Podcast Episode 211 – Why Do We Sell Courses If We’re So Successful on Amazon?

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Episode 211 Transcript:

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:01.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Full-Time FBA Show. In each episode, it’s our goal to help you turn part-time hours into a full-time income, selling almost anything on Amazon. Now, your hosts of the show, Stephen and Rebecca Smotherman.

[WELCOME]

[0:00:21.4] REBECCA: Hello there and welcome to another episode of The Full Time FBA Show. Today, we are on episode number 211 and we’re talking about why we sell courses teaching other people how to sell on Amazon. I mean, if we’re successful at selling on Amazon, why would we sell courses to teach people to do that?

And, as always, here with me to talk about this topic is my cohost, Stephen Smotherman, also, my business partner and my writing-in-course production partner.

[0:00:50.7] STEPHEN: Wait, we make courses?

[0:00:52.3] REBECCA: Yes, we do.

[0:00:52.4] STEPHEN: We sell courses?

[0:00:54.6] REBECCA: And we do a podcast together.

[0:00:56.0] STEPHEN: Yes, actually, we do. We’re doing it right now and I love it.

[0:00:59.0] REBECCA: We love creating contents.

[0:01:00.8] STEPHEN: We really do, and we’re going to answer that question that we get asked from time to time, “Why do you sell courses if you’re so successful on Amazon?”

[DISCUSSION]

[0:01:11.7] REBECCA: We’ve been asked a lot of questions over the last 10 years of helping people get started and helping people find success as Amazon FBA sellers and one of the questions that we’ve been asked multiple times is, “Why do you sell courses if you’re so successful at selling on Amazon yourself?”

And I have to admit, when I first heard this question, I thought, “Well, that’s weird, why wouldn’t we if we enjoy putting together content and putting together courses?” Because like I said, we both think this is fun. We both really enjoy writing, we enjoy making videos and audio, and we just enjoy putting together content, so, why wouldn’t we do it?

But since people have been asking us this question for over a decade now, we thought, “Let’s spend some time breaking that question down, and then we’ll answer it today on the podcast.” So, it turns out, people ask this question for a variety of reasons and we’ll talk about those reasons today.

And Stephen, I want you to kick us off with one of the bigger reasons why you think that people ask this question and how our listeners today can learn a big lesson that they can apply to their own Amazon business from this question.

[0:02:20.0] STEPHEN: Yeah, so, super-quick, and Rebecca kind of already kind of alluded to this but the quick answer to the question is this: We, as Amazon sellers, sell courses about selling on Amazon because it actually is fun for us and something we like to do, plus we get a lot of joy out of helping people grow their own business from start to success, and it’s very fulfilling to help people and we feel like we have the knowledge and skills, the experience, and because of that, we can help people. So, why not help them?

[0:02:46.8] REBECCA: Yeah, we really do enjoy helping people, any of you out there do on a regular basis get to help other people, serve them in any type of capacity. You know that it is very fulfilling that there’s just something in us as humans that I benefit when I help somebody else, it makes me feel good, it gives me just a boost of serotonin and I just enjoy it, and that’s included in helping other people to learn about how to run a business, and so that’s a big part of it as well.

[0:03:15.6] STEPHEN: Yeah, that’s like the super quick answer, you know, we enjoy it and we get a lot of joy from it but that would make for a super short podcast.

[0:03:23.6] REBECCA: Yeah, okay, we’re done, that’s it.

[0:03:24.9] STEPHEN: All right, let’s run the credits. Wait, we don’t have credits but there’s more reasons why we sell courses. So, when people say, “Why do you sell courses if you’re so successful selling on Amazon?” Some of them actually mean, “If selling on Amazon is so successful, then why aren’t you spending all of your time selling on Amazon, instead of also selling courses?”

So, to answer this question, you know, it sounds like they might think something’s a little fishy going on here and I get it. On the surface, it can seem kind of fishy, why would somebody sell a course if they’re making really good money selling on Amazon? But let’s take a minute to answer that more detailed question and that is, here’s the truth: We do make a full-time income selling on Amazon and we found a way to do it with only spending part-time hours and we like only spending part-time hours on our Amazon business.

