Serious Sellers Podcast: Learn How To Sell On Amazon FBA & Walmart

#520 - Amazon Launches, SEO strategy & UGC Tips

Ever wonder how an Amazon ranking maestro maneuvers the complex chessboard of e-commerce strategy? Alina Vlaic, the founder of AZRank and our go-to guru, returns to the show with a fresh cache of tactics for conquering Amazon's ever-changing TOS and algorithm. With a pivot towards market research and feedback-driven methods, she reveals how her business remains a tour de force in enhancing keyword relevance. Our conversation is a riveting game plan for sellers eager to sink their teeth into compliant and effective ranking strategies, tailored for those who play to win.

Navigating the e-commerce seas requires a versatile captain, and in this episode, we chart the course through the distinct waters of Amazon, Walmart, and Etsy. Discover how social proof anchors Etsy's success, why Walmart's ecosystem is the new frontier to watch, and what Amazon's virtual bundles mean for your bulk sales strategy. I even share a personal tale of triumph with these virtual bundles that's revolutionized how my industrial scientific brand approaches the bulk market. This is your masterclass in adapting to the unique currents of each platform, a conversation not to be missed by merchants sailing towards profitable shores.

When it comes to marketing artillery, press coverage and user-generated content (UGC) are the cannons of the day. We dissect when press really packs a punch for brand awareness and the shift towards a cost-per-click payment model. Then, we turn the spotlight on UGC, contrasting its current clout with the fading glitz of external traffic channels. To cap off, I let you in on a strategic secret using Amazon's Opportunity Explorer to sharpen your PPC and ranking initiatives. For visionaries ready to unleash the power of authenticity and innovation in their online presence, this episode is your treasure map to success.

 

In episode 520 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Alina discuss:

• 03:13 - Dynamic Year in Amazon and E-Commerce
• 05:34 - New Strategies on Amazon, Walmart, Etsy
• 15:05 - Ranking and Variations in Virtual Bundles
• 18:50 - Press X and UGC in Marketing
• 22:07 - Discussion on UGC and Expanding Opportunities
• 23:03 - UGC and AI in Amazon Selling
• 31:03 - Expanding Brand With Miraclecom Dashboard

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we got Alina back on the show, and she’s gonna talk about what is working with Amazon and Walmart ranking strategies, as well as some cool Amazon virtual bundle that I didn’t even know about. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we're going to the other part of the world. I believe she's in Romania right now. We've got Alina back on the show here, and what city I'm trying to remember? What city in Romania are you at?

Alina:

Sibiu

Bradley Sutton:

How far away is that from the Dracula castle that I've always wanted to visit?

Alina:

Very close, like 100 kilometers.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. So, yeah, all right if we visit your family over there. I know we've hung out in Turkey, another place in around the world, but not in your home country, so I definitely want to visit over there. Now, guys, if you want to get her full backstory we're not going to go too much into it today because she's been on the podcast before, make sure to go to episodes. 122 was one of them, and also 267, and then most recently she was on in 406. All right, so this is now her fourth time on the podcast. Each time she's expanded what she's done, and you might know her from AZRank, which I've talked about a plethora of times. I've always joked with her that I wish I had some kind of contract where I get $10 every time I mention it. I might not be working at Helium 10 anymore. I'd be so rich. But hey, I mentioned things that I organically use, and no, you know, Alina doesn't pay me to, I'm not an affiliate, but I naturally will recommend services and things that I use and that I trust, and that's definitely AZRank.

Bradley Sutton:

Throughout the years has changed because of Amazon differences, and then last year we talked a little bit about one of our newer companies called Press X, and so let's just first talk about what people know you for what's going on in the AZRank world these days. Like somebody might think that, oh, AZRank must be completely out of business because now there's no search, find, buy and stuff. But you know, you guys are obviously still doing things that are above board. It's not, it's not, it's kind of on purpose. I'm wearing a gray hat, I'm not wearing a black hat, not a white hat, but it might be some gray here, but no, but anyways, update us on what's been going on the last year on the AZRanks.

Alina:

Yes, First of all, hello everybody and thank you so much for having me again. It's a pleasure, always a pleasure. It's been a very interesting year, a very dynamic year all around, I feel. I mean, from all the five and a half years I've been in the industry, it's been the most dynamic year from all points of view in the Amazon and e-commerce world. Yes, we're still alive and breathing in our ranking business. Things are working still very well In terms of TOS compliance, because I know everybody has this question on their lips. I feel like and I know we've talked a lot before about this everybody has its own, their own, risk tolerance about how the Amazon TOS is interpreted. You've known me for a bunch of years now and we've always tried to be TOS compliant or as much as TOS compliant as possible, because even back in the days, people have always been debating about even the search find buys were they compliant or not. So it's pretty much the same thing right now. We have pivoted and we have changed our way of doing things. We're mostly focused on market research and we have combined that with some surveys and with some feedback that people give you back while you're still ranking for keywords. And from my point of view. Now it's been like two years since Amazon has changed completely the TOS and I strongly can admit that the way we're doing things right now it's working much better because you're going on a broader experience with everything that means ranking and that helps you basically be more relevant in the algorithm point of view.

Alina:

So, yes, working, still doing it. We have a lot of, you know, tweaks and tricks and different strategies depending on. Depending first of all on the product, second of all on the marketplace, because Amazon is one thing, Walmart is another thing, Esty is another thing, and so on and so forth.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now what about on? You know you're talking mainly about Amazon, but did refer a little bit to, like Walmart and Etsy. Still the same old school stuff. Working on platforms like that, as far as you know, like, like you know, potentially search, find, buy, which is not against Walmart's service, and then on Etsy is something similar, is what's working for ranking.

Alina:

These days, etsy is pretty much in the same place you need to. On Etsy, we don't have too many tools yet. It's still the E rank that we're mainly getting the info from and the organic search that you're doing and finding your ranking. But at the same time, what we've seen lately I mean not lately, like lately in the past year or so, a year and a half on Etsy is that you need to have some social proof, like you said, you need to have some reviews, you need to have some, some people talking about you posting some real, real life photos of your product, because you know, etsy is all about visual. So Etsy, that's pretty much it. And on Walmart is very dynamic, it's extremely dynamic lately. They're changing so much and, yes, search, find, buy is not against terms of service you can do those. Add to cart are not against thermal service you can do those. And there are a bunch of strategies that we were working on right now and we're doing a bunch of tests to see which way to better go on specific situations. But it's going really well and I feel like Walmart is going in the right direction.

Bradley Sutton:

Finally, Now, going back to the Amazon, you know, like you know you're kind of like me in the sense that you like, you like experimenting and different things and you've had different theories. You've tested. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But you know, I know you've talked about experimenting with the questions and answers and potentially finding the scene you can find the secret sauce of if Amazon posts. You know influence, you know algorithms and stuff. But what can you tell me like in the last year or so, like even ones that failed, because you know if you tried it, I'm sure somebody else probably had the idea that maybe it would work. So what are some experiments that worked out well? Some things that are like Nope, can't really influence, you know, can't really help this ranking at all. What are some stuff you've been doing?

Alina:

So a lot of stuff, but what? I can tell you something? That it didn't work and it's related to my latest episode of the last year, one in December, when I was very sure that I am very close to discovering the secret for Amazon posts. Unfortunately, something happened and I think in the algorithm at one point it just didn't work anymore. If you're already doing the Amazon post, go on and do them. If you don't do them at all, maybe it would be a good idea to have that content out there and more visibility for your brand, but not in the terms of doing them just for ranking. I couldn't find the secret sauce yet. Hopefully it's still going to be out there. What I found to be working, and working real well, is something about virtual bundles. I know we've talked about that a lot lately in the past. So virtual bundles before pretty recently I couldn't say exactly when, but before recently you couldn't shuffle the quantity of the same product within a virtual bundle.

Bradley Sutton:

So then yeah, because I know, let's say, I've got a coffin shelf and a coffin bath rug I could make a virtual bundle, and it's one each. But now you are ready. Now are you saying that I could do a virtual bundle with 10 each, or I can do a virtual bundle with 10 of one and one of another.

Alina:

Both. Now you could also make a virtual bundle out of two coffin shelves only.

Bradley Sutton:

Of the same ASIN. I really Well, since when I haven't even been. You see, that's what happens. That sometimes boggles my mind. You know, like Amazon, obviously we were just talking about how I had to delay you because I was on the, I was doing the weekly buzz and you know I Amazon announces so many things and a lot of it is just like little tiny things, but that seems like it would be a pretty significant announcement or a change, and I never saw that announced. Anyway, were you just like playing around with it? And that's how you?

Alina:

discovered it. Here's the story. Uh, I think I told this like back two years ago in one of your podcast. So I'm selling uh, one of my brands is an industrial scientific and I'm selling some lab supplies, which usually are a pack of 10, pack of 20, pack of 100, because there's small stuff, you know. So I I saw at one point that people were buying more of the same product, right, like two units, three units five units. But since the virtual bundles were there, I couldn't do a virtual bundle with shop with the same quantity, I mean more of the same um quantity of the same product. So then I I created some FBM listings with pack of 500, you know, and combined and basically I was it's it was the same product but I was selling. I was sending the buyer five packs instead of a pack of 500. I was sending five packs of 100 because my pack of 100 was the product I was selling on Amazon. Make sense. So.

Alina:

But I did them at the end because I couldn't do them inside Amazon and I couldn't and I didn't want to do it FBA back then, because the FBA fees and all the stuff wasn't worth it. The, the package would would be too big and everything. So the, the profitability wasn't that great on the, it wasn't worth it to keep it into FBA. Let's say so. Then I did this. And then one point recently, very recently it's a matter of 10 days, two weeks maybe I discovered that that it was allowed to. I mean, amazon allows you to create virtual bundles, two of each, two of this, with one of these, three of this was one of this five of the same thing, you know, and at that point I well hold on.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm trying to, I'm trying to do it here and I can't figure out. Let me share my screen here. Let's see. All right, so well. First of all, I was able to add more products. I never did that before, like right then how, where you can only add two, before I was able to have like three here.

Alina:

You have the couple there to add more products, if you see, like on the left.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So I'm looking here and at first I didn't see it. But right here under quantity I can now individually change this.

Alina:

That's crazy To as many as you want.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, like, and then now it's gonna reflect in the ASIN. That is super cool. I never. Why in the world would Amazon not make this an announcement is kind of crazy. And did you just randomly discover it? Like you were creating a virtual bundle and you're like, hey, what's this button do? And that's how you figured it out.

Alina:

It's not entirely my personal discovery. Like me, Alina, I was working with somebody from my team and all of a sudden was like he said I need to try this, I need to try this. I think I saw a plus button somewhere and then that's how it worked. But I have more on that, and this is something even more crazy. That was absolutely not possible at all until now. You can run PPC on the virtual bundles.

Bradley Sutton:

You couldn't run PPC on the virtual bundles, yeah, before I think you could only do sponsored brand ads back in the old days, right.

Alina:

Now you can do anything. He discovered this Really. Yes, my team made discover this first by mistake because he was doing some bulk uploads in the campaigns and he forgot some bundle ASINs out there and all of a sudden we had like some huge conversion on one ASIN and he said this is a virtual bundle. How on earth this one got here? But then we started looking into that and apparently it works Mostly. What I can guarantee for is it's working through bulk upload. I don't know if you can add them manually in your campaigns or with some tools that you're using for the PPC, but with the bulk upload 100% working.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I don't think you can do it in the campaign manager. I'll just double check or add products to advertise.

Alina:

I would check this. If anybody has some bundles that really work, I would definitely check this because, since these changes are happening, they might allow this as well.

Bradley Sutton:

And then you've actually seen it then in the wild where you see a sponsored ad and it's showing the virtual bundle as opposed to so you like confer, wow, okay, that's pretty cool. But bulk upload, then very interesting, okay, so that's like super cool. Now what about ranking? In the old days it was mainly if you're ranking for one of the component units, like the coffin shelf. Let's say, I had a double coffin shelf bundle I could only rank. It's almost like a variation listing where you can only rank for one and you can't rank for the virtual bundle. But I swear I've seen recently where I had a placement for the virtual bundle and the individual. Are you seeing that too?

Alina:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now I've seen it and I've seen it a lot. I haven't run any tests for clients, but on my product, since we have a lot of this type of bundles I mean in the hundreds probably I see it a lot. So it's 100% valid for my category at least. Again, I'm not sure for all categories, but I think it's out there for everybody. If you're ranking on a keyword with your main product, you can rank on the same keyword with your virtual bundles.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, so really cool virtual bundle stuff going on. Any other hacks that you can share with us that's been working for you. These are not hacks, but another strategy or anything else.

Alina:

Relevance is still the main thing that helps you with your product launch or relaunch or ranking campaign or PPC or whatever. If you're not relevant, you cannot do anything. Basically and I know you were saying a couple of months ago about the Amazon recommended thing. Amazon recommended rank. I tested that myself and it works like a charm and it's very much valid in terms of ranking campaigns. I mean, yes, if you're having problems ranking, I double you and I say you need to check that Amazon recommended rank. Because there you have your answer and something related to keywords. I would say make sure you stay focused. I mean, of course, all of us want to rank on hundreds of keywords, on thousands of keywords, on as many keywords as possible, but for Amazon, especially when you're launching a new product, you need to be very focused on a particular set of keywords so that you can find your relevance and your ranking juice and then Amazon will start showing you on its own on some related keywords. If you have some root keywords, some good root keywords, in your title, in your bullet points, then you will have ranking on a lot of additional keywords. As I said before, try to have a logic for everything. If the common sense and if everything makes sense to you, then it will eventually make sense for the other people and for the algorithm itself.

Bradley Sutton:

What's been going on the Press X side? Last year you were doing a lot of cool work with getting a lot of traction on the Press side. Is that still a valid tactic, using Press during launch or to promote products at all?

Alina:

After one and a half years now, I can say that you should look at press and especially press acts. I mean, since we're talking about press acts, but press in general, not necessarily as a conversion tactic or a launching tactic or a ranking tactic, but it's a brand awareness, it's an appearance, it's something that people want to talk about, it's traffic. If you're looking at sales, conversions, this type of numbers, and you're planning on making a press article or getting your product featured in a magazine just for sales, then I would say, think again. And especially if we're talking about a new launch Press from what I've seen over a year, it's not necessarily for new brands. You can look at it if you're a very established brand launching new products. That's a different thing. You can very much look at it. If you have a strong Shopify website or outside Amazon and you have I mean, people know your brand and it's not just on Amazon only then, yes, you could look at that. You could also look at that, for example, if you have an extraordinary product, something that is unique, innovative, something that is very special, you can look at press too. And also an idea maybe you can look at press if you're looking at Kickstarter. I know it's very popular right now, but if you're planning a Kickstarter campaign, you can maybe consider also press to driving traffic to that Kickstarter campaign to make more money.

Alina:

So that's how press works. It's working better for some products, not that great for some other products in terms of again, in terms of ranking, in terms of sales, in terms of traffic. It's there. So it depends a lot of what your expectations are. Our model is a CPC cost base, so you only pay for the clicks you get. It's not like a retainer fee, it's not a fixed amount. If your article drives only 10 clicks, that means, for example, $20, that's all the amount you're going to pay and you're still going to get the article. And you need to consider that as the more articles you get, the more love you're going to get from Google and for all the external or outside Amazon platforms that are out there, because once the article is there, it's just there. It's there for everybody to see and click on it.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, all right. Any quick experiences of somebody it's worked out for in the last year like hey, they were doing this and then they ran a series of articles and this is what happened from it.

Alina:

We had a brand which is into the dental hygiene niche and we've had a few campaigns very successful. I mean, I remember the ROAS was six, so for $1 spent they made six, which was good. I mean, on top of the traffic and everything else, this one also made money, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. All right, now switching gears. You seem you're kind of like me. You can't stay doing one thing. You have to have your hand in like 75 different things. So you and I are liking that. So the latest thing I heard you talking about which I purposely didn't ask you about because I wanted to kind of like find out about here I know nothing about what you're doing there is you've mentioned you're doing some things on the UGC side. So first of all, what prompted that? You know like you don't just dream. One time I actually did have a dream about a tool and it eventually became something in Cerebro, the advanced rank filter. It literally came from a dream ahead. Most people, I think, don't dream up things. There's a reason why you thought of doing UGC. So what started that? And then, what exactly are you doing in that field now?

Alina:

OK. So UGC I think it's the. You know how external traffic was two or three years ago, when everybody was talking about external traffic. That's how I feel UGC is right now. So I started this because, from the community of people that we have and that we use for our ranking campaigns which is huge at one point I thought these people can do more than that. So what do we need as Amazon sellers? What does the market need that we can help with? And so this came First. We only started with UGC because it's more than that. I have something else that even you don't know about.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh my goodness OK.

Alina:

So, ugc, I don't know what's your take on the AI. I love it. I'm a little bit afraid of it as well, but what I can say is that, as much as people love it, eventually everything is a cycle and they will turn back to real life photos, real life commercials, real life billboards. I've seen this happen in Europe, at least Romania, and also other places in Europe. There are billboards with burger photos or commercials saying this photo was taken using a phone and they're showing real people. Those brands could afford an AI and they probably are using AI in different other type of places. I've done some research lately and I found some really interesting data.

Alina:

For example, brands huge brands that are running Google ads, and they compared not necessarily on AI, let's say a professional studio photo which is a wide background, blah, blah, blah, everything with a photo taken with a phone, a little bit of editing, but nothing serious, and they ran Google ads on it. Guess what? The CPC was 60% lower on the UGC one. The user generated a photo and the conversion was 38% higher on the same photo. So that's how we started. I think that's where we're going to go.

Alina:

It's a lot of stuff that you can do with your UGC. We do photos and videos, especially videos that we recommend people using, filling Amazon with content on their listings. In places where it's still free, For example Q&A, you can answer every question with a video and every event I go to and I speak when I ask this question, I get a maximum of five people in the room raising their hands. Who uses this? Almost nobody's still nobody's using this, and it's a free place on Amazon where you can post content. And then there's videos about your product line, right, or it used to be called related videos, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

I have brand.

Alina:

I have eight and nine figure brands I work with. They do not launch a product without at least three to five videos filled in that section, because if you don't put them yourself, then your competitors will come and they will tag your ASIN into one of their listings and then their video is going to show on yours. So when I want to buy your product and I scroll down your listing, I'm going to find theirs and maybe, I don't know, maybe it has a thumbnail that attracts me, and then I'm going to click on that and I'm going to go buy that instead of yours and then all that content, for example, all the UGC we do. If you want to, we can post on TikTok Just like that. Not on influencer accounts we don't work with yet we don't have those type, but we're working on creating a few influencer accounts from our people, but we're posting it there. As I said, you never know what happens on TikTok. We use hashtags. Everything can be there, and this is something that you don't necessarily have to come to us to do it.

Alina:

You can do it yourself in the beginning. You can do your own Q&A videos. You can do your own unboxing or whatever More explanations you want to do about your product and post in your Amazon listing, and then you just go post it on TikTok. It just has to be there. And then, of course, as I said, you can use it on Google Ads. You can do a bunch of things with it. One of the things I do believe it's very important nowadays is that we have so many tools, including AI, because sometimes you can combine these two. You can combine UGC and AI and have something amazing without going to a professional photo studio. I'm not saying that they are bad. They have their own thing. Which they do is great and necessary, but for some things you don't need to go to a professional studio to do it and pay an arm and a leg. Most of the time you can just do this. I hope I didn't ramble too much about this.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now, before we get into your tip of the week, which you even prepared, so that means it must be a good one here is can you just let us know how people can contact you for any of these 75 different things that we've been talking about today? How can they find you on the interwebs?

Alina:

So if they search for my name, which is Alina, like vlaic on pretty much everywhere, they can find me and message me in person. Or I'm going to just say one website which is azrank.com Contact form, or my email is alina@azrank.com. Feel free to contact me with every I don't know, critique, feedback, idea. I'm always trying to reply to everybody as fast as possible.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right, what's your strategy of the week?

Alina:

A lot of people ignore opportunity explorer section in the seller central. I know all of us love the search query reports and everything that's. It's out there, right. But when you're launching a new product, you don't have that data, unless you use one of my older strategies that you can have. You can have the data, but I'm not going to go into that. When you launch a new product, you don't have that data right. So you should go into opportunity explorer, because Amazon gives you a list of keywords, right. First of all, you need to identify your niche and your perfect list of keywords, because maybe your product will be in several niches, so you need to go there and find all the keywords that are relevant to your product and those should be your focus keywords for your listing and for your PPC and for your ranking campaign. Because if that data comes from Amazon and it's basically given to you for free, if you use it, I'm pretty sure you have much better chances of success to become relevant in Amazon's eyes, rather than I don't know doing your own keyword research and focusing on 3,000 keywords at the same time and spending a lot of money.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Alina:

And again, that's valid. That starts with your listing and then your PPC and whatever other ranking strategies you may use. So something else that is maybe a little bit for advanced sellers, but I found it very interesting. I spoke about this at the last Billion Dollar Seller Summit. If you've mentioned Kevin King, it's something called mirakl.com. It's Mirakl, but mirakl.com. It's a dashboard that helps you expand your brand on thousands not thousands, hundreds of marketplaces all over the world with a click of a button. What does that mean is, basically, they create you an account, you have a dashboard, you list your catalog there and they will take care of everything else. You just need to fulfill. You can connect it with your Shopify for now, but they can get you into I don't know, into Best Buy, into Target, into marketplaces that are very difficult to get in otherwise. Just give it a try and I know a lot of people will find it interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right, well, Alina, thank you so much for joining us today. Very few people make it to four episodes on the podcast that means that you're a popular guest. So you've made it, and I'm sure you'll be one of the ones to make it to five. So we'll reach out to you at the end of next year perhaps, and see what's going on with you In the meantime. I look forward to seeing you, hopefully at one of these upcoming conferences. And yeah, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you soon.

Alina:

Thank you. Thank you, see you soon. Bye.

Helium 10 Buzz 12/21/23: Amazon Minimum Inventory Level | Shoppable A+ Content | New Brand Analytics Tool

Curious about how the latest Amazon innovations could reshape your selling experience? Let’s see what’s buzzing in the tech giant and Helium 10’s newest features that are stirring the E-commerce pot!

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

We're dishing out the details on Amazon's revolutionary Fit Insights tool and the game-changing low inventory level fee, set to shake up the way apparel and shoe vendors approach their trade. Experience firsthand how Amazon's shoppable A+ content module is making waves with its compelling conversion rates, and join us in tipping our hats to TikTok's staggering $10 billion consumer spending landmark, a true testament to the app's growing prowess in the digital realm.

As we navigate the ebb and flow of online retail, we're also spotlighting Amazon's translation feature for sponsored ads, now making waves across North America and Europe. And for a quirky twist, don't miss our take on California's recent ban on donkey skin gelatin sales.

TikTok becomes first non-game app to reach $10B in consumer spending
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/tiktok-becomes-first-non-game-app-to-reach-10b-in-consumer-spending/

Language translations are now available for Sponsored Display custom creatives
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/language-translations-available-for-sponsored-display-custom-creatives/

Amazon will stop selling donkey skin gelatin, but only in California
https://www.engadget.com/amazon-will-stop-selling-donkey-skin-gelatin-but-only-in-california-212555337.html

We're thrilled to have Bradley with us, sharing his expert insights into the new Black Box Brand Analytics tool, a powerhouse for sellers seeking to maximize product research efficacy. This episode is brimming with strategic insights, so plug in and prepare to power up your Amazon and Walmart selling game!

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Shivali covers:

• 00:44 - Minimum Inventory Tool
• 02:00 - Fit Insights Tool
• 03:35 - Shoppable A+ Content
• 04:45 - Tiktok Hits 10B?
• 05:43 - Language Translations for SD
• 06:33 - Partnered Carrier
• 07:32 - Your Donkey Meat
• 08:05 - Subscribe to Helium 10's YouTube Channel
• 08:17 - Pro Training Tip: Helium 10 BlackBox x Amazon Brand Analytics
  

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#519 - Product Ranking On Walmart, Shopping Experience Survey, and Q&A

Join us as we navigate the intricacies of ranking on Walmart and gauging customer sentiment on this platform with our special guest, Costin Vlaic, from AZRank. Listen in as Costin shares his unique e-commerce experience, shedding light on the importance of product ranking at Walmart.com and how it directly impacts sales. He also shares valuable tips on ranking, from using microworker platforms to leveraging your social circle to place orders.

Further, we explore the value of Walmart Plus and Amazon Prime as essential additions to households. We discuss an interesting survey that reveals a trend of consumers comparing prices and offers on both platforms, with groceries emerging as a hot favorite on Walmart. Get the inside scoop on the potential growth of the Walmart platform and strategies sellers can use to optimize their product range and pricing. Our chat with a successful Walmart seller is sure to provide you with unique insights, from testing and patience to avoiding common mistakes. Listen in as they share their future strategies for selling on Walmart. Tune in for a comprehensive discussion on all things Walmart!

In episode 519 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Costin discuss:

• 00:00 - Ranking on Walmart and Customer Sentiment
• 04:57 - Developing and Ranking Products on Walmart
• 09:01 - Insights From Walmart Shopping Experience Survey 
• 10:08 - Walmart Plus and Amazon Prime Insights
• 13:52 - Online Shopping Platforms 
• 17:19 - Initiating Google Exposure Through Walmart 
• 21:54 - Starting to Sell on Walmart Advice

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

On today's episode we have Costin Blake from AZ Rank and he's going to be talking with us about how to rank on Walmart and customer sentiment about shopping on Walmart, as well as some of the most popular categories to sell on Walmart. So this and so much more.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Do you like to network with other Walmart sellers? Make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually search for that on Facebook or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup and you can directly go to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me or Carrie for questions and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook.

 

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller and I'm going to be your host, and this is our Walmart Wednesday, where we answer all of your questions about Walmart and we bring in guests that are experts in the Walmart field. So today I'm very, very excited to bring on Costin Vlaic, and he is from AZ Rank and so I've actually worked with him and, if many of you probably know his wife, Alina, I've worked with both of them for a lot of different projects, and so I'm very excited. They've been selling on Walmart for a while, and so I'm going to go ahead and bring Costin on Welcome.

