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

#469 - Walmart Traffic, Q&A, And PPC Tips with Carrie Miller

Welcome to this special Winning with Walmart episode on SSP. Today’s host, Carrie Miller covers a wide variety of topics about selling in the Walmart marketplace. She talks about how Walmart sends online traffic to your listings to get more eyeballs and sales, how to get Walmart’s Rich Media for free, and more! Additionally, she answers questions like what’s the process of joining Walmart.com as a seller and can international sellers sign up on Walmart?

In episode 469 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie discusses: 

• 00:51 – Where Does Walmart Get Their Traffic?
• 06:23 – How To Get Rich Media In Walmart For Free
• 07:37 – Take Advantage Of AMX Platinum Card
• 08:17 – Process Of Joining Walmart.com As A Seller
• 09:01 – Carrie’s Blogs On How To Sign Up On Walmart and how International Sellers Can Now Sell on Walmart
• 09:21 – Helium 10 Tools That Work In Walmart.com
• 10:54– How Many Countries Walmart Is In?
• 12:19 – Does Walmart Accept Brand New US Business Owners?
• 12:48 – International Sellers Can Apply In Walmart Too!
• 13:53 – Does Walmart Accept PO Box As A Business Address?
• 14:17 – Let’s Talk About Walmart PPC And Helium 10 Adtomic
• 18:09 – Why Walmart Is A Good Opportunity Right Now
• 19:30 – Get Adtomic For Walmart Demos From Carrie Miller

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

In this episode, we are going to be talking about all of the different ways that Walmart is sending online traffic to your Walmart marketplace listings so that you can get more sales. We’ll also be answering all of your Walmart questions. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research. Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including usa, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India, and much more

Carrie Miller:

This morning with Walmart Wednesday. I have some great stuff for you today, and I wanna talk to you a little bit about basically where Walmart gets their traffic. Okay? This is a kind of an interesting question because a lot of people wanna know, like, how can I get more customers on my Walmart page? Or how can I get more sales? And this is going to help you, I think, get a very good understanding of that. So the first thing is that most people are actually just shopping at Walmart. So there are, you know 90% of US households actually shop on Walmart. So if you can, you know, think about yourself, think about whether or not you shop on Walmart or if you go to Walmart you’ll know that there’s a lot of people already shopping at Walmart and they actually have an app.

Carrie Miller:

And many people, about 80% of people that are in the stores are actually using the app while they’re in the store, which is really cool. So there’s a lot of exposure there through the Walmart app where your products are. So that’s number one way is just because there are a lot of, you know, Walmart shoppers. The next way is Google. So I don’t know if any of you have noticed this if you’re already selling on Walmart, but your products actually, even if you’re not advertising, are showing up on Google. And the way that this happens is you optimize your listings for Google. And one of the ways to do that is to not keyword stuff. So on your title, if you’re following the guidelines that Walmart has set up for you to do this is going to help you quite a bit because the less keyword stuff you do, the more these search engines are gonna pick up your title and your product.

Carrie Miller:

So for example, here, this one is a Walmart product, you’ll see in the Google shopping, and it’s absolutely incredible because you’re not even paying for this and Walmart is, you know, doing this to help you get some exposure there. Also there are Bing searches. So not only Google searches, but anyone who’s using Bing as a search engine, you’re gonna be seeing Walmart ads there. So if you can see right here, we’ve got you know, a garlic press that’s being advertised under Garlic Press on the Bing search. So you’re showing up on Bing, you’re showing up on Google. So sometimes when you look at, so in, when you’re looking in Cerebro or Magnet for Walmart, which we have actual search volume on the Walmart app, you’re not actually seeing complete traffic because maybe people are coming in through, through Google. So you’re gonna, you know, see that 50% or so is what Walmart is saying is coming from outside traffic.

Carrie Miller:

So it’s really important to make sure you’re optimizing, maybe look up some Google Google Planner keywords, make sure you have some of those main keywords that are really related to your product, like in your title and in your listing so that you can actually show up on Google and bang for those. The next thing is something that’s really new, which is really cool, and I’ve seen this myself because I am all over Instagram and TikTok. You actually can see now that there’s a lot of people that are Walmart influencers. So if you search the hashtag Walmart partner or Walmart creator, you can see there’s a lot of influencers. Now, back when I did this search you know, back in January, I think it was, there were probably maybe 2000 hashtags, but if you search it now, there’s more than 11,000 hashtags for those those hashtag keyword searches on Instagram.

Carrie Miller:

So that’s pretty incredible. And there’s, there’s actually a quite a few more on TikTok, so lots of really great exposure. These creators are getting a commission, a really good commission depending on the category that they’re, you know, selling in kind of like Amazon. So you can see there’s, here’s some different you know, traffic, you know, creators that have shown their videos. So we have outdoor one, we had a Walmart summary, fines, a lot of clothing. I’ve seen a lot of clothing influencers really showing off Walmart stuff because people who are selling on Amazon are moving their stuff over to the Walmart marketplace. So there’s higher quality in clothing there. Home fines are big, that’s a big category. So you see a lot of home fines and there’s makeup as well. So if you’re in like the beauty categories, it’s really perfect for you to use influencers for that.

Carrie Miller:

There was a Father’s Day one recently that was just Father’s Day this last weekend. And so you’ve see, you see all these things and they actually also have their own Walmart creator pages like they do on Amazon. So they’re really kind of, kind up quite a bit in the creator space, in the influencer space. So there’s a lot of opportunity with that. So, you know, search those hashtags. Maybe you can find some creators that can create some content for you if you send their products work out some deals that way. The next thing is Walmart+. Okay, so Walmart+ is basically like Prime, so they’re gonna get the free two-day shipping. They’re gonna get you know, a lot of different perks. And one of the main perks I would say, especially with this economy, is that you get gas discounts.

Carrie Miller:

So you’ll see that you get, if you join the Walmart+ program, you get free discounts on gas, you get free shipping on two-day orders. You also get free delivery on grocery orders of there is a minimum purchasing it’s $35. But another thing is I’ve seen them working a lot of different partner programs. Now I’ve seen more than just this one that I’m mentioning, but you’ll see that this, this is the Platinum American Express. I was actually looking at getting this American Express card and one of the perks is that they actually pay for your Walmart+ subscription. So they’re really doing a really great job of getting Walmart+ subscribers, which is just really helping to funnel more people to Walmart through the Google searches, cuz maybe they’re looking at Google and searching for a garlic press and they’re like, oh, Walmart, I get free shipping, why don’t I just click on that?

Carrie Miller:

So there’s a lot of really good opportunity here with Walmart and the traffic. So something else that that is new that you guys might not know, and you’re listening now, so this is actually really good for you to be listing, is Rich Media. So Rich Media is a lot like a plus content and it is available now pretty much without having to pay. So Rich Media, you basically, you would have to go through kind of a provider and you would have to pay for hosting. You can still do that, but you actually can get it for free by going into your help center. So you’re gonna go into the items category, and then you’re gonna click on Rich Media. And then Rich Media, once you’re in there, you can click on video and there’s also a 360 image as well. So you can basically, it shows you how you can submit your videos for free so you don’t have to pay for getting that rich media up.

Carrie Miller:

So video is really, really helpful for really, you know, giving more benefits about your product. So if you can do that, if you have some time and you have some little slideshow videos, I highly recommend going in to, you know, the, it’s basically your contact support. So it’ll go, you go to Contact Sport and you do items in inventory, you’re gonna click on Rich Media, and then you’re gonna go through all the steps to create your rich media. So that is an, you know, an a very, very easy thing that you can do if you’re already selling on Walmart. Okay someone said, thanks for the heads up on the AmEx Platinum benefit. Yes. yeah, it’s, if you have the AmEx Platinum, if you’re a shopper, go ahead and just take advantage of that free membership to Walmart+, I know a lot of people have that card because you got a little lot of, you know, good perks and it’s like, I think it’s like $695 a year for that card.

Carrie Miller:

So one of the benefits is it, you know, pays for itself with all these different cool benefits and Walmart+ is one of those benefits. So make sure that you take advantage of that. Okay, so what is the process to join as a seller on Walmart? So for Walmart, you are going to want to basically go and apply. It depends on your your country. There’s different requirements. I actually have a blog for this, and it explains the different countries. But you’re basically going to go ahead and set up an account and you just apply, you put in your information and it’ll kind of give you a login right away. That doesn’t mean you’re accepted. You have to put in your business information once you’ve logged in, and then you wait for them to confirm that you are accepted and then you can put in your payment information and shipping details.

Carrie Miller:

So it’s really easy. It used to be a lot more difficult. You don’t have to put a whole bunch of information in. They really can look up your business on their own. So I’ll put the link to the how to, you know, sign up and then also the link to the blog article that really explains the different countries. So another thing that we do have that you guys may not know about is that we have some really great tools for, for Walmart. And so if you are a a Walmart seller already, there are Cerebro tools. So you can use Cerebro and do a reverse product Id search, and you can get all of the keywords. So for example, you have a competitor and you wanna see, you know, what keywords they’re indexing for. You can put in their product id, which is the last numbers on their url.

Carrie Miller:

You can take that product ID number, you can put it in Cerebro, and they’ll do a reverse search and it’ll show you all the keywords that they are indexing for. So it’s an amazing, amazing tool. We have Magnet for just searching phrases. So what you would do, say you have a garlic press, you can search garlic press and it’ll give you a lot of keyword suggestions that are related to garlic press. We have we have Adtomic now, so I can do, I’m gonna do a, a demo later on for that. But we have Atomic for Walmart, so you can do your pay-per-click management through Adtomic on Helium 10, which makes it a ton easier to manage your pay-per-click. So if you’re not doing pay per click advertising on Walmart, you definitely should be, that’s a hundred percent the most important thing you would never launch on Amazon without doing pay-per-click.

Carrie Miller:

So we’ve got Adtomic we’ve got inventory we’ve got profits management we and we also have our X-ray extension. So let’s see about some other questions. Someone said, how many countries is Walmart in? There’s I mean in terms of the actual retail store, they’re in quite a few countries, but availability, I believe it’s five or six countries, but they’re expanding constantly. So as you go to the signup page, you’ll see which countries are allowed to join. So you wanna check that out. And there’s definitely you know, a lot of expansion going on. They really want to get more sellers for sure. The UK, China, India, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, the us, those are all countries so far that are able to sell, but they, they have expanded to more recently. So they, if I didn’t list your country, it may also be available. However, if you’re a really, really big seller, you’re selling millions of dollars you might have an extra a leg up to be able to go onto Walmart. So you could send me a DM if you are kind of a, like a seven figure, eight figure seller and you wanna get on Walmart and you might not be in one of those countries.

Carrie Miller:

Does Walmart Rich Media direct on platform allow you to use Rich Media template for formatting or just upload videos? You’re just uploading the videos. They don’t have, they don’t have like the templates, but it’s pretty easy. You can follow the process. You can see when you go onto the and also, it’s nice to see you on here. You can, yeah, it, it’s just an upload for the video. So they, they had a lot of really cool templates before, and I think that might be what you’re referring to, but they’re gonna, I think they’re gonna be expanding that a lot more.

Carrie Miller:

All right, next question. Does Walmart accept brand new US business owners? I do believe they are accepting new business owners. You have to make sure that you have a business set up. Something I would recommend is maybe set up a Shopify account before so that you can kind of show yourself as you know, an established business and that you’re serious. So yeah, I would, I would definitely not shy away from applying, even if you’re a new seller. Okay, and then someone said, I missed when you spoke about international signups. So the international signups. So there are new, when we first started talking about Walmart, you really could only sell if you had a US business address, but now they’ve expanded to multiple countries. So you can you can apply if you’re in the UK, if you’re in Canada, if youre in India, China, I’ve written a blog on how all the different qualifications, because there are different qualifications for each country.

Carrie Miller:

So you’re gonna want to, you know, take a look at that. And each one’s different. So there’s different kind of business entities and things like that that you need to to show when you’re applying to Walmart. So it’s, it’s different for every country. And they are expanding countries constantly. They are that’s their main goal is to continue to expand and open up to more sellers and really grow their marketplace. So that’s pretty exciting for everyone who’s international. And if you’re not on the list yet, you know, definitely, you know, keep, keep a lookout. But if you are a really big seller, you know, sometimes they’re allowing you know, it depends on your revenue. But if you have, if you’re a high revenue seller, you know, in the millions, then you potentially could you know, get onto Walmart.

Carrie Miller:

So does Walmart accept PO Box as a business address? I don’t believe they do. So you’re gonna need a physical address. That’s, that’s the way it’s been in the past, is you really need a physical address for your business. So you could use, some people use their home address. So it depends on where you have your business set up, but you don’t wanna use a a PO Box that’s not gonna, they’re not gonna accept that they, they haven’t in the past anyway, so that’s a really good question. All right, any other questions?

Carrie Miller:

All right, I don’t see anymore. But if you’re not doing pay-per-click advertising, I wanna talk about that a little bit. Pay per click advertising is definitely a must. So we do have Atomic for Walmart and if you want to start utilizing Walmart Atomic, you can also send me a message on, on Facebook. Basically, on my product, I have the clicks I was getting on Amazon, were, you know, three and $4, and I was actually losing money on this particular product because the pay-per-click was so expensive on Walmart, it’s actually about 35 cents, 40 cents, you know, max 50 cents per click. So I really recommend if you, you know, haven’t started advertising on Walmart, it is a huge advantage if you start doing that, you’re gonna start to rank better. You’re gonna, you know, it’s much cheaper clicks, you’re gonna get more sales, and you can get all the way to the top of the search.

Carrie Miller:

So before about it’s been about a year now since they changed it, but before you could only rank advertise as high, as high as your organic rank, but now you can literally pay to get to the top of the search, and it’s not expensive. So I highly recommend, you know, taking a look at your category, see if anyone else is even advertising. A lot of times you might have a product and there’s no one even advertising on that product. So it’s really an amazing time to be on Walmart. It’s a very basic pay-per-click, very easy. I am not a PPC expert and I do it myself. You can do that with Atomic. So it’s a very, very helpful tool. So any other questions on here? I don’t see any more questions, but I guess I have a question to see if anyone on here is already on Walmart or if you’re in the, in the process.

