Greg Cesar Interview

The Marketers Corner interviews Greg Cesar

TMC:

This time we’re talking with a real high flyer when it comes to selling on Amazon and dominating niche markets. Not only does he have a degree in economics, but he is also an inspiring trainer, which is why he’s been invited to speak on stages around the world in places such as Singapore, Malaysia, as well as closer to home. So it’s a real pleasure to say welcome to Greg Cesar.

Greg Cesar:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

TMC:

Well, it’s great to have you. Let’s start by asking a little bit more about you and your background and how you got started.

Greg Cesar:

Yeah, absolutely. I graduated college and went out and got myself a corporate job, like everyone else is supposed to do, and my goal was to work up the corporate ladder and become president of a company somewhere. And one day I had a boss tell me, “When I tell you to do something, you do it.” And I instantly realised that I was unemployable. I said, “There’s just no way I can go work for someone who’s going to tell me that.”

So in 1997 or ’98, I bought a product from television. It was some work at home thing and I had it for a couple months. And when I quit my job, I said, “Well, let’s start this internet thing everybody keeps talking about.” And I started consulting local businesses on, “Hey, you’ve got to advertise and market on the internet.” And they all thought I was crazy. I actually had one guy say to me, “This internet thing is not going to be any good until the year 2050.” And-

TMC:

Wow. Wow.

Greg Cesar:

I wanted to say, “Where did you get that figure from?” So it wasn’t the easiest thing back then and-

TMC:

I was going to say, this is the early days of the internet too, right?

Greg Cesar:

Oh, this was the days, if you wanted to rank number one on Yahoo, all you had to do was put a letter or a number in front of your domain, and you’d be number one in a day or two.

TMC:

Wow.

Greg Cesar:

That’s how easy it was back then. Yeah. And so I started consulting businesses and I started getting good at it, and I wanted to go out and get more clients. So I decided, let me learn how to sell products and content and things like that on the internet. And I got really good at that. I mean I’ve sold my own personal products since then, and probably 170,000 customers that I have personally sold to over the years. So I learned that what I thought was an impossible thing was actually the most easiest thing once I learned how to do it. So that got me speaking all over the globe and training people and it’s been an amazing journey.

TMC:

Well, a lot of people either listening or reading this will know you through the book, Selling Info Products Through Amazon FBA. That’s something that you are really well known for. Maybe we can just touch on that for a second, how that came about and what’s the background to that?

Greg Cesar:

Yeah. So before I started selling content on Amazon, I was selling info products off of my websites using Google traffic and did very well, drove millions and millions of visitors. And around 2014, everyone had been talking about FBA, FBA, FBA. And for those who don’t know, FBA is Fulfilled By Amazon is you take a product, you ship it to Amazon, and they sell it, blenders, widgets, cars, toys, whatever it is.

And so I had looked at the model and what I saw was a huge flaw in the model in that everyone was, if I want to sell blenders, I have to order a thousand blenders from somewhere, I’ve got to get my name put on the blenders, and if I’m paying $20 for the blenders, just the cost to get the blenders before anything else is 20 grand. And I don’t know if that’s going to work or not going to work. So I kind of hesitated a bit. And what motivated me to actually give it a try, and it’s a true story I tell in my webinars, is I went to a barbecue and a friend of mine showed up with his daughter and he told me, “You won’t believe this. My daughter’s making $38 a day on Amazon.” And here’s the crazy part, she was eight years old at the time.

And I said to myself, “God dang it, if an eight year old is kicking my butt on Amazon, what the heck do I got to be afraid of?” And so I said I’m going to get started. And the thing about it was I sat and I asked myself, what’s the fastest and quickest thing that I could sell? And I said, “Well, I’ve been selling information. Why don’t I take one of my courses and why don’t I see if I could sell that?” But I didn’t want to go on the Kindle side. I had done Kindle and Kindle is amazing, but the price points on Kindle are very low. You’re talking $3, $4, $5, $9 a product. So I said, “I want to sell a $50 product. I want to sell a $90 product. So how do I do that?” I said, “I got it. I can’t make it an ebook, I have to make it a course, and I have to make it physical. And if I do that, people will pay me.”

