the e-mail from Amazon saying that my product went live. So it took me about two-and-a-half months, I'd say to finally get the product there.

JASON:

So in January in Austin. Two-and-a-half months -- that counted everything; right? Label, ship it to Amazon, get the manufacturer, discover the product, write the product description -- all of that stuff in about two-and-a-half months, we're looking at?

RAUL:

Yeah. To be honest, I was ready a lot sooner. In fact, my goal was to make it to the Christmas rush. I just didn't have the funds. That's what held me back.

JASON:

Interesting.

RAUL:

I didn't have the funds to be the first purchase. My approach was different right off the bat. They show you that there's people who are making $100,000 a month. Now that I've done ASM for a while, I know a few of those people. I've bumped into them. They've actually, on their phones, shown me their accounts. I just talked to Matson two weeks ago, and he showed me a screenshot which was 87K. So there's people out there who are definitely making that money, but for some of us, that kind of money a month is kind of hard to wrap our head around when we haven't even been able to make 500 a month. I haven't even been able to make 200 a month. It was kind of hard. So right off the bat, I said you know what? No. Let me get me. What do I need to do? I needed to make, like I said, 500 a month and hopefully 1,500 with my first product. That was a huge difference because, as I went through module one -- and you guys will see. When your audience signs up, they're going to go through module one, module two, and they'll see the different steps. They give you homework. Get me 20 products. Here's the criteria. Find 20 products. So instead of finding 20, I went out and found 50. Then they said bring it down to 3. I brought it down to 5 based on my criteria, the whole time in mind, though, was 1,500 a month.

Here's why I was actually in a better position to pull the trigger than most people. Because when you get it down to 3 like they ask you to, people sometimes are really worried they're going to pick the wrong product. They're thinking of their 100K, 50K-a-month product. "My gosh, one of these is going to be a 50K product. Which one is it? I don't want to pick the wrong product." But that didn't happen to me. I got it down to 5, and I applied all the correct filters they told me. All five of those were $1,500-a-month product at least. So there was no wrong product. I brought it down to 5. There was no longer a wrong product. It was just a matter of which one did I like to start off with.

So I was ready. It's just I didn't have quite the money to make my first -- we're not talking a lot of money. My first purchase from my supplier cost me just under $700. So it wasn't huge. But it was around Christmas, so things were a little tight. Once I got past Christmas, I was ready. I just picked one. The truth is, I probably could have been up and running in six weeks, but because of those reasons, it took me a little longer.

JASON:

And I love that.

RAUL:

I'm a real guy. I've got real bills, and I've got real restraints. So it took me a little bit.

JASON:

I love that, Raul. First of all, two-and-a-half months is not that long of a time, really, to start a whole new business with a physical private label product and all that kind of stuff. The other thing is you didn't let a small thing hold you back from a big opportunity, which is obviously this investment in ASM made it very tight for you. It was in October, which is right before Thanksgiving and right before Christmas. You didn't have a clear idea of when exactly you were going to have money to order inventory. Even thought the inventory order for the minimum quantity in your case, and in many cases, is very low, you didn't quite know when that was going to be, but that didn't stop you. You didn't use that as an excuse to say "I'm not going to invest in this, and I'm just going to let it go by me because money's tight." I wanted to point that out just because it's such an important lesson for anybody.

Just real quickly, in 60 seconds or less, even though the money was super tight for you to sign up for this thing, why did you sign up for it anyway?

RAUL:

Jason, I got to tell you. I've seen a lot of offers. I was on a lot of people's lists, and I saw a lot of offers. The one good thing that I can say about many failed offers is that when the right offer comes, when the real deal comes, you recognize it. There is no doubt. Your heart is pounding. Your mind is going if this doesn't work, nothing else is going to work. I've got to tell you. Your program is awesome, and it's complete in its own sense. Your bonuses made it an absolute, absolute no-brainer. This train was never going to come around again. That was it for me, and that's why I went ahead and pulled the trigger even though it was going to put me in a difficult situation. You know what? I found a way. I've got four kids, yet I found a way to make my payments on everything, including ASM, and I found a way to pick up the money. You're in a community, and you hear how well everybody is doing and how excited. That was the motivation for me to pick up an extra shift at work. It was a motivation for me to maybe cut down on some other expenses so I could make this happen. This has changed my life.