Carrie Miller:

So if you are in the process, or if you’ve already started selling at Walmart, let me know in the chat. Just wanna see who’s on here and if you have any more questions. But if you haven’t taken advantage of the free Rich Media, do that 360 is available and you can upload a video. And then the other thing is, if you haven’t started Pay-Per-Click advertising, please, please, please start advertising. Go onto Cerebro and Magnet and search for exact keywords. Okay? You’re gonna find the exact search volumes, look for exact keywords, and you don’t need to forget about the low search volume. I’ve actually found that even low search volume keywords I’ve been making sales on. And I think the reason for that is because we have Google traffic that’s coming out like the Google searches, the Bing searches.

Carrie Miller:

So say, you know, the product gets, you know, a hundred searches a month or something like that, you’re still getting a lot, a lot of sales on that because of the fact that there’s a lot of outside traffic there and there’s creators. Now, maybe they would pick up your product, find some of those influencers that are doing Walmart that are Walmart creators, and you can find them by searching the hashtag Walmart creator or Walmart partner, and you can find some great influencers. Maddie says, I’m in Walmart, but can’t find a UK marketplace. Yeah, it’s, it’s mostly the, the US marketplace. So I would say right now the best opportunity for Walmart is in the US marketplace. They do, you know, have other marketplaces available, but I would say definitely if you can get into a Walmart fulfillment services WFS, you could ship your products in just like FBA. It’s a great opportunity.

Carrie Miller:

All righty. I think that is it. If there aren’t any more questions these revelations about the traffic, I think, you know, really hopefully sparked some, some thoughts in some of you to really optimize your listings for Google as well as Walmart. So you’re gonna get your keywords for Walmart from Helium 10, but then you can look to see if there’s any other keywords on Google Keyword Planner that might be really helpful for you to kind of rank for Walmart on Google. So if you have those lists already, you can, you know, utilize those. But definitely kind of think about what ways can I optimize my listing best? Look at the guidelines because on Walmart, they really don’t like keyword stuffing. Look at your listing quality score. The higher your listing quality score, the more visibility you’re gonna get and the higher you’re gonna rank.

Carrie Miller:

So you’re gonna get, if you have good shipping, you know, you’re, if you have the pro seller badge, there’s all these things you can do to optimize your listing on Walmart. Go to that listing quality dashboard and make sure you completely optimize your listing. And if you get, you know, 90 to a hundred percent, you’re probably going to be optimized for Google too. So that’s, you know, kind of a good rule of thumb, but Walmart I do have kind of a test product just to let you know about a revenue, my product that I’m, I really haven’t paid too much attention to. I should pay more attention to it, but it’s doing about, for one product, doing about 10,000 in revenue every month. I’m doing pay-per-click advertising and you know, I’m getting RoAS of, you know, between, you know, fours and $6.

Carrie Miller:

So really, really good opportunity right now for Walmart. So if you’re not already doing the advertising, if you’re not in there make sure you get in there and and start advertising. Utilize our Walmart Adtomic and I’ll do some demos on that later on and show you how to set it all up and get you all started with Adtomic. So again, if you are interested in Atomics, send me a message and we can get you all set up with Adtomic so that you will be ready for my demo. Alright, and if that’s it, I hope that you have a great rest of the day and thank you all for joining my Walmart Wednesday. Bye bye.

#468 - Amazon & Walmart PPC Strategies, Dayparting, & Improving Organic Rank

In this special TACoS Tuesday in SSP episode, let’s dive into the world of Amazon and Walmart PPC together with our expert guest Jocelyn Jeffries, Senior Manager for Retail Media at Pacvue. Our guest is an experienced professional managing $50 million in ad spend annually. Let’s listen to her insights, tips, and answers to our community’s questions about PPC asked live.

In episode 468 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jocelyn discuss: 

• 01:33 – Let’s Meet Our Guest Jocelyn
• 02:25 – Managing $50 Million In Ad Spend Annually
• 04:21 – A New AI Innovation That Pacvue Released
• 07:10 – Jocelyn’s Favorite PPC Metrics
• 08:08 – How Do You Get New To Brand Data For Sponsored Product Campaigns
• 09:27 – What Are The Benchmarks For NTB Data?
• 12:53 – A Weird Situation With PPC And Attributed Sales
• 13:57 – How To Use PPC To Improve Your Organic Rank
• 16:34 – Tip When You Are Targeting Top Of Search
• 17:35 – Running PPC Campaigns After Missing The Honeymoon Period
• 19:41 – PPC Tips And Insights For Amazon Europe
• 20:45 – How To Use Day Parting In Your Campaigns
• 22:46 – PPC Sales Increased But Organic Sales Stays The Same
• 24:32 – PPC Strategy For Walmart.com
• 28:03 – Rolando Joins Us To Ask His Question Live
• 35:31 – How To Get In Touch With Jocelyn And Pacvue

► 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 somebody on the show who manages over 50 million in an annual PPC spend who’s gonna be answering a lot of your questions, such as, how did you Day Partying, how to advertise on Walmart, how to launch and get organic rank from PPC and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think

Bradley Sutton:

We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/keywordtracker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly tacos Tuesday show. TACoS Tuesday, where we talk anything and everything PPC related, whether it’s on Amazon or Walmart, or even off Amazon and Walmart. We can take your questions on PPC, on other platforms potentially as well. So every month we bring on a special guest. And so without further ado, I’m gonna bring her on here, Jocelyn from Pacvue. How’s it going, Jocelyn? Good,

Jocelyn:

How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just delightful. And what do you do at here at Pacvue

Jocelyn:

I am on our kind of managed service consulting team, so I’m actually guiding strategy for some of our largest enterprise clients which is very fun. We work with really cool brands, you know, across, you know, self-service, managed, et cetera. And we have a lot of fun, but really mapping out the entire strategy for the year, and we’re pretty deep partners at that kind of level where we’re involved in the retail side and the you know, promotions and merchandising and all of that kind of aspect when we’re that deep into the relationship with the client.

Bradley Sutton:

Have any rough, like, cool figures you can throw out, like, Hey, I manage one gazillion dollars worth of spend per month every day, or something like that. That impressive.

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I probably manage about 50 million in ad spend through the year, which is very cool. You know, when you’re up to that level of budget, you get to do a lot of fun stuff, a lot of testing, a lot of learning. You know, I love a good test and learn. That’s kind of my thing at this point. Whether that’s, you know, testing new, creative testing, new audiences kind of addressing some larger, you know, brand initiative questions. You kind of get to do that, some of that when you start getting up to the higher budgets, which is certainly fun for someone like me.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What platforms are you knowledgeable on? I’m obviously Amazon, but are you currently, you know, running any campaigns on other platforms, be it Walmart, Instacart, et cetera?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so I manage campaigns on Amazon, Walmart, Criteo, Instacart, DoorDash.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s the one you said before Instacart?

Jocelyn:

Walmart, Criteo.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s that?

Jocelyn:

Criteo is like Target, CVS shipped a bunch of the smaller retailers. They don’t have their own networks but that’s how Target does a lot of their advertising. So pretty much Jenny and everything I’ve done some campaigns on, which is fun. Obviously Amazon’s the biggest and has the most opportunity to learn and whatnot. But I do have experience in pretty much every retail media site.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. I don’t, so at least one of us knows what they’re doing here. All right. So you know, I wanted to show this quick video. We just launched something at Pacvue yesterday. Now you tell me, how do you say this? Like, I’ve known about this film festival and stuff for like, years. How do you actually say, is it Cannes? Cannes?

Jocelyn:

I think it’s Cannes. Cannes Lions can

Bradley Sutton:

Cannes. Okay. Well, I’m, I’m just gonna go with that. But at the Cannes Film Festival,

Jocelyn:

Think it’s all real name, but most people call it Cannes.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well, people don’t come to me for your Instacart advertising, nor your French word pronunciation, but everything else you can come to me for. But anyways, let me show this video really quick for everybody to see, like this really cool, kind of like AI innovation that Pacvue has launched. Maybe, maybe I can even ask you a couple of questions about it if you know. So let me just go ahead and throw up this video for everybody to see in 3, 2, 1. Here we go.

(Video):

Pacvue Excel copilot is industry’s first natural language generative AI for commerce built directly into Microsoft Excel. You can query all of your PAC view data in one place with prompts, like, show me my top campaigns by ad spend. Pacvue Excel Co-pilot can also generate pre-formatted dashboards. Co-Pilot can reduce the time it takes to produce these reports from hours to just minutes. Now teams can spend their time on critical thinking, discussion and strategy. All of these charts can be automatically generated into a prebuilt PowerPoint alongside the relevant analysis. Learn more about Pacvue Excel Co-pilot and Pacvue AI today.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, pretty cool. So basically if I’m under, I haven’t seen this in action, so what it seems like it’s kind of like, hey, I can threw in a prompt like enter, say hey, like, Hey, show me this metric combined with this, make an Excel chart for it, or something like that. Or am I on the right track here?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, that’s exactly what it really does, and it’s a pretty powerful tool. You know, I think of that’s really how we think when we’re looking at reporting and looking at performances. You’re thinking in questions like that of what’s got the most efficiency, what has the highest conversion rate, things like that, where it’s gonna take some time to man either manually pull that or to, you know, shift through Excel files and whatnot to generate that. So it’s a much more like, I think, natural way to approach reporting. And it makes it so much easier and really kind of mirrors the way you’re thinking with the way performance is, is able to be displayed and makes reporting so much easier and so much time being saved. I think that’s what probably a lot of us who are hands on the keyboard are really doing is reporting out to your stakeholders, reporting out to your boss, reporting out to your client, whoever it is. A lot of what we do is, you know, the storytelling of reporting and performance. And so this makes it a lot easier to do at a lot quicker of a pace.

Bradley Sutton:

What are some of your favorite, maybe more under the radar metrics? You know, we’re talking about reporting, we’re talking about analytics and things. I mean, you know, everybody I’m sure looks at ACoS, you know, most people nowadays look at TACoS, which is the name of this show. But what are some other things that, that you, that’s important to you? Like what would you say is the next thing that people need to be looking at? You know your CVR or your ROI, your RoAS? Like what’s your star metrics?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I think, you know, return is what most people use when they’re looking at performance, and that’s obviously important. You know, you need the kind of the one-to-one efficiency of what that ad spend is generating for you. But I also enjoy looking at new to brand percentage and subscribe and save. Those kind of are the two opposite ends of, you know, the, the full funnel, you know, where you’re kind of living in the middle, when you’re focused entirely on return, you’re look living in like the, just what is the revenue that’s being generated? You’re not looking at the long-term impact of how many new customers am I bringing into my brand or my store? And how many of those are becoming loyal customers through subscribe and save. So when you start looking kind of beyond the RoAS and you start looking at different sections of the funnel, that’s where you’re looking at more of a long term kind of growth plan versus very short term, which is where you can kind of get kind of pigeonholed into when you’re looking just at return.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now speaking of RoAS one of the first questions here, it’s from Jack and Jack says, let me see if I can get it up here. How do you, or not RoAS new to brand how do you get new to brand data for sponsored product campaigns? Is that available? I know it wasn’t like, you know, a couple years ago, but wasn’t that something that was recently released?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so you can get new to brand data through for sponsored brand just through the native console, but through AMC, Amazon Marketing Cloud, you actually get significant, you know, much more data. That’s really what Amazon Marketing Cloud is, but it also allows you to get new to brand data for sponsored product campaigns along with all of your DSP metrics as well. So AMC is a very flashy, exciting topic. There’s a lot to do with AMC, but it does kind of fill in the gaps for some of the, the data that’s maybe missing. So that’s a huge kind of piece that we’ve been rolling out at Pacvue in general but also with a lot of our clients in the last, so it’s a year or so. It’s a pretty big huge topic and a lot of people are kind of overwhelmed because it is so much data and it’s hard to figure out where to even start. But you can kind of start by filling in some of the gaps that you have and, you know, just the native Amazon console.

Bradley Sutton:

And what do you do with this information regardless of how you’re getting it, you’re getting in Pacvue, somebody’s getting it you know, themselves, there’s something else. Now I know what my new to brand data is. What constitutes good numbers, what constitutes bad and, and what’s, what’s your action plan once you get that number?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so new to brand is gonna vary category to category. If you’re looking at toothpaste that’s different than if you’re looking at TVs. You know, you’re not gonna be buying a TV every year or maybe you are. But you know, those metrics are really gonna differ by your category. So looking at some category standards is important. You know, we release our CPC report I don’t think we include new brand in that percentage, but talking with you know, your Amazon rep and getting some of that data through context that you have is important to kind of set, like, what is the benchmark for me? Because 10% for one brand is gonna be horrible for another and wonderful for a different brand. So once you kinda have a benchmark of where you’re starting and where you’re trying to get to, that’s really when you can start taking action.

Jocelyn:

And a lot of that action is gonna be around targeting and shifting spend. So, you know, if someone’s already searching for your brand name, they’re probably not gonna be a new customer. They’re already aware of who you are. So maybe shifting some of that spend out of brand defense and going into more general category terms where people are searching for, I don’t know, natural toothpaste versus, you know, the brand name itself. So that’s when you start shifting where you’re investing in order to impact certain metrics. So, you know, the reverse is true for subscribe and save. If they’re already brand aware and they haven’t purchased, you know, in the last 90 days, you can spend some additional budget on retargeting, for example, to try and generate more loyal customers. So once you kind of have your objective of what am I trying to achieve in the next quarter, for example, and what are my benchmarks and what are my goals for that, you can then start taking action and start shifting spend of in what direction is gonna start influencing those metrics. So those are really kind of the actions you start taking once you start looking at this broader data.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So talking about, you know, PPC from a branded side, you know, your branded keywords and, and things like that, do you always keep those or do you suggest to keep those segregated like, hey, if any branded, you know, keywords or search terms come out, let me, let me keep those in its own campaigns, or do you keep them co-mingled with, with your regular random search terms?

