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[INTRODUCTION]

…I’m going to give you my best answer or at least direct you in the right area. You guys that are brand new to the podcast, I want to welcome you guys and everyone that’s coming back for, well let’s say the 184th time or maybe this is your 10th time coming back, I want to say thank you so much for hanging out with me today.

You guys know that I love doing this, these Ask Scott sessions where you submit your voicemails and it’s a way for me to be able to connect with you guys. If you guys have not done it already, as far as submitting your voicemail to ask a question, you can go ahead and do that and you should go ahead and do that. Head over to theamazingseller.com/ask. Once again, that’s theamazingseller.com/ask. You can go ahead and record your message there, leave your first name and then a brief question and I’ll do my best to answer it. All right.

These are awesome because I love hearing from everyone all over the place, by the way, I mean all over the world. It’s just really awesome to be able to hear the voices of the TAS community. All right. Now, speaking of the TAS community, before we jump into the first question for this episode, I did want to give a little shout out to one of our TAS peeps out there. Alright. I wanted to read this to you because I think it’s really awesome and I think we can all celebrate, we can all give this person a round of applause because they’re taking action and they’re following through and I want to share it with you. Let me go ahead and do that real quick, let me go ahead and pull it up here on my screen.

This one here is from Gong Lamore. Gong Lamore posted this inside of the TAS community, the Facebook group that is, well over 25,000 now by the way, of you awesome people out there in the group so congratulations to you guys for being awesome. Okay. Let me go ahead and just read this to you really quick. You got to see this picture by the way. I believe Gong is sitting here all spread out, almost in like a spread eagle, one foot in the air balancing in front of a pretty good size shipment here by the way. It’s pretty awesome to be able to see that.

If you guys do want to see this picture, definitely check out the show notes to this particular episode and you’ll see that all posted there for you, you can go ahead and check it out. That is episode 184 by the way. The show notes to this and the transcripts and everything that we’re talking about today will be over there at episode 184. That’s theamazingseller.com/184. All right. Let me go ahead and read what Gong has to say.

[00:02:55] SV: “Dear fellow dream makers, wanted to share some inspiration as you have shared and done so much for me. Finally, got my first shipment of my first new product, couldn’t do it without the amazing seller podcast and all you amazing people who helped me. Had some newbie challenges on the way, nothing that taking action with support from you all can’t fix. Happy, now to go to phase number four, launching,” and there’s a little picture of a rocket there. “Thank you everyone, especially Scott,” with a smiley face. I think we got to thank everyone in the group because you guys are amazing for helping out as well.

“This is an extra special day for me as we celebrate women all over the world. Keep on taking action! Garlic press rocks,” with a bunch of little stars around it, these are emojis that Gong is using. Gong, thank you so much for posting that, it definitely … I love too, dream makers was your dear fellow dream makers, I love that. Over 402 people liked it and a ton of comments, so proud of you, great job, thanks for sharing and all of that stuff and also asking a lot of questions and Gong is actually answering them. Great, great job, everyone inside of the Facebook group and TAS’ers worldwide, you guys rock.

Definitely check this out, I’ll leave the actual link to this post that I’m reading right now with the picture, I’ll also link that inside of the show notes. Alright. Really awesome and I want to encourage anyone that is not part of our Facebook community, definitely head over there and join, it’s totally free. It’ll take a couple of hours to get approved, it is a private group so go ahead and request that. You can head over to theamazingseller.com/fb . Go over there, check it out and yeah, become part of the TAS community, dream makers, that is, #dreammakers, I like that.

All right, let’s go ahead and let’s dive in, what do you say? Let’s go ahead and listen to the first question of this session. Well, that kind of rhymed, I guess I could probably be a rapper, my son would be proud of me right now, my 17 year old son. Let’s go ahead and dive into the first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:05:07] JG: Hi, my name is Joseph Glenn. I hear from you from my friends and thanks for your all website, I’ve much knowledge from you. I have a question, when I create my listing and I put it in the search terms, keywords, should I take from Google ad words like from one ASIN and I take the whole thing and I put inside how I can, how much I can or should I take just the best one, should I take like three, four listings and take the best one from everyone and then put in?

Also, I see too, that when someone make the PPC and I put it and make a campaign from the whole 800 keywords and when I see I don’t have [inaudible] one keywords. You said that this can be because I don’t have it in the listing. If I have it in the search term, is it good? Please leave me back a message, thank you.

[00:06:11] SV: Hey, Joseph, thank you so much for the question and thanks for being a listener and I’m so glad that you are taking action so that’s awesome. What I want to do here is talk a little bit about keywords and keyword ranking and all of that good stuff. The main reason that you are looking for keywords, and we’ll talk about that real quick as far as what’s your first step for finding those keywords that you want to target because it sounds like you’re pretty new at this and from here you need a starting point. We all kind of need a starting point to figure out what keywords we want to target.