 

Costin:

Oh hi Carrie.

 

Carrie Miller:

Thank you for coming on and talking with us about Walmart.

 

Costin:

It's nice for me to be to be here. I'm pretty nervous about but I hope we can bring back. We can bring some very useful information for your audience.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think you're going to do great. All right, so let's go ahead and get into the question. So the first one I want to ask you is can you tell us a little bit about you know, your background and experience in the e-commerce space, just particularly with selling on Walmart?

 

Costin:

So my background I'm based in Romania, so that this is the reason why it's 10 pm I'm speaking at. I'm trying to speak at 10 pm. I guess I was an early adopter of e-commerce in Romania and also an early adopter of Walmart marketplace. I liked the challenges. So this is why when they open, the marketplace is the marketplace. I applied immediately. Luckily for me, I didn't have any issues to be approved, because right now there are still people that have issues with getting approved by Walmart. I don't find any logic from Walmart to not approve big sellers on Amazon. But that's, that's life. So I like to play with the Walmart platform and I discovered things. I'm discovering things, new things every day.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, very cool, thank you, and so so I guess that kind of answers. My next question is like what would inspire you to sell products on Walmart? So I think it's you had already answered that, but do you have any kind of insights? A lot of people are asking you know, should I sell on Walmart? They're not really sure if it's a good opportunity. So Do you have any insights or like success stories from your experience in selling on Walmart?

 

Costin:

So, first of all, because all the people are talking about brands and branding and building a brand, in my opinion, if you want to become a real brand, you need to be on more platforms or more sales channels, not just rely on Amazon, because I think most of the people that are trying to apply to Walmart are coming from Amazon. So my insight is I mean all the time. I advise especially my European friends that are selling on Amazon in Europe and they want to expand in US, because most of them have a big range of products. I encourage them to try Walmart first, not Amazon. Amazon in US it's pretty difficult than Amazon Europe Just to get their feet wet with American customers. I always said that maybe they should think to start with Walmart in US.

 

Carrie Miller:

And so have you seen some success for many of those people selling. Do they get more familiar?

 

Costin:

Most of the people I refer to are people that are afraid, but I know some people that they've been to our company and they are successfully on Walmart. I really think that at some point this is actually one of my personal projects for next year is just to develop a range of products just for Walmart.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's actually an interesting thought, because I have talked to Walmart and they said that the products that do the best are complimentary products to what's already on the Walmart marketplace. So kind of creating products that are just for Walmart, for products that are just not even on there, I think is a really good idea. So I think that's a great plan. The next question is, since you all have a company called AZ Rank and I've used you all for ranking on Amazon and Walmart and so you basically help people to rank in these different platforms, so how important is product ranking on Walmart and how does it impact the sales for sellers?

 

Costin:

We can talk about ranking in every platform. So in every platform you are, you just need to think about the ranking. So, particularly for Walmart, I just show you that just before today I did some tests and lately I mean especially for the niches that are not so big add to cards and even some clicks. Sometimes they are working and they are working fine. So you don't just need to place orders, but at some point if you want to be on top of the page, you need also to place some orders. But just to start some add to cards and some clicks, even from your friends and family, because the TOS it's not like in Amazon. You can do.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, that's a really good tidbit there, so can you maybe give a little bit more insight about what you all do, what your strategy is for ranking products on Walmart? You don't have to go into details, but how do you usually go about helping people ranking on Walmart?

 

Costin:

It's depending on the niche. So basically we tried for some customers also the add to cards, which are pretty difficult to be made. But you can always use a micro workers platforms Even you can use even a mechanical Turk or I don't know. I think there are also other platforms for micro tasks and with a few cents you might get some clicks or some add to cards and just to see evolution. And from time to time just ask your friends just to place from in the first week one order. And it always depends on the niche. But if the niche is not very crowded you can try that and you might be successful.

 

Carrie Miller:

What kind of keywords do you recommend focusing on when you're trying to rank? Do you think that Long tail keywords are good, or what do you think about the types of keywords you focus on for Walmart?

 

Costin:

Well for Walmart. I don't believe in long tails, I just believe in pretty broad keywords. I mean, of course they need to be specific to your products but not to be long tail keywords. You should try always the search bar recommended what Walmart is recommending in the search bar. I found them very useful and not focusing, like in Amazon, on a bunch of keywords. Just take two or three in the beginning, the most important ones, and focus on them in the beginning and if you are ranked well, you can develop this strategy with other keywords.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, and just for anyone who doesn't know, that we actually do have two keyword research tools for Walmart. We have Magnet and Cerebro. So you can do a lot of really great keyword research for Walmart on those tools through Helium 10. Okay, so we talked a bit earlier and you mentioned that you conducted a survey with over 300 people about their shopping experiences on Walmart. So what were the main objectives of the survey and what kinds of things did you discover?

 

Costin:

First of all, I'd be very curious to apply the same survey next year and see the changes. Maybe we can share these results of the survey on the chat. So we always share our opinions about Walmart, but I think it's better all the time to return to the people, the people in our community, and ask them what they think about Walmart. So I found it very nice that I mean very encouraging for the ones that are starting a business on Walmart Just to see that, for example, 50% of them have Walmart plus, even if they have Amazon Prime. So they consider a very good add-on to their household to have Walmart plus and Amazon Prime. So that's a very interesting information. Also, I found out that a lot of people are checking both Amazon and Walmart for the prices and a lot of people are following the offers and the prices.

 

Costin:

We found out also that the main categories they are buying in Walmart are groceries. Most of the people said that groceries in Walmart it's much better than Amazon Fresh Groceries. It's a category that's much better than Amazon Fresh. Other categories where people are shopping in Walmart are toys, electronics, things like that, but all those categories are in that survey. I wanted to make the people to write with their own words instead of just checking some boxes. And also I think the results are very interesting. So, for example, around 30% of the people said that they have some products that are buying only one Walmart, not in Amazon, things like that. I guess these are useful information for the ones that are trying to build a range of products in Walmart, because they have also a direction with some categories. And also, in my opinion, after seeing the results of this survey, I believe that this is a platform that will grow in the next future.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think that there's a lot more exposure to Walmartcom, especially because they also have this advertising where you can basically do Google ads through the Walmart platform and your stuff will show up in Google shopping, so you can see a lot more exposure of your products there. When you're searching for anything on Google, you'll see Walmart pop up pretty quickly, so there's a lot more exposure there. Also, I noticed for Walmart Plus, a lot of credit cards are giving free Walmart Plus access. So if you use the credit card to pay for Walmart Plus, then the credit card company reimburses you. Like American Express Platinum is one of them. There's a few other cards that I've seen where they literally give you a free Walmart Plus membership. So Walmart's doing a really good job of kind of giving people incentive to start shopping on Walmart too. So I think that's very interesting that people are intending on getting Walmart Plus or they already have it. So very, very good insights.

 

Costin:

Yes, I'm not living in US, so I don't know all those information, so I was just preparing to say that I mean, I don't know if Walmart has a one year subscription like Amazon has. I think it would be a good way to attract people to their platform and also it's very good for Walmart. I mean this is a plus Walmart has, that they can pick some goods in stores.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, definitely. Was there anything on that survey that you found that you weren't expecting? That you thought was not something you thought people would say on the survey, or was everything kind of what you were thinking?

 

Costin:

I was very surprised that a lot of people that are buying usually on Amazon, are checking also the Walmart platform. So I mean I was really surprised.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I think that's pretty surprising too. I think it's definitely growing, because I think probably a year or two ago it wasn't the same. So that is very, very interesting.

 

Costin:

This is why I'm very curious what it will happen with this survey next year to see the trend.

 

Carrie Miller:

Is there any kind of strategy that you think, based on what the survey revealed, like, what kinds of things do you think sellers should focus on, based on what you found in that survey?

 

Costin:

We all knew that Amazon, that Walmart, likes pretty cheap products. So if they want to move their brand from Amazon to expand to Walmart, I think they should create a few products that are cheaper than in Amazon and just to sell on Walmart and also on the other platforms, but just not to have them in Amazon. I think this is number one. If they are starting right now an e-commerce business and the brand, they should focus on the category, the order, on specific categories. First of all, of course, they can see in the survey what people answered and also they can check where Walmart is not selling many products, because if they are selling products, it's pretty difficult to rank there.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I know there's a lot of brands that do a different brand. That's a cheaper brand, and I've noticed big brands in Walmart when I've actually gone into the store. I see Ralph Lauren, like Ralph Polo Lauren. I saw BCBG and a few other really bigger brands that I would have never thought would have been there and they're basically the cheaper version of what they already sell. So it's kind of I think that's a really good strategy and I do know some other sellers who have maybe some products on Amazon, but they do the little cheaper version. They kind of rebranded a little bit for Walmart and they've done well that way. So that's really good on that.

 

Costin:

Exactly. I mean, in this moment we have three or four products we are selling on only one, walmart. Two of them we used to sell on Amazon but the cost of advertising was very high, so we moved them to Walmart. We sell pretty decent quantities but actually we get some profit in Amazon. We just selling but no profit.

 

Carrie Miller:

That's a challenge one. I did see a question in here that somebody asked. Jeremy asked how do you initiate the Google exposure through Walmart? So the way to do this is what you're going to do is you're going to go to your growth opportunities tab once you log into Walmart's seller center and then it's a tab that's called SEM. So SEM is where you can create these Google campaigns. So it's not through Connect, it's actually on the Walmart seller center part. So growth opportunities and then SEM, so that's where you find those. That's a really good question, because it's kind of some of these things are hidden and you kind of some days, oh, you go in there and you see some new things that pop up. So it's kind of interesting that way.

 

Costin:

By the way, also in growth opportunity. You can see the performance of your products. Of course it's not like very detailed like in Amazon, but, like I said before, just to follow a strategy for ranking, you can see if you really have exposure. You know clicks on your products. First of all, I think you need to start with some clicks for your product. You can do it with friends and family Doesn't matter if they are doing that, if you have five friends that can do that every day for one week and see what it's happening. So it's not, I mean Walmart, it's not. I find Walmart it's not a data-driven platform like Amazon. So for the ones that are very data-driven, I think it's pretty difficult to work on Walmart. But Walmart it's more of a, let me say, instinct platform or you need to feel a little bit. You need to try.

 

Carrie Miller:

You got to kind of play around with things a little bit more, since it's so new, you got to figure it out a little bit. Yeah, exactly, okay. Let's move on to a different topic and I'm curious to know what you think the most common challenges that you faced as a Walmart seller or that you've seen other sellers have. So what are some of the challenges you think that are on Walmart?

 

Costin:

First of all, it's opening the account. I mean, I guess you discussed that a lot of times here, so I don't want to go into very big details. Maybe at some point you will have someone from Walmart to explain as the strategy, if there's the approval strategy of the accounts, because it is really annoying. There are people that are selling millions of dollars in Amazon and on Shopify or on the other platforms they can open an account with Walmart. So I don't understand why. So this is the first one. Second of all, I think the common mistake is copy-paste listing from Amazon. I think this is the biggest mistake everybody does Until now. I was about to say that the listing score is very important. I guess it still is because Walmart tries to take care of the catalog. But I did a test if I can rank a product just by optimizing the score in a very, very small niche. It happened.

 

Costin:

So right now I'm tempted to say that the listing score is not so important. So maybe you can sacrifice a little bit the score just to have a listing that it's rolled for your customers and not for Walmart. The same is that in Amazon you should write listing for your customers, not for indexing. I guess this is the common mistake. The common mistake, and also the other mistake, is that sometimes people are panicking. In Walmart things are not happening very fast Like in Amazon, so you need to test a lot of things, you need to have patience. And also for the keywords if you really want to be index and rank for a keyword, you need to have it in the title.

 

Carrie Miller:

A lot of people. When I ask them why they think they're not doing well, I ask them have they optimized their listing or have they focused on some keywords? They run ads and a lot of times people haven't they just copy pasted. So I think that that's probably a big challenge for people is they have to kind of focus on Walmart, like you said, and kind of test things out, because each category is different too. So when I have two different categories of one things that work in one category or not working as well for me in the other category, so it's kind of an interesting thing.

 

Costin:

Yes, things are happening, happening differently in the different categories in in in Walmart.

 

Carrie Miller:

Another question is for any anybody starting to sell on Walmart or that wants to start on Walmart. What advice do you have to give them to start selling on Walmart?

 

Costin:

You can make really good money in Walmart by starting with a big assortment. You I mean you, you really don't need for testing out some products, you just need to buy them from a wholesaler in US. Just put it on your list, it with your own brand, different, different UPC, and just you can just test it. With 20 pieces, I mean, you can start this kind of business in one week.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, you can start. A lot of people do actually also wholesale that I've talked to you where they actually use the brand but they bundle it so like they'll bundle a bunch of different things together that they see people already buying together on Amazon and other places, so they'll just bundle those and they create their own UPC for that bundle and then there's no competition for it because other people have that bundle.

 

Costin:

Right now Walmart, it's really allowing you to play with different brands. It's not like the same policy with Amazon, so you can play with those those brands. Yeah, if you want, or even if you are thinking to to have a private label brand, you just buy from a liquidator or from an out-sailor, just to bundling, just buy some product from anywhere else and just test it. Even if you are losing a few dollars, it's very important to test.

 

Carrie Miller:

You can also test, you know, with AliExpress too, because you can, you know, get things in shipped and do smaller quantities. So AliExpress is a good place too. What do you, what do you think is the future of selling on Walmart, and how are you kind of planning on changing your strategies for what? What do you see as the future like? What does 2024 look like, you think, for Walmart?

 

Costin:

Well, I think Walmart is is still flexible and you can test a lot of things, but unfortunately I see a trend that they will become like Amazon, I guess because they have a lot of employees that leave, leave, left Amazon and went to Walmart and actually I thinking they are doing the same mistakes like Amazon. I was expecting for them to listen a little bit more. The sellers, of course, every company is focused on their customers, but guess what? Also, the sellers are focused on the customers, so they at some point I think I think this will make a big difference, just to to to listen some sellers and some some needs. So the strategy for 2024, it's also from my side and from my point of view it's just testing a lot of things. A lot of things will change. Maybe the rules will be different in two months in Walmart platform, then they are. Now it is possible Because you you can see also a trend that they are changing a lot of things, but I guess, for next year at least, it's still a platform where you can test a lot. All right.

 

Carrie Miller:

Well, I think that's pretty much. We're coming to an end here. So thank you to everyone who joined live and thank you so much, Costin, for sharing all this information with us. You you have a lot of really good, valuable tidbits on ranking for Walmart and just strategies for Walmart. So thank you so much for for joining and and answering those questions and and talking with us about those strategies. So thanks again and we'll see everyone again, I guess in the new year in 2024, for Walmart Wednesday in January. Bye, everyone, thank you very much.

 

Costin:

Thank you very much for having me. Bye.

#518 - From $300k a Month on Amazon to Owning a Fitness Studio

Are you looking to lead a healthy entrepreneurial lifestyle and diversify your business? Our special guest, a fitness celebrity, shares her journey from being a successful Amazon seller to becoming a wellness influencer after a tough E-commerce business setback. Her story is not just about overcoming trademark issues but also navigating a major shift in her personal brand and adapting to a new market niche. 

This episode indeed offers a goldmine of insights. From harnessing the power of Helium 10 Chrome extension for Amazon keyword data to branching out into drop shipping, wholesaling, and even selling audiobooks, our guest offers a wealth of knowledge. We also revisit her previous episode about her brand, Dollface, exploring the trademark drama that ensued and the valuable lessons learned. 

Finally, we delve into the realm of fitness, discussing the transformation of our guest's YouTube content and the decision to open her own gym. Packed with her wisdom on personal branding, niche-finding, and maintaining a balanced lifestyle, this episode is a must for both health-conscious Amazon entrepreneurs and those seeking to diversify their businesses. Tune in to learn, get inspired, and glean wisdom from our guest's entrepreneurial journey and her commitment to fitness.

 

In episode 518 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Carabella discuss:

• 03:38 - Beauty Products to Fitness Celebrity Transition
• 10:02 - Personal Branding and Followers
• 17:46 - Unwanted Attention in the Gym
• 20:53 - Entrepreneurship and Healthy Habits
• 23:09 - Non E-Commerce Questions for Guests
• 28:42 - The Importance of Health and Discipline
• 33:05 - Tips, Tricks, and Transformations for Success
• 34:34 - Diet Plan for 30-Pound Weight Loss
• 36:38 - Introduction to Bella Tech Studio

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton.

Today we've got a guest back who at one point was doing over a quarter of a million dollars per month on Amazon. That had it all taken away and now she's reinvented herself as a fitness celebrity. Out there, she has her own gym and everything and she's going to talk about her Amazon journey and she's going to give us tips and tricks on how to stay healthy as entrepreneurs. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Esty, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension demand analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we've got a serious seller. Probably this might be the record of the most time between coming on the podcast. I think the first time you came on the podcast is probably like three, maybe four years ago.

 

Carabella:

Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

We've got Carabella here. The last time you were on the podcast, did you film it here too?

 

Carabella:

We didn't film it here.

 

Bradley Sutton.

But you came here for something else.

 

Carabella:

Then I came here, for there was a conference or some sort. We were teaching something. It was an Amazon event.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yes, Okay, I was about to say, like you might be one of the only people have recorded in this old this is the original Helium 10 pPodcast or the second Helium 10 Podcast Studio, but we don't even, I don't even record here anymore. But okay, so this is your first podcast here, first time in a few years. All right, so if you guys want to get her like full, full backstory, her original episode was actually episode 64. Now we're like at 500 something. But anyways, let's kind of like catch up, because at that time you had your brand Dollface and then you were going through some drama back in those days because then somebody was trying to come and say, hey, this is no, this is our trademark. And I believe how we left it off was you basically had to like sell them your inventory or sell out of your product or what happened.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, exactly. So the company was named Dollface but they were selling cosmetics. I was so new to business and online business I was very naive. My thing was I'm just going to reach out to them see if they can approve me getting my trademark, cause the USPTO, I think, who does trademarks. They were saying there's somebody else that has something similar, you can't do it. So I said I'll just reach out to them. We're not really competition. I'm doing, you know, skincare tools. They're doing skincare creams. They said no way. So then I said okay, I have all this inventory. You're already selling skincare. Why don't you just take it? They said, okay, sold it at cost. And then we went from there and then I went out of business, out of Dollface, out of Amazon completely at that time.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, completely at that time.

 

Carabella:

And then I started doing drop shipping, wholesaling. I started doing audio books. I still have my audio books on there. I made the uh all of these on Amazon all of these on Amazon. So I did a fitness tracker book, things like that, and I was selling those, yeah, so completely different business.

 

Bradley Sutton.

And then that was around the time, like at that time you were kind of like a micro influencer in the beauty uh, you know, seen, because that was what your product was Right. But then you kind of like I remember that was when you first started doing like fitness videos on YouTube. Yeah, did you like make a new YouTube? Channel or you just switch your existing YouTube channel to the fitness stuff. Yeah, I switched my existing.

 

Carabella:

YouTube channel. I completely pivoted. I just started posting workout content and all my subscribers were like what is going on? And I just took down all my skincare stuff and a lot of people unsubscribed. They were like we're here for the skincare? And I said, okay, see, you later, but I just started posting workout videos. I had a tiny little apartment and I started doing these little workout videos in the dark. Basically it looked so bad, and then, little by little, I started my community there. What, uh, what prompted that?

 

Bradley Sutton.

Like, were you just so like, so fed up with what happened with the beauty, so like I don't want to do this, or the skincare stuff, that I don't want to do this anymore. Or you're like you know what. I think there's a need, I see a, you know, like an opportunity for me in the, in the fitness world, or how did that happen? It was kind of like a passion thing.

 

Carabella:

I took Tai Lopez's course 67 steps and he was saying what could you do all day long and love it and talk about it? And I was getting burnt out. On the skincare thing, I was making too many videos. My skin was breaking out. I didn't even wear makeup in reality. It was just like not aligned with me. I was just selling it to sell it and it was selling. So I was focused more on money there when I said what could I really do and just do it endlessly? It was fitness. I worked out every day I ate healthy. I was just in that lifestyle and it didn't feel like work. Okay, so I just jumped in.

 

Bradley Sutton.

All right now how you know the other Amazon stuff. You know audiobooks, drop shipping, like how did those work out for you? In the meantime was like was that the income that was sustaining you?

 

Carabella:

in those days. So I did drop shipping and I did wholesaling and I didn't do anything for fitness. I just kind of learned how to do all this drop shipping.

 

Bradley Sutton.

What kind of drop shipping?

 

Carabella:

I was pulling products from Walmart and I was selling them on Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton.

I used to do that too Until.

 

Carabella:

I was on sorry tracking down and it was money making baby.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Like I think in one like November, December, I probably did like maybe $200,000 in just like one or two months. It was insane in those days.

 

Carabella:

Yes, literally million dollars in like a few months, just in. You know that selling and it was crazy. And then slowly and I started opening more Amazon accounts. This was before they got so strict. So I had multiple selling accounts, I had multiple LLCs and I was doing all this stuff with Walmart and then I was also using Home Depot, I was using a Costco, I was using all these other places to fulfill from because Alibaba and AliExpress. It just took way too long and people on Amazon they want their orders but people started telling on me taking pictures of their Walmart bags why is this that was so ghetto.

 

- Bradley Sutton.

Walmart was ghetto in those days. They would straight take DoorDash I think they still do it a little bit like DoorDash drivers and they would like literally leave a plastic bag of Walmart.

 

Carabella:

And this is supposed to be an Amazon order, it's all yeah, I got busted, but I made a lot of money very quickly and it was pretty successful for a while.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, and then how about the books? Did that do anything for you?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, so I wrote a few. I wrote a planner, a fitness planner. It was like scan the QR code and work out for 60 days with me in a planner. So you scan the work out, you scan the QR code, you get a workout and then you do. You know, I ate this today and it's a weight loss book basically A little bit digital because the QR code. And then from there I said, okay, what about Kindle books? I took a course called publishing.com or something like this, where they teach you how to build out Kindle books and eBooks, and so I started doing that. I made a couple of those and those are still on Amazon, just listed there. I don't even look at them.

 

Bradley Sutton.

So around what year? From when to when I'm assuming it was after we had the podcast, obviously so like 2019, you started doing the drop shipping. How long were you doing the drop shipping?

 

Carabella:

I did the drop shipping for, I think, two years, so okay. So it was a decent amount of time. Decent amount of time, Made a lot of money, built a little team. I had a bunch of VAs, you know it was pretty successful. And then from there I was already doing the fitness recording.

 

Bradley Sutton.

I had my YouTube channel. Yeah, I had my.

 

Carabella:

YouTube channel and I had the drop shipping thing going on simultaneously.

 

Bradley Sutton.

And then you said you were doing a little bit of wholesaling, like what kind of was that?

 

Carabella:

That was like Amazon business, where I found pretty big suppliers that were selling in bulk and I would list on Amazon and then same thing like using Costco, using Sam's Club, these type of places, and I would just fulfill bulk orders at a discount.

 

Bradley Sutton.

What do you mean by bulk? Fulfilling bulk orders?

 

Carabella:

Like wholesale. So somebody orders like 200 units instead of one or two On Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, so also you made like a, like a very, was it like a variation where it was like 200 or they literally had to order 200 items.

 

Carabella:

They literally have to order like 200 items of something Interesting. There was a there was an Amazon business section sector and I got in there and I was able to sell bulk orders, yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, interesting, and then all right. So now, what year are we about? Like when we were talking about the second year of this 2019.

 

Carabella:

2021. 2020, 2021. 2021, end of 2021, 2022. And then I completely stopped all of that. No more drop shipping. Amazon got crazy. They closed all out of my accounts. I had like one account open. I think I have one account open which is where my books live.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, and then on the YouTube side was there a time you know where it just started taking off, or has it just always been gradual, Because I don't really start really small, but that was really big.

 

Carabella:

Actually it's not crazy big. It's like 6,000 subscribers still kind of small, but I feel like I have a very loyal following. And then I started doing selling from there, so selling inside of there. So I created a Shopify store with, like some workout things from Walmart. People can come by from my Shopify store, things like that. And then obviously YouTube pays you for ad revenue and super chats and all these things that you can do when you're going live and stuff like that. Okay, yeah. So that was always just gradual, steady, steady, steady.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, I think that's important, you know, cause it's not always about the number. Sure, yeah, if you're like MrBeast, you know like having he's a beast. Yeah, having that number of followers obviously is good for you, but other you know, you could have like a hundred thousand followers and then if you're not doing branding or you're not really personal, like it doesn't really do you any good because people only they're not following you, they're just like all right, I'm subscribed to this. Oh, there's another video. That was like when I started on YouTube, like a long time ago for the Zumba stuff, I was following a lot of people. Then I thought about it was like, if I saw these people like in an Amazon or Amazon see, I always think about Amazon nowadays If I saw these people like in a Zoom book conference, I literally wouldn't even know who they are, right, I don't know their names and stuff. So I'm like, if I'm gonna do YouTube, it's like how do I make myself memorable? And that's why I created that character. I wear the crazy socks and different things like that. But you kind of have to have a thing that makes it personal. Then you can have like six or 7,000 followers, yeah, and then it still works out for you.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, and you can monetize it and it's still good. And then, from there, I started doing fitness for brides and teaching online. Ah yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

I was doing that, I would do Zumba classes. For you know, guys, don't get twisted for bachelorette parties. It wasn't, the clothes stay on, all right, but you know, like, like, weddings are very stressful, oh yeah. And they're like for weeks, they're just like going crazy and they're like, hey, right, a couple of days before the wedding we just want to kind of like get our indoor friends out and just like work it out. You know, we're kind of and so like I would make a lot of money doing bachelorette and there'd be good dudes there too, you know that'd be kind of strange, you know, but you know so. So that's a, that's a interesting thing. So you would, you would like, was it mainly like, hey, get the bride in shape over?