Jocelyn:

No, I, we definitely always pull those out because you wanna know how much you’re spending on those, and you wanna know how much people are searching for those, you know, if that’s going to increase over time, you wanna be able to see that. And you’re gonna have a lot more control over how you’re defending your brand. You know, it’s kind of up to you of how much you want to spend on protecting your own brand name. It’s, if it’s very competitive and people are, you know, targeting your brand name, you need to be there to defend it. And if not, you can shift budget out of that, but you have a lot more control over how and where you’re spending when you have things separated out. So we typically have things break broken out by branded, you know, general non-brand category terms, adjacent, maybe, you know, similar products, things like that. And then competitor, if you are going after competitors that’s the best way to kind of structure your campaigns. So you have, again, much more control and you’re very intentional in, in how you’re spending your budget.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve got a Facebook user here that says, Hey, I noticed a weird situation. I got impressions, zero clicks, but a sale. So like, is that is that a data error from, from Amazon, if, you know, is it, is there a such thing as getting zero clicks, but actually getting a, a attributed sale?

Jocelyn:

It would be something from the past. So, you know, if you are advertising June 1st through the 20th, and then you pause for the 21st through the 30th, for example, you may get some sales attributed after, you know, after the time that you pause where you may have zero spend and you know, zero clicks that day. But because they clicked on the ad, you know, four days ago, the sale may be attributed then. So it’s probably an attribution thing less, you know, they’re not converting on an impression that sale would not be attributed to that impression. But it’s possible that it was attributed at a later date. So if you run outta budget, you know, with five days left in the month, you’re probably still gonna be seeing some sales trickle in because of the attribution window. So I would say that’s probably what the situation is.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I’ve got opinions on this next question, but you know, maybe we, we’ll, we’ll talk to you too, because it was actually interesting says, what is the best way to use PPC to improve organic rank? I was at the billion dollar seller summit in Puerto Rico last week, and there was a, a customer of PAC views there. Matt Altman, he runs a, an agency I forgot what the name of the agency was, but he, he was extolling the virtues of Pacvue, talking about how it’s really cool how they, you, you can kind of set rules based on your organic rank. Now, you know, now that you know, the last couple of years things like search, find, buy and two-step URLs are, are not you know strategies that we’re allowed to use anymore. Pretty much, you know, PPC is is one of the only, you know, on Amazon waste to improve your organic rank. So how, so how are you for your clients utilizing PPC in order in order to try and increase your organic position?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I mean that’s kind of the beauty of Amazon is that you do have the ability to influence a flywheel through advertising. Obviously things like promos and inventory and retail readiness obviously play a factor in as well, but PPC is the, the factor that really have the most control over. So when we’re looking at improving organic rank, it’s important to look at why are we trying to improve organic rank? Is it a new product? Are we trying to be more competitive or are we trying to go after higher volume et cetera, things like that. But if we are purely looking at, I want to rank higher on natural toothpaste, for example, we’ll, we’ll run with the toothpaste example. It’s gonna be very intentionally spending. Again, that’s kind of what my whole job comes down to. But in like understanding how much you’re spending and what it’s gonna cost to, you know, compete on that.

Jocelyn:

But if you want, if you’re in the natural toothpaste space, you need to be competing on those terms. You know you know, Toms of Maine, 12 pack natural toothpaste, blah, blah, blah, blah, is only gonna get you so far. That’s not really gonna improve your rank. You’re probably already solid there, but if you’re looking to improve your overall rank for a product, you need to be going after the keywords that are gonna keyword lead to that improvement. So it’s very much about understanding where you need to be spending and what terms you need to be spending and what’s actually gonna lead toward you know, improvement and rank. I think that’s the, the first step and then it’s going and executing on that. So PPC is really the, the tool that you can use to influence specific pieces of search term and, and customer behavior and whatnot. So that’s really how you start going after improving your organic rank.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, we got another anonymous question here. It says the question says, I’m trying to get targeting top of search, I put the maximum Amazon suggested bid as well as a hundred percent on top of search, but still we are getting clicks on product pages. What should I do?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so the bid adjustment is just gonna be adjusting for that target. You can do negative targeting. So you could do like negative a hundred percent on product pages, for example. It’s not like it adds up to a hundred. You could have a hundred, you know, 60% on top of search, it’s gonna increase that top of search bid 60%. Then you could also have, you know, 60% on product pages and it’s gonna increase the bid for product pages 60%. So it’s not totalling up to 100. So if you absolutely wanna cut off product pages, you can decrease, you can have negative bid adjustments, but just because top of search is at a hundred doesn’t mean it’s gonna completely eliminate product pages.

Bradley Sutton:

Wells has a question here. He says, Hey, we missed the honeymoon period. Our product doesn’t rank, so barely no sales. We’ve got a lot of competitors, so what do you advise us to do? We started PPC campaigns two years ago before learning Atomic or anything about ppc. So Osama’s got this mature product, I believe he actually sells in Amazon, Europe somewhere. If he’s who I think he is here. And, and obviously honeymoon period is, you know, this is a mature product, is two years old he’s not getting sales cuz he’s not organically ranking like, you know, I’m assuming he’s got some, you know, some reviews. So would you just suggest like trying to just go hot and heavy on some long tail keywords and, and build up some of those core keywords? Or should, you know, should he go extreme and maybe start over, you know, again, if he doesn’t have too many reviews or what would you say in a situation like this?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so there’s a couple approaches you can take. I think the long tail keyword is a good way to look at it. You know, if you’re spending money on again, natural toothpaste that’s gonna be probably a waste of money to be honest with you. It’s gonna be so expensive for you to even try and compete in that, that it’s gonna be a waste of dollars. So starting to look at what are some of the longer tail keywords that I can win, you know, if it’s, you know, the most br you know, specific keyword ever, but if it applies to your product, going after that and starting to just chip away at some of that organic rank is gonna be a good way to start. And then, you know, if you have a similar product within your brand or you have competitors, you can start targeting their product detail pages.

Jocelyn:

So if someone’s not specifically searching for you, but they see you on you know, another product detail page, that’s a good way to kind of start again, chipping your way in and kind of moving from the outside in to the, the kind of larger volume because again, it’s gonna be a waste of money if you’re trying to go after those high volumes and you don’t have the foundation of strong rank. So starting to chip away I think is the best method and mantra of having it, and this goes to new products as well of if you’re starting from zero, it’s gonna take some time. So long tail and product detail pages is what I would recommend.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean along the same lines as his question but you know, if he is who I think it is, like I said, he sells in Amazon Europe. If I’m not mistaken, I’ve never sold an Amazon Europe. I’ve only I only sell in Amazon, you know, North America. I’m sure you manage across multiple, you know, marketplaces. Does your strategy differ like say Amazon, Germany, Amazon France compared to Amazon USA or pretty much you are using the same, the same principles and the same strategies?

Jocelyn:

I would say as far as like foundation, like campaign structure and segmentation, it’s gonna be the same, but it’s gonna be different. Like there’s nuances obviously in how people search in different regions and whatnot. So the targeting’s probably gonna be a little different as far as, you know, what keywords customers are using when they’re searching for your product. You know, some words in, you know, America that are English are different than, you know, the UK for example. So it’s I think more targeting, but the core foundations of how do I set up a good account, how do I set up a good campaign structure? Those are gonna be the same, those are gonna transfer over well. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Rolando says, how do you use day partying as part of overall campaign spending? You know, I think, you know, Pacvue has had this for probably over a year now. You know, we’ve had it in Adtomic, I’ve dabbled a little bit we call it Schedules in Adtomic. I’m curious, you have way more experience than me on on day parting, so, so how are you utilizing this?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of way to utilize it from a day-to-day perspective. You absolutely should be using it. Pacvue released maybe a few months ago, maybe six months ago, a feature where you can do day parting based on specific metrics. So you’re maybe for conversion focused campaigns, you are basing your day parting automation on conversion rate, or you’re doing it based on impressions or cpc. So you can choose what metric you wanna even base your day parting schedule on. But it is really crucial, you know, every product, you know, some products are the general, you know, eight to eight but some, you know, have early morning shopping hours, evening hours, things like that. So it is good to be using that no matter who you are. Because it does save a lot of money where there’s no reason to be spending at, you know, 3:00 AM for example.

Jocelyn:

Or it may be a really competitive time at 2:00 PM in the afternoon. Being able to make adjustments like that is gonna save time for, you know, preventing you from doing it manually, but it’s also gonna save money pretty significantly. And then day parting, as far as like special events, you know, we can set up schedules for Cyber five where we’re going aggressive, you know, the 6:00 PM after Thanksgiving to midnight or whatever. You know, and you can do that around Prime day that’s coming up, you know, next month. So there’s a lot of ways you can do it from an always on perspective, but then also scheduling around how do you wanna spend during tent poll events. So we definitely have that laid out for clients around Prime Day. Like I said, cyber five, any of the peak periods, it’s really gonna save you a lot of time and money to outline that. So I always recommend a day party schedule.

Bradley Sutton:

Here’s a scenario, I’m sure you’ve run into, so, so somebody the PPC sales ha have increased, you know, which is not you know, could be good, could be could, could be bad, obviously bad if, if it’s not profitable, but regardless of what’s going on, the PPC sales have increased, but organic sales are staying the same. So, so the, the PPC piece of the pie as far as sales go has increased organic is still the same. What other methods would you be using to, to help increase organic sales? This person asked?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, you know, there’s a lot of things that lead to PPC sales increasing is, you know, you could have been much more efficient in how you were spending or you could be increasing your budget. You know, there’s a lot of factors that lead to increased PPC sales, but there’s not always a one-to-one of, I increase my ad sales 10% this month and my organic sales also increased 10%. And sometimes it’s, you know, a kind of trailing you know, this line goes up and this line goes up, you know, two months later, for example. So I think, again, going back towards what terms are gonna be actually leading to an increase in organic sales you know, that increase in ad sales was coming from just branded terms. You know, those may have been people that would’ve already shopped and already converted if it was an organic placement as well. So understanding what is gonna lead towards incremental growth versus existing sales is something I would take a look at. So you’re not just kind of eating away at sales, that would’ve already happened if you didn’t have an ad showing up for them. Sometimes it’s a matter of where you’re spending and where those sales are even coming from versus would they have already occurred organically.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I’m actually gonna send a, I see Rolando has another message. Rolando, I’m actually gonna send you a link. Maybe you can just hop on, hop on our our broadcast here and ask a question like, well, what about speaking of off Amazon, you know, Walmart is probably the, the second most, you know, known, you know, place to advertise and sell for as far as online marketplaces. How your PPC strategy lately for Walmart? I, it seems like in the last six months or so, they’ve really you know, really come a long ways. They’re still far away from the, the capabilities of Amazon on the advertising side, but, but you couldn’t even have what is it called, like second price auctions or what you know, like, like just, you know, a few months ago. So what are some big ways that your strategy differs? As far as Walmart advertising compared to Amazon advertising?

Jocelyn:

Yeah. So for those who don’t know, Walmart switched to a second price auction Q2 last year. So this is, we’re coming up, we’re lapping it essentially for the first year. And then they also changed the relevancy model. So that was kind of the big kind of hindrance of Walmart was, it was just not that advanced. And so it was very inefficient to advertise on Walmart. You know, first movers that got in early, I think did well, but overall it was more of an uphill battle than certainly Amazon. Obviously Amazon had quite a few years headstart, but with those changes, so many of our clients saw drastic improvements in Walmart. You know, we’re talking about triple digit growth basically because your money that you were spending was so much more effective once they made those changes. So a lot of it is kind of related to campaign structure as far as, you know, the product variations are a little bit different than Amazon.

Jocelyn:

So understanding how to segment your campaigns based on products and, and variations and whatnot, which they have now since recently allowed you to advertise much of the, the variations and really the different products themselves. So the campaign structure was very different based on the amount of products that you can even advertise and how you could advertise it, but it’s get definitely gotten a lot closer to what Amazon is as far as like a, an algorithm model and an auction model. They are rolling out some onsite display towards a kind of larger segment. You know, it’s been in beta for a while, but it’s becoming much more accessible. So I would say it was very sponsored product focused, but display is definitely becoming a bigger piece of Walmart now. So they’re doing, I think everything they can to catch up, I would say.

Jocelyn:

And then sponsor brand video, which obviously Amazon has had for quite a while. Walmart has rolled that out since as well. So there’s a lot more ad types now, but it was very much restrictive based on product and sponsor product was really the only ad type. So I would say our campaign structure has expanded much more in Walmart in the recent months based on what Walmart is making available. So that’s, I think, the biggest difference in the last three to six months is really accessibility to additional ad types and more ways of advertising your products than before.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. All right. Let’s go ahead and bring our first live guest on here. Let’s bring Rolando to the stage. Rolando, how’s it going, man?

Rolando:

Hello my friend. How are you?

Bradley Sutton:

I’m doing just delightful. Thanks. Thank you. You, this is a historic moment, first ever outside guest live on tacos Tuesday, so here we go.

Rolando:

Where’s my food man? Where’s my tacos

Bradley Sutton:

It’s right here. I got some right here for you. I got some right here. On my shirt there’s the tacos, but before you forget your question, what was your question?

Rolando:

In looking at PPC spend, obviously Bradley was talking about how PPC spend is going up, right? It’s unavoidable, but we can look at where we can get better value. So if we’re spending a dollar a click to convert on a, like you’re talking about natural toothpaste, could we find a cheaper way to do it, whether it’s externally, like on Google ads, or maybe that term is 50 cents per click and shooting that over to the listing or somewhere else within the Amazon ecosystem that brings more value or essentially like a retail arbitrage on keywords. That’s what I’m trying to say. How do you approach that when you’re looking at spend as it just keeps ballooning every year Yeah. On Amazon?

