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

#465 - Amazon Small Business Success Story

In this episode of SSP, we speak with two guests. Rod Johnson, Co-Founder of BLK & Bold specialty beverages and Andrea Marquez, Host of Amazon’s This is Small Business podcast. We explore the journey and story of Rod’s Amazon brand, from small business to a big brand that’s thriving inside the Amazon platform. Andrea also shares resources and programs inside Amazon like the Small Business Academy, Black Business Accelerator, and more! Don’t miss out on this episode where our guests share all their tips, strategies, and common factors that will lead your Amazon brand to success.

In episode 465 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Andrea, and Rod discuss:

• 03:43 – Rod’s Backstory
• 05:01 – Andrea’s Backstory
• 06:10 – How Did Rod Get His Start In Amazon?
• 08:00 – Hosting Amazon’s Podcast: This is Small Business
• 11:31 – Checking Out Rod’s Amazon Brand & Story
• 13:56 – Developing The Brand Story & Mission Before The Product
• 17:38 – Amazon Services & Programs You Should Know
• 19:30 – Free Resources From Small Business Academy
• 20:39 – Listen To The This is Small Business Podcast!
• 21:16 – How The Black Business Accelerator Helped Rod’s Business
• 23:57 – Rod Johnson’s Tips For New Amazon Sellers
• 25:00 – Common Factors Andrea Sees Successful Sellers Have
• 27:19 – Promoting Their Brand Through External Traffic
• 28:31 – Let’s Talk About Their Brand’s Logistics
• 29:10 – Bradley Doesn’t Like Coffee?!
• 30:38 – “Support Small Businesses”
• 31:20 – Bradley Walks Rod Inside The Helium 10 Suite Of Tools

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton: 

Today we’ve got our first seller on their show who’s never even used Helium 10 plus the host of a podcast that is fully run by Amazon itself. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Are you looking to learn how to sell on Amazon? The Freedom Ticket Course made by Kevin King is one of the most popular courses ever created for Amazon sellers. It’s got over 90 modules and 40 hours of detailed step-by-step training to help get you started on your entrepreneurial journey. Now, this course costs $997, but Helium 10 actually covers that cost of the course for any Helium 10 member. Find out why tens of thousands of students love this program by going to h10.me/freedomticket. Don’t forget that if you do, sign up for a Helium 10 account. Don’t pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10 to save 10% off for life. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sut. In this is the show that is actually a special show here cuz we’ve got Amazon themselves, another podcast, but literally from Amazon here on the podcast and we’ve got another Amazon seller. 

Bradley Sutton: 

So I’m so happy that we are, are here’s only the second time we’ve ever had somebody from Amazon on the podcast. And we’ve got thousands and thousands of listeners, and so you can kind of like flip the script a little bit. Now we’re gonna put Amazon in the spotlight, but we’ve got an Amazon Stellar who doesn’t use Helium 10 for the first time ever potentially on the show. This is great, to talk to somebody who, who’s had to scale up on their own. And we’ve got somebody who talks a lot to other Amazon sellers due to her podcast. So Andrea and Rod, welcome to the show. 

Andrea: 

Thank you for having us. No pressure on the Amazon side. 

Bradley Sutton: 

None. None at all. 

Rod: 

Thanks for having me. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Now Rod, you just said, while we are off air here, you’re from you’re in Des Moines right now? 

Rod: 

Yes, yes. The company’s based in Des Moines. And I have my business partner to blame for that his life choices. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. So that was my second question. Is that where you were born and raised, or I’m assuming not then? 

Rod: 

No. Born and raised about 30 minutes outside of Chicago in a small city called Gary, Indiana. 

Bradley Sutton: 

And then is that where you went to like high school? 

Rod: 

Yeah, yeah, born and raised there and then eventually traveled south to Bloomington, Indiana, where I earned my bachelor’s from Indiana University. 

Bradley Sutton: 

So you’re a Hoosier? 

Rod: 

Yes. Hoosier. Hoosier through and through. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. Through and through. All right. Andrea, what about you? Like, where are you right now, and then where did you grow up? 

Andrea: 

I am right now I’m living in Houston, Texas, and I am a Texas girly. I was born at the border of Brownsville, Texas. Lived on the Mexican side of it till I left to college at 17. So I’m Mexican American at heart, very daughter of a two immigrants. And, but at the same time, I’m a Texas girly, so I’m a little bit of both. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Tex-Mex. You said you went to college at 17. Where did you end up going? 

Andrea: 

I went to New York at Columbia University for my undergrad, which was like a huge culture shock for me coming from a relatively small city/town. And then going to this like the epicenter of like, everyone lives there almost. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Let’s switch back to Rod here. What was your main, like, like first career? Like what did you study there in college and then did you actually use that, as soon as you got out? 

Rod: 

Yeah. so I studied criminal justice or at least that’s what the paper says. But I started my career out actually in fundraising. I got a job on campus working for our call center, aka interrupting people’s dinners, asking them for– 

Bradley Sutton: 

You’re one of those huh? 

Rod: 

Absolutely. And it was better than working in fast food or working as a server, like, I can sit down and I can run my mouth. This sounds like the perfect job. And ultimately– 

Bradley Sutton: 

And nobody can throw the food right in your face or anything like that. 

Rod: 

There we go. And then just continue to use those skills that, that I acquired in undergrad to build a professional career as a fundraiser for different academic institutions as well as hospital organizations. So, I had an opportunity to or a ton of opportunities to speak with people from all walks of life and talk about how these different institutions really propelled their personal and professional lives. And you know, presenting them with the opportunity to invest in people to have that same experience was, was pretty rewarding. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. All right. Excellent. Excellent. And Andrea, what about you? Did you enter right into your field of study right away? 

Andrea: 

Not really similar to Rod here. The paper says I studied a double major in political science/international law, but I also double majored in theater directing. So I feel like at the end of the day, it’s all theater, isn’t it? I feel. So, but that took me to journalism. I think that right now what I’m doing is much more tied to my master’s degree than my undergrad, but it’s, it’s all the same. You learn how to tell stories. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. All right. So is this kind of like working for Amazon, your first entry into like the e-commerce side of things? 

Andrea: 

Absolutely. My background was much more into nonprofits, so this was very new to me. Yeah. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. All right. All right. So interesting, interesting. I love hearing that because the perspective of somebody who doesn’t hasn’t been 10 years and in e-commerce and might be already biased and jaded of certain things is always a fresh perspective to have. Now, Rod going back to you, how did you get any, it’s one jump from your major to what you ended up doing. It’s another jump to go into selling products online from fundraising. So where did that segue happen? 

Rod: 

Yeah as rewarding as that fundraising career was I just really reached a point where I had to take some self-inventory and ask myself, am I being fulfilled on all fronts and really at the most important fronts to me. So while I’m connecting these people back to their passions, my passions weren’t necessarily being addressed. And that was helping people who had similar circumstances to overcome that I did. So to that point my friend that I grew up with in Gary, Indiana was having those same conversations, right? Where it’s like, is this the end all be all for me? Do I want to continue to use my skills to grow someone else’s dream? Or can I use that to leverage something that’s really important to me? 

Rod: 

And you know, we were throwing a few things back and forth to each other, and what we realized is that we could use something that fueled us to fuel those passions, and that thing was coffee. So as you know, that idea became more and more of a reality the easiest, or rather I say the path that had the fewest barriers of entry was going to e-comm, right? So you can have your brick-and-mortar space and you can have a profound impact in your community or you can make your product and rather our social impact mission more accessible to millions of people by way of e-comm. So it was intentional and really it was the path of least resistance that led us there. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. Interesting. Now, Andrea, were you hired at Amazon for the podcast or have you been doing other things there? 

Andrea: 

I was hired specifically for the podcast, and it’s very nice to hear Rod again, cuz he was in one of our first episodes of season one. He believed in us before we had even launched of this is small business, and I solely dedicate my time here at Amazon to telling small business owner stories. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Let’s talk about how this got started. When did it start? What was the kind of like the thoughts there at Amazon of why they needed something like this? And if you can just talk a little bit about the history and then you just mentioned it, but if you can mention again, the name of the podcast so everybody can take out their phones and make sure to subscribe to it right now while they’re listening to this one. 

Andrea: 

Yes, of course. So the podcast is, This is Small Business and it’s hosted by me. And we produced, this is Small Business because we understood that as an aspiring entrepreneur. And Rod, maybe you can also talk to this later, but like, there’s a lot you’re learning along the way. And the more I talk to small business owners, the more I realize how it’s a lot of things are new and you have to learn a little bit about everything. And especially if you’re someone who’s starting their first business, you, you don’t really know what you don’t know, right? So we wanted to make sure that we had something inspirational, but also easy to listen to and on the go. And that’s why podcasting was the best way to go for us right now. And I think that this is small business serves us two things. So it’s an accessible educational resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners, right? 

Andrea: 

But I think it’s also a great way to celebrate and highlight small business stories, which before I started working on this, I feel like we didn’t hear about a lot of these stories. We hear more about like, these bigger brands that have made it and like, have become household names, but a lot of the small business owners who are in this journey, they wanna hear from people who are either going through what they’re going with through right now or are have just passed that. Right. And they’re barely starting to learn what it is to build a small business. And so on the podcast, we of course cover hot topics and challenges that small business owners face every day. And then we end every episode with key lessons that I think all small business owners can use on their journey. 

Bradley Sutton: 

I like it. I like it. All right now. Yeah. Rod, what would you think, this is obviously not your first podcast because you were on This is Small Business first. Like, some people are reluctant, I think to kind of like tell their story and then it’s really funny. Like, I’m not sure how involved you are with the Amazon community, but it’s really weird that I mean, in the outsider’s opinion I’m not an outsider, but like when I tell this to other people, they just don’t understand it. Like, a lot of people at Helium 10 here work or don’t come from an Amazon background. And what’s really weird to them is that Amazon sellers, they’re so private, a lot of them are private. Like you have you know, a party of 300 Amazon sellers, 290 of them don’t even want you to know what category they’re selling because they think that maybe they’re gonna get attacked by listing hijackers or something so that’s, that’s kinda like a, a little culture shock in the Amazon world. 

Bradley Sutton: 

But you, you’re pretty much open with your brand. Like did you talk about it with today on her, on her show? 

Rod: 

Yeah, absolutely right. I mean we are in the for-profit business, while I have a nonprofit background you know, black and Bold exists to make a profit and participate in community economics, and the only way that we are going to welcome more people into that ecosystem is to drive our passion to of helping kids in need is to talk about it. The thing that’s most authentic to us is our story. You know, we know that there are others that can relate, whether it be our background, whether it be our entrepreneurial journey and dealing with the turbulent times that are inevitable. And the successes that come along with it, we, we felt as though that was it needed to be heard. That’s what inspired us to even jump into entrepreneurship where other people’s stories, right. You know, generically you can point to something like a Shark Tank and you hear all of these entrepreneurs that have amassed some success in their relative, their communities and they’re looking for that boost. That’s inspiring, right? That’s the American dream. And we wanted to participate in inspiring the next generation of business owners and just career professionals. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Yeah. Now speaking since you are open to it, lemme just share my screen really quick for everybody to see. I’m looking at one of your listing pages right here, and you talked about your story and like you’re literally using the brand story section on an Amazon listing and a lot of people don’t. You have got here meet the founders and you talk a little bit about your goals here. You know, like you know it says you create this company with a desire to unite coffee and tea lovers worldwide. I’ve got my tea here, by the way. I’m not drinking coffee, but I go coffee sometimes. And then it says, the common interest of investing communities specifically for youth. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Now, sometimes I think Amazon sellers out there who do have a brand story or decide to kind of like weave in a story here. They start with the product first and then after a while they’re successful. Alright. Alright. Let me go ahead and start talking about the founders and let’s talk about our mission, but I could be wrong here. It seems to me that with what you’re saying here, like you, you almost had the mission first and the story first, and then you kind of like develop your brand around that. Would I be kind of on the right path there? 

Rod: 

That is 100% accurate. You must have our place bug essentially. But yeah, that’s what we did. It was certainly mission first and the product is more of a vehicle to help elevate and, and propel that mission. And like I mentioned we just look at our own daily habits. We drink coffee and tea. I traveled a lot for work meeting with different donors where do you set up shop when you’re on the road? In a coffee shop. You go to a Starbucks, you go to someplace that has cheap wifi and you get your work done. And I had a, a real affinity for the, the, the community the coffee community and how welcoming it was. 

Rod: 

And we’re like, that’s gonna be the, the vehicle that, that drives this social impact mission. That’s, that’s really core and keen to our DNA. So yeah, you couldn’t be more spot on by saying it was mission first and then coffee. So as our company continues to grow, we don’t talk as much about our story, that that’s our foundation and it is more about the product experience and how there are differentiators between us and other indie brands and other more household names and we’re getting great response, right? We’re getting even deeper affinity from those that are already in our community and they’re telling other people and is just continuing to grow in a real organic and rapid fashion. So I think that we’re looking in hindsight to choose the right path to get those people that are lifelong fans. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Yeah. Now, how much do you think that’s helped you? I see that you have, you’ve got your own website too. I’m assuming you might have social media out there, or ways to communicate with your customer or even on Amazon, like, like do you get messages from people where it’s like, Hey man I love your story, or really resonated with me, where you kind of get the vibe. Like, I bet you that at the beginning they probably had three or four different coffees they had to choose from. They had no idea what your brand was, but when they, they started learning about you, they’re like, you know what? I’m gonna go with this one. You think you could say that there’s a certain percentage of your customers that’s definitely resonated. Maybe that’s the reason they’re even your customer? 

Rod: 

Absolutely. Right. So there, there are many reasons why people rock with our brand, right? Whether it be because we have a great product, it could be the fact that we give back to the community. But one thing that certainly is also true is the fact that there’s a relatability between us and our consumers, right? We didn’t come from coffee. Pernell and I, my business partner just had an affinity for coffee and tea. In fact, I didn’t even drink coffee before starting the business. So similar to you, I would have it every now and again, right? I was more of a tea guy and being vulnerable, if you will, even if that’s vulnerable. But being vulnerable and sharing that and, and letting people see how we were able to learn as we built this business that is something that people you know, stop us and tell us about all the time. Whether it be when we go to a farmer’s market or if we’re at a conference or wherever we are and people are familiar with our brand. You can guarantee that someone says, Hey, this, this inspired me. Thank you. Because I too didn’t know a lot about coffee. I’m intimidated by walking into a coffee shop because I don’t know what’s the difference between a light, medium, and dark roast. And because you were– 

Bradley Sutton: 

I don’t know what’s the difference. I’ll tell you that right now. 

Rod: 

I can nerd out if you want me to, cuz I’ve learned so much in the five years that we’ve had our business. But you know, that just being more human and not performative. I think that’s always gonna resonate and cut through the noise. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. Now switching back to Andrea, like I was just looking at Rod’s listening here, I saw that he’s part of the black-owned business program, and I actually had somebody from Amazon. See, I can’t say that you’re the first person from Amazon here on the podcast because she came on here before, and I’ve actually had some of my listeners in my network who are part of this and talked about the benefits. Now everybody knows about FBA and everybody knows about PPC and stuff like that. But what are some other things that Amazon provides that you think maybe have flown under their radar, some of your favorites? 

Andrea: 

Yeah, so there’s a lot, and through my conversations with Amazon sellers, I’ve come to learn about a lot of new ones. So shameless plug, I will say this is small business. Listen to us, we are a great tool and resource and we’re not just educational, but we are inspirational. As Rod has mentioned, we tell great stories like Black and Bolds. And I think, for me, it’s pretty cool to be able to help small businesses tell their brand story because it really changes the game in terms of being memorable and having loyal customers. And then going back to what you mentioned with the Black Business Accelerator, that’s also a very exciting one that I’ve learned about a lot because a lot of our guests on the show are part of the Black Business Accelerator, and they have very tailored programs and an experience for each black-owned business that’s part of it. 

Andrea: 

So they have financial assistance through credits and cash investment opportunities, which is great. They have business education and coaching, and then marketing and advertising support. So I highly recommend it if you’re a black-owned business. And then the last one I will say, which is fairly new, and that’s also why it hasn’t been heard of that much yet, but it’s the Amazon Small Business Academy. And the reason I’m super excited about this one is because it’s a one-stop shop and you can get a bunch of resources from it regardless if you are selling in the Amazon store or not, and everything is free. And I mentioned that because a lot of people can’t believe that the Amazon Small Business Academy has all of those resources for free. And what you do is you get on the site, which is www.smallbusiness.amazon, and you take a free self-assessment. And then based on that self-assessment, they figure out where you are in your business journey. And then they choose a learning track specifically for you. There’s live and on-demand training, there’s Q&As, there’s events, and podcasts as well, including that this is small business podcasts and there’s more coming soon as well. So highly recommend for anyone wherever they are in their small business journey. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. Now, I think everybody, I’m sure your podcast is searchable on any podcast player like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or on a computer and you want to take, gets a visual look at some of her episodes, I found it at smallbusiness.amazon.com and then you click on that podcast. Now I would probably recommend, even though I haven’t yet, that’s the first one I’m gonna do. The very first episode that I’m gonna listen to of yours is episode seven here. Cuz there’s this good-looking gentleman and his partner here, we’re on this podcast. 

Andrea: 

Yes. One of our favorite. 

Bradley Sutton: 

I heard they have a good story, Rod and Purnell here. Now switching back to Rod, like one thing I’ve learned about the black-owned business program is, it’s like you start getting an Amazon rep that you can’t call, like you’ve got some issues and something stuck with a listing or they might call you and say, Hey, like, I noticed you’re not using the brand story. What are some of the benefits that you have experienced by being part of this program on the Amazon side? Like how have you been helped that maybe if you weren’t part of this program, you might have been stuck or might have been harder at least to fix or figure something out. 

Rod: 

Yeah. So I’ll double-click on what Andrea has said. That’s just having a program that’s tailored to where you are in your journey and having someone that is invested in your success, right? So we meet with our person rather frequently whether we’re initiating those calls or he’s reaching out to say, Hey, have you thought about this? Here’s a new program. Here’s an opportunity to be among other sellers. It’s a plethora of resources that we otherwise would have no knowledge of, right? So again an earlier statement was, you don’t know what you don’t know. And we’ve been able to peel back a lot of the layers of Amazon by way of participating and the Black Business Accelerator. So much so it’s been so helpful that Purnell, my business partner actually now sits on the advisory team for the Black Business Accelerator. So just by way of staying connected and trying to find additional ways for us now to be helpful for earlier stage small businesses you know, that, that, that opportunity presented itself. So again, we love it and we want to continue to be a part of both ends being resourceful a as well as using the resources that are within it. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. Cool. Cool. Now, I don’t have access to your numbers, but using Helium 10, I can kind of see the estimated number of sales you’re doing and you can see how many reviews you’ve got. You’re definitely doing, you’re definitely, I would call you successful on Amazon. So there might be listeners out there who just starting out and are wondering what are, if you had to think of maybe two or three things that, either a specific thing, like a specific strategy you’re using or just a mindset kind of aspect of things that has been a contributor to your success. What, what kind of advice would you give to newer sellers out there? 

Rod: 

Gosh, that’s such a loaded question. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Putting you on the spot here. 

Rod: 

Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways whether you know, you think about the storefront itself and the image and the message that you want to be conveyed as soon as someone is introduced to your store. And that’s something that I don’t think you should go by the wayside. Think you should play a lot of time and intentionality to make sure that your images and your descriptors again, tell the story that you want for your brand. In addition to that we were not afraid and are not afraid to advertise on Amazon. There are a lot of different ways that we’ve been able to use that strategy or use strategies within the paid ad function to welcome more people into our ecosystem. And that’s also something that people, I think, shy away from. But there are resources out there that can help guide those that may be a little bit more novice and throwing up hate at it. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. What about you, Andrea? You know, you’ve talked to a number of sellers yourself due to the podcast. Any traits that they have or, or common themes or like this is what helped them get to where they are apart from what Rod mentioned, I 

Andrea: 

Think one of the things that we cover across episodes that I would tell small business owners or aspiring entrepreneurs who are barely starting out. If you don’t have a strong why, you’re only gonna get so far when you try to communicate what your brand stands for and what your vision is to your customers. So I think that in order to be memorable, to connect and to inspire, have a strong brand story, understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and I think through that, you will inevitably be able to bring along the right type of customer for you for a lifelong journey. And it doesn’t matter if you change or not. And as an example, one of the small business owners I speak to actually talks about how they had to completely rebrand, change the name of their business, and a lot of customers had a couple of issues with that because they were so tied, it was part of their identity almost, that it’s like taking part of their identity away. And that’s because they had such a strong brand story. It was more than just a name. It was more than just a product. It’s who you are. So if I could tell that to any small business owner, it would be that have a strong brand story. And then the second thing tied to that is to choose carefully who you surround yourself with. Who is part of your team, because that will have a lot to do with how successful your business ends up being. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay, cool. Now going back to Rod, are you sending outside traffic at all to bring them to Amazon? Like I just assumed that you had social media or do you send most people to your website or what’s your outside, obviously, the biggest advantage of Amazon is you’ve got this existing traffic, a bunch of people who are already searching for these keywords related to your product and you can take advantage of it. But we know Amazon loves outside traffic too. So how are you getting new eyes to your listings? 

Rod: 

So we’ve been fortunate enough to build a couple of subscriber lists, whether it be email or SMS. And at given points, whether it be around Prime Day or other promo times, we’ll send or send out communication letting people know about those opportunities that exist on Amazon. I don’t have a direct breakdown as to how often that happens, but it’s again, in alignment with our promo strategy. That was something that we didn’t do at first. In full transparency, well, we would only drive to our website or to our brick-and-mortar retail partners, but we recognized that we wanted to make sure that we give our consumer base as many opportunities as possible to shop our brand. You know, we have a lot of prime customers that exist within those two subscriber lists. And we wanted to, again, present to them and give them, an option that otherwise they probably didn’t know about. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. Nice. Now, do you have your own warehouse too, like where you fulfill, like off Amazon or everything you use like the FBA inventory even to fulfill your website sales, or? 

Rod: 

So we use FBA we do have a manufacturing facility here in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s grown from my friend’s garage to about 33,000 square feet where we will produce a manufacturer and package all of our, all of our goods, and then we send them to Amazon for them to fulfill those orders there. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Nice, nice. Everything made in the USA? 

Rod: 

Well, coffee there are only two states that actually grow coffee. Fun fact California and Hawaii. Coffee otherwise is grown in places that are close to the equator, right? So think about Brazil, and Columbia. 

Bradley Sutton: 

I don’t know anything about coffee. So like, that might be an ignorant question here, but like you, like you, I’m a tea drinker mainly. But I do drink coffee, but it’s only for the caffeine. So like, like, I actually don’t even like the taste of coffee, but sometimes I’ll drink coffee, so. 

Andrea: 

No, no. That’s unacceptable. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Oh, no. You see, that always offends the die-hard coffee fans, is it? 

Andrea: 

Weren’t you a coffee drinker Rod, or, yeah, 

Rod: 

I wasn’t. And I certainly, that pendulum has swung dramatically, right? So instead of my chai or my green jasmine, I have traded it in for a nice fruity aromatic light roast from Ethiopia. 

Andrea: 

Good job. Good job. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Side note, Ethiopian food is my favorite food, even one step above Mexican food. But so Ethiopian coffee, I’m sure I like it too. But anyways, one more thing to offend on here. When I drink coffee, because I don’t like the taste, I dump two scoops of protein powder into each coffee just so I can have a completely changed taste, but I don’t think that’s like diehard coffee. People would probably get upset at you. 

Rod: 

Oh yeah. You, you’re giving them heart palpitations right now, my friend. 

Andrea: 

That sounds awful. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Alright, Andrea, we better go back to you. Parting words for you for our audience. Words of advice, strategies, anything that you could share with everybody. 

Andrea: 

Support small businesses just in general. They not only are so incredibly passionate and I have the honor of being able to tell their stories every day, but they have great products just all around and they’re very personalized and they really think about the customer journey and how they can help you. And when you buy the product you’re getting a good quality, well-thought-out product. So do that. And then obviously just do some research on all of the Amazon resources offered if you are an aspiring entrepreneur or an early-stage business owner, because anything you need there is something out there to help you, including, obviously this is small business. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Awesome. Awesome. Now, normally at the end of the podcast, I do like, like I just, like, I just did and I was asking about y’all’s strategies, but I’m gonna do something completely different since, since Rod says he’s not using Helium 10. Let me just show you just some of the power here of what we do. While you were talking, I just ran one of your, like, I’m assuming this is one of your top sellers right here. Cause it comes at the top of your, your storefront here, and then I can instantly see where all of the keywords you are ranking for organically. And so I could see right off the bat that, hey, you’re doing excellent like, on your branded terms here, like people are, are searching black and bold coffee black and bold just by itself is has some search volume and you’re ranking high. 

Bradley Sutton: 

You’re actually ranking for even competitor brands here. But what’s interesting is you know, like there’s not a lot of like, generic keywords that you might be. So what would be cool is that like, I don’t know too much about the space. I know there’s like death wish coffee and other ones like that. But imagine being able to look at this now, like, hey, go to your competitors’ listing and kind of reverse engineer where are their sales coming from. And so you’ll be able to do that by seeing where they’re showing up for in the organic ranks. I could see where you’re, where you’re doing some sponsored ranks like you’re, you’re definitely targeting your own brand. I could see your position three on that one. But bold coffee you were showing up there. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Not very highly, but you could just instantly look at any of your competitor listings and see and kind of like reverse engineer their keyword strategy. Cuz like I said for me, one of the biggest benefits of Amazon is you just got so much traffic that like 15 years ago, you had to pay for all these eyeballs to come onto your product. You gotta pay cold traffic to come to your listing. With Amazon, you don’t have to worry about that because there are just millions of people already shopping. So it’s like finding out what are the keywords that are relevant to my product, are people searching for? And then what’s driving the sales of my comparison? So I’m gonna hook you up with like three months free of Helium 10 and get you started so that you can start doing some research, maybe optimizing your listing a little bit more, maybe targeting some new keywords you haven’t before. And let’s see if we can increase those already good sales that I can see from here. How’s that sound? 

Rod: 

That sounds amazing. And it’s just in time for as we are celebrating or just celebrating our fifth year anniversary yesterday, right? So I’m gonna receive that gift. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Fifth-year anniversary, gift anniversary for Black and Bold Coffee. And then in exchange, all I ask for is, I noticed that you’ve got some kind of Matcha, something, I saw it on your website and some of your keywords here. That’s my weakness right there. I don’t care about Matcha any, I will eat Matcha. I just spent three weeks in Japan. I had Matcha things that I didn’t even know existed. I don’t think it was a Matcha coffee yet, but there’s definitely Matcha tea. I know. So you’re gonna have to hook me up with some of that. How’s that sound? 

Rod: 

Bartering is my middle name. So sounds like a plan. 

Bradley Sutton: 

There you go. All right. Well, I appreciate both of y’all coming on the podcast today. And I’m about to go binge-listen. Is that a word? Binge Listen? 

Andrea: 

It is now. 

