Kevin King part 3 of 3 show notes 

What's working best in your business now?

Kevin encourages people to focus on Amazon. It is the biggest platform for online shopping and if you focus on maximizing on Amazon first, it will pay off. People are already there with their credit cards out wanting to buy. Since Amazon is always changing things, you need to keep tweaking your listings to keep up with the changes. You can't just post your products, sit back, and watch the money roll in. It doesn't work like that.

Once you maximize on Amazon, what do you do to expand off Amazon?

Kevin is working on getting into some big-box retailers as well has having his own Shopify site. Kevin has also found success using JoeLister. Using this tool is Amazon items are automatically submitted to eBay. Any sales from eBay are sent to Amazon for shipping and sends the customer the tracking number. It's all automated. It does a relatively small amount of sales, roughly $1000-2000 a month. However, since it is all automated he doesn't require any additional time and effort to get those sales. It's free for the first couple listings and after that it's only $29 a month.

He also has his own branded site to go along with his Shopify site to add legitimacy to his brand. That way if first-time buyers try to look him up they will see that his are valid products. However, these are just tools that support his Amazon business. Again, the main focus should be Amazon.

Another great tool is Amazon Assistant for Firefox.   This is a plug-in for Firefox that allows you to download your reviews from Amazon as well as the video reviews. He then takes those videos and puts them on his YouTube channel and links those back to the product listing.

Kevin has found that Amazon is a great way to refine and improve your products for another stage. He is looking into getting into big-box stores like Sears or Wal-Mart and has been taking feedback from his Amazon customers to make sure his products are at the highest level. The last thing you would want is to get into a big store like Wal-Mart and have a low quality product. You are going to have a lot of returns and the stores aren't going to want to carry your products anymore. So use the feedback you get from Amazon and tweak and improve your products.

His long-term goals is to create a strong brand in these big-box stores so that he is covered if something happens with Amazon. If you're looking to make this a full-time job then at some point you will need to expand beyond Amazon because at anytime Amazon could decide to unlist you. Therefore, in order to survive elsewhere, it is important to build a strong brand. Kevin is looking to take his brand to $10 million a year by the end of 2018 and he is well on his way to reaching that goal.

Kevin explained that he doesn't want to have a huge business with a lot of employees. He tries to take care of as much as he can by himself because bringing on other people will really eat into his bottom-line. So he isn't a big fan of outsourcing too early. However, many people don't have the same background and might need help with shipping and freight and will need to rely on outside help.

Kevin is also looking to expand his business into the UK. Once he gets his VAT number he will be ready to test the waters in Europe. Europeans have very similar cultures to that of the US and are just as willing to spend money. The UK has the highest ratio of online shopping to income in the world. That means that they spend more of their money online than anyone else. Plus there are 60-70 million people buying that have similar cultures and buy similar products, so the UK is a great opportunity for expansion.

A big advantage to selling in the UK is that it will be much easier to expand into other p...