At the beginning of 2021 I created a goal of creating a passive income stream. My professional career has lots of experience in ecommerce and Amazon. So my thought process naturally drifted to this area. If you’ve ever looked into selling on Amazon people always say identify a niche and fill that niche. Years ago I began tenkara fly fishing. I had never fully been satisfied with the products in the market for holding my line on the tenkara rod. I developed my own method and ordered all the supplies to make my own.
Through 2021 I launched my product from ordering bulk supplies. Planning the marketing materials. Hiring designers to produce the files and print the materials. Then listing them on Amazon. Once I had the initial run of products I began selling them on Amazon. For the first few months it was trial and error on spending money on Amazon pay per click ads. The only way to get traffic on Amazon is through SEO or pay for advertising. So the goal was to pay to drive organic search ranking. Over several months I was able to gain organic search results to the point that I was able to significantly dial back the spend.
I learned a ton about product development and business management through this cycle. It takes lots of planning to bring a product to life. There will always be unexpected challenges but you keep moving through them. Also, there is never a perfect launch. Its important to get the product out there and then you can adjust while your going. Eventually I realized that there are more efficiencies to using Amazon’s fulfillment model. for the first few months i was shipping all the sold items myself. I then learned all the nuances of using Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA). I began shipping directly to Amazon to let them handle the fulfilment. This drastically lowered my costs and improved my efficiencies. At the end of the year. I had turned a net profit and used those funds to purchase a new line of product. Hopefully in 2022 we will have a new successful line of tenkara packs.
Walk to Victory 