Jocelyn:

Yeah. You know, obviously outside Amazon signals influence you know, Amazon performance as well. So that’s always an example and that’s always an option. I would say looking at ad types because we have some clients where sponsored brand is so much more efficient than sponsored products. Maybe sponsored products is very, you know, in the highly competitive space and it’s cheaper to win, you know, a video placement than it is to win the top sponsored product placement. So kind of understanding where you’re spending as far as like an ad type, because natural toothpaste for sponsored product may be different for than sponsored brand video, for example. And thinking about, you know, sponsored brand as a whole, there’s a lot more options of, you know, outside just the product collection, you know, there’s the brand store. So how can you get people from the brand store into your product detail pages because people that shop on the brand store typically have higher order values, for example. So looking at where you’re spending, not just from a holistic bucket of money perspective, but from a an ad type perspective we have a lot of clients actually with dsp. It’s pretty effective and it’s actually more efficient than sponsored products based on, you know, interesting more refine targeting and an audience understanding.

Rolando:

I just heard that the business side on Amazon is getting ready to open up targeting on the sponsored display. Have you heard about that?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, so there’s a lot around business owners that you can target and there’s, you know, Amazon business lookalike and whatnot. So there is so much more, I think, refinement in who you’re actually targeting. You know, if you’re searching national toothpaste as, you know, a father of five, for example, versus me, a single woman in Denver, you know, those are very different audiences and maybe we have different conversions, for example. So I think that the real value of DSP is the audience understanding and kind of refinement. That’s the huge, huge piece of DSP. And when you’re looking at brands that have a very clear vision of who they think their customer is, it’s a better way to kind of approach that versus sponsored products, for example.

Rolando:

Can I ask you one more question while I have you here and Bradley? Yep. The B2B side and, you know, there are a lot of consumer brands on the, on the Amazon platform, but as you know, the B2B side on Amazon itself is, is growing every year. They’re making concerted effort with dedicated reps. They’re going after large enterprise accounts, government accounts. What’s the feedback that you’re hearing from your customers that have a contingent of B2B customers buying from them on Amazon?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, we actually have a few customers our clients that are thinking of like, how do we expand in to B2 B? I think they’ve met it pretty closed off, and I think they are making an effort to open up more in the kind of the coming year, because it’s only, I think about 10% of total Amazon revenue, if I remember that stat recently that we kind of heard from an Amazon contact. So they are, there are a lot of customer or clients who have thought about B2B and they haven’t really had the ability to go after it in the past and are now taking a look again of like, okay, Amazon’s kind of opening up some targeting and some placements and whatnot. How do we approach this? And it is very different I would say of what products you’re even including as far as, you know, you’re talking about pallets of batteries versus, you know, a 24 pack, for example.

Jocelyn:

Indeed. So so a lot of clients that are kind of have a presence but haven’t specifically gone after B2B are reevaluating it, certainly. And I think the B2B team at Amazon is reevaluating how do they kind of grow this side of the business? So I think there’s a lot more taring that’s available now, and I think it’s kind of like a mutual reconsideration that everyone’s doing right now of how do we make this work and how do we grow this side of the business. Again, it’s only 10%, so it’s not gonna be a huge kind of factor for a lot of clients. But if you were in kind of more the

Rolando:

Industrial industrial, yeah, we’re not office products. I would say we’re way over overindexed on, on for the percentage. You said we’re way above way, way north of that and the office space. So we’re seeing more of our sales come from B2B than that 10% mark. So it’s there. And then, and I, and I would imagine it’s only gonna get bigger as the overall pie start getting bigger at Amazon.

Jocelyn:

I would agree. Yeah. Awesome

Rolando:

Thank you for bringing me on, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

He’s actually been on our Serious Sellers Podcast en Espanol before good episode there. So I gotta bring him on the English one. Now. My last question is, is, is, you know, speaking of what, what this person was saying about smaller accounts, you know, Pacvue is not for smaller brands, but I’m gonna ask you what, you know, how can people find more you know, reach out to Pacvue for, for more information or reach out to you? But before I do that, who are the people who should be, you know, reaching out? Like if I’m doing only like about $600,000 a year on Amazon and don’t have much PPC spend like, like I’m doing right now, may, maybe I’m not the right fit for Pacvue, but, but who would get the most benefit out of contacting you and, and maybe seeing if you, you guys can help them.

Jocelyn:

Yeah I mean, I think that Pacvue is, it is more designed for bigger clients that are gonna, you know, benefit from the tool. But I would say there’s a lot of different ways to work with Pacvue. You know, the clients that I manage are, you know, the big boys in the space, and those are you know, require a lot of additional support. But we have, you know, kind of consulting abilities and we have, you know, people that just use our platform just purely for the technology. And the, the benefit that you’re getting is really the efficiency in operations and the time saved and the ability to kind of step beyond like the day-to-day bid management and be able to focus more on strategic initiatives, for example. That’s really kind of what, and that’s what Helium 10 does as well.

Jocelyn:

You know, like any of our, you know, suite of tools is really helping you be more efficient at what you do day to day so that you can think, you know, bigger picture and look at more, you know, higher level operational initiatives versus, you know, changing a bid from 45 cents to 50, you know, for 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM for example. You know, like that is really the benefit. So I would say there’s not a ton of, you know, minimum spend. You know, there’s a lot of ways that we can work with clients who just want help saving time. So I would say don’t limit yourself, but pfu definitely is, to your point, more for somewhat larger sellers. But there is not, you know, a specific dollar amount that I would say you have to be spending in order to benefit from.

Bradley Sutton:

And then if somebody, you know, did think that they might qualify and how can they reach out to you guys?

Jocelyn:

Yeah, I mean there’s sales@pacvue.com would be a good place to start shooting us an email. And, you know, you’ll filter through a lot of, you know, the people that I’m not on the sales side, so probably wouldn’t end up talking to me, but feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or whatnot. And we can get you guys connected to the right place. But pacvue.com is a great resource for understanding what our tool can actually do for you and start getting you into the funnel of some emails and, and some contacts with people who are more on the sales side than I am. But pacvue.com is really where you’re gonna see a lot of what we can do and, and what we can do to help you. So I would say our LinkedIn and our website are basic.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Jocelyn, thank you so much for coming on today. It was nice to have your expertise on here. And look for, it’s gonna be exciting to be seeing what copilot at Pacvue is gonna be doing for sellers moving forward. And would love to reach out to you maybe next year to come back on the show and, and help sellers like you just did right now.

Jocelyn:

Awesome. Thanks for having me today.

#467 - Amazon Pre Launch Episode: The Bali Blast - Part 2

Welcome back for part 2 of this 2-part strategy series with Bradley! In this episode, we dive into a range of strategies and tips to supercharge Amazon brand pre-launch activities. We kick off with a quick recap of Part 1 before getting into advanced topics like reverse engineering your competitors’ PPC strategies, expanding your keyword search, and uncovering long-tail keywords. We also explore tactics for identifying products frequently purchased alongside yours and share a seller’s success story after using the Maldives Honeymoon Method. Additionally, we discuss leveraging search query performance, optimizing listings using the Amazon algorithm, and understanding indexing versus ranking. Tune in for valuable insights on all the steps you need to do before launching your brand on Amazon.

In episode 467 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 02:18 – Make Sure You’ve Heard Part 1 Already
• 02:45 – Reverse Engineering Your PPC Strategy From The Competitors
• 05:05 – How Widen Out Your Search For More Keywords
• 06:19 – Get Long Tail Keywords Of Top 10 Phrase Roots
• 09:20 – Which Products Are Frequently Bough Together With Your Product
• 10:32 – How The Maldives Honeymoon Method Helped This Seller
• 13:07 – Bonus Hack: Using Search Query Performance With No Product Yet
• 14:48 – 10 Relevant Spanish Keywords? Check The Translation
• 17:56 – How To Use Frankenstein For This Strategy
• 18:57 – How Does The Amazon Algorithm Work For Listing Optimization
• 19:21 – Subject Matter Is No Longer Existing In Front Or Back Ends
• 19:51 – Amazon Indexing Versus Ranking
• 22:05 – Using Your “Keyword Bank” Inside Listing Builder
• 22:32 – Use Chat GPT To Build Your Lising Inside Helium 10’s Listing Builder
• 23:37 – Try To Nest Your Keywords Together
• 24:20 – Important Things To Note When Making Your Listings
• 25:24 – Don’t Use A+ Content To Index For Keywords
• 25:39 – More On The Difference Of Indexing And Ranking
• 27:17 – Check Indexing For Main And Secondary Keywords
• 29:32 – Add Top 10-30 Keywords Inside Keyword Tracker And Turn On Boost
• 30:11 – Setup Helium 10’s Market Tracker Tool
• 31:38 – Make Sure To Activate The SKU In Inventory Management
• 32:53 – Activate Your Helium 10 Alerts
• 33:27 – Use Follow Up For Automatic Request A Review
• 34:50 – More Bonus Tips: Strikethrough Pricing
• 36:11 – That’s It For The Bali Blast Pre Launch Strategies
• 37:06 – Stay Tuned For SSP Episode 500!

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today is part two of my two-part episode where I’m talking all about my pre-launch strategies for Amazon. You don’t want to miss today’s strategies because it’s gonna get you on the right track for the Maldives Honeymoon Launch method. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Wanna check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon? Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result, have the actual search keyword in the title. You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool X-ray. More than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray. 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 completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And I am still here in Bali. I just finished my last dinner with the team.

Bradley Sutton:

They gave me this like parting gift, vegemite. I’m not even sure how to pronounce this hat I’m wearing here. So again, thanks to Regina and Chris for organizing this event. It was awesome and now as for my last night. I got my flight in a couple of hours here. I wanted to record part two of my Bali Blast method, which is my pre-launch method. Again, you guys call it whatever you want. This is just me being silly with, you know, making up names for strategies and things. But if you miss the last episode, part one, make sure to go back and watch that episode. Otherwise, you know, a lot of this is not gonna make sense. But basically what this two-part episode series is, is like, hey, I’m like, Hey, you wanna get that Maldives honeymoon when you launch your product.

Bradley Sutton:

We know about the steps that’s taken there. What about before? You know, what comes before the wedding? Well, bachelor’s party or bachelorette party, and where’s a cool place to go for that Bali, which is just happens to be where I am. So I was like, let me call this the Bali Blast method just to make it trending in my own mind at least. So anyways, the last episode, we went through 16 different steps on, you know, everything from keyword research to a little bit of listing optimization. And we’re gonna do a little bit more keyword research today and also some more listing optimization. And we’re gonna bring you right up until almost getting your, your PPC campaigns ready. And I’ll give you guys some bonus, bonus strategies as well. All right, let’s go ahead and hop right into it.

Bradley Sutton:

The first step of today is actually step number 17 in this whole strategy, and that’s reverse engineering your PPC strategy from the competitors. All right? So basically what I want to do is put my competitor’s ASINs into Cerebro, just like I was doing, you know, to get the initial keywords, but this time I’m looking at sponsored rank average. So if I put a whole bunch of competitors into Cerebro, I’m gonna put a sponsored rank average from about one to 30 and maybe I wanna put in a minimum search volume. It’s not necessary, but I am then going to look at how many competitors are advertising for the keyword, like a high number of competitors and what their sponsored rank average is, which means if I were to take their position of where they showed up in search results, approximately what position would it be?

Bradley Sutton:

Like, for example, if they were ranking, you know, one four and eight, well, the sponsored rank average would be four, right? And the reason I’m looking at this number is because these will be some, some keywords that potentially, you know, are good or that at least the competitors have decided that they’re gonna pay more money. You know, you don’t get on the top of the page of sponsored results if you don’t have a, a pretty high bid and you don’t bid high unless you have some, you know, facts and figures that back up that that bid. All right? So it’s kind of, again, a way of reverse engineering what your competitor has had to learn through trial and error. And so this is gonna get you some more keywords that you definitely want to get indexed for.

Bradley Sutton:

Another step is, again, if you don’t have Helium 10, another way you can do some preliminary keyword research and get some more keywords is look at the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer. Alright? Product Opportunity Explorer. Even if you don’t have brand register, you have access to that. It’s in your seller central dashboard. You enter in a, your competitor’s products and then find the niches that that product appears in. And these are niches of keywords, right? So for example, one of the coffin products, they are in the Halloween decorations niche. And then if you were to click in there, you are gonna see, you know, anywhere from 10 to 30 keywords that make up part of that niche. That’s another way to get some relevant keywords, I think not a lot of people are using. Even if you have Helium 10, it’s kind of like a cool way to get some more keywords for your listings.

Bradley Sutton:

Next is still in Cerebro. All right? I’m still in Cerebro and I still am looking at the same 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever competitor ASINs. Remember that first step, which I went over in the Wednesday or the last episode, this part one of this was clicking the top keywords and the opportunity keywords. And then just now I talked about looking at the sponsored rank average. Well, in this situation, under the same exact search. I’m going to start widening out my search. Remember, I wanna start finding keywords where I wanna get indexed for it, but I don’t necessarily need to be the number one, you know, click item. I don’t need it in phrase, form my listing. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna have minimum search volume, maybe 200 or 300 or 400. I’m gonna put advanced rank filter number one, minimum one, okay, minimum one.

Bradley Sutton:

And then advanced rank filter two, which means where the range, I’m looking for 1 to 100. So basically it’s like, Hey, show me keywords where any of these products that I put as my competitors, at least one of them, at least one, is ranked in the first two pages. All right? So this is, you know, gets me a good list of keywords that I might want to be indexed four cuz they could potentially get me sales in the future. Alright, next keyword research step to get ready in this Blas method is number 21, get long tail keywords of top 10 phrase roots. Alright? Get long tail keywords of top 10 phrase roots. What in the heck does that mean? You know, when, when you’re looking at your, your top keywords, I already finished up until when I’m on step 21, I’m already finished with my steps that get me my keyword phrases.

Bradley Sutton:

So if I look at my keyword phrases, I might put them into a Magnet first. And let me just show you, what I can do is I can take those keywords and either stick it in magnet or just look at the keywords and see are there certain root words that are appearing? You know, Magnet will tell me if there’s keywords individual keywords that are appearing most often. It’s the ones that are most frequently there. Like for example, if I have a bunch of keywords like coffin letter board, coffin letter board, decor coffin letter, this coffin letter that, well, coffin letter and coffin for that sense are root words or phrase or mini phrases that are appearing in a lot of the keywords that I targeted as my main phrase. I know this sounds like kind of crazy, especially if you’re brand new.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me try and break that down one more time. Make sure you understand it’s really important, guys. All right, so if I have a list of 20 to 30 main keywords, I want to find the top keywords that are most commonly occurring. Because those 30 phrases, isn’t it completely 30 phrases that are completely unique keywords, right? Coffin, for example, if I’m doing coffin shelf coffin’s probably gonna be in half those keywords, right? So I wanna find those keywords, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into magnet and I’m gonna put that root, all right? So for example, coffin letter, I’m gonna put that root word here and I dunno, 3000 keywords might show up, but this time I’m going to use the filter in magnet that is entitled Smart complete. All right?