JASON:

Bingo, bingo. That's awesome. So you get the product up there two-and-a-half months after you started this program, which I think is still a very quick amount of time. Regardless, you get this product listed. How quickly did you reach your $500, your goal for $500 a month?

RAUL:

Oh, I think it took me five weeks.

JASON:

Five weeks.

RAUL:

Five weeks to meet my initial goal.

JASON:

Five weeks to meet your initial goal.

RAUL:

Because I am not telling you my (** 09:47) sales. I'm talking pure, organic, real profit Amazon sales, not the ones that I used as part of the tactics to get my product going. I could have shown a screenshot that showed my goal a lot earlier, but I'm real. I'm the kind of person that if I was golfing and I have a bad shot, I count it. How am I going to get better if I don't use real numbers? So I use real.

JASON:

So five weeks net profit. Incredibly fast turnaround time. Very rarely it's where you sit down and meet a goal and say "Monthly, I'd like to be here," and you almost, in real time, in one month you hit that thing. Was it what you expected? Was it as hard as you thought it would be? Was it easier? Was it harder? The process to get from 0 to 500 net in five weeks -- can you walk me through that a little bit.

RAUL:

Well, sure. I'll tell you one of the most exciting things. I was at the event in Austin, and they encourage you to meet other people. I met a gentleman behind me, and I started talking to him. He told me his product had been up just three weeks before. I'm like, "Really? And how's it going?" He showed me a screenshot. He was like, "I'm two products away from hitting my 1K badge, my 1,000." Now, I want everybody to know that my profit margin is 51 percent. So if I tell you my sales are 1,000, that's my $500 take-home goal profit. When he showed me that, I'm like, "How did you do it?" He says, "Raul, I only did what they said." When I saw that somebody who wasn't a testimonial, when I saw that somebody who was just like me had already hit my goal in about three or four weeks, I knew it was real. I texted my wife like "This is really going to work, honey. This is really going to work."

So what did I do? I did exactly what they said, and the first thing I did is I got a few friends and family behind me to make what I call friendly sales. Because they had cracked the Amazon code and I used one of your amazing secret tools, that really catapulted me up to page 4. When I first launched my product, my category only was 20 pages deep, and my product was nowhere to be seen on 20 pages. So at first I was a little frightened, but as I started going, as week 1 and week 2 progressed, I wound up on 17; I wound up on 12; I wound up on 10. Then before I knew it, I was in the top 5, and my first organic sales started to come in. That's a big deal. Every time I see someone post in the forum "I made my first organic sale," I celebrate with them because it feels so good.

JASON:

Yep, yep. So you get it up to 500 within five weeks. Then what happens?

RAUL:

Here's the thing. Everything you guys told me was true. This thing starts winding up. It took me maybe five weeks to make my first 1,000 sales. It probably took me another two weeks to double that. In fact, I hit my 2K badge probably just slightly less than two weeks after I hit my 1K badge. Here I am hoping for the real 1,500, which to me was a big deal. I set a goal. I said from here to my birthday, which was about two months afterwards, I've got to average three sales a day. That's it. That's my goal. Because according to my margins, if my average is three sales a day, I make my $1,500. So my goal was to do that by my birthday. Well, my birthday came, and I had actually hit 7K in sales.

JASON:

Wow.

RAUL:

For me, that's beyond success to me. My perception of success was if I could bring home 1,500 a month. Is my wife a believer? She's already saying, "When are you going to put out your second product? When are you going to put out your third product?" which I'm actually already working on. Yeah, she's behind me 100 percent now.