Bradley Sutton: 

I’m about to binge. All right. We’re gonna make that trendy right now. I’m gonna go binge-listen to This is Small Business Podcast with Andrea here, and I’m about to partake in the black and bold. Just to make Andrea happy. I’ll you’re gonna have to send me some coffee too. Some black and bold coffee too. And I’ll try and have it unadulterated with protein powder. 871584518 

Andrea: 

Try it just alone Alone. Okay. And then you can add maybe a little coffee if you don’t want it that strong. I mean, sorry, little milk if you don’t want it that strong, but keep away. Let’s separate the protein powder and the coffee. 

Bradley Sutton: 

Okay. All right. I’ll try my best. But thanks guys for coming to the podcast. It’ll be lovely to like, maybe reach out to y’all in 2024 to see what’s new. 

Rod: 

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. 

Andrea: 

Thanks for having us.

#464 - Amazon Prime Day Strategy Checklist

Prime Day is an excellent opportunity for Amazon sellers to boost their sales, gain exposure, and connect with new customers. In this SSP episode, Bradley unveils his never before shared strategies and techniques to help you prepare for Prime Day. We will also provide insights from three successful Amazon sellers who have achieved remarkable results, including the 9-figure brand Solo Stove!
 
Our panel of guests share their game plans and tips for Prime Day success, giving valuable advice on PPC campaigns, sales strategies, and simple ways to maximize sales during this event. Whether you’re a seasoned Amazon seller or just starting out, this blog offers valuable insights to help you make the most of Prime Day and boost your sales.

In episode 464 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kseniia, Mike, and Nate discuss: 

• 02:25 – Have Brand Analytics? How To Check For Top Performing Keywords
• 03:46 – Check For ALL Of The Keywords A Product Was Ranking For
• 04:04 – How To Check Your Historic PPC Budget Utilization
• 05:45 – Making Bulk Changes To Your Budgets with Adtomic
• 06:52 – Utilize Adtomic Budget Rules
• 07:45 – Try To Determine Competitors Sales: Organic Or Sponsored Search
• 10:37 – Find The Keywords That Converted For You In PPC Last Year
• 11:57 – Check Your Sales Heat Maps from Last Year
• 13:08 – Check Your Competitor Price History
• 14:08 – Check CPC & Keyword Ranks BEFORE Prime Day Last Year
• 14:11 – Check CPC & Keyword Ranks DURING Prime Day Last Year
• 15:18 – Let’s Welcome Today’s Guests
• 15:41 – Nate Barnard From Solo Stove
• 16:35 – Mike Kim 7-Figure Amazon Seller
• 16:57 – Kseniia Reidel 6-Figure Amazon Seller
• 17:19 – Solo Stove Is Making 9-Figures In Sales Annually!
• 17:57 – How Many Sales Do They Make During Prime Day
• 18:46 – How Does A Big Brand Go 30x On Prime Day?
• 26:39 – Leveraging Adtomic For Their Prime Day PPC Campaigns
• 28:50 – Kseniia’s Gameplan For This Year’s Prime Day
• 29:42 – Nate And Solo Stove’s Gameplan For Prime Day
• 30:13 – Mike’s Gameplan For Prime Day
• 31:03 – Kseniia’s 60-Second Tip 
• 31:28 – Nate’s 60-Second Tip
• 32:44 – Mike’s 60-Second Tip

► 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, I’m gonna give you guys my top strategies on how to prepare for Prime Day. And we’re gonna listen to three sellers out there who have been crushing it as Amazon sellers, and including one who was a nine figure seller, who had a 3000% sales increase on Prime Day. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

If you’re like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don’t have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me, allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I’m managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic For more information. That’s h10.me/adtomic. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. 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.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, we’ve got a special episode today because we are getting ready for Prime Day. All right, so Prime Day is coming up and for some sellers, this is one of the biggest days of, of sales for the year. So we obviously kind of like want to know what do we need to do to get ready for Prime Day, at least on like the advertising and maybe keyword analytics side. What are the things that we can do in order to make sure we put our best foot forward? So I’m gonna be giving you guys my top tips, and then later on in the show, we’re gonna invite three different sellers on here who are at different stages. You know, we’ve got a six figure seller, a seven figure seller, and a nine figure seller. A couple of them were able to 530000% x 30,000, 3000% x Their pri, their regular sales on Prime Day one seller was actually down on Prime Day.

Bradley Sutton:

So we’re gonna learn what mistake that he that he made and that he’s gonna correct this year so that you guys don’t make that same mistake. So, but first, before we get into that, let’s go ahead and get into my top strategies. How many people have brand registry who are currently selling on Amazon? All right, so what does that mean? If you have brand registry, you have access to search query performance and brand analytics. So what you can see with search query performance, I’m gonna want you guys to go back and take a look back at the week. All right? So go back to either your brand or the ASIN level as you can see on the screen. And you are gonna go to the week of 2022, July 10th, all right, because that was the week that Prime Day was. And then you are gonna sort this list of the keywords by search funnel purchases and sort it by ASIN count.

Bradley Sutton:

What that number means is you are, you now have a list in descending order of the keywords that generated sales during that week for Prime week, all right? You’re gonna be able to do that in brand analytics as well for your competitor. So in search, career performance is mainly for your own products, but then take your top competitors, throw the ASIN into brand analytics, and then again, go to the week last year from when Prime Day was, and then see where were your competitors. One of the top three clicked products during the week of Prime Day. Next strategy here, check for all of the keywords a product was ranking for. So if you’re a Helium 10 member, you can see the difference here of when you’re looking at brand analytics. And then when you’re looking at Cerebro, Cerebro is taking a whole month of information.

Bradley Sutton:

So you wanna look at the historical trend of prime month instead of Prime Week Brand Analytics, Search Query Performance is going by week in Cerebro. We’re looking back in a month. So you’re gonna put July, those of you who are elite members, you can do this. You want to go to July, 2022, and this is gonna show you all of the keywords that you and your competitors were showing up for in organic and sponsored ranks on average for the entire month of July. You’re gonna want to take a list of those keywords. Next strategy, check your historic budget utilization. So what you wanna do hopefully you were downloading your reports during Prime Day last year for all of you who are new sellers, Hey, make sure to download your reports this year so you can have it, because you might not be able to see it in Seller Central all going all the way back one year, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Cuz you can only see usually a few months of information. So make sure to download your information. So if you did that or in Adtomic, you can go back a year or even two years to see what was going on with your advertising. You can’t do that in Seller Central. So what you wanna do is, like, right here, here are the, I put Adtomic to the two days of Prime Day last year, and I could see that my budget on one of these campaigns was $30 a day. I only spent $50. What does that mean? That means I obviously didn’t hit my budget on that campaign, but there’s a couple other campaigns, as you can see here, that I clearly hit the budget and we even went a tiny bit over the budget. So this is gonna give you an idea about, hey, you know what, for these products or these campaigns, I better keep an eye on this.

Bradley Sutton:

I might want to think about increasing my budget during Prime Day this year. Now, once you make that decision, you can actually make bulk changes to your budgets. Or maybe you’re just like, you know what, I wanna make sure I don’t run a budget on any of my campaigns. All my campaigns are super profitable. I just want to bulk change for Prime Day this year. So what you’re gonna do is right before Prime Day, the day before Prime Day, you can go into Helium 10 Adtomic and then select all the campaigns you want to increase your budget and select bulk actions and so just with one, a couple of clicks, you are going to be able to change all of your budgets. You can do something very similar in Seller Central. That’s the in the advertising campaign manager right there on the right hand side, there’s an option where you can select multiple campaigns, and then you can do a bulk edit adjust budget.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, let’s say you don’t want to do it. You don’t wanna have to remember to turn off your budget. So all of those is gonna change your budget. Like maybe you’re doubling your budget, right? But after Prime Day, maybe you want to go back to what it was. If you don’t wanna have to do another bulk edit, well, maybe the tool that you can use, it’s actually something in Amazon Advertising and Seller Central, it’s a Budget Rules. This is fairly new. A lot of, you might not have seen this before, but if you go into your Budget Rules and then select settings, you can actually schedule certain budgets. You can pick a custom date, or you can choose the date of Prime Day. You can also do this during special holidays, like you can see there. You could have done this on Memorial Day as well.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s if you want to not have to worry about going back and changing your budget, but the only drawback on this is you can’t do it in bulk. You have to do this kind of campaign by campaign. So there’s pros and cons of each way. Let’s keep going here with some more strategies. I showed you guys about the top performing keywords I showed you guys about checking for the historical keyword ranks of a product. Now, take a look at this one. You wanna determine if your competitors were getting sales from organic or sponsored search, all right? So for example this is what you want to do, get your top competitors. So hopefully you did the other steps first, right? So get one of your top competitors. Now go into Helium 10 Keyword Tracker and put their ASIN in your Keyword Tracker.

Bradley Sutton:

A lot of people think Keyword Tracker is only for your own products. No, no. You can track any product on Amazon, yours or not, in keyword Tracker. And then you can actually see the historical ranks. So remember in the previous steps either through through Amazon or through through Helium 10, you’re checking what keywords were driving sales for you and your competitors. You know, maybe you found that in Search Querey Performance for you. Maybe you found it in Brand Analytics for your competitor. Maybe you found it for you or your competitor in Cerebro historical data. Add those keywords and their products into keyword tracker. And guess what? Even though you, you weren’t tracking those keywords back then, guess what we probably were. If this is a keyword that was at least like viewed and had a search volume of like 1000 or 3000, we were probably tracking it even way before you.

Bradley Sutton:

So what you’re gonna see is you are gonna be able to go back in history in keyword tracker, you click on the graph, and then you click like all time or one year and then zoom in at the very day level of Prime Day last year. Guys, this is like, I hope your mi your minds are being boggled right now, guys, because this is mind boggling stuff of what you guys can do. I mean, people can’t do this. Who, who do Facebook ads and stuff like that. It’s not as easy as just like a couple clicks. Like, like we’ve made it here. So you, you can see where was their sales coming from? We already determined through our other steps, competitors were getting sales from his keywords. Was it from organic sponsored or both?

Bradley Sutton:

Take a look at the top one. I know it’s hard to see if you have a small screen, but that was a keyword coffin shelf. And this is one of the competitors, right? You can see that they were getting sales from both placements. Look at that. They were organically positioned, one and two, and they were sponsored rank fluctuating between like two, pretty much they were one sponsored rank there as well. But take a look at the bottom keyword there. I did the same thing to this competitor’s listing, and one of them, the coffin decor, they were at the top of page one, so they’re probably getting their sales from the organic rank, but look at their sponsored rank there. They were on page two, so they were probably not getting any sales from sponsored rank. So this is gonna give you some crazy amounts of visibility to understand exactly how your competitors were making sales from search.

Bradley Sutton:

Was it from PPC? Was it organic? Was it both? So super cool stuff here. Let’s keep going. Find the keywords that converted for you in PPC last year. Take a look at the screen here. I have Adtomic going. You, you’re not gonna be able to do this in Seller Central, unless, like I said, hopefully you downloaded your reports last year, but if you were selling last year and you were using Adtomic, go in there, set the date range of Prime Day and find all of your profitable keywords. Like here, I put, hey, I wanna look at the keywords that had less ACoS of less than 40% and had at least one PPC order it. I’m just pretending that that was my, my my kind of like breakeven point and then now instantly I’m gonna see all of the keywords that drove sales in PPC for my product.

Bradley Sutton:

And then what I’m gonna want to do is I need to put these keywords into Keyword Tracker to make sure that I am ranking highly for these keywords still. Now, it’s important that you get an early start. Like whenever Prime Day is gonna be, if your organic rank is low, you’re not gonna increase your organic rank in a couple days if you wait until then. Start now with, with perhaps trying to increase your organic rank by having some aggressive PPC to hopefully get your organic rank up so that by Prime Day you are already there at the top of the page. Only a couple more strategies here, and then we’re gonna have some cool interviews. But another Helium 10 tool is Inventory Heat Maps and Sales Heat Maps. So go into Helium 10, go into the profits tool, and then under inventory heat maps or under Heat Maps go to Sales Heat Maps.

Bradley Sutton:

Go to the Prime Days in July of last year and take a look at where your sales were. Look at that top screenshot there. That was one of the coffin shelves and you can kind of see those bigger circles are showing where the sales were at the time. Where my heavy duty sales were. Now what you’re going to want to do is you’re gonna want to look at your inventory heat maps now and make sure you have enough inventory distribution. I’m looking here and not, I had a lot of sales last year in the Washington area. You guys see that there in the northwest. But look, now I barely have any inventory in Washington, so I’m probably gonna want to send more inventory to Amazon and hope that they’re gonna distribute it a little bit more.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is another thing that you can be doing in the weeks leading up to Prime Day to make sure you have enough inventory distributed around. Another one you can do is check your competitor price history. Like did they lower their regular price or did they have a sale price going during Prime Day? You can actually do that. Go to any of your competitor listings. And then with that Helium 10 chart right there that has a history of their prices, what I want you to do is you’re gonna click on one year or all time and then take a look at Prime Day last year, go to July of last year, and then you could see. Look at this customer. Look at this coffin shelf. They lowered their price down, it looks like $3. They lowered their price $3 down during Prime Day.

Bradley Sutton:

So now I’m like, you know what? Maybe they’re gonna do that this year. I kind of have a heads up on what their strategy might be, and I can like at least have a few days to think about, Hmm, what about me? Do I want to have a similar strategy? Should I lower my price $3? You have this visibility on even your competitor’s price history. Next one here is check your cost per click and keyword ranks on your main keywords before Prime Day last year. Lemme say that again before Prime Day. So now the next step after I do that, and I write down those numbers, take a look now, do the cost-per-click and keyword ranks on those main keywords during Prime Day. So look at that date above, I changed it to July 12th and July 13th of last year. And take a look.

Bradley Sutton:

Those bids are 66 cents and 68 cents. So now I know that, you know what, during Prime Day, my cost per click actually went up a little bit more than 10%. So now I’m wondering, well, wait a minute. Did I lose keyword rank or did I maintain keyword rank right there at the bottom? I maintained sponsored rank on number one. So with this information, if I was selling last year on Prime Day, now I know, all right, for this year, I’m going to need to potentially make sure that I have enough room in my cost per click and my target price to allow for a 10% increase in cost per click so that I don’t lose my organic rank. So there’s another tip. So now guys we’ve got a special treat. We’ve got some real life sellers these are not professionals. These are not Helium 10 employees here. You know, these are, are not service providers trying to get your money. We’ve got some real life sellers here. So let’s go ahead and invite them to the stage now. Nate, Kseniia, and Mike. Nate, how long has your company been selling online and and what’s your company?

Nate:

I’m with Solo Stove. We’ve been online for about 13 years. Myself, I’ve been in the Amazon space for a little over five years.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now before I hadn’t really heard of of Solo Stove. I probably have, but I guess didn’t register. But it’s funny, after I started finding out about Solo Stove I was telling this story the other day. I was looking at my American Express credit card portal, and it gives like special deals on like Reebok and Nike and Disney and stuff like that. Like, Hey activate this deal and you can get extra points for your Hilton credit card, blah, blah, blah. Well, the other day it was Solo Stove on there, so I’m like, man, Solo Stove is legit. Solo Stove is definitely a legit brand if they’re coming up in my American Express offers. All right next up that new face to us here is Mike. Mike go ahead and introduce yourself and how long has your company been selling online?

Mike:

Hey, I’m Mike. I’m with Hemlock Park, and we’ve been selling for just about three years now on Amazon. And we had make organic candles in-house and do everything in-house. The team of five people.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. Super unique making stuff in-house here in the USA. And then just in case nobody has seen her podcast before. Kseniia, same question for you. How long have you been selling online?

Kseniia:

I’ve been in Commerce for four years, I think, and the two years with the current brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Now going back to Nate like, I kind of gave a little bit of a tease that you guys are not exactly newer sellers. You’re a heavy duty company. What’s your approximate gross revenue? Yearly and and which marketplaces are you selling?

Nate:

So we are worldwide nine figure business. And so domestically outside of our website marketplaces are Walmart and Amazon domestically. Then we have a handful of other marketplaces in Europe.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, excellent. Nine figures, guys, I’m in the Czech Republic right now in this hotel that has bad internet and things are glitching a little bit. That wasn’t a glitch right there. You heard that, right? Nine figures that is amazing. Let’s go to Mike. Same question for you. What’s your approximate gross revenue yearly and in which marketplace are you selling in?

Mike:

We’re doing seven figures. We’ve had two X growth year over year for the past three years, so hopefully that keeps on going. And we’re on Amazon and then also Fair Wholesale, which is a wholesale distribution marketplace and then those are the two.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Now Kseniia, what about you? Leticia probably knows, but for those who didn’t hear your podcast, what’s your approximate or gross revenue and are you only selling in Amazon USA?

Kseniia:

Only Amazon, US and Canada, and I was very close to seven figures last year.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Definitely you’re gonna have faith that you’re gonna hit it this year. Now Nate, the I think from the company name, we can kind of figure out what kind of products you sell. But, but what, what are some, some of your top sellers?

Nate:

So our flagship products are smokeless fire pits which we offer in three different sizes. And then most recently we have a tabletop fire pit that’s good for like s’mores marshmallow roasting for the kids.

Bradley Sutton:

I’d imagine that leading up to like Memorial Day, 4th of July, like those kind of holidays, you get some spike in sales?

Nate:

Yeah. we get a pretty good spike Memorial Day for sure. We’ll get a little bit in July though, because a lot of our product is kind of springtime related. Most of our sales actually happen quarter two, quarter four and then quarter three is relatively dead. So Prime Day is a big deal for us because it keeps us alive in July.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I bet if we looked at their Sales Heat Maps, I was showing you guys like maybe during December might be a little bit rough in those states where there’s rough winters. Now Mike, you are in Nevada, I think they don’t know nothing about rough winters out there, but then again you know, I’m not sure if parts of Nevada I guess get gets cold, but you said you were, you make candles in house, so like how in the world did you start that? Like, was this a hobby before? Like I’m thinking of what was, what was the girlfriend on the office, how she tried to do her own candle making business?

Mike:

Yeah, it totally was a hobby at first. And I just wanted to make all natural products. I used to make ’em for myself and as gifts. And then a friend said like, do the farmer’s market with me. And I was like, all right. And then when the pandemic hit and I got laid off, I was like, maybe I can turn this into an actual business. So that was only two and a half years ago, and now we’re doing seven figures. So that’s been amazing. It’s been an amazing experience.

Bradley Sutton:

That is absolutely awesome. Very inspiring. Like, you don’t have to worry about things getting stuck in customs and new import taxes. Cause because you’re making the stuff in-house, huh? I love it. I love it. Now Kseniia, like, last year, thinking back to 2022 Prime Day how, how did you, how did your brand do in Prime Day? Like maybe, like if you were to take your daily average before Prime Day, and then what Prime Day actually was, what was the comparison?

Kseniia:

It was about 5x the normal daily revenue, I would say.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, that’s pretty impressive. Would you say that was successful or you think you could have even done better, or what?

Kseniia:

Well, it was the first Prime Day with that brand, so I think, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I’d say that that’s pretty impressive, you know 5x. So, so those of, again, going back to all the 50% of the people on this call who said this might be their first Prime Day we’re not trying to say, Hey, anything less than 5x is gonna be a failure, but just to show you the potential of what could happen on, on a, on a Prime Day for you. What about let’s just go reverse circle here. Back to Mike, what about you? What was your Prime Day how was it leading up, and then what did Prime Day end up being for you?

Mike:

I would say last Prime Day, I would’ve been happy with even two x, but we were actually down 20% based off of an average day, and we realized that we did everything right except for not making the right deal. We were only 10% off, and that was our offer. We had all our PPCs and campaigns and everything wasn’t place, but our deal was only 10% off, and our competitors were 40% off, and it was our first one. So the learning experience, and we’re like, your deal is only as good as your actual deal. So that’s what we learned. So this year we’ll be 40% off to compete with everyone else, and I think it’s gonna be good.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go, guys. Like, like I said you guys know how we do it on the podcast too. We keep it real. It’s not just all rainbows and unicorns here. So we got, somebody said that she was 5X up, and then we have Mike who was actually down. So again, that could happen. And so what’s important though is, is Mike didn’t just give up and say, all right, I’m done with Amazon. I had a disastrous Prime Day. He clearly was able to do the research and see why, and determine why he was down. And now he, he’s pretty much ready to go for this year. What about you guys? Nate, how was your Prime Day compared to the days leading up?

Nate:

Yeah, it was pretty good. Our lead up time, the lead out time versus Prime Day, we saw about a 3000% or 30x on Prime Day itself.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, you see, we just got nonstop things where you must be thinking Nate’s glitch in here, but that was not a glitch. He literally said 30. But anyways he said 3-0 guys 30 times that I just can’t even wrap my head around that. So like, what was the one thing that, like, why, like was it your deals or does your competitors not know how to do Prime Day? Or how in the world can a brand who’s already big go 30x on Prime Day?

Nate:

Yeah, so I mean, there’s a number of different factors that, that play into it, right? Obviously. we have a relatively high organic search ranking. So because of the product, because of the fan base that we already have it’s a product that people are looking for. On top of that, we give the second best deal of the year on Prime Day versus Black Friday. And so major discounts and then just a really good PR campaign off Amazon just to make sure that the word gets out and it’s an opportunity to buy some of our most popular products. On top of that, I have a really robust advertising strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Now what about you, Mike? You talked a little bit about what didn’t work. Did was there anything, was it only the deals or did you kind of, like in retrospect say you want to do something different on the advertising side at all, or inventory side, was there anything else, or pretty much just that deal is, is gonna make the difference for you this year?

Mike:

Yeah, I think it was really the deal. Like if its only like, really, we were next to all these ads that were like 40%, 50%, 60% off, and ours was 10. Like, honestly, like no one was gonna buy ours if they’re looking for a deal. So I feel like that really killed it from the start. It was like a non-starter, basically. Yeah. so this year that’s what we’ve learned from. And there’s been other times that like Mother’s Day and Q4 is our best times, and we’re like, what can we take away from those really hot times for us and apply it to Prime Day? So that’s kind of what we’re using. And kind of like what you mentioned in your presentation about identifying those keywords historically that were good and using for Prime Day.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What about you Kseniia? Like, like what, what do you think was some of the biggest factors in, in the, you being able to get up to 5x?

Kseniia:

So I’m in a very small niche, so what worked for me is I had about 20% off coupon. And I would say probably two weeks before the Prime Day I was trying to rank on the maximum amount of keywords. So on the Prime Day I can utilize the organic ranking and not overspend on PPC because everybody knows that the bids are much more expensive on the Prime Day itself. So that worked for me.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Now going back to Nate, you guys use, that’s why I’m worried. My, my Adtomic, this is actually not Adtomic. This looks like the Adtomic, this is actually a minor league baseball team from Albuquerque, but it looks like I really close to our Adtomic logo. So I decide to wear this hat, but how are you guys, Nate, there at Solo Stove leveraging Adtomic for advertising just in general, and then what are you gonna be doing in it for Prime Day prep?

Nate:

Yeah, so in general, we leverage Adtomic quite a bit for search term analysis monitoring our ranking for our core keywords and then identifying top performing campaign strategies in the market there. In addition to how we’re gonna be preparing for it for Prime Day the big piece this year is gonna be making sure that we have budget rules in place so that we have healthy budgets, we’re not running out of anything just because we want to make sure that we’re taking advantage of every piece of traffic possible during the day.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. And Mike, you also use Adtomic. What have you been using it for lately and what’s your plans for Prime Day?

Mike:

I think my two most useful uses are automating keywords, like identifying keywords. And also the big one for us is adjusting campaign budgets. We have over a thousand live campaigns and I’m the only one that manages it. So with Adtomic, I’m able to semi-automate that to keep our a cost around 20%. Without that, I was spending like 15-20 hours a week doing it manually, which is insane.

Bradley Sutton:

You yourself were, you were the one in charge at for ppc? Oh, my. That when it becomes more real for sure.

Mike:

So that was the game changer for me after I discovered I had to use that, I was like wow. So that was huge for me, so.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Alright, so that’s cool. We got a seven figure seller, we got a nine figure seller using Adtomic and, and, and we’ve got smaller and bigger and in the middle sellers too, using Adtomic myself. You use Adtomic. I’m only a six figure seller these days because I’ve been letting some of my accounts slip. People aren’t as interested in coffin shelves, I guess, as, as before, but I digress. What about what what about you Kseniia, what is your plan for advertising and promotion this year? Now that you had a successful Prime Day last year, you kind of know what worked and didn’t work. What’s your game plan for this year for either PPC or, or sales or coupons, stuff like that?

Kseniia:

Well, I think I’m gonna do the same thing as I did last year because it worked. And, but in addition to that, I’m also updating the images and A+ Content, so I’m making sure that listing actually converts the most that I can get.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, excellent. Do you have premium A+ content yet, or do you just have the regular A plus content? Yes,

Kseniia:

That’s another thing I’m working on right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Well, what’s yours, like, are you gonna do video at all or just like have–

Kseniia:

Already have videos? Yes, I have videos for each of my ASINs. I have videos, but yes, I just got access to the Premium A+, but that’s what I’m working on right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Nate, what’s your, what’s your game plan this year? I mean, a huge brand like you, like we could just do a whole show probably on it, but, but gimme some, some highlights of, of what you think is really gonna pay dividends for you this year for Prime Day.

Nate:

So again, around ads, we’re looking at the historics of last year and just making sure that we’re identifying the keywords that worked well. We’re also gonna be adding more prime specific campaigns related to deals, clearance sale basically things that historically people have searched for on Prime Day. This like, just like you showed earlier

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Excellent. Mike, same question for you. Game plan.

Mike:

So like I said, I’m gonna be competitive with my actual discounts and lightning deals and deal of the day. And I think in addition to that, like identifying the keywords that performed last, last year and yeah, just putting those all into action and increasing our ads spend about 10% over an average day.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. Excellent. All right, so this is some, some, some strong game plans here now. So my last question Ksenia knows all about at the very end of, of, of podcasts, I ask for a 30-second or 60-second tip. So do you have any general tip or 30-second tip, or take all the time you need Ksenia what’s your strategy that you can leave with or the audience with for could be about Prime Day. Could be about advertising general, anything you want.

Kseniia:

Well, everybody kept talking today about the competitive price and the PPC, but I would also add to just pay attention to optimizing the listing in terms of a plus video and images. So making sure you will take the maximum advantage of the Prime Day traffic, so you’re listing converts I would like to add that.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Cool. Excellent. All right, Nate, what’s your what’s your tip of the day?

Nate:

Yeah I’ve worked with dozens of very large brands and, and smaller brands over the years with, with Prime Day and, and Amazon in general. And Prime Day is a very special day. You’re not gonna get traffic like Prime Day, pretty much any other day of the year outside of maybe Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And so my tip is always obviously do what’s best for your business, but do as good of a deal as you can to separate yourself from your competition. And then take advantage of the three pieces that Amazon uses that Brett announced earlier. Like posts, Amazon Live feeds, things like that. Do everything that you can to utilize every tool to your power to capitalize on the traffic in that day.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now no pressure, but I save the best for last here to, to Mike because I, I pretty much am gonna come, go on record and guarantee that of these three, the one who’s going to do the best on Prime Day compared to Prime Day last year is gonna be Mike. Okay. Because Kseniaa was already at 5x I don’t know how you can improve 30x, but negative 20% were, you’re gonna be the winner this time, Mike, because you’re gonna turn that around today.