 

Carabella:

a certain amount of time, or something like that. Exactly From there, I started doing my YouTube. Amazon was like way gone, didn't even focus on it. I started doing more personal training, one-on-one stuff, and then I said I can't do one-on-ones, this is going to be crazy. Like I have no time, yeah. So then, from there, I took a course and look at me taking all these fricking courses. I learned Amazon from a course, though, too.

 

Bradley Sutton.

But hey, see, see, hey guys, real quick takeaway here. Everybody takes courses. Very few people actually act or actually do what they learn. You know, I take a course, oh great, I learned so much, it was great. Or are you doing it? No, like maybe they haven't all worked out, but literally she, you know, she took a course on Amazon. She started Amazon. She took a course on wholesale and then drop shipping. She started doing that and now she took, she took a Tylopus course. She started. You know, she did something off that. I like that. I wish more people were like you. But go ahead anyways.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, it's a finisher, mindset, right.

 

Bradley Sutton.

There you go.

 

Carabella:

I did the publishing course I made books on Amazon. They're still there selling like you get royalties from them. So I took this course. Ruben Brooks he's a coach and he teaches coaches how to build their online presence for fitness. So I took his course. It was expensive like $6,000, $10,000 course and I was like I'm going all in. So I built out my online program. He said you need to niche down. I said okay, who can I teach? I had experience in the bridal industry from way before I started selling on Amazon. I worked with weddings and events. So I said brides, they got the money, they want to look good in their dress, feel sexy, they're honeymoon after, they want to be like ready. So boom, that became my niche and I started building out my course for brides and then from there it just was kind of easy, because there's a lot of brides in LA, especially Beverly Hills, that have the money to take training.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, so all this time, like you were saving money too from Amazon, because I'm assuming you weren't like living it's not called paycheck, they paycheck, but disbursement to disbursement from Amazon. You started saving up money and then. So that means when, that you know, when Amazon cut you off on some, it's not like you were on the streets or anything.

 

Carabella:

No, no, yeah, Always definitely have savings, have backup plans, keep your and I did one-on-ones between. So after that I did my one-on-ones, I made clients. I mean, I made money doing, you know, one-on-one training in the gym and things like that. So from there I said, okay, online is the way to go about the course. I went to conferences in Arizona to learn about the industry and then I started making money online again, but in fitness this time.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, all right, cool. So at what point were you like, did you just kind of like, shut down almost all of your Amazon? Like, today you have no physical products, it's a hundred percent, just like your digital product, digital books.

 

Carabella:

yeah, Two digital books. They just are on Amazon. I don't even look at them.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Was it? Did you have like tons saved up or was it a little bit? Was there a time where you're kind of scared Like, okay, amazon's not going to work out, like I better get something else pretty fast. Or was that other income from the training and stuff already going by that time?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, it was already going by that time. I was also. I'm also very much a worker person. I look ahead a lot. So I'm seeing like, okay, I'm stopping Amazon, they're closing my channels, I'm gonna get my personal trainer certification so I can start teaching people what I love already. And this was already in my mind, because I was teaching people how to do it on YouTube without a certification. So then I thought why not be more legit and then offer these things in person? And trainers can make a lot of money. Especially where I live, you can make a lot of money per hour. So I had already kind of foreshadowed what I wanted to do before Amazon cut me off completely. So I had savings and I didn't live beyond my means, which a lot of people I feel like do, which is bad running up their credit cards, especially in California, not paying the thing, I had a Mazda. I think you knew me then. I had a Mazda. I lived very humbly, so I didn't have all of this debt on my head and I didn't have too much to play catch up with.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, cool. Was there a point where just the trainer on their own like completely replaced what you were doing on Amazon, or was it still a little bit less?

 

Carabella:

Still a little bit less. It was less in person for sure. And then when I started to build scale with the online program and I could have way more clients than just like six a day, because six a day is like six hours of your life.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Hold on, like I'm kind of like spazzy anyways, are you saying you were doing like online, like Zoom? Like oh okay, For some reason I missed that.

 

Carabella:

Okay.

 

Bradley Sutton.

So that just widens your bait. Instead of trying to have to find some, all right, let's find a gym that we can both go to or come to my house or something you were, somebody could be anywhere.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, exactly. And then I was doing training for brides and things like that. And then I built out courses. I already had libraries of videos on YouTube. I just put them in trainer eyes, which is where all the videos live like a course, and then all you have to do is reach out to people who are getting married. And I did the hashtag thing, the cold DM thing. Hey, I see you're gonna get married. I see you just got proposed to. Hey, da, da, da, I'm a trainer, this is what I do. I'll give you a couple, you know, seven days free, 14 days free. Check out my course. Boom, get a sale. This type of thing.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, Okay, yeah, Interesting. Now at what point did it get in your head where it's like I want to have my own like brick-and-mortar location, like a physical studio or Always. Always, so that was always a dream.

 

Carabella:

I love equinox, I love working out and I always wanted my own place and literally I put it on my vision board. It's on my vision board, this little studio with perfect yoga mats, laid out with little yoga blocks. And then, when I got my studio, I did the same photo shoot in there and I matched it to my vision board. It was one year later. Wow, I put it on my vision board and then, one year later, I got the opportunity.

 

Bradley Sutton.

That's awesome. So what was your thought process? Cause I believe it's a little bit unique where you're only catering to female clients, right Like was that always the plan, or were you just like kind of like thinking like an Amazon seller, how can I niche down? Or what was going on there? A?

 

Carabella:

little bit like the Amazon seller. How can I niche down? How can I make it special? Also, being in the gym as a woman. Sometimes you get unwanted attention. A lot of women feel the same way. It was a consistent thing I heard from my brides about being in a physical gym. It's uncomfortable. I have a husband, I have my man, this and that I don't want to get gawked at all this stuff.

 

Bradley Sutton.

So I have to deal with that. I don't know. I'm just like.

 

Carabella:

So I just thought what a concept. And I know the majority of gyms are full of men, so I cut my audience in like half, maybe even 60, 40. Cause men just are in the gym. But we're doing something very different. It's only group classes and it's only for women, and if you go to gyms and you look at their group classes, it's all women.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, when I was teaching Zumba it was like 45 women and like two dudes only. Yeah.

 

Carabella:

And it's all feminine. You know style of movements, classes, so I feel like we're on the right path, Okay.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, all right. So yeah, basically this episode is about guys. Hey, you guys are Amazon sellers out there and if you want to do this for the rest of your life, do it. I think I might do Amazon for the almost rest of my life. You know, like I have no plans to do anything, but it's important to have you know kind of backup plans too, and if something goes wrong with your Amazon business, it's not over. You know, like, like she, she's had a couple of two kind of major bad events happen on Amazon. One because of her trademark. She didn't, you know, do enough research and she got shut down and then she started it again. And then again because Amazon kind of changed her policies with drop shipping and things, and again she didn't, she didn't let it knock her down. So do you have, like you know like financial advisors, or you know planning and stuff, or have you just done everything on your own?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, no financial advisors, no planning. I mean I had a financial advisor when I got life insurance, but that's as far as I've gone, you know, so far. Yeah, hopefully I get huge and I'll need all of those. But yeah, from where I'm at now and where I was, no financial advisors, I did QuickBooks, I had an accountant, but that's the extent of it.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, yeah. So what's in the like on the horizon for you? What's your plan? I mean, obviously the studio just started like a few months ago, right? We?

 

Carabella:

just opened about a month and a half ago. On the horizon, I want the studio to flourish. I'm only focusing on this one location first, but my big dream is to have a clothing line with this company, more locations with this company, and I want to go worldwide. Oh my goodness.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, I want to have.

 

Carabella:

Bellatec clothing line yoga mats. You know huge events. You know how Aloe Yoga teaches yoga too, so we're actually going to do our first event with Fabletics and USC. Wow.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, that's exciting. And the Clippers came into our studio looking for a place to train their girls.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yes.

 

Carabella:

So we're right in the middle of downtown it's my team right there. There you go.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yes.

 

Carabella:

So, yeah, wow, I really want to expand and make this a huge, huge company. I'm looking at it right now Like realistically. I just want to make this baby grow up.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, so then you're almost guaranteed going to find your way back into physical products and online and e-commerce.

 

Carabella:

Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Because you know, if you start doing merch or something for your brand and start to, you know making your own, I mean you're going to. If you get popular here, you know like right now you're probably just buying all your own like yoga blocks and mats and stuff.

 

Carabella:

Exactly, we actually bought everything from Alibaba.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, but then you see, you could still do that. But then now you put your logo on it and then you know, sell it for people, especially since you're, because you're still doing the online courses and stuff like that. So then in that case, you know, like it's not just, oh, only the people who go to your physical location would be buying your stuff. You know, if you have customers all over the world, they could buy yourself online.

 

Carabella:

Exactly, and Bellatec is going to have an online portal as well, where people can work out with us from all over the world, even from this first location. I've already started building out with our web developer an online portal for girls to work out from New York, and they can join our Bellatec community from anywhere.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Awesome, awesome, alright. What's your advice for somebody else out there, like, maybe people nowadays obviously can't make money that quick the way you did, because it literally doesn't exist anymore where you can just do drop shipping and stuff like that Bye. But is it a matter of like, hey, if you're selling on Amazon or Shopify or TikTok shop or whatever, like Start putting some money to the side. Or what's your advice? Like, how were you able to succeed with life after Amazon?

 

Carabella:

I feel like you just have to play it smart. Be careful, but also take risks. And finally, don't be scared to like Burn it and keep moving, but also just be careful. Like I'm not a financial advisor, and so I can't really say much, but definitely focus on having a cushion, a fallback cushion, save money, plan things for longer term. You know, think smart, think about your future, because Amazon changes every single day and, like you said, you literally can't do that to type of drop shipping anymore, those type of selling anymore, and that was insane. But yeah, I would say just you know, focus on being a little bit careful but also still taking risks, because you can't be too careful or else you won't grow.

 

Bradley Sutton.

We're going to talk you know the rest of this episode is actually something I've been doing. The last year for guests on the episode is I've been asking them a lot of like non e-commerce questions like, hey, what do you do when you need to step away from your business? Because I think all of us you know, you remember how it was like you can get so engrossed because it's fun, you know sometimes, but you know like what's that mean? There's like a meme like hey, amazon sellers are the ones who want to quit their nine to five just so they can work 16 hours a day. You know, like because we just get engrossed and especially when you're work from home, you know you could just like kind of let yourself go and not have great eating habits. So let's talk about healthy habits. But first of all, what's yours? Like you, it's kind of like fitness is almost like your job. That was like for me and like people ask me back in the day what did I do to stay in shape? When I was in shape, like doing zoom, but like I didn't have to. That was my job. Like like I was doing 10 classes, 12 classes a week. I could almost eat whatever I wanted to, even though it's not good, but I would never gain weight because I'm just working out. But like, what about you? What about mentally? Maybe I need to take away from or take a step back from the studio, take a step back from my training. I just need to have some me time. What's your go to? Hobbies or things?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, this is the most important thing for all of us entrepreneurs, because we get obsessed and there's no work life balance and at the moment, I have a brand new baby. I have no balance, but I force myself.

 

Bradley Sutton.

You have a brand new baby?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, at Bellatec.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Oh, okay, I'll say wait a minute. Okay, I was like, did I miss something?

 

Carabella:

No, my business is like a month old. I'm looking at it like a child.

 

Bradley Sutton.

It's how born, yeah, newborn.

 

Carabella:

So things that I do to step away. It's very hard to get away from my phone, just I don't know, it's an addiction thing, obsessive controller thing, but I just go get massages, turn my, turn my phone off, get a massage, put it on, do not disturb. I ride horses, I get in nature. I love to run on the beach, I love to meditate. Journal I'm a big journal. If anyone read the book, the artists way Okay, this book is amazing, it'll change your life. And so she talks about in that book that to sit down and do morning pages where you brain dump three pages a day and you give yourself time and then you can, you know, understand yourself better. But healthy habits for me is giving yourself time alone, alone, alone not with friends, you know. I like to take a bath, I like to spend time in nature, go see my family. Sometimes I mean they're not very far, but I don't make enough time.

 

Bradley Sutton.

They're my neighbors. I know they are your neighbors.

 

Carabella:

My sister just had her sixth baby. Can you believe your sister has six? Wow, that's crazy, yeah. And then I'm in the gym every day, were they were.

 

Bradley Sutton.

they when we're not tri-city, hmm, tri-city hospital right there, I don't know. That's where my kids were born.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, I don't know, but I saw the new baby on Thanksgiving and she's so cute, oh yeah, but yet I I work out every single day 5am. Make sure that you're choosing healthy foods. You know your food is your fuel. Yeah, so if you don't choose good fuel, you're not going to have, you know, a good day. You're going to feel slow.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Let's talk about that, for a little Cause entrepreneurs out there, I think 15 years ago was different, but nowadays, thanks to the apps from the devil AKA door dash, uber eats and everything else, like it's just so easy to you know, at least back in the day maybe you were lazy you actually ate better because, all right, I'll just make myself a ham sandwich or something you know which is probably more healthy than all right, let me order McDonald's to be delivered to my doorstep.

 

Carabella:

Exactly.

 

Bradley Sutton.

What are some eating habits for the stay at home entrepreneur? Simple things that they can keep in mind to stay healthy.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, no breakfast. Do intermittent fasting, I would say.

 

Bradley Sutton.

How many hours on, and I would say 16, eight 16, eight 16, eight.

 

Carabella:

So 16 hours fast eight hours. Eat no breakfast. I don't eat until 11 o'clock. My biggest meal is lunchtime and then I take breaks. Make sure you take breaks, guys. Get off your butt, walk around, get your steps in 10,000 steps, minimum 10,000 steps a day.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Minimum. We just did the okay hold on Minimum Hold on hold on. We did this thing at work where it was like a challenge and they were like all right, we need to do 7,500. And I was struggling, like I was walking, like I would go an hour on the. I have like a standing desk so I have the treadmill on the bottom and then I would do like an hour on that. And then there was some time where I was traveling. So I would like walk like two miles and I'm like I'm still not at 10,000. I'm like what is it? Or not even at 7,500. So like to get to 10,000, what does that mean? Does that mean I need to walk like three miles? Does that mean I need to spend an hour and a half on a treadmill? It's about six miles?

 

Carabella:

Oh, my goodness, it's about six miles If you walk. So I wear an aura ring. Usually it's dead right now and I see my step counts are insane. I mean, I walk 25,000 steps a day. But if you want to be, if you want to be like the hunter and gatherer people that we used to be walking everywhere, they did minimum 10,000 steps for women.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Wow.

 

Carabella:

Men's steps should be way more, cause you have higher testosterone, you have different bodies. So I would say 10,000 steps a day minimum. Get up and walk around and then your smallest meal should be dinner. So you go to bed light but you're not hungry. You know, and then I don't eat after 7pm. Okay, so 11 to 7 is my window, and that's all I get to Just water. Yeah, water, I like green juice, celery juice, ginger tea, things that'll flush you out also. Yeah, that would be my way to how to eat if I'm going to stay at home and even if I don't stay at home. This is how I eat. Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

So maybe like, hey, you know, maybe that seems unattainable, I mean, it seems unattainable to me almost 10,000 steps, but you can get a treadmill, that's on. You know, you can still be on your computer, but on your treadmill, like while you're doing it, but then I, the thing that I don't do enough of is, you know, like, take walks outside. Hey, do you have a zoom call or a call that doesn't require to be in front of your computer? Take that zoom call on your phone, maybe and just take a walk. Wow, okay, yeah, I need to step on my. I need to step on my game here.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, but don't forget, health is wealth and you don't want to get to your wealth and be sick because you're not in good shape. Like, don't forget that your body is should be your number one and the sharper you are physically, the better your wealth is going to be. You know and I saw something somewhere, I think it was the guy who does the 75 hard, andy Fersilla. He told me he said when people see a person in shape, they want to do more business with them, they want to work with them more because they see the discipline. So that discipline from your health transfers into other places of your life, like your business, getting things done on time, planning things out, showing up to meetings on time early. Da, da, da da. Cause you build that habit.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, what about I mean, apart from just steps? You know, like, like, if that's all we're doing, that's great, but it's still not enough. Like, what are some easy maybe exercises? The desk jockey, you know, can do just like break. You know, like you said, take breaks and stuff, so like, what should? We? What kind of little mini exercises can we be doing during our breaks?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, jumping jacks, pushups, sit ups I would say planking for sure. Keep that back strong. Anything that's in the area that you're, anything you can do in a very small area. So think about it. If I were to stand up here, I could probably do some jumping jacks. I can get on the floor and do some pushups, simple things like that For guys. If you have a pull up bar at home, hang it on your door, do some pull ups. You don't need a full gym to get in shape or to stay in shape, and then you burn calories a lot. Jump rope get a jump rope, stand outside. That's the best one.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, yeah, All right. What about as far as counting calories portions? You know you talking about having dinner as your smallest, but, like you know, how much vegetables, fruit should we be having? Like? What do you think about these different trends, Like you know, like carnivore diets and all this crazy stuff?

 

Carabella:

I feel like it depends on the person. Not one diet fits all, but I would say depending on. For calorie counting, if you want to lose weight, you got to eat less than your, your basal metabolic rate, which is like the minimum calories that your body burns at rest.

 

Bradley Sutton.

How do you, how do you find that out? Calculate that?

 

Carabella:

There's a, there's a or a ring will track it. Your Apple watch will track it.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Oh, I have an Apple. I didn't know I had that Okay.

 

Carabella:

Your Renfno scale will track it. These scales that scan through your feet they'll track it. So they do this scan and they'll you'll be able to see, you know your weight, your body fat, your muscle mass, your water, your you know metabolic age, which is the age that your body is at in the state that you are in now, and then how many calories you burn at rest. So if you burn 1500 calories at rest and you want to lose weight, you better eat a thousand calories a day and you will naturally lose weight. If you want to gain weight, you eat 2000 calories a day. It's very simple math.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, and I mean that is definitely going to help you lose weight. But then you want to have you know if you go to a physical checkup and have your good cholesterol high, your bad cholesterol low. So what are some foods to stay away from? What are some foods that you think are must haves in your, in your diet?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, Whole foods diet is the best diet, which means not whole foods. See instantly, See, instantly See what I thought about. No whole foods like anything that comes from the earth chicken, eggs, spinach, greens, fruits, anything that comes from the earth. Anything that comes from a bag and you don't know what's in it when you read the ingredients, that's automatically not good for you. I don't drink sugary juices. I would stay away from sugar completely. I would do just foods that come from the earth must haves in your diet eggs, chicken, steak unless you're vegetarian, which I did, vegan, and it was a shit show for me. I'm sorry, Can I say that? It was it was not for me. You know, I did some blood work when I was vegan. Going through that, my protein tanked, my hair was falling out, I had low iron, low vitamins not for me. Some people are thriving on vegan, so I feel like it depends on the person's body. But Whole Foods diet is the best way.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, yeah, cool. What are the tips, and tricks or anything can you give to our community out there?

 

Carabella:

Try to de-stress. Get an animal. I don't have an animal, but a lot of my friends have dogs and I ride horses, so getting around animals makes you feel happy, release dopamine, release stress. Also, you have a companion and then just spending more time outside, fresh air, grounding, just staying. Staying a human in a digital world is so important and that we get lost in that. Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, any inspiring stories of people like transformations that you've had, you know, like maybe it's a bride or maybe it's just one of your you know clients, your one-on-one clients, um, where they actually like, all right, we're just going to go ahead and do whatever you tell me. And then they saw some like incredible results.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, actually I have a lot, but I'll tell you this one which I absolutely love. This guy I was training. He's a pharmacist, very successful pharmacist, very busy guy. We started training and he was basically lying to me. He's like I'm not losing any weight, I'm not losing any weight and we're working out three times a week. This isn't, this is not working and not everybody can eat healthy and lose weight. And I said what are you eating? And he was like I'm eating healthy. What are you talking about? And we sat down one time and I was so ruthless I'm like you're a liar. You're not following the diet I'm giving you. Show me a picture of your food every day, every meal. So then we I we had this really tough conversation. Two months later he lost 30 pounds. He was eating clean, he was training consistently and 30 pounds he looked like a different person.

 

Bradley Sutton.

He went what did he take out of his diet? Mcdonald's Also. He was eating McDonald's and complaining that he wasn't losing weight.

 

Carabella:

He was eating out every single day, drinking alcohol, and he took all of that out of his diet. He started work. I had him on something very strict like tuna, salad water and just almost like a keto, and he lost weight so quickly. He went from 193 to 163 and literally like two months.

 

Bradley Sutton.

How tall was he?

 

Carabella:

He's 5’10.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, Well, I mean 193 is not, that, you know, like for for a guy, unless you're like five, six or something that's all right. Can you give me his his diet plan, or the one that you gave him?

 

Carabella:

I could give you a diet plan. I want to lose 30 pounds. It is strict.

 

Bradley Sutton.

It's strict, but I'll give it to you All right.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, I have it on my phone right here.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Awesome.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, I'll give it that to you.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Cool, all right. So this has been a great episode because it's like, you know, we don't have, you know, like we have tons, of course, amazon success stories on here. But success doesn't mean just success on Amazon, just success in life is like, hey, are you happy, are you, you know, supporting for you and your family and stuff like that, and you've achieved that and it's, you know, sure, amazon, you know paved the way, but then you completely transition and it's nothing wrong with that. So, guys, don't be thinking that Amazon is the only way to success. It's a. You know, it could arguably be said that you wouldn't, you might not have been able to have enough to start this, you know, uh, business and stuff If you hadn't done the Amazon, absolutely use Amazon. And then if Amazon keeps working, great, keep it rolling. I'm sure you would have loved to have kept doing like six figures a month.

 

Carabella:

I'm coming back when I get my, when my clothing comes out and I know how to work it and I'm going to come back to it. I love it All right.

 

Bradley Sutton.

But then, most importantly again this you know, you guys know I've had some lot of health issues in the past, and so that's why this year I made sure to always ask the guests about their health regime. And this is, you know, one of the experts in the game as far as that goes, so I hope you put her advice to use now. If somebody is in, you know, if there's any of our female listeners out there who are in the like LA area, how can they find out about your, your studio?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, check out bellatec.com and you can come in for your first class free, and all you have to do is register on the website. It's very easy. The steps are there. You can find me @carabellariazzo and DM me on Instagram. I'm very personable. I talk to everyone. I'm not the type of person who's going to ignore people, except Bradley, except me when I'm trying to get her on the podcast for like a year. Just kidding, but yeah, so check us out there. We're at Bellatec studio on Instagram and everywhere else. Yeah, come say hi.

 

0:37:15 - Bradley Sutton.

It's great to see you again, and I hope the next time you see me, you don't recognize me because I'll be like the more fit version.

 

0:37:22 - Carabella:

Let's go. I believe in you, I love it.

 

Helium 10 Buzz 12/14/23: Amazon Seller Chat | TikTok Shop News | Multilingual Videos

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

TikTok Shop Wants to Beat Amazon at Its Own Game
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/tiktok-looks-to-challenge-amazon-amzn-with-tiktok-shop

Let shoppers engage with your brand across multiple products using Amazon Video Builder
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/amazon-video-builder-powers-use-of-multiple-product-asins/

Walmart pushes ahead with e-commerce platform
https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/29475-walmart-pushes-ahead-with-e-commerce-platform

Etsy lays off 225 workers after ‘essentially flat’ sales, says CEO
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/13/etsy-layoffs-online-business-retail-industry

But wait, there's more to this episode. We'll guide you through the process of automating Amazon keyword research using Helium 10. We'll help you streamline your efforts, saving time by setting up keyword insight settings to alert you when a competitor ranks for a new keyword. Plus, we're handing you a roadmap for business growth in 2024. We're talking about a free downloadable checklist that will help you develop essential daily habits, and keep you focused on your goals. Go to: https://h10.me/habittracker for more information! So, whether you're a newbie seller or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with strategies that will give you an edge. Grab your headphones, and let's get started!

 

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie talks about:

• 00:42 - TikTok Shop Vs. Amazon
• 03:19 - Seller Support Chat
• 04:36 - Video In Multiple Languages
• 05:41 - More Products in Video Ads
• 06:51 - Walmart Investing in Marketplace
• 07:33 - Etsy Sales Flat
• 08:21 - New Apparel Tool
• 09:35 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 13:36 - Pro Training Tip
• 17:26 - 2024 Daily Habits Seller Checklist

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

TikTok is giving Amazon a run for its money. Chat is now available in Amazon seller support, and now you can upload videos in multiple languages on your Amazon listings. This and so much more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

 

Carrie Miller:

Welcome back to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast. My name is Kari and I will be your host, and this is our weekly buzz, which is our weekly episode, where we give you all of the latest news and updates for Amazon, Walmart and the e-commerce world. We also give you updates on Helium 10, new alerts and features, and we also will give you a serious strategy for serious sellers of any level. So let's go ahead and see what's buzzing. Okay, so let's go ahead and get into this first article, which is how TikTok shop is giving Amazon a run for their money, and I do know that they are doing a lot of amazing incentives for sellers. First of all, there's no fees. They're also covering shipping costs for you and if you give discounts with some of their promotions, they often will actually cover those discounts. So, for example, if you give a 30% off discount through one of their promotions, they'll cover the 30% discount cost so that you don't have to pay for it. And I've actually talked to sellers who have made more money than their usual listing price for products. In addition to that, they're giving customers coupons to purchase and really helping to incentivize them to start purchasing on TikTok, so they'll give them a $20 off coupon. I know I bought something that was $21.95 and I got $20 off, so I only paid a doll her 95 for it.

 

Carrie Miller:

Let's go ahead and get into the article that talks about this. This article is titled TikTok shop wants to beat Amazon at its own game. It's from Bloomberg and they talk about a seller who had started getting all these incentives to sell on TikTok shop and they were really surprised at how they even did $10,000 in sales the day after Cyber Monday, even after all this was done. Really really cool stuff that they started selling and learning how to use TikTok shop and because of all the incentives they're more profitable, which I know. A lot of people on Amazon are kind of wondering what's going on with profitability because it keeps shrinking. So this could be a potentially good opportunity, especially while they're giving these no fee incentives to get in there.

