When Scott attended and spoke at the Seller’s Summit a few months ago he met Mike Jackness, an Amazon seller who makes over 7 figures from his private label products and the two of them hit it off right off. Mike got into private label sales when he purchased a website that was already selling its products on Amazon. Over time, he replaced all of those products with his own private label products and began working to drive traffic to his products outside of Amazon through Facebook Ads, contest, and much more. This episode is not for the newbie, it’s stuff that experienced sellers who are already having success can apply to increase their revenue over time. What is a sales funnel? The term Sales Funnel has to do with getting people who are interested in your products onto an email list and using a progressive series of emails to build a relationship with them with the end result of them becoming a customer, and hopefully, a repeat customer who tells others about your products. Mike Jackness tells the details of how his team set up their sales funnels, how they got their initial email subscribers, and how they used a variety of tactics to give them great content that was truly helpful and build the relationships that translate into trust and then sales. You can hear all of those details on this episode of the podcast. Building an email address through contests. Mike Jackness has used an online contest platform to drive two vital things: his number of email subscribers and the social sharing and social proof of his brand’s reliability. On this episode Mike shares the details of how he ran his contests, the timing of the rewards and winner announcements, and how they leveraged the social component to greatest advantage. This is some advanced, high level stuff that you’ll want to hear, especially if you’re already experiencing a good deal of success as a private label seller on Amazon. How to build trust through your automated emails. When you get someone to subscribe for your email list, the last thing you want to do is send them a series of emails that ask them to do things for you. Instead you want to provide them tons of value, tons of helpful things that make them wonder why you are being so generous. You want them to know that you care about them, that you want to give to them in a way that is related to your products or niche. Once you’ve established that trust, then you’re ready to ask them to do things for you - leaving reviews, buying more products, taking advantage of discount codes, and more. You can hear Mike Jackness describe how his company did that very effectively, on this episode. Using an email list to create new product ideas. Mike Jackness has been learning from his email list processes daily for some time. One of the things he discovered was that his mailing list was a great resource for helping him narrow down the ideas for new products, and it’s not only helped him produce items that are tailored to his audience but also to avoid mistakes that would have cost them thousands of dollars. It’s a great way to poll your users and customers to not only make smart business decisions but also to be of greater value to your audience or customer base. Mike’s insights are very helpful and you can hear much more than what has been described here on this episode. OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER [0:03] Scott’s introduction to the episode and his guest! [2:30] Get into the free private label course. [4:20] Why Scott wanted to have his guest on the show. [5:51] The site purchased and how Mike’s gone about replacing its products with his own. [7:45] Not wanting to be relying on one channel of revenue. [9:42] Building a funnel to capture email addresses: at the right time. [10:31] How Mike went about building his email list: the first steps. [12:48] The task of building a contest to fill their email list (and get some orders). [22:41] Different approaches to driving traffic without already having a huge follo