Mike:

I don’t know until we gotta that last part.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, Mike. So what’s your strategy for the winner of the best, most improved player on Prime Day? What’s his strategy?

Mike:

My strategy is well, I guess, and advice is to apply for those lightning deals, deal of the day as soon as you can. Like I did it like three months ago. I think it’s too late to do it now. And once it’s accepted, if you have an account manager at Amazon to get it pitched, to be promoted on like a feature deal on Amazon, I think that would be huge. And if you’re gonna do Prime Day to make the most of it and go in, go all in and do every possible program an offer they have.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. when you say rep, are, do you have like a SaaS core rep or which kind of account manager do you have?

Mike:

Yes. I have three SaaS, launchpad and Handmade. So pretty much anything we qualify for, we’re doing it

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. All right, cool. All right guys. So you know, we can maybe look for Mike’s products and, and Nate’s products. Check out their Prime Day deals. We already know that they’re gonna be doing some discounts on there. Look out for a 30 or 40% discount, I guess, on mics if you want, if you want some nice smelling candles that are you made in the USA. And then if you need some, some, some stoves for grilling this summer or some grills. I can’t, I was about to say some grills for Sting. No, that, that’s my dyslexia there. But anyways buy some Solo Stove too, and you get some American Express points to add it. But Kseniaa and Nate and Mike, thank you so much for coming on here and, and sharing your knowledge. I love bringing just re regular Amazon sales. You guys are not here to sell anything. You have no agenda. You’re very generous for coming on here and spending your time and sharing your secrets, your wins and losses and so we are very appreciative of that. And thank you guys, and wish you the best success for Prime Day.

 

Helium 10 Buzz 6/14/23: Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime Back | Data Outage | Seller Payouts Frozen

In this jam-packed episode, we cover all the latest news in the E-commerce space like the return of Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime, the difference between indexing and ranking, and more! 

#463 - How To Improve Your Listings For Foreign Marketplaces

Join us as we catch up with Jana Krekic, renowned expert in international market expansion, as she shares her latest tips and best practices. In this power-packed episode, Jana discusses the growing relevance of AI in our industry and addresses concerns about its potential threats. She delves into the challenges faced by AI tools when it comes to translating texts and emphasizes the enduring importance of the human touch.
 
Jana emphasizes the crucial role of translations when selling to foreign marketplaces and highlights the significance of translating your main image. Stay ahead of the curve as Jana reveals the trending international Amazon marketplaces and prepare to be intrigued as she unveils her groundbreaking new service, AMOR. Don’t miss this insightful SSP episode that will revolutionize your approach to global expansion!

In episode 463 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jana discuss: 

• 01:55 – Catching Up With Jana Krekic  
• 03:10 – Is AI A Threat To Jana’s Business?  
• 04:41 – The Problems Of AI Tools With Translating Texts  
• 05:29 – “The Human Touch Is Still Important”  
• 08:24 – You Need Translations When Selling To Foreign Marketplaces  
• 09:41 – Translating Your Main Image Is Important!  
• 12:14 – Trending International Amazon Marketplaces Right Now  
• 14:43 – Difference Between EU Sellers And US Sellers  
• 18:46– Talking About Jana’s New Service – AMOR  
• 24:53 – Having Your Own Website/Domain And Benefits Of SEO  
• 27:35 – Optimize Your Titles For Amazon Mobile  
• 29:37 – Jana’s Healthy Habits And Habits Outside The Grind  
• 30:10 – Include Turkish Keywords In Your Listing’s Backend

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we talked to the foremost expert in the entire world in international marketplaces, and she’s gonna give us all the latest on what’s the best practices for expanding outside of our home marketplace. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you wanna see how your listing or maybe competitor’s listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you wanna compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other. Maybe you wanna 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. 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. And going to the other side of the world today we’ve got Jana back with us. Are you in Serbia right now? Home and Serbia right now?

Jana:

Yes. I’m home in Beltway and Serbia. That’s right.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, excellent. Now guys, we’re not gonna go too much into her backstory. I got some notes here from Mhel, our podcast coordinator who looked up when she’s been on the podcast before. So, like her origin story, first time she was ever on the podcast, if you wanted to look it up, go to episode 99. And then she was back again in 229, and then she kind of had like a, a preview episode that she did with her husband Lazar last year you know, before Sell and Scale Summit, and that was 356. But, but now she’s, she’s back here by herself. So kind of like the third time really, the other one kind of didn’t count, but back up for the third time. Jana, how’s, how’s it been going? How’s 2023 been for you so far?

Jana:

2023 has been actually pretty, pretty good. I would say 2022 was not the best year, honestly. And I think a lot of sellers and service providers have been affected by various issues we’ve had the last year. But I kind of feel like this year, like everything is kinda going back to normal at least when it comes to sellers and service providers and software tools and all that. I think it’s been overall a very good year for us.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, lemme ask you just right off the bat here you were on the show last year, but AI wasn’t even a thing last year. I think the, for, for the average person who might be just watching on the sidelines, they might think agencies like yourself translation very human based agency. Like, oh man people like YLT must be scared they’re gonna be irrelevant. Yeah. Because now we can get just AI to do whatever these agencies and listing optimization places and translation places did. But is that the case? Are you, are you having to fire 90% of your staff because now you are irrelevant in 2023? Or what’s the real situation?

Jana:

Well, I mean, I had to disappoint everyone, including Kevin King who approached me at one of the parties in Vegas who was like, Jana, are you, like, are you guys done? And I’m like, well, that’s a great conversation starter, Kevin. So yeah we’re definitely not done. And actually, like, we’ve been working with very big enterprises this year, including Nestle and a lot of their supplement brands like Vital Proteins and Solar Vitamins, Crocs national Geographics. We’ve been just like working with a lot of the very big brands. We kinda focus more on enterprises now. And what we’ve seen is that they still trust us, but I’ve actually, cause I’m really of course interested in that, and that is definitely going to affect the future and also like what we are doing.

Jana:

But just not as of like right now. And five months ago I’ve tested a couple of best Amazon list INTEGRION tools. And at that time, I tested Copy Smith what was it? Percy Copy Monkey Jasper and Power Listing. And none of these tools were great for translation. They were okay when it comes to like the listing creation because all these tools, like all the AI tools are now created to create something outta nothing. And I think they’re great, like for them to get like a topic. And then they have like the whole storytelling is like all up to them, but it comes to translations. The problem was that if I’ve if you were to give the text, like, let’s say not do like a product listing with a title and the bullet and so on, the AI tool would only take certain portions of text and then translate it as it wants and create something completely different that was not in the original listing because this is how AI was programmed to think outside the box and to create completely new content and not to focus and improve the already existing one and to localize it not even like, use the keywords and other things.

Jana:

So I would say that I think the developers are definitely focused on creating something outta nothing and not just like focusing on doing the content improving it, localizing and putting keywords in it. I don’t think they’ve focused on that yet. So that’s why I think you still have like the like the human touch is still very important. And when it comes to translations, it’s still how it was. I mean, you can use Google Translate or you can use gt, but you’re gonna get like a mediocre translation with no localization and no keywords at all. Sometimes, like if you even like asking like, could you use the keywords like from Google, like they would use it, like something that you would get from Google AdWords or like Google Trends, and this is how they would embed them, but this would not be anything that’s like kind of Amazon friendly.

Jana:

And from this point, like us using AI tools would not help us because if we were to use it, we would have to dedicate twice as much time to fix it and to make it like an Amazon style according to that Amazon style guidance, then to create something that would work. So for now we haven’t found something that would help us. Of course, I would wanna integrate as soon as there’s something out there that will make our lives easier and will speed up our work. But for now, AI tools are not focused that much on the translations. I think they’re more into copywriting and just as I said, like doing like articles, PDFs, doing your slides doing bunch of other amazing things. I’m a big fan of ai. I use a lot of prompts and to help myself on like a daily basis and also like create pictures and stuff like that. But when it comes to translation, I would say that it’s still not dead advanced or advanced at all.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now you know, I think you’ve been on here a while. People understand that you do deal with translations, but I think the tendency might be that people think, Hey, yeah what I would need a translation company for and rightfully so, is to, to make my listing, like, Hey, I’m selling in Amazon, Germany, and now I want to go to Amazon USA need to make it in English. And we shouldn’t just use Google Translate, but I was looking at your website today and it’s kind of like, you don’t really realize nowadays how much different things you need translation for. So not only is there the listing, but there’s a plus content, and then there’s the ads like it’s not gone are the days where it’s just, Hey, let’s throw in our you know, just a PPC or targeted keyword and target a product.

Bradley Sutton:

But you’ve got copy that you have to do, like on your sponsored display ads and your sponsored brand ads and your sponsored video ads. You’ve got your brand store, your packaging, chat bots, if you use it follow up emails your website. And I’m, I’m looking at all this stuff. I’m like, oh my goodness. Yeah, there’s like, there’s like a really a lot more involved nowadays when you want to sell in another foreign language marketplace. Which of these is the second most common then when you just say as a the second and third most common after just like, Hey, let, let’s get our listing up on another platform.

Jana:

Yeah. Well, I would say like, when it comes to content, definitely, like the title Bullets A+ Content, it’s the most important one because this is like your content, it represents brand, your products and so on. But main images now that could be localized according to the country you’re selling are very much important. And especially now, like if you go to Amazon, you’ll see that the title is moved to the left. So like they cannot emphasize even more on the main images. And a lot of times these images are left in English and they’re not translated to any other language, which is a very big mistake. Because like we had also like a really great case study where we could trace and follow like the changes that made like big impact, just like putting German language on main images really made a big difference.

Jana:

I think they had 60% increase in conversion and I think like 65% or 70% increase in profit. So that, that was really, really impressive. And they’re like a bunch of other brands that can tell you that, that actually when they change the language or the main image that they kinda like spike the conversions even, even more because I think that a lot of people still don’t speak English. And you know, like the Harvard Business Review says that only 50% of people speak English. So you’re basically targeting every other consumer instead of like every single consumer out there. And just like those main images are very important because sometimes people will not even go through listings if they don’t understand what’s on the main images. If you’re selling beauty products or supplements and people are like, not sure about these ingredients, oh, there’s a grammar error.

Jana:

Well, I’m better not like drink this collagen, I maybe like take another one. Cause I’m not sure if they’re doing a good job. And people will judge your listing, especially in Germany. They’ll judge your listing, I’m sorry, they’ll judge your product according to your listing. And also they had like a brand, it had like fantastic content keywords. And then fifth bullet they said, we’re offering German support 24/7, 365 days a week German support, blah, blah, blah. Local like speakers. And that fifth bullet was full of grammar errors. And then people would be very suspicious about if you are telling the truth in the rest of your listing. And if you are legit, as you say, and also like from all of the international marketplaces, Germany still is the marketplace that gives out the most refund. So you really, really have to be careful about the content and about what you say and how you present your brand and your product, because Germans are very picky. And then when they see something is weird, they might move on to the next listing. You know, that’s something that I’ve noticed. And that happens quite a lot.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Now, just in, in general you, you have probably the most experience than anybody in the world as far as different marketplaces and every time I’ve, I’ve had you on this show, I’ll ask you, Hey, what are the, the newer ones or what are the ones you think people are sleeping on? And you’ve talked about Amazon, Japan, and then there’s a couple European marketplaces that before they even launched people were already, you know really trying to hit you up for translation. So you, that you knew there was a lot of demand now we’re in the middle of 2023. There hasn’t been too many in the last year that, that Amazon has opened, but what about just either Amazon marketplaces or other marketplaces.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s trendy now outside of the normal USA, Japan, Germany, you know marketplaces. What are having some meteoric is that, wait, how do, how do you, what’s the word I’m looking for? Meteoric. Is that a word? It goes like a meteor. I don’t know what you said. Meteoric. I, I need translation for English cuz my English is isn’t is not great, here’s why it was good to have a translator. But what are having some like really big time rises in the marketplace world these days?

Jana:

The Meteoric rise?

Bradley Sutton:

Meteoric there. Thank you for help with my English.

Jana:

I think I think a lot of people have unfortunately been disappointed with the two new West marketplaces, Amazon, Poland, and Sweden. And honestly, like when people ask me, Jana like, what should we do next? Should we do Polish? Should we like Sweden? What should we do? I mean, yes, you can like do translations for those marketplaces, but like, do you really wanna spend your money like running PPC ads that are not bringing any sales? So I would say at this point, like to forget about Amazon Poland in Sweden, because Amazon has not been pushing them a lot. They haven’t focused on these marketplaces enough. Like Amazon Netherlands is a small one, but it’s doing better now, much better than two years ago when I think I last talked about it because they’ve been like focused on it. They wanted to push out bull.com being their main competitor at the time.

Jana:

But now what we’ve seen is that a lot of sellers that did translations, they’re now choosing allegro.pl instead of Amazon in Poland. Because Allegro is bringing them some results, Amazon Poland isn’t. I’m still expecting really good results from that marketplace. I just don’t know when is it gonna be the time that Amazon is gonna say like, okay, like now we’re gonna focus on this one. We’re gonna push this marketplace and we’re gonna like, you know make people earn money on it because that’s why people are there. But I would say that Poland and Sweden are definitely out for me if you ask me like where to sell in Europe, but what’s been very interesting is the Italian marketplace. And then if you like go through like a Bloomberg reports and all the other business reports, you’ll see that e-commerce has skyrocketed during last year and this year as well.

Jana:

Now Italy is also like a very small marketplace, but people seeing amazing results with selling in Italy. And I think that a lot to do with this was Covid and just like the shopping habits that obviously permanently changed in Italy that were not that big of like e-commerce shoppers, but now they ob obviously are. So that’s why we’ve seen like a really, really insane growth in Italy and a lot of sellers and brands wanting to go there and like try to like see how the products are gonna do. So I’ve seen Italy being very really successful, which really surprised me. I was not expecting that at all.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I mean that’s one of the, the OG European marketplaces

Jana:

Like open the shadow on like all of the other. I would say like of course UK, Germany, Spain, France, but Italy is like, nah. Like if you have something that you think is gonna go big in Italy or just like, like the Italian marketplace, then go for it. But apart from that, I would not ever get my hopes up, like on what if it was like selling something in Italy, honestly. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you have more interactions with European sellers than me, but I’ve been trying to interact more with, with sellers from Europe. And one thing I’ve noticed, which is kind of goes against maybe a stereotype that I had was I thought that, hey, all the European sellers, they just go ahead and, and open up in all marketplaces. And that’s not the case at least in my experience, like there’s like one like, yeah, I sell in the UK and that’s it or I sell in Germany, or maybe they sell in two marketplaces. Is that kinda like what you see too, where it’s not just, oh yeah, once we sell in Europe, we’re just gonna go ahead and open it up in all whatever, eight marketplaces or whatever it is now?

Jana:

No, you’re absolutely right. That is absolutely not the case. And one would think that, oh, since you’re in Europe, why not? Why not do all like some marketplaces? But a lot of European sellers are actually focused only on the bigger ones like the UK, Germany, France, and then they would sell in the US and then they would sell maybe in Mexico. But you know, like they would not sell on all European marketplaces. I would say that they will almost, in 90% of the cases they would sell in e the US and they would sell like on bigger marketplaces in Europe, but not on all of them for sure. And what is very also typical is that they would not only sell on Amazon, they would sell on in France, like in see discount, or they would sell, like on land of, they sell fashion, they would just like sell on all the different, like marketplaces.

Jana:

They are available in Europe in the countries that they wanna sell in, but they would definitely not expand to all of the Amazon global marketplaces. So that’s what we’ve seen that’s quite, quite often, but what I’ve seen is that US sellers are like, okay, let’s try two marketplaces in Europe and if it’s working, let’s go and do all of them. This is what I’ve seen happen. So like the majority would be like, try out one or two marketplaces and if it works, let’s just, let’s just like spread ourselves like everywhere. But Europeans are kind of more, I don’t know, like they’re more careful with that. They just don’t go like you know, like all in with their expansion, their product. But now I think it’s becoming easier for let’s say UK sellers to sell in Europe and also to get the products out to Europe via Netherlands because like if you were to register the number that has to do with like import export in, in the Netherlands, then you would not need to register it anywhere else and you could distribute all of your products across the whole Europe.

Jana:

And I think not a lot of people and sellers know this, but basically you can get everything done in the Netherlands and ship the products also like via Netherlands to Germany, which was quite known back from last year. But what people dunno is like that the import expert issues could be all done in the Netherlands for like twice less time than you would get, like you would need if you were to do this in Germany or in other countries. And you can just like ship the product everywhere in Europe. That was very helpful when I talked with some of the UK sellers. We had like a small mastermind when I was in London. So that’s what, this was what some people were using. And this kind of speed up the process when it comes to selling from uk to Europe, which I found very helpful.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now is this like when you’re trying to help sellers understand where there might be opportunity, is this kind of tie, does this kind of tie in with you had a new service and I like, I like the, the name of it. It was AMOR was the name love in Spanish, but that’s obviously not it’s, you’re not giving love workshops, even though of course you, you, you and your husband are the, the Amazon couple the famous Amazon couple who got married from the industry. But what does AMOR stand for?

Jana:

So AMOR, it means basically spreading the love internationally cross border for your product. So basically a more is an acronym and stands for Amazon Marketplace Opportunity Report. That’s what stands for. And I thought it was quite appropriate to have the little AMOR with his like bow and arrow and spreading love and shooting those arrows across Europe and other global marketplaces. I came to the idea, like to just kind start the service because I’ve got like so many questions about like, where should I sell next? Like what’s the next big thing for me? And then I would always answer like, well it is a million dollar question. And then I was like, well, what if I can help them? Like I can’t answer it, but what if like, we can kind of help them with some of the things that we are really good at.

Jana:

And that is like content and keywords, a little bit of the market research and a little bit like asking the audience what audience feels. And I just think that a lot of people just forget about like you know if you do everything right, if you do the due diligence the way you’re supposed to, one important factor is will people buy it? Will people like it? Cause we’ve had a seller that was selling a product and he does everything. Well, the, the pictures like everything was just great, but the audience just just didn’t like it. So I went to my team and to my German team and asked them like, look, so this seller hasn’t had any success, like zero. I dunno why, like, maybe you, you can tell me something. You guys are all Germans. And then all of them told me like, we would never buy this product.

Jana:

It’s very not German. I’m like, really? And all 14 of them said the same thing. And I was like, huh, how interesting. And who knows how many more products would be like that. And they’re, they’re not gonna be successful because the audience doesn’t think it’s interesting or a good fit. And I also don’t think that selling internationally is for everyone. I don’t think all brands should do it just because you saw that your competitor is doing and Amazon tells you to do it, and you wanna kinda like you wanna maximize a profit, you wanna exit your brand. But I don’t think it’s a good idea for everyone, honestly. I mean, this goes like you know, against what we do, but I’d rather be fully transparent, like as you said, like this is a no BS podcast and I just think that sometimes it’s not a good idea for you to try and sell in Germany or UK or Mexico just because you’re gonna have not, you’re not gonna have a good roi or sometimes things will not go as you planned.

Jana:

And all this to say that brands do not do any due diligence, like at all. They’re just like, oh, well there’s a lot of sellers and a lot of buyers in this like, particular marketplace, let’s do it. And they never do any due diligence. And that is most likely because their team does not speak the target language. Then they use Google Translate to find keywords and, and so on. It doesn’t really end well. And like just by using, let’s say Helium 10 Black Box, like they can find and see the revenue of the competitors. They can see, like, they can compare the percentage of what the competitors are making, what the target place versus what they’re they’re making on their home marketplace. And then see if it pays off. Also like sometimes the pricing is higher in Germany than it is in the us but this is all that can be compared.

Jana:

And you can do it on your own, but out of certain reasons. Like brands just don’t do it. But there are like a lot of tools, like as I mentioned, like an helium can that that can help you with the due diligence for for your product. And just like having the product discovery also, like also in so essentially you have the, the, the product opportunity, which also shows like the percentage of like how much opportunity your product has. So like all of these can like become like one big all these are the basic pieces of the puzzle you cannot put together and then figure out like, oh, okay, so I should do it or I shouldn’t do it. Also, like if you don’t wanna wanna do polls, you can go to like Facebook aspect groups and just ask people like, Hey, would you buy this?

Jana:

Or like for instance, like in order to get more people, you can just ask them. You can just ask them like, would you or somebody you know buy this? Because maybe they would not personally buy it. Cuz they’re not into like, I dunno, skiing or snowboard equipment, but maybe like their cousins or their best friends or their coworkers are like real like snowboard junkies and they would love to have this product. So you kind get ask access to more people than, I don’t know, like 100 that this group has. So there are like so many different ways how to get the idea, data, numbers, comparisons, competitors and see how they’re all doing before decide to expand. Because honestly it costs a lot of money and a lot of your time. And especially if you have like a goal saying like, I wanna exit my brand in 12 months like you really kinda wanna focus on what’s important for your brand. Brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah. Alright, good to know. Yeah, I think people nowadays definitely due to the economy inflation in many countries and competition, people are more conscious about making their money count and having the best TOI. And sometimes it’s not just, Hey, let me just go ahead and sell in every marketplace that I can because it takes an investment. You gotta, you gotta buy more inventory, you gotta pay companies like yourself to, to translate their, their, their listings. You gotta run customer service in different languages and potentially do different packaging and it’s not, it’s not cheap to be in all these different, different marketplaces.

Jana:

One thing I really wanted to say, like a, it’s not a, a marketplace, but you should definitely have your own website. Like you should sell on the website as well, like outside of Amazon. And also like, there are like so many ways how you can how you can scale your website also with help of SEO. SEO is my bread and butter obviously, but I’ve been in e-commerce for about 15 years and I know a bunch of like different things. But driving traffic to your website, like your Shopify website should be very, very important to you. But there are so many cool ways, I’m just gonna mention one and I’m gonna mention, and it’s called Leveraging old expired domains. How you can actually like purchase an old expired domain and all the traffic that this domain had and put all of the content that was on the website to backend WordPress content of your website.

Jana:

And you’re gonna have bunch of traffic that this previous owner paid bunch of money for and you’ll be able to, to like drive certain audience to your, to your website. Of course it has to be something that is pretty similar with your brand or in the same niche. So you don’t buy, I dunno, like a politicians web domain and then make it for your pet brand. But there were like a bunch of examples like that politician, British politician called Nigel Farage. He was the head of the Parliament Union and the Brexit movement and all that. And he stupidly let his name domain drop, his team just forgot about it. And then there was someone who found out about it. There’s a website called spaz.io where you can see the domain names expiring we’re about to expire and somebody clicked renew.

Jana:

And externally it was an SEO guy. And he then later published an article in newspaper saying what he did, and he thanked him for all the back clicks, which include backlinks from BBC, YouTube, Daily Telegraph. And these are some domains that you cannot buy with money. You know, like there’s a certain limit to all that. So I’m just saying that there are like so many cool things that you could do with your workshop, so you can also leverage it that way. And there’re just like bunch of other things how you can manipulate. It’s blackheads just like taking advantage of something people dunno about. So I also wanted to you, I think having your web shop and focusing on it is really important. And I know that Amazon sellers really don’t know a lot about SEO and Google, and this is something that can drive a lot of traffic to you and you don’t have to pay fortune to run advertising on Google for that either.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Good stuff. Good stuff. Now you’ve been giving us lots of different strategies, but instead of just one 30-second tip, let’s just take the last five, 10 minutes here and talk about just specific strategies, you know could be with seo, could be with translation, could be with watching great TV shows like Breaking Bad

Jana:

The best TV show ever.

Bradley Sutton:

Check on anything. Go ahead. Yeah,

Jana:

Yeah. Also you can brush on your Spanish by watching the show, so it is kind useful. Very,

Bradley Sutton:

Very true.

Jana:

It’s basically bilingual show, so I support that. But when it comes to translations, but we know this is basically maximizing on the keywords in the first 60 characters of your title. A lot of people forget about the mobile version of the website on Amazon which only shows first 60 characters. And a lot of people go crazy and wild with the keywords, like at the end of the title, just don’t put enough of the most important ones in the first part of the title. And I say like, you should definitely do that, if not because of like the mobile version. Cause a lot of people also will purchase products on their phones and people forget about it. They tend to forget a lot. Especially if you have like a really, really long brand name, then you couldn’t really wanna think about if you’re gonna like play with it or not.

Jana:

There was the one brand that we did, it was eye patches and then it had like the wordplay eye, like your eyeball, like Eye love it cause it’s an eye patch. And that literally took the whole first 60 characters of their title. And in the mobile version, it didn’t show any of the keywords. So that had to be completely redundant. We completely dropped the, I love it because also like in German and for Germans, it did not sit well, like too much English never work, works amazingly well for the German audience. So that is my tip when it comes to the title. And just like the mobile versions for Amazon. Cause brands really do not think about it a lot.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. All right. Interesting. Interesting. So before we get to your next Amazon tip, what are your health and wellness tips? You know, like what do you do? Like, I would like to think that I know because I watch your Instagram, but you, like me, travel is one of your like, hobbies of when you need to get away from the business. You know I was watching your guys’ Instagram story of like, Hey, I was just there. Hey, I was just there. Like, like it, it was fun watching you, your your guys’ long trip in Japan, but travel, what else do you and Lazar do to kind of like, when you need to get away from the, the regular day-to-day work?

Jana:

Well, I just really like to go to the spa. I think that that is like something I really care about a lot. I think going to the spot, just like going to the pool, doing the infrared saunas just relaxing like a deep relaxation and basically without listening to any podcast, just like being like sitting in silence really, really helps me to unwind and just get back my energy.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now back to what one more perhaps e-commerce tip of the week.

Jana:

So like when you do a keyword research in the US and then you get a research full of Mexican keywords because of the Hispanic population, which is normal because there was like a very, very big number of that population in the states. And then of course you’re gonna include some of these keywords in backends and they’re gonna search for your products in Spanish language. And then a lot of people who expand, they don’t think that they’re gonna be that sort of possibilities for other languages as well in let’s say Germany or England or France. But we’ve found out that, for instance, in Germany, there’s a very big population very big Turkish population. And then a lot of times when you have products that have to do anything with food, you’re gonna have a lot of Turkish keywords actually.

Jana:

And a lot of people are searching for those products in Turkish. Because you don’t know this language at all, you would probably think that like the listing results are probably a mistake or there’s like misspelling or like what sort of word is it that is probably Turkish and you also would want to include it in the backends because they have a very big search volume and none of your competitors are ranking for that. We double checked and for a couple of those problems that we’ve done, none of the competitors were using any of those Turkish keywords. And every single keyword had couple of thousands of search volumes. We found out that using Magnet and Cerebro and they all showed the same very big search volume and none of the competitors are using it.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Okay, that’s a good one. All right, well Jana, I’ll be seeing you at, at different conferences potentially this summer. It’s always great to link up with you and, and talk about Serbian sports with Lazar too. A lot of course because of the Denver Nuggets is on a lot of people’s mind these days, Thank you so much.

Jana:

They’re winning it. They’re taking it.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Thank you so much for coming on and look forward to having you on this show next year for the fourth time. And let’s see of course, that is, if you’re still around, unlike what Kevin King might think.