 

Carrie Miller:

But something that's really interesting is that they're saying that Amazon shouldn't be too worried yet because basically people are seeing things on TikTok. They don't necessarily yet trust the platforms that are purchasing elsewhere, so they might go to Amazon. In addition to that, the shipping isn't as fast on TikTok, so you can see that people are going to go and want that two day shipping, which is why you'll see a lot of people buying something on Amazon. Maybe it's the same brand, so a lot of times people will look for the same thing that they found on TikTok to see if they can actually find it on Amazon to buy that. Something else that I found very interesting in this article is that they were talking about how people are saying it's kind of like a farmer's market or a digital craft fair, because you can do live selling on TikTok shop and people can ask questions and you can interact with the product live and show people how to use it. So it's a really good opportunity to kind of have a different experience for people and really incentivize them to purchase. I'm really curious to know if any of you have started selling on TikTok shop and how you've done so far. Put your comments below and just let us know how you're doing. Have you had a hard time starting? Have you gotten some success on TikTok shop? We would really like to know.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let's go ahead and get into the second article, which is something I think a lot of people are going to really like, and hopefully this is something that is really beneficial for a lot of sellers and that is that now that you can actually get chat instead of just email and phone call on seller support. So this is a little press release document that was released by Amazon so you can now chat with an actual person. So, instead of having to call, you can actually chat. So there's an FAQ. So one big question that's what I had. I thought is it going to be a chat bot, because I can't stand dealing with those. So they said will I be communicating with an actual human? And yes, all live chats will be handled by a seller support associate. Will I see if this receive the same level of service that I do with email? And it says many cases you will, and then you don't have to go back and forth with email. And in what cases is it not available? It says they can currently help you with the majority of support issues with chat. So that is a really good thing that they'll be able to kind of help with a bunch of different things with chat, and basically you have to go and find it in the same way that you would any other support and there will be an option for chat. So my question is what do you think about this and are you going to start utilizing the chat feature instead of email or the phone call, or what do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this next article is really exciting, especially for the US, because there are so many people with different languages in this country and you want to really market to as many people as possible, and I know I've been noticing a lot of Spanish keywords when I'm doing keyword research in our helium 10 tools, and this is a great opportunity to be able to reach Spanish speakers and all speakers of a lot of different languages. So this article talks or this is actually an announcement from seller central that now you can actually upload your videos in other languages. So now you can upload Spanish videos, you can upload Chinese videos or other languages that you think that your customers might be looking at your listings and maybe they might need it in their native language. So this will help you to be able to sell to those people and really showcase your product to a wider variety of people, and I'm really excited about this. I think this is really a great thing to be able to kind of further expand the languages on your listings that you already have. Now Let us know in the comments below if you think this is a great thing and if you're going to get started doing it right away, or what you think about, you know, being able to upload these videos in different languages.

 

Carrie Miller:

This next article is about being able to upload more than one product to your videos for your ads. I think this is a great opportunity to showcase more than one product. I noticed that when I was able to show more than one product on my brand story and my A+ Content that people were buying in bulk or bundles, basically, of things that they weren't buying in bundles before. So this is a great opportunity to showcase all of your products in one video and catch the eye of a lot of different customers. So this is actually an announcement from you know advertising on Amazon and the way that it works is you're going to be able to upload those three different products, and why it's important is you know you're going to be able to get more brand exposure and just a lot more reach. Maybe one person might not be looking for one thing that you sell, but maybe one of the other items they're going to be interested in, so it's a really good opportunity there. Also, this is where the feature is available. It is. It is available in the US, Canada, Mexico and then all these other countries across South America, Europe, middle East and in the Asia Pacific. So check out to see if your country is allowing this and start getting some of these video ads up, and so I think this is going to be a really good thing for showcasing even more of your products and incentivizing people to buy more of your products all at the same time.

 

Carrie Miller:

So the next article here is in the Walmart realm, and that is basically that Walmart is going to continue to invest in their e-commerce platform in 2024. And this is according to an article on meatpuletry.com. They have they did see quite a bit of growth on their digital market, so they want to keep growing it. They actually talk about how it was even more. They had more growth in China. However, they are still just overall, growing this marketplace so that, you know, more customers can buy their products online, since more people are switching to online shopping. So it's a really you know good time to get into Walmart as well. If you really want to grow your, your brand and your products. You know, maybe consider selling on Walmart as well.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this next article is a bit of sad news and that is that, um, basically, Esty had to lay off a bunch of workers because their sales were flat, so they laid up 225 workers. I'm not sure what this means for the future of Etsy or what they're thinking about sales trajectories, but it is really a curious thing. I know there are a lot of Etsy sellers who watch our content. So if you're an Etsy seller, have you seen sales kind of stay the same? Have you seen growth? I know it really is dependent on the individual seller, so, um, you know this really could be dependent, um, you know, seller to seller, but also Amazon does have Amazon hand made and you can get these products pretty quickly. So that might be something that's been causing some competition for Etsy. But hopefully this doesn't mean that it's doomsday for Etsy and that we'll see them revive again.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this is the last but not least, but this is a really good thing for apparel brands and I think that because of Sheen and Temu, those are really big platforms that are really competing with Amazon right now and they sell mostly apparel and basic. We saw last week with the fees, they're reducing fees for apparel, which I think maybe has something to do with the fact that they want to compete with those, those platforms. But now they have a new fit insights tool that's going to help give you know apparel and shoe brands access to fit specific insights about their products to help you know the customers you know get the right sizing so they can help reduce returns. I think this is a really good thing to help offering you know sellers the opportunity to you know, improve upon their actual sizing measurements to make sure they're the most accurate for customers to prevent the most amount of returns. I do sell in this category and I think this is a really good thing. Um, you know, for all of us, I do sell in this category and I think this is a really good thing to add and really help us to be more specific with our sizing so that all of our customers can get the exact product that they want with the exact right fit. All right. So that is all of our news. So let's go ahead and check out with Shivali what our Helium 10 feature updates. So, Shivali, go ahead and take it away.

 

Shivali Patel:

Hi guys let's get into this week's helium 10 new feature alerts. We have some ground to cover today, the first feature being located inside of Cerebro, our reverse ASIN keyword research tool. Let's talk about the Amazon total search volume and Amazon average search volume metrics Diving into Cerebro. Essentially, when you're performing a keyword search and say you end up filtering down any group of keywords or phrases, then the tool will actually tell you what the total search volume is for that given pool of phrases, as well as what the average search volume is per phrase. The first number is especially helpful if you want to understand the combined impact or reach of all the keywords that your products are ranking for on page one, while the latter is great for understanding individual averages of your pulled key phrases, since the multi ASIN search that I have pulled up here is quite broad and it includes indexed keywords and phrases. We have a Amazon total search volume that is upwards of 3.5 million, but let's refine the search to have an organic ranking somewhere between positions 1 and 50. In applying these filters, what you're going to see now is the combined value of your page one reach, and that for us in this cuff and shelf market is 22,000 roughly. Alternatively, in the case that you want to see the search volume of all the keywords that your competitors are beating you on, you could use a different filter. Instead of the position rank filter, you could use the relative rank filter and then proceed to take a look at those metrics. How cool is that? Right, all right.

 

Shivali Patel:

And the second thing that I want to talk about now is filter presets available inside of Atomic. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you navigate over to Atomic, you can actually access this inside of the, the analytics or the add manager tabs. I'm already inside of analytics and I'm in the search terms tab, so I'm just gonna stay here, but you guys are more than welcome to do this inside of the add manager tab as well. You probably are gonna see this inside of Cerebro, too, and going down say that instead of going through all of these 1450 search terms, I want to take a look at the last 60 days. I know that I want to see those different search terms that have 20 clicks but no orders, no PPC orders, and I'm spending at least three dollars on that search term. Well, now I can actually go in and click save the filter preset, and when I click save filter preset, you're gonna be able to name it and then click apply, and every time you go back into Atomic, you're actually going to be able to access it quickly with just one click, by clicking filter library, and then select whatever you'd like to see and it's automatically going to take those search terms and narrow them down based off those filters that you selected.

 

Shivali Patel:

So be sure to take advantage of this. If you are really interested in minimizing your actions maybe you have a lot going on and you really want to get straight into the actionable data and insights that will move your business forward then this is a really quick way to do that, to optimize those PPC campaigns you have. Or even if you're doing this inside of Cerebro, you're using the filter presets to quickly get in and take a look at any new keywords or phrases that might be relevant to your niche. So be sure to take advantage of this if you really want to minimize the actions that are needed to get to actionable data and insights, and I wish you much success.

 

Carrie Miller:

Alright. Thank you so much for those updates. Helium 10 is always doing a great job of just updating products that we offer and then coming out with great new tools that can help you to further your business. So we are so excited about all the things that are going to be coming in 2024. So keep staying tuned to the weekly buzz so you can be the first to know about all these new updates. And, last but not least, we have our training of the week, so we will go ahead and send it on over to Bradley for the training video of the week.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How to automate your Amazon keyword research. Alright, we've been talking about a lot of strategies as far as how to find top keywords from your competitors. You know from your own listings, etc. Now I the way I showed it to you guys. It doesn't take too much time. But you know, maybe you've got 10-20 products and you want to be checking your competitors keywords once a week. Well, it can start getting pretty tedious and time-consuming and a lot of data that you're gonna have to process to every single week or every other week, go through all of your products and all of your competitor products and no, alright, is my competitor ranking for any new keywords that I didn't know? So I can put it in my listing. So how would you like a way to just put time back in your hands? I mean, time is money, right, so that you know this could take hours and hours a month, but instead of that, let Helium 10 do the work for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How can you automate keyword harvesting from your competitor's keywords? Well, it actually goes back to your dashboard, all right. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go back to just your regular dashboard, okay, and you're going to hit insight settings on the very bottom left of the screen insight settings all right. Once you do that, you are going to find the keyword insight settings and then you are going to hit four insight types and you are going to select customize under keyword suggestions based on my competitors, all right. So hopefully you've set your competitors, and if you haven't set your competitors on your Insights Dashboard, you know there's videos that we have on our dashboard on how to do that but you want to put your top five competitors for all of your products and these are the ones that you probably are running Cerebra off of. Once you've got that done, like I said, go to your insights types, hit under customize under keyword suggestions based on my competitors, and what you're going to do here is you're going to enter exactly whatever you like to do inside of Cerebro. You're basically automating your Cerebro process.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So maybe you said, hey, I want to know any keyword where the search volume is at least 400 and my rank is like maybe I'm not ranking at all, so I'm going to put zero and zero, but at least one of my competitors is ranking in the top 20 positions. All right, that's it. You just fill it out just like you would on Cerebro. So now, any time that one of my competitors for any one of my products right, is getting sales from a new keyword that I'm not ranked for now, I'm going to get actually an insight on it or a notification right here and it'll tell me hey, your competitors rank for these new keywords. Would you like to start tracking it? Would you like to start putting it in your listing?

 

Bradley Sutton:

This is like super, super cool guys, next level. If you don't have access to it, you're going to need the diamond plan in order to access this. But I mean talk about putting money and time back in your hands. I mean this saves hours and hours of work. You now don't have to even run Cerebro almost ever again on your products, unless you want to do some advanced filtering, but you can now get those keywords delivered to you in a message saying hey, your competitor is getting sales from these keywords. Do you want to put it into your listing? So, guys, if you want to start automating it, make sure to set that up on your Insights Dashboard.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, everyone, thank you so much for staying at this point. I do want to leave you with something that I think will be really helpful going into this next year, and that is our 2024 daily habits seller checklist. Now, I actually helped to put this together, and it's daily habits that are going to help you to stay on track, to monitor things that are really important for your business, things like your sessions and your page views and all the kind of metrics that you need to make sure that you're staying on top of your account. There's a ton of different things in this checklist that are going to help give you really good habits to help you to continue to grow in 2024. So I hope that you all check it out.

 

Carrie Miller:

It's really just an easy, free, clickable download. You can actually check these things off digitally, so you don't even have to download and print this thing out. You can do it all on your computer, so we will have the link ready for you in down below in the description so that you can check out this Daily Habits checklist, and I think you all are going to love it. So go ahead and check it out and we will see you all again next week and we'll see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.

#517- Amazon Seller Success Stories from Germany & Latin America

What happens when you blend the minds of Adriana Rangel and Marcus Mokros, hosts of the popular Serious Sellers Podcast Spanish and German shows, with the world of Amazon and its ever-evolving marketplace? As it turns out, a captivating concoction of strategies, trends, and real-life success stories. From the transition from UPC codes to QR codes to new monthly networking calls for Spanish and German-speaking audiences to an imminent event in Germany - we dissect it all with our esteemed guests. We talk about special highlights featuring their recent guests.

Buckle up as we take a ride through the ups and downs of outdoor sports sales on Amazon with two seasoned sellers. One recounts their thrilling journey from a booming 2020 to a challenging 2021, all leading to a triumphant comeback in 2023. Hear their plans for product expansion and driving website traffic, and learn from their experiences. From across the pond, our European seller shares his wisdom on improving product images, revealing two crucial photography tips. We also touch on the advent of a novel 3D rendering service, eliminating the need for physical product delivery to a photography studio. All this while emphasizing the critical role technology plays in growing an Amazon business.

Did you ever wonder how selling on Amazon varies across different European countries? We've got you covered as we compare and contrast Amazon sales in the top five European countries: the UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain. We navigate through the VAT-related intricacies in these nations and how Amazon aids in VAT declarations. Find inspiration in the story of a successful Spanish seller who has grown her Amazon business with a unique approach - collaborating with artisans in Spain and Mexico through Amazon Handmade. We also chat about avoiding burnout while scaling up your Amazon business, ensuring a healthy work-life balance. Wrapping up the episode, we shine the spotlight on two entrepreneurs who’ve built flourishing podcast communities and Amazon businesses. This journey is filled with challenges, triumphs, plans for the future, and valuable advice for budding entrepreneurs. So tune in for an episode filled with information, inspiration, and innovation.

 

In episode 517 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Adriana, and Marcus discuss:

• 00:00 - Tips and Strategies From SSP Spanish and German Hosts
• 01:19 - Celebrating Podcast Milestones and New Networking Calls
• 06:33 - Insights From Amazon 
• 08:28 - Trends in Outdoor Sports Sales
• 14:42 - Using AI Tools for Content Creation
• 18:19 - Build Brand With Technology and VA's 
• 20:50 - VAT and Selling Strategies on Amazon
• 24:11 - Artisan Networks in Spain and Mexico 
• 29:19 - Uniqueness and Innovation in Saturated Niches
• 31:50 - Tips for Balancing Work and Relaxation
• 36:06 - Amazon's AI Strategy for Product Listings
• 37:55 - Celebrating Podcast and Amazon Success

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got the host of our Spanish and German podcast back and they've got lots of tips and strategies from themselves and their guests on a wide variety of topics, such as Amazon, image creation, KDP, amazon handmade European marketplaces and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hey guys. Heads up, Kevin King is the new host of the AM/PM Podcast, so if you love Amazon strategy, make sure to subscribe to it. Whatever you're listening to this podcast on, take a listen to AM slash PM podcast just by searching for it on that platform. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we've got a couple of our host from different parts of the world here today. We've got Adriana from Mexico and Marcus, who is in Europe right now. Welcome back to the show, guys.

 

Adriana:

Hi Bradley, thank you for having us.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It’s really great to have you both here. This is now. We just celebrated two full years of Serious Sellers Podcast and Espanol Serious Sellers Podcast of Deutsch, and the numbers have been going up, you know, record months this year. It's really great to see what you guys have created just from zero, like literally zero, and now you've got podcasts that are listened to by thousands of people out there. We have YouTube now, you know, for the podcast. So, guys, make sure, if you speak German or Spanish, you need to be listening to Serious Sellers Podcast and Espanol or Alph Deutsch. You can search for either of that on whatever you're listening to this on, even on YouTube now. Now we're doing full videos so you can get kind of like a better vibe of it as well. So guys, this is this is really cool. And just one more thing that's new We'll go ahead and promote it right now is that you guys are now hosting in Spanish and German like monthly networking calls, zoom calls, for Spanish and German speaking community. So, Adriana, tell us about yours like, like when we just had the first one on December 6, but is it always like on the 6th, or is it going to be like the second Tuesday of each month, or how is yours going to work and how can people sign up for it?

 

Adriana:

Yes, of course we're meeting the first Wednesday of every month, so I'm not sure what that is for January, but of course that's going to change for February as well. So basically, the first Wednesday of every month at 6pm, Mexico City time and people can sign up. They just need to visit our link, h10.me/llamadaconadriana and that's it. You can, and that way you will get the reminders and the link to join us in a live call networking call every Wednesday.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right Now, Marcus, you too are just had your first ever German call in December, but starting in January. When is it going to be? And also, what is the link for it?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, we want to keep it simple. It's the first Monday of the month, 12 o'clock, and the link is h10.me/elite-de.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, h10.me/elite-de for German speakers. And when you say 12pm, that's 12pm Germany time, 12pm German time. Correct, speaking of Germany. Guys, I'm going to be in Germany. I'm not sure if anybody out there is going to be in in town, but I'm going to be out there on January 27th in Berlin. I'm going to be speaking at an event and also I will be hosting an elite workshop. So if you guys are interested in going for the event I'm speaking at h10.me/germany. So h10. h10.me/germany. All right, enough of the kind of like logistics here. I think, hopefully, if you're a Spanish or German speaking person, you got enough information there to take advantage of these. Everything we just mentioned is free resources for the community. But you know, you guys, let's start off with. What I like to do is because I don't. You know, I obviously can't speak German, so I can't listen to the episodes and understand what's going on. So I'm going to first start with you, marcus. What are some notable guests you've had in the year that really had like some really cool strategies or really cool story that you can relate to us?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, really some really awesome guests and it's hard to make any kind of selection. But one recent one was from GS1, the company who is doing the UPC codes, and the employee. He told me that they are preparing a big change. They want to go in the next couple of next years from barcodes to QR codes and they call it as a 3D code, and that will be more than just a number to identify your product. That will have like access for you to, for marketing, for example, the customer. Obviously, obviously the shop can scan the QR code, see the price, but the customer can scan it as well and you can put your promotions in it or, for example, like giveaways, anything, and he says it will even support promotions day by day. You can have one promotion set on a Monday, something different on a weekend, or like if there's like a bad batch should produced, you can add it into that QR code and the cashier will know I shouldn't sell that. So there will be a lot of functions and features coming and I mean that's where that will be a big task. They will have to change all systems in all shops worldwide. That will be something very interesting for marketing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Huh, interesting, yeah, I mean because you know the traditional barcodes is kind of like what the world's been used to for so long, but the move to QR and having extra information, that'll definitely be interesting. Alright, going to Adriana now, the first kind of story that comes from your mind, or Stragia, or something that's one of your guests in the last year talked about.

 

Adriana:

Yeah, well, one of the highlights is that we had Amazon join us on a call or on an episode for the podcast, maybe a couple of weeks ago, maybe two or three weeks ago and that was great because we had the opportunity to ask them stuff such as you know, what's up with seller support, how can we best go about getting an issue fixed and, let's say, something happens to your listing, your listing is down, or an FBA shipment, or you know, these things we deal with as a sellers on a weekly basis, right, and so that was a big one. I was very excited to have them on a call because, you know, it's our opportunity to get answers right, instead of, you know, searching in forums or asking other people. It came directly from them and they gave us really interesting tips for how to go about certain issues and also they shared with us really interesting well insights, of course, but also resources on how we can learn more about the platform, etc. Right, and I think that this is very valuable because it comes directly from the how do you say, the horse's mouth? Or, yeah, I guess, directly from Amazon. So that was a lot of fun. That was two weeks ago and, as I said, for me, the main takeaway that I got from them was basically how to work the seller support system to get them to answer and fix our issue, as opposed to getting you know, like the template response that we sometimes get when they don't understand. What is it that we need help with?

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm curious how are your own Amazon businesses going? Like, are you, do you think you're going to be up this year than before, or how things been going for you?

 

Adriana:

So for me, 2023 has been a good year, actually compared to 2022. 2022 was weird. I sell in the outdoors sports category, so 2020 was amazing because, of course, at least the second half of 2020, because, of course, everyone wants to be out of the house and in some place. You know that was outdoors, not indoors at a restaurant or at a mall. So it was. It was a great year sales wise, 2021 as well. 2022. It had, yeah, I experienced a deep, I would say, because everyone was, you know, out and back in the clubs and the restaurants and the concerts and all of that. So people just forgot about outdoor sports. And then 2023 came back strong. Of course, I did focus a lot on my ranking and, yeah, basically, like optimizing my listing and all of that, my images especially. I was like you know what, like if I up my conversion rate, then everything else will fall into place in a way, you know, like my ads and all of that. I do my own PPC, but I'm like you know what, as long as the conversion goes up, then I can send as much traffic as I want via ads and it should convert right, Like it should turn into sales. So 2023 was great and I'm hoping for a good 2024. I want to expand my product line and I also want to work on getting more traffic to my website and, yeah, basically growing that channel too.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now going back to Marcus, what about for your Amazon businesses, your communities? What's some trends that you've seen this year like, especially since your community and you are mainly selling in Europe? Like are things in? Is there inflation in Europe? Is things getting harder? Is competition getting more? What's going on in the European Amazon market?

 

Marcus:

It's an interesting question because, like over the years, I always got that kind of question is it still worth it? Should you still start Amazon? But that somehow that dried out. Everybody knows that Amazon is big and I mean like yeah, like the whole world is in a tough time, I guess, right now. But as I see it, like Amazon sellers, they are doing good, they're doing well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

On the strategy side. You know like one of your specialties and you have people in your community who are specialists about this is like photography and things like that what do you see as kind of like working? Now, what's some tips you can give the audience about, like how they can really make sure their image deck and or videos are really better than the competition?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, actually I have two photography related tips and first one is from JP. He was a guest in the podcast. He's quite young guy but like living the dream, traveling to through Bali, Thailand and doing Amazon FBA. He's like selling a lot and he also started a photography business. But he has a totally different approach. He doesn't need your product. You're providing photos from your smartphone. You get a tutorial. You have to send him six photos from every site and here's a team who does a 3D rendering of that product and, um, that way he's at a price point that's just a fraction that you expect for a product photography. And, yeah, his team will do a 3D model of your product that looks like totally photo realistic and they will put it into a lifestyle photos, put it into Infographics and send you the whole products as a product shots that you expect, but without touching your products. And I mean one.

 

Marcus:

One thing is interest. It's interesting for people who sell, who just start out, or sell products that have like two thousand five thousand dollars of revenue, but also people who don't have time, because imagine your product is being produced in China right now and you don't have a master sample right now and as soon as the first product is finished in China, you can ask your manufacturer Do these photos for me with your smartphone, send it over. He does your product shots and the moment your delivery arrives in your local warehouse, you already have your listing completed. By the way, that website is JPD Dash advertising dot com.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And yeah, that's what I think I remember. You know, I again I remember. I don't, you know, I don't speak German, but I remember that episode because I look at the videos just just like see how they look. And he looked like a, like, a Like, almost like a, like a tick tock celebrity or something like crazy, crazy hair right, yeah, okay there. There we go cool. So that, yeah, that's interesting because Just recently, amazon announced that there's no longer going to be the three hundred and sixty degree Images that have been for a while. Like, if you look at the project X coffin shelf, it has it like we didn't we didn't put it there, amazon just did it themselves. It's being replaced with a 3D image that I think you can you can still like, turn around and then they were saying that all they need they're making some kind of app where you can actually take the images with your phone, and then the Amazon app, I'm assuming, or something, yeah, and then submit it. So that's interesting. You know Concept, because you know, like, I'm still using, like, traditional photography studios and that's. You know, logistically, you know you have to send the product there and then they you know they have to shoot it. So have you seen images that? Or have you seen listings that actually came from this model where they just take the pictures and they do it 3D and it looks realistic, or what's your experience with looking at?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, I mean, I saw it on his listings he sells thirty thousand units a month, and he's just using his service, of course. How many units thirty thousand a month is selling? Europe, US, Japan?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, it's quite, quite busy cool all right, so that's a good one. Let's go back to a either a strategy or some kind of cool story from your experience.

 

Adriana:

Yes, going back to technology, per per Marcus comments I feel like many people, many sellers, that want to Be able to grow without having to invest all of their money into, you know, launching a ton of SK use or Paying people to to write blog posts for them or kindle books for them, etc. I am seeing how many people that come on the podcast. They say how they Work with either either they do and themselves, basically they they use to create content. They are using this To, such as me, journey, etc. Ai tools basically to help them create content, to help them generate user generating content, etc. Right, and so I chatted with Casspin. She was episode 90, actually episode 100 a couple weeks ago and she was telling me how she will.

 

Adriana:

First of all, the way she Gets ideas on how to expand her product line. She goes to her competitors stores and she's like, okay, let me see what else they're selling, right, and they some. And she sometimes finds ideas that way for complimentary or supplementary products to grow her product line and she says that it's actually very easy to launch this new SK use because, of course, you already has the Relationship with the manufacturer and it's a matter of basically just sending other products that can be, that can actually, you know, sell on their own or become kids, right, or become a brand new SK you and she was telling me how she even launches act With every SK you that she, or with every main product that she launches on their her brand. And so, of course, she, she can do this very easily because she can either get a BA to write it for her that that content for the Kindle book, or she can do it be a chat GPT, which I think it's like you know, this is something we couldn't do maybe a year ago, right, and that way, she, of course, she adds a thank you card inside of the store and then you know, for them to get the free Kindle book, because it's, I feel like people see a Kindle book Like a more valuable, I would say, gift as opposed, as you know, like just like a regular, regular PDF. And so you know she tells them that they will, that she will give them that Kindle book, access to the Kindle book, for free.