I tell you what. My sales, believe it or not, could have been much higher, but one thing kept getting in the way, and that's that I kept running out of inventory. That's always slowed me down. I was tight on money, so I've always reinvested my profit. I've never thrown another dime. Once I bought my first shipment, I've never thrown another dime at this. I've just reinvested and reinvested. The downside of that is you tend to run out of inventory. The upside of that is I no longer had to go and tell my wife we need to throw more money at this and her saying "When is this going to stop?" I don't have to go there. So I kept it straight for a while. But this will be the last time I run out because the Facebook group that you guys have is so vital. Through that, I got some great advice, and they taught me how to ask for terms. So because of some of the stuff I learned there, because of some of the people I had access to, I was able to go back to my supplier and make sure that running out would never happen again. But I did my math, and my math says that had I never run out, right now I'd be at 15K a month in sales.

JASON:

15K a month; right?

RAUL:

Yes.

JASON:

Well, you live, and you learn. So if I understand correctly, now you're doing around 3-, 3 1/2 thousand net profit per month; right?

RAUL:

That is my last 30 days. That is correct.

JASON:

Do you work a full-time job still?

RAUL:

Yes, I do. I have a full-time job.

JASON:

I love that, by the way. So full-time job. So you go and work full time, and then you come home. How much time do you spend on your Amazon business right now?

RAUL:

Well, at the beginning, I spent a little bit more time because it took some learning, and it took time watching the videos and making phone calls. So the first month I put in some time. Having said that, probably in the last four weeks, which is when I've gotten the bulk of my sales, I've probably spent, I'm going to say, one hour a week maybe making a video, maybe doing a little bit of traffic one day a week. The rest of the time it's just checking stats.

JASON:

So is it one hour a week or one day a week? How many hours a week if you just had to guess?

RAUL:

Well, right now, actually physically sitting down and working on it, I'm only doing an hour a week. Right now that's all I'm doing. Now, as I'm starting to release my second product, I'll put a little more time into it. It'll take a little more time. But to sustain and grow what I'm already doing, at this point I'm doing about an hour a week. That doesn't include all the stat checking.

Oh, some people send their product directly to Amazon. I do not. I have it sent directly to me because I package it in a special way that my sourcer doesn't want to. So when my product arrives here, which I do about once or twice a month, I spend three hours on that.

JASON:

So it'd be safe to say that with the approach that you're taking and all that, even if somebody had a full-time job, this is very, very manageable in a very short amount of part time. Now, there are obviously times when you have to time block a big upfront time to find the product, do the research, but that's done once. Then after that it kind of just runs on its own, and then it gets bigger and bigger.

Let's face it. Are you the number one ranked product for your main keyword that you're selling on Amazon right now?

RAUL:

Oh, no, no. I have a lot of growth. There's a lot of room to grow. My numbers are beyond what I need, yet still there's a lot of growth. I keep going between page 2 and the bottom of page 1. There's a lot of room.

JASON:

A lot of room. Now, I think it was you that Wil was telling me this. The standard model that they teach in ASM is to target best-selling products in a category between 0 and 100. Is that your approach when you're looking at this product and the future products that you're going to put out there?

RAUL:

No. Because I had a different mindset right off the bat. If you want that 100K product, you probably want it somewhere in that range, but that wasn't what I needed. I tell you what really helped me is when you shared the results, the ongoing results of your first product. One of the things that I learned quickly is, according to Wil, that product ranged anywhere from a BSN, which is a bestseller ranking, up 2,000 to 10,000. While your product ranged in there, you will still making anywhere from 5 to 34 sales a day depending on where you were.

JASON:

Yep.