Jana:

Yeah, I mean hope we’re not done till 2024. We’ll see

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we’ll see you then.

Jana:

Take care. Bye.

#462 - PPC Tips, Pivoting Product Niche, & More!

In this episode, we welcome back the dynamic duo, Shan Shan Fu and Schrone Hardeman. These two amazing Amazon sellers have been making waves in the industry with their strategies and success. In our exclusive interview, we caught up with Shan Shan and Schrone to find out what they’ve been up to lately. They shared insights into how Schrone keeps his profits steady and how Shan Shan’s brands are performing today.
 
Additionally, they discussed a lot of PPC strategies and tips. Schrone also addressed the common fear of overspending in PPC and shared his best tips for new sellers. Shan Shan highlighted the importance of networking in her business journey and discussed the challenges faced in selling inside women’s clothing categories.
 
The “Tripe-S Crew” is back and ready to inspire and empower sellers once again, so stay tuned for more groundbreaking strategies and achievements from this dynamic duo.

In episode 462 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Schrone, and Shan Shan discuss: 

• 01:26 – Let’s Welcome Back The “S Crew”  
• 02:14 – What Is Shan Shan & Schrone Up To These Days
• 04:03 – How Schrone Keeps His Profits Steady
• 07:39 – Diving Into The Market Share Inside His Category
• 10:26 – How Shan Shan’s Brands Are Performing Today
• 13:06– There Are Two Types Of Sellers…
• 14:14 – The Amazon PPC Math Technique
• 19:11 – Dividing Your PPC Into Two Cycles
• 25:23 – “My Student Has A Fear Of Overspending in PPC”
• 28:38 – Schrone’s Best Tips For New Sellers
• 30:14 – How Networking Helped Shan Shan’s Business
• 31:25 – Problems In Selling Inside Women’s Categories
• 32:55 – “The Opportunity Is Disguised As A Setback”
• 33:57 – Benefiting From The “Taylor Swift Economy”
• 35:15 – How To Reach Out To Schrone Hardeman
• 35:22 – How To Reach Out To Shan Shan Fu

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got some former guests back on the show to talk PPC strategy and more. Now, both have inspired others on previous episodes with their story of how they became Amazon Sellers. One was a military veteran turned six figure seller, and the other, an immigrant to the United States, who recently has had her clothing line featured along the likes of Louis Vuitton. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you know that Amazon sometimes loses or damages some of your inventory? Usually they reimburse you for this, but sometimes they might miss things. That’s where Refund Genie comes in. What Helium Ten’s Refund Genie does is we go check out your reports and see if Amazon owes you any money, and then we give you the reports that you need to submit to Amazon so that you can get your money back. If you haven’t run this, you can have hundreds, if not thousands of dollars that Amazon might owe you, especially if you’ve never used this before and you sell a lot on Amazon. So, to find out more information, go to h10.me/refundgenie. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series 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.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve got a couple serious sellers back on the show, and I like to call this show kind of like the, the Triple S show. You know, like at Helium 10, we’ve got tons of, of S’s everywhere. First of all, this is the Serious Sellers podcast. We’ve got the Serious Sellers Club. We had Sell and Scale Summit. You know, to go along with that, we’ve got Sean Chan and Sharan Triple S. I’ll almost start wearing my Triple S sneaker today. I got my s hat, I got, I got the, the s logo here on my jacket. This is actually the logo of the DJ Slushy who makes our opening for the podcast that little song that you guys hear. So we’re just all about the s today. How’s it going? My Triple S crew?

Schrone:

Yeah, it’s great. What’s going on with you, Bradley?

Shan Shan:

Hey, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just great. Awesome. Now, you’re still in Texas. I see you there on the famous the famous sofa there. Shan Shan, didn’t you move recently? You’re not in California anymore, are you?

Shan Shan:

No, I left San Francisco and now I’m in Miami/New York.

Bradley Sutton:

I think everybody from California is moving to to Florida, and I dunno about New York. I don’t hear about much people moving to New York, but but Florida for sure, Texas, a lot of people are moving to. Whereabouts in New York? I used to live in New York back in the day.

Shan Shan:

Oh. So there’s a thing called Snowbird, where you live in New York in the summer and Miami in the winter. So I don’t have a place place, but I have a sublet at the Upper East Side. So, yeah, just I’m actually hosting an e-commerce dinner tonight at Soho House. So trying to penetrate this e-commerce world in New York, which is quite robust.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, cool. All right. Now we’re not gonna go too much into everybody’s backs stories. This is actually between them, about the third or fourth time they’ve been on the they’ve been on the podcast now. The last time they were on the podcast, they were actually, you know, they’ve been on the podcast by themselves before, but the last time I had them on together and that was the first time they had even met each other. That was episode 344. So if you guys want to catch up with what they were doing a little over a year ago, then check out episode 344. But I said, Hey, let, let’s bring them back. You know, it’s been a year. Let’s see what exciting things these individuals have been doing. And, and not only do they still sell themselves, but they also, have branched out more and more to, to helping other sellers. And so, like, I like talking to people who are in the industry like that because they, they sometimes you know, come across a lot more things than just if we were working by the by ourselves. So let’s start with Schrone. First of all, how how’s your own business been going the last year? So kind of steady, we down, we up, what’s going on?

Schrone:

Okay. So a revelation came about, you know, after the the Great Depression called Covid, you know, where everybody was quarantined me being in the maternity area and the people having nothing left to do but procreate. So I had a boom during the covid and didn’t realize it was because of Covid. So last year, the last two years I’ve had a drop, but I’ve been steady. And the reason I’ve been steady is because of how I maintain my profit. The way I do profit is I use the previous year’s profit for the current year’s salary. That way I can never go under, you know?

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Schrone:

So for the last two years, I’ve been pretty much steady at a decrease from 2021.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So your profit then is steady, but your revenue is maybe down a little bit you’re saying?

Schrone:

Right. I’ve dropped from about 450,000 a year to about 300,000 a year.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, did you suffer, like on the inventory side, like maybe you didn’t plan for that, or, and thenyou suffered a little bit extra inventory, or, or how did that work out for you?

Schrone:

So, yeah, because I did not recognize it was a boom for me. I did pre over order. So hey, some of the troubles that you gotta overcome is access inventory, and I currently have about 1500 units in my garage next door.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now for you I know you’ve had like different variations of your products. Didn’t you launch like a separate line, or, or is it still pretty much you have one product and just a whole bunch of different variations?

Schrone:

So last year, I launched a premium version of the same product that I have maternity bills. Okay. It’s a little bit more expensive and it gives the, the mom a lot more support. That launch has been slow, but it has not been a failure. So I’m waiting on that to pick up and move with that. But it is a premium version of the same product with more colors and more sciences.

Bradley Sutton:

Have you looked into expanding the brand out or possibly starting another, another brand, or you’re kind of just like happy, happy where you are right now since you are profitable and plug it along?

Schrone:

So the, the purpose for me to start my whole business was to support my family. And by the grace of God, I’m doing that right now. And I this may sound weird to a lot of people, but I do not have high ambitions of becoming rich. Right. I’ll take it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take it. But I don’t have high ambitions of becoming rich. I am very happy that I’m able to take care of my family and that’s where I’m at right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Okay. Interesting. Now you know, for your niche, I’m not sure if you’re using like the regular market tracker or not, but like, have you been, been checking, like, are you keeping kind of like your market share, but just, you know, the size of the pie has gone down? Or your slice of the pie gone down in addition to the whole entire pie?

Schrone:

So my, my biggest thing is finding out why. So when I dropped in salary or dropped in revenue, I had to discover the why. And in that process I did find out that the whole category dropped. So it was definitely an economic reset, if you will, instead of me just losing profits. So everybody across the board dropped about 30% down, dropped down about 30%. So as far as ratio of the pie, I still have that being one of the top five sellers in my category. But everybody has dropped.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, sometimes when, when you’ve got mature products, you know, and I say mature, like, like you’ve, you know, you’ve, you’ve been there about three, four years. Now, you know, like if there’s a successful niche out there, a lot of people kind of figure that every single time it’ll just get saturated with sellers from factories, you know, be it, be it from China, be it from India, be it from wherever and you’re not gonna be able to sell anymore at a decent price. And, you know, I’ve actually had a couple of, of smaller niches where we’re just got, you know, to the point where it wasn’t profitable as much. Now, you know, you’re still plugging along, you’ve kept your slice of the pie. So has that not happened, or you haven’t gotten involved in any price wars or how come you are still selling the same product that, that you were, you know, three, four years ago?

Schrone:

Yeah. So that, that was a major concern for concern for me about two years ago. We did have a rush of new sellers, possibly from factory, and they were selling at half the price. And I was thinking like, I have two options. Stay strong with my integrity of the value that I see from my product or succumb to what the category is pushing towards. Well I’m thankful that before that happened, I found my category before that happened and the process, or the time before it happened, I, I gathered six thou almost f almost 6,000 reviews. Which gives me the social proof to keep my prices where they’re at. And I have not raised my prices or lowered them for five years, and I’m still able to sell based off the strength of my brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Cool. Now let’s switch to Shan Shan on there. You know, similar to Schrone, you had a product that was kind of boomed also by, by Covid, you know, like masks, I remember way back in the day. But you know, you, you, you, you saw the writing on the wall a long time ago and were already pivoting away. What about you, the la the last, the last couple of years? Like, how, how have your brands been doing lately?

Shan Shan:

Yeah, so the last time I talked to you guys, my face mask sales, which was my first product was tanking. And I had to desperately get a new sustainable product category up there before it totally tanked. And I did it, I tripled sales from my non mask products since last time I saw you guys. But the face mask went to zero. Cause face masks went down, but everything else went up. It’s still, there was an overall increase, but not by a lot. But it showed me that your sales can triple and if it can triple this year, I’m on track to at least double. And then some fun things have been happening. New York Times reached out and asked me to send mys to a Ghana to a fashion shoot in Ghana where I was going to be paired up with like Louis Vuitton and Chanel and all the big brands on their big winter accessories feature. So the, so in it’s hilarious, in the, in the feature says Louis Vuitton dress, $5,000 Chanel sweater, you know, $2,000 and millennials emotion types $15.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s something you’ve always been good at that, you know, for those who don’t know, like two episodes ago when we, we first did her fullback story, that was how I how she got on our radar is I actually saw her on kind of TV as it where it was like CNBC or, or one, one of these shows did a special on her story, and then she had mentioned Helium 10 in there, you know, using Helium 10. And I was like, but you seem to like have this magnetism towards getting featured by, by big media here.

Shan Shan:

Thanks. Yeah, it’s an honor. And and I guess, you know, what I came out of that is, hey, fashion that’s edgy for millennials and Gen Z can be affordable too. So that was fun. And now I live in Miami and New York and trying to build a community with other e-commerce founders in the area as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now last time you, you were giving us some, some, some cool strategies about how you kind of like do your product validation on Etsy. Are you still doing that where you try and launch first on Etsy and then hit some certain numbers before you go to Amazon? Or are you just doing both simultaneous or what’s your strategy, your marketplace strategy these days?

Shan Shan:

Yes. So I realized that there’s two types of sellers in this world and I’m gonna really simplify it. Their sellers are very conservative and they just expand within their existing successful niche. Just like little variation changes here and there, and it’ll succeed and it’ll make more money, but it’s not gonna make that much more money. Then there’s sellers that go really hard on one product. They launch one product and put ton of ad spend and ton of capital in it, and just like, fingers crossed and succeeds. And sometimes it does, and it catapults. But that, that requires high capital. It’s high risk. So I couldn’t figure out which one I wanted to do. So instead I decided to do both, and I launched simultaneously more women’s clothing, which is arguably one of the toughest categories. And then I also decided very recently to launch in non clothing categories as well. And, and we’ll see how that goes. It hasn’t launched yet. Next time I come back, Bradley, I would love to tell you how that went.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Let’s I know both of you guys have, have a lot of strategy or a lot of, you know, opinions and things behind this next topic, but I wanted to talk a little PPC. So let’s start with Schrone. Now you mentioned something in our group chat you know, kinda like, I guess one of your own terms, but, but it’s something that that could apply, but you said PPC math, you know, so that’s not exactly a common term. You know, that that’s common in the Amazon industry, but, but I kind of like the sound of it because it’s like, all right, good. Well, we’re gonna talk about something some a little bit unique here. So, so what do you define as PPC math Schrone, and how does

Schrone:

That help you? Right. So yeah, that is something that I coined and it’s very, it’s once you know what it is that aha moment, right? Because when I’m in the Helium 10 Facebook groups chatting, and I see people that say, you know, my budget has gone in the first three hours of the day and I got this, that, and the other, they don’t understand why. And they think, and the first thing they say is, competitors are clicking my ads. And that is not always true. You know, I’m not saying it’s completely false, but it’s not always true. And then I say, well, here again, why does that happen? And when I coin PPC math, I, I tend to teach my students that you have to be mindful of how much budget you spend, how much the average click is per keyword or product target that you’re, that you’re targeting, and what is the strength of the search volume for that keyword that you’re looking at, or category that you’re searching in.

Schrone:

And when you put all that together, you can find out exactly what’s gonna happen. So here’s some quick math. I I think I can do it in my head. Let’s say you have a category or a campaign that has one keyword in it that has 30,000 searches a month. Okay? And, okay, stay with me on the math here. Check me on the math. So if I divide that 30,000 by 30 days, that’s 1000 searches per month, I mean, per day, excuse me. Right? The average shopper is gonna shop, and this is a number that I made up around 14, 15 hours a day, somewhere between 7:00 AM and, you know, 9:00 PM and then you got, you know, on the average, right? So if you divide that thousand searches per day by 15 hours, you get, I don’t know, let’s do some outrageous math and say you get a hundred clicks per hour.

Schrone:

So if you got a hundred clicks per hour, and you’re targeting that keyword that produces a hundred clicks per hour, and that keyword is according to Amazon, expensive at $2 a click, that’s not expensive, but you get what I’m saying, right? Yeah. So to to gather all those clicks at the top spot, you would need at least 200 bucks per hour, right? And our budgets are like, you know, for some campaigns, 30 bucks a day, 40 bucks a day, and if you get in the top spots and there’s a hundred people per hour clicking that, if you do the math and the frenzy of it all, you’re going to get clicked out. And that’s just one keyword that you may have in that 15 keyword campaign. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And when people realize that, it’s like, oh, I don’t have enough budget for this $2 average cl keyword that gets a hundred clicks per hour based on the numbers. And that’s where you decide to figure out what keywords you really want and how much you can afford and what to expect from it, especially in your position, because, you know, the first page, the top half gets about 90% of the clicks.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, so then in that situation, let’s say maybe you can’t afford to keep that budget higher. Do you just go ahead and run out of budget on that at 10:00 AM and, and be cool with that, or, you know, if it’s profitable or, or you try and do something else.

Schrone:

So that’s the thing. If it’s profitable, hell yes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, it, it, you never quit something that’s profitable.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Just making sure, you know, people do some crazy things out there, <laugh>,

Schrone:

If, if, but you gotta figure out if it’s profitable. If it’s just draining your profits and you know you’re wasting your money, then sure, decrease the bid or x the keyword until you’re able to, to afford it. But if it’s profitable, let’s go forward. Three hours a day.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Shan Shan, let, let’s switch back to you now. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but are, are you not working for a PPC agency now since the last time that we that we talked?

Shan Shan:

I used to so I spent a year working with Trivium. Okay. And I talked to over a hundred Amazon sellers every day about their business. But currently I, I just work on my brand.

Bradley Sutton:

So then I, but I would imagine though, in the year, you know, wor you know, when you’re not just focused on your own brand you, like you said, you’re talking to so many people that your eyes were kind of maybe open to, to a whole bunch of other a whole bunch of other things that, that, you know, were going on in the PPC world. So what about you for the last year, either your own brand or from all these conversations you were having, what, what kind of, you know, insights, new insights did you get into p c or, or unique strategies that, that you’ve got?

Shan Shan:

Yeah, so I hear a lot about people not able to scale. They have their, their PPC is basically just going like this. And one strategy to scale is to divide your PPC into two cycles. So in cycle one, you focus on impressions. That’s where you train Amazon to bring you as much relevant traffic as possible. And a lot of the sellers I talked to would basically have Amazon throttle them by having really low budgets, like $10 per campaign per day. But you shouldn’t do that. Instead, you should have a hundred dollars per campaign per day, not because you’re actually gonna spend a hundred dollars, you’ll manually manage to add, spend yourself or, or somebody else will. But if you put a hundred, Amazon won’t throttle you. They won’t make a judgment and say, oh, this is a small seller, so we’re only gonna give her a tiny pie piece of the pie.

Shan Shan:

So one, teach Amazon not to throttle you and get as much impressions as possible. Then cycle two, you focus on profit, that’s when you cut down on ad spend, remove all the wasted spend and try to get your a cost as low as possible. And when you do that, the benefit is one, you only have one goal, so it’s easier to measure. And two, if you do it successfully, what will happen is it’ll goal like this cycle one, cycle two, cycle one, cycle two, and it go up in an upward trend because it’s not confusing for Amazon. If you try to do profit and impressions at the same time, you’re adding as you’re cutting. It’s confusing for Amazon as opposed to really just helping them help you scale up.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Now that’s you know, that, that’s something that I think, you know, sometimes people are scared and that’s why I ask you know, Schrone about that, because, you know, sometimes it’s, it’s a matter of you, you gotta, you gotta raise the, you gotta have high budgets just as seemingly sometimes, you know, get, get Amazon to move on on some things, but it doesn’t always mean that, that, you know, that’s, that’s what you’re gonna hit. So without hitting the budget, so how else are you, are you controlling your, your spend? Are, are you just talking about like, like do you, what if it does, what if it does start getting a little bit outta control and, and it’s not profitable at the beginning? Like, like how do you draw the line where like, obviously none of us wanna lose money, but, you know, hey, my plan is to do about 50 bucks a day, so I’m gonna put my budget to a hundred.

Bradley Sutton:

And of course, you know, may, maybe it just does, you know, $50 a day and, and I’m, I’m good to go. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve hit my goal. But what if, you know, especially in a newer one where it might get a little bit outta control, you know, like, what, what do you do in order to, to make sure that you stay profitable? Because, you know, you can’t, you can’t really control Amazon all, all too much. They can take your, your, especially if we’re dealing with broad campaigns and, and auto campaigns, you know, they can start getting going wild with you, with your, with your placements

Shan Shan:

A daily attention be on it every single day, which is hard for a lot of people who have second jobs because you’ve got to remove any keyword that hits a certain threshold. And because, you know, at that point, this is not a winning keyword. So, for example, for me it’s $7. $7 if there’s a keyword and it hits $7 worth of clicks and it didn’t get any sales, I kill it forever. It’s gone from all my campaigns. And so just be ruthless, you know, and I found that, you know, it’s fairly consistent when it’s a key word, specific keyword word. Where it gets tough is abroad in the auto campaigns right there, you’re gonna have so many key words that you’re not gonna know. You know exactly how to control it. So in that instance, you know, I just, it’s kind of similar.

Shan Shan:

I just ruthlessly cut broad keywords after certain thresholds. If it doesn’t get enough sales, if I spend $30 on a broad keyword and it doesn’t get any sales, then I kill it for a certain amount of time, say four months. And then I, maybe I’ll bring it back if, if in the past it’s seemed to be a success, cuz it might be a seasonal thing. So you can kind of cycle through. But I wouldn’t keep spending on a broad keyword or phrase or exact that keeps wasting money. I only spend on the ones that are winning. And yeah, you might lose some keywords that would’ve eventually got well, but in my industry, in women’s clothing, I don’t have the luxury of margin.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Cool. Now switching back to Schrone. You know, with the coaching and things that you do, you talked to a, a lot of people, a anybody over the last couple of years like has some other kind of like, inspiring story or like motivates you, you know, like I, I think that that’s what a lot of us definitely thrive off of is, is like hearing other people’s stories. And it’s, sometimes, sometimes it’s more exciting to see somebody you know, thrive, you know, even than your own success. Sometimes any anybody’s stories stick out in the mind or like, somebody started here, now they’re here. Or anything like that.

Schrone:

I have a student who was fear driven and their decisions were based off of how scared they were to make that leap. To make that jump. And one of my hardest things is being a transparent coach that I am is showing them your flaws and as well as your successes, your failures, as well as your successes to see to tell them that it’s gonna be okay if you keep pushing forward and you keep pushing forward smartly. One of the things that we went over was her, her, her, their fear of overspending on PPC. And the way I got her to, well, it’s Ahi, so I’m a, I’m gonna use her. The way I got her to commit to ppc was to give her an understanding of what PPC actually is. Her concept of thinking when she came in is, if I throw money into advertisement, I’m gonna get sales.

Schrone:

Right? And my, I had to break it down to her and I said, that’s not entirely true. Right? The purpose of PPC is exactly in its name, prices per click. The purpose of it is to get you clicks your listing. The purpose of your listing is to convert that viewer into a buyer. So if you’re not, if you’re getting clicks, then your advertisement is working. If you’re not getting sales, then your listing isn’t converting that viewer into a buyer. So when I brought that to her attention, she was getting all the clicks that she wanted, but she wasn’t getting the sales. So now we transition to her listing as to why aren’t, why isn’t your listing converting that viewer into a, a customer? Right? And it’s social proof, and we fixed on that stuff right there, but once she understood that, then she wasn’t afraid to spend money because she now knows that she’s spending money in advertisement to get the clicks to bring people to her listing. Right? If, if the pur, if the sole purpose of advertisement or PPC particularly was to get sales, then you would have a buy now button on the search result page. But we don’t, so the purpose, yeah,

Bradley Sutton:

You never know. Amazon’s been testing so much stuff, you never know what the, that that search results page, oh my goodness, there seems like there’s something new on there every day, but hey day, right? They might’ve just heard you and come up with a new idea there. Hey, I hope so. No, I I’ll follow you, I’ll follow you here.

Schrone:

Yeah. That the faster Right. We can get a viewer to buy, I’m awful. Yeah, right. But once she realized that, then she realized that her money for advertisement had a, a bigger purpose mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and now she can focus her attention on fixing her listing. And sure enough, two months later, she was getting more sales.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now what about just general strategies for yourself, for your students? What are some new unique things that maybe we haven’t talked about on this podcast about, you know, you, you, it could be about PPC since we’ve been talking about PPC. It could be about launch, could be about your image strategy could be about other marketplaces, whatever you wanna talk about Toronto. What, what’s some unique quick hittings tips that you can give our listeners out there?

Schrone:

Oh, so I think the best tip that I can give any seller out there that I’ve given my students is understanding as much as you can about the next step before you take it. That being said, when, when you apply that concept to product research we like to use, I like to use Helium ten’s x-ray tool to get as much information about the category as a whole before deciding to sell in that category. And there’s a lot of different data that you could pull from Helium 10, particularly the x-ray tool that will give you an understanding of how much money that category brings in and how much your slice of the pie is going to potentially become. You know, I work off the law of averages as a st as a, as a, a foundation or baseline for what you could do in there, because I believe everybody’s at least average, right? You can be at least average. And if you can accept the numbers at average, then you can hit that as your standard and then excel beyond that. So my tip to all, all the listeners out there and always my students is learn as much as about learn as much as you can about the next step before you take it. Especially if the next step requires you to spend a lot large sum of money.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Shan Shan, what about you? Si, similar question as far as the first one I just asked Schrone is, is, you know, in dealing with, you know, talking to so many sellers, a a as you, as you have over the last year, any inspiring stories stick out in your in your mind?

Shan Shan:

You know I recently joined a forum called E-Commerce Fuel and I, I’m all about building community. I’ve been hosting dinners in happy hours in San Francisco, Miami, and New York. And through my networking I have really learned a lot of the strategies, the tips that I wouldn’t have learned elsewhere. And I wish I had been more engaged from the beginning. Cause I would’ve saved myself a lot of mistakes. So really my tip is just to get engaged. You know, reach out to me if you wanna join my dinners reach out to me if you’re female and an e-commerce founder, cause it’s an underrepresented group and we’ll help each other get there because you know, Amazon’s always changing, you know, they, they screw me a couple times over the last year, but with some help, you can always get past it.

Bradley Sutton:

I think you had mentioned you had alluded to something that happened to you on, on the negative side in the last year. That’s probably what you dressed alluding to now, but I didn’t get details on it. So what, what was that negative thing that happened to you?

Shan Shan:

Yes. The reason why women’s clothing is one of the worst categories is sizing. And women tend to return way more than men. Men buy something and just like never return it, but women return everything. So 20% is low for return rate, which is astronomical for regular am Amazon product. So if you’re dealing with 20% returns, how do you make profit? Right? and with sizing, I’ve, there was some products where you know, women tried on and it didn’t fit them and they would give it a bad review and complain. And then Amazon saw enough complaints that they just took all my inventory from that number one best seller and moved it to reserved and said, you know what? You have to upload a size chart and and then we’ll release your inventory. One inventory go on is very bar for ranking, right?

Shan Shan:

I know warning about that. And when I upload the size chart immediately, because I, you know, want my product to go back up, it took them over a month, two months for me to move their, the reserved inventory back into standard available inventory. So Amazon loves to throw these curve walls, and what I learned is that I have to diversify. I can’t just have one best seller. I can’t just have one product line, women’s clothing, you know, I need to have other types. So one of my favorite mantras is sometimes a opportunity is disguise as a setback. And that was a setback. I lost a lot of sales from that one main bestseller, probably half the sales from that product. But from that, I was more motivated to launch other products and hopefully double or triple my sales next year. And it wouldn’t have happened if Amazon didn’t screw me a little.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go. Sometimes a a good thing can come out of a negative thing. Now, you know, I was just looking at your, your storefront right now. I see that your, your, your pattern tights I is selling like, I don’t know it looks like, you know, 10, 20, 30 units a day, sometimes even now. How come those took off? Is this the one that a, that that Amazon had had shut down? Or why do you think that this product is doing, you know, better than, than your other product lines

Shan Shan:

Partially due to Taylor Swift. So there’s a thing called Taylor Swift Economy right now. I had one pro, i i, I keep launching products every year. You gotta keep launching products to, to stay on top of it in women’s clothing. And some of the products look similar to what Taylor Swift would wear on in concerts. And Taylor Swift has filled hotels in the cities that she’s been at more so than like, major sports events. She has driven economies, she’s kept people spending like, I think they call a Swift, swift economy or something like that. And yeah, some of my products sales just went up suddenly because, hey, Taylor Swift is promoting it and all the girls want it. So I didn’t even know about that. And that kind of made me realize, you know what, I should really keep an eye on stuff like that, you know? Is there a huge celebrity that’s wearing a certain look? Is there a big cultural event happening where everybody wants this type of design? Because if I had known, I would’ve doubled down on those products. But still I got to ride the wave.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Cool. All right. Now, Schrone, like if people wanna reach out to you find you on the interwebs how can they do that?

Schrone:

amzpowercircle.com, all one word, amzpowercircle.com.

Bradley Sutton:

And Shan Shan, how can people reach out to you on the interwebs?

