The Million Dollar Case Study Session #18: Time Management & Productivity Hacks

A few months ago, we surveyed several thousand Amazon sellers to learn more about their businesses and ambitions. When asked about the struggles they faced in launching and growing an Amazon business, there were three responses that were most commonly given:

• Not enough time
• Not enough money
• No educational resources

While we have yet to source a supplier of more time on Alibaba, we can at least find ways to maximize our use of the 24 hours a day we do have.

In Session 18, we dig in to some productivity and time management tips and tools that we find most helpful to manage all that we have to cram into any given day. How you can do more with the time you have to build the best business possible, regardless of how much time that you have? We will offer some tools and ideas to help you get there!

Here is a recap of the webinar:

And the slides:

 

Jungle Snugs Updates – Lifestyle photos are here

Before we get into the meat of the presentation, let’s get some updates on Jungle Snugs.

We now have some cute lifestyle photos to use:

 

The lack of high quality lifestyle images was one of the biggest shortcomings of our listing at this point. With better images, we increase our likelihood of standing out in the search results, generating more clicks and conversions.

Jungle Snugs sales updates:

And regarding the actual performance of the product, organic sales are improving, and the number of discounted products given away on a daily basis is decreasing. Here’s an overview from the Fetcher dashboard:

 

 

The recent sales velocity and increase in reviews (currently at 15 reviews and 4.8 rating). The sales numbers look nice for sure. However while we’re still in the product launch phase and spending on product giveaways and pay per click campaigns, Fetcher reports that profits are not yet positive. It’s all good, and part of the plan. Trust the process, as they say…

 

Keyword ranking improvements

Our organic ranking for main keywords is also improving as we get more sales history and social proof (ie good reviews). We are currently ranking 9^th for the keyword “baby hooded towel”.

Another interesting thing that you’ll see is that there are two Jungle Snugs ads running, one for the white variation and one for the pink variation:

 

The benefit here is that we are getting more “real estate” at the top of the page, increasing our likelihood of getting a qualified visitor. But we are not paying twice as much to have two ads, as presumably, a person will only click on one of the ads. The beauty of the Pay-Per-Click model 🦄

The Challenge Of Time When Launching On Amazon

OK let’s get into the nitty gritty of session #18. The process of launching a product on Amazon is very front-loaded: a majority of the work is invested early on in the process, in the product research phase. The time spent launching a product looks like an inverted triangle:

 

So if a bunch of the work is concentrated at the very beginning, how can we push through to get to the smooth sailing of having a product that ultimately sells itself?

Greg outlined five thoughts that drive maximum productivity on an ongoing basis.

 

1. Planning

Planning tasks ahead of time, daily and weekly tasks, is highly important to stay on course and executing on goals.

Greg tends to plan things out on a calendar, working backwards from a goal and breaking up the end goal with high bite-sized tasks.

For example, here’s the calendar that he created for the launch of Jungle Snugs:

 

One helpful framework to help guide the planning process is the Stephen Covey Quadrant weighing responsibilities by importance and urgency:

 

 

Ideally you can work from Quadrant 1, that which is both important and urgent, and continue focusing on Important work. The tasks that are less important can be delegated out or outsourced.

 

2. Avoid Multitasking

Relentless focus is how things get done. That’s not much of a revelation. And nor is the statement that avoiding multitasking is beneficial. However, it is incredibly hard to do if you are on a computer and have dings, rings, beeps, and buzzes coming at you all the time. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, the distractions will never stop!

Before running under a rock, there are a few things that can help:

The Pomodoro Technique –  Pretty simple. Work, uninterrupted, for 25 minutes on one task. Take 5 minutes to move around or scroll your feeds. Then back at it. There are a variety of tools to help you stay on track. One that I have used and like is Forest, a free Chrome extension to help you stay on task.

Noise Canceling Headphones – the noise canceling version from Bose are nice. They’re too fancy for my blood though, I just have the normal in ear buds, but they are infinitely helpful in blocking out the background noise and outside sound. There’s nothing that spurs on work like cat-in-a-blender screeches of dubstep.

Duet App – This is actually the opposite of avoiding multitasking, but there’s a great app that helps you connect your ipad to your computer (PC or Mac) for $9.99. It’s called Duet, and works seamlessly to have a second monitor anywhere you bring your laptop and ipad.

 

3. Tackle the Hard Tasks First

Mark Twain: “If you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you can go through the rest of the day knowing the worst is behind you.”

Not much to add to the wisdom of Mark Twain here.

 

4. Focus on Strengths, Delegate The Rest

As mentioned above, the Jungle Market is a very helpful way to affordably get extra help on your Amazon business. You can find everything you’ll need from professional Amazon consulting, graphic design, product photography, listing copywriting, and also a ton of other stuff.

Everyone advertised on the Jungle Market also has experience working on with Amazon sellers, so they know exactly what to do which will take a load of stress off your hands.

 

Ready to start growing your Amazon business?

Get access to the best Amazon freelancers all in one place!

With the Jungle Market, you won’t have to browse through thousands of unqualified freelancers. The Jungle Marketplace offers only verified pros that have been fully vetted by the Jungle Scout team.

 

5. Ship It

Waiting for perfection can cause you to delay a launch until… forever. Nothing will be perfect, so waiting for the perfect final touches should never be the hold-up between launching and not. “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you have launched too late” are the wise words of Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.

The takeaway is simple: Just get started!

You just have to put it out there if you want to start and scale your business. The nice thing about Amazon, as with many other things in life: you can always change it down the road. Jungle Snugs launched with less-than-perfect images, copy and an estimation of pricing. But we will gather data, review and improve it going forward!

Which is exactly what we will do in Session #19 of the Million Dollar Case Study next week.

 

Conclusion

If you are following along and launching your own product, make sure you are reviewing your progress just like we have at the beginning of this post. What are your findings? Let us know in the comments!

Hopefully these productivity tips will help you to improve workflow in the coming months. These tips have been learned and tested by Greg and many other successful Amazon sellers. There’s no one-size-fits-all rule, so if you have any other cool productivity hacks then do drop those in the comments too!

 

Next Up

In the next session, we will be optimizing our pay per click campaigns that we launched back in Session #13. Greg reviews the data that we’ve collected, and makes changes to the campaigns to maximize our ROI and ramp up our conversions!

Be sure to catch this highly actionable content on how to run the best pay per click campaigns possible – watch the replay.