How I Make $720K/Year Writing Amazon Product Descriptions

Omar Deryan

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Published: July 13th, 2022

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Omar Deryan

Founder, OJ Digital Solutions

$60K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

OJ Digital Solutions

ojdigitalsolutions.com

from Wilmington, DE, USA

started September 2017

$60,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Omar recommends to grow your business!

productivity tool-icon

Notion

Discord

other

Grammarly

Discover what books Omar recommends to grow your business!

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join ... Timothy Ferriss

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is Omar Deryan, and I’m the founder of OJ Digital Solutions, an agency helping Amazon sellers create launch-ready killer product listings.

Typically our clients are Amazon sellers (whether they’re just starting or established brands) that want to launch their products on Amazon USA and/or Europe. We help them create killer, fully optimized product listings that will boost click-through rate and conversion rate using our OJ Method.

We handle the entire listing, from copy to graphic design. And as of today, we’ve helped over 3,000 sellers worldwide, and our agency makes around 60K USD per month.

Presentation at the White Label Expo, London

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I am Lebanese / Italian. My parents are originally from Lebanon, and I was born in Rome, Italy, where I lived until I was eight years old.

I studied in a multi-cultural French school, so by the time I was 17, I was fluent in 5 languages (Arabic, Italian, French, English, and Spanish) - This is relevant for what’s coming.

I studied Medical Lab and completed my Master's degree in Management in Healthcare at Oxford Brookes University, UK, in 2013.

South Park, Oxford City

Then I realized that I didn’t want to work in the medical field, so I started a career in sales in various industries (including working for Tripadvisor).

In 2016, I was working for a Dental company headquartered in Salzburg, Austria.

During my three-week summer holiday that year, I traveled to Thailand and Malaysia with my wife Jessica and fell in love with Southeast Asia.

First time renting a scooter. Penang, Malaysia

I started deeply questioning what I was doing in my life!

I discovered the “digital nomad” lifestyle and, in October 2016, decided that I’ll spend an entire year trying to shift to a digital nomad life and quit my job (which was great, by the way).

I even made a promise to myself that by December 2017, I’ll be quitting my job no matter what (whether I succeeded in starting a business or not)

In 2017, the company relocated me to France. During that year, I have tried and tested various business models, in this order: blogging, affiliate marketing, dropshipping, Amazon FBA, and Airbnb investment. These all failed until I retried dropshipping and Amazon once more by the end of the year with proper training and started seeing some sales.

Dental Conference in Munich, Germany

By September 2017, I was making around 500 USD profits per month from Amazon, which was still not enough.

But during this time, as I joined multiple online communities, I started receiving requests to write, optimize and translate product descriptions for Shopify (Dropshippers) and Amazon sellers.

Using my languages, I could write and translate for many clients. Soon enough, the demand became so high that I saw it as an opportunity and dedicated all my time to building a quality agency and hiring experts to serve this audience better.

My salary at the company I was working for was 3,000 euros at that time, and when I quit in December 2017, my new company’s revenue was 7,000 USD just the following month!

Working from a coworking space in Cairo, Egypt

Of course, it was clear that this was the path I needed to pursue, at least to improve my quality of life and perhaps move to something else later on, which was the case as now I’m also focusing on my own personal brand.

The first step was deeply studying competitors and similar services. I wanted to fully understand the packages they have, how they price them, and how they find clients.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

So in terms of cost, given that it’s a service delivered online, there were little to no financial expenses to start. The cost was my time, which I was happy to invest since I needed to get things rolling.

To make sure I create an offer that my audience wanted, I first had to learn exactly what they are learning themselves. I was already part of the audience since I had a dropshipping business and an Amazon business. But I enrolled in more courses and focused more specifically on what interested me.

I started building the first package while working with clients. First I would receive their requests and just deliver exactly what they wanted. Then, I started noticing the patterns and what most clients would order and built a package that included those details.

Describe the process of launching the business.

First of all, the entire business was self-funded. Because of that, my inexperience in starting a business, and my desire to be financially independent, I was extremely cautious about where I was spending my money.

To properly launch, I first set a specific goal for the year. In 2018, the goal was simply to maximize revenue while maintaining a very high quality of service. This changed two years later with the goal being to scale with minimal involvement in operations.