Bradley Sutton:

Because that’s gonna show me long tail versions and different versions like plural form or singular form of that root phrase, coffin letter. So for example, in this case, six different keywords come up, longer tail keywords. And then again, these are ones I’m gonna put into my secondary keyword list because these are ones I want to get indexed for. You know, maybe nobody’s getting sales for it right now, that’s why it didn’t come up in Cerebro, but it could be potentially, you could be the first one to, to rank for it all, right? Because if it’s a longer tailed version of a keyword that you’re relevant for, there’s a chance that it could be relevant to your product. So make sure to check those keywords as well. Next step right here is step number 22. Now, this is something that we went over in step three.

Bradley Sutton:

In step three in the last episode, I showed you guys about how to use Black Box Product Targeting in order to find frequently bought together products, all right? And that could be potentially be used for bundling or maybe to add something to give a good chance to get a good review. But in this sense, use that same function, all right? To see which products were, you know, really frequently bought together a lot with your product. All right? And now what you’re gonna do is some of those products, like maybe there’s five, hopefully there’s, you know, not too many, maybe there’s five or six. Pick a few of those really good selling ones that you think are more on the relevant side. And now what you’re gonna do, instead of trying to, you know, think of bundling options, this is gathering kind of loosely relevant keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

So for example, in this coffin letter board, frequently bought together search, there were like stickers that showed up and there were these you know, actual letters that showed up and there’s probably coffin shelves that showed up, et cetera. Now, none of these are like substitutes for a coffin letter board, right? It’s not like, oh, I’m gonna buy, it’s not like it’s not like the same product, right? So the keywords that are driving sales to these products, like let’s say it’s a coffin letter board, and the product that’s bought with it is a skull candle holder. You know, the keywords are most likely completely different. But here’s the thing, you are gonna wanna for the mo again, we’re, we’re trying to look ahead to the Maldives honeymoon method, the launch method, which, you know, if you’re, that’s the first time you’re hearing this.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ve talked about that in like at least 10 episodes here. Oh, by the way, I just talked to, you know I told you guys, I’m here in Bali organized by Chris Thomas. Chris Thomas is one of the leaders here in the Amazon collective and Amazon collected mastermind, and he’s also a coach, and he was on this podcast before, he was telling me in the car today that he helped somebody with this Maldives method, the Maldives honeymoon method, and was able to net something crazy, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, like within a one month timeframe, all unfulfilled by merchant products, but they used the Maldives honeymoon method, and he was like thanking me, thanking me for that. I was like, oh, that’s why I do this kind of thing. It’s so great to actually hear people using this methods again.

Bradley Sutton:

So, so what we’re talking about today, Bali Blast method, it’s trying to get us ready for that Maldives honeymoon. Anyways, I digress. We’re talking about frequently bought together products and then finding the top keywords for those products and then putting it in your listing. So when I say top keywords, if my product is a coffin letter board, let’s say one of the frequently bought together might be a coffin shelf, or no, what did I say? A gothic skull candle holder, right? I’m going to look using these same techniques we’ve been talking about or using brand analytics, whatever the case may be, I wanna find the top three to five keywords that are driving sales for that gothic skull candle holder. I can find that in brand analytics. I can run cerebra on it. And when I find the top keywords that are driving sales there, you know, by looking at what’s high search volume where they’re ranked at the top of the page, I’m gonna put those into my listing somehow.

Bradley Sutton:

And the reason why is I want to loosely relate my products to these other products that have a history of being bought together with my competitor’s products. Does that make sense? I’m not trying to steal the sales of a gothic candle holder. No. What I’m trying to do is set up my listing so that from day one, once I start doing ppc, maybe I’m going to product target these frequently bought together products. It could be that Amazon from day one might not give me any impressions if I’m trying to target the gothic skull candle holder, because Amazon might be like, wait, this product seems to be a coffin shelf. Like what would that have to do with this? Right? But then what I want the Amazon algorithm to do is be able to see like, wait a minute, this, this product has a lot of similar or some similar keywords with this product.

Bradley Sutton:

You know what? It’s very relevant to this product. We’re gonna start showing them this from day one that was actually, you know, a method we talked about too in, in Project X. All right, so Project X, you know, we talked about, you know doing some product product targeting as well. Alright, the next step here, that was step number 22. This is actually just a bonus step, but search query performance is something that was released, you know, a few months ago and, you know, people have like raved about it. Well, you can only do search query performance if you have an existing product and the existing brand, alright? So if you are doing, if you’re launching a new product that you’ve never had data before, you, you technically don’t have any access to search career performance data. Now, why would you even want search query performance data?

Bradley Sutton:

There’s some people I don’t look at it too much in this regard, but I know there’s some sellers who like to use it in order to get some more insights into like what kind of add to cart ratio certain keywords have, what kind of impression share you know, different products have, they wanna go deeper into the click share reports. So I, I did an experiment like a couple of months ago where I actually was going to you know, launch some socks on this, on the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Seller Central account, and obviously I’ve never sold socks on the Manny’s Mysterious Project X account. All right? So what I did was I created a dummy listing, maybe made a couple FBM inventory, and I s I I made the listing active, sent some PPC, and then what happened after a couple of weeks, I had a whole bunch more data that I could look at in Search Query Performance.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you are launching something brand new that you have no search query performance history on, that’s kind of like a way around it now you’re gonna have to burn a UPC code and actually make a real listing and, and just put a really high price to, to make sure that nobody buys it. All right, the next step we’re gonna talk about, this is important. Step number 23 is if you have more than 10 relevant Spanish keywords, check the translation. All right? So if you are doing product or keyword research in Cerebro maggot in those, those earlier steps that we talked about, you know, I, I forgot what the steps were, like steps 10 through 17 or whatever, it’s very likely, if not guaranteed, that some of those keywords that you found, if you’re doing this in the American marketplace, you found some Spanish keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, here’s the thing. If you only found like two or three relevant Spanish keywords that you want to be indexed for, just go ahead and throw those in like the backend search terms. All right? But here, here’s what happens. What if you get like 12 or 15 Spanish keyword phrases? Well, you know, you don’t really have room in your backend search terms to put in 15 phrases of Spanish keywords. No, you’ve only got like, you know, 250 characters. So what you can do is go to the listing, go, go, go to your listing once you make it, all right? Once you make your listing and this is kind of like in the future, but again, right before you launch your product, and then go to the flag at the very top of the Amazon page. Now I’m talking about this in the context of USA and Spanish, but, but this could be Amazon, Germany, and we could be talking about English keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

You find it could be Amazon, France, and you found Italian keywords, right? This is the same principle, but anyways, on the USA side, change your listing to Spanish. And then what I would do is I would click on the import listing to scribbles, which is listing Optimizer, like, right, it’s, it’s right there on the Chrome extension, and it’s going to import the, the front end of your listing into in the Spanish version, you know, since I just changed the version to Spanish, which is what Spanish speaking people do, they change Amazon’s interface into Spanish, and instantly it translates the listing. I’m gonna pull that Spanish translation into scribbles, and then I’m gonna have that list of 10, 15 keyword phrases into scribbles. And remember when you put those phrases in the scribbles, it shows you the full phrases and it breaks it down to the singular keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to check, it’s going to instantly show me where I am where if I have those Spanish keywords in the translation, I didn’t make the translation, Amazon makes a translation, alright? But what happens sometimes is, is even though it translates your whole listing, right, it doesn’t use the exact phrases, you know, the correct phrases that maybe people are searching for. So if you have more than 10 Spanish keywords, this is what you do to go in there and see if there’s keywords that you already, that Amazon is already translating for you. Because if that’s the case, you’re probably optimizing enough, you’re probably relevant and you’re definitely indexed, right? Of course, obviously you can check if you’re indexed or not, but you, you’re probably relevant, right? But if, if those keywords aren’t in phrase form or some keywords are missing altogether, that means you’d probably want to put those individual keywords into the backend of your listing when you are creating it.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? Step number 24, that was a little bit out of order right there on 23. We’re, we’re going back to the listing optimization stage right now. Remember I had two buckets of keywords that we’ve been talking about these last two episodes, the main keywords and the supplemental keywords. So now those supplemental keyword phrases, it could have been 200 phrases, it could be 300 phrases, whatever. I know I can’t put all 300 phrases into my listing. So what I do is I put those into Frankenstein and then I click on remove duplicates. And what it does is it extracts all of the unique words that make up those 200 phrases that I want to get indexed for. All right? So this is important to understand that don’t try and put all the phrases into your listing, you know it’s not going to fit.

Bradley Sutton:

So go ahead and put it in Frankenstein and first extract all of those keywords on the individual level. Now, this is something that I’m always asked about, and I’m gonna tell you since I made this slide, it’s actually changed. All right? So how does the Amazon algorithm work for listing optimization? Here is a level of importance, number one for indexing. All right? So if we’re just talking about indexing, which means being searchable on Amazon doesn’t mean ranking indexing how Amazon ties your listing and makes it relevant to a keyword so that you’re in the Amazon index. Number one is special features. We’ll talk about that in a couple of seconds here. Number two is title number three used to be subject matter, but as of about nine days ago, subject matter is no longer existing in Amazon front nor back ends. And actually, you know, I have found that bullet points are actually ranking higher now than generic keywords, which is the for artist, formerly known as backend search terms, so that it goes special features, title, and now bullet points, it’s next, then generic keywords and then description.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s for indexing. I’ve tested this a lot lately. I just tested this like literally last night on a live training I did for Serious Sellers Club members. And definitely bullet points is ranking faster than even generic keywords these days. Now for ranking, ranking is different. Ranking means like what gives rank juice. Like if a keyword is in phrase form in a certain part of the listing, which parts of the listing give the most bang for your buck, right? Number one title. The new number two is going to be bullet points. Number three is going to be generic keywords. Number four description. And the last would be special features. Special features does not help too much when we’re talking about indexing. And just to show you about how amazing special features is here’s somebody in the Helium 10 members Facebook group who, who said, Hey, shout out to Bradley for the tip of putting keywords in special features.

Bradley Sutton:

She writes I had two products with great conversion, great seo, and they would not index on my most relevant high volume keyword For three months. I opened several cases with Seller central, nothing, only after I put it in special features field boom became page one, positional one. So this special features works. I just tested it out literally last night on a live call. And on the live call there was a keyword that I couldn’t rank for, or that I had in the listing emo in the coffin shelf listing, and it wasn’t it wasn’t indexing for it all right? Even though I had it multiple places, put it in special features before that call ended, like 10 minutes later, we were indexed for that keyword emo that Amazon had previously refused to index me for. All right, next step, step number 25 is I have two lists of, of keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Remember, I have those top or main keywords, which are I have in phrase form all or phrases, you know, that should be anywhere from 10 to 30. And then I have a whole bunch, you know, maybe 100 or 200 individual keywords that, that were taken from my supplementary keyword list. And now I put all of those right here in into listing Builder, right? It’s super, super important that you do it this way and not just put all the phrases. All right, so now this is my keyword bank and listing builder is 10 to 30 phrases and maybe 50 to 300 individual keywords. Step number 26 is then go ahead. Hey, start with your title, optimize it for your main keywords, your canonical url, you know, get your listing really optimized. And then don’t forget, you have got to put those emotional trigger points we learned about in the last episode that you had taken from the customer reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one thing that you can do if you have the diamond plan in listing or in Helium 10, you can actually, if you, if you have writer’s block or you’re not confident with confident, I was about to say you’re not confident with your English level, yeah, I’m obviously not confident with my English level either. I can’t even speak English here. But if you’re not confident with your English level, go ahead and have the ChatGPT AI help you write your listing inside of Listing Builder. If you put your keywords and you put the kind of vibe you’re looking for, ChatGPT can kind of start your listing out and write it for you, and then you can tweak it to, to how you want it. But that really helps with writer’s block even for me sometimes. Alright, so again, create your title, make sure it’s optimized.

Bradley Sutton:

If you have multiple keywords, guys, if you have multiple keywords that were some of your top phrases, try to see if you have different roots of each other and get those in a title. The number, even though you have 30 keywords, that was your top you have 30 keywords, that was your top phrases. Can’t put 30 f keywords in your, in your title. So, so try to find the most relevant one. You definitely have to get in there. All right, so like for a coffin shelf, duh, it’s gonna be coffin shelf, right? But then what you wanna do is see if there’s a possibility to nest keywords together. So maybe one of the keywords was coffin shelf, maybe another keyword or a small coffin shelf. And another keyword is coffin shelf decor. Coffin shelf might be my number one keyword. And those other ones were main keywords, but maybe it’s all the way in the bottom.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m still gonna put those in the title because if I put the keyword small coffin shelf decor, I get three keywords for the price of one. I have got coffin shelf, small coffin shelf, and coffin shelf decor, if those were three of my keywords. So try to find those kind of things in order to get into the title. Alright, step number 27 is make the rest of the listing with your customer mind. Use main phrases, then single keywords. So try and get all those phrases that were your main ones into your listing, and then work on those single keywords in there. You know, you can use humor when it’s possible, and that’s even something you can put into ChatGPT to, to make it humorous if that’s appropriate for your niche. But make sure to speak to the customer’s use cases and problems the product solves, their fears that it might allay, and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Really make an emotional connection, especially when you’re writing those bullet points. Don’t forget about those niche themes that we learned about earlier in the last episode, where you want to, you know, use niche themes in order to kind of analyze the images and, and your image strategy. And before you even make your listing, you can, you know, set it up in helium 10 Audience which is powered by PickFu in order to maybe get some feedback from customers on if they like your main image. I like, especially if you have like two or three main images that you’re not sure which one you should go with, then that’s really going to, you know, let you know what customers like. Another thing you should do before you even get, you know, the listing fully ready is create your a plus content, right? And then activate the translation A+ Content.