So I took my course and I recorded it. I turned it into an audio and put it on a cd. And I said, “Well, let’s see if anyone’s going to buy it.” And sure enough, within the first day, I made $9. Within the first two months, I was at $3,000 a month in sales. And then it just went up from there. So it was something that was really, I saw an eight year old kid doing it and said, “If they can do it, I can do it.” And that is what motivated me to get started.

TMC:

That’s amazing. I mean you’ve had an incredible success, obviously with everything that you’ve been doing online, but to see that you’ve been inspired by an eight year old, I mean there’s something in that, Greg, to be fair.

Greg Cesar:

I tell people, you never know when your next opportunity is going to come. And that’s the second opportunity I’ve had that has come from a kid. Another one was, we were running ads in newspapers and I saw a 16 year old kid who was doing it successfully. Well, who do you think I called? I called a 16 year old and said, “Hey, show me what you’re doing.” There is no shame in the game. Whoever has the knowledge, I’m going to take it. The age doesn’t matter. So in a lot of people, they would’ve said, “Oh, that’s a kid. I’m not going to listen to a kid.” I say, “It doesn’t matter. It’s whoever’s doing it successfully is who you want to learn from.”

TMC:

Absolutely. And Amazon, as you say, a lot of people are tempted to get into Amazon, because it has a lot of customers, you don’t have to set up a website, they’ll handle all the shipments, all the fulfilment, all the returns if necessary. It’s all done for you. But I guess the barriers to entry can sometimes put people off. What do you say to people to motivate them to take those steps that are necessary to get their products onto Amazon?

Greg Cesar:

Well, the great thing is, because we’re selling content and information, 99% of those barriers are gone. The only thing that can hold you back right now is your own laziness. That’s it.

So let me give you an example. I’ve got a product that we’re selling on Amazon, and it’s in a market that I know absolutely nothing about. That should have been a barrier because I don’t know the market, I don’t understand the market. And it’s actually a musical instrument which I actually don’t even play. So how did I go in and dominate a market like that, that I know nothing about, never even held the instrument in my life? Well, I went out and found someone who was really good in the instrument, and they already were selling content in courses and training. And I said, “Hey, what would you charge me for a licence to sell your product?” And I sat back and I said, “Oh, this guy’s going to get me,” because it was a five star product with thousands of reviews.

And the gentleman said to me, “Well, I might be interested. What do you have in mind?” My answer was, “I don’t know. What do you think is fair?” And he said, and I quote, “Send me $500 and it’s yours.”

TMC:

Wow.

Greg Cesar:

I PayPaled that money faster than you can blink. And what ended up happening was he sent me the content, I changed the name of the product, I put a different name as the person who’s teaching the product, I created my own graphics and started selling. So the barriers to entry don’t exist when you’re selling content, especially in a marketplace where most people aren’t thinking content is something that I could sell there. Most people think it’s the shoes, the sneakers, the clothes, the watch, the hats, the blenders is what you have to sell on Amazon, but content is infinitely easier to sell and content will always sell there, always.

TMC:

I think what’s interesting there, Greg, is the fact that you were able to get the rights, if you like, or ownership of a product that was complementary to the one that you wanted to sell, and you were able to get it for such an affordable amount too.

Greg Cesar:

Oh yeah. And actually, that’s on the expensive side. Typically, I’m getting things for 90 bucks, $100. If I’m going to get resell rights to something if someone is selling PLR, that can be as little as $10. And PLR stands for private label rights. There are people who actually create content with the sole purpose of reselling the rights to it. Now, most of those aren’t great pieces of content, so you have to take them and fix them. But when I reach out to someone who has good content that I might licence to, that content typically is perfect content because that person didn’t create the content with the intentions of selling it to somebody else, they’re trying to make money with their content. So typically they’re going to do really, really good content.

So it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s fast. And because of the way that I did it, I might have had an hour into that project because I didn’t have to create the content. All I had to do was get somebody else to do the graphics, because I’m not a graphic design artist, so I also cannot spend the time on the graphics. I have to get somebody else to do that. So I always tell people, this is probably the easiest thing I’ve done in all my years of selling products on the internet. Why? Because I finally figured out that I could take myself out of the equation. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t have to be involved in the process. And that’s, again, another one of the barriers that holds people back is I hear people say, “Time. I don’t have time. I don’t have time.” Whoa. What if you did something that didn’t require your time?