But for maximizing revenue, this meant that I needed to hire more people, but I couldn’t hire without having enough cashflow.

So the first step was deeply studying competitors and similar services. I wanted to fully understand the packages they have, how they price them, and how they find clients.

I created a basic website, create the first logo myself using a free online tool, created all the social media pages, and created profiles on freelancing platforms.

Once that was done, started posting and advertising my services anywhere, including Facebook groups and community sites, and offered my services at a more affordable price to secure more deals and get more reviews.

At that point, surprisingly, I was already fully booked because of word of mouth.

One of the key mistakes I made was trying to move to a different business (shiny object syndrome) when I still hadn’t fully established the current one. This led to a delay in growth and made me think of multiple things at the same time.

Because of that, however, I was quite overworked, working 10 hours per day straight sometimes, even while traveling. So I slowly increased the price of my services and started hiring people that were better at this than I.

That in itself was a huge challenge that took me months to figure out, but the good thing is that since then the business continued growing month after month for 3 years straight!

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

It’s really simple: excellent customer service, super-fast communication, and quality work.

This is a slow but guaranteed way to always get customers. If your client is happy, they will talk about you to their network. And you never know who will come and order from you.

For instance, I once had a course creator try our service. He was so happy with what we delivered that he talked about us to his 1,000+ students and we ended up forming a partnership that is constantly bringing us new sales.

Now when starting out, it’s a bit tricky to find customers, and what worked very well with us was using freelancing platforms, particularly Upwork initially. But it’s an extremely competitive space there since thousands of other freelancers are there and they will try to copy what you do at a lower price.

You can only counter that by having exceptional customer service, showing your face, and being confident with what you provide.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Today the business is very healthy, we’re making an average of $60,000 per month in revenue (10k plus or minus depending on the months), with 50 to 60% in net profit.

In my opinion, the success is not in the profits only, but in me not being involved in running the business but more in growing the business.

This was my goal for 2021, and just recently things started to unfold the way I planned.

Our audience included lots of small sellers, and in the future, I’m focusing on having larger clients instead, which are in general easier to work with and offer design services, which we recently introduced as part of our offering, to provide a more complete solution to amazon sellers.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I’ve learned tons of things! Most of the things I have learned were from mistakes I made. I’m surely not able to mention everything I learned but I’ll try to mention the main things.

Since I wasn’t familiar with how a business works, I made so many mistakes, and was also many times on the verge of stopping the business, not because it wasn’t profitable, but because I was overworked and didn’t know how to properly scale things or be less involved in things that I shouldn’t be involved with.

One of the key mistakes I made was trying to move to a different business (shiny object syndrome) when I still hadn’t fully established the current one. This led to a delay in growth and made me think of multiple things at the same time.

Thankfully, the good decision I took here was to focus 100% on the goals I had for this business and face the main issue I had: hiring the right people.

The same goes for the revenue. The best decision I made was to focus on the 20% that generated 80% of the results, which was targeting clients similar to the ones we were working very well with. So instead of quantity, we focused on quality relationships, as well as partnerships that would bring more revenue over time.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

For internal management, we use Notion, Discord, Kartra, Gmail.

For work, we use Helium10, Jungle Scout, Grammarly.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Perhaps this has been mentioned before, but The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris was a big inspiration for me when I got started. It pushed me to build a lifestyle business that allowed for location independence.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

I believe that any business model can make you successful, and as you’ve heard countless times before, there’s no magic formula to success.

Perhaps there is a magic attitude. It all starts with clarity, and deeply understanding yourself, disregarding all the fluff you hear constantly everywhere.

The mistakes I constantly see other people making are jumping from one thing to another, not having clarity on what they truly want to do in life, settling for the easy solution, and ending up not doing anything meaningful.

Instead, clarity gives you clear goals, which you should 100% focus on. This allows you to organize yourself in achieving those goals over time, milestone by milestone, and slowly you will see yourself having achieved all the necessary milestones that will allow you to reach the goals you’ve set.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

Yes, I’m always looking to hire exceptional people for our team. We’re hiring writers, designers, and project managers.

Of course, all positions are paid and 100% remote. To apply, first check the available positions on our work for us page, then send an email to [email protected] and our HR manager will get back to you.

Where can we go to learn more?

The best way to learn more about what we do and our services is to visit our website or read our blog posts.

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!