Bradley Sutton:

Don’t be using it to try and rank for keywords or index for keywords, because I haven’t had enough tests where I can show it has an effect. Like I’ve tried to put keywords that I’m not indexed for and I don’t have in my listing, and I put it in different fields in a plus content a hundred percent of the time does not index me. But the one important thing is that you need to make sure that you have the Spanish translation active or whatever marketplace you’re in, go to the back end where after you get your, your a plus content approved, there’ll be a button that says Create language variation in America. The language variations would be Spanish and a Hebrew, I believe. And this is important because what happens if you don’t have this? All right, well, lemme just show you what happens if you do have it, if you do have it activated, like here, I’m showing you for, for those watching on YouTube, I’ve got on the left the, the a plus content for our coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? Looks pretty good, right? And then on the right it’s our Spanish a plus content. So that’s, if somebody changes the flag to Spanish, just like I showed you, changes the language of Amazon, this is how it’s going to show up. But take a look at this coffin makeup shelf, all right on the left, they’ve got a really nice looking a plus content right here with their coffin shelf. They’ve got a lifestyle model, et cetera, but they never activated their Spanish translation. So look what happens on the right side. If somebody changes Amazon to the Spanish version, their description and a plus content completely disappear. So, you know, is that gonna, you know, tank a hundred percent of their sales? No, but that just means that, you know, their conversion rate might go down by 20% or something for Spanish speaking people because they don’t have this a plus content activated for Spanish.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the next step, I’m gonna talk a little bit more about indexing and ranking. All right? So again, the difference between indexing is you are potentially searchable for a keyword ranking means that you are actually showing up in the search results in those, in what Amazon displays, which is usually seven pages. Now here’s what could happen, and this is why you’ve gotta do this step number I’m not even sure what number we’re on now, like 30 or something like that, but is to check indexing for all of your main and secondary keywords. So remember those main keywords that were like 10 to 30 keywords, take that full list, paste them as is, as phrases into Index checker, and then take those 100 individual keywords, paste it right there on the next line of index checkers so that everything is there and you are going to run index checker for it.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? And Helium 10 is gonna tell you, are you index? Did Amazon index you for these keywords? Now, here’s the thing, you are gonna find that even though sometimes, sometimes, even though you have the keyword in your listing, you’re not indexed, here’s a product that I did, a test product that were coffee socks, and you can see all of these coffee related keywords and even Mother’s Day related keywords I was not indexed for, despite me having it in multiple times. Now, here is why that might happen. Of course, it’s gonna happen if, if it’s like branded keywords or, or keywords that you don’t have the rights to advertise for or something like that, right? But, or if you don’t have the keyword in your listing, it’s like, duh, that’s why you’re, you’re not indexed. But in this case, think about what category these socks were in.

Bradley Sutton:

They’re in the, what is it, fashion category or clothing category to Amazon. These coffee related keywords might be completely irrelevant. They’re like, why would a piece of clothing need to rank or need to index for the word coffee? So what happens in this case, this is why you have to go and use that special feature sometimes to, to make sure that you’re relevant or that you get indexed for this keyword. So it’s very important. Don’t just assume because you did the greatest keyword research in the world, thanks to Helium 10, you’ve got the greatest listing optimization in the world, thanks to this podcast. But just because you did all that, that every single keyword that you put in your listing, you’re gonna get indexed for. Make sure to run this check with index Checker. Alright, the next step here is all of those top 30 keyword phrases, or like I said, maybe it was 10 or 15.

Bradley Sutton:

Add those all to keyword tracker. All right? This is, again, before you even start your listing that make it active, add them all the keyword and turn on Boost. Boost is that function that allows you to check 24 times a day what your ranks are, because this is super, super important. Once you start doing that Maldi honeymoon launch strategy, you know, and you’re in the honeymoon period, you want to know are, are you at the very top of the sponsor ranks? Are you improving your organic rank? You’re gonna know that as if you have boost on, and you are tracking these keywords from day one. The other thing to do is set up Helium 10 market tracker. This is not to be confused with Market Tracker 360, which is an advanced tool for like, you know, eight figure sellers, but the regular market tracker that you, that you have in your platinum or diamond plan, add your product there, add your main competitors, and four, three or four very, very specific, very, very specific keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

All right? I made the mistake one time when I was setting up my coffin shelf niche that I put the keywords coffin shelf, which is right, but then I put like gothic decor and like spooky accessories. What happened was then Market Tracker started spitting me all these like new keywords that could be my competitors, but it really, it wasn’t because all I consider my competitors are actual coffin shelves, right? So this is important to do that. If you are using Market Tracker, you only put the most super, super hyper relative or hyper relevant keywords to your product. So that when, what market Tracker is gonna do is it’s going to start recommending to you like, Hey, do you want to track this other coffin shelf? Or, Hey, did you know that there’s a new coffin shelf that is entering your niche? And then you’re also gonna be able to, to start tracking your market share.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is something I would say that, I don’t know, 75% of Helium 10 users are not taking advantage of. This is literally what you should have going in your account from day zero. That means before you’re even in the MALS honeymoon launch strategy or launch period, you need to get market tracker set up. Next step is make sure to activate the SKU. You know, once you, it’s live in inventory management. All right? So your FBA sku, if that’s gonna be your main s skew, go to Helium 10 Inventory management. If you have platinum, you’ve got this, this is for USA customers. If we have more demand, we’re gonna go ahead and get it for European customers as well. But this is really important so that you make sure that you are not going to miss out on, on your, you’re having the right inventory in there, right?

Bradley Sutton:

It’s gonna tell you when to transfer from your warehouse. It’ll tell you when you need to order more, but because this is a brand new product, the Forecasting Algorithm inside of Helium 10 that you’re gonna use, this is again, Helium 10 Inventory Management. A lot of people don’t even realize we have full inventory management. I’ve been using this for years already for all of my brands. You are gonna choose the exponential algorithm because you don’t have enough history yet for the sales. Now, you know, if you want to, you can just change it to seven day velocity or 14 day velocity. But again, Helium 10 Exponential Forecasting Algorithm is going to forecast things out based on recent sales. Now, once you’ve been selling this product for a year, that’s when you change it to what’s called the additive forecasting model, because now it’s gonna look at your like 12 month history in the seasonality and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Another step here, again, before you even launch the product or before you go live, make sure to activate it for Helium 10 Alerts. All right? Because what’s gonna happen, as soon as you get product into Amazon’s warehouses, sometimes they might immediately change your dimensions to something wrong. And so you wanna be able to know if Amazon does that, so you can take care of it right away. And then also see if hijackers jump on your listing at the beginning or if you start getting some bad reviews. So again, takes one click, go into helium 10 alerts, activate the activate the alerts for that new FBA SKU. Go into Helium 10 Follow-up. This is for any level of helium 10 platinum diamond or above. And s set up the automatic request or review. Alright, I, I don’t do anymore the custom emails. You know, I know a lot of people like those because you can do things that maybe have better conversion rate, but no, all you have to do is you go to a request, a review and seller feedback template, make a new one, and then select the request a review template, all right?

Bradley Sutton:

And then, you know, I like to make it wait a certain number of days before I send it out or after it ships, I’m sorry, before I ship a certain number of days after I ship a product for when they’re gonna receive the notice. If you’re selling supplements, you don’t want them to get a note for a review, like right away, you know, they’re not gonna have enough time to, to know if they want to give you a review and if, and probably it’s gonna be a bad review if they give it to you right away. So what you want to do is you wanna set that date if you have a supplement to like 22 days after it ships or something like that. So that’s at the end of that 30 day window that you have. But maybe you’ve got a product that you knew that people use immediately and are immediately gonna know if they like it or not like it within a day of receiving it.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, for those people, I might go ahead and put, Hey, you know, show me or send this, you know, seven days after shipping or six days after shipping, send them a request for review. And once you set it, you can forget it. It’s always gonna go ahead and send to all of your customers. More bonus tips here, all right, this is something I haven’t talked about on the podcast before, but have somebody purchase your product potentially at your list price to give you the best chance to get a strike through pricing. All right? This is what you can see I did a few months ago when I was launching those socks, is I wanted the, the price to the retail price to show as 11.97 and my product was gonna be 9.97. But I’m also doing, you know, in the Maldives honeymoon launch strategy, which, you know, we talk about in other episodes and we’ll talk about again in episode 500, is I wanted to have a, a cheap price a cheap price to start 497.

Bradley Sutton:

So in order to do that, I set a FBM listing or or it could be I’ve been FBA listing live for like one hour or 30 minutes just in, just for it to go live on Amazon. And then they, I had somebody buy the product at 11 point 97. I only need one person to buy it. And then what happens like 48 hours later eat when I put my sale price at 4 97, I’m gonna have a strikethrough price on 1197, and it’s gonna show a big red letters here of 58% off. All right, guys, there you have it. That’s my new Bali blast or Bali Bachelor party, whatever you think. You guys let me know if this even needs a name or which, which name you like, but I’m gonna call it Bali Blast for now. This is the Bali Blast method on Amazon pre-launch.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, we went over about what, 36 steps on how to get your product ready to make sure how to give it the best sendoff of its single life. You know, the best send, how to give it the best bachelor or bachelorette party so that you can be ready for that wedding day, which is your launch date, and then your Maldives honeymoon period, which is that, you know, precious first, you know, month or so of time and you know, where you’re, you’re utilizing our launch strategies. But all of these steps are super important because if you just use the Maldives strategy for launching and you didn’t do these steps, you’re not gonna be successful. I’ll tell you that right now. These are vital to give you the best chance for success when you do launch your product, guys. All right? So let me know in the comments below what you guys think of this.

Bradley Sutton:

Again, two episodes here. Make sure to check both of these give it to your team to review so they can make sure that your next launch is gonna be using these methods. All right? Don’t forget coming up episode 500, toward the end of the year, we’re gonna, I’m gonna give you guys my latest updates on the Maldives honeymoon strategies. I’m gonna try and go to Maldives and film a special, that’s a special number, 500 episodes of the podcast. And then we’re gonna go into my latest launch strategies. But if you wanted to see what’s working for launch you can check out episode four. I think it’s like 400 or 400 to one in the second half of that. And that’s like what I’ve been using earlier this year for Maldives honeymoon launch strategy. But anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed this two part series and I’ll see you guys in the next episode.

#466 - Amazon Pre Launch Episode: The Bali Blast - Part 1

Live from Bali, Indonesia, Bradley shares his top strategies that have to do with Amazon pre-launches. This is to prepare your Amazon brand for a great launch and honeymoon period. There are a lot of steps that lead to your Amazon launch, but these groups of strategies put a close to the product research, keyword listing, sourcing, and listing optimization stage of your Amazon journey to now skyrocket your new brand into epic launches! Let’s go ahead and hop into it.

In episode 466 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 01:46 – A Strategy To Help You For Before Amazon Launches
• 02:37 – What Makes A Bachelor Party Really Cool?
• 04:08 – Bradley’s Amazon Dad Joke
• 04:50 – Check This On Your Main Keywords
• 06:44 – What Is Title Density?
• 07:41 – Checking Your Competitor’s Strength
• 08:54 – Explore Bundling Options
• 11:29 – Identify Your Top-Selling Child Item
• 12:46 – Identify Main Topics From The Reviews
• 14:14 – Identify Pain Points From Reviews
• 15:56 – Check The Opportunity Explorer
• 16:40 – Analyze Your Competitor’s Image Strategy
• 19:37 – Preparing Your Keyword Lists & Bradley’s Keyword Research Strategy
• 22:21 – Keywords That A Lot Of Sellers Miss
• 22:29 – How To Get Opportunity Keywords From Helium 10
• 25:46 – Brand Analytics And Helium 10 Data
• 28:04 – Checking Off Amazon Keywords
• 29:24 – Find Sales Peak Days Of Your Competitors That Are In Your Niche
• 30:06 – And Corelate That Day To Brand Analytics
• 31:47 – What Is Bradley’s Time Machine Keywords?
• 33:48 – Bonus Hack: Checking Historic Keyword Ranks
• 36:57 – Stay Tuned For Part 2 Of This Episode!

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, I’m here recording this live from Bali because I’ve come up with a new strategy on how to get ready for your Maldives honeymoon launch. It’s my pre-launch Bali blast strategy. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think

Bradley Sutton:

You wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for. Maybe at the top of page one, you can actually find that out in seconds by using helium ten’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for eCommerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro, h10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast, discount coupon SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Bradley Sutton:

And as you can see, if you’re watching this on YouTube, I’m here in Bali, but the Amazon collective mastermind and it’s really amazing. My first time in Bali, really incredible. And I was inspired to go ahead and talk about the strategies that I talked about here at the Bali Conference and at the Billion Dollar Seller summit, most of which actually have to do with pre-launch. Alright, so I think you guys, you know, know about the Maldives honeymoon launch strategy. It incorporates, you know, a lot of pre-launch strategies, but I want to kind of like separate it out like how to get ready for an epic wedding and honeymoon, right? Maldives honeymoon in real life is potentially to have an epic bachelor or bachelorette party. I never had one. I didn’t, I didn’t do that. But, you know, I’m sure many of you have, and, and some people I read actually go to Bali for their bachelor party.

Bradley Sutton:

See the B theme here? So I’m like, you know what? Let’s just make this easy to remember. Let’s call this like the Bali Blast method. All right? You guys don’t have to call it that. It is what it is. It’s a strategy that helps you get ready for a good launch. All right? So you don’t have to call it the Bali blasts. I might not even call it the Bali blasts. I’m just throwing that out there cuz I’m here in, in Bali right now. But think about what makes a bachelor party really cool. Again, I don’t know because I’ve never, I’ve never even been to one, let alone had my own. But I would assume that hey it, it’s meant to be kind of like your, your last hurrah really set you up for you know, not missing your single days, right?