Now, the easiest way to do this is you’re going to be looking at your competitors. We want to look at our competitors on the top or out of the top 10 let’s say, or top 12 and we want to see the theme that’s starting to run here. If we’re going after garlic press or stainless steel garlic press, you’re probably going to see that in everyone’s listing. That’s like the very first thing that we want to pay attention to right now. That’s going to be in our title, of course, because our title is going to be one of our main drivers for ranking because that’s what is weighted the most as of right now.

Then from there we also want to look at the back end of our sellers account, I think that’s what you’re asking, where do I find other keywords to put in the back end? Again, there’s no really set way or set thing that I could advise you to do other than what I’m about to tell you, which is doing that. Going to the Google planner, maybe, and then looking at your competitors’ listing. I’ve done this before in other episodes and I’ll give you guys a few of the links that I’ve talked about ranking and some of the things to find keywords that you could possibly target, whether that’s in your pay-per-click or just including them inside of your listing.

The one way is, yes, to go over to Google, take your competitors’ listing, the actual URL, the web address. Take that, go over to Google planner, it’s the keyword tool, you need an ad words to count for that, it’s free. Then you just punch that in and it’s basically a website address that you’re going to be scanning, in a sense. Then what it’s going to do is it’s going to comb that listing and then go out and give you suggested keywords inside of Google. This doesn’t mean that these keywords are being used inside of Amazon, but it does give you a good idea of the market that’s searching for these so it’s a good starting point.

Now, another thing that you can do is you can straight up just take that keywords, let’s say stainless steel garlic press, use that as your root keyword and then you can run that search in the keyword planner and probably get more of that particular keyword or around that keyword. That would be another thing. Then I would start to look at common themes that are starting to be searched for. You may also even discover another product along this research because a lot of times you’re going to see similarities in other keywords. That’s for another discussion but that’s one way.

The other tool that’s pretty cool to use is merchant words. Now guys, if you guys want any of the tools or anything that I use or if you want to learn more about them, you can head over to my resources page and I have these linked up over there. That’s theamazingseller.com/resources and again I’ll throw these inside of the show notes to this episode. Merchant words, I don’t look at that as exactly like what’s being searched for on Amazon, like I kind of take that for what it’s worth. It’s aggregated different keyword searches that could be kind of like Google planner type keywords but it does give you other suggestions to try and test. Alright.

[00:09:50] SV: Amasuite 4 has a keywords feature in there as well. What they do is, let’s say that you’re going after garlic press, what it actually does is it will add another letter to the back end of that. Let’s say it’s garlic press space A and then everything that would start with an A, including garlic press or garlic press apparatus, let’s call it, that’s not one but let’s just say it was, that would be in there but it would give you everything that’s started with an A after garlic press. Then it would do that for the Bs and the Cs and it would go all the way through the alphabet.

There’s even … You can even do it through the numbers and all that stuff. That would be Amasuite would also do that and give you a ton of data. Another really cool tool is simple keyword tool, that is. Again, that’s … I believe how it is simple.keywordtool.com, I believe it is. Again, I’ve got that linked up in the show notes and I’ve also got it linked up on my resources page. What this one does, it allows you to take your competitors, let’s say you take your top three or top five competitors. What you can do is take their ASIN and then you can reverse search that so then you can get all of the keywords that are being found inside of Amazon for their product.

Then from there you can take and again find the common themes that you’re finding or the top keywords that they’re ranking for and then start to target those. Yes, you will want to put the ones that are driving more traffic. Again, this is going to take some time to figure this out but what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to take and put them in the back end because I believe that it’s the title and then it’s the back end keywords and then from there it is like the bullets and then the description. Those have very little … They do have relevancy factors when you do pay-per-click and stuff, but I believe that the main search places or the search, I guess, relevancy for search, organic search that is, is your title and then the back end would be the two main sources.

If you have variations, again I’m going off on a little bit of a tangent here, but if you have variations you can also fill in another five fields in the back end of each variation to then cast a wider net. If you have a lot more keywords than you have room for, you can do that if you have more than one variation. If you don’t have more than one variation, you can’t really do that. Okay. Again, this is going to take time, this is going to take testing but you will see the obvious ones, and the obvious ones, after you kind of go through this process, you’re going to see the obvious ones. Those are going to be the ones you’re going to want to target first.

Now, the other thing that you will start to learn of once you start running pay-per-click, you mentioned running pay-per-click. You can do the same exact thing, take all 800 keywords or 500 keywords that you get from these different search terms that you’re bringing back or this certain research, you can take that and then plug that into an Amazon pay-per-click campaign, run some money, run some traffic towards it using a budget and then from there seeing what it does. Look at the impressions, look at the clicks, look at the sales. Then it’s going to tell you what keywords are getting the most traffic, which ones are getting the most clicks and which ones are getting the most sales. Then you can start to say, “Okay, well now I’m seeing that this is well searched for but I’m paying for this and right now maybe I don’t have enough reviews to convert, but I still want to show up for those. Instead of paying for them right now, I could take that data and then bring them into my listing so I can start organically ranking for those over time.”