TMC:

Yeah.

Greg Cesar:

And that’s the way we’re doing it is one of them.

TMC:

Well, I think what’s interesting as well, maybe you’ll agree or disagree with this, is that even if you buy PLR sometimes and it’s not that good, it’s low quality, the writing isn’t perhaps as good as it should be, I find that it’s easier to reversion that PLR than it would be to start with a completely blank page because a lot of people have fear of a blank page and getting started. So at least that way you’ve got a starting point, even if the original PLR isn’t so good. Is that what you find in your experience as well, Greg?

Greg Cesar:

Absolutely 1000%. There’s a lot of PLR out there in some really good niches and ideas. So, use that as a basis point. Use that as an idea for something, “Hey, I want to create a product in this niche or I want to create a product in that niche.” So a lot of times I will look at the sites where PLR is being sold just to get an idea for something that I might want to sell. So what, the content is not great? I can always fix the content. That’s easy. That’s super easy. It’s coming up with the idea that may hold someone back, but if there’s an opportunity there, why not go and see what’s already being sold somewhere else and create your own version of the content.

In fact, there’s one product recently, someone was selling PLR rights to it for $9. They’re no longer selling PLR rights. So I then said, “Let me see if anyone is buying this content on Amazon.” So I went and did a search on Amazon for the particular keyword. And what I felt was there was someone who has the product on Amazon, but they also have the product on ClickBank, same exact product. So I said, “Oh, okay.” When I did the math based off of what Amazon says how many people leave a review on their website, I reverse engineered and said, “That particular product on Amazon, my guesstimate is almost a million dollars in sales.” It was a straight PLR product.

TMC:

No way. Really?

Greg Cesar:

100%. And it was sold for $9. So now there’s no longer access to the PLR. So what did I do? I went out and I said, “Okay, I know what the subject matter is now.” All I did was go out and make a couple posts and say, “Hey, I need someone to create me content in this space.” That’s it. So take that PLR and look at the idea and the niche and say, “Okay, if I need to improve it, let me pay someone to make it better.” That’s all you need to do.

TMC:

Yeah, yeah. And also, you touched on something earlier that I’d just like to, again, highlight is that you talked about you’ve tried Kindle, you’d done physical books as in printed books, but also you’ve also dabbled with audio as well. How important is it to you to make your content available in different formats like printed books, like audio, like video, and so on?

Greg Cesar:

Okay. So I tell people, and that’s what we call your media. What is your media or your medium that your content comes in? And the only thing the medium does is it determines your price.

TMC:

Okay.

Greg Cesar:

So I could take, don’t change a single word in the product, if I sell it on Kindle, I might be able to get $9. If I take that product and make it audio, which is what we did with ours, so on Kindle, we were selling the product for about three to four bucks. We made it a CD and all I did was record what was in the ebook. I just read it into a microphone, that now is being sold between $27 and $40. Not one word was changed.

TMC:

Wow.

Greg Cesar:

All I changed was the format, one was a downloadable Kindle, one was a cd. Now if you take that product and you turn it into a video-based product, now you could get 60, 70 bucks for it. And then if you then take your chapters and you break them down into individual modules and you make a piece of graphic with nine little module graphics or it looks like they’re getting something huge and now you’ve got $100 product, yet you haven’t changed one word of the content. So the media is important because it’s going to change what you can sell the product. If I sell it as a physical book by itself, 10, 12 bucks is the max I’m going to get for something like that. You’re not going to get 60 bucks for a book. So-

TMC:

Yeah, yeah, of course. And a lot of people want to chase the high end first, they want to make the videos, but then get put off by the fact that if you’re going to appear on video, you’ve got to be comfortable doing so, the lighting has to be good, the sound quality has to be good, and so on. So do you think that it’s always worth maybe starting with the, as you say, $3 to $4 Kindle to see how that sells first, and then if it’s getting traction, then you could take the next step and turn it into audio and then once that’s proved itself, then move on to video? Is that the kind of business model that you would suggest, Greg?