Shan Shan:

You can add me on LinkedIn Shan Shan Fu or you can email me hello@millennialsshops.com millennial shops with an S at the end. And reach out to me if you want to get some PPC help if you want to join e-commerce field and you want six months free and you’re a female, or if you just wanna connect and come to my dinners.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well it’s been great reaching out you know, to you guys. I hope I to be able to see you in person, you know, soon again. I think last time I saw you, Schrone, was probably at Sell and Scale. Yep. Last year and Shan Shan, were you at sell scale or when’s the last time I saw you might have been at a Prosper, a previous Prosper show.

Shan Shan:

Prosper. You were dancing to Mark McGrath.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, yes, yes. I was a Prosper show, I believe. Okay. So hope to reach out to you guys. I’ll be going to New York later on this year, maybe Florida. So I’ll, I’ll see. I’ll see you over there. And Schrone, I know it’s, it’s tough to get you on an airplane sometimes, but, but hopefully I’ll be able to see you soon as well.

Schrone:

Yeah, man. I’m there whenever you need me.

#461 - Norm Farrar’s Crazy Influencer Challenge - Part 2

In this episode, we continue our conversation with Norm. He also takes us through his journey as an Amazon Live influencer, revealing strategies for successful influencer collaborations and the key to boosting brand visibility and increased sales.
 
Do you want to be your own brand ambassador? Norm addresses the common challenge of finding the right influencers, highlighting the pitfalls and misconceptions surrounding influencer marketing on Amazon. He also walks us through the process of signing up for the Amazon Live program, ensuring you have all the information you need to get started. Gain a deeper understanding of how influencers can impact your brand and learn best practices for successful collaborations.
 
Also, Norm shares important information about the New FedNow Service Program, discussing its potential impact on online businesses and how sellers can leverage it to their advantage.

In episode 461 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Norm discuss:

• 01:31 – The New FedNow Service Program
• 02:49 – Diving Into Norm’s Influencer Challenge
• 05:23 – Norm’s Amazon Live Page And His Tips
• 11:52 – How To Make Money From Amazon Live Videos
• 15:17 – How To Sign Up For This Program
• 19:01 – Finding Influencers: Many Brands Are Not Doing It Right
• 23:36 – Understand The Process Of Influencers On Amazon
• 26:00 – Norm’s Gift For Our Listeners
• 29:05 – How To Find Norm Farrar In The Interwebs

► 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 is part two of a two-part episode series where we’re talking to Norm, and he’s got some eye-opening strategies about having to do with being an Amazon influencer, doing Amazon lives, and understanding how the whole system works at a level you’ve never heard before. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think

Bradley Sutton:

Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions, so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious 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. What else can you tell us?

Norm:

Another thing, there is a new program that I only became aware of it just recently, and it’s another game changer for e-commerce businesses, and that is the new FedNow, have you heard about this?

Bradley Sutton:

FedNow? No.

Norm:

Check it out.

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe I have, but I just don’t. It’s ring a bell. It’s

Norm:

It’s a platform that the government is implementing in July. They were gonna implement it a little while ago a couple months back, but they decided not to. But this is for money laundering, and now this service is starting in, I think it’s either the beginning or the end of July, and it is gonna change the way that we do business on the internet.

Bradley Sutton:

Is this related to what, you know, Amazon was having everybody re-verify their information recently like sellers had to like reprove who they were? Or that’s completely unrelated.

Norm:

I’m not sure. I probably might have something to do with it, but I’m not sure.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s interesting.

Norm:

So if you’re listening and you’re an amazon seller, e-com seller, do any business on the internet, you wanna dive into FedNow. It’s gonna change things.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. There’s a couple, another tip for us. Now, you had sent over a message before, you’re doing some kind of influencer challenge, and that’s all you said. So like, what does that mean? What does an influencer challenge?

Norm:

Well, you know, Kelsey, you’ve been on the podcast, so Kelsey’s my son and, and my kids every year give me a challenge of some sort. Usually it’s, you know, lose weight or something. This year we were talking with Gracey Ryback, she was at a Mexico event. And I said to her, I wish I was like you. And she goes, well you are. You’re an influencer. I said, I’m not an influencer. And you know, I have like no zero followers for product influence. And so my kids came back and they gave me a challenge on the podcast, said, oh, why don’t you become a product influencer? And I said, oh, God, I can’t, that’s too much work. And so anyways, I said yes, which was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

Norm:

And so the challenge was get to a hundred thousand followers by December 1st, so zero to a hundred thousand followers. And what we’ve done is gone out, learned to be an influencer, and really trying to show Amazon sellers what they need to look for. What are some of the pitfalls? Do they wanna be their own brand ambassador or do they wanna do a side hustle and can you really make money at it? So it’s taken a lot of work. And we’re doing three times a week, Bradley Amazon lives for 90 minutes to two hours.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me follow you.

Norm:

Oh, good.

Bradley Sutton:

Hold on. Lemme go to.

Norm:

It’s called Lunch With Norm Deals.

Bradley Sutton:

How do I go? Is it amazon.com/live, right?

Norm:

It’s forward slash I think it’s just–

Bradley Sutton:

That worked. All right. And so I’m on browse, like, where is their search? Let’s see. Gracey’s the only one I follow actually on here. Let’s see. Alright, Lunch with Norm. I got, I’m gonna, let me just show my screen here to the people watching on YouTube later. So how do I find somebody on here? Alright, I think I found it here. I just typed in Amazon Live LWN deals. And then I recognize this right here, right here.

Norm:

Oh, there we go.

New Speaker:

The results, click here and voila, learn. Launch With Norm Deals, big beard, bigger deals. I love it. Give you a follow. Let just take a look also. Okay, hold on. This is something I was curious about. So these little one, one minute videos here. Yep. What are these? These are not Amazon Lives.

Norm:

Gotcha. Okay, so this is what a lot of people don’t realize. If you don’t, and I’m gonna just back up and then I’ll tell you about this. Everybody who’s starting out in Amazon, you have to fill, you have to have that slide deck filled, six images and at least one video. And I’ll give you a reason why. If you don’t put that one video, it could be the simplest video out there. You’re missing out because people like myself that I learned, if I’m an influencer, if I’m registered with Amazon Influencer, I can create a shoppable video, which will make me money. So just to give you one example. I showed an espresso machine. Somebody asked me to review this coffee here. Okay, so it’s espresso coffee, and I needed a machine, so I needed to buy one. I went out, I bought one, and I said, well, since I have this machine, I might as well do a video on it, a one minute video. So I did, and within two weeks, 50 of these machines sold. And then after that, another 20 have sold. So I’ve sold 70 of these, my espresso machines.

Bradley Sutton:

When you say I’ve sold, that’s because like you left like a video, but it’s not your listing, right?

Norm:

No. So what happens is you’ll notice that if you have a video and you can see this quite a bit, so as long as you have one video on your listing, so in your product listing, your slide deck you have a product video, you have a demo, anything that you put there it will allow Amazon’s algorithm to pick up the shoppable videos that influencers have done and they place them. I don’t have any say on it, but they place them on the listing. And people get this mixed up, you’ll see the related videos underneath and you’ll see a lot of people there, but those for the most part aren’t influencers. The people that are influencers usually, like they do a nice job. All I’m doing is, Hey, this is a Coke, can, I just bought it.

Norm:

This is why, this is how it opens. I enjoy the taste. I can’t promote it. And it’s all done. All I do, my little spiel is I shoot from my beard down and I just use my hands and that’s it. It’s just nobody sees my face. In fact, when I do any, I do I do beauty products. Yeah, there we go. So I do bu beauty products, and if I do usually do a beauty product, and then they do have to see my face, I put a beauty mask on and you know, I’ll do it that way. So it’s just a little, it’s fun. But these are things that I learned that I would never really have known about until I took this challenge up. So it’s good for my brand to know it because if I didn’t have that listing when I launch, that’s part of my launch. I’m gotta have, I don’t even care if I go to Animoto or Canva, put up something cheap, a slide just transitioning, just something. So the algorithm will pick up and put the influencers videos up there. And this is where a lot of people aren’t talking to influencers. You know, they’re not doing it well.

Bradley Sutton:

How did this work? I’m still having trouble understanding the process here. This, this coffee machine, did you actually buy this? So you bought it and then you recorded this video. And I’m assuming you already had your own influencer or Amazon Live account. Now you posted this video as a review, or you hit on the listing itself. You add video,?

Norm:

So if you type in my espresso, it’s a real, it’s a horrible video, but people liked it.

Norm:

I don’t even know if there’s a search, but where

Bradley Sutton:

View my storefront? Wait, that’s not it. Yeah. Oh yeah, maybe it’s here. See Ethiopian coffee here. I see a bunch of knives.

Norm:

So if people come and they buy, like somebody just bought a hundred dollars knife I get a commission for that. There’s the beauty mask. I use.

Bradley Sutton:

How can you even fit a beauty mask on you? Wait, I don’t, I don’t see that coffee machine. Oh,

Norm:

There’s probably–

Bradley Sutton:

Did I pass it?

Norm:

There’s probably a page button.

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe I passed it here. Well, let me just pick one of these other ones. Yeah. Cause I’m assuming it’s the same thing. I like Ethiopian coffee, so let me, let me click on this. Oh, I think that is,

Norm:

That’s Kelsey that did that one.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So then I see here’s the product down here. Yep. So let me go to their listing. Okay.

Norm:

All Right. And guess what? And so, so you, you bought this product or they sent it to you, or what? Yep,

Norm:

They sent it to me. Here it is. Right here. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

They sent it and then you went, or your son went to this listing. And then, let’s see. Lemme see

Norm:

If I can find, Nope, we didn’t do

Bradley Sutton:

Anything. Nothing. You didn’t do anything? Nope. How did this video? Yeah, see, here’s your video right here at the bottom under videos for this product. Now

Norm:

Go up and go up

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Norm:

To their page. Okay. Or the product listing and guess Okay. They have a video there. Click on the video. Let’s see. And you’re gonna see right there,

Bradley Sutton:

There it is. Related videos. Yep.

Norm:

That will never Okay. Come up if you don’t have, like, you won’t see the, you see all the other videos that were down there?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Norm:

Mine is the only one showing because I’m an influencer.

Bradley Sutton:

So you, this video you uploaded on your own, like, like influencer whatever you call it, portal. I, I guess you could say I uploaded it and then you tie it to the asin.

Norm:

Yes. So when I uploaded this video, so I created a video and we upload it and it gi it gets an affiliate link attached to it. And so anytime that anybody watches that video for 30 seconds and they go and buy, then I get a commission from it. And what what was really interesting is that there’s, there’s different ways to make money. You’ve got your Amazon Live, which for me takes a lot of work for okay, return. Well very little return right now because I, I, the followers have to build up. And then you’ve got the shoppable where you can do 20, 30, 40 shoppable over a weekend, post them and immediately start making cash immediately. So the trick for shoppable videos is that you have to follow the guidelines and you get three attempts. If they, if they, the first three videos that you upload, if they get rejected three times, you’re not gonna three strikes and you’re out.

Norm:

Yeah. Yeah. So you gotta know the guidelines. And then once you do that, once you’re approved, you can upload these videos, you can do a bunch at a time. In fact we just were we, Amazon even reached out to us to go and become, it’s part of their, their new influencer challenge where that coffee video that you just saw, Kelsey did it. It’s more like a TikTok video. And if they select it we, we can do up to 50 videos if they select it over the next month or two to show you get 50 bucks per, and they, this is the new style they want rather than just a finger pointing. They want more of that. Tiktok look like you would have an inspire. So then there’s, then there’s just the affiliate program where you can have your wishlist.

Norm:

So there was a lot on what you were just looking at. You saw a lot of videos. But there are wishlists that if Mother’s Day coming up, I’ll have a wishlist with videos or images that I want to promote. And if anybody clicks on that and buys anything, then you get a some money. Now, one of the things I was really skeptical about because I literal literally started with zero followers. I had followers on the lunch with Norm side. You know, those are Amazon sellers or E-com sellers. Sure. But on the product side, who’s the old guy? You know, who, who’s, who’s this guy? Yeah. And I had to start building up and building up and building up, and it’s gaining momentum, but can I make money at this? And I could only do this so long. I’m not doing this full-time, but can somebody make money doing this as a side hustle?

Norm:

And my conclusion is yes, and it wouldn’t be bad money. If, if you’re dedicated to doing this and you, you can get people to send you product and you want to do these videos, or if you buy products, like, I’ve got two Mevo cameras, a Sony camera, I’ve got these ring lights, I’ve got the Sure mic. I can take any of these products and upload a video now that I’m registered as an influencer. And if the algorithm picks it up, that Sure mic, let’s say it’s three or 400 bucks, I get three or 4% of that. So anyways, it,

Bradley Sutton:

So wait to, to sign up, like, like at the very bottom here, it says, are you a brand interested in live streaming? Learn? How is that step one or a step one signing up for the Amazon affiliate program? This

Norm:

Is, this is one of the reasons why man, it is confusing to sign up. So the first thing that you should do is sign up for an affiliate account. Okay? So get that affiliate account you know, get your list going, and then you can sign up for the influencer program. Now if you don’t have a social media following you know, and I don’t know if that’s a hundred or a thousand, but if you don’t have that, that social media following, or you don’t have websites that are going to promote products, cuz they’re gonna ask you for that, then it’s probably not a good thing to do right now. However, there is a tip, there’s a little trick. If you want to go and buy an Instagram account, maybe in the pet niche and you’re selling pet products you could, you can use that to show Amazon that you have 10,000 followers.

Norm:

It’s very easy to do. You can go, there’s a bunch of different sites that you can go to. But that’s, that’s one way that you can do it. And then you can start doing all these videos. Now it’s a slow start and you should be doing items that are a hundred dollars plus. Most of the items that I have right here, I’ve got, you know, some of the stuff behind me, some beauty products. The coffee here that I, I it was 85 bucks, but I, I just to get some videos out there, I’ll do anything from 20, $20 down, even though I make a couple of pennies on it. It was more to prove a point what I can do. But right now, if I were to spend more time doing it, if I did an eight hour day, you could be making a hundred, couple hundred dollars a day and at the end of the month, like let’s say over three to six months getting out there, if you could do it you, I can’t see why somebody couldn’t be making thousands of dollars a month doing this if it was something that they liked to do.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, the reason I’m asking a lot of these questions, first of all, I think I might, I might go ahead and try and do that challenge no way I can get a hundred thousand followers by December or anything like that. So more of a, just a personal challenge. But you know, like if somebody’s just getting started, like getting like some relatives started in this and then they would be like your first, you know, like, you know, generating some UGC for you and Yeah. And potentially, you know you know, he helping you launch, you know, he helping you launch some of your products or, or get some, some traction on it. But this, yeah, this is just interesting. So which, which, did you buy a social media account or did you use your, your lunch with Norm?

Norm:

Yeah, so what I did Instagram or I created a website I think you can still see it called Lunch with Norm Deals. I put, or l w n deals if you want you know, that’s the short form. And we created a website. We created some social media and we got the buzz going. And then from that, we got, there it is. Yep. Then you could just go into all deals and you’ll see,

Bradley Sutton:

Can see it here. Yep. Okay. Oh, wow. This is a pretty good looking website here. There you

Norm:

Go.

Bradley Sutton:

And then this, this like, but, but they’re not checking website. They want you to have a social media presence. Yeah.

Norm:

Or if you have a website like this you know, it shows that if you’re going to have a product, that you have an outlet to go and you know, use it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Norm:

So let’s, like that you just checked there we go.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. You’ve only got like 92 followers. This is not like they needed a thousand or anything for you to

Norm:

No, but

Bradley Sutton:

To get started. Just, just, okay. Yeah.

Norm:

So with that one I didn’t use as this is what I was gonna do. I used which account was it? I think it might have even been lunch with Norm. So, you know, I had thousands of followers there. And so that was a no-brainer. I got, I got accepted. So here, so now the, there’s a bit of a a journey if people wanted to follow it. I’m doing it on TikTok, although I’ve paused it for a while because I found that TikTok, the algorithm didn’t pick it up, so I thought I’d just focus more on the shoppable. But how can a brand, because so many brands are not doing it right? There’s a lot of information about influencers out there and going out and finding them, and it’s a very arduous, tough task. It doesn’t have to be, there’s lots of ways to use influencers that it doesn’t have to be that tough task. And as you can see, you can hire these people, you know, hire me send me the product and, and I’m just joking, but send me the product and

Bradley Sutton:

Well, I’ll send, I’m gonna send you a coffin shelf. I want you there. I wanna

Norm:

See all, I’ll do that.

Bradley Sutton:

One of our coffin shelves,

Norm:

You know, all of these products, I’ve got probably 350 products in this house right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Now is it just because of what you’ve done in this short time now sellers are, are seeing what you do and they’re, they’re just like hitting you up and saying, Hey, can I send you the products?

Norm:

Yeah, a lot. A lot are. Yep. So like what I’ve done is I’ve, I’ve put together something and it’s a presentation. People want to, to get, and I do this for free by the way. So I don’t charge anybody for going live on Amazon. I don’t charge anybody for a shoppable video. So a lot of influencers will, but because I’m doing this just as my challenge, I’m not charging anything. Yeah. We pay for the paid advertising to drive the traffic. The only thing we say is where we will charge is if we sell something. So if those, the my espresso coffee machine, if they sent me that, then they would owe me 10% of the gross of the sale. So it’s not a big

Bradley Sutton:

Deal. And that’s in addition to your affiliate commission then? Yeah. Yeah.

Norm:

That’s in addition to the, so

Bradley Sutton:

You can make like what, 30 bucks on 30 bucks

Norm:

More?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. On the, on this one. Okay.

Norm:

Yeah. So well on the, my Espresso, it’s not a very expensive machine, it’s 79. So I made, okay, I’d make $8 per plus the, the commission. So but that if I have, so here’s the other side that I did not think about the sponsored brands. I have people sending me brands right now, and they’re paying me like a thousand, 2000 bucks to show their brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow.

Norm:

It’s crazy,

Bradley Sutton:

Huh?

Norm:

I’ve got people every day not every day, every week. Now that’s, I’m getting a little bit better known that are approaching me for Prime day. Hey, what will it, what will you charge me to show this product on Prime day? We’ll give them a price.

Bradley Sutton:

Like on, on a live or, yeah,

Norm:

On a live, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

On Amazon is, is the only place we are doing this stuff. Or you’re also like Gracey, you know, doing stuff on your Instagram and, and other, other places. Yeah.

Norm:

So a again, we held back on doing all this other stuff because it was getting pretty pricey, and I thought, let’s wait till we get the followers, let’s wait till we get the products. We get the system down and then we’ll start to really boot this out, and especially on YouTube. But I’m, I’m leveraging other people’s customer base and I think that, I don’t think it’ll be a problem to do this. So, you know, your wooden coffin there, we can go on an Amazon Live, you’d be on with me and we could talk about the, the brand, you know, the overall brand. So it’s more of a podcast interview than a shopping. And that’s why, and I’ve been bringing on a lot of beauty brands and look, you know, here’s some old bald-headed guy with a big long beer drinking out of a Harley Davidson mug interviewing, you know, this person about retinol, you know, serums or vitamin C serums and what it can do. And, you know, it’s, it’s just a different angle.

Bradley Sutton:

Fascinating. I mean, I heard from Gracey that you were doing something, I didn’t even know that was what this, it was part of a challenge or anything. Yeah, I just thought that you were doing some experiments. It started with her. That was the thing. So super cool. Yeah, this is awesome. And, and like I said, you know, I, I don’t think every single Amazon seller podcast listener who who’s out there is like, Hey, I wanna be my own influencer, but I think it’s important to understand this process. Yeah. So you know who you’re dealing with, you know, put yourself in their shoes and like I said, hey, get some family members to start. This is great, you know, this is great. You know, side hustle stuff and, and just having somebody close to you who’s in this process, I think it’s gonna help Amazon sellers a lot.

Bradley Sutton:

Understand, you know, all these different avenues. I mean, in the last, you know, I thought I knew, so I had Gracey on, I’ve interviewed her, but I didn’t know about the, you know, the whole process of, of signing up to be a having a affiliate and then separate is the influencer thing, and then separate is the livestream thing and bringing people on to interview. And, and I had no idea there was like, you know, influencers had their own portal where they would upload the videos. I guess I just figured that all those videos you would see is when people go to that page and, and hit upload video. But yeah, you know, like your, these videos you know, since it’s an influencer, they were able to get into the as you know what, as a matter of fact, I swear I thought it was a mistake, but I think I’m gonna look up my coffin shelf really quick. I almost wanna say somebody might have done a video on our coffin shelf, and now I’m going to see, like, I am not sure, but I swear I saw something and I have been meaning to look at it again. Cause I know I have a video on there. Yep. There you go. There it is. Right there. Yep. So that means, that means this is an influencer on his own, got our coffin shelf, it’s under related videos.

Norm:

There you go.

Bradley Sutton:

There. And now it’s showing up here. All right, thank you, Doug and Nikki he said, how cool is this? My, my review? I wonder if he’s a podcast out there. So how would he know that catchphrase right there? But here, here he made a large coffin shelf video. Okay, well see. Like fascinating stuff, norm. Fascinating stuff. Now, completely switching gears before we go, you actually said that you prepared a gift for one listener. That’s up to $500 of value. Tell me about it.

Norm:

So this is completely different, but when we’re sourcing from China Chinese use HS codes, and we know that in the US we need an h t S code. These are the harmonized tariff codes. And what’s happened is people pay way too much. Just, and I’ll give you an example, my soap. So I make soap, and I was paying 17%. Okay? I looked into it and I found out that under natural soap I was paying 17% and I thought I knew my stuff. Then after lobby, my partner at HONU comes over and says you know you could probably get a better, a better deal. And okay, well, you know, what kind of deal can you get me? How about zero, I just saved 17%. And we did, we reclassified it as Castile soap because it was an olive oil based soap.

Norm:

So no lying, you know, we don’t wanna lie, that’s the last thing. But I know just recently we took these signs and they were just quarantine signs you know, the big yellow like aluminum quarantine sign. And what ended up happening is AF Lobby found it as advertising, and it went from 25% plus 15% down to, I think it was next to nothing. I think it was zero. They saved $15,000 bringing in the product. So this is what I, I have, it’s called the tariff terminator, because if he could do that for me, I thought, oh, what we, what could we do for others? And typically what we do is we, we’ll charge a $50 fee upfront. If we can save you money, great. If we can’t, well you’re out 50 bucks, but if we save you money, the, it’s, it’s another $450, but you’re on the winning side. So what I said is, look, one of your, whoever, whoever wins this will do a tariff terminator. You, we won’t charge you a penny, you get the full thing. Usually 80% of Amazon sellers we save a lot of money for.

Bradley Sutton:

So to basically this tariff terminator to expensive tarrifs, you can just say Hasta la vista, baby.

Norm:

Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing and I’ll make sure,

Bradley Sutton:

Sure, that’s a Terminator reference for you young folk out term who are I was aging myself with that there.

Norm:

So the other part to this is that there’s a report that we can provide saying, look, if you move from China over to Korea for cosmetics, you’ll get X. If you switch from a wood to a resin or to an aluminum, you’ll save x. And so there’s a lot of options that are also provided in this report. So there you go. It’s called Turf Terminator.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well for this, and, and you know, your podcast and everything else, like, you’ve got a long list. I, I feel like we need a link tree right here. But how can people find you and, and reach out to you on the interwebs?

Norm:

Well probably the easiest way is you can always listen to the podcast Lunch with Norm. And that’s every Monday and Wednesday and Friday, and that’s live. So you can listen for my bloopers or you could just check me out the on the web. And if you search me, just search Norm Farrar and you’ll see a beard guy. I

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. I love it. All right. Well, norm, we got two for the price of one two podcast episodes for the price of one here. So I appreciate it. As always, you know, that’s the reason why you’re back here four times is you bring nothing but value to our listeners. So we really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you at one of these upcoming events soon.

Norm:

Fantastic. Thanks for having me back.

#460 - Expanding To Retail & Google Business Profile Strategies – Part 1

Welcome back to The Serious Sellers Podcast! In our latest episode, we had the pleasure of hosting a special guest for the fourth time. Norm Farrar, a seasoned expert in the Amazon industry, joins us to discuss some exciting topics and share valuable insights. Tune in to discover what Norm has been up to lately, including his strategies for getting Amazon or E-commerce brands into retail stores and the latest strategies in marketing your brand inside Google Business Profile.
 
Is your brand or product ready for retail? Norm delves into this question, providing practical advice and highlighting the importance of being prepared before taking the leap. Additionally, he shares his experiences and candidly talks about the challenges faced when dealing with certain buyers in the retail industry. Norm also brings us up to speed on the latest developments with Google My Business and Google Business Profile. Find out what’s new and how these tools can enhance your online presence and increase visibility for your brand.

Make sure to stay tuned for Part 2! It’s an episode you won’t want to miss!

In episode 460 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Norm discuss: 

• 01:09 – Another 4-Time Guest In The Serious Sellers Podcast!
• 02:52 – What Norm Been Up To Lately?
• 03:36 – Getting Amazon Brands Into Retail Stores
• 07:34 – Consider Independent Retail Stores
• 15:33 – Is My Brand Or Product Ready For Retail?
• 20:46 – “Some Buyers Are Jerks”
• 22:30 – What’s New With Google My Business / Google Business Profile?
• 30:59 – Norms Healthy Habits & Hobbies Outside The Amazon Grind
• 32:52 – Make Sure To Upgrade To Google Analytics 4
• 34:04 – Stay Tuned For Part 2!

► 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 is part one of an information and strategy packed two part episode with the Beard Guy, Norm. Now, in this first episode, he’s gonna be talking about how to get into retail stores in order to get up to three quarters of a million dollar purchase orders, and also the latest with Google Business Profiles and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

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 Ten’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 Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton. 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 now, I believe, if my math is correct here, for the fourth time, I think you’re only the second person who has ever been on the podcast four times. Cuz you know, we have a guest once per year and we don’t bring everybody back. You know, it’s by popular demand, you know? So Norm, I’m pretty sure Kian was the first, but now the second person to ever be invited back total of four times, Norm Farrar. How’s it going?

Norm:

It’s going great. What an honor. Four times

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. I love it. I don’t know. What’s that? Three times that trifecta. Four times. Is there a word for that?

Norm:

I don’t know. Lucky?

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. Well, my dad always says better lucky than good sometimes, right? That’s right. So guys, we’re not gonna, you know, since he’s been on here before, we’re not gonna go into this full backstory. I took the liberty of writing down his old podcast number. So if this is your first time you’re hearing Norman, you wanna learn more about him very first time he was on the podcast was episode 80, so make sure to check that out. You can get his backstory. And then in episodes 211 and 327, like I said, about one, one per year. He was sharing a lot of good tips on, you know, Google my business and Amazon Post what it was just getting started off and press releases. And so, you know, last time we talked about Google Business profile, and I’m sure we’re gonna be talking about some, you know, things that are up to date there, but tons of information in those episodes. So make sure to, to give those give those a listen at your leisure. But anyways, we’re here now in, in the middle of 2023, and we want to see what’s been cooking, you know, for you. So, so how’s, how’s the last beer? The last beer? Yeah. Have you been drinking a lot of beer? Norm doesn’t drink at all. Last beer he drank was probably never, but yeah. How has the last year been for you?

