My journey in Kibo has been heavily documented inside of Kibo Talk, and I’ll also include in my reply to you a link to one of those threads. And in that thread, I link back to all the other threads, so I documented all my milestones. There’s a ton more documentation there if you want to do some research about my Kibo journey. So, my background, that’s your first question, my background is that I’ve been in and around internet marketing online as a side hustler since 2007. I have a podcast related to internet marketing, but most of the things that I focus on are content marketing. I’m not really an e-commerce marketer, and so that gets into why I decide to join Kibo Code, because I’m always looking at ways to potentially diversify my income streams online.
I’ve known Steve and Aidan for more than a decade. I’ve been a participant in many classes. I’ve made a lot of money with Steve and Aidan, and I know the quality of those two guys as people and also as marketers. So for me, those two guys are can’t miss, in the sense that I always know what I’m going to get; amazing over delivery on content, things that they’ve actually done and tested that actually work. And that doesn’t mean that a hundred percent of their students are always successful, but what it does mean is that a hundred percent of the time, what they’re teaching can and does work for people, and usually the missing ingredient is some combination of mindset and hard work. And I know that probably, very likely, that if you have the right attitude and you do a lot of hard work, you can make money with whatever Steve and Aidan are talking, even in the face of weird economic situations like we’ve been through with the pandemic. And so that’s why I joined Kibo Code and why I’ll always be in and around Steve and Aidan’s work.
Another thing that they’ve added recently is [Sean 00:03:20], and I’m aware of Sean and I consider him to be one of the better teachers that they’ve ever engaged, and I love working with that guy. I think he’s really amazing. He’s sort of one of my favorite Canadians, so there you go. Were their road blocks for me and what did I do to overcome them? As a side hustler with a lot of other side hustles always going on, the big roadblock for me is always time and consistent commitment. Not just this soft idea of time, but what am I doing every day to move the business forward? I really do believe that when you work on a business like Kibo, one of the key things is that you do something every day. It doesn’t have to be 10 hours every day, but you do something, even if it’s 10 or 15 minutes to move your business forward every day. Life is a busy thing, but consistency pays amazing dividends.
A lot of times, what I find happens is that if I go ahead and spend a few minutes every day, those few minutes sometimes will accidentally turn into an hour and an hour and a half, and I’ll make amazing progress. Like most things, with exercise and a thousand other things in life, the key is really consistency. And so if you consistently put on those running shoes and at least get started, a lot of times you’ll surprise yourself, and the same thing is true with Kibo. You’ll surprise yourself with how much you can do as you stack up win after win after win every day, when the win is simply just that you did something to move your business forward. It’s really kind of an amazing effect, and I think it goes to mindset and it goes to actually the physical act of stacking up wins every day in your business. I think that’s really important, and that’s how I overcome my roadblock of not having enough time.
You asked about my tips for choosing winning products, and that’s easy. I did exactly what Sean taught in the course, and that’s all I did, exactly that. Then when I saw that was working, I added one more thing. I found a software tool called Zik Analytics and that helped me. That’s Z-I-K Analytics, and that helped me with one particular thing, and that is the idea of sales velocity. One of the things about finding winning products is understanding what is selling now, but the question is, over what time period did that sell? Let me give you an example. If you’re looking for a product in December or January and you see that it sold a ton, the question is, when did that sell? What if it’s a Halloween item and you’re looking in January? You would see that that sold a ton, but all the sales were done in October. Right?
And so it doesn’t really do you any good to list a Halloween product, generally speaking, in January. And so what you want to know is not only how many items have sold in total, but how many have sold in the last 30 days? And so I use this additional tool, Zik Analytics to do exactly what Sean taught, exactly what he taught, plus the additional idea of, is this still selling right now? Is this hot right now or was it hot months ago? That’s the only thing that I added there. Other than that, I think Sean’s product selection training inside the course is spot on, amazing. Sean’s an excellent teacher, and it’s one of the reasons I really like him, because he’s really able to demonstrate over and over and over again how to do a thing like this.
Top traffic and advertising tips, I did not do a lot of paid traffic yet, because I’ve been focused on Facebook Marketplace where the traffic is free. I did do a semi-scientific experiment with boosting listings inside of Facebook Marketplace and I did not find that that was effective, so one tip would be don’t just blindly boost Facebook Marketplace posts. I think you need to assess for your particular situation whether boosting is delivering a return on investment and make a decision. For me, I could never see any evidence that that was the case.
I will say that I have used Sean’s teaching regarding paid search a number of times on various other projects outside of e-commerce, and that is a fantastic approach that he uses. He teaches this particular thing called the machine gun approach. That’s an amazing approach. It works great for e-commerce and about a thousand other things.