Greg Cesar:

Well, so you definitely want to be in both anyway, so don’t ignore Kindle. You definitely want to have your product on Kindle. Typically, I may put it as a different name just so people don’t see they can get it for $3 on Kindle. But believe it or not, when I say video, I’ve never been in front of the camera. My videos are PowerPoints and I’ll use Camtasia and record my PowerPoint. My audio, same thing, I’ll just take out the microphone and start talking. So the reason I typically will gravitate towards doing something like that first is a one-hour video takes one hour to create.

TMC:

Yes. Yeah.

Greg Cesar:

A 50 page ebook might take me three weeks to create.

TMC:

Of course.

Greg Cesar:

So even though it would seem the ebook is the easiest route, I can actually create that video way faster than I can create the ebook. So I can come up with an idea at three o’clock today and I can literally be on Amazon selling by Monday.

TMC:

Nice. And do you do much editing, Greg? Or is that kind of, it’s a warts and all kind of insight, when you start, hit record, that’s it, you’re off and you’re running?

Greg Cesar:

Okay, so you’re going to laugh about this one. So, one of the biggest questions I get is, especially when you outsource, my students will say, “Well, how do you know it’s any good? Do you read it?” And you know what I say? I never look at it.

TMC:

Wow.

Greg Cesar:

I don’t.

TMC:

That’s great, that’s great.

Greg Cesar:

And here’s the reason why. Let’s say I decided I want to create a course that teaches people how to speak Portuguese. And I always say, “Well, how do I know the person who’s talking on that audio is talking Portuguese? I have no idea.” So I’m not going to go through the content to make sure it’s correct or not correct because there’s nothing I can do to tell if it is or not. So typically what I do is if I’m going to outsource and get people to create content for me, I will hire right. I will hire people who have good reviews because my belief is someone who does good work doesn’t know how to do bad work.

TMC:

I like that. Yeah, absolutely.

Greg Cesar:

So when it comes to editing, I call myself One-Take Greg, I’m not editing anything, unless I made some huge mistake, then I may take the time to go take that out. But there’s ums and uhs in my recordings. People don’t care about that. What people care about is the solution. Are you solving their problem with your content? Because that’s what we’re doing is we’re selling solutions to problems. And I always tell people, if you sold the cure to cancer and someone who has stage four cancer purchases your product from Amazon and they say, “You got ums and uhs in there and you recorded this on an iPhone 3, I want my money back,” that person will never say that because the solution to their problem is way more important than the ums and uhs and how it was created.

So I always tell people, look for people with big problems because they don’t care about how you created the product or even the quality of the product, they care is, can you fix my back pain? Can you help me be able to walk straight and go to the park with my grandchild? Can you help me lose weight so I can look good on my wedding day? That’s what they care about. They don’t care about the quality of how it was recorded or where it was recorded.

TMC:

I think as well, it can also make you sound more human if you do make errors or have to go back and correct the phraseology or the grammar as you go through anyway. So a few ums and ers, I do it all the time. So I’m right there with you, Greg. I completely, completely concur with you on that. Now, you must have, along the way, perhaps experienced some challenges, shall we say, that you’ve overcome. Any of those that stick out in your mind?

Greg Cesar:

The only thing that’s going to happen as you build your business is once you start to get sales is you want to pay attention to your inventory. Because we are selling a physical product, so that means Amazon has to store it for us and they’ve got to ship it out to the customer. In the beginning, who cares? So typically I tell people, once you get started, you’re not going to send 1,000 units to Amazon. If you’re selling a DVD set, you’re going to send five. If you’re selling a flashcard set or posters, which we also sell posters as well, so posters, cheat sheets, things like that, I’m sending in five because I need to test the market. I don’t need to create 100 units.

So that’s another barrier for people is price. How do I send in 1,000 units of blenders when you need 20 grand? Well, if I’m selling content, I only need $15 worth of material to send my first batch. So inventory in the beginning, you’re going to run out, you’re going to send in your five. Once you sell the five, you’re out of inventory, you go and send in some more. Then you sell those five, then you send in 10, then you sell those 10, then you send in 15. But once you start to move 600, 700, 800 units a month, you don’t want to go out of inventory then because when that happens, you’ll lose some of your ranking in Amazon. So if you were number one and you’re out of inventory for two, three weeks, because you’re getting your new flashcards printed or your posters printed, well when you come back, well you’re now in position number seven, so that’s going to decrease the amount of sales you get until you work your way back up and it becomes a cycle.