Norm:

It had its challenges. You know, Amazon’s not always acting the way I want it to. But, you know, you have to learn to be resilient and you have to find different channels, and, and that’s what I’ve been doing. So I have been exploring Walmart quite a bit for the last two years. Carrie and I have been, you know, talking back and forth about that getting heavily into retail. So now retail, what do

Bradley Sutton:

You mean by retail? Like, like, like brick and mortar or Yeah,

Norm:

Yeah. Getting into bricks and mortar. So not literally, but you know, trying to get the brand on. Yeah. And

Bradley Sutton:

You could sell brick and mortar in brick and mortar, I guess you like, get a product in Home Depot or something, but that, yeah.

Norm:

I guess you could. So no, it’s, it’s been great because I’ve been learning just a process on how to go and approach all the big box stores as well as the mid and the independent retailers and have seen, well put it this way, you know, when you have a single purchase or, you know, a weekly purchase, okay, you might sell a hundred, a couple of thousand, whatever it could be. Well, you get a purchase order from Costco or from Walmart, whatever. They’re talking, well, I showed one we were on the cruise together, the online sellers cruise. I showed one that I picked up the day before I left, and it was $279,000 for this one buyer.

Bradley Sutton:

This is one of your products or like a client’s product or?

Norm:

No, I represent a few brands. So this is one of their brands that were on the marketplace. And sometime in the last seven days, there was another one that I just showed. I showed up for 710,000.

Bradley Sutton:

Hold on l let’s take that quarter of a million dollar one. Yeah. Walking back, was this originally an Amazon? Only brand. Okay. So, so they’re an Amazon only brand. What they reach out to you and like, Hey, we’re interested to get into retail, or you were looking at their account like, Hey, why, why don’t we get this in retail? Walk us through how this happened.

Norm:

Okay. So I talk a lot about retail. And so one of these Amazon brands a good brand, I reached out and, you know, asked if I could do anything with them with the brand. And I said, yeah, this is what I can do. I’ll introduce you to a bunch of retail buyers. I’ve got a enough experience and a big enough database that if anybody is looking for pretty much any buyer in and all the main retailers, I could pretty much do an introduction. So what I started to do was create these emails, craft them so they were worded properly help guide them with their with their catalog. So you wanna have a wholesale catalog to show the buyer. So just got them retail ready. And then it doesn’t happen all at once, but it could happen in the first month.

Norm:

It could happen in three months. But all of a sudden buyers start to get in. We got one today from the toy the senior brand developer dev, the senior brand manager in toys at Walmart saying, Hey, do you have any toys that you can introduce us to? So, yeah, we just, we take those and we ship ’em over to the buyer. Then the buyer it’s their prerogative if they wanna respond back to the buyer or not, or to the seller. If they do, they’re, they’re just dealing directly with them. So yeah, we’ve got quite a few brands into the retail market recently.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I mean, that’s what I’ve always been, been preaching. You know, before Helium 10, I was working for a company that was mainly in retail. And you know, I, I’ve said this story a lot of times, but I’m always proud of myself. Yeah, I brought their sales from like one to 3 million, but that’s nothing compared to, you know, they’re, they’re in every Walmart and, and every retail store. And I, and I got them into like a bunch of grocery stores and the POs dwarf, what is going on on Amazon. If you think about, hey, there’s 4,000 Walmart stores, you know, each store has to have, you know, quantity on the shelf. And so, you know, each store is buying a few cases of the product. You can do the math about the kind of numbers that that show up. So, so like that takes kind of like special people like yourself. I know, like, you know, my old company, we used to use brokers and stuff cuz you, you can’t just like go knock on the door of, of Walmart or Kroger or something like that and say, Hey, introduce me to your buyer. I wanna, I wanna show this to them. So like, you know, how have you, how did you get to the point where you, you actually can go in and do that?

Norm:

Yeah. One of the things that you know, we do preach is that if you want to go and use a distributor, by all means go ahead. Because they have this grouping of retailers that they’re already in. So if they’re a toy distributor or supplements or whatever it is that’s a fast track, you pay a little bit extra for that. So if you do have the margins that are built in, then great. When I first started working with distributors, this is when my family owned manufacturing companies, so we would be working with them and, and we had all the margins that we needed to build were that were built in. So we made a nice little profit, but to do it on your own, these are just, we’ve just searching the internet, trying to get into different buyers.

Norm:

Linkedin does a great job, but more importantly, you can knock on a buyer’s door. But if you don’t set up and talk the lingo one of the things I would recommend is learn the, the language of retail. And if you can do that, that’s great. If you come off that you’ve never done this before and you’re a hack, well, they might just put you in the other pile. People that can, that, that come retail ready, they have the proper packaging, they have the right catalog, and their emails are properly written then you’ve got a chance and that’s going direct. And again, I’m not, I’m, I I’m not even naming my service. I’m, I’m just telling people this because I, if they’re gonna do it and they wanna have a chance, they’ve gotta look professional. And another big tip is that when you get that buyer and they do send you an email, if you’re gonna wait more than 24 hours, forget it.

Norm:

You’ve gotta get back and forth to them. And one fear that I’ve seen a lot of sellers in Amazon have is that, well, one big one is cash flow. I’ll talk about that in a sec. But the other one is how do I, I I only have so much inventory, and if they want to have a container load, which will never happen on your first order, but if the fear is, oh, they’re gonna order too much, it’s gonna kill my Amazon listing, that’s gonna go down the tubes, and then I’m not making that much profit on the other, and I don’t even know if I can get all the inventory to them. So what you can do is when you, when you do get that initial po you can talk to the buyer, they know that first of all, you’re gonna get a test po, then you’re gonna get something that’s probably more regional, a few more stores, then it’ll spread out, and then it’ll spread out.

Norm:

But during that first time you can let them know that you’ve, you’re gonna create better retail packaging or that your product, we just ordered enough product from China, it’s gonna take a month to get here. There, there’s no problem, there’s no problem with that. So anyways, those are just a, a few tips. And then cash flow, you gotta be careful. Sometimes I tell people if they really want, or if they’re really cautious about cash flow, which you should be you can always go to independent independent not grocers, but retailers. I, I live in a small hick town, you know, more cows than people. And we have a pet store independent, we have the variety stores, we have all these independent stores in town. They’re still, I mean, they’re not dead. Some people think they might smell funny, but you can go and approach these people and say, Hey, you know, I have this really great soap, and if they wanna be a little bit different than buying Dove or Irish Spring, and they want a natural soap, all how much is a case?

Norm:

So you give them a case, or your minimum order quantity might be two cases. And guess what? They pay with a credit card, a credit card. Now what I found, if you do have a bit of cash flow and you work out all these terms with your, with the buyer, okay, right at the, during the contract, and you, you know, if it makes sense, great. If not, don’t be afraid to negotiate. They might come back with what’s best for the chain. And you come back with what’s best for you and you’ll, you could meet somewhere in the middle.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So, you know, should I be at like, at a certain level before I even start thinking about this? Or, you know, maybe I’m still newer on Amazon, but I’ve got like rock solid pricing. So I’ve got decent profit margins, I’ve got amazing packaging, retail ready packaging you know, I might even have products stored here at my own warehouse or something. Like, am I ready to go? Or do these buyers wanna see some kind of, so, you know, online history, whether it’s on walmart.com or amazon.com before they, they can see you. Like, how much does that help? Where you can show like your, your, your resume, your your product resumes. Like, look, I’ve been a best seller on Amazon, or I I’ve sold $1 million in the last year on Amazon. Like, how much does that matter?

Norm:

It really does depend. Like for Walmart, for example, I know this for a fact, like to get onto the Walmart marketplace, they’re looking for seasoned sellers. So they’ll look at your Amazon or they’ll look at your Shopify and bring you over. Now the great thing about going onto the marketplace, they have bees basically pitch fest twice a year. And if they see that your online product is selling, you could get invited to it. But if you want to get down there in front of Walmart and you’ve got a really great product, same thing. As long as you can get in front of the buyer then you might have a chance getting in there, going online for any retailer. Think of it, all these retailers right now have online marketplaces for the most part. If you’re in the pet business, well maybe pet value if you’re target, target.com is actually fantastic platform if you can get approved for it.

Norm:

But you can check out all of those and get onto those marketplaces. But if you want, you can target it. I’ve seen, I wouldn’t say new sellers probably should probably stay away, but mid-level to advanced sellers. If, if you can show that you’ve got a good product, it’s well-branded. And this is, you know, we’ve talked about this before, just making sure that your branding is consistent and Walmart wants you to have this community, this brand community that they’re trying to build. Well, this is just another level where that retail purchaser or that buyer wants to make sure that you are, your, your brand is consistent with whatever that store is, right? If it’s not, they’re, they’re just gonna pass you by. So if they can go and take a look at your Amazon listing, they see that you’ve got, you know, really great images you’ve got great reviews.

Norm:

It’s priced accordingly. And then they go to your Shopify store, and then they might type in a couple of keywords. See if you pop up or your brand name and you’ve got some social media presence, you might have an influencer or two. All of this adds up to being authority. The more authority that you have, the more trust and more trust equals sales. And that’s the same thing with a buyer. They don’t want to have a fluke. They’ll take a, they will take a gamble on you, but you better have the brand or that look to support it.

Bradley Sutton:

So how know when I have enough? You know, like, is it a revenue? Is it a more like a longevity thing? When do I know my resume is ready to go?

Norm:

Yeah, you, you can try it out 50 grand a month, a hundred grand a month, and they’ll come back to you and they’re gonna ask you those questions. So you know, what is, what are you generating right now? What’s your gross revenue? What’s your top line? They’re gonna ask you that. And in fact was it chewy? I think I was working with Chewy and they just came back and they said, okay tell me your costs. Well, I don’t want to. Yeah, well, if you don’t  so they’re trying to work out the profit margin, right? So you know your cost compared to what you’re selling it for. You know, what is your manufacturer’s selling retail price? And if you have map, which is your, it’s basically the minimum amount you’re gonna allow them to sell it for.

Norm:

Well, if it meets the if it meets their range, then it might, might be okay, maybe you have to change a few things. Maybe you have to change your pricing. We’ve talked about perceived pricing before. And maybe with just adding better packaging and making it for the packaging ready for retail, because there is, there will be changes to your packaging. Like, let’s say, oh, I’m just trying to see what do I got here? Okay, Macha Tea right there. Macha Tea. Well, is it gonna sell like that or is it gotta be into a box? Or does it have to have a hang tag, a clamshell? It depends. And you might have to get different packaging for different retailers. And I’ll give you a great example. Costco, they want bigger, better Products. Well, if you’re gonna go in with, you know, it’s not gonna happen.

Norm:

Yeah. And when I say this, this is a very small package of Mati because you can’t see it, but if it’s a much larger version of this mati tin, then that’s fine. But just that’s one of them that you’re going to have to change for for the store. The other thing is I’ve got into very well into the Dollar General type stores, you know, used to be a dollar, now, $2, whatever it is. Maybe it’s $10 by now. But anyways, those types of stores don’t require the same thing. Like they don’t require the same type of packaging. But you still have to go through the same process. And for those people who don’t necessarily have a, a big dollar item or something that’s that’s in that dollar range, or you, you know, maybe you, if they’re, if you can sell, like, I don’t even touch this at all, but if you’ve got a smaller dollar item and you can sell it over to Dollar General or any of those types of brands or stores, and that might be perfect for you. I did sell e eva foam like cosmetic wipes for women, okay? And we actually, we did the private labeling for cvs, Ecker, Walmart, target, we, we got the whole group of them, same foam, but in do the dollar stores. It was a lot less than if you went over to Target and bought it. It just, the packaging looked a little bit differently.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Now, the, let’s go on the flip side. The ones who have been rejected is there, is it just, you know, it’s not like, you know, they’re gonna accept every single product. And sometimes it’s just luck of the draw maybe. But, but anything stick out in your mind about why somebody you brought there might have been rejected, like a specific reason that, you know, maybe you can save somebody the trouble or, or somebody can, you know, hear this and all right, well, I better, I better make sure I have this in order before I go present

Norm:

First research the the retailer. Because if it doesn’t line up with your brand, mm, forget it. You know, there’s a lot of different pet stores out there. There you might have a, a boutique style of a pet product, and you’re going to a pet store that is, you know, is very price conscious and it just doesn’t line up. I know, again, going back to Walmart, if you don’t line up with their their brand, the Walmart brand, then you’ll be rejected. Now that doesn’t mean, and, and maybe you don’t have enough sales. So if you go to a Walmart buyer, so you, you know, now you’re talking back and forth, they like your product, but you just can’t support it. You might get rejected, but that doesn’t mean you can’t reapply. The worst thing I’ve seen is when people go into these buyers with big time egos, oh, I sell X on Amazon, whoop d do, that’s nothing.

Norm:

That’s a one time order. You know? And they might have a big ego and then they get rejected, and then they show they get resentment. And you know, you, you can’t do that. You, you have to go in and come in with a business tone, regardless. Even if the buyer, some buyers are jerks, you know? And that’s the other thing, by the way, you might be dealing with this awesome, really awesome buyer that you get along with. Now, back in the day, I’m an old guy. I could go and take that buyer out at Walmart. I would go and I could buy lunch, you know? Yeah. Depending on the retailer. There’s no way you could do that. Nowadays, you can’t do that. So if your personality aligns with that buyer and your product does well, there’s, you know, two check boxes, but all of a sudden you might have just a jerk. Sure. But they know what they’re looking for and they will, you know, they’ll let you know what they’re looking for, and you might think you, you know what they’re looking for but they know your category, your niche much better than you. And some just double barrel you. And you just, you you get deflated and you shouldn’t because in six months that person will be on a rotation out of the system.

Bradley Sutton:

I remember dealing with that and yeah, you know, like you can strike out a couple times, but hey, he just takes one. You know, who, who doesn’t want a $750,000 po? So, you know, you’re not gonna get that from Amazon. Alright, well that’s interesting stuff. We, we might circle back a little bit there, but you know, the last couple times on the podcast, and actually you’re the only one I’ve ever had on to talk about this, but what’s new with Google My Business? Because like you’re probably the expert of the world in the Amazon world, at least on this. I don’t hear anybody talking about this. So what can you educate us on?

Norm:

Oh my gosh. So I love so now they’ve changed everything, and this is why I thought it might be something to talk about is it’s now called right across the board Google Business Profile. So first of all, some people are gonna say, where do I start with that? Well, you can go to business.google.com or if you go up to those nine icons that you see in the top right and click on it, you’ll see it under profile, and then you can just register and you can get started. But the, what the main advantage and it’s always been is that Google loves people working with Google products. And Google Business Profile is one of those tools that puts it all together. So the more that you fill it out, and by the way nine out of 10 people that I talked to say, you can’t do this with brands wrong.

Norm:

You can absolutely do this with brands. You answer the wrong question and they’ll say you can’t do it. So there is a question that you have to answer when you get verified to get verified. And one of them is do you leave your office? Okay, or yeah. One is, do you leave your office or I forget the exact wording, but the other one is do you ever leave your office? Something like that. Well, if you and I would check the box, I don’t leave. My office is not a retail store. Well, chances are you’re gonna get denied, rejected. What you, if you attend a trade show that’s leaving the office, okay? So if you’re going to an event, you know, one, one of helium tens events, well guess what? Your brand now, and you can get approved easily.

Norm:

They’re approval process is almost immediate. Now they have five different types of approval where you only used to have two a mail-in card or a phone. Yeah, it was a phone call before and the phone wasn’t really working at Google during the pandemic, so you had to wait two or three weeks for the card. But anyways, what you can do with this is so cool let’s say you have a Shopify store with an Amazon store. Maybe you got approved over at Walmart. Well, you can, with Google, you can open up a category or a brand, you could put your product line under there. So when you have multiple brands, let’s say you can put multiple brands in your Google profile under your company, and then one image, you have one image that might be that mache tea.

Norm:

Okay? You’ve got that Matcha and you’re selling it over on Amazon. Well, that link goes over to your listing. The next pitcher goes over to your store, the next pitcher to Shopify in your next over to whatever you want it to go over to Walmart. And 100% in the second that you click submit, this is indexed. The second that you do that, it’s a shoppable link. And if you do this properly and you put in the proper keywords, just describe it. Or if you put in metadata, it will help it will just help in the rankings. Now, the more information that you’re putting, let’s say we talk about this and we have a blog article on our website. We can take those blog articles and post it from Google into Facebook or into other social medias sites.

Norm:

Or you could take it from Facebook and point it over to your Google business. All it is, is Google will provide you with a link. Every time you do anything with your Google profile, you get some sort of lift, you get more ranking. And I’ve used this for years. Every time I’ve done a press release, any type of blog article, any type of repurposing. So if I’m on TikTok or if I’m doing whatever on any social channel, all I’m doing is they’re gonna ask you when you first start, what website do you want this to point to? Not for the images, but what website is this about? So if I put that, it’s for this web, like x, y, z Matcha Tea that’s your anchor URL. So if you put that anchor URL information into a press release, a blog article, a post, anything that will be related to your Google Business account, and voila, it gets indexed immediately.

Norm:

It you take a little bit of time and just go over. Now Google just reset everything. If you go into Google Business profile. Now, it used to be very intimidating. There was tons of tabs on the left hand side that you’d have to fill out. Now there’s eight. And you open it up and you’ll see the eight different tabs. This is where the command center is, and this is where you can post and post and post 10 minutes a day and you are going to skyrocket. Now, it’ll take a bit of time, cuz Google’s gotta, and you wanna be consistent, but 10 minutes a day, we did this we got an event coming up where you’re gonna be, oh, you’re gonna miss it this year. But I, I’m gonna be talking about this and we, we took two brands, brand new, never been on Google business at all. And I was asked to talk about this three, four months ago. Within the last three months, they’ve had a thousand clicks on their website to buy. That’s not bad.

Bradley Sutton:

They have the Amazon other ones too or everything? The only one they put in their profile was the website. This

Norm:

Is just online sales off of a Shopify store.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. A thousand clicks.

Norm:

A thousand

Bradley Sutton:

This is not paid at all. This is organic.

Norm:

That’s the beauty. So right now, it it’s all free. It’s been free forever. And this is why I can’t, like, I really don’t understand why people aren’t doing this. And when you put those pictures up, those are shoppable links that you can find in the carousel. And if you’re paying for, I shouldn’t say this, but cuz I know Google’s gonna, if you’re paying for Google shopping, you’re wasting your money because you get the same thing when you do it for free with Google Business Profile.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, there you go. So guys, hope you, you know, might need to rewind that to, to, to get, to get the full, the full benefit there. But something that’s pretty easy sounds like to do. And, and who doesn’t like the f word of free? But like you said, if somebody had done the old Google My Business, Amazon or Amazon, Google might have deleted some stuff. So they need to go and redo their store or?

Norm:

No. And so all the information that you had, all the photos, any posts that you’ve done those are all, it’s all still there. And by the way, if you have an event, so let’s say any type of event, Google will weigh that event with the keywords in it a lot higher than your typical post that you put out. So people will see it through Google My Business and it gets indexed.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. All right guy., I mean, see, I told you Norm always brings some unique stuff to the show. Before we get back into your, you know, some more strategies. Here, one thing I’m doing this year is I talk a lot about healthy habits. You know, be it physical health, mental health and hobbies, you know, people to what they do to get out of the regular rut. You know? Like myself, you’re no spring chicken either I believe you’re above 40 like me. So what about you? First of all, what’s your main hobby of like, Hey, I need to just get away from podcasting and e-commerce and stuff. What’s your go-to thing? I love cigars. The license plate said.

Norm:

There we go.

Bradley Sutton:

So cigars.

Norm:

Yeah, that’s that’s my vice. I don’t drink. You know just if in the afternoon I take a break sometimes if it’s nice out, we just start to get some nice weather here and just like to sit out and have my cigar.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Now what about, you know, physical health as far as, you know, do you have any special foods you’re eating? Special routines exercising.

Norm:

You know what, I let everybody else do that. I figure if you’re gonna save 20 years, going out to the gym I’d rather not. And, you know, just knock off 20 years off of me, so I don’t have the hassle of going to the gym.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, hey, I mean, you must be active, you know, it’s not like you’re just sitting in your, in your office all day long, you know? No,

Norm:

No. Like we we’re on a nice park and so we got the lake in front of us and I’ll go out okay. And do my thing around, like, just walk around the lake once in a while. That’s about it. Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s it. I don’t go to the gym. Okay,

Bradley Sutton:

That’s good. That’s good enough. Like, like another reason not to live in the city, you know, that’s a little bit more difficult to do. You’re living in, you know urban area, but a nice nice little thing. Benefit of living in the countryside. All right. Now let’s just do some, you know, you’ve given us some longer strategies there. Let’s do some quick hitting strategies. They don’t have, have to be about Google wine business or they don’t have to necessarily be about the other stuff you we were talking about like retail, it could be about anything you want.

Norm:

GA4

Bradley Sutton:

What is that?

Norm:

Have you heard about that?

Bradley Sutton:

Sounds like a video game.

Norm:

Okay. So it would probably be a really good video game. This is one of the biggest game changers in on for the internet that we’ve ever seen. And it’s gonna be happening in July. And if you do have Google Analytics and you don’t migrate over to GA4, which is Google Analytics four and you can just you know find it on Google and you can do it yourself or you can get a team to do it for you. But anyways, you’ll lose all 100% all information that you’ve had, any type of analytics and you’ll lose it. Keyword research everything. So they’re coming out with a completely different system now and they’re giving you until July before they just hit the button and everything changes. So it’s gonna change the way searches are done, the relevance of searches it’s gonna change everything. It’s gonna be the biggest game changer that we’ve seen from Google in a long time.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. All right, so there’s one thing, guys Google that if you don’t know about it, and if you guys have been doing some research, and you don’t wanna lose it, make sure you take action. Alright guys, I’m gonna pause it right here. I wasn’t planning to do this, but this episode started getting even better than it already is and we just started going on. I thought I was about to end it right here, but he comes out with some stuff that I had no idea even in existed. So I was like, let’s extend this out. So we’re gonna pause this now, and then tomorrow if you come back, you’re gonna hear the next episode where we get all really deep into the whole Amazon influencer and affiliate program and Amazon Live and a whole bunch of cool stuff. So I’ll see you guys tomorrow.

#459 - AI Tools Amazon Sellers Should Be Using

In episode #459 of SSP, Steve Simonson joins us on the show to talk about artificial intelligence and which AI tools Amazon sellers should start using. Let’s discover how AI can revolutionize your Amazon FBA business as Steve shares his insights on tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and more! From automations, systems and SOPs creation, image creation, branding, marketing, and email campaigns for your Amazon brand.
 
Make sure to listen to the very end as we explore the impact of AI in the Amazon-selling industry, learn practical tips on how to utilize this new technology, and how to train your ChatGPT by using powerful prompts.

In episode 459 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Steve discuss: 

• 02:13 – How Did Steve Get So Passionate About Artificial Intelligence?
• 05:00 – How Should Amazon Sellers Use AI Tools
• 06:15 – Text-To-Speech AI Tools
• 07:19 – Tier 1 Tool To Automations & Systems
• 12:55 – Using AI Tools For Image Creation
• 17:57 – AI Features For Branding And Marketing
• 21:00 – How AI Improves Your Email Marketing Campaigns
• 23:09 – How To Improve Your ChatGPT Prompts
• 25:48 – Common Mistakes People Make When Using AI
• 31:11 – Steve’s Healthy Habits & Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
• 32:51 – Other AI Tools That You Should Be Using
• 36:12 – How To Reach Out To Steve Simonson
• 37:07 – Steve’s 60-Second Tip
• 39:26 – Catch Steve And Bradley In Amazon Events

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► 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’re gonna bring one of the Amazon industry’s foremost experts on artificial intelligence. He uses so many different kinds of software, so he’s gonna give you guys all of the best AI tools that you should be using to help your Amazon business. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you wanna be able to sync your listings that you create in Helium 10 to your Amazon account in one click, including being able to sync subject matter, which you’re not able to even edit. Now, in most listings on Amazon, you’re gonna want to use Helium 10 Listing Builder. Make sure to find out how to use Listing Builder by going to h10.me/listingbuilder. That’s h10.me/listingbuilder. 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 somebody who’s been a serious seller for years here. Steve Simonson, back on the show. How’s it going, Steve?

Steve:

It’s going great. Yeah, I was just wondering. I’ve definitely put up some serious numbers, but I’m quite irreverent. So sometimes not always serious in the boardroom.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Steve:

Serious numbers. But also I like to crack a joker too.

Bradley Sutton:

And that’s what we like. So if you we’re not gonna go too too much into Steve’s backstory, if you guys want to check that out, episode 38 is a good one to see some of Steve’s backstory. But I brought you on because I’ve been seeing you pop up a lot and you’re good at email marketing too, and you’ve been marketing to me for some webinars and stuff that you’ve been doing lately on AI and that seems to be all the rage. And I’m one of the ones who hasn’t really completely, you know, dove into it, you know, and like, let it take over my life. Like, I, I see some people, I definitely see the advantages. I see the disadvantages, you know, sometimes too with relying too much on it. So I was like, you know what, let’s bring an expert on, and let’s just talk about, I mean, first of all, like how you got passionate about it. Like what was it about cuz you know, it’s not like you’ve been doing AI for 10 years, you know, you have a lot of specialties, you know, be it sourcing and, and logistics and, and a lot of different things. What made you so giddy about, about the the AI phenomenon? I guess

Steve:

<Laugh>, giddy is a good word for it. Well, if you look back at my background and likely in episode 38, we talked about my fascination or love for systems. Like I’m a huge systems guy. The system runs the business. The people run the system. This is right out of the E-myth. So my thoughts are like, how do you make great systems? And for more than a decade, probably nearly 15 years, we’ve been using some levels of machine learning. This is a precursor to AI. Machine learning is like, Hey, take all of your reviews and detect the sentiment of those reviews. And then the ones that are positive, try to extrapolate some of the keyword, like make a word cloud out of the, you know, positive sentiments, or the same with negative sentiments.

Steve:

So you can use machine learning, and you train it to, this word is good, this word is bad, right? It’s very I would say boring and takes a long time, and it costs a lot of money. But when you have, you know, lots of call center call records, or lots of reviews or lots of, you know, inbound data that is more than a human can do, machine learning makes sense. So from my perspective, that history of, you know, how do we make the, the bots do more work? That’s always been part of my DNA. And so, frankly, in November when Open OpenAI kind of started making a bunch of noise, we said like, I don’t know if this is a beanie baby fidget spinner thing. Like, is this just some fad or is this real? And frankly, I was skeptical. I’m like, how could it be? But after a couple weeks, I’m like, you know, this is not the invention of the automobile, right? And mass, you know production capabilities. This is not the pc, this is not even the advent of the internet. This is like fire man discovers fire, or man invents the wheel. That’s how pivotal this is for humanity. For better or worse, the trains on the tracks to use a historic metaphor, and we better get on board or get outta the way.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So, I’ve had a few people on here talk about, you know, some of the basic things that can be done. You know, like you mentioned it before, that was the, probably the first thing that people thought to do is, hey, let’s take Helium 10 review insights and let’s download the reviews and let’s, let’s try and get a sentiment here. And, and other people have been using it to get like, you know, maybe some different brand ideas or heard of a couple people do it for potentially even product research. But now we’re in, you know, June of 2023 what are some maybe next level things that people should do outside of just these these basics here?