 

Adriana:

And then she gets that email and then, of course, through email marketing, basically she sends a coupon For, you know, 10% off, 20% off, so they shop the product via her Shopify page, basically right, and that's how she starts creating her email list. And then, of course, she has when, when people visit her site, her Shopify site, they see that she has, you know, six or eight SK use, right, and so people, I feel like six or eight SK use, it's a good enough quantity to you know, for people to see like, oh, you know, this is a legit brand, right, like this is not a brand that you know, only has one product and that's it. And she says that it's like a fairly easy and it doesn't exhaust her, basically her resources to launch up, you know, like a complete brand off of one product. Really, you know she finds the main product and then she gets ideas on what else to add, what other SK use to add and, of course, grow her Shopify brand.

 

Adriana:

Get that images from either me, journey or, you know, get different variations of the content, charge EPT for the, for the text, for the Kindle, or, if you want to, I mean you can create the first draft with charge EPT and then have a VA. Basically, look, you know, do some editing on on on her part, and that's about it, and I was like, okay, I mean that sounds like like something we can all do. Even I feel like when I have some guests in the podcast, I tried to find Useful information for sellers that are starting out and that maybe they have a full time job right and they don't have, you know, eight or 10 hours a day to put into this business. Or, and maybe they don't have a ton of you know money to put into the business. So, finding ways to basically leverage technology and leverage you know help from VA's etc. To to build a brand and, you know, have a brand in a matter of maybe six months.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, she doing this in English or Spanish English, in the US market English, okay, all right, cool, marcus in. Let me give you a couple scenarios here. Talking about Amazon Europe, under what scenario would you suggest somebody in or outside of Europe to, or would you suggest that they only launch in one marketplace to start like, hey, you know, go ahead and start in UK, or go ahead and start in Germany? Or would you always recommend you know, you should go ahead and take advantage of the Amazon Europe network and at least start in a few marketplaces? Is there a scenario where you would suggest one or the other, or it's all one or all the other?

 

Marcus:

I mean, like it's up to you If you're from the US, you could start in UK and you already can reuse your listing, your PPC campaigns, because it's the same language. Germany is the biggest market. That would be also a great test if your product works in Europe and if it works in Germany, you could go to the smaller markets. I mean, france is still a quite big, italy and Spain as well, and then it gets a lot smaller. But yeah, that could be a good strategy to start in one of the bigger countries to test your product and then go all Europe.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay Now, as far as those smaller ones go, like are there any that you think is going to one day become, you know, better than the others? Because I think the core five is the UK, germany, Italy, france and Spain, and then like there's a big gap, you know, between all of the new ones Like I forgot, like Netherlands and Poland and a bunch of others. Like are there any of those lower ones that you think are better than the other? Or they're all kind of just like equally low?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, I mean, it's a question of the population and I guess, like the Scandinavian countries are also very interesting. But yeah, you already named the top countries for the moment.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So now I'm just curious about like VAT and things like that. So let you know, there's obviously not an Amazon in every country, so I'm assuming that, or you correct me if I'm wrong, but if I'm living in Austria, am I ordering from Amazon Germany? Or what website am I using if I'm just living in that country trying to buy something?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, actually, austria shares the website with Germany. You order from the German website.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then. So in that case, like I know, like with for VAT, do I have to have VAT in every country? I'm selling things in from day one, or it's only until I hit, like a certain kind or amount of revenue in that country. Is it by country or by marketplace? But and what I mean by that is all right, well, there is no marketplace in Austria, so does that mean I never have to have a VAT for Austria? Or or how even does this work, because I've never sold it?

 

Marcus:

over. That's a good question, and that's where it gets a bit complicated. So Austria shares the website with Germany, but there are warehouses in Austria and as soon as you got your products in the warehouse in that country, then you have to register for a VAT number in every single country that you have your products in and regardless how much you sell. Yes, and Amazon has has has a program for that, where they help you with that VAT declarations.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Back to Adriana another story or strategy that you can share with us.

 

Adriana:

I interviewed Noemi from Spain I know there's a big, big community in in Spain that basically they, they do Amazon full time and she was telling me how actually she works with another two partners I have one of her partners here at the podcast too and she was telling me how she is growing her Amazon business through Amazon handmade. And I was like, oh interesting, because I mean, yeah, I mean I guess we usually we focus on, you know the regular Amazon program to launch you know products. And she was telling me how she works with people, people that artisans I wait, yeah, that's the correct term, right, artisans, is that a term in English?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I mean, that's English, but it's too fancy for my language. But I know what that means.

 

Adriana:

Yes, she basically so. She likes doing, you know, handmade stuff for herself too. But she started basically connecting with artisans in Spain, apparently and I didn't know this I mean, I've traveled to Spain for, for vacations, but I haven't, you know, spent much time there. But she was telling me that there's a big, big network of artisans in Spain and of course, as she was saying this, I was like, oh my God, I mean I'm from Mexico and of course, there are a ton of artisans here in Mexico, like a ton, ton, ton, especially cities such as, like, of course, Mexico City, Guadalajara, etc. And she was telling me how she has scaled this, because that thing I guess the first thing that comes to mind to us Amazon sellers were like, yeah, but how are we going to scale this, this business? And she's managing I mean she's, she's managing to scale her business because she, of course she doesn't do or like work on this product herself, of course, right, Like she has a network of artisans.

 

Adriana:

And I was, I was thinking, as she was telling this to me, I was like yeah, that's true. I mean I see, when I travel to the US, how much more expensive, or like highly priced, these products that we manufacture in Mexico are selling in the US, right? Only because they're like unique and they are and they are just like more attractive than you know like the regular products. And I was like, oh, wow, this is interesting. Like I guess I always knew that there was that option over there, but I just didn't see how we could scale that. But it makes sense. I mean, if you just work with artisans and you already know, you know like you start and of course one artisan connects you with another artisan and that's the way it goes and she's I mean, she sells a lot of, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of units of different SKUs and you know the price point.

 

Adriana:

That's at least where my mind went right. I was like you have no competition really, because if it's something very unique, then of course you can play with your pricing strategies, but usually you won't be concerned with you know someone else, that competitor, lowering their prices or you know going 30% off. You know of the sales price, etc. So I was like that's interesting. I mean, even you don't have to be selling a ton of units a day to be making good money, because if you have 40% margins or 50% margins or even more, because I've seen in, you know in the US at the retail shops how they sell Mexican or yeah, artisan you know this type of products and they sell and I'm like what the hell like, do people buy these products at this price? And I know how much they go for in Mexico. So I was like, oh, this is very interesting. And so I thought that was a very interesting. I think that was episode 98 with Noemi. She's based in Spain and yeah, I mean, Spain has a big next to us.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Is she doing all of this in Spain, or is she doing this in Amazon USA?

 

Adriana:

No, amazon. No, she's doing it in Spain and I think she expanded already to Europe. Basically, you know how they have that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I didn't even know there was Amazon, handmade in Europe, in Spain and other. Okay, interesting yeah. It's like oh interesting because definitely a way to make it the key, that of that you mentioned, there is the no competition. You know, like, like. This is a very unique product. It's not a cookie cutter, you know, by definition. So I like that Back to Marcus. One last story or strategy from you.

 

Marcus:

Yeah. One last story that's from Michael. He doesn't sell on Amazon. He runs an Amazon agency called me to you, but he's like the Amazon detective. He's every day on the website looking what is Amazon testing right now? What, what did they change right now? What do other sellers miss? And he's like he comes with the craziest things. And one thing he told me, like would you start to sell a drinking bottle on Amazon? I mean that's like super competitive, me probably not, yeah, and I mean everything is the same. You just fill water in it and that's it. So it's difficult to stand out and there's a company they found a way to differentiate themselves. It's called Arup and they have a small cartridge on top and you can get it in all kinds of flavor, like sherry, melon, whatever. And when you drink your water you still drink 100% water, but you breathe the sherry flavor. So your mind is drinking like sherry juice, but you're still drinking 100% water. But the thing is he pointed out that they just sell the bottle and the cartridges. But if you have, like, all your different flavors and you want to change them during the week, what do you do with your cartridges? So you need like airtight, sealed box for it and people are searching for that. You can see it in Cerebro but they don't sell it. They just concentrate on their bottle. So every Amazon seller should find like an imagine like Apple are selling just their iPhone and you can sell chargers and cases, like I bet there's like in every niche there's something, yeah, and it's a big innovation and the company is just focusing on the product. So, yeah, that was a really awesome takeaway to look for.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Two things there. Number one is never think that a niche is 100% saturated, because there's always, like, a fresh idea you could bring. And then number two you don't always have to be the one that has that idea, you know, let somebody else come up with the idea. But then how can you take advantage of that? Like, is there a unique storage or a unique accessory that's needed?

 

Marcus:

Maybe even a coffin shelf to store your cartridges.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hey, there you go. Hey, coffin shelf to store your water bottle cartridges. I'll get on that Okay An episode. I'll give you guys, or everybody here, a preview of a coming episode. I'm launching some new project X products and one of them is a bat shaped bathroom mat or rug and that potentially might make a coffin one as well. But you know, the possibilities are endless and that's one of the ways that you could also get into saturated niche is take a saturated niche like bath mats you know like they're going for like $10, you know who knows how they're even making margin on it. But then do you bring in a unique material like make a bamboo one, or make a coffin shaped one, or a bat shaped one for like spooky. So you can almost take any niche on Amazon that's saturated and just come in with a unique idea or unique design or unique material and now all of a sudden it's not saturated because you're the only one who has that. All right. So I'm going to ask for your final strategies, your 30 second or 60 second tips. How can they find you guys on the interwebs? They know how to find your, your, your Helium 10 podcast, but both of you have, you know, audiences and communities out there. Marcus, how can they find your communities on the internet?

 

Marcus:

You can look on YouTube for Amazon FBA by Marcos and everything else is linked inside the videos.

 

Adriana:

For me, my YouTube channel is Adriana Rangel Vende. Just like that, adriana Rangel Vende, and yeah, in there, there you can find everything else that I have going on, and I have a free like 90 minute like masterclass. I would call it because I go from product research to like keyword research, to what kind of keywords you need to put in your listing, et cetera. So, yeah, I would. For people that maybe need some free resources to kind of like figure out how this works, I would advise you check out that video. Adriana Rangel Vende in YouTube.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, adriana. Like, do you have any last, maybe 30 second tip or parting words of wisdom for the audience out there?

 

Adriana:

Yes, well, you know, one topic that I've seen guests come with and share with us in the podcast has been basically focusing, you know, at the first. You know, when we start our business in Amazon, we usually focus on launching products right, and launching new variations, and doing your PPC and ranking and all of all of these activities that we have to, of course, take care of. But one topic that has been coming up very often in the in our episodes here at the podcast is that we at some point, especially maybe like two years into the business, we need to focus on growing our team, right, because if not, we'll get burnt out at some point, right, like I know that happened to me and now I'm working, I already have a VA and, of course, I already have a designer that helps me, of course, with my you know, my products, my listings and also for my thumbnails for my YouTube channel. Like, he helps me for a ton of things, and I feel like that is the way. You know, that marks a big difference between someone that is making, of course, a few thousand dollars a month in Amazon and, you know, the seller that is doing several dozen thousand dollars in Amazon a month.

 

Adriana:

Right, because you cannot do it all by yourself, and also so you keep your motivation right, because at some point, whatever it is that you are doing repeatedly and that you're doing for 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day, after 18 months or 24 months you're burnt out. As much as I mean you can love it, but still you know your body gives out. So that is something that I would like people to start thinking about. Maybe this is your first year in Amazon and that's fine, but maybe start listening to you know these episodes where people such as Rolando and I know you had Rolando Rosas in the podcast because he speaks English too you know Juan David as well talked about this, rod as well talked about this, and I think it's just like very important to start planning this before it's like, before we're like burnt out and it's too late, right, and that way we get we can scale faster and just like with less effort.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What's your Adriana, what's your hobby or what you do to take your mind off of work? You take off your mind off your Amazon business, to you know. Relax like what do you do for fun.

 

Adriana:

Yeah, well, before I got into this whole Amazon business world, I was in the art business. So I of course like to, you know, business museums and you know, if I can business museums with friends and all that that you know, the better, of course. But I try to yes, to, even if it's like at nighttime, right, like I try to consume content that it's not, or like even listen to podcasts that are not like business related. I basically try to put you know if it's after 8pm, even though, even if there's like this really good podcast episode, I'll watch it tomorrow at 6pm or whatever when I take a break from work. But I try to put like hard limits because I just do it. I mean, I just do it for the business, right, like I remember I saw this at the other day that says that says something about your performance of tomorrow basically depends on your recovery tonight. Right, you know something in that frame of words and so I think it's just very important because we talk about, we go on YouTube and we saw, we see everything about. Yeah, you know you can scale to blah, blah, blah and you can be making all this money, but you have to be feeling okay, right, you know, your body has to be healthy and your mind has to be healthy as well. So that is something to we cannot ignore, that, even if that doesn't sound like you know, like the sexy tip, I feel like that's as important, or even more. To grow a business, scale it to as big as as you want, really.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, I like killing two birds with one stone. So my advice to you if you wanted to do that, go to the museum while listening to the podcast in your headphones, and then now you can kill two birds with one stone, all right. So, marcus, what about you? One last 30 or 60 seconds strategy or tip for our audience.

 

Marcus:

Yeah, one tip I learned that will make a lot of changes. Amazon recently announced that they will look for title images that are not meeting the terms of service and they will use AI to change that. They will download your image, remove everything that doesn't belong there in their opinion and upload it again, and that is something you don't want. You don't want an AI to touch your title image. Yeah, and Michael from AMZboost, a product photographer, he told me, just use your picture, space number nine. Nobody looks there. Put a title image there that will meet the terms of service and because what Amazon is doing first, they will scan your product photos and check if there is something that is compliant to the terms of service and they will put it to spot number one as your title image. And if they don't find something, they will change it in their terms. So that's an awesome hack.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, I never heard of that one. That's a really good one, All right, cool. And then same question to you also is you know, like me, that sometimes we can get and Adriana, we can get burnt out and if we put too much emphasis on work. So what are your hobbies, what are you doing to take yourself out of work when you need to relax?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, my hobbies are working out. I've got my home gym in the basement and that's also a good place to listen to something. Or I go for a walk at the beach with my yeah EarPods in and listen to a podcast. That's where I get new content.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right, well, guys, thank you so much for joining us. Wish you the most of success. You guys have had already a lot of great success. It's going to be really cool to see the next milestone for you guys, I would say is like hitting that 10,000 downloads per month. I never thought that would ever happen, but the numbers that you guys are doing are getting close to that, so it's probably within the realm of possibility. But I wish you the most of success with your podcast communities and also your Amazon businesses, and we'll see you next year.

 

#516 - Amazon PPC Strategy and Insights Deep Dive

Get ready to immerse yourself in an enlightening discussion and AMA session with Matt, an expert in advanced strategies and Amazon PPC. Join us in this TACoS Tuesday episode, as we answer questions about variation listings, auto campaigns, broad campaigns, and ranking. We also take a peek into Matt's impressive background in e-commerce, recounting his experiences with selling textbooks and private-label products. Hear us as we dissect Amazon's latest data tools like Product Opportunity Explorer, Search Query Performance, and Brand Analytics and discuss how these can help sellers optimize their advertising strategies in this highly competitive market.

As we journey deeper into Amazon PPC campaigns, we touch on our “north star metric” of two sales and a click-through rate above 0.2%. Learn about the significance of negative matching and how to identify underperforming keywords using the search query report. We also shed light on the benefits of using software like Pacvue for automation and analytics and how it can save you time and effort. Plus, discover the advantages of day partying and understand the impact of different match types on campaign creation.

 

Lastly, listen in as we dissect the topic of Amazon PPC and how to leverage it to drive sales and boost profits. We share the calculation for adjusting bids based on target ACoS and emphasize the importance of not solely focusing on ACoS as a metric. We also touch on the recent announcement of Sponsored TV and its potential for both large and small brands. Tune in as we demystify the misconception that PPC must always result in immediate profit and share strategies for effectively utilizing broad keywords despite their increasing cost. This episode is packed with practical advice, insightful discussions, and cutting-edge strategies to help you win in the world of Amazon selling.

 

In episode 516 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Matt discuss:

• 00:00 - Expert Matt Altman Discusses His Amazon PPC Strategies
• 07:59 - Keyword Promotion, Sales Metrics, and Negative Matching
• 11:59 - Maximizing Advertising Efficiency With Pacvue
• 15:44 - Bid Adjustment and Amazon Sponsored TV for Sellers
• 23:28 - Amazon PPC Strategy and Optimization
• 28:21 - Analyze Ad Performance With Feature Pack
• 32:25 - Using Keywords for Effective Campaigns
• 35:27 - Boost Search Ranking With Brand Name
• 37:29 - Amazon Variations and Outside Traffic Strategy
• 43:08 - Invitation for January Case Study

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got one of the world's foremost knowledge experts on Amazon Advanced Strategy and PPC Matt back on the show and he's going to be answering all of your questions live, as well as answering a lot of my advanced questions on things like variation listings, auto campaigns, broad campaigns, ranking and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce and other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like New Egg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me forward slash blog.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our tacos Tuesday PPC show of the week or of the month, I should say where we go in-depth into anything and everything Amazon advertising with special guests that we have, and this week or this month we're going to have a special guest. We're going to invite him up. We're having some technical difficulty. I'm here at the Helium 10 office actually here in Irvine, California, today. So I don't have my regular setup here, but wanted to make sure everybody's having a great Q4. So far, all right. Let's go ahead and bring up our guest of the month, and it is Matt from Clear Ads. Matt, how's it going?

Matt:

Good, how are you doing, Bradley?

Bradley Sutton:

Doing awesome, doing awesome. Where are you actually watching us from? Where are you located?

Matt:

So currently in London. So we're here in London for the next few months, but we moved to Spain about six months ago.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, nice, how's that been.

Matt:

We're in Barcelona. It's been great so far Loving it.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Have you been to any FC Barcelona games since you've been out there?

Matt:

We haven't yet now, but it is at the top of my list.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I've been to a couple when Messi was still there. Of course, those are good times. Love Spain Now, just in general. We've had you on the podcast before and you gave us really cool strategies in general. Today we're kind of going to be focused on PPC. That's like one of your specialties, but can you talk a little bit about your background and how you came into that Amazon space, if maybe somebody might be listening to you for the first time?

Matt:

Yeah, definitely so. Been in the space since around 2011, started in college actually selling textbooks and retail arbitrage, so did that for about three to four years. Kind of scaled up my bankroll to where I could get into private label and jumped at it and honestly launched a bunch of crap. We did really well for a few years until a lot of the manufacturers just started going direct to Amazon and had some pretty bad years. But pivoted, got into supplements and food and that's been for like the last six years.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Now you are known for a lot of like really next level strategies. We've had you before at our elite workshop and things. And so thinking just first of all, I mean it could be about PPC, but just thinking outside of PPC, almost with all this new data that Amazon has come out with in the last couple of years, I mean I think a lot of us were even surprised years ago when Brand Analytics came out. And then nowadays, search career performance and things like that, this is stuff that I would say I don't know about you but me. Like four years ago I would have bet $10,000 that there's no way Amazon would ever tell you exactly how many sales are coming from a non-normalized search and what the click share percentage of top 10 competitors are, and this and that I mean people were paying Amazon employees thousands of dollars for these underground reports that weren't even as robust as what is now available for everybody. So what's your favorite thing? I'm assuming it's search career performance.

Your favorite thing that Amazon has come out with? And then what part of that especially do you think is super powerful that Amazon sellers should be using?

Matt:

Yeah. So I would definitely say search career performance is up there. I would say they haven't changed too much about it in the last like year and a half, but really, where we've been getting a lot of knowledge and data from is Product Opportunity Explorer. I would say like this used to be kind of bland, like years ago. They recently updated it, and the amount of data that they are giving you is insane. I mean, they're telling you exactly if you sell such and such supplement. These are the 15 keywords that matter. Here's the trends on that, here's the seasonality. Like every data point that you really need is there, and that's what you need to win on, I would say. The other big one, though, is the new reports in the brand analytics, where it's giving you greater details into your customer segments. So, like we sell and consumables, and we've always kind of taken a strategy on ads that's hey, like, even if our cost is 100%, what is our cost per net new customer? And we were trying to manually calculate that previously, and now they're telling you specifically by week, how many returning customers, how many net new customers you have. So it's really helped us dial in the ads for that specific strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, like. One thing I always liked about Product Opportunity Explorer even when it was kind of bland, as you said was seeing how many, for example, how many products it took to make up or in the old days, 80% of the sales for the entire niche. Now they kind of like, without even announcing it, they change it to 90%. But then it'll be interesting to see that you know some, you know quote, unquote markets or niches, what they call it you know, would have like 200 products, means like it's kind of like wide open, it takes 200 products just to make up 80 or 90% of the sales. And now you know there might be some where it's like only 40 or 10, you know like or like wow, there's 10 people dominating this. Now how would you personally use that information? Like is one or the other like better than the other?

Matt:

Yeah, so the great thing about Product Opportunity Explorer is it really shows you what keywords are driving the sales for those. So more than how many products are there we're looking at, are there branded terms that are in the Product Opportunity Explorer.  So like an example that we were looking at this past week was for a floor cleaning product and we saw that of the 20 top like 50 keywords, bona was one of the main sales driving keywords. Like, even if there weren't that many products in that category, we aren't going to be able to overcome that branded search deficit. So it's just not something that we would go into Um, but we definitely prefer to go into categories where those sales are spread across more Um. The main reason for that is we really like to do kind of um I would call it kind of like tailgating. We like to kind of stay behind everyone and we'll pull like 10% of the sales from this person, from this person, and you can kind of pick off keywords from certain top products and they may not notice that you're coming up and then you can really use that to catapult yourself to the top of the category before the rest of the products in the category realized what's happening.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, interesting, all right Now. Just, you know switching gears and going, you know kind of like PBC. Let let's do like some kind of beginner question, then let's do some some, some, some advanced things. But just, I always ask a lot of the, the the tacos Tuesday guest, about their strategy on this, because I think this is applicable almost to any level of seller. But what's your, your kind of like rule set as far as uh, when you promote keywords from like an auto or broad to to an exact, and also when you negative match on the promotion side, like, in other words, like are, are you looking for at least you know just one sale, or does it have to be two or three, like in the auto and then, and then, and then you, you put it in um or what. What's your criteria for for moving something from an auto to a exact?

Matt:

Yeah, so short answer. We're usually looking for two sales and a click through rate above like 0.2% Um. That's kind of like our North Star metric Um, but it really depends on the strategy of that campaign. Um, like, if we're wanting to run a lot of just awareness, we're going after ones where we may not even have sales at all but we have a high click through rate because it's a discovery keyword, that someone's kind of navigating that category with Um. So it varies, but typically it's two orders and above like a 0.2% click through. Okay, Awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

On the flip side, when are you negative? Uh matching, like uh, is it a certain number of clicks? Uh, is it a certain number of clicks that, uh, you have to have? Is it spend that you're looking at without a sale? Um, and then the follow-up question to that is are there scenarios where you're like not just automatically negative matching but you're like, oh shoot, this is like an important keyword. I got to figure out why in the heck I'm not converting on it before I go and just blindly negative matches. So it's kind of like a two prong question there.

Matt:

Yeah, Um, so this is, this is where really the search query report kind of data comes into play. Um, we're looking at, hey, like for competitors, um, like, is this performing? Kind of what's happening? Why aren't we getting sales? Um, we'll go ahead and test, possibly changing out our titles, our images, um morph towards those keywords and seeing if we can produce some sales through that. Um, but again it kind of goes back to, like, you know, the, the, the, the sort of focus that we used over a year and a half. Back to like, what is the source of that keyword? Is it really a converging keyword? Is it a discovery keyword? Like, we have a few keywords that we spend thousands of dollars on a month on my own brands, where we maybe get one or two sales Like it's out of loss, but we know it's a keyword that someone that's looking for a type of product uses is like their first term when they're trying to figure out which one to buy. And we just want to make sure that we're always top of mind really hard to like, distinguish that out and see that you were getting benefits from that. But now we're able to go a little bit deeper in that funnel and see that like yes, this is actually driving sales further down the funnel for us.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, cool. Now on the more advanced side, like you know, as I just threw on my, my pack view, my pack view jacket here, what, what are you? You know, like I know you've been using pack view for a while, but you know somebody out there my in general not understand, like you know, some of these services. You know pack view is not like oh yeah, you know, $49 a month subscription, but no, it's, it's, it's, you know costs, costs some money to you. So at what point does does it make sense for somebody to to like say you know what, I'm overdoing these Excel spreadsheets, I need to use a software. And then what? What makes a software suite like Pacvue so valuable? Like, how to you know? Cause you're not going to be paying money for something for you or your business or your clients that doesn't give you good ROI. So why is it worth it for you?

Matt:

Yeah, yeah. So we've been using Pacvue for gosh almost like seven years now. I think we were one of the first like agencies at my prior agency to come onto the platform and we love it. Honestly, wouldn't go anywhere else. So first thing I did when we came to Clare ads, we actually started switching all the accounts over to Pacvue. But in reality I would say it's usable for every level of seller. But we've had a lot of accounts come to us that may be using it but they don't know how to actually use Pacvue to its full advantages. They aren't taking advantage of all of the automations and analytics that are on the back end there. But I would say, even if you're a smaller seller like in using something that, like Bradley said, is $49 to $59, like even though Pacvue is gonna cost more, you're going to get so much more out of it. It will make your ads been more efficient. You will see better results as a whole. Like make the switch now, because it's a lot easier to switch when you're starting out and you have very few campaigns. Like migrating accounts over that have 400 campaigns already. Like it starts to get hard and you've got to really rework a lot of that. So I believe in doing it right from day one, and you're gonna save yourself a lot of work down the line.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one of the things Pacvue does that probably eventually is gonna come to regular sellers might have some visibility in this aspect, but it's kind of like the ability to do like day partying and things. So is that something that you guys actually do Like? Do you use that service of turning off ads or changing budgets at certain times of the day and if you are, what's your criteria when you're looking at that?