So I tell people, once you start to get your volume underneath of you, you don’t want to go out of inventory. So now, where you normally might have ordered 200 units, well now you got to order 300 because you need to have that extra cushion so that you don’t run out of inventory. One of my students who’s selling a massive amount of product, he’s selling about 200 units a day and he’s actually in the UK and he is actually targeting Amazon UK, which a lot of people say, is only Amazon US good? No, it’s all of them. And so he’s moving 200 units a month and just a couple days ago, I’m sorry, 200 units a day, but just a couple days ago he told me that he just ordered 25,000 units.

TMC:

Nice. Nice.

Greg Cesar:

In the beginning he ordered 50. So inventory is the thing you got to get good at once you start to really move units.

TMC:

I love that idea as well of kind of snowballing it, start off small and then as those orders come in and they’ve sold, you’ve got the money in the bank, then reinvest that to buy more stock and send those in and so on. So it’s like a gradual process, isn’t it? As opposed to, as you say, making that big $20,000 or pounds or Euros investment in blenders, just start out small and then grow it over time. I think that’s a really key point to all of this. What tips would you give to anyone who’s just starting out, Greg?

Greg Cesar:

Great question. And my thing is start.

TMC:

Simple as that, yeah.

Greg Cesar:

Don’t be afraid of, “Hey, can I do this? Or is this hard?” It’s not. It’s easy. Like I said, it’s one of the easiest things that I have ever done and people have said, “Well that’s because you’re a guru.” No, when I started on Amazon, I was terrified. I sat on it for a year before I did anything. It took that eight year old to show me that I could do it. So I was in the exact same position. So to Amazon, I was completely green. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I got started. That was the only thing that was the difference between me succeeding and starting to make money on Amazon versus not. I just one day decided to do something.

And don’t worry if it’s perfect or not because there’s no such thing as a perfect product. So you can always make your product better. Listen to your customers. If you’re selling a poster set and people say to you, “I think that colour is atrocious,” okay, you can always change the colour of the poster. So I always tell people, don’t be afraid of getting started. And if you start and do things the way I do, which is, hey, it’s that snowball effect. Start small, start with five products, get your products done. Start with a simple product that if I’m going to outsource the content to, it costs me 30, 40 bucks for my content. I print five of them, so it costs me another $10 for printing. So I’m sub $100 to get started. You start with the product there, you know what that does? It takes the fear away.

If I start with the product where I’m going to buy licences for 500 bucks, there’s going to be a little fear there because I got to get it right. I just paid 500 bucks. Well, if it only costs me 50 bucks, there is no fear. Who cares if I get it right or wrong? But that allows you to just do it. And then once you do it, you say, “Wow, it’s easy.” Do you know, the difference between a product that makes $100 a month and a product that makes a million dollars a month is demand? That’s it.

TMC:

Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Cesar:

So what you do to make a million is exactly what you did to make 100 bucks. And most people don’t realise that. They think to make a million dollars, I have to do this grandiose amount of work. No, it’s just the demand. One market has 50 people searching for it, the other one has a million people searching for it. That’s it. When I got that epiphany in my life, that was one of the biggest changes for me also, was realising that I thought I had to spend 100,000 hours on products and this, no, I realised it was I needed to find the products that were selling. That’s it. That’s one of the biggest key secrets.

TMC:

Yeah. Greg, I mean it’s a fascinating story. How can people find out more about you and the products and services that you provide?

Greg Cesar:

Yep. So we’re actually in the process of putting out our new sites. It’s going to be at gregcesar.com and that’s C-E-S-A-R, so gregcesar.com. And we’re going to have all of our products, our services, coaching, all the stuff that we do is going to be listed there.

TMC:

Fantastic. Greg, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much for giving us so many insights and telling us about your story. It’s been absolutely fascinating. Thanks once again.

Greg Cesar:

Thank you. My pleasure. I enjoyed it.