That would be my traffic recommendation for things like e-commerce. I think that’s a really, really good way to buy highly-targeted traffic with extreme commercial intent. And what’s amazing about that sort of paid traffic is you can see directly what keywords are actually converting and you can adjust your spend accordingly on those keywords. That’s an amazing capability of paid search traffic. I like that better than any kind of other traffic for e-commerce and that’s what I recommend.
Again, it boils down to following the training. I think for this particular course, my best advice is to follow the training exactly and relentlessly, and just grind and grind and grind and grind. And if you find something that you think might help you, like I expressed with Zik Analytics, test it, and if that’s helping you keep it, and if it’s not, toss it away, but don’t get too far afield from the training. Small deviations are great. Reinventing the wheel, not so great.
Your next question was top five recommendations for building an e-commerce business. Let’s see if we can come up with five that are really important and simple, that are easy for people to execute. First tip, absolutely follow the training. That is the number one tip. Find a plan that you know works, which if you’re going with Steve and Aidan, you know that that’s going to work, and follow it relentlessly. Second tip, have a mindset that will allow you to succeed. Aidan teaches all of these things inside of his courses around mindset. Why does he do that? I’ll tell you why he does it, because it is absolutely critical. He would not waste his time teaching mindset if he didn’t believe it was super important for people to be successful.
Even Sean, who says he’s not a mindset guy, is probably one of the biggest mindset guys I’ve ever met. The thing with Sean is mindset is so much a critical part of his business, he doesn’t even realize that mindset is a thing. It’s automatic for him. It’s why he’s successful. So I would say the second thing for sure is mindset. The third thing is something I already mentioned, and that is make progress on your business every day. This idea of making sure that every day you’re doing something to move your business forward is absolutely critical.
Fourth thing that I would suggest is that you not be afraid to ask for help, and let me make a distinction between whining and ask for help. I see a lot of people that are working on internet businesses and they run into some obstacle, and they complain and whine and talk about how things don’t work and how they’re victims. Okay? I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about situations where you followed the training and you don’t completely understand, or it’s not working the way you expected. It’s really important that you reach out and say, “Hey, here’s my experience. I need help getting to the next step or getting this done, because it’s not working the way I expected. Am I right or am I wrong? What am I doing?” and getting that kind of feedback.
That’s one of the most amazing things about a course like Kibo, because not only is there an extensive help desk that can help you with these things, and not only are there things like office hours, there’s this vibrant talk community that we had established that made it possible for you to ask your peers who are going through the same thing and they’re doing that at the same time you are. So you can ask, “Hey, does this make sense? Am I doing it right?” And with those three resources, it’s really easy to ask for help. And as long as you’re doing it the right way with the right mindset, I recommend asking for help when you need it.
And then the fifth thing is, and I think this is equally important, is to be patient. Look, there’s an old cliche that you hear over and over again, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Neither are e-commerce businesses. One of the things I love about Kibo is there is the ability to get quick wins, but if you’re looking to build a six figure a year business, that’s not going to happen in week two, and you’ve got to be patient. You’ve got to keep your eyes on the prize.
I’ll give you a bonus tip that will help you with the fifth tip, and the bonus tip, tip number six, is to celebrate your small wins. This is another thing that’s done really good inside of Steve and Aidan’s courses. They always have a specific area for celebrating success, even the small stuff. You need to take the time to do that, both with your Kibo brethren or the people that are also taking the course, and with your family or whoever’s supporting you outside the course. I think that’s really important.
Other tips and nuggets of wisdom, well, I don’t know if I actually have wisdom, but I can say that one of the things that you need to spend time on is mindset. I mentioned that before, but I want to double down on it here is that my experience is people who expect to win, they win. And people who expect to win, they have a more robust response to adversity and they overcome that adversity, because they have this expectation that they are going to be successful in the long run and win. And I think that if you can master your own mind, that will take you a long way. That’s one nugget of wisdom.
The second nugget of wisdom that I’ll offer you is the power of masterminds. I think it’s really important that you find a group. In the case of most of Steve and Aidan’s products, those groups are provided for you, but whatever you’re doing in e-commerce or elsewhere, even if you’re not working with Steve and Aidan, you need to have a group of people that are going through what you’re going through or have a diverse set of capabilities that are aligned with the things that you’re working on. They have similar goals in life that can help you move forward. This idea of masterminding around things that you’re trying to get accomplished is really critical, and we could do an entire course on that. I won’t do that here in the interest of time, but that’s a really, really important thing is to be around like-minded people that are interested in helping you be successful.
A day in the life of a top-selling Kibo Code student. For me, this is great, because basically what I did was I got up every morning. I worked for 10 or 20 minutes literally processing orders, running things through, answering questions from my virtual assistant, which is not something we’ve talked about here, but maybe I’ll cover it at the end here, and just making some purchases, dealing with some complicated customer service things, and then I did that again in the evening. So I was spending on the order of less than an hour a day on the Facebook Marketplace, part of this business.