Matt:

Yeah, so we do use that on every single account. We use it in one of two ways. One is we're manually adjusting it based on, like our peak sales hours that we know of, if it's a high selling account. But on other accounts, Pacvue actually has an awesome feature where you can set up a day partying scheduler based on conversion rates, click through rates, number of orders by hour, and it will dynamically update that based on a trailing two week, three week period, whatever you set it to. So Pacvue really does a lot of the thinking for you and eliminates kind of that concern from your mind.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let's see we've got from Dota In Amazon PPC campaign. Should I create one campaign containing an ad group for phrase match exact and broad, or should I create each match in their own campaign or like? So I guess he's saying like maybe he should have different ad groups in one campaign or do you just have like one ad group per match type, per campaign?

Matt:

Yeah, so I'll tell you why we do it a certain way. I would say this is definitely kind of interchangeable depending upon how you want to manage your campaigns, but in order to have full and absolute control you need to have a separate campaign for each of these. A good example of this is we had a client who came to us. They had a lot of mixes within their ad groups during Black Friday, cyber Monday, they upped their bids with top of search modifier and they didn't realize that it would affect their broad targeting terms, that they were spending like $7 on broad terms and just getting placements everywhere and tank the performance. So we always break them out into their own campaigns and then even from there we'll typically segment out, like superhero keywords, into their own single keyword campaigns.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent. Let me see we've got another one here from Kim Kim K. I don't think it's the Kim K. Hey guys, do you have a calculation that you use to determine how much to adjust bids? Longstanding sponsor campaigns with lots of history is the focus target. Acos, thanks to Vets.

Matt:

Yeah, so this is pretty easy. You can put together a pretty simple formula to figure out bids based on your target ACOS. So, off the top of my head and I could be saying this wrong we have it in Excel sheet. But you're really just looking at cost per click times, conversion rates, and then equals your ACOS over that. I would say we typically don't optimize any campaigns towards ACOS. I think it's something that's been brought up a lot across, like the Amazon ecosystem, and it's never really the best metric to look at. We've had a lot of accounts that have come to us where their sales have depleted over the last year, year and a half, and they're running very efficient. Like 20% ACOS. Tacos are like three to 5%, like the account looks healthy but you're undermining the daily velocity per keyword that you can achieve, which ultimately kills your organic ranks, and then you may not see it now or three months from now, but six months from now you're gonna be like what the heck happens and it's really hard to climb yourself back out of that pit.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah makes sense. But just in general, before I go into some more specific ones that I had. You know, we recently had Amazon unbox and there was a number of announcements one of them being sponsored TV, that create a lot of buzz. But the question I think a lot of people have is is, well, that's still something, or maybe only for humongous, you know sellers like first of all, is that true, or is there a path to using sponsored TV for, you know, maybe there's a low seven figure seller, high six figure seller, and then is it kind of only for brand awareness, or do you think that there's? You know the way that they're doing it, sometimes with QR codes, you know, like on Black Friday football game that they had, where there's a direct to purchase link or is it more for brand awareness, do you think?

Matt:

Yeah. So we ran some over Black Friday, cyber Monday, across large and small brands and actually saw decent performance on quite a bit of them. I would say the biggest factor that really drove it was the quality of creative. A lot of our smaller brands didn't have the creative backbone to really fulfill a huge TV push like that, and that's probably the guardrail that smaller brands are going to have trouble getting over. Like you can't take a $200 video off the Fiverr and put it on TV and expect it to do well. So really focusing in on the creative and making it more like a TV commercial definitely helped for us. But we did have some very basic like stop motion slide animated videos with just some text over them and they did pretty well as well. So I would say it's worth trying out. Just make sure you're really narrowing down those audiences that you're targeting, because the CPMs on it are extremely high. But test it, put $20, $30 behind it per day and just really see what you can do. I do think this will kind of be a big lever that larger brands can definitely lean more into to increase that awareness as they tap out other pieces of DSP and Amazon ads. But smaller brands is like it's just as evil, even as a playing field. But the creative does have to be elevated.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. William says should I expect to see profit from PPC? I rarely see profit, however, the volume of sales increases. Where I see profit Maybe he's kind of like talking a little bit of tacos here, or like you know people, I think the narrative nowadays when you hear, when you hear sellers, is oh my goodness, like PPC is so expensive, like I don't even know how I can be profitable. But it's not always trying to just make profit on the exact ad. Right, talk a little bit about that.

Matt:

Yeah. So like one question I always ask sellers that even like potential clients that come to us when they're complaining about profits or tacos or a cost, I'm like, what's your CPA? And honestly, I can count on one hand the number of people that actually knew their CPAs by product that we've talked to. Every other ad channel you look at CPAs, whether you're running on meta, TikTok, whatever you're looking at CPAs, and every time we've run the numbers the CPAs are way cheaper on Amazon than they are on any other channel. What that means is yes, probably there are some categories where you're going to run PPC at a loss, Like on my brain, main brands. We run PPC at a loss because it keeps our velocities up, it keeps our organic rankings up and you'll see those metrics in your tacos. So really, tacos is kind of your guiding light on that, but really setting in stone a target CPA and not adjusting your bids based on a cost or tacos. But as long as you're hitting that target CPA, you're continuing to see growth. That's what we really like to maximize towards.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, thank you for that. William Guarov says hey, amazon PPC is getting costly. What's a strategy to play with broad keywords? And then maybe I can piggyback on that and take a step back. Broad it seemingly has almost changed over the last year or so. I could kind of predict what would come with Broad. I would use Helium 10, magnet, I would do the smart complete and then I could see all the Broad kind of variations. I kind of know what could potentially come up here Now. I might have coffin shelf as a Broad match and then I'll get thrown in like Gothic decor, like not even the same, doesn't even share the same keyword, and so maybe I'm not sure, if that's what he's talking about there, how it might be getting more expensive. And then if, if so, like, like, how do you deal with that?

Matt:

Yeah, so I'll answer this and I'll answer more about kind of what you went into, Bradley, because I think that's a bigger picture that people need to look into in the future of Amazon. But really when we're running Broad, we're running modified Broad campaigns so that we're at least trying to get more exact towards what we wanted. I will say it doesn't always work. Sometimes you still get those keywords way out of left field, but you have a bit more control. But I would focus again really on the search query performance data and the product opportunity. Explorer, like Amazon, is telling you specifically what keywords are being searched and what's being purchased. Broad isn't as useful for us as it used to be like. All that data now is getting piped back to us and using Helium 10, using Pacvue, you can find pretty much every keyword that's going to be a converting keyword. The biggest thing that we've seen Broad actually do for us here recently and I would say for the last six months, is it's allowed us to catch on to like TikTok trends that are basically going viral and it's picking up those keywords quicker than we would be able to pick them up. So that has been a huge opportunity. But there are a lot of other, like TikTok, specific tools that you can use to kind of find those trending things to get them into your ad campaigns.

Matt:

The bigger thing kind of on how Broad has expanded is Amazon, like Google and other search engines, is really kind of shifting towards a semantic search, which is why, like you're coming up for Gothic decor and things like that and you've probably heard other people in the space talking about semantics this has been key in, like Google, seo for the last few years and it's only going to get more and more relevant in Amazon as Amazon starts to switch more towards an AI learning model for their specific search. So a lot of what we've been doing and working on is, for example, typically if you're creating your listing, you'd find your keywords through Helium 10, you'd use Scribbles to craft your listing, make sure you get all your keywords in there, but, like in your example, gothic decor that is a huge semantic keyword that is relevant to your coffin. We would go ahead and put that on the back end or try and figure out how to fit it into the bullet points, because it's just a checkmark that Amazon's looking for now because semantically they're saying you should say something about Gothic with your current product and a lot of products that we've been optimizing towards this on, we've seen success like crazy, probably more than anything else that we've done in the last year and a half.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting, let's see. Guarev has another question here. What would be the ideal ratio performing and non-performing keywords in broad? Not sure if I understand that question fully, but do you know what you might be listening for?

Matt:

Say like in broad you're going to have a lot more non-performing just because of the control factor. Unless you're using a lot of negatives, negative phrases, throughout it, I would say we don't really look at the ratio of performing and non-performing in broad because really where we're caring about performance is on our exact match. We aren't caring as much here. We're using this to seed keywords, so even if they are performing, they aren't staying in broad that long if they are. So typically for us it would be like 90 to 95% are non-performing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, Now switching gears to auto campaigns. What's your strategy as far as, like the close match, loose match substitutes? Do you keep them all in one campaign or do you actually segregate those targets in separate auto campaigns?

Matt:

Yeah, so we actually mix it up. We've seen hit or miss performance on these when we break them out, for whatever reason. Sometimes they work better even with the exact same beds when they're all together. I don't know why that happens, but we typically test both and then whichever one's performing, we pause out the others and let one continue on. We do do a lot of negative matching in our auto campaigns that we're bidding on elsewhere, but we do also always still run a super low bid auto campaign. We negate out brand of terms and run them at like 30 cents per click, and I was just looking at account before I hopped on here Last week one of them got 135 sales for like $22. Like these campaigns still work, I've used them honestly as long as I've been selling on Amazon and we always set them up for all of our products.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, going back to software, software like Pacvue Adtomic. One cool thing that we can do is I could just see a search term, but not just at the campaign level. I could see it in all campaigns. Like, let's say, in an auto campaign, for example, I got a coffin shelf and in that campaign I had 40 clicks and zero sales. And let's say I felt that it wasn't too relevant of a keyword. I'm like, yeah, I don't want to keep spending money on this. Obviously, at 40 clicks I would negative match it. But with the software I can see that, hey, it's getting impressions and clicks in a broad campaign over here, maybe an exact campaign over here, but in those campaigns there's only like maybe five clicks. So, theoretically speaking, if I was just looking at that campaign in isolation, there might not have been enough information to be a negative match. But since you have so many negative or clicks with no sales in one campaign, do you just go ahead and say you know what, across the board, I don't want this keyword showing up in any of these campaigns. Or do you let the number? Do you let it roll? Do you let it ride in those other campaigns?

Matt:

Yeah, so great question. This is actually a feature pack view that we use every single day because you see a lot of variance in this and even like moving keywords over to exact match. But it may be in phrase that have dead like a third of what your exact match one is. Whatever reason, the phrase one is serving like crazy and you're getting sales. The exact match one isn't. So we look at this daily and we're trying to figure out one like why isn't our exact match getting served? Like hey, what's going on here? And adjusting the bids and keeping a close eye on it. But typically if we're seeing performance elsewhere, we'll keep it on, mainly because we don't know exactly where that ad is appearing Like. I mean, we now know like top of search, rest of search, product pages, but we don't really know granular details. This is also something that pack view does really well. When you have your share of voice turned on, you can see exactly where your ads appearing and what placement, what percentage of time. So using pack view or actually I don't know any other tools that do it as deep as pack view does on that We've been able to really narrow it down and figure out like, hey, this one's performing really well and slot four of ad positions. Like we can't get served for this one and slot two or three, and we can readjust our entire strategy for that keyword for position four and actually set up automations in pack view to make sure we're always in sponsored position four.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. Now, speaking of that, how are you keeping at top of search? You know like I'm kind of old school where you know you're more old school than me, but you know like in my days when I first started learning PPC, there was no, you know, top of search modifier and things like that. You just raise and lower the bits and I kind of kept doing that because, like you know, I obviously with helium 10, like I'll turn on the boost and keyword tracker and it's checking 24 times a day, rotating, you know addresses and browsing scenarios. So I kind of like, no, am I showing up in top of search and sponsor or not? And I've just kind of like kept doing that. Now, are you still doing that, or do you use those those? You know like, hey, I'm going to go 200% for top of search or some kind of formula like that.

Matt:

Yeah. So I'll say when the bid modifiers first came out like they were amazing. We could bid like 60 cents with 900% top of search and get crazy conversions and everything was great. Too many people are using them now and it's kind of just a battle of who's going to pay more to get that position. What we've actually switched most accounts over to is actually using pack view organic and paid position bidding. So we'll set up rules to basically increase the bids until we're in position one and that will like set our new base bid if we're going for top of search and then we'll use that and then look at our percentage of serving time through pack view into that and adjust as needed. Like. One nice feature is you can set like I want a 90% top of search share of voice for this keyword and pack view will automatically update your bid without the modifiers, because sometimes using the modifiers can get out of hand quickly and you could spend your whole budget and one day, if the keywords big enough, within a few hours on one of the 50 keywords in your campaign. So we really rely on pack view to figure a lot of that out for us and optimize the perfect position for ads and we've kind of stepped back away from modifiers. The one place we do still use them quite frequently, though, is product page modifiers. We do a lot of product targeting where that's really what we're going after, and it does seem to still work well for us there. Rest of search hasn't been a great modifier for us as of yet. We have better success using set rules and pack view to manage that versus the rest of search modifier.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, cool, I got a fight to bring that into Adtomic. I didn't know that pack view had that Nice Two part question here from Duda how do you use these keywords Electrolyte protein phrase match and then electrolyte protein powder phrase match? My issue is that they are my main keyword but they generate different variations in customer search terms with different variations. With only one click or two, the most Out of those 50 different search terms that get that those main keywords are generated. How do I pick those that convert it? So I'm assuming that he's got two targets here and that maybe he's getting clicks on a whole bunch of long tail versions of this. Perhaps, if I'm deciphering this correctly.

Matt:

Yeah. So it depends on how that campaign is set up. So a typical phrase match campaign for us we would never put those keywords into the same ad group or campaign because electrolyte protein is electrolyte protein powder phrase. If you do have them split out into separate campaigns, if you have different bids there, one's going to serve over the other always. You have no real control in that. So I would say if it were me, I would just do electrolyte protein as a phrase match and get rid of any type of variation possible and use that as my guiding light. If you aren't getting served typically I know that's a high volume category your budgets probably aren't enough within that campaign to keep it serving constantly and you're getting middle of page or bottom of page placements. So that's how it's getting your budget throughout the day. I would test increasing the budget on that campaign and seeing what it scales up to and you'll probably see a bit more even click distribution between those.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, Cool. Sergio has a question here. Hey say, when launching, you tell your friends and family your brand and your product and hey, go buy it. Should I do an exact campaign for the brand name so they don't have to scroll? So first of all, at least it's good that you're like, don't be doing search, find, buy things or something which it sounds like you're not. Otherwise you wouldn't even have this question and hopefully you're telling your friends and family, do not leave your reviews just at all, to make sure that you're not getting in trouble with Amazon. But yeah, if you're trying to get your friends to support your product, I mean I think regardless, if you're trying to get your friends and family to support your product, shouldn't you always target your brand name, or that's only kind of like when you're more of a mature brand, Does that really come into play? What do you think?

Matt:

Yeah, I would say it depends on your brand name. If it's a unique brand name that, like nothing else is really going to come up for, like yeah, I wouldn't run ads. But if it's something that could be construed as something else, I would definitely run some ads to get towards the top. The one thing I would say about this and it's something that we do when we're launching and you're telling friends, family, anyone about it, we leave it kind of bland and just say, hey, this is my brand and it's a protein powder. I would really appreciate if you can buy it. You're not telling them to go search, fine, by keywords. But if you tell them that, hey, it's protein powder, and brand names are probably going to search protein powder, that brand name without you doing anything, Because it's always better, which is why search fine buys work to get a real keyword in there beyond your brand. But even just pumping the brand name does work as well. We've seen it with TikTok. Brand name searches can skyrocket you for every other keyword that you're relevant for.

Bradley Sutton:

William says yeah, this is a universal question, I think, or universal debate, I think. For successful exact keywords, do you recommend making those keywords negative in the broad? Some people teach that although you're converting for a keyword in the exact, do not remove that keyword from broad.

Matt:

Yes, this is debated quite a bit and I'll tell you from our experience it can kind of go either way, like sometimes we'll negate it in broad and then the exact stops performing. Sometimes we'll leave it and the broad performs better. Like it can go either way. I would say it's something that you should definitely test. Amazon ads is still kind of finicky on some of these things. For whatever reason. Older campaigns still tend to work better for us. So if your broad campaigns older than your exact match, it may still continue to outperform for a little bit. But what we do typically do is if we're going to leave it in broad, we lower the bids in broad I'm not specific keyword quite a bit and try and give the exact match as much room to run as it possibly could.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, cool, let's see. Hina has a question. I have 10 variations. They're not page one ranked. What strategy can I apply to get a good conversion on it? So I'm not sure exactly what he's saying here. But let me just change this into another question here. Like I've got betting that has a bunch of variations, or a consumable that has a whole bunch of different flavors, are you putting all the variations into one campaign? Do you have different campaigns for each variation? Do you only promote maybe one or two child items out of the whole variation? What's your strategy on variation items for PBC?

Matt:

Yeah, so we run a lot of variations. This is the one place where we do run ad groups. So our main products, the main variation, is flavored. So if someone's searching for a lemon flavored one, you obviously don't want that running against a chocolate flavored one. So an exact match campaign would have an ad group for each flavor and we'd be breaking out the different flavor variances within there. If it's a more broad term that doesn't include a flavor name, we're usually pushing it towards our hero product within that variation. But something that you can definitely test. I would say one thing to look at is search query performance and also the top I think they call it top search term report Now it used to be the old brand analytics report and see what the other top click products are. In our instance, if someone's searching for a sugar cookie, it may be that they're searching for a specific flavor and you can see that by the click through rate and a commercial rates from brand analytics.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now, before we get into your final strategy of the day, can you talk a little bit about clear ads? I mean who you know, who, who you guys might be able to help the most, and what you guys do.

Matt:

Yeah, definitely. Um, so we're an ads agency um based in the UK. Um, we work with sellers and actually every single amazon marketplace now, so can help you across the board there. Um, we also do offer like full service management. So if you're looking for content creation, lipstein optimizations or even just day to day like inventory management, case log management, we can help you with all of it. Um, we also run DSPs, so pretty much a to z on amazon, we've got you covered. Um, and many of you may know George Um the founder. Um, he's everywhere. Um, so, yeah, head us up if you need any help with any of those things.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right, now um 60 second strategy of the day could be about PPC. It could be about search career performance. Could be about how to live as a foreigner in Barcelona. It could be about anything you want, so go ahead.

Matt:

All right, um, so I'm going to take it away and I'm going to do. Uh, outside traffic to amazon Um, so I think one of the big questions that search career report has brought up with a lot of people is like, hey, these sales numbers in here are extremely low. I know I'm selling more for this keyword or this product. Like, why isn't this represented? And I think majority of people don't ever look at outside traffic to listings and what's happening. But if you actually take the time to dive deeper, you would be amazed at how much traffic comes straight to your listing from other sources outside of amazon. Um. One great way to do this is how we do it. Um, you can use SCM, rush or a trust or really any kind of SEO tool. Plug in your canonical um amazon URL and just see, like, what articles have been written about you that you know nothing about, where you're getting posted on social. It will highlight all of these things. Um, but really the big key factor that we've been looking at is if you have a competitor in your category that you just you can't figure out how they're doing things. Chances are it's all coming from outside of amazon and that's why you can't compete. So doing this simple search, you can see like, hey, these are the bloggers that are talking about it, these are the articles that they got. You can reach out to those people directly. Most of those positions are paid. Like, don't trust any of those top 10 articles, they're all paid. Um, you can reach out and pay for those, and sites like a H refs SCM rush will tell you how much traffic that bloggers are, so you can kind of estimate what your return is going to be on that dollar. Um, I would say another big piece that we've been kind of working on for these is for a lot of terms like your, your coffin example.

Matt:

Like there's no one out there that has a website about coffins, like that specific product, it would take you with AI a few days to whip together a basic word press site that has everything you would ever want to know about small coffins and since no one else is writing about that, you're going to rank in Google like top three within a few weeks. If you're in these categories where there isn't that much competition or it's a unique product, start making some micro sites. Um, like I've shared some examples at some prior events and presentations, we have a few of these micro sites that are giving us seven to 8000 people a month now to our Amazon listings, and we used AI for the entire process. Um, so it took us maybe an hour per site and they just continue to produce. And the big thing with that is it's a traffic channel that no one else can really steal from you, because most people aren't looking at this and you'll always kind of stay at the top of your category because your velocities will just always be higher.

Bradley Sutton:

That might be something I'd like to dive into, if you are able to come out in January. Like your step by step case study on that, that sounds fascinating. Alright, well, matt, thank you so much for joining us. I know it's late over there. I appreciate it and hopefully we get to see you in January.

Matt:

Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

Helium 10 Buzz 12/8/23 - Amazon Fee Increases: How Does This Affect Sellers?

Ever wondered how Amazon's impending FBA fee changes could impact your selling journey? Let’s tackle this complex web and break down what these changes might mean for you.

#515 - Generative AI & Crazy Data Strategies for Amazon Sellers

Join us on a journey as our special guest, Ritu Java, takes us from her beginnings in India to her experiences in Japan, ultimately transforming her into a data-driven entrepreneur. With a unique perspective on the blend of culture and commerce, Ritu shares insights on how she leveraged her expertise in data and analytics to excel in Amazon PPC strategies. You'll also hear her intriguing tales of running an Etsy store from Japan and overcoming the complexities of helping Amazon sellers worldwide.

The conversation doesn't stop there. Discover how AI has become a game-changer in running Amazon PPC campaigns as we discuss our personal experiences combining AI with other data sources to optimize campaigns. Listen as we unveil the advantages of using chat GPT for keyword research and translation over traditional methods like Google Translate. This episode offers a unique perspective on integrating AI into workflows and SOPs, driving efficient and effective results. We also underscore the value of incorporating AI into Amazon PPC strategies for successful product launches and campaign management.

 

To cap off this enlightening conversation, we tackle the future of Amazon selling and the role AI plays in it. From generating keywords for Amazon searches to creating images for sponsored brand ads, we unravel how chat GPT and mid-journey can elevate your selling game. Don't miss out on our tips for creating effective lifestyle photos and the significance of close-up product images. We also shed light on the evolution of Search Query Performance on Amazon and share our strategies for effectively managing and analyzing data.

In episode 515 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ritu discuss:

• 00:00 - AI Power for E-commerce Sellers
• 07:54 - Utilizing AI for Amazon Sellers' Success 
• 09:05 - AI in PPC Strategy With Chat GPT
• 20:52 - Search Term Modifiers and Word Order 
• 23:04 - Enhancing Amazon Ads With AI
• 31:24 - Generating Posts Using Canva and Amazon 
• 32:19 - Utilizing Search Group Performance Data
• 33:47 - Optimizing Data Strategy for Efficient Analysis 
• 41:23 - Convert Snapshot Data to Time Series

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got a first time guest who I think is probably top five in the world these days as far as actionable Amazon strategies, and she's going to give us an absolutely value-packed episode full of tips on generative AI, PPC and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews? By following up with them in a way that's compliant with Amazon terms of service?

Bradley Sutton:

You can use Helium 10 Follow-Up in order to automatically send out Amazon's request, a review emails, to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don't want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit h10.me forward slash follow-up. You can sign up for a free account or you can sign up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We've got a special guest today Ritu. So, first of all, we're going to get into your backstory about how we can even talk in Japanese, because that's something that's crazy. Were you born in Japan or were you born?

Ritu:

I was born in India, but I lived in Japan for 17 years.

Bradley Sutton:

So from what age?

Ritu:

You want to know how old I am.

Bradley Sutton:

No, no, no. From what age were you living in Japan?

Ritu:

Mid-20s. Yeah, so mid-20s.

Bradley Sutton:

Also was, so you didn't go to school in Japan.

Ritu:

No, I didn't. I went there as an adult. I was working at a company and I take company 17 years.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, that means you had to have gone there when you were a child. Then because you can't be over 25 years old. So I don't know what's going on here.

Ritu:

That is very cute.

Bradley Sutton:

I was all the reason. I was asking if you grew up because I wore this shirt today. Do you recognize this character here?  What is this?

Ritu:

Yes Doraemon. Yes, I grew up with Doraemon when I was a little over there, that's awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, I grew up with Doraemon when I was a little over there, that's awesome. I know a little bit about you, but I for some reason had this idea that you actually grew up in Japan and that was why you were so fluent in language. Once you go as an adult, it's a little bit harder, unless you really immerse yourself in the culture.

Ritu:

I did. I really immersed myself in the culture. I went there just for a year, honestly, and ended up staying 17. It's so crazy how that place had such a big impact on me. It was such a stark contrast to where I grew up, which was India.

Bradley Sutton:

Whereabouts in India.

Ritu:

In Delhi, the capital city of chaos that's how I describe it from chaotic to super orderly. You can imagine what a difference, that is A stark difference from the world I knew. I was just drawn to the calm and the orderliness of that place. How things were punctual, everything happened as expected, there were no surprises, everything was planned in so much detail, which I kind of liked. I think where I'm at right now is a nice middle ground, because I think I like the chaos. It has energy. It has a certain type of progressive energy that all of us need, especially as entrepreneurs. We need that energy to be able to kind of keep moving forward. But then I also like the organizational skills that I picked up while I was in Japan, because you need that to have good execution. I think best of both worlds is what I'm trying to be at right now, trying to draw from both my cultures.

Bradley Sutton:

Then did you go to university in India.

Ritu:

I did. I'm an engineer. I did my electronics engineering from India. I went back to school much later in life. I went back to school in the US and I did a course in data science, which is why I'm very attracted to PPC and data and data analytics and that sort of stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

When you graduated with the electrical engineering degree, did you start working in India, or is that when you went to Japan?

Ritu:

Yeah, I started working right away and I started working in India and I worked for an IT company and it was a pretty long stint there as well, like I was very interested in technology right from the start and it kind of aligned with my life's goals and stuff like that. At the time. I mean, little did I know that I would completely switch at a certain point. When I was in Japan I worked for not only the company that I was in India, I kind of went to their Japan office and I started helping them out. But then later on I switched to a more technical role at a school, at a high school, American school in Japan, and then I had my kid and took a break from work and then I kind of dealt in a little bit of entrepreneurship. I started running my own business. I had an Etsy store. Yes, in Japan, while I was in Japan, I started my Etsy business selling jewelry. It was like kind of one of a kind jewelry and I realized that, gosh, it's not enough just to create a listing and people are not going to flock to that listing. So I had to teach myself a whole lot of stuff like marketing advertising. So I learned Facebook ads, Google Ads, blogging, YouTube, all of that stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

So Etsy in the United States, or is there an Etsy in Japan?