I mean, it provides us with a full-time income, but we also like the concept of diversification. Basically, not putting all your eggs in one basket, you know? If the basket drops, all the eggs get broken but with income coming in from multiple sources, multiple streams as some may say, then that gives us more flexibility, more stability, and you could apply this in your Amazon business in a lot of different ways.

You know, if you’re just doing retail arbitrage, well, diversify and expand to online arbitrage. You just source books or just toys, then diversify your inventory, and expand to include other categories. The more your Amazon business is diversified, the more solid it becomes as an income-generating machine because like when COVID hit in 2020, we were able to keep our Amazon business afloat because we turned down the income stream of retail arbitrage and turned up the online arbitrage sourcing stream.

And so, when the biggest threat of COVID passed, we could turn back up the income stream of retail arbitrage and you know, just being diversified in our business is a big part of our long-term success path and should be a part of your long-term success path. Now, with being diversified in your Amazon business is really important, you want to make sure you add diversification at the right time and that’s like a whole other episode that we’ll drop sometime in the future.

[0:05:32.2] REBECCA: And there are other reasons that people might be asking us this question about why we sell courses, and so another big one is, when people ask that question, “Why do you sell courses if you’re successful selling on Amazon?” what they might actually mean is, “If you’re so successful and you found some way to be profitable at selling on Amazon, why are you teaching others to do that if they’re going to just be your competition?”

Isn’t it true that the more you teach others, the skills and strategies of how to make a full-time income on Amazon that the less you would be able to sell because of the increase in competition and then the less you’d be able to earn? And we’ve been hearing about this since the early days. Look, you know, over 10 plus years ago when we first started putting out content, “Why would you train your competition? Why would you teach your competition?”

And the simple answer is found in mindset and it’s found in the mindset and the perspective of the person asking that question because some people can see how teaching others how to sell on Amazon would be a threat to them and their own business but we just don’t see it that way. We have an abundance mindset and we hold on to the perspective that helping another person succeed does not have a negative impact on our own business in any way.

Just because somebody else is successful, doesn’t mean we’re unsuccessful or we’re in any way putting up any type of threat to our success and a lot of those lines, here’s some numbers just to consider about how big Amazon is as a platform right now. Amazon as a seller, sells around 12 million different items on their platform. 12 million different items but if you add in all of the third-party sellers, like you, the listener, and us, as we’re selling on Amazon, then there’s over 400 million items selling on Amazon right now.

And then, with Amazon having over a hundred million Prime members, that’s a ton of products that you can sell and a ton of customers. So, 400 million items, a hundred million prime members, that’s a ton of products, a ton of customers. In fact, Amazon is selling around 17 million dollars worth of merchandise an hour. That is staggering, so no, we do not worry about “training our competition.”

So, all of this is in a country-wide level for the US but we don’t even think we’re training our competition on a local level either. Like, if you’re just looking at where we live in Texas, I’m not worried about people in this area learning more how to sell on Amazon and then becoming our competition.

We train employees to go out and source for inventory for us and we just haven’t been worried at all that they would become our competition and one of the people working for us even at one point, she already had an Amazon seller account when we hired her and we trained her and she works for us for about a year and now, she’s making a full-time income selling on Amazon and our Amazon business was not impacted negatively in the slightest.

She finds things to sell that I would never find, that Stephen would never find. She just is doing her own thing and I find things, I’m sure I find things that she either would not find or would pass on if she saw it and was given that opportunity to buy it. So, this is a win-win situation for us, we just don’t think we are training our competition when we teach other people about how to sell on Amazon.

[0:09:05.8] STEPHEN: Yeah and again, the major reason we sell courses about how to sell on Amazon is because it’s fine. We love to help people, which leads me to another reason people ask us why we sell courses and this one is something that we’ve been asked more recently. When people say, “Why do you say courses if you’re so successful on Amazon?”

Some actually mean, “If you’re making a full-time income selling on Amazon, why do you sell courses?” If you want to help people and just help people succeed, why don’t you just give away these courses for free?” and again, I get it. The simple logic is this, the people who get the free training, they’re going to learn for free.

We help for free and maybe they’ll succeed for free except that’s not what the data or even our life experience has shown us and this is what I mean. How many times have you, think about it, how many times have you downloaded a free book? You know, how many of those books did you actually finish?