So I’d wake up in the morning. Some sales would’ve come in overnight, or there were some things that needed to be ordered, or there were some questions from my VA that I needed to answer. I did that. It took 20 minutes. Then I went on with the rest of my day, which for me, as a side hustler in general, meant going to work. And then in the evening, some time in the evening before I went to bed, usually after my family had settled down for the night, I would log back on, answer some customer questions and so forth. I was not spending a lot of time on this, and yet I was still able to generate $50,000 or more. I don’t know what the final total was. We’ll have those in the screenshots, but I was able to generate over $50,000 in revenue, with essentially after the first couple of months, 20, 30, 40 minutes a day.
How did I achieve my best sales days? By listing as many items as possible. I mean, look, this is a numbers game. Sean has said this many times. You achieve sales by listing items for sale. That’s it. There’s no magic. The more things that you have for sale, the more opportunity you have to win. You’re not going to sell everything. A lot of things are not going to sell, but the good news is it doesn’t cost you much to test these things. In the case of Marketplace, Facebook Marketplace, it costs you nothing. In the case of running ads, it costs you very little, and most of that money you can get back in the form of a few sales.
So, failed products in e-commerce, they don’t fail very badly. Usually, it just means that they’re not profitable. It doesn’t mean that you lost all your money that you spent on advertising. It just means you didn’t make money. So that means that with a very small ad budget, you can actually run lots and lots of tests, test lots and lots of products. And so really, the key to winning in business is to make lots of offers. That’s not specific to e-commerce, right? The more offers you make, the more sales you can make, and that’s doubly true for Kibo.
What advice would I give to someone interested in joining Kibo Code? Talk to people about Steve and Aidan. These guys are the real deal. They’ve been around for a long time. They have a fantastic reputation. Ask people what they think. That’d be my first thing. Because you need to trust your teachers, and Steve and Aidan, I can tell you, they are guys who care about the community that they build. They care about students’ success. They care about over-delivering. They care about people. They are going to be one of your very best bets. If you’re looking to start a business, then Steve and Aidan are great partners to have.
Does that mean that you will absolutely be successful at this on your first try? Of course not. That depends on you, how hard you work, whether or not you follow the training, what else is going on in your life. It’s not on a guarantee, but what you want to do is you want to maximize your odds, and I think Steve and Aiden give you the best odds of being successful. I’ve been involved in a lot of internet marketing programs out there, and these guys are really fantastic when it comes to delivering online training for businesses. It’s really cool.
My objectives for 2022 and beyond, like I said, I’ve got a lot of objectives outside of Kibo. We’re going to keep driving on this, Kibo. I want to extend the business into more traditional e-commerce, meaning paid advertising and sales on my website, and I’ll continue to ride the Facebook Marketplace train, as long as that thing is going someplace that I want to go. What I’d really like to do is to get my support system extended, my VAs extended into more traditional e-commerce, and I plan to use Kibo for that, so that’s going to be great.
Let’s talk about VAs as a bonus. I promised that. People hear that. They freak out. They’re like, “Oh my God, that’s another expense.” I recommend that you consider VAs. This is the most VA kind of friendly business that I’ve ever seen in my life. When you’re making a little bit of money, I recommend, or even maybe just before you’re making a little bit of money, I recommend that you spend just a little bit of money getting people to help you. And for me, that meant getting someone in the Philippines who I could pay much, much more money than they could make doing anything else. So I could improve their quality of life, but still pay them a relatively small amount of money compared to what I would have to pay someone in the United States to help me move this business forward.
While I was sleeping, they were working, and let me tell you, that’s a magical thing. When you wake up in the morning fully rested, and someone in another country, who’s very interested in doing a great job for you because you’re paying them a competitive wage for work that they’re doing in the comfort of their home on a computer, this is a beautiful thing. And all of a sudden, magically, your business moved forward. You remember I told you move forward every day? Your business moved forward while you were asleep. That’s an amazing, incredibly powerful thing.
And so I recommend that in these businesses, as you are able, and maybe even just before you really feel comfortable enough to be able, that you invest in getting someone to help you, because it more than doubles your productivity. It’s not a linear thing, because when someone’s working on the blocking and tackling in your business, you get to work on the things that pay more than just time dividends. You get to work on the business process. It’s about working on your business instead of in it. If you pay someone to work in your business, then you can work on your business, and that can pay you back your money fivefold, tenfold, a hundredfold, depending on what you’re doing. So, that is my thinking on VAs, and I think that’s a really important idea.
My observation is a lot of the people in Kibo that were successful used virtual assistance, and that’s something that, that outsourcing idea, is something that’s talked about in the course and is an example of one of the ways that Steve and Aidan over-deliver. This is not a course about outsourcing, but when you look in the course, down in the bonus material, there’s outstanding training on outsourcing right there for you. And so that’s one of the things that’s magical about Steve and Aidan.