If you follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ve def read that I am working to add another income stream to my life. You also read that I love BRANDS. Brands survive the test of time; are better at protecting your product/services from being ripped by other internet marketers and they can be turned into nearly passive businesses where you are NOT the business.
This is why I decided to get into Amazon FBA and white-label a product and create my own brand.
I have already have an edge (a MOAT as Charles Ngo would say); most of the sellers on Amazon don’t have a clue about paid media buys or SEO. External traffic helps increase your rank on Amazon, especially if that external traffic converts. I learned this from an awesome FBA course I purchased here.
In the course, after the initial intro – the 2nd segment is fully devoted to product research. The young lad does a wonderful job covering various ways of product research; these methods combined with the tricks I’ve learned from playing with Shopify product research and finding drop shipping products have gave me some high opportunity products.
High opportunity products are lots of high-intent searches on Amazon of people looking to buy that specific product and low number of competitors. I can do my own research obviously but as with all my businesses I love to delegate tasks; and this was the perfect chance to seek out a product research specialist.
There are TWO benefits to hiring a freelance product researcher.
1. They will bring different ideas to the table.
2. Once this business takes off, they can be always the go to person to find new product ideas for me to evaluate.
So I went over to Fiverr and did a search, and based on the reviews I picked two highly recommended people and I also picked a new comer that had a really genuine looking profile and they looked real. (They were not using a picture of a hot woman to disguise that they are from India or Bangladesh, They weren’t over promising to disappoint me and under deliver – they seemed real as if they know what they are talking about)
It’s been 72 hours since I placed the orders, and I just finished reviewing the results.
The first person recommended I promote sunglasses for women, especially aviator glasses. This obviously is a horrible, horrible product to run, there’s way too much competition and Luxottica and pretty much their endless mega brands dominate the scene – only way to compete with them would be to be cheap as hell. NO THANKS (This btw was a Fiverr contractor with insane reviews — I was disappointed)
The second contractor also had awesome reviews 4.6/5 but when I looked at what they recommended – I was blown away in SHOCK! They told me I should run a water bottle product and not any niched water bottle product but a generic stupid water bottle product that’s so boring. Again, my quick check in the amazon due diligence tool revealed that this is a high search, super high competition product with many brands already and unique product designs dominating. Again a disappointment.
The 3rd person, newcomer to fiverr – well I opened his submission and was pleased to see that they told me what product this was, and submitted a break down on what people were complaining about in product reviews, what kind of ideas come to mind on how to improve it, and potential amazon geos to scale it to. And that is not all, he also included an ebook for best practices on Amazon. WOW – I was blown away. The newbie with the cheapest price was the BEST? YES that happens a LOT!
In fact, when hiring any freelancers I always tend to hire in batches 3-5 freelancers for the same job and give them a test and fire fast. This is how I found bad ass coders that sub-contract for Banners&Landers, this is how I found a great assistant that now handles one of my companies’ and even a kick ass video editor when I have to edit family videos from birthday parties (No Joke).
If you want to outsource and hire a product researcher that is awesome, be sure to use the strategy of hiring multiple people for the same task to find the best one. Sadly you can’t rely on reviews, and feedback scores or sexy looking service descriptions these days.