Bradley Sutton:

You’re ready to move on to the next phase, which is, you know, married life and first of course the honeymoon. Alright? So that’s kind of like the thought process behind this strategy too. Alright? It’s, we’re here in Bali, think of a bachelor party. And what I’m doing is I’m trying to set up like completely put a close on the initial, you know, product research sourcing and listing optimization. Like, how do we put a close to my previous single life or before I had a product and now get ready to move on to that. All important, you know, merry life starting with that honeymoon period because it’s not just about, you know, the, the honeymoon period. And the Maldives Honeymoon strategy isn’t just about, you know, doing the right PPC, you know, during launch and setting your launch date in the future and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s all important, but there’s a lot of steps that lead up to the launch that will help make sure that you get off on the right foot for your launch. So let’s go ahead and hop into it. One thing I was doing guys, when I spoke at different events is I was doing some Amazon dad jokes and I’m gonna give the one that I gave, I don’t remember where I gave this, but it was the one that was the hardest for people to understand. All right, so let’s see how fast you guys pick this one up. All right, so here’s an Amazon dad joke. I was doing product research and I was trying to validate an idea I had for people to put loved ones ashes into a glass urn. All right, a glass urn. So my question is, you know, is this a good opportunity?

Bradley Sutton:

Did, did I validate this? Is this a good opportunity? Well, the answer is remains to be seen. Think about that for a second. You didn’t get it. Glass urn, remains to be seen. You know, the glass is transparent, all right? So it’s remains, you know, ashes to be seen. All right guys, don’t worry. This is not an episode about Amazon dad jokes. Let’s go ahead and hop right into the strategy. But before I do that one bonus strategy I mentioned this to the elite members a couple months ago or about a month ago, and I talked about this on my tour, is something interesting that you can notice on your main keywords. So if you go to your main keywords, especially in like the home and kitchen category, look at the search results and see if your competitors have this kind of bold black letters underneath the title, alright, underneath the title.

Bradley Sutton:

And if they do it’ll say sometimes, like, you know, here I’m looking at a Tesla thing I did, I see solid and it says geometric. And what happens is some sellers, they don’t know about this field and, and they just have like gibberish in there cuz probably cuz they were trying to fill up their listing you know, with the flat file and like, look at this one listing here. It just has a bunch of gibberish, looks like they’re SKUs, says Halloween show, 1790, all one word, right? This is something that you could fill out. This is the pattern field. All right guys, so this is the pattern field, and if you fill it out, it can give you potentially some extra ranked use. And at the very least, what it can do is it just sticks out on the page. If you have like your main keyword there or something that’s kind of sticks out on the page as opposed to just like random gibberish like some of these competitors have, you can see I was doing a Tesla scene for a, a bat math.

Bradley Sutton:

So or a bat bath mat, say that five times fast. And then I just go, went ahead and threw it into this pattern field and within like two hours it was already there showing up on the main page. So there’s a strategy in itself. Now, if we’re thinking about pre pre, pre-launch, it actually starts all the way back when you’re trying to validate your product and maybe you’ve already decided on it and you want to decide on what are the main keywords. And once you decide what those main keywords are, the first step into having a successful pre-launch is take a look at the title density of your main keywords. Alright? So your title density for those who don’t know, it’s, it’s a field that’s in Helium 10. And basically this is how many listings on page one have the exact phrase that was searched in phrase form.

Bradley Sutton:

So if I search coffin tray and Helium 10 says I’ve got a title density of nine, that means there are nine listings on page one that have the keyword coffin tray in exact phrase match. And this is important because it’s going to give you an idea of how difficult or how easy it might be to launch. All right? So the bigger the number, that means the harder it is to get to page one. The smaller the number, you know, potentially if it’s a lower search volume and the title density is zero or one, theoretically from day one of your launch, you could already be on page one because that’s how much emphasis Amazon puts on the title. So that’s something important to think about. Check your title density, that is step one. Step two, analyze your competitor’s strength. All right, this is important because when we’re talking about how hard or how easy it’s gonna be to get to page one, it’s not just about the title density, but how strong is your competition.

Bradley Sutton:

So what you do is what I’m showing here on the screen, throw all of your listings into lists or your competitors’ listings into listing analyzer and take a look at at their top keyword phrases, and it’ll show for the top keyword phrases in this niche where they ranked the last time helium 10 checked. And then you’ll see, like, look at this, this guy is a strong one here because look, he’s got, he’s ranked number one, ranked number one, ranked number three, ranked number six. However, this other main competitor in this niche, he’s only in the top 10 on one keyword and everything else, he’s like on the bottom of page one or middle of page one. All right, so now you know, hey, this com other competitor who’s at the very top of the page, he might be a little bit tough to work with, but this other guy, I can definitely take him.

Bradley Sutton:

You might reason. All right, so again, listing analyzer, go in there, see what kind of search volume top 10 search volume that your main competitors have. All right? The lower it is for some of them, that means that’s the competitors that you’re gonna probably easily be able to beat. Another thing I wanna talk about is explore bundling options, not just as something to add to your listing or to your product. I mean that, yes, that’s definitely something that you can do. You know, maybe you see that people are buying a coffin shelf and a skull together, right? So maybe you’ll be the first one to have a coffin shelf with skull together. Of course, that’s an option, right? But take it a step even easier. Use Black Box product targeting. Enter in your competitor’s ASINs and then filter for frequently bought together.

Bradley Sutton:

This is gonna show you what has been frequently bought together over the past, like 30 days or more that Helium 10 has detected. And sometimes you might find a product that’s like seven or $8 or even $6. And basically what this means is this, this could potentially be a product that you could source for like 30, 40 cents. Like one of the ones that was showing up here is, is spooky stickers. You know probably you could source some spooky stickers for like, what, you know, 25 cents or something like that. But if you have a history that your competitors are selling their product, and then the buyer at the same time is buying spooky stickers on their own, because you can see it in frequently bought together. Now what you should do if it’s really cheap, just go ahead and buy that product, maybe even in a smaller quantity if it’s a little bit more expensive, and then stick it into your product costing you 25 cents each.

Bradley Sutton:

If it’s really small, like stickers. And don’t advertise it. Don’t even advertise in the listing, right? I mean, you could advertise in your listing, but I prefer that for like, you know, more impressive bundling opportunities. But here’s what happens if you don’t advertise, and this is a strategy that, you know, Toma Rabinovich has, has been teaching for, for a while now. It’s part of his like six star method, and I’ve seen this myself out, out in the wild. But what happens is now your customer gets the product, they open it up expecting whatever they bought, say it’s a coffin shelf, but then all of a sudden they have these spooky stickers that customers like them, like, now what does that mean? That means it’s like a pleasant surprise, and it gives, it makes them like double 2x, 3x, maybe even 4x more likely to leave a positive review than if they were just happy with the product by itself.

Bradley Sutton:

And you could see this, there’s a couple of coffin shelf listings out there where somebody was bundling, you know, some stickers in it, and you see a, a decent number of reviews mention the stickers, like, Hey, you know, it was so nice to, to have these spooky stickers or whatever, whatever it said. So this is a something that costs you like 20 cents an order maybe, but could potentially increase your positive review velocity. The next step for Bali Blast, all right, your pre-launch setup is identify the top child or top selling child item. So this is only if you guys are trying to launch for a product that has multiple variations, and Helium 10 is obviously showing you the same sales for each one. Well, that just means that’s how many sales it has overall. So the way that you could kind of have an idea of which one is selling the best, so that you don’t have to buy one of each color and launch for each color is you run a review analysis on the listing and then hit product variations.

Bradley Sutton:

And then you’re gonna see the breakdown of the reviews. Usually one child item, it’s the one that is kind of like the star child item and has all of a big majority of the reviews. Like, like this I think is a letter board. I’m looking at the black coffin letter board has 77% of the review share. Number two is purple with 10%. Everything else is like less than 7%. So if this was me, I’m like, all right, I know if I’m just starting off I’m cool with maybe just getting the black coffin shelf, maybe the purple one to start off, and I’m not gonna worry about those other colors. Imagine if you didn’t have this visibility and you’re, you’re like, all right, let me order 500 of each of these colors. You would obviously be in a bad way for your inventory.

Bradley Sutton:

The next step we’re going to go in, number five is identify main topics from the reviews. This is going to be useful for your listing optimization later on. So the way you can do that is with that same tool, review insights, hit review analysis, all right? And then see what are the top phrases that are showing up. And then start digging into what people are saying about the top phrase. Like for example, that coffin letter board one of the top phrases is for Halloween. So what I would do is I would click on that and see, alright, what, how are customers using this for Halloween? And then I’m going to actually make sure to make that one of my images. Like let’s say the use case or what you saw in the reviews is, Hey, I put this in front of my house for Halloween to advertise what candies I have.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t know, I don’t even celebrate Halloween. I don’t know what, what people do for this. But let’s just say that’s what people are saying. Well, now what I would do if this was my product is I would put that as one of the pictures, let, like maybe in front of a house that looks like it’s decorated for Halloween and the exact use case that people are using, I’m gonna make sure to put that in my image and maybe even the first bullet point, this is something that is not gonna show up in your keyword research, right? You know use for Halloween for, for what candies I have, you know, that’s not a key word that people search for. It’s not gonna show up in Cerebro, but this is a way that you can, like really again, start from day one, your Maldives honeymoon launch with a little bit leg up on the competition.

Bradley Sutton:

Next step, we’ve gone through five so far, number six, still talking about reviews, identify pain points from reviews. All right? So what I would do in that same tool on my competitor’s listing, I’m going to, from the all reviews page, all right, from the all reviews page, I’m going to see what are people complaining about. And I do that by sorting or filtering right here, one star only reviews. I could go one star or two stars and then look at this. I I’m seeing here people are saying, Hey, the letters fall out, letters are junky. Letters are hard to stay on. Alright? So again, this is something that is gonna go into one of my images. I’m gonna really show how, hey, you know, our letters don’t fall out. I’m gonna put that in the bullet points. All right? This is not a keyword. You would not have found this if you didn’t analyze the reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, one little bonus tip is I like looking at the all questions as well right here inside of Helium 10 review insights. And I wanna see what are the questions that people are asking about my competitors listing? Now here’s the benefit of that. Basically the questions section is telling you what your competitors have been missing from their listings. Does that make sense? Cuz think about it, if it was clear, may, maybe it’s not even missing, but it’s just not clear in their listing. If it was clear or if it was in the listing, would somebody need to go in and figure out how to actually ask a question? That’s somebody who is super interested in buying the product, right? And they even know how to find the question in an answer section on a page, and they couldn’t find the answer they’re looking for.

Bradley Sutton:

So that should show that it’s obviously not as obvious as the seller probably thought they were when they made their listing. So that’s something that you can, you know, get some extra insight as well. Another way you could look into review and kind of sentiment is check Opportunity Explorer and enter the ASIN and in product Opportunity Explorer, under customer review insights, they have like another cool way to kind of get some sentiment about the reviews and Amazon is even experimenting with some like ai different kind of ways to look at that as well. But that’s, for those of you who might not have Helium 10, you know, first of all, shame on you. Go ahead and sign up for Helium 10, six months, 20% off discount code SSP20. But if you don’t have Helium 10, you’re not gonna take advantage of that offer.

Bradley Sutton:

You can still get some sentiment of the reviews by going into the opportunity explore. Number eight, this is an important one. Analyze your competitor image strategy. So don’t just go in and, and, and give a whole bunch of, of instructions to your graphic designer or your photographer based on whatever they think you should do for your listing or based on whatever you think is the best image strategy. You want to look at what your competitors have been doing. Like, especially if you have competitors who have been selling pretty, pretty well, you know, for six months, maybe for a year or something. Take a look at their image stack tho those of you who are Amazon sellers, I’m talking to you right now. You have multiple products, let me know if you have a product that has been on Amazon for more than six months or a year.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have the same images right this second as you did from day one? If your answer is yes, shame on you. You, you’re a terrible Amazon, I’m just playing. But seriously though, you’re, you’re not doing very good. Alright? I would say that 90% of you who listen to this podcast and, and meet that criteria, your answer was probably no. I’ve changed my images over time. Now, let me ask you, why did you change your images? All right? Maybe you guys were doing a pick food test and saw that a different image might have worked better. Maybe some of you were using manage your experiments AB testing on Amazon, and saw that a different image worked better. Maybe you were reading the reviews from your customers and saw that people were confused about a size or something, and so that made you update your images.

Bradley Sutton:

But anyways, you have updated your images based on what the market has been telling you. Well, guess what? Your competitors who have been selling the product that you wanna sell for six months a year or more, they’re prob they’ve probably gone through a few iterations of images and what they have come what they have come to is a stack of images that’s been working best for them. So instead of you having to sell for a year and you having to figure out what is the best image strategy, kind of go off of what the competition is doing. And historically, you know, the way that Tomer and I I learned it from him, you know, we’re teaching this strategy is, hey, go to all your competitors listings, copy their images one by one, throw it into a PowerPoint, give it to your designer and try and see if there are like trends like, hey, every second or third image is an infographic that has the size of the product.

Bradley Sutton:

Or man, look at this. Every single competitor in this coffin letter board niche, they all on all of their images. Keep writing different interesting letters that actually have messages on the letter board that’s kind of marketing the product, right? Well go with this niche theme. You don’t have to do that. If you have a Helium 10 listing analyzer and you have the Diamond plan. If you have the Diamond plan, you hit the button that is media comparison, and within three seconds you are gonna see all of your competitors listings all laid out on one page where you can see these trends, you could see their strategy, what’s working for them, download this as a PDF with one click of a button, and then talk it over with your graphic team and they’ll be able to help you out with that. Let’s go on to the next strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

But before we do that, I’m gonna talk about preparing keyword list. All right? The next few slides are gonna be all about how you do your keyword research and which kind of keywords you are going to have. The way I like to do it, and you, again, I I like naming things guys, you know, Maldives honeymoon, Bali Blast, Bali Bachelor party, whatever. I have these two buckets of keywords and my personal name for these keywords is just real simple, no fancy name here. Top phrases and supplementary keywords. You do whatever works for you. What I say when I mean top phrases I is, I’m looking for between a max of 30 and 40 keywords that come from the following categories. Number one, the niche’s top keywords. And I’m gonna, there’s gonna be a slide about that. Number two, opportunity keywords. Number three, potentially off Amazon keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Number four, brand analytics keywords and number five, frequently bought together top three keywords. You might not understand what these are cuz these, again, this is Bradley’s names, you know, for them I’ll, I’m gonna explain each of them in detail. The next bucket I call supplementary keywords. And my supplementary keywords are my keywords that I’m only gonna have the individual keywords, not full phrases. So this is kind of not necessarily without limit, but you know, it could be 200, 300 or more. And my number one is gonna be time machine keywords. I’ll explain what that means. That’s another Bradley name right there. PPC, keywords, opportunity explore keywords, top two page keywords, Amazon recommended keywords and long tail keywords. All right, so let’s go ahead and go into the first one, which is identifying the niches top keywords. We are on Bali strategy for pre-launch number nine.