Ritu:

No, there's an Etsy in the United States, but I was selling on the US market from Japan. So I was producing my stuff there, but I was shipping it worldwide wherever there were shoppers. But shipping costs are exorbitant. Sending stuff from Japan it's very expensive. Yeah, so mostly was attracted to the data side of things. Yes, I have both left and right brains, because the creative side was just all my creations, the jewelry that I made. But then I needed the data science side of things to kind of round things off and make money out of my business, because everything we do here is based on data and I know he's intended the data company. So is PPC Ninja. We might think that we're in the business of selling goods, but actually we're in the business of leveraging data. So that's why it was so important for me to get that knowledge and make sure that I'm kind of ready to go with my own endeavors.

Bradley Sutton:

Now. So, Etsy was kind of like your first online marketplace. Now, did you ever end up selling on Amazon or did you go straight into software and consulting etc.

Ritu:

Yeah, so I've never sold on Amazon, but I've helped businesses sell on Amazon. So it's basically the data side of things. So, I only sold on Etsy. I sold on my own website for a bit, but then I have never sold on Amazon myself. But PPC is where I'm focused on.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now you talked about having an analytical mind, and that's kind of like what you're known for. When you've spoken at events like Billion Dollar Seller Summit and others is especially in the last couple of years, you're one of the go-to people as far as AI and things like that, now me, I'm a little bit behind. I use even on this podcast, we use AI to generate title options and transcripts and things like that, but I would say I'm not one of those full force ahead like, hey, ai is going to replace hours and hours of work. I haven't really adopted it to that effect. So, the typical Amazon seller what are some things that you don't have to be a seven, eight, nine figure seller but just like any Amazon seller if they have not started utilizing AI to help them in their operations or business? What are? Let's take it to that spectrum first. What are some things that you think that any Amazon seller could benefit by utilizing AI?

Ritu:

Yeah, there's so much. Actually, the magic happens when you start combining things. So AI by itself may not be the be all and all of things, because it's not going to operate in a silo. You've got to combine it with other pieces of data that you have access to. For example, just this morning I was preparing for a new product launch for one of our clients and I'd got all my data from Helium 10. I was at the stage where I have to come up with some keywords for broad match campaigns. I wanted to make sure that all the right keywords are in there, not just the long tail ones with high search volume, but I wanted to make sure that I'm capturing all the seed combinations of important words that make sense. So what I did was I exported the Helium 10 cerebral analysis and I fed it to chat GPT and asked it to come up with two words and three word combinations of seed keywords that would perfectly describe this product. Now what I'm going to do next with that is basically convert that into broad match modifiers, which basically means you add a plus sign in front of all the seeds and then I'm going to create campaigns with it. So that's something that I do at every launch. I generally don't skip that step. It's an important one for me. So, in addition to all the long tail keywords, I will come up with enough seed words that will run at a slightly lower bid but will be like a discovery campaign for me through the broad match modifier channel. So that's kind of one thing that I do.

Ritu:

Then, like yesterday, I was doing another one for another client, where we have a list of keywords that we discovered from the search query performance report, which is kind of this new, very valuable piece of data that Amazon is giving us these days. So from there I was able to come up with a structure for sponsored brand headline ads and I didn't have to do the work. I just fed that entire list to chat GPT and said, hey, organize this into groups of very related words and then give me a headline ad which is less than 50 characters, because that's the amount Amazon will give us. And then it did that for me. I also gave it one other important instruction, which is to make sure that one of the keywords or a very close variant of that keyword in the group must be included in the title, and that's basically my way of saying, hey, I want this to be a lower funnel ad, not a generic kind of upper funnel ad, because my sponsored brand ads tend to be more focused on ROAS rather than brand discovery and brand awareness. So those are some of the ways that I'm using it almost on a daily basis. I had switched to chat GPT plus a long time ago. I've been paying for it and it's totally worth it.

Bradley Sutton:

So there's how much is it for somebody to subscribe to?

Ritu:

that it's about $20 a month. It's not much at all, yeah, it's just $20. And what it gives you is all the beta features, all the new stuff. So right now you can actually upload files very easily. You can upload any kind of file to almost any kind of file to chat GPT and then ask it to analyze, analyze the file and then you can ask it a bunch of questions. So it's just made life so much easier. And I mean I think sky is the limit with what you can do with AI. It's like I always, always feel like I'm not using it enough, even though I'm using it probably quite a bit more than a lot of people, but I still feel cautioned to use it more.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting, interesting. So there's some of the ways that you can use it in PPC. Now I remember you presented something. I've seen you speak, you know, various times, but I don't remember which event, this or what it was. That might have been a billion dollars, but where were you doing? You were doing like translation, using like Helium 10 because, like you were doing research, you weren't translating the English keywords. That's obviously a big mistake that some sellers make. Hey, I've got my Amazon USA listing, let me just translate it. Or let me just translate the keywords. No, you need to do the research in that marketplace. So you switch Helium 10 to Amazon Germany, for example, but if you're not a German speaker, you just see all this Deutsch keywords and you don't really know what it means. Or so they're doing it in Amazon Japan and they don't speak Japanese like you, so they might not know. So what's your? I'm not sure if it was AI or just something in Google you were doing to kind of like make that process a little bit easier.

Ritu:

Yeah. So what we've done is we have integrated chat GPD right into Google Sheets, and we had to write a little bit of code for that. But once we did that, what's happened is that we have these ready to go sheets where we simply change the prompt and add a bunch of keywords and then it will just translate into whatever language, right? So? And I've noticed that any translation done by chat GPD is way better than Google Translate and I've tested it, especially in Japanese, because I can read it. I know that the quality is much better.

Ritu:

Just to give you an example chat GPD will use the right combinations of Kanji and Hiragana, whereas Google Translate will not. It just doesn't do a great job. And if I tell chat GPD to give me a translation in all four different scripts, that's, kanji as well as Hiragana, Katakana and the Roma G, it will give all those to me. It's a no-brainer to use chat GPD for that sort of thing rather than Google Translate and then other languages as well. Like we're just onboarding this client that has four markets and we have no speakers of those languages on our team. But with chat GPD, we can simply include that into our SOPs, into our workflows and just use those sheets to kind of get the final product out. So it's really great the combination of Helium 10 and chat GPD workflows. They work really well for us.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now going back a little bit, just remember you were talking about broad match modifiers. There might be people out there who don't know what that means. Can you explain that a little bit?

Ritu:

Yeah, yeah. So a broad match modifier is a type of broad match, so when you're setting your add up, it'll still be a broad match. However, by simply adding a plus sign before every part of the keyword which means if it's a two word keyword, then both the parts will have a plus sign in front of them what you're gonna ensure is that the buyer search must include those words in exactly that format in order for that match to happen. So this eliminates any kind of kind of synonyms or related words that Amazon might try to kind of connect to, which you don't think need to be there. So at this point, amazon is even replacing exact matches with weird sort of words that it thinks are similar. So we don't want that, because we've done all of the research to find out which exact version of that keyword is giving us the highest search volume, so we wanna stick to it.

Ritu:

In order to make that happen, we're actually finding ourselves doing more and more work with broad match modifiers, because all the other match types are being weird anymore. Like exact matches are not behaving like exact matches. Same thing with phrase match and broad match anyway, always was a bit too broad and it was always kind of giving you all kinds of weird matches for sponsored brands, but then it started doing the same thing for sponsored products as well, and that makes it a little challenging. It can be wasteful. So yeah, broad match modifiers is a great way of making sure that your matches are clean and that they don't bring in kind of extraneous, superfluous words that you shouldn't be targeting.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you use that 100% of the time when you have a broad campaign?

Ritu:

So you always have if it's a three word phrase.

Bradley Sutton:

You'll put the plus in between each of the.

Ritu:

Yes, 100% of the time. We've been doing it for the past two years and we actually future proved ourselves because we knew this was coming. It's kind of like Amazon always follows Google. So we knew this was coming because Google introduced broad match modifiers first. Now they've already sunset it. So I don't know where this is gonna end up for Amazon, because what I've heard and I don't wanna just speculate, but what I've heard people say is that Amazon might be moving toward a future where there aren't any match types. There's only a word, there's only a keyword, and then it figures out how to match it the best way. Now it's plausible, especially in this AI world. It's plausible that that might happen. But in the interim, I'm betting on broad match modifiers and exact match. Of course, can't do much about the fact that Amazon isn't treating exact matches the way they ought to be treated, but that's the best we have right now.

Bradley Sutton:

So what would the difference be between using broad, doing broad target with modifiers compared to phrase for the same, the same, you know, like coffin shelf, like. So if I do coffin plus shelf in broad or coffin shelf in phrase, what's the difference in the potential? You know showings of that keyword.

Ritu:

Yeah, no, I think the showings of that keyword might totally depend on the bids and they might also depend on relevancy. So it's very hard to predict which of the three match types are gonna win. You know that's been a struggle. I mean you can't really say if you put coffin, what was it? Again coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, coffin shelf.

Ritu:

Yeah, if you say coffin shelf broad coffin shelf phrase and say coffin shelf exact, what we would want it to do and what would be logical is that if I had a higher bid for exact match, then you know all the searches should come in match through exact match. But that's not always the case. You know, we've seen so much variability there. It also depends on which campaign, you know, starts out those keywords and then each campaign has its own story, its own history. Because let's say, you combine that keyword with a bunch of other keywords and let's say those other keywords got a majority of the early data points, like it started hitting some other words coffin longtail words Before it hit your coffin shelf word, then what happens is that this word starts getting starved of impressions, the other words start to take dominance and these words that get starved of impression give you the false impression that they're not working, whereas it's just a matter of how things started off, like what were the set of searches on that day, on that very moment that Amazon decided to match?

Ritu:

And then it's going to just take its cues from whatever little data it has in the beginning, because that's all it has to play off of, and then it just keeps giving more and more and more impressions to the early data points and everything else just gets ignored, you know. So it's like a game Like PPC is a game that you know you've got to be able, you've got to be willing to keep playing, trying different things, different ways, moving things, you know, trying it in a different match type, in a different campaign, restarting, stopping, all of that you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay now you know like, for example, if I just do you know, going to this same example, you know coffin shelf, no modifier and broad. You know, yeah, nowadays you know something crazy can come up with, like, you know, spooky decor.You know, potentially it could even come up not even including the word, but ones that are traditional, would be like, you know, coffin shelves for men, coffin shelves for women, but then also it could be coffin shaped shelf, like it could insert a word, or shelf shape like a coffin. You know, like changing the order, but if I put that modifier in there, does that force it, in your experience, to be only longer tail, like it's coffin shelf has to be in there as a phrase and then it's only putting words at the beginning or the end, or still. It could switch it up a little bit.

Ritu:

Yeah, it will switch it up. So coffin shelf could be shelf coffin even. As long as the word shelf and the word coffin both exist in the match, it will match. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, going back to Helium 10, now I was looking at, I did it. I still haven't seen your replay of your presentation you did for Helium 10 Elite a few months back. But I was looking at your slides and there was something that you were talking about magnet and seed keywords and just by looking at the slide I couldn't tell what the strategy was. So can you explain what are you doing? I'm not sure if this has to do with chat, gpt or, but just how are you using magnet in a unique way?

Ritu:

Yeah, so what I do is basically I start off my keyword research by looking at audiences, like who is the right target audience for a product, right? So that's my first step. Now the audience list will help me figure out what words these people use. So if it's a garlic press and let's say there's five different types of people, there could be just regular straight up chefs, there could be restaurant owners, there could be whatever. So there's like five or six different types of people who might use a garlic press.

Ritu:

Now I ask ChatGPT to tell me all the words that these audiences or avatars are likely to use when they search on Amazon. So I'm actually starting from a suggestion of a seed keyword. That's my starting point, and then I use those seed keywords that chat GPT generates to go and dump that into magnet. And then I use the expand option the second one, not the first one and that basically gives me all of the keywords and their search volumes, and that's what I need Basically.

Ritu:

I wanna kind of run it by search volume information to figure out if it is really a word that I should be going after. Now I don't always come up with those words, probably because the search volume is too low, in which case I don't need to worry about it, but I can still use that information as broad match modifiers to just generate some sort of discovery. So like, for example, eco-friendly. I don't know if there's any sort of garlic press that's eco-friendly, but let's say someone in that audience wants an eco-friendly garlic press made out of bamboo or whatever. I will still create broad match modifiers that have those important words in that combination so that I can at least start to do some keyword research through an ad rather than through existing search volume data.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, switching gears from keywords now to images. I know you've talked about mid-jurdy Canva. Have you played around at all with the new Amazon one that they made kind of for sponsored brands? And then, if so, what's your results? I've had very different, like some of it are absolutely terrible, but then I know that part of it's because I don't really know how to prompt them. I'm not very good at prompting, but what's your experience with the new Amazon AI image generator for sponsored brand ads?

Ritu:

Yeah, I mean it's not bad for someone who's really struggling with image creation in general, but it's not really usable for every case right? In some cases, it's gonna be hard to come up with the perfect background for your image. The other trouble I have with it is that the product image is too small on the canvas, and that's not how I like my sponsored brand headline ads Generally. This is a tip actually for our listeners when you create a sponsored brand lifestyle photo, the biggest mistake people make is that they fully capture the lifestyle setting in which that product is being used, but then the product itself is so tiny. That's a big mistake. That shouldn't be the way right. The way to do it is to have the product front and center. It has to be blown up right in the middle and then you could maybe suggest what the background is. You might just use suggestive creatives rather than have it in absolute terms. It's being used in the setting that it's being suggested, so for that reason I generally like to request for zoomed in, highly close up type of images so that we can have better conversion rates.

Ritu:

And there's a story that I just wanna share here real quick. We had one client with a dog product and the product was being used on a dog that was sitting in the lap of a woman on a sofa, and then there's a living room in the background so you can imagine the size of the product. It's like so small you can't see it right. So then what we said to this client was give us a zoomed in image. So then they zoomed right in, so all we see now is the pop and we see the product. Right. So it completely changed the metrics for that ad and then we started using that particular image for many other of their sponsored brand headline ads, and then the rest is history.

Ritu:

They really started growing after that. But the point is that close up images are more important than pretty images, right? So pretty images anyone can create pretty images. You wanna make them highly converting images and for that reason I might not use the Amazon's AI generated images right away, unless they become better, unless they can kind of keep the product as the hero it needs to be, front and center. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out any prompt that can help me get to that stage, but I'll keep testing. I'm not sure yet.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so then what outside of Amazon? Then, like I said, I know you're using like mid journey, which is another one that's not too expensive it isn't like 10 bucks a month or something like that to use mid journey, or yeah. So then what if somebody is like all right, you told us what some basic stuff that people how chat GPT for 20 bucks a month can help Amazon sellers. What is something that Amazon sellers of any level can use mid journey for? That's kind of simple and definitely adds value.

Ritu:

Yeah, I think mid journey is definitely the leader and if you can learn to use it, there's nothing like it yet. But even straight up, chat GPT is now getting pretty good with images, so you can describe whatever you want and then it is connected to dolly in the back and then it generates those images and gives them back to you right in your chat GPT prompt, right. So if you have the paid version, then you can start testing that as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so let's say I've got all right, I've got a pretty nice image. You know, maybe it's a white background image or something of my product. Would the first thing I should do with experimenting with AI and mid-journey and things? Would it be making an infographic? Would it be trying to make a lifestyle? Like I remember in the early days of AI, like you could never put a human being in there because they would have like 17 fingers and just crazy faces and stuff like that. But like what should I do then? What kind of images? Or is it not really don't use it for your main images, but use it for, like, the sponsored brand and sponsor display, things like that?

Ritu:

Yeah, so okay, I think we need to think of images as layers, just like we think of layers in Photoshop. Right, there's layers like a background layer. So if you want just the ambience, the mood, the background, you generate that layer independent of anything else. That's one way of going about it. And then you layer in your product. You have your kind of no background product. Then you can always place it right in the middle, do those sorts of things. So it would probably be a two or three step process where you think of each layer separately, even the humans. You could bring humans in from a different source. You can get humans from there, you can get your backdrop from somewhere else and then you can get your product from your own product images and put them together. That would probably give you the best results.

Ritu:

But if you tried to have mid-journey to all of that, you might experience some failures there or some surprises with, like you said, 17 fingers and stuff. Now, mid-journey, the latest versions of it are getting better and better, so it's very human-like and it doesn't appear awkward. The facial expressions aren't awkward anymore, so that's good news, just means that we're going in the right direction. It's only gonna get better from here. So I would think of layering as one concept, and then, of course, where you wanna apply it is another thing infographics. I don't think chat, gp or even mid-journey would be good for infographic other than just generating the background for it, because text it still doesn't do a good job with text. You'll have to use some of your other tools for text. So again, it's layering, combining tools and coming up with the concept. So yeah, those are some of the ways in which you can use images.

Ritu:

Now posts is another interesting one. A lot of people are using mid-journey for generating posts, and that's a good way of generating lots of posts content, because Amazon doesn't allow you to repeat an image twice. So what you can do is you can have Dali or even Canva. I've used Canva AI, which is different from Canva normal. I can explain the difference, but anyway. So Canva AI can generate based on your description of what kind of backgrounds you want, and then you just slap in your photo your kind of hero image on top of it and there you have your posts. It takes barely any time to create like 20 different posts and most people don't realize this, but posts are free advertising. I would highly recommend generating posts on a regular basis and take advantage of it.

Bradley Sutton:

I've seen them more in search results lately too.

Ritu:

Posts. Exactly, it's one of those widgets that comes up.

Bradley Sutton:

That never happened, like six months ago or something. But, now it's right there on page one, so it's important to do, I agree.

Ritu:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So earlier you talked about search group performance. I love search group performance. My self is just like it's stuff that three, four years ago we would have. I would have bet a million dollars that Amazon would never release this kind of data to the public, and Amazon definitely has come a long way. What are some other ways that you're using search group performance, analyzing the data that Amazon gives?

Ritu:

Yeah, so search group performance. Like you said, it's unbelievable that Amazon is actually sharing this information out, so it's really up to us to take advantage of it as soon as possible. Almost feel like time is of essence here, because everybody's going to have access Everybody has access to that information. But right now most people are in the state of overwhelm. They're like, oh, I have this great data, but I don't know what to do with it. So most people are stuck at that stage.

Ritu:

But if you want to take the next step, then I would suggest start downloading those reports right away, because these things also get lost. Amazon discontinues things that you think they're going to be giving us forever and forever. For example, the brand analytics data that used to be I don't know millions of rows has certainly been compressed to just 10,000, and so on. So I mean there's a loss there that cannot be replaced. So I would say, number one start downloading your at least your monthly data at the ASIN level and then stitching all that data together, and by stitching I mean maybe putting it into a data warehouse. We use BigQuery in order to bring data in, and the way to stitch it is by making sure that your reports have some extra columns like the date column has to be there Then you have to make sure that you have the brand name in it and you want to make sure that your market is in this, so that when you stitch all that information together, then you can use a single report like a looker studio to dip into the data warehouse and you can basically use switch filters to switch between your different markets. So if you plan your data strategy well, then you will be able to use it more efficiently than just using it in a throwaway style, which most people do.

Ritu:

Most people go download a report, they look at it, they stare at it and they're like, ok, whatever Done, and it's thrown away. You don't want that. You want a system. You need an ecosystem for managing your data so that you can look at those from time to time. You get a month over month review. You get a month over month trend. You can see if anything has lost its search volume over time. It's so easy to check that at a search term level. Once you have stitched all that information together and is available in maybe something like a looker studio, how about something that's good?

Bradley Sutton:

it's important to understand the you know, like how to get started and not just like, all right, let me. Let me just look at search career performance or this data, just, you know, in the UI on on Amazon. But then what's the next step? Now I've got everything in my data warehouse and stuff like, for example, me. One of the things I like to look at in search career performance is comparing the conversion rate by the keyword for for just the overall niche, compared to my own. You know my own conversion rate. But you know, I think that's probably one of the most no brainer things. What are some other maybe not so common things that you're looking at when, when you get all of that data into your, your data warehouse, and start you know, start looking up stuff?

Ritu:

Yeah. So one of the things that I find really interesting is the average price per search term. So this is you know, amazon gives you the average price and that, basically, is a good indication of whether that search term is going for cheaper products or is it going for slightly more expensive products. Just to give you an example, let's say you have the word lotion right Now. You have a $50 lotion by L'Oreal, maybe, and you have a $5 drugstore brand Same thing, selling lotion. But if you're going after, if you're looking at the search term lotion, whatever, daily lotion or whatever and if you see that the average price for that search term is going at $6, let's say that's the average price of the product being sold. That is telling me that, no matter what I do to compete on that, on that search term, it's going to be hard because I'm going to be competing with lots and lots of cheaper brands. So we actually have filters on our search terms or search query reports, so that we only look at those searches that are in the ballpark of our products price point. That basically eliminates a lot of the noise, because otherwise you might be led into thinking that gosh, this is a great keyword and then you spend lots of money on it and ends up being a high cost scenario. You don't want that. So you look at both of the things one that you mentioned, which is what we call strength, keyword strength, which is determined as a ratio of purchase share and impression share. If you can get that ratio to be above one, then that's a good keyword. That is strong, inherently strong, because you're winning more of the purchase share than you're winning of the market, which basically puts it in a good spot.

Ritu:

And then the second one would be the filter on price. The third filter I would put is search volume, because, again, we don't want noisy, insignificant terms to distract us. And I think the fourth filter I would put there is data sufficiency, like how many sales have you had for that keyword over that period of time? So yeah, those would be the four filters to kind of get everything else out. And then, yeah, I mean that would be our way of figuring out which search terms are good. Then the other use cases of that would be to stitch that data with your ad data. So when you stitch those two together you can find gaps in a systematic sort of way, not just like a one off, throw away kind of way, where it's always being merged and it's always coming together and you can always see these are the ones that I'm not advertising yet. And then, yeah, I think those were the two main ones.

Ritu:

The third, slightly more advanced one, is when you want to figure out if a search term is good for product A, product B, product C, product D off your catalog because they might be sharing those keywords. Then you can see relative strength across your different products and see where you want to channel your information. Now that comes with the caveat, and that caveat is that there's a very high halo sales ratio on Amazon, which means you might be directing traffic to one of your product variations and something else is actually getting picked up eventually. So you need to know all of the. You need to know all those pieces in order to make the right decision and essentially in terms of using your, your traffic source as a fire hose, literally, and saying, okay, I want to direct it to this product and not to this product. Unless you know what the halo sales are, you could be off.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah, well really great stuff. Now, before we get into your last strategy you know, maybe it could be a PPC strategy, since that's your specialty how can people reach out to you if they, you know? How can they find you on the interwebs if they want to? You know, get some help with some of the stuff that you've been talking about today.

Ritu:

Yeah, absolutely so. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there, so just look up my full name, Ritu Java, and you should be able to find me there and just say hi and I'll be happy to help. Yeah, and other ways, you can just reach out to our website, ppcninja.com or anywhere else. You see me.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now we have some of we do on our show. We call it TST. That's the 30 second tip. So you know you've been giving us lots of great tips and strategies, but what's like a hard hitting one you can give us in 30 seconds or 60 seconds or less. I'm not going to cut you off, go ahead.

Ritu:

So I think that you know we're all sitting on tons and tons of data and we don't know how to use it. I would suggest start thinking of strategies to use your data by connecting them up. Every piece of data that we get from Amazon or other sources, whether it's keyword rank tracking or search volume data, or your ads data or organic data. Also, you know competitor data and stuff like that. It's in different locations, it's hiding behind wall gardens and stuff like that.

Ritu:

You want to figure out a system to bring it all together, and I would recommend using a data warehousing strategy to start bringing everything together so that you can start looking at it holistically. So I would recommend start to think of simple ways in which you can convert your snapshot data into time series. That that would be my advice, and time series is basically for people who don't understand that. It's basically assigning dates to all your downloads. If you're downloading a business report, make sure you add a column and put the date there so that that becomes a way of identifying when that event happened. When you're connecting so many pieces of data together.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, Awesome Well thank you very much. Thank you so much for your time.

Ritu:

Than you so much Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

This was really awesome, awesome and we'll definitely be having you back on the show sometime next year to get your latest strategies.

Ritu:

Awesome, we'll look forward to that. Take care, Bradley, have a good one.

 

#514 - Managing 200 PPC Campaigns in 10 Minutes

What if you had the power to manage over 200 Amazon PPC campaigns in just 10 minutes each week? Imagine the time and resources you could save with the right tools and strategies. Join us in this episode as we share how we use the Helium 10 PPC tool, Adtomic, to streamline our campaigns and work smarter, not harder. Bradley shares his best tips on campaign structure and show you how to apply rules to automatically transfer successful keywords from broad campaigns to exact ones. 

Ever wondered how to navigate the labyrinth of Amazon PPC management? Allow us to guide you. We've harnessed the power of Helium 10's Adtomic tool for campaign automation and optimization. Discover how to conduct regular campaign audits, use negative keywords to curb wasteful spending, and use Adtomic to pinpoint unprofitable keywords.

Now, let's talk profitability. We know you're in this business to make money, so we'll show you how to optimize your Amazon advertising costs to maximize your return. We'll demonstrate how to set goals for ACoS and TACoS and use the Adtomic tool to optimize bids. And before you think about outsourcing, let us convince you of the merits of understanding Amazon PPC yourself. Despite your busy schedule, we believe learning how to manage your own PPC should be a priority - and we'll help you see why and how. 

Google ads, Amazon PPC techniques, factors to negate keywords, and insights beyond the attribution window - we've got it all covered. We know the value of data and why you need to pay attention to it. Intrigued? Excited? We hope so because this episode is packed with strategies and tools that could revolutionize your Amazon campaign management. 