The data or the data because I like to use the word pronounced both ways, the data shows us that the number of people who actually finish a free ebook, they’re super small especially if they’re a how-to ebook. Yeah, there are exceptions. You might be thinking, “Stephen, I downloaded your free Seller Central tips ebook and I read it from cover to cover” and well, congratulations but you are not the norm.

In fact, some of you might be thinking that, “Oh, I have that free book collecting the digital dust on my computer right now and I have started it but I never finished it” or “Maybe I haven’t even started it yet, so I need to go finish that book.” So, we’ve tried giving away books, we’ve tried to give away courses and we tried to sell courses for like five dollars, USD 17, and the truth is, is that most people don’t value items they get for free or super cheap.

People usually don’t invest their time in something they’ve gotten for free and so in truth, people are more willing to invest their time in a book or a course that they’ve invested their hard-earned money in.

[0:10:59.5] REBECCA: Another psychological reason that we sell courses and that we offer paid coaching is because a lot of times people assume that if something is free that there’s not really any value to it. So, as Stephen was talking about, all the free ebooks that are out there, I went through a free ebook phase and I kind of got to where I stopped downloading them because my Kindle was just full of them and there was no way I was ever going to read all of them.

[0:11:21.3] STEPHEN: Same.

[0:11:21.9] REBECCA: And then the same goes for courses. You know, you might have seen some free five-day courses out there or free courses on the site Udemy, and those, Stephen and I both have downloaded those and we’ve taken one or two of them but a lot of times when you get something like that for free, people might subconsciously be thinking, “Is it really worth my time if it’s free?”
We just don’t value things highly if we get it for free a lot of the time. That’s not true 100% across the board but a lot of the time it is, and so our courses and our coaching, we put a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of our knowledge into it and we find them to be of really high value, and they can be a big time game-changing course for you if you take them and our coaching is the same way.

And so we make you a promise with our courses and our coaching and we’re confident that if you put in the hard work that we teach you online or coach you on that you’re going to see success with those specific courses or just overall success with the coaching that we offer. We put a value on that, we put a price on it so that you can value it and you will actually be motivated to consume that content, and that you will see the success that we really know that you can have in your own Amazon business.

[0:12:38.5] STEPHEN: Yeah, so we think that if we give away our courses, we will actually be doing you a disservice because we’ve actually tried to give away our books and give away our courses even to people we know like, “Hey, you can have a free access to this course” and then they usually don’t follow through and do anything with it but people just – they don’t ever seem to follow through when you give it away for free.

You know who does follow through? Those who invest their money and their time to learn the process that we teach and take action, that’s why we sell our courses and our coaching. It’s actually for your benefit and for your overall success.

[0:13:12.4] REBECCA: So, just to kind of wrap things up why do we sell courses if we’re so successful on Amazon, the number one reason is because we love helping people and we’d love to help you. If you’d like us to help you become a successful Amazon seller, then check out our line of courses that we offer by going to fulltimefba.com/ourtrainings and if you want even more help, then check out our 12-month coaching program, where it’s our goal to get you to making a full-time income during that 12 months.

You can find out more details about that at fulltimefba.com/coaching. Whichever path you decide to take, we’re here to help you along your way and we really love to do that.

[0:13:51.1] STEPHEN: Yes.

[CLOSING CONVERSATION]

[0:13:55.1] REBECCA: Thank you again for listening to this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. As always, you can find the show notes and the transcript for this episode at fulltimefba.com/211 because this is episode number 211 and while you’re there, make sure you are subscribed to The Full-Time FBA Newsletter, at fulltimefba.com.

[0:14:14.0] STEPHEN: And next week on the show, we’re going to be talking about overcoming failure in your Amazon FBA business. You are going to experience failure from time to time, we’re going to help you not let it get you down but actually help you find success through that failure. So, join us next week on The Full-Time FBA Show.

[OUTRO]

[0:14:32.4] ANNOUNCER: That is all for this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. So, head over to fulltimefba.com/podcast, where you will find the show notes and links from this episode. While you’re there, subscribe to our newsletter where you’ll get several free downloads of our popular and helpful Amazon FBA resources. Now, take action on what you have learned today, so you can find success at turning part-time hours into a full-time income with Amazon FBA.

[END]