Steve:

Well, the, the first thing is there are many ways of viewing AI. And I tend to look at it in tiers, right? So tier one is the basic tier that we all start with, which is, how do I use this tool? Right? There are many ways to use technologies. And the first is, you know, it’s like, I’ve got a nail. Where’s a hammer? Right? You don’t wanna use a screwdriver to try to hammer the nail. So find the best tool for the job. So, some of the things that I love to do and this may be fun for you, Bradley, just this past week, I calm my voice, and then we started having transcriptions of various things that I’ve written, tried to be, you know, read in my voice and the intonation. It’s not perfect just yet, but it’s so close that you’re like, oh, in six months, this is gonna be pretty amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s crazy.

Steve:

Yeah. So that’s elevenlabs.io, If anybody wants to check that out. Spectacular. And by the way, they have, they’re actually so good at reading. Their bots are not like the, I won’t throw people under the bus, but there are many people who use text to speech tools that are very robotic, and they don’t read with any level of, I’ll just say humanity.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah.

Steve:

If you go to 11 labs and you go to their podcast, it’s now, by the way, one of the top 50 on Spotify, at least in the business area. They’re having their bots read, like old out of copyright things like Alice Wonderland or old news articles from 1899, and the different voices they select are amazing. And you can then start to say, depending on your line of business, obviously for a podcaster like yourself, lots of applicability, whether it’s cloning your own voice or reading, you know, the thing in a new voice. Many fun things you can do with text to speech. Really extraordinary.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. You just mentioned one I’ve never heard of. Everybody now has heard of ChatGPT and, and MidJourney, and maybe, you know, we can probably talk a little bit about that if you have some strategies there. But what are a couple more things that, you know, have maybe flown under the radar for, for most Amazon sellers that, that you think are, are useful?

Steve:

Well, one of the things that excites me the most is the idea of taking that tier one tool and turning it into a an automation, right? So an automation would be, so as an example, we have the ability to create SOPs that write themselves, right? So you just go to a screen, you type in, you know, how to add an item to Amazon Seller Central, or how to create a new class in QuickBooks. You click the magic AI button, and it literally writes the SOP for you, right? So that’s a tool high use, right? If you need the hammer nail, let’s get the, get the big one out and, and it, it takes that blank screen and destroys it. Like, that’s the worst thing is the blank screen. But level two is things called Auto GPT, or Baby AGI these are types of terms you may start to hear.

Steve:

Lang chain is another thing where you can actually stitch together conversations, which allows more contextual referencing of the AI, and I won’t bore the details unless we get into it. Or vector databases, which allow a lot more scanning of you know, internal data sources. So imagine everything at Helium 10, all of that knowledge baked into one Vector database, whether it’s videos, audio, text, right? You could even have, you know, word and Excel whatever you wanted. And then this thing, you can just chat with it about what do I need to know about Helium 10 internal or external, or the tool, or, you know, an individual product extraordinarily powerful. So Baby AGI has now several iterations, and AutoGPT will take that tool, that hammering process and turn it into, gosh, I’ve got a little bot that’s running around doing this for me, without being a API driven, without being Zapier driven.

Steve:

It’s just like, Hey, go in, check this inbox, and then, you know, start to create replies. You can put in a human layer of validation if you wish, until you feel comfortable with it. But at a certain point you’ll go, yeah, this thing is just gonna go to, you know, this software, it’s gonna grab these stats, it’s gonna add ’em to this, you know, database or spreadsheet, and then it’s gonna carry on with its life. Eliminating a lot of this what I would call low value add work. And that’s that it means the people can be augmented and their capabilities extended into more value add work.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Now, you mentioned, you know, systems, and then you also mentioned the outset here of what you were just talking about you know, the SOPs. You know, this video you had sent me about I think it’s called, SOP Box you, you had this like kind of cool flow where I’m assuming that, hey, this is like, Hey, I’m an Amazon seller. I need to, to make sure that I’m not the only person in my company who knows how to do this. I hire, you know, staff instead of, you know, taking a full day to write out you know, some crazy PowerPoint with a million screenshots that for, for every single process that we do, you found a way that that can kind of like, make this a, a quicker process. Can you walk us through fir first of all, tell us what that program is, and maybe walk us through a sample, a sample process that we could create?

Steve:

Yeah. So first it is so exciting to me because like I say, I hate the blank page. And really every time I’m at an event and I talk to sellers and they talk about some problem, often it’s, you know, HR related or something broke, or some system, you know, failed. And I’m like, well, where’s it written down? Well, you know, I made a video about it, or, you know, I haven’t got there yet. Like, the original sin is the, the lack of creation, right? And so we want to, we want to eliminate that and allow people to document with simplicity, like super easy. So literally just about anything that is public facing. And, and by the way, this works on the, the ChatGPTs or even Bard to a lesser extent, Bard is not quite as sophisticated at this moment, but it’s coming for chat g B t quick.

Steve:

You can just type in, you know, how to add you know, an item or how to delete this or how to do, you know, whatever function you’re trying to do. And if it’s a public facing documentation, there’s a high probability the system will just give you a step by step process. We take it a step further from that documentation, and we add process, and we say, you know what? If you’re closing your books once a month, that’s a checklist of eight or 10 steps. Let’s link the, SOP what for the new people who don’t know what, how to do it, but the existing people, they just need a checklist and they need to be reminded. So we set recurring schedules that becomes, you know, so document and then process. The operationalization is where the payoff is. Now you have accountability. You’ve made life easier for everybody who works in the company because all of these processes can be shared amongst, you know, the entire company and assigned to individuals.

Steve:

So the payoff in management, and for founders, we, we often lose sight of this cuz we’re like, it’s in my head, I, I see how it should be done. The payoff is accountability, like reports that show, yeah, here’s what happened. Here’s how productive, here’s the variance on this task between team members or between, you know, each individual day. That is it’s a powerful thing. So systems are so necessary, especially as we head into times that are maybe uncertain financially. We gotta get tight and we gotta have our processes down. So having this kind of baseline is really important in my opinion.

Bradley Sutton:

What about imaging? Like, what are, you know, be it MidJourney, be it, be it something else. What can Amazon sellers do? Cause when some of these, like DALL-E first came out, you know, like, you can’t even make a human face. It was like a months, it reminded me of the goo the Goonies movie. What was his name? The, the guy, the, Hey you guys from the Goonies. You know what I’m talking about. But that’s like how, how the, you know, when it tried to create humans, that that’s how it would look. But where are we now here in the middle of 2023 with how Amazon sellers can use AI on the imaging side? Like, like, are we at the point where we can go ahead and start creating some lifestyle images or, or perhaps even parts of a plus content or, or creating Amazon post? Where, where are we at

Steve:

For sure? We’re not a hundred percent there, but we are, well, on our way. within a year, almost everything that you do, you can do with the AI assist, right? Obviously you need your product to be able to be, you know, some base photography that is going to then be inserted into lifestyle or, or what have you. But the complexity and the geometry that has advanced just in the past, you know, six weeks is unbelievably good. And the, the level of complexity there, there’s still errors. Let’s not kid ourselves, but sure. I’m always of the, I like to look ahead, right? What’s coming, because if that trend, and, and this is again, not a Beanie Baby trend, this is a life is changing trend. If that trend is gonna get better and more sophisticated, I’ll get good at it now.

Steve:

And then a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, I’ll be well poised to maximize it. And I can say unequivocally, whether it’s MidJourney or stability AI, these are diffusion engines that are exceptional and for sure for social content, you can make spectacular images, certainly lifestyle images. And by the way, you know, sellers forget that, you know, we think the star of the show is the product, right? That’s, yeah. Because we’re egocentric or, you know, we just wanna make the sale, right? And that’s fine mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but the customers couldn’t care less about our logo. They couldn’t care less about really the product you know, how it looks. They want the benefit that the product gives ’em. So imagery should be, you know, the, the product is a, you know, I use this, and then I felt like that.

Steve:

And so that’s where you want your imagery to, you know, start to move to that emotion that, you know, evoking of, you know what, I used to hate going camping, and now I have this particular you know, tool or, you know, tent or whatever the, the product is now my life is, is pleasant. So I’ve got this beautiful sunset photo of, you know, a tent over, you know, the mountainside or whatever it is. All of these can be created. Text to image is spectacularly powerful. We use MidJourney constantly. And when it comes to Amazon posts or any social, I would say spectacular results in fact, my, my one of my kids, my son is starting a business and they’re going to have, you know, basically an entire AI setup to create multiple daily posts that are kind of brand-centric.

Steve:

So you train the AI about your brand, here’s our values, here’s our product selection, here’s all the things about it. And this is a really important part of the framework, by the way, in ChatGPT, if you train your brand or train a conversation about your brand, and then start asking the, the the AI about your brand and say, well, you know, what’s a good elevator pitch for this brand? What would be some good target markets for this brand? What’s a good avatar within that target market? You can then start to realize, oh you know, this particular avatar, they don’t care that my teapot, you know, is made of stainless steel, grade number 39, whatever, they care that the tea comes out hot, right? Yeah. And I have a pleasant morning. And so you make that the focus and AI is well equipped to deliver all of that and much more including you know, photo studio level replacement, frankly.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. What else? What’s some specific things that, that somebody, like, somebody listening to this right now, you know, without having to go and, and, you know, learn how to do something for one week, but they could literally hop off this podcast, sign up for something, you know, and then within one hour they’re gonna have this result. Like what should an Amazon seller right now do? Like which one should they, should they start with right now? Should it be ChatGPT? And then can you give them like, some homework? I want everybody listening to this like, to take what Steve is gonna tell you. And this is something that can bring your Amazon business value and, and it’ll, you’ll be able to do it within one hour of listening to this. Is can you, can you, I’m putting you on the spot here.

Steve:

Oh, no problem.

Bradley Sutton:

Can you think of something?

Steve:

Absolutely. So let’s talk about, so every seller should be building a list, an email list, right? This is something that it’s a little harder to do on Amazon, but with the, the right methodology and, and certainly, you know, broadening into other channels, you can get an email list regardless of how big that list is. You do not need a 10,000 or a hundred thousand person list to start interacting with your customers, right? So it doesn’t matter if it’s 50 or a hundred or 500, let’s get that thing going, but use the AI to get smart about it. So one idea, right? And I like to RnD stuff Bradley, you’re probably familiar with the term r and d in the traditional sense, which is fine, which means research and development. In my world, it means rip off and duplicate.

Steve:

So let’s get to it. That’s how we do it. So, okay, the first thing, you can go to ChatGPT and just type in, you know, what are some well known effective frameworks for email marketing, right? Instead of us writing the emails, let’s get some frameworks, and it will bring back things like ADA and BAB and Pass, and it’ll explain what those are, which is essentially like, Hey, we, you know, ADA’s, attention, interest, desire, and action. So when you say, I wanna write an email in the ADA framework, it’s going to follow that framework, right? And that, that gives you, you know, kind of the, the baseline. Like, how are we gonna structure these emails? We’re gonna use one of the, the blueprints that we’re familiar with. The second is, you know, hey, what’s a good target audience for, I, I like to use the example of garden hoses, right?

Steve:

Who are customer audiences for garden hoses? And it will tell you, Hey, you know, you got your people who own homes, they’re homeowners, right? You got your garden enthusiasts, you got your, you do it yourselfers and you know, pet owners and commercial customers. It’s going to tell you the types of customer segments. And as I mentioned earlier, a great idea then is like, well, what’s a, a great customer avatar for a garden enthusiast? Give me, gimme that avatar, and it will give you chapter and verse, you know, here’s a name, here’s an age, here’s, you know where they’re located and what’s their occupation? And, you know, what are their interests? What are their goals and challenges? And this is a really important point about marketing. We get, I would say distracted by the simplicity of search term sale, right?

Steve:

That kind of the Amazon method. But as we all evolve and make no mistake whether, whether or not we think we’re evolving, the marketplace is evolving, right? And the sophistication of our competition is evolving, by the way, your competitors that used to struggle with, let’s say, you know, native language in the, in the home market, whether it’s German or Spanish or English, they no longer have that problem because AI is really good at language. Really good at language. So literally, you can type in, let’s just use Mandarin as an example. You can type in, you know, what is the English way to make, you know, actually do all the conversation I just mentioned Mandarin, and then say, now write an English email that accomplishes as objective. So really, really high use case across the world. So anyway, once you have that avatar, then you might say, okay, now give me a logical email sequence over the next six months to take a cold lead who is a garden enthusiast and meets this avatar, and then turn them into a rabbit fan.

Steve:

And it will literally give you a six month plan, you know, month by month, you know, week by week, here’s what we’re gonna start doing. And then you start creating emails for each of those parts of the sequence. And, and obviously the next thing you can simply say is, you know one of the things I like to do is I like to learn from the great. So I would next say something like, who are the 10 top direct response marketeers of all time, right? Technically they’re marketers, but I’m a Disney fan, so I call ’em marketeers, but it’ll come back with a list like Dan Kennedy and David Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins and, and all the greats. And then you just pick a voice and you go, you know what? In the voice of David Ogilvy, write a cold email for the introduction to my brand.

Steve:

You know, we’ll just call it hose guy from the founder, you know, Luke Skywalker, and use the BAB framework, and it will write that perfectly even if there’s a small, you know, edit here or there, it’s far superior than the average output that I’ve seen. So that’s kind of an RnD case study. And by the way, you do the same thing. Give me 10 email headlines with emojis, and now you have everything, right? You’ve got all of your emails, you’ve got all of your planning, you’ve got your avatars, you’re, you’re now a marketing, you, you just became a CMO or the bot, the AI became the CMO.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. I like it. Alright. What else can you, can you talk about? So like some, some, some of this stuff I’m so new, I don’t even know the questions to ask because like, I’m not even sure what’s, what’s possible. So like, everything you’re telling me is all education to me, as I’m sure it is for much of our audience. So what should I be asking? Like what should we be talking about here along these lines of ai?

Steve:

Well, I’ll give you two things. There’s one is that I like to say it’s all in the prompt. So if you conjure up your favorite Happy Gilmore scene, it’s all in the prompt. It’s all in the prompt. He had a funny scene. And my, my message to you is that the more sophisticated your prompt is, the better your output is. So, and when I started programming computers when I was 12 years old, the seventh grade teacher said, garbage in, garbage out. They taught us the acronym giggle. And so if you have typed in prompts and you got garbage back, it was probably a garbage prompt, frankly. So how do you advance the prompt? And the answer is, you just start thinking about it as a formula. You know, like, Hey, please generate this type of content, right? Twitter post for my target audience, right?

Steve:

Whether it’s an avatar or a general audience that highlights the benefits of my blank and encourages them to take this whatever desired action, right? So it’s, it’s a formulaic approach to prompting, and this, this applies to anything, you know, can you create a you know, email or blog post that addresses the common pain points of a garden enthusiast and positions my hose guy product as the solution. The best part of this, and I, I referenced it earlier, but I wanna be sure you guys are clear about it. If you create a conversation in GPT 4, that conversation thinks back or remembers all the prior parts of that conversation. So each conversation, you start, you should be appending with a mission. You know, AI is just a giant auto suggest. It actually has no intelligence. The more, just like on Amazon or Google, the more characters you type in, it keeps trying to fill in what it thinks you’re going for.

Steve:

And that’s all AI is. It’s a giant auto suggest. So the more in the prompt you’re extending, the more precise and the more deliberate those results will be because you’ve given it more to work with. And the more you consider that auto suggest is, is not actual intelligence, it’s just kind of a database of knowledge, and it’s, it’s on a bell curve, like, like anything else, right? The fringe data’s ignored, and it’s delivering the bulk of what it considers the available data, not it, it can’t score whether it’s right or wrong. Yeah. It goes, most people say this. So if you have a, a product that goes against the, the flow, you may often get bad replies from from ai, but does that help you kind of see where I’m headed that way? Yeah,

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Speaking of bad results, speaking of hallucinations and different things, what, what are some ways to prevent this? What are some some common mistakes that you’ve seen people make with AI where they probably get frustrated? Oh, this is useless, but No, it’s, it’s because you’re the useless person. You’re the one who’s doing something wrong. So like, what are some common mistakes of newbies who are getting into AI and how can we avoid them?

Steve:

Well, it’s funny because I have this conversation frequently because people have used it once or twice, and they’re like, e even myself, I, I had it, I just went to chat GBT and I said, give me a bio for Steve Simonson, and I might have even included the word entrepreneur. And it came back and it said, you know Steve’s a founder of, you know e-commerce companies and a speaker and an author, and went on. And I’m like, okay, so far it’s not terrible. Although the author feels a little weird. And then it gave the birth date, it’s, which was wrong, every part of it. And then it gave two books that I had written, which I have not written, nor do the books exist. And it gave me some lifetime award from some organization that although I’ve heard of the organization, I’m unaware of receiving such award.

Steve:

So that that prompt was not enough. Now, the more I augmented that prompt with certain details, it got better. But my message to most everybody right now is the hallucinations exist not because of things that we can control. It’s just because the data set is so large and not yet well refined. The more an individual conversation becomes granular and precise, like you could say, no, that is not right. Stop using that information again, just in this conversation. Here’s the facts, then it will use those facts. But it does not like permeate through the rest of the internet, right? That’s not how it works. Yeah. So I, I would encourage people to be patient. I would say that like doing a prompt, which is like a linear thing where you type in something and the thing comes back to you. Amazing stuff.

Steve:

By the way, there’s a site, forgive me because I don’t remember the exact address, but there’s a site, you can just go have conversations where you speak into your computer, and then the bot speaks back with the personality and voice of these celebrities. So there’s John F. Kennedy, there’s Elon Musk, and they really are different conversations. John f Kennedy’s, you know, polite very political, right? Elon Musk, I ask it like, what are your hobbies? And it’s like, you don’t have a better question than that. Come on, I’m a busy guy, right? So, yeah, yeah. Crazy, crazy iterations of, you know, these, these personalities that you can train. And one, one that I wanted to share with you, Bradley, in terms of a workflow, and it, I think it applies to any marketeer, okay? So anybody who creates content for video purposes or for audio purposes, you have a big library or potentially have a big library of audio content.

Steve:

And by the way, it doesn’t matter if that content is in French or German or Spanish or Urdu or any number of other languages, you can take using a, an open AI tool called Whisper. You can take that content in with transcribing and effic efficiency and effectiveness that is beyond compare. There, there are a lot of transcription tools in the past that flatly sucked, right? They were 90 mm-hmm. <Affirmative> percent, and that was better than nothing. But this is like 99%. And if you go to the Whisper examples, you’ll hear a guy in Scotland speaking in English, and I can barely understand the guy, and I certainly can’t understand all his words, but they, it nails it. There’s another guy speaking in French, and it nails it all to English transcription, by the way. Even a K-pop song that they, they transcribe and it, it shows you both the Korean and English words and it transcribes it.

Steve:

So this tool called Whisper takes all of that audio content, makes a transcription of it. Now you’ve got that in your database. You put that wherever you store your files, and now you can say, you know, write me a blog article about that. Write me a summary of that, you know, maybe if it’s a a longer complex thing, write me an ebook outline and then write me an ebook about that. You could also say you know, write me a blog in English. Write me a blog in French, write me a blog in Spanish, right? And, and really powerfully take what I call industrial scale marketing content and make it into a workflow. And by the way, we’re, we’re all about putting that in our system. So we, we don’t have to do this individually, we just drop files like wisp the whisper function. We drop a bunch of files in a folder, and it will then run the transcriptions, and then we can go in and say, I wanna run summaries or blogs or e-books or whatever off of all of these files. And that’s the way I want you guys to think, right? It’s always a workflow. What’s the input, what’s the processing? And then what are the potential outputs?

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. I’m gonna ask you you know, for your 60-second tip in a little bit, and, and also get your top favorite AI tools that people don’t know about or people are not using. But before we do that, something new I’m doing on the podcast this year, and you know, I ask all the guests you know, me having health issues last year and, and, and having to be more you know, top of mind and people having mental health issues, you know, during covid and stuff. Like, I ask all the guests, what are you doing to like, stay mentally and physically healthy? Like, what’s your habits, if at all? What’s your hobbies, when you, your favorite hobbies for when you want to, you know, step out of the daily grind of, of work?

Steve:

Well, it’s so I’ve also had a little bit of a health run in you know, a few years back. And the, the moment somebody tells you have stage four cancer, you kind of wake up and go, oh, yeah, I’m not a fan. I I basically just said, you know I don’t feel it. I don’t have any problems. I’m gonna carry on and do what I gotta do. Luckily, after a year or so of chemo, I’m basically clear, and all the people ask me all the time, they’re like, well, how did that change? Or How did that, it’s like, it didn’t change me, per se, but it made me more grateful. It made me more aware of our own mortality. Like, I didn’t, I didn’t wanna die yet, and I wanted my death to be random.

Steve:

Right. And I, I wish everybody to have a random death knowing that you’re marching towards this particular deadline, not awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I, you know, I love to get out and I you know, when I work out, I like to listen to podcasts. That’s a hobby. Cool. Every Friday night I play Battlefield 4 with my brothers and friends. Anybody wants to jump on the Xbox? We love to shoot each other. And it’s a complete disengagement. There’s no way to think about anything except running for your life and not getting shot or even worse, stabbed by your friends. And then they replay that animation over and over, over. So I highly recommend some sort of thing that disengages your brain, cuz even at night, my brain is still going full tilt.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, cool. Cool. All right. Now what about your, you know, top three outside of ChatGPT, MidJourney, the ones we’ve mentioned today? You mentioned a few more Whisper and others three more that people should maybe go, go out and take a look at, see if there’s something there that interests them.

Steve:

Well, I definitely, again, for people, especially when you’re trying to create content or take existing content and leverage it into other areas. So for example, long form YouTube content, you can use an AI called Munch that will then break those and make ’em into shorts, and it will even, you know, break in and put in the the appropriate wording and allow you to, you know, select different break points. But mo it’ll start with an automation. It’s like, here’s what I recommend. So Munch will actually take that long form content and start creating social media shorts or TikTok style real style videos, great tool. Another one similar in function called opus.pro. My friend Jamie Davidson told me about Opus Pro, and it’s similar to Munch, but it actually comes up with a score. So you can go to opus.pro, put in a YouTube, and it will, you know, take maybe 10 minutes to process, depending on the length, and it’ll come back and it goes, this score is the best and here are what the highlights are.

Steve:

You know, here’s the hook, here’s the action. And it’s quite amazing. And again, for me, leveraging existing assets is hugely important. I mentioned elevenlabs.io. I wanna reiterate that using voice, having voice read in a hu more human way, ironically, from written content is extraordinarily powerful. So imagine using ChatGPT to create blogs, but you might even say, you know, I want this to be a narrative blog that’s gonna be read aloud, and it will then modify the format, and then you have that voice read it. You could again, start a podcast like ElevenLabs did their podcast is doing really well because it sounds, well, mostly it’s a novelty, I’ll be honest with you. That’s why people are listening now. But it sounds real enough that people don’t feel like they’re being tricked. And as long as the quality content is good, you know, it, it’s adequate, you feels good to listen to it without being tricked into it, dealing with a bot.

Steve:

Honestly, there’s so many. The other one I mentioned earlier, but II should reiterate is AutoGPT, this will, this will change the world when it matures a bit. So I, I mentioned SOPs and having the idea of having an SOP written for you or having a checklist written for you that’s cool. But having the AutoGPT, where you can just go into that SOPand you go, you know what, I’m gonna make this a bot driven function, and then the bot just reads the instructions and goes and does it, you know, based on how granular the details are, that’s, that’s where we’re heading. And so, AutoGPT,s not necessary for people to try to deploy on their own, but certainly something that they can I, I think get some benefits from if you follow. Cool.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now, bef before we get into our, your your 30-second tip for everybody can you, you know, I’m sure people have many more questions or they might wanna learn more from you. How can people find you on the interwebs out there to, to perhaps reach out to get some more help on this?

Steve:

Yeah, I think the best way you know, is if they go to the, the Twitters I think that’s how they call it, the Twitters. I’m at Steve Simonson that’s also me on YouTube. I think it’s also me on Instagram. I don’t get into the social media as very often because I’m just, I don’t have the time frankly, or the interest. But I, you know, anytime somebody finds me, whether it’s on messenger or WhatsApp or you know even YouTube or Twitter, then I try to, you know, I try to help entrepreneurs. Like, I love entrepreneurs, not like people say they love cheese pizza. Like, I love entrepreneurs. I want every entrepreneur who’s really risking it all. I want to try to, you know, help them and pay it forward if I can.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. I love it. Love it. Alright, 30-second tip strategy for everybody.

Steve:

So my, my primary strategy would be to go in and train a ChatGPT four conversation by copying and pasting all the MidJourney documentation. So essentially you go to MidJourney, you find the documentation, you copy and paste that to, let’s just say a text file. And then you go to ChatGPT in a singular conversation and you paste each of those training points. You then find some of the, the best prompts that you can find on the MidJourney Discord, which you can see the format of some of these prompts. They will, you know, they’re public unless you click the stealth mode, which I like to use that’s a secondary inside tip. Use stealth to avoid the secrets, but for all the people who are doing it in public, take your best prompts that include things like cameras, filters, shutter speed, lighting settings, environments, and then structure a couple example prompts, copy and paste those in as well.

Steve:

And then you can take a, a basic prompt like Baby Penguin and it will ChatGPT will turn it into like a, a mini paragraph of just deliciously rich, descriptive prompting. And you paste that into mid journey and your level of outputs will be absolutely superhuman. And that’s, that’s you know, that was one of our first blueprints that applies not just to mid journey, but to anything, you know, train that conversation and then keep, keep going back to it. You type in a simple, let’s just call it human prompt and a superhuman prompt comes back

Bradley Sutton:

Marvel or DC superhuman?

Steve:

Well, you can decide, I’m not decide the religious war over here. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

That, that’s some fighting words for some here. Okay.

Steve:

Right.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Well, well, Steve, this is, this has been great. I guess next time I don’t even have to bring you on the podcast. I’ll get your voice clone and ask it some, some questions if it’s been trained properly. And then we can, we can have Steve Animals every week without even you physically having to be here. So but, but thanks, you know, seriously, thanks, thanks for all the, this information. I’ve learned a lot and I’m, I’m gonna be, shoot, I’m, I might try and use some of that to start transcribing our own podcast cuz we’re paying this other service that I think is too expensive. And so, like, you might have just given me some some great tips there, but I think, I know everybody’s got some great tips. So thank you very much Steven, and we’ll definitely be in touch and I look forward to seeing you at some of these events. This summer we’re going to Bali and you’ll be in Puerto Rico too for a Billion Dollar Summit, correct? Man, we’re gonna be following each other all over the place.

Steve:

I dig it. Yeah. Well, we can do this AI stuff live and it is spectacular.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. All right, we’ll see you there.

Steve:

Take care.

Helium 10 Buzz 5/31/23: Verify Your Amazon & Walmart Info | Repeat Customer Marketing | Amazon Small Business Report

In this episode, we cover the latest news in Amazon and Walmart. We dive into Amazon’s small business report, listen to an inspiring interview, and check out a cool Insights Dashboard feature. 