Bradley Sutton:

This is super simple guys. You guys hopefully have been doing this for years, right? Go into Cerebro, throw a, a random product as the first one if you don’t have your own product yet. And then five to 10 of your top potential competitors that you are going to be competing with. And you just hit one button, guys, one button in Cerebro and it’s called drum roll please. Top keywords. All right, so just one button and it’s gonna show you all of the, the keywords that these products have been ranking for. I wanna pull about 15 to 20 max keywords from here. So I might have to fool around with the competitor rank average. They’re ranking competitor filters in order to get my top 15 keywords, but I’m looking for the ones that are searched for the most, where almost all of my competitors are ranking for and they’re all ranking high.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t think I need to go into too much detail here because it should be obvious why that is a list of my most viable keywords. The next one though, that a lot of sellers miss in my opinion is opportunity keywords. All right? Opportunity Keywords are keywords where only one or two listings are ranking highly for a certain keyword out of your list. Now, I want you guys to, we’re gonna talk about this for a second cuz it’s important you understand why this could be a valuable keyword. If I were to ask you why, what would you say? And if you say, well, if it’s opportunity, well yeah, that’s, duh, that’s why I call it the opportunity keywords. But why is it an opportunity? We have to understand this, to understand the value of why this could be a golden keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

If I’m selling coffin shelves, my main keyword is gonna be coffin shelf it might be coffin bookshelf, well, whatever, right? It, it’s like that’s what the product is. That’s my main keywords. It doesn’t matter if all of my competitors are ranking for it, that is the most important keyword for my product. I’ve gotta rank for it. But I want you to think about this. Let’s just pretend for a second that out of your top 10 competitors, including you, all of you guys had the same number of reviews, the same price, very similar function, right? When somebody is typing coffin shelf into the search results and they land on that page and they see 10 very similar coffin shelves, obviously that’s not the reality, but, but just work with me a little bit on this. Basically, you technically have a one in 10 chance of getting that sale.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s just say that they can see all 10 at the same time. Maybe they’re not looking at the mobile browser where they only show top three or something, right? And the reason is because it’s all the same and they were looking for a coffin shelf and all 10 of those products meet what the criteria of what they were looking for. Now here’s the thing, let’s take, and again, I’m not saying that’s bad, that’s obviously the most important keyword for your niche. But let’s take a a more generic keyword like gothic decor. Now, if you go to gothic decor, maybe that’s one of the opportunity keywords, meaning only one of your coffin shelf competitors is ranking for it. If there’s only one that’s in the top 10, first of all, you know that to get in the top 10, there’s a subsection of customers who are searching gothic decor who end up buying that coffin shelf, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the top 10 if it’s, if it’s a decent search volume keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

So by definition, you know that there are some customers who type gothic decor, but either A, they’re really looking for a coffin shelf, they just didn’t know that keyword, or B, they’re kind of just shopping randomly, but they’re the type of customer who maybe would buy a coffin shelf if they saw one on there, you know is this gonna get a lot of sales? No, it’s gonna get only a fraction of the ones that are coffin shelf. But here’s the thing, if that customer who is searching the keyword searches it, and they are the type of customer who’s either really looking for a coffin shelf or would buy it. Now if your product was only the second one on there in the top 10, compare with another, you know, the one who was already on there, you have a 50 50 chance, not a 10% chance.

Bradley Sutton:

Like, like in college of you have a 50 50 chance of getting the sale potentially more if you’re ranking higher. So you see why this is a valuable set of, of, of keywords, opportunity, keywords, one of my favorite ways and you know, Helium 10, one of the few tools that you can do that with just one click of the button just hit opportunity keywords and it will give you a list of those keywords and I would probably just pull like, you know, some of the top ones from there. Maybe a maximum of five or six depending on relevancy. Number 11 is I like to look at brand analytics and then compare it to Helium 10 keyword ranks. I can do this manually. If I didn’t have helium 10, I guess, you know, I would just go into brand analytics and look at the main keywords, and then I would look at the keyword ranks just by, you know, looking on Amazon where, where it’s ranking.

Bradley Sutton:

But you can actually do both of that in one tool, and that’s in cerebral or maggot. If I have the diamond plan with Helium 10, I can go anywhere into brand analytics. And what I’m going to be able to see is if I see the top three clicked for an item or for, I’m sorry for a keyword on the right hand side, I can see for the month what were the organic and sponsored rank averages for that month for the product. And here’s the reason why this comes in handy. You can see that here with some of these some of these listings here on this page. But what happens is sometimes it’s not always, oh, I have to be organically ranked at the top or I have to be organically ranked at the top of the page and sponsored rank high.

Bradley Sutton:

So I could see maybe a keyword where consistently the top couple clicked keywords. Maybe they, they weren’t ranked organically high, they were only ranked sponsored high. Guess what? If you look at the keyword coffin shelf and you’ll see that the Helium 10 coffin shelf is one of the top ones on there, well, you are actually going to see that our organic rank is only like 10 or 15. Our sponsored rank is one. So I could see that just with one click, I can actually see that right here inside of Cerebro. And so what that means is now I can take this information and plan my launch strategy. I’m like, you know what? I don’t necessarily needto be at the top organically for this keyword. I can be one of the top click ones if my sponsored rank is at the very top.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is a very valuable tool inside of Cerebro that I think a lot of you Diamond members aren’t using, but check brand analytics, which comes directly from Amazon, who were the top three click clicked, and then compare it to where they were ranking organically and sponsored to have an idea about what your launch strategy is gonna be for that. All right, the next one that we’re gonna go on is number 12, which is checking off Amazon keywords. This is only gonna be applicable if you are in a newer niche where there’s nobody that you can really kind of look or there’s not enough people to look at their keyword history on Amazon or in Cerebro. But there is some history on Etsy. What you do to do that is if you find a product that has some good history on Etsy and you wanna just see if there’s maybe some keywords that you haven’t thought about, go to Etsy, find one of the top sellers on Etsy of your product.

Bradley Sutton:

Go to their product page. On the very bottom, you’re gonna look at explore related searches. That’s a section that is on any Etsy listing. If the seller has filled it out, what this is is what the seller is telling Etsy are their main keywords. Maybe they based it off of you know, what keywords have driven the most sales for them. Maybe they base it off of you know, where what’s keywords brought them, sales and PPC and Etsy, whatever the case is. This is like looking at the most, like if, if Amazon sellers had a part of their listing where it says, all right, what’s your top seven most important keywords? It’d be like being able to look at that section. You know, a lot of people don’t realize that’s what this explore related searches is. So that’s a great way to look off Amazon for some important keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

The next step is number 13, find sales peak days of your competitors that are in your niche. All right? So you can do that by looking at any BSR chart. All right? So if you’re using Helium 10 or you got the free, even the free Helium 10 Chrome extension, you’re gonna be able to do this. Go to any listings page, scroll down to where the BSR chart is, and then look at where the big dips are. Remember the dips in BSR, that means the lower the BSR number, that means the more they were selling, and you can actually see this on a day-to-day basis. So I’m gonna look for the exact day of when they had a peak. All right, so that’s number 13. And and that kind of goes right into number 14, which is now correlate that day that you found in step 13 to brand analytics.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so again, I love brand analytics. I always have, I’m gonna, let’s say I found in their BS r chart that on July the 14th of 2022, they had a killer day of sales. Well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put July 14th into brand analytics. I’m gonna make it daily, the reporting range, and I’m gonna put for top click products, whatever my competitor’s ASIN is. And then what’s gonna show up is now what were the keywords where they were the top three clicked, or they were one of the top three clicked and potentially purchased for that exact day. And I can now kind of reverse engineer what were their main keywords that resulted in them having one of the best days of sales for them for the year. Do you see how this could be beneficial? You know, when you’re just doing your regular keyword research inside of Cerebro, I mean, it’s totally fine.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s, it’s, it’s great keyword research, but that’s showing what’s going on right now. What if one of your competitors has fallen off in the last 30 days? What if they were outta stock for a couple months and they just came back in a stock? Well, they might not even be ranking very highly for all their keywords. This is a way where I can go in and see when they were ranking the best, when they were selling the best, what were the keywords on that day that were driving some of the sales for them. And then boom, right now, in July or June or whenever this is, even though I might be looking back at at November or October, I’m gonna be already have in my listing these main keywords. And again, we’re, let’s go back to what we’re talking about. Bali Bachelor party, the Bali blast.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re talking about having a pre-launch, you know, getting your listings set up to make sure you have that successful marriage period or that successful honeymoon period. This is one of those ways that you can do that by making sure you have the best keywords that were, that were historical. I could also do this for months, like maybe they had instead of just an exact day of when they just had a, like a blip maybe for some crazy sales for one day. Look at what months they had the best sales. Like here’s a BSR chart that I’m looking at and I can see, wow, July, they had a killer month, maybe October or November, they had a killer month. Overall in, in this case, what I like to do is I like to run the Cerebro time machine for if you’re a Helium 10 supercharged plan owner or an elite member, you’re the only ones right now who have access to time machine, but throw that competitor’s listening into Cerebro just like you normally would.

Bradley Sutton:

And then hit the historical analysis button. I call it time machine. I think in Cerebro it’s called historical analysis. And what you’re gonna see there is you are going to go ahead and see for that month, I can click on any month in the last two years. And then I’m gonna, it’s kind of like being able to see Cerebro at the time of, you know, whatever month I’m looking at. And I think it kind of goes without saying why this could be beneficial is because now all of a sudden I could see, you know, they were crushing it in, you know, September of last year. Maybe it’s a seasonal product and now I’m in February. Well, if I’m looking at Cerebro in February of a product that is seasonal and is really crushing it in September, am I gonna have the full keyword strategy, the correct keyword strategy?

Bradley Sutton:

No the keywords that are bringing themselves right now in February, if it was February right now that’s not gonna be the keywords that’s gonna be their top keywords for the year. So using this time machine is really a great way to go ahead and get some information there. Let’s do maybe just one more. I think I’m gonna have to like split this into two episodes because we got too much good information here. But the next step I want to talk about is just a quick bonus here, and this is checking historic keyword ranks. So this doesn’t even have a number here in the steps, but a lot of people don’t realize that you can actually add your competitors ASINs into keyword tracker in your, in your Helium 10 account. It’s not just your products. You can put anybody’s products in there and you think another, a lot of people also think that, okay, I can start tracking their keywords from the moment that I put in their keyword rank, right?

Bradley Sutton:

No, that’s not the case. Yes, you can, you’re gonna see it right from that moment, but you can, if it’s a, a keyword with decent search form, you’re gonna be able to see what their ranks were going back a year, going back potentially even two years. So let’s say through these steps like, you know, steps 13, 14, 15 or whatever you, you saw which keywords they were ranking they were getting sales from maybe which keywords they were highly ranked in Cerebro, throw those keywords, throw that product into keyword tracker and then wait like maybe one hour. Or actually you don’t even need to wait, wait one hour, wait like 10 minutes and then click on the historical chart. You are gonna be able to see everywhere where they were ranking day by day, week by week throughout the last two years for a certain keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is key again, I would say 95% of sellers are not doing this, where they’re checking at like almost a daily level the history of how their competitors were ranking. Here’s another, you know, thing that you can get from this. You can go back potentially to when they launched their product. Let’s say they launched their product in the last two years. You can almost redo their own Maldives honeymoon or their own honeymoon period to see what keywords did they focus on. How, how long did it take them after launch to get to page one for their keyword, you know? So this is like kind of a little bit crazy what you can, what you can do here. As far as reverse engineering. The other thing that you can do when you were looking at this historical keyword ranks is again, you can see where where they were ranking organic and sponsored.

Bradley Sutton:

Like for example, if I saw in brand analytics from step 13 that this, this product was ranking highly for coffin shelf, or not ranking highly, but getting sales from coffin shelf, well, I can see in both their organic and sponsoring for this keyword, they were positioned one or two for both organic and sponsored. So now I know like, man, for this keyword coffin shelf, if I wanna be the top seller, maybe I have to be ranked one and two if that’s what I was looking at. But look at this other keyword coffin decor that this competitor was ranking highly for. Look at their organic rank was like between two and four. So again, man, I gotta be top of the page, you know, I’m looking at the historical keyword ranks, but then look at their sponsored rank. It is like going from 20 to 15 back to 23.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s like on page one or two. Or not even, I’m sorry that, that’s like page two or three of the search results. So now all of a sudden I know, hey, you know what, for that keyword, I just gotta make sure I’m ranked organically because it looks like my sponsored rank is not necessary for me to be one of the top three clicked. Alright guys, that’s gonna be it for this first edition. I’m gonna have to, I don’t even know if I have time. My flight is in a few hours here. I’m gonna see if I can maybe record part two of this for you guys. But anyways, I’ll figure it out. I’m gonna come back with about 15 or more strategies for you guys that are all about your pre-launch, your pre-Amazon launch. Call it whatever you want. I’m calling it my Bali Blast or Bali Bachelor party. But these are the strategies that you need to take in order to get your listing ready for that Maldives honeymoon launch strategies that we’ve talked about a lot of times. So, hope you enjoyed this episode. Stay tuned for the next one. We’ll see you there.

#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

► 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 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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► 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 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

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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 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.