In episode 514 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 01:09 - Manage 200 Amazon PPC Campaigns Efficiently Using Adtomic
• 03:53 - Campaign Grouping and Targeting Strategies
• 11:04 - Optimizing Keywords in Amazon Ad Campaigns
• 11:52 - Effective Amazon PPC Strategies
• 14:05 - Keywords and Campaign Management Simplified
• 16:41 - Optimizing PPC Costs for Profitability
• 17:56 - Profitability and ACoS
• 27:39 - Keyword Negation and Pausing Decision Factors
• 27:50 - Google Ads and PPC Techniques

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► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today I'm going to show you guys how I managed my 200 PBC campaigns in only 10 minutes a week, plus answer all the questions you guys submitted live. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitors listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask Me Anything, where we go ahead and take your questions live after giving you a demo of a cool tool that can definitely give you serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today you'll notice I've got my what I call my Adtomic hat and shirt on. That's because I'm just going to give you guys kind of like a 10 minute run through of what I do to go through and manage my PBC accounts. I've been using Adtomic for since it was before Adtomic Used to be called At. So I've been using it for probably about three years now and you know I have probably over 200 PBC campaigns, over three, four accounts that I use it on, and I pretty much you know some. There can be a week where I don't even open it once, like it's doing everything for me. On average, I would say I spend about 15 minutes a week just checking out what's going on and implementing suggestions and things like that, and that's over 200 campaigns. So let me just give you kind of like a little idea about how I roll through it. Like maybe you used to use Adtomic before but trust me, it's like way different Now. A lot of this stuff. I already just recently audited the account, so you might not see too much new information here, but let me just show you what like my process is and why it only takes me like 15 minutes Now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

First of all, I have everything set up in kind of like my campaigns talk to each other, all right, and regardless if you guys use Adtomic or not, this is how I feel you guys should set up your PBC. All right. You have these groups of campaigns that all go to one product, and you've got one that's a exact manual campaign. You've got a broad or phrase match campaign I like to call that a research campaign You've got an auto campaign and then you've got an ASIN product targeting campaign, potentially a sponsor display campaign and then potentially sponsored brand headline campaign. So all of these kind of talk to each other, the auto and the broad campaigns. You can view those as kind of like keyword harvesting campaigns, discovery campaigns. You're discovering keywords that you might not be targeting yet and then, if you find some good ones now you move it to the exact product marketing campaign. Maybe you move it to the exact match keyword campaign, all right. But again, everything talks to each other so that you know the campaigns are benefiting each other, all right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So this is where I let me just show you how I set up that, that kind of like flow that I just talked about. So, for example, here is my large coffin shelf rule rule group, all right. So we've got a large and a small coffin shelf, or a large coffin shelf, and then there's a variation where it's a large and a small together. All right, I'm targeting both of those in my PPC campaigns. And here's the rules that I have set up so that I am not having to just, you know, every day download Excel sheets and make pivot tables and things like that. What I did is I put all of those campaigns right here in a group of campaigns. I've got my performance campaign. I actually have two. You know I probably hit like 25, 20 or 25 targets in one. So, like now, I only add it to a new one.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I've got my product targeting campaign. It's an ace in targeting campaign, sponsor display, my auto campaign and my research campaign, which I actually have as a broad and, as you can see what these checkbox that I'm showing on the screen for those of you watching this is. I'm saying, hey, if you find a keyword in the research campaign, like a broad right, like, let's say, I'm targeting a broad target coffin shelf and all of a sudden I get sales on this keyword coffin shelf for gothic decor, like a long tail keyword that I wasn't targeting, I'm saying, hey, find it here and then go ahead and put it in my performance campaign because instead of waiting for Amazon to show me in this broad match and just like hope that Amazon shows me, no, I want to target it specifically, all right. So that's basically all of these little boxes up here is me telling Adtomic to look for keywords in certain campaigns that I don't have in the other one and then, if it's good, go ahead and add that keyword as a manual target, be a product or keyword. Now, it's not just any keyword. Um, you can put your own criteria. So, as you can see what this is, just me, this is not saying oh, you guys have to copy what I'm doing right here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I said I only want you to move this keyword to an exact campaign or suggest to me to do it if it gets at least two orders, cause, you know, sometimes there might be one, or like it might be complete fluke. You know, like maybe Amazon has me in an auto campaign and for some crazy reason, they showed me for my coffin shelf or, uh, you know a keyword egg tray or something like that, right, and then it could be like five days after clicking to add maybe the person actually does buy a coffin shelf. You know, it's probably not going to happen again, right? So I I put here a minimum of two because to me I'm like, hey, I want two people to order something. Then I know, hey, this is probably kind of like a good, a good keyword. And then I said, and I want my ACoS to be 30%. You know, if I had to spend 200% ACoS just to get these two sales, probably not that great of a keyword. And so, basically, that that's what it's doing, it's going to, it's going to, it's going to look at this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I could set here the look this is, by the way, this bottom part is all new. I could look at the look back period. You know, some people might say, hey, I want to look at the last 30 days. Some people say, hey, no, I want. I'm a big seller, you know I'm doing spending $1,000 a day. I want to look every five days if there's new ones that meet this criteria. I put last 60 days. And then, hey, how often do I want to check this? I put daily. And then, what time zone do I want this rule to be off of? Now? I could automate this, right, I could automate it, but I'm not going. I don't automate my mind because I just like to be able to, to to click on it. Now, what about? On the flip side?

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's arguably more important to have good negative match, good negative match rules set up, all right. So I've got a negative match on this auto campaign and let me just show you how I have that set up. In the negative match, my, my rules aren't talking to each other, my campaigns aren't talking to each other, all right, cause I just like to do it in isolation. So I put here hey, I don't know why I didn't put this, somebody put six clicks. I don't want to get a negative match if it's just six clicks. So I'm going to split $10 here or $5 spent. So what does that mean? So some people people have their hands on the cookie jar in the project exit count and keeps screwing up my, my things that I have to end up changing it back.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, what this means is I'm saying, hey, if I get 15 clicks on a keyword or a search term in this auto campaign with getting zero sales, I want Adtomic to suggest to me to go ahead and negative match this so that I stop spending. Or if I spend $5, regardless of the number of clicks on a certain search term with zero sales, I want Adtomic to suggest to me to negative match that. And that's all this is doing, all right. So this is what. Again, I don't care if you guys are not using Adtomic, if you're just downloading spreadsheets. This is kind of like what you should be doing, right? I hope you're doing something like this where you know every few weeks, you kind of uh, you know audit what's going on on your PPC so that you're not wasting your spend, all right. So that's the kind of just the simple structure.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I can go a lot deeper into. You know budget rules and and different kinds of uh. You know situations there for what I want Adtomic to look at, but I like to keep my stuff real simple and then so, basically once a week, I come in here to my suggestions and oh yeah, by the way, one thing I forgot to tell you guys is I set everything at target ACoS, all right, there's different rules for my bidding, all right. So I was talking about keyword harvesting, keyword negative, what my rules were? Well, there's different rules that I could pit for uh pick for my bidding.

 

Bradley Sutton:

As you can see, I put everything here on uh and this is like AI powered. I want to target ACoS, like I want the campaign to perform at a 20% ACoS on almost all these. All right, I could choose max impressions or max orders, that it's not looking too much at the ACoS, but just just for this account I have everything on uh target ACoS and then I could put min, max, max bid. You know, like, maybe I have a $10 product and I know I never want to go past $1 on a, on ACoS per click. So I could say, hey, for my bid, I never want Adtomic to try and raise this bid on this search term or on this target. I should say for more than $1, or I want to. I never want to suggest to me something lower than than this. All right, so so that's that's. Uh, that's another thing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now, once a week I have my, my bidding, uh, you know, targeting, uh algorithms. Here I've got my rules as far as my positive keywords, my negative keywords. All I have to do is go to the suggestions, all right. And then, for example, uh, what I'm looking at here is the AI bids. So, hey, my, my target ACoS is 20% and let, on this keyword, my ACoS is 86%. So it's telling me to go ahead and lower my bid. All right here. And then, if I, if I agree with the suggestion. All I have to do is click one button. I can actually click the whole entire page here If I agree with all these suggestions, and it happens instantly.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm not finding it in seller central. Where is this campaign? Where, you know, let me click on edit bid and let me, you know, find it. This and that that would take just by itself. You know like how, how many. I have a hundred and seventy nine bid changes I need to make. Do you know how long it would be to find these in my, in this account only has like maybe like 75 campaigns, but to go find them in these 75 campaigns and go into the ad group and everything and change these one by one, that would take forever. I could literally do it in 10 seconds right here if I just click a couple of buttons.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, here is my new keywords. I actually do have two ones, all right. So let's take a look at what it found. All right, take a look at this, look at this keyword here Coffin shaped shelf. All right, I spent $7 on this and I got $89 worth of sales. All right, and this was from an auto campaign. And so what is it telling me to do. It's saying hey, click me and then go ahead and add this to your manual campaign and, potentially, your broad match campaign. Now again, am I having to go find these campaigns, add a target, set the bid and all that stuff, like I would if I, if, if I'm down, if I'm working in seller central, uh, manually? No, I just click one button and boom goes the dynamite. It is now done. It is now added to that campaign so that I can go ahead and target that manually.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Here's another keyword that it just found. Again, it must have found this in the last four days because I just audited this. I just went through all my suggestions. Like three days ago, wooden egg rack, I spent $5 on uh, which campaign is another auto campaign. I got $55 worth of sales. It's saying hey, go ahead and add these to your manual campaign. All right, it would do the same thing for ascent targets as well. That it might find in the auto campaign.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Again, negative keywords. It's, it's, it didn't find anything right now, but that's where it would be All right. Now, what if you're just getting into Adtomic and you don't have all your rules set up and and you're just setting up your campaigns? It might take a while. What I suggest doing is like audits on your account, all right, and I just did this audit. Let me show you the kind of audits that I do. I go right in here to analytics and the first thing that I want and again, nothing should come up here that's not already negative matched, because I, like I said I already went through this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But let me show you what I did to, in seconds across my account, find the worst keywords. So what I did was I said, hey, I'm looking back at the last two months of PPC activity here and I'm saying, hey, I want to see something that gave me zero sales, all right, but I had at least 30 clicks and I'm on the wrong page. I need to go to the search term page. Let me go to the search term. I can look at this at the ad group level, campaign level, target level. I'm going all the way down to the search term level in this case, all right. So again, I'm saying, hey, I had zero PPC orders, but I spent, let's just say, $8 at least on a keyword or on a search term, and what came up? Look at this Right instantly.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, great, I'm positive. I already negative match all of these because, like I said, I just did this audit. But look, if I had done this earlier I would have saved myself $152. Right here. This is not a big account, guys. This project X account doesn't do that much in sales anymore, but still, this is how much money I was wasting $150. I can just negative match all of these in one fell swoop. Right, right, instantly. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What about the flip side? What if I want to find some killer keywords again? All of this is automated anyway, so that that's why I don't have to negative match any of these, because it already did it. But what? What if I'm like hey, is there anything that is is is doing really well for me that maybe I could increase my bid on? So I'm going to go to my target instead of search term level, all right. And I'm going to say, hey, show me something that got at least one order. But the ACOS was less than 5%, like crazy kind of ACOS. Right, and take a look, there was three targets that hit that. All right, now you can see I already change it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But look at this. I was targeting this asin in an. It must have been in a product targeting or sponsor display. Look at this. It was a sponsor display campaign, guys. I spent a dollar and 42 cents and I sold $119 worth of product for a 1% ACOS. I could be leaving money on the table by having such a low bid. So my bid before was 47 cents. So you can see I already took action and I raised it up, almost doubled the bid, to see what would happen. Look at this one. Here's one where this broad match target fresh egg holder countertop. I had the bid at 51 cents and after one click I got $18 worth of sales. So now I raised the bid to $1. Cause I'm like, all right, let's see if I can get some more action on this keyword. But again, I click literally two things to be able to find this. So this is why, guys, I have four Amazon accounts and over 200 campaigns. This is why I can spend 10 minutes a week doing all of it and manage everything.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now I was going to go into a refund gene a little bit, but I went kind of long here on Adtomic, so I want to just make sure there's enough time for Q&A. So at this time I'm going to check back in the questions to see what questions you guys were asking. You can ask me about anything Helium 10 related here, and it doesn't have to be about PPC, it doesn't have to be about Adtomic. Another Facebook user says what can we do to reduce PPC? I pay a lot and every product I sell is paid for by Amazon, all right. So one thing is don't think about it. As far as you know, reduce PPC Like, if you're profitable, who cares if you spend a million dollars on PPC, if you're making $8 million, right, and you're profitable, right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So it's not just about the amount you're spending, but if you're be thinking more of, in terms of profitability, if you're spending so much on PPC that you are no longer profitable when you make a sale, yes, that is something you absolutely need to tackle and there's different metrics. You can look at that, you know. Maybe you're looking at your TACoS, your total, ACoS. Maybe you're looking at just your ACoS at the campaign level and you need to know what is your breakeven point, what? At what ACoS or TACoS are you able to turn a profit? And then that's the goal you set. And again, I just showed you guys how to do an Adtomic. You put in that goal of what you're trying to do where you know you can be profitable, and it's gonna kind of give you these suggestions automatically on what how you need to lower your bids in order to hit that goal. And, at the same time, it's not just about lowering bids, it's about stopping altogether spend on keywords that just are not doing it for you. So pretty much everything that I just showed you today, that is exactly what you need to be doing. You know, even if you whether you have Adtomic or whether you don't have Adtomic doesn't matter. You need to be auditing your account, looking at those metrics.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another Facebook user says what is the best ACoS? So the best ACoS is what you can make money on. All right, for some people it's 5%, because they have very slim margins. Some people it's you could be like 80% ACoS right, and you're not making money. But guess what? It's okay because you've got products in like Subscribin' Save or some kind of replenishment right, where you're willing to lose money on that first order, because you're selling tea or you're selling coffee or something like that, because you know that they're gonna turn on Subscribin' Save or a certain percentage of customers, so you're willing to lose money on that first order and because you're gonna get that money back, all right. So again, the answer to your question is there is no magic ACoS number. The magic number is whatever you can still be profitable at.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Somebody says my ACoS I'm not sure they're the same person because I can't see your name but they said my ACoS is 70%. You know, for me, if it was 70% that would be terrible. I'd be losing money, crazy money, because I do not have enough margins on my products where I can afford 70% ACoS. But three years ago me, I was doing a lot of supplements which I'm not doing anymore. I absolutely wanted 70% ACoS, all right. I've got an account that is a hemp cream, all right. And I'm totally fine with 50% ACoS because I'm getting people and Subscribin' Save, absolutely fine with 50% ACoS. But you know, in my coffin shelf, brad, I want 20% ACoS, all right. So you gotta use these kind of you know reasoning here in order to know if your ACoS is good or not. I've got a shout out from Tony from YouTube. He or she says cheers, cheers. Back to you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another Facebook user says what subscriptions should we upgrade to so I can communicate with me more? The way that you can communicate with me, regardless of levels is here Once a month. We open this up so you can talk to me on these, on this. Ask Me Anything. If you want to be able to reach out to me in a Facebook group that I check every day, it's the Elite Group, so only Helium 10 Elite members have direct access to me. You can even book one-on-one calls with me if you're a Helium 10 Elite member, and we also have weekly Zoom calls that usually I'm on as well. So lots of touch points in the Elite Program. I'm not trying to sell you Elite right now because, guess what, if you want to sign up for Elite right now, you can't. It's closed. It only opens up certain times of year and right now it's closed. But you know, go to helium10.me forward, slash elite. I think there's might be a waiting list there. And if you want to join that so that you could be able to talk to myself and Kari and Chevali and Kevin King, then yeah, make sure to sign up for the wait list for that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another Facebook user says I hired somebody, but unfortunately I don't get any profit. I pay a very high fee. For instance, the payment is 500. Are you talking about you hired somebody for PPC management? If so, don't do it. I suggest to anybody out there don't outsource your PPC unless it is a resourcing thing, in other words, that you, you're, you're trying to expand and you're a one person one man or one woman show and you just don't have the bandwidth to do PPC. But you know how to do PPC. Okay In that sense, go ahead and hire an agency or or a service provider to to to take care of it. But it's important that you know PPC really well yourself first. Otherwise it's going to be hard for you to judge the work of an agency or a service provider if you don't know what is good and what is bad management.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now my suggestion if you do have the bandwidth, you 100% should be doing PPC yourself. All right, you absolutely should be doing it yourself. Like, it's not that difficult, it's. It's complicated, right, there's a lot of moving parts, but, as you can see, tools like Adtomic just completely simplify the process and make it really fast. And that's why, to me, it's not even a bandwidth issue, if I can manage to I mean, guys, I work at Helium 10 full time, more than full time. Like you think I have time to be managing all the all these things on my own. I that's. I only spend 20 minutes working on PPC and that's that's for four Amazon accounts and I have a full time day job. Right, it's not that much. You should be doing Adtomic yourself or you should be doing PBC yourself.

 

Bradley Sutton:

In my opinion, if you have a tool like Adtomic Now, if you were trying to do it on your own and you have to do it manually and you've got 200 campaigns, what I do in 15 minutes would take you maybe five hours a week, if not more. All right, just look at that. Remember that bid page that I was showing you guys 179 bids after just five days to change, like what. That just takes forever to do manually and even to get to those calculations. So if you're on your own, I highly recommend not hiring out and there are plenty of great agencies out there and there is a need for them, like, we love agencies out there, I have them on this show, right. But those, the ones who I suggest using those, are the ones who have kind of like outgrown. They're like hey, I'm a seven figure seller and I've got 3000 campaigns to manage and I've only got one employee. I don't want to have to train somebody from scratch. Okay, go ahead and hire an agency, but if that's not you, I think you should be doing PBC yourself.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Somebody says the ACoS was 1%. Yeah, on that. On that example that I showed of how I had this crazy good search term, I had one where the ACoS was 1.18%. And then so that's a situation where it's like, let me raise my bid up right on this target because you might be leaving money on the table when your ACoS is so low. Because, like, let's say, my bid where I got that 1.18%, what was it? It was 47 cents. Right, maybe that 47 cent bid is only getting me impressions 10% of the time, like at the end of the day, when other people's budgets are out. Oh, then I start getting some bids or I start gaining impressions at that 47 cents. Maybe if I raise it to $1, I could be getting impressions all day long. All right, is my ACoS going to be 1%? No, but I don't care. If my ACoS is 10%, 10 times as much, I'm still making money like crazy. Because if my break even point is 20, 25%, that 10% is still making me money. So that's why you want to look at the small ACoS and don't just like pat yourself on the back and say I'm a PBC king, no, you want to raise that bid up because you might be leaving money on the table. All right, let's keep going with the questions now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Dennis says what should be an approximate ad spend to justify Adtomic monthly fee. It depends on how you value your time. It's $1.99 a month for Adtomic and that includes $10,000 spent. So basically that means if you are spending less than $10,000, if you're paying Amazon in PPC fees less than $10,000 a month, you're only paying that flat rate of Adtomic $199. So at that point it's a matter of how do you value your time. Like, if you value your time at $50 an hour, right, if you value your time at $50 an hour and it takes you 10 hours a month to do your PPC, that means you're kind of spending $500 of your own time on PPC and in that sense is $200 of Adtomic to take that 10 hours down to 30 minutes or less than one hour. Is that worth it? Absolutely it's worth it. You know Every week Above that it's still a matter of time savings. All right, if you're spending $20,000 a month to PPC, you've got a pretty big operation. All right, you know you're probably a million dollar seller. If you're spending $20, $30, $40,000 a month on PPC, it probably would take you a full-time employee to manage your PPC, or paying an agency like $1,000 a month or something like that, right? So in that sense again, it's probably worth it to have Adtomic, it's all. There's no right or wrong answer here. It's about how you value your time. If you only value your time at $10 an hour and it only takes you 10 hours a month to do PPC now manually, is it worth it to get Adtomic? Probably not, I'll be honest, probably not. But if you value your time more, then I would say it's worth it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Dennis, how to get initial reviews apart from the Vine program? That's pretty much it you know like. If you're talking about like some actual service that is, terms of service, approved, it's Vine. You know that's the only program that Amazon has for reviews. Now if you just wanna get a better chance at getting more reviews, you can use the Request Review. Amazon allows you to send one Request Review per order to customers. Has to be at least, I believe, eight days after the product delivers. So you can automate that in Helium 10 follow-up, right, you don't have to click one by one each order to say hey, let's say hey, 13 days after the product is ordered, send a Request Review. That actually triggers the Amazon Request Review inside of Seller Central. But you're doing it from Helium 10 follow-up and then you could just say, hey, do it on this day and only orders in this marketplace or only this ASIN, this schedule, this other ASIN, this other schedule. You can automate that and basically do, set it and forget it, and then that can give you a better chance to get a review, because your customers are theoretically reminded to leave a review more.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Sergio says what factors do you decide to negate a keyword or pause campaigns? It's very rare that I pause a whole campaign, right, like I don't think I've ever paused a whole campaign because my campaigns will have five, 10, maybe 15 targets. Sure, will I pause a target in the campaign, but all 15 of my targets are bad and I'm like that's very rare, you know. But to negate a keyword, I showed you what I put in Adtomic. I put, hey, I want at least 15, 20, sometimes 25 clicks and slash or a spend that's equal to 50% or more of the retail price of my product. So if I'm selling a $30 product, I put $15. In other words, if I get $15 worth of spend on a target with zero sales, I'm probably gonna go ahead and pause that target. What if?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another question from Sergio is what if the keyword is highly relevant but competitive and have to spend a lot to rank? Check your conversion rate, all right. So look at your conversion rate for that keyword in search query performance and see if it's really bad compared to your niche as a whole. You gotta figure out why. All right. So it's not just a matter of, oh, let me pause this or let me just keep spending a lot more money, et cetera, et cetera. It's a matter of you gotta figure out if that is your most important keyword, why are you not converting for it? Why are people converting for others more than yours? Is it your price? Is it your pictures? Is it your bullet points? What is it? That's something that's very important to consider. I don't just blindly change bids or just pause or just give up on a keyword just because I'm spending too much money. At the same time, I don't just blindly keep it going because I know this keyword is important. I have to understand why my conversion rate is not good on it and try and fix it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Matt says I've noticed that my overall ACoS for my PPC has almost doubled to 28% over the last two weeks. Does PPC usually get expensive around Christmas? Yes, ACoS per click goes up. A lot. People raise their budgets, they raise their bid sometimes and that's just gonna drive up the cost. So that is. I'm not saying oh, you gotta deal with it and be happy with losing money. But no, if you're asking, is this typical for this time of year, the answer is yes, and the reason why is because, again, people's budgets are higher, so that means less people are running out potentially of budget, so that you're not getting in at those cheaper prices that maybe you would towards the end of the day. Normally Other people are just like taking a blanket raising of their bids across the board so that to try and make sure they get top of search and that could be raising the bids as well. But yeah, this is a very competitive time for PPC.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Tony says what is the thing with the electronics category? Why don't you get data All the time? I mean, we can only give what Amazon gives, and so a lot of products in the electronics category, amazon doesn't give parent level BSR, so that means we can't have a sales estimate for it. Uh, now the says I spent $500 a day in ads. Uh, I get over 200,000 impressions, 350 clicks, but zero sales from those. However, my organic sales are extremely good. Is it because my impressions, my clicks? I'd make sure you're.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Uh, what is your look back period? I would not look this week. Make sure that you're looking at least one to two weeks back, and if those are the numbers you're seeing, that's very strange. I don't think I've ever seen 350 clicks in zero sales. Now, if that's across, like you know, 40 keywords or something, okay, well, well, that makes a little bit of sense. But first of all, make sure you're you're looking outside of just the, the attribution window. If you're looking within the seven days, it could very well be that somebody today is going to click on something or going to buy something that they clicked on maybe a week ago or something, uh, and you might be looking at the data and they'll say zero sales. But if you look at that same data for this week, in two weeks, it'll say you had sales. So I would make sure you're looking back at least two weeks, first of all.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But then, if, if it is true that you're just not getting sales, you got to figure out why are these keywords relevant to your listing? Now, if you've just got a whole bunch of those 350 clicks is across 50 keywords, right, so that each one is less than 10. I'm not sure it's time to panic yet because, like I said, I wait until I get 15, 20 clicks with no sales before I start worrying or thinking. That's not going to be good for me. You know, maybe only seven clicks per keyword has happened. Who knows, maybe your eighth click you're going to get a sale. So it all depends on what kind of um, what time period you're looking back on.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, and your, your second question kind of alludes that uh, now that it says could clicks that haven't been attributed to sales for that day be attributed to a high organic sales the following day? Uh, clicks can't be attributed to organic uh sales, like it's either one or the other. But if, if, if the sale, uh, the, the sale that you see might not be updated in Amazon as a PPC order, if that's what you're asking, then yes, that is possible, which is again why I suggest looking no less than uh a week, a week back and an older, instead of looking at this week. We got one more here. Let's see.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Matt says I love the freedom ticket course. Great job, learned a lot. Can you recommend a Google PPC course? I'm looking to drive more external traffic from Google directly to my Amazon listing. I've actually been looking into trying to create some content not myself because I'm not a Google expert but we might be bringing some Google ads into uh Helium 10 as far as in our training, so that we can, you know, let people know how to drive that external traffic. But even you know something that's very lucrative these days, even more than Google ads from right here is Tik Tok uh shop, and, and so I I suggest looking into Tik Tok shop If you haven't done so yet, matt, and we'll have some content about that soon as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. This is something that our serious sellers club and our elite members get every single week here, which is our ask me anything, but once a month we go ahead and open it up to everybody, like we did today, and we also repurpose this as a podcast. So thank you, guys, so much for joining us and we'll see you next week. If you're an SSC member, we'll see you guys next month. If you're just in our Facebook groups and make sure to write all your questions down about Helium 10, I'll try and get them answered right here, live on the air. Thanks a lot, guys. Bye, bye now.