#458 - Amazon Handmade, Selling In Amazon Europe, & More!

Join us in this episode of SSP, where we listen to the stories of two Serious Sellers Club members, Sean Lonergan and Dana Midkiff, two highly successful Amazon entrepreneurs who have made their mark on the e-commerce world. Discover how they found success selling in Amazon Europe and selling handmade products across multiple marketplaces, making nearly 8-figures and multi 7-figures a year in their respective Amazon businesses.

Tune in to learn their unique strategies and insights in this inspiring episode filled with wisdom and actionable advice.

In episode 458 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Dana, and Sean discuss: 

• 01:41 – The Serious Sellers Club
• 02:11 – Sean Lonergan’s Backstory
• 05:09 – Selling A Garlic Press As A First Product
• 07:21 – Dana’s Backstory
• 10:34 – Started In Etsy 10 Years Ago
• 12:39 – Finding Success Expanding To Amazon Europe
• 16:28 – Making Almost 8-Figures A Year
• 17:43 – How To Get Into Amazon Handmade
• 19:37 – Selling Handmade Products In Multiple Marketplaces
• 21:52 – Making Multi 7-Figures From Handmade Products
• 24:37 – Unique Strategies From Sean And Dana
• 27:37 – Are Handmade Products A Good First Product?
• 31:06 – Sean and Dana’s Favorite Helium 10 Tools
• 32:26 – Healthy Habits And Hobbies Of Sean And Dana
• 34:31 – How To Reach Out To Sean And Dana

► 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 two sellers from opposite sides of the world who both have sold multiple millions of dollars online but in completely different ways. One started with the most cliche Amazon product ever, and now mainly sells actually on Amazon Germany, and the other produces all of our products and sells in the Amazon handmade category. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think

Bradley Sutton:

Helium 10’s got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you’re gonna learn how to use everything, or maybe even to know which ones you wanna get started with. So for a completely free course that’s gonna guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy. That is h10.me/academy. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious 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 couple of serious sellers from the Serious Sellers Club here with us for the first time on this show today, we got Sean and Dana. How’s it going?

Sean:

Yeah, very well. All good from this end?

Dana:

Same. Doing great.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. All right. Well, I never at least as far as I know, I have a bad memory, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to you guys in person or had one-on-one calls or anything. So we are gonna just completely learn about you guys from the Scratch. You know, this all came from a post I did, and we have a private Serious Sellers Club Facebook group, and that’s where we have six, seven, and eight-figure sellers. And, I was like, Hey guys, I’m looking for some new people to come on the podcast. You know, just, by being in this club, I already know that they have verified revenue with Helium 10, otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to be in the club. So I didn’t, I don’t have to, I didn’t have to do too much of a background check here. I was like, you know what? The background check we are gonna do live on the air. So let’s start with Sean. Where are you all calling in from right now?

Sean:

I’m in a city called Alicante, which is about three hours south of Madrid.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. I’ve heard of I’ve heard of that. Have I been there? I’m not sure. I’ve been to Madrid, Barcelona, you know, many times, but not sure if I’ve been there. I know that they have a good soccer or football team down over there as well. Now, where were you born and raised?

Sean:

So, I’m originally Irish, and I spent the first half of my life living there. And then I moved to the UK and spent quite a few years there. And I’ve been in Spain since July 2020.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Did you go to university in Ireland or UK?

Sean:

No, I didn’t. I was always one of these kids that university just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t wait to get outta school. I love school. So I was very lucky. Well, when I went to the UK I got a job with the US Bank, Citigroup, and I was with them for about 25 years. I quite enjoyed working there and moved up the ladder. So and then I left the city and started a domestic cleaning business.

Bradley Sutton:

What prompted that? Just looking for something different than corporate life, or?

Sean:

Yeah, I mean, corporate life became very much of a tick-box exercise where you were just constantly making sure that you are compliant with everything and it was a very slow mover for obvious reasons. And I was sort of counting down the days to retirement, and then I thought, you know what? This is wasting life. So one day I just decided that’s it, I’m gonna go and so I didn’t spend any time thinking about it. And I asked for redundancy and they said no. So I begged them for redundancy, and they give it to me. And I started a cleaning company for a couple of years, and that was quite difficult, but it was a good introduction to business. About 18 months into that, somebody introduced me to selling on Amazon, and I thought, this is ideal for me. It ticks all the boxes. So I started my first business, I think in 2016.

Bradley Sutton:

And was that in Amazon USA? Europe?

Sean:

Yeah. I mean, I was one of the Amazing Selling Machines, ASM, I think it was. And it’s like I didn’t know what I was doing. My first business wasn’t very successful.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m assuming that from what you’re saying, you’re not still selling that same product, that was your first no, no. Can you tell us what it was then?

Sean:

Yeah. I mean, my very first product was a garlic press.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you serious? It almost sounds like I was setting that up, but I had, I literally had no idea, but I just had a feeling it might be something cool. A garlic press. Like that would be like, if I was like, yeah, I was selling collagen peptides and over there. That’s classic.

Sean:

Yeah. It’s a slightly different model to what’s available, and it did okay. But it was never going to go crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And then I, but, but

Bradley Sutton:

You learned from the experience. I’m sure.

Sean:

I learned about branding because I had several different products under the same brand, which of course, is the absolute wrong thing to do. I also, you know, was a bit unlucky in the sense that a few of my shipments got lost coming from China, and I never got reimbursed for that. And that really didn’t help the cash flow. So I had a lot of headwinds. But the most important thing was that you know, I learned a lot and everything I learned then I use, we were using in the business that I have today.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. We’re gonna come back to you a little bit, but that’s we’re gonna pause right there 2016 and, and garlic presses. Dana, what about you? Where are you calling us from?

Dana:

I am just south of Louisville, Kentucky.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. I actually just have a new hat of an I don’t have it here with me, but if I think there’s a minor-league baseball team around there called the Louisville Bats or something like that. Yeah. And I got the hat because it says LB like our listing builder tool. So like the next time I do a listing builder video. So anyways if I visit that area, you’ll have to take me to one of those. I love minor league baseball and, and just random sports at different things. Anyways, we’re not here to talk about that. But is that where you’re born and raised? And saved your whole life? And what about you? What about did you go the college path or did you enter work? Or what did you do after high school?

Dana:

I very much went the college path to the extent of becoming an accountant. I actually got my CPA license, so I did that extremely difficult test. Did it all, did taxes and audits for many years.

Bradley Sutton:

Where did you go to college? Where did you get that training?

Dana:

The University of Louisville.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Hold on. Is that the Cardinals? Ah, there we go, guys. See, I’m doing good with my sports teams today. All right. So, so actually started working in the field that you went to college once. Yep. Sounds like that should be normal, but like nine times outta 10, I think people can say that. And what about you? Like what brought you out of that field? Or what made you start thinking about e-commerce?

Dana:

Yeah, so I mean, the world tells you to fit that box. And so mom wasn’t a 25 year journey or anything. I had been in it at about seven years, but I had a family at home, and if you’re familiar with anybody who’s done and worked in the accounting world inside of taxis, and like, I negotiated my way into 60 hours a week for that timeframe, where everyone else had to do way more than that. Like that was my, Hey, I’ve got kids at home, can I only do 60? And it just year after year, that just became it. It just, I felt like there was something that I could have more control over. I didn’t, that’s not really why I started to make my craft, but it quickly became like, okay, if I decide to do this I could have a little more control over when I work and when I don’t. Or I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m still working, but it’s under my thumb. And so it was a gradual, I’ve been in business for 10 years, so.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So 10 years ago you started to make this shift. Now, was it something you started in the beginning, just you know, like in those few off hours, out, out outside of those 60? Or did you, you know quit cold Turkey and just like, oh no, said I’m gonna start something new?

Dana:

No, it was the majority of my business until I quit until I actually quit the corporate grind. I did both for four years overlap. So until I quit, the entire business was built between 9:00 PM and midnight. My employees were all moms and we were all friends. And as soon as our kids went to bed, we all came to my basement and made products.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Like others you know, all these husbands in Louisville are like, where’s her wives going at 10 o’clock? And now I’m going to my friend’s house in the basement. Sure, you are, but you guys actually were.

Dana:

What’s more questionable, cuz we work with a lot of glitters also, so you would come home at 1:00 AM and it’s like, all right, I swear we’re working.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Okay. Now you said at the beginning, like, wait, what, 10 years ago, was Etsy a thing 10 years ago? Yeah. Okay. So you started on Etsy and, and going to local places. How, how did you guys decide like, I guess what we call an Amazon nowadays product research? Like, like how did you decide on your first products? I’m assuming it wasn’t a garlic press, but like how did you decide what you would produce and why did you pick it? Like how did you know there was demand and stuff like that?

Dana:

It was, honestly, it’s a totally different conversation when you talk to somebody who crafts. And I hate saying craft cuz like, that’s not what I do. I run a, a stupidly large business. But it’s, it’s, you don’t usually approach it like doing product research, it’s usually like, Hey, this looks really fun. And then a bunch of people are like, Hey, I wanna buy that. And then it just kind of becomes a thing. So it’s less of knowing where you’re going first and, and more of, okay, this is becoming a thing. So it’s a whole different conversation when you talk to somebody who’s kind of sourced and done all their research before they ever drop a dollar. I was just going to Hobby Lobby and buying a bunch of stuff and seeing what happened.

Bradley Sutton:

And it was fairly profitable for you from the get-go.

Dana:

Yep.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, what year did you decide to give Amazon a try?

Dana:

Well, I won it on Amazon for a long time, but we don’t really fit the mold of that. And so it didn’t really become a thing until they opened Handmade in October of 2015.

Bradley Sutton:

2015. All right.

Dana:

When they opened that category and I was one of the first ones there. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now before then. What did you get your sales up to, like on other platforms? Out outside of Amazon?

Dana:

We have multi-six figures between all of our other avenues. But that was a lot of grind. Some of it, I mean a large portion of that was Etsy. But it was, it was in person, it was wholesale, it was all kinds of avenues.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. And it was like, it was a company that was run by you and all your other mom friends that you were Yes. You’re referring to there. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. All right, let’s switch back to Sean now. So 2016, you made the garlic press, probably didn’t make too much money if at all, but learned a lot and what did you pivot to? And like, you know, I’m assuming you actually like, Hey, you know what? I need to find a product that’s not saturated, or I need to, you know, figure something else out. But I definitely like this Amazon thing, so, so tell me about how 2016-2017 worked out for you.

Sean:

Yeah, I mean, I think looking back on it I didn’t really have a plan. I probably had my head in the sand a little bit and sort of hoping that sales would pick up rather than, you know, just facing that it’s an issue and you know fighting it head on. But I tried some other products and again, they had you know, they didn’t do very well. I mean, I expanded to Europe as well and you know, that basically, you know, kept me going, but it was never going to take off. So it was just by pure accident. When I was on a forum, I was one of the few sellers on there that was selling in Europe, and most people didn’t know how to navigate VAT in Europe and, and so forth in the various countries.

Sean:

And I had done quite a lot of research on that. And a lady from Slovenia contacted me and said, she was selling in the US as well with her brand, but she wanted to expand Europe, but she needed some help with registering in the VAT and so forth. So I helped her and then she said, you know, is there anything I can do to help you? And she helped me. She’s basically a superb designer. She has an eye for detail that no other human being on earth has. And she started helping me and then, you know, we both became very familiar with each other’s businesses. And then in 2018 five years ago tomorrow she said, you know, defensive doing something together. And I said, yeah, why not? And we found a product and it was just for the UK very quickly.

Sean:

We found a product very quickly. We sort of estimated that we would get 30 sales a day globally in the whole year round. But the product just took off immediately and with no PPC, no reviews, no advertising. And you know, after I think about eight months or something, it was doing like 1200. Well one day I did 1200 units a day in Germany. It was very different to our competitors. And she had another business, which then she exited that business and we worked on this full-time. And we found that her skillset and my skillset were the complete opposite. And you know, the designing the product, picking and images, videos, and everything, she took care of all of that. And I did the logistics, the ranking, inventory, and so forth until we got to a stage where, where we couldn’t cope, we had a couple of VAs that were a bit of a disaster because they’re very task based as opposed to showing initiative. And in the middle of 2021, I think it was, we decided that we would either sell the business or we would expand by investing in getting some good people on board. And we took the latter and the business then took off. And that’s sort of where we are today.

Bradley Sutton:

So what was your best year since now you’re doing this joint venture with somebody else, like, was it last year? Was it 2021?

Sean:

No, we’ve doubled every year.

Bradley Sutton:

So 2022 was your best year? Yeah,

Sean:

So I mean, our year-end is the end of May, so we were like 120% up in the last 12 months.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you combine all your marketplaces, and gross sales, what was it about in dollars, roughly?

Sean:

How much in dollars?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Sean:

Oh, the total, I don’t know, but we did get up to a million dollars one month. So I would say seven or 800,000 maybe over you know, balance to balance out over the year per month. So

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So getting closer to eight figures in other words.

Sean:

Yeah, I mean, one thing we did was like, we had a lot of stockouts and it should, as you know, kill you, but by bringing somebody on board who knows exactly what they’re doing we haven’t been able to stock for one product for the last 15 months, I think, and that’s made a huge difference.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Sean:

So, and you know, launching in the US as well as we’re starting to gain some traction there.

Bradley Sutton:

Is Germany still your number one marketplace revenue-wise?

Sean:

Yeah, Germany’s by far the biggest okay. Germany and the US is a distant second, and then maybe France and the UK are probably next, so.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Cool. Now back to Dana here. Why don’t you let everybody know what are the requirements for Amazon Handmade? You know, like, like, I can’t or maybe I can, you know, like with my coffin shelf, you know, could I technically get on on Amazon Handmade, or what do they make you sign or what is the terms of service of being able to list your product in Amazon Handmade?

Dana:

Yeah, so it’s a juried category, so you have to like, fill out an application. And so part of that application is stating whether or not you make your products or what percentage of the products are made by you. So you can, like I have people who ask me all the time, they’re like, well, I have a laser machine cause my laser’s the one who’s actually cutting it. And I’m like, okay, that still applies. But you have to verify or when I say verify you have to answer the question as to how many employees, basically they wanna know how big you are because they kind of don’t want you to be too big. It is a small business category, and when you get to the place of needing 50 employees or whatever it would be to produce your product, it’s no longer handmade.

Dana:

And so they do some verification inside of some accounts periodically. I’ve never had it done on mine, but I coach a lot of other people who sell handmade, and if you have an item that you’re selling in handmade that’s easily reproducible with Chinese sellers or something, they’ll get that question a lot. Where they will basically have to do a video call with Handmade and show them they wanna see you in your workspace and your scenario to prove that you’re still supposed to be in that category. So there’s no real rhyme or reason, but I’ve seen enough people go through it to see that some of the categories inside handmade that they will kind of pinpoint just to make sure it’s not somebody who’s gotten in who ha, who shouldn’t have.

Bradley Sutton:

Now are you still continuing to sell on Etsy and other platforms as well?

Dana:

We do. We’re a brand in general, so we do a lot on Shopify. Any traffic that we drive ourselves is all done through through our own website and stuff. But Amazon’s a big piece of that. But yes, we still sell on Etsy. We still sell we do some wholesale and then we do a tremendous amount of traffic to our own webpages and email lists and stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

And then so how do you choose what to do now? You know, like, I know you said, you know, 10 years ago it was just kind of random but what’s your process now for deciding what you’re going to make and then also for all your products? Does it just automatically go to all the platforms? Hey, we’ll list it on Etsy, we’ll list it on Amazon, we’ll list it on Shopify, or some things are on some and some are not another, what’s your basic MO there?

Dana:

So we put it on all of them. And what we sell is very seasonal based, so we sell holiday items. So for Easter, we put up Easter items for Christmas, we put up Christmas items. And so it’s, I’m telling you, the conversation is so different than people who are like, Hey, Sean’s, like, I have one product and we have it all under one brand. And I’m like, well, we’re literally gonna finish up five different new designs today, and they’ll all go up on all of the platforms today. And it’s all underneath that brand. So we’ve learned kind of what styles our customers like and stuff, but it’s a constant production of new designs. And then because on handmade, the majority of the items we do FBA, but like, it’s not a requirement to kind of sell inside handmade.

Dana:

It’s not the way that everyone necessarily approaches their handmade business. I do, because I’m now kind of in the Amazon world but a lot of the people who come into handmade to start with they’re selling on Etsy. And so they make the items, they send them to the customer when the customer orders it. And so they just transition their Amazon business to fulfilling themselves. And so that’s, that’s what a lot of it is for people. So we just kind of listen to what our customers like as far as the styles go, but we still produce and, and send a lot of the items here from our warehouse.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Now, what about you? What was your peak of sales in the last few years? Was it, was it last year before, and then how much about was it across all these different platforms? I know I’m not sure if you have that number handy, but just rough estimate.

Dana:

Yeah, so our biggest year was 2020. What we sell is handmade products are over a hundred dollars. So it was very based off of and we only sell on the US market. So it was very influenced by people who were at home and they wanted their items that they could just shop online and they had an extreme amount of, kind of extra income. So that drastically affected us inside of 2020 specifically. But we still do multi-seven figures a year.

Bradley Sutton:

And you’re producing all of these yourselves. Is it still you in the same group of people, or?

Dana:

It is. Yeah. So we did because I did kind of become an Amazon girl and learned that world. So I kind of do both pieces and dip my toes into both sides. We do sell supplies and other items related to what we make. And so that is a contributing factor to kind of the large piece of it. But we’re still over seven figures just for the handmaid side for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Now to be in the millions of dollars of sales you know, I’m assuming this is not obviously something you’re doing from nine to one o’clock in your basement, right? So like what kind of operation are. Have you had to get a warehouse you know, hire full-time employees and things like that, or?

Dana:

Yes. So you asked about like, starting and how we decided what we were gonna make If I would’ve done it again. Yeah, I would’ve started with something smaller, but what we make actually classifies us in the oversized category. So we are in the growth of expanding into 10 years of business it doesn’t fit in my basement anymore. It’s a lot of space that it takes up. So, yes I quit my corporate job in 2017. That year we moved into a warehouse. We’ve since moved into a different warehouse. And so we have a couple of employees on that supply side where that’s just kind of fulfilling orders. And with that as well, we do Shopify, we do Etsy, all of that. My whole business is not meant to be just an Amazon brand type thing. But we do have, it’s seasonal, as I said. We make like Christmas items, we make Halloween items, et cetera. So we will be heavier in staffing during those periods, but we try to run between 7 and 14 people or so throughout the year.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Dana:

We are actually making the handmade products. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now we’re going to just go back and forth with just some unique strategies from both you you know, things that, you know, not any Amazon seller can or online seller for that matter, can just say, Hey, yeah, we do millions of dollars a year. You guys have achieved that. So, you know, looking back, like what are some things that, you know, some strategies you could share that you think you’re a little bit unique on? I mean, almost anything about the handmade is something unique because not many people do it, you know? So let’s start with Sean, like give us one strategy, you know, 60 seconds or less. Something unique that you guys are doing that’s helped you achieve this level of success.

Sean:

Just two things. One is staff, having good staff. The second thing I think we’re doing is we manage our ASINs at a very low level. So we know exactly every day how each level, how each ASIN is performing. And we have an internal tool that’s, I can look at ’em within 20 seconds. I can see how the business is performing if there’s any trends that we don’t like. The other thing that we do quite well, I think that a lot of people don’t really take much notice of is our numbers. So we’ve invested a lot in making sure that we know exactly what our numbers are and exactly what profit margin we have on each product. And if there’s a product not performing cause that happens then we just get rid of it. So I think that’s what separates us from a lot. But I think having good staff is definitely the most important thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Dana, what’s a strategy you can give us? Something that you think people can learn from?

Dana:

So again, coming from a different world, the people that I’m dealing, in trying to launch the handmade side, those are my people. Those are my conversations. I love having and in that mindset or in the conversations with those people, it’s shifting their mindset that they are a legitimate business. And so that’s a lot of times what my story has done for them is proving to them that they can be kind of whatever level that they want to be. Which is why, like, I love having conversations with people in the Amazon world who are not approaching business the same way that I am. And they, they look at me and they’re like, oh, like you’re legitimate. Like you’re actually making things. And I’m like, yes, that is what we do. And so speaking to those people they struggle to realize that their business could become kind of whatever they want it to be.

Dana:

A lot of them are really stuck in the mindset that, okay, if I made $10,000 this year, that’s a win for me. And I’m like, okay, that’s great, but if you buckle down and you do something different or break the mold cuz there so many of ’em are like, I don’t wanna do Amazon, I don’t wanna do Amazon. And I’m like, okay, but if you do, look what could happen. So just push yourself outta your comfort zone a little bit and whatever your business is made you comfortable in doing maybe there’s something else out there that’s different that could help you be more than you dreamed it could be.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s your launch process like Dana look? Like are you doing the similar things, any private label seller is, you know, PPC and try and get visibility and get to page one? Or is there something unique about selling and handmade that’s different than non handmade?

Dana:

Well, depending on kind of the, the saturation of which handmade category you’re in I don’t have to do a whole lot of work to get on page one of the category that I’m in, in handmade. So handmade is a main category, but then it has all the subcategories. So you can have t-shirts, you can have mugs, you can have Tumblrs, like, whatever that might be, but it might be a subcategory within handmade. So we don’t necessarily approach it the same way because we’ve created so much brand recognition and just, we, we have a lot of products out there that kind of dominate the category in general that we’re in under handmade. So our approach is different. We do PPC but it’s not necessarily to get one item to get traction. We are approaching a launch which is funny cuz no one in handmade calls it a launch. That we make a product, we take a picture of it we list it and we’re only making the one until we turn around and get more orders for that same one. And then for us, if it’s kind of proven itself, that might be something that we turn around and send into FBA. But it’s us creating the one getting great images of it and just adding it to our entire catalog. And just rising the whole tide of the whole business.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now what about somebody who’s like, you know what, I don’t necessarily want to be making stuff, you know, for years in my basement or, or this is not you know, the exact career path for, for producing my own products, you know, but at the same time, I don’t have 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, $8,000 to invest in a product you know, from China. Is, is handmade a good way if I, if my budget is low to at least get my feet wet in the game and start building up capital? Or is it kind of risky to do that if you don’t have experience? What would you suggest to somebody who’s out there who’s like, who definitely wants to sell on Amazon wood handmade, be kind of like that gateway drug potentially for them?

Dana:

I mean, it could be you have to have a passion behind selling your product or making your product basically. It’s not a thing or a category that you approach of, Hey, I wanna be in on Amazon. What thing can I make? That’s not usually the kind of conversation that I have with handmade sellers. It’s usually that they love what they’re making and they, they make it really, really well. The conversation that I have to have with a lot of people when they’re trying to decide if Amazon as their next route is, are they ready to take on what that scale might look like? Because if they, if they turn around and get increased orders, 200-300% of what they’re doing now, just to start out within those first couple months, a lot of ’em are like, okay, no, I’m not sure I could handle that. So the conversation’s just, it’s different. I’m not usually speaking to someone who says, Hey, I wanna get on Amazon, is handmade the right place? But it’s, it’s an avenue that yes, if you get into it and you catch the bug, which is kind of what happened with me. I sold in Handmade, and then we turn around and, and branch into other pieces outside the handmade category. But that’s not usually the approach for anybody in that category.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now last two questions for each of you Sean, first of all favorite Helium 10 tool and how you use it.

Sean:

I guess, you know, the keyword ranking tool are used most.

Bradley Sutton:

Is that one of those metrics that you’re looking at when you’re looking at the product’s health? Like how it’s ranking on keywords or

Sean:

Yeah, I mean that’s what we’re looking at right now. I mean, we’re working on. I’m getting data getting other data on our own tool. It’s just an internal tool. But yeah, I mean we, we use that and we use it. I mean, my favorite one, which I can’t even remember what it’s called, it’s the one whereby you can split up all the words into individual words.

Bradley Sutton:

Frankenstein.

Sean:

Is it Frankenstein? Yeah, I have great fun with that too. So yeah, we use Helium 10 all the time.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Dana, favorite Helium 10 tool on how use it?

Dana:

Listing Builder. I use Listing Builder to just to give variation cuz what we sell is, I’ll have Christmas items and so if we’re selling 50 of the same, it’s all the same keyword, you know, so making sure that they’re, that they’re varied or I can use that easily to kind of mix it up.

Bradley Sutton:

Last question is like I always talk this year about people’s hobbies and what they’re doing to get the, out of the, you know, 9-5 or for entrepreneurs, sometimes it’s 9-9. We, we get, you know, like we, we always need to have something to take us away from our daily grind. So, so Sean, what are your hobbies? What are you doing to make sure that you’re mentally and physically healthy?

Sean:

I mean, I, I’m a huge sports fan, so and I play a lot of tennis and pedal out here. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of Paddle? I’m not, it’s you, you will do. It’s apparently it’s, it’s starting to gain some traction in the US. But I’ve never heard of it before. I came out here, it’s a little bit like, I think you have pickle ball. It’s a little bit like that. And you know, and that the weather here is fantastic. You have sunshine, I think 320 days a year. So it’s quite good. But, but also I love what I do. So I don’t feel as if it’s a job that’s important, you know? So I don’t need to get away the way I did when I was in the corporate world. Yeah. That’s it.

Bradley Sutton:

Dana, what about you?

Dana:

We are still in the process of kind of figuring out that balance but me and my husband have gone into short-term rentals. So there’s a lot of kind of travel associated with that of launching Airbnbs and that side is kind of fun learning something new. But to get out of, that’s a piece of the get out of the 9-5 grind. But I also coach on handmade at Amazon. And so just that education world of not necessarily having to trade time for money is kind of the end goal. But I love, like, still growing this and, and managing my team. I don’t make the products anymore, so it’s more just helping brainstorm what, what the next step is and that kind of thing. So like Sean, it’s, it feels nothing like the grind that I used to do. So it’s a different activity that lights my heart on fire and when it stops lighting my heart on fire, then I’ll figure out what’s next.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, Dana, if anybody wanted to reach out to you on the interwebs to learn more about, you know, what you do or, or hit you up, is that possible? And how could they do that?

Dana:

Yeah, I run a Facebook group that is Handmade to Amazon. And it has my name in the Facebook group, so that’s the easiest way to find me. I’m in there loving on all those people and teaching them to actually take their craft as a business.

Bradley Sutton:

So what is the Facebook group’s name?

Dana:

It’s Handmade Amazon – Dana Midkiff.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Got it. And Sean, what about you? You want to stay private out there or are you down with people are reaching out to you on?

Sean:

I Don’t mind. I love to talk to people too, so I guess they can get hold of me on the Serious Sellers Facebook page.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, they can’t get in there. Like LinkedIn or any, or just, maybe they can.

Sean:

Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn, so. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Or if they find you on a tennis court, they’re in Spain. Exactly.

Sean:

You can, as long as they don’t interrupt the match, you’re fine.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go. All right. Well it was nice getting to know your stories and you know, next year maybe we can have you guys back on the show, and let’s see what you guys have accomplished in 2023. It’s definitely an interesting year so far. So I’d love to catch up to you guys next year and see where you’re at.

Sean:

Perfect. Thank you very much.

Dana:

Thank you for having us.