RAUL:

I knew automatically that I only needed three sales a day, which meant that I could find a product and range it in the thousands -- 5,000; 7,000; 2,000; 10,000 -- and it would meet my goal. I would be successful. So when I looked at the product, I stayed away from the lower hundreds. I just went higher, and I just made sure that several top-sellers in my category were all in the thousands range, less than 10,000. That was not hard to find because that's kind of untapped territory. As I go back down to my second and third products, I was able to bring up a list pretty quickly of products that ranged in that area that fit the ASM model.

Here's the best part. Yes, I made 1,500. Yes, that was a great goal. The best part is I can do it again. I know how to do it again. 1,500 was an important number because that 1,500 is times one, then times whatever products I want. If I need to make 5,000 a month, I'll do two to three more products. Of course, that's not counting that they run away like this product did, but I'm sure some of them will. That's why my approach was so different. Once I do the research and I bring it down to five products, there is no one product. With my research, they all will sell at least three products a day. They all will meet my $1,500-a-month goal.

JASON:

That's amazing. By the way, how do you find a product listed in, say, an 800 to 1,000 bestseller rank? I mean, how do you do that?

RAUL:

Well, that's where your tools come in. That's where your secret tools come in. That made all the difference for me. Sure, I could do it the long way, but who wants to work hard and do it the long way and still not be sure if they'll get the right results. That's where it's been invaluable. The best decision I did was signing up for ASM. The one best decision I did was to sign up through you guys because there's no way I would have had the success as fast and be as encouraged if I had not gone straight through you.

JASON:

Awesome, Raul. That's fantastic. Parting words here. We're going to wrap this up here. If somebody is thinking about signing up through ASM 3 and they're thinking about signing up through us or through somebody else or through anywhere, what would you say to them if you could sit down and talk to them and encourage them because they weren't sure if they were going to sign up or not?

RAUL:

Well, let me talk to me. Let me talk to me back in October. I'd say, you know, I know you've tried several things before, but I know how important it is for you to meet your goals and your dreams. Just whatever you're doing right now is not working. This is the real deal. I know it's a challenge because it's an investment, and I know it's a big step of faith, but your heart is telling you. It's the rhythm of your heart. It's the pounding of your heart. It's that little voice in the back that's telling you this is the right deal, and it is. There's no doubt about it. I've never come across a program that has even close to the success rate of its students as this one does. You hear in the news all the time how big Amazon is getting. It's already massive, but that thing keeps growing and growing and growing. We're still at the front lines. Now is the time to make that decision. Now would be the best time to make the smartest decision, the smartest investment, and you won't be sorry. I would not be where I am today. I would still be looking for the next thing if I had not signed up for Amazon.

Here's the thing. I run into so many people who wish they had signed up through Wil and Jason, who wish they had done it. It would have made the big difference. We're given an opportunity to bring other people aboard on ASM. I have a few people who are so excited because they've seen my success. I am immediately directing them to Wil and Jason because, on my own, I could not help them as much as Wil and Jason have, and I love these people. I want the optimal success for them. So not only am I encouraging them to make this investment and sign up, I'm encouraging them to do it through Wil and J because their success is important to me.

JASON: Awesome, Raul, awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time out to do this with me. I got so much good stuff to use here. RAUL:

No. Thank you guys. You guys are the real deal. I couldn't be happier. You're great people to know, and I bless you guys. I do. You asked me if anybody can do it who has a full-time job. Not only do I have a full-time job -- I'm a nurse in a critical care unit. That's a lot of work. Not only that, but I was asked to go back to school. So now I'm currently back at university trying to get my bachelor's degree. I have four kids. I help my wife run the side business. We volunteer at church. So can anyone find the time to do this? Hey, if anybody with this much on their plate can do it, trust me you can do it.

JASON:

That is amazing. Awesome. Thank you again, Raul. If you need anything, let us know. I'm going to go ahead and get the recording out so that way we can edit it out and all that cool stuff and transcribe it. Again, thank you so much for taking your time to do this. Like I said, let us know if there's anything you need from us.

RAUL:

You're welcome, my friend. Thank you.

JASON:

Have a good day.

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