[00:13:22] SV: Again, I just threw a ton at you, but that is how you do it. Again, this isn’t something that’s going to happen overnight, you’re going to go ahead and want to start really just defining the market with all of these different searches that you may not even be aware of. Again, after you run your auto campaign in pay-per-click, you’re going to start to discover what Amazon is feeling that you should be positioning your product in front of that type of a search. Then you can take that data, put it into more Amazon pay-per-click campaigns and you can start to tweak your listing and optimize it fully. Okay.

Again, this is something that doesn’t just happen overnight, it takes time and you also want to give it time to really run through the different tests, if you’re running tests. I’m getting a little off now if I start going into testing, I don’t want to do that yet right now. Alright. But what I do want to say is you’re on the right track, you definitely want to be pulling your competitors’ search terms so you can get a good idea, use Google, use Google Trends too. Google Trends has related searches for that trend and that might be another useful tool, let’s see, merchant words, I mentioned those, that particular software, Amasuite 4 is another one.

All of these stuff is great data to have and then you can start refining your search. One little tip, as you’re doing this or actually before you do this, go to the simple keyword tool and run a reverse search on your listing and mark that and date it that particular time. This way here, after a month you can rerun that and then see how well your listing is starting to get organic search. Then this way here you can start to see the impact that you are making by doing all of this research and then plugging it into your listing. Just a really great way to see how well you’re doing with the keyword implementation of the optimization, all of that stuff.

That’s a lot of big words there, optimization, implementation, I can’t believe I can even say that. Alright, anyway, that was a pretty long winded answer but I needed to cover all that so hopefully that makes sense. Again, full transcripts are now available for episodes, you can go back and read what I just said if you’d like to and again the show notes are there for you as well. Let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:15:38] Victor: Hey Scott, this is Victor from Chile. I’m very thankful to have found your podcast, I appreciate your work very much. I wish I would have found it though. I have listening to the episodes 161 and 56 several times and I’m trying to apply that for what to you is a very natural process. I’m trying to do this in the right way because I need to overcome my first product experience and make a good one now. Then, regarding this product research process, I have two big concerns.

The first one is when finding products using this criteria, the criteria described by Greg and you, I’m assuming we are considering just a demand under the a hundred reviews threshold, right? But, what if after finding a great product under this criteria, we search for the main keyword and find that the demand is way more than 3,000, let’s say 6,000 units a month. But, over the first 3k units demand, there are another 10 sellers or even more and the main sellers have over 500 or a thousand reviews. I was still interested in going to that demand. I’m guessing we’re trying to enter to the demand under the 100 reviews. Please, clarify me this, I’d really appreciate it.

My second concern, it’s let’s say I found a good product under the same criteria and even better, just five to 10 grands for the same product. But then I realized that the number of sellers shown in the seller column was bigger, around five to 12 sellers per each listing shown. What I did was divide the total revenue over of total amount of sellers and of course the revenue projection and the units sold per month dropped drastically. Is it right to do this analysis or I’m misunderstanding something? I hope you can clarify this to me and probably other sellers traveling this hard process to find a good product. I really thank for your work and I send you big, big hugs from the end of the world. Thank you again my friend. Bye bye.

[00:18:29] SV: Hey Victor from Chile, what is up? Thank you so much for the question and for tuning in man, that is awesome, I really do appreciate it. It’s just amazing, it always amazes me on how we can connect now so easily from around the globe, this is just awesome. I am very, very grateful and honored that you asked the question because we get to talk, this is cool. Alright.

Let me dive in. I think what you’re saying here, if I can kind of distil this down and break it down for everyone listening, what you’re saying is, right off the bat, let’s say that you’re finding a product by going after products that have really low reviews, like let’s say a hundred reviews or less and they’re still doing 3,000 units per month combined across 10 listings, I think that’s what you’re saying. If anyone s listening, that’s what Greg Mercer and I had talked about in our last discussion and that was episode 161. That’s theamazingseller.com/161, that’s the interview I did with Greg and actually it was more like a discussion going back and forth, talking about different product criteria and kind of like how to find products that are doing well without a lot of reviews and also maybe not even being well optimized.  Alright.

In this case, I think what you’re saying here is you are finding something with the keyword, let’s say garlic press. Let’s say with the garlic press example, you’re finding that everything lines up, you’ve got listings that have a hundred or less reviews and they’re still doing, combined across the 10, they’re doing 3,000 units, so they’re doing 10 units per day per listing. Perfect, right? But now, if you do stainless steel garlic press, you are getting a lot more sellers, maybe even some of the same, but a lot more at a very, very higher review count because they are targeting the stainless steel garlic press not just the garlic press. I think that that’s what you’re saying.

Maybe, I guess, the example should have been, let’s say you’re looking for stainless steel garlic press and you find those sellers that have a hundred reviews or less, maybe that’s more of it because it’s more of a long tail, then if you find one that is garlic press, it’s more broad, you’re going to find more competition and you’re also going to find more reviews. If that’s the case then what you want to do is niche it down to that product. You want to niche it down so you’re only going after the ones that are looking for stainless steel garlic press. That’s where you want to focus your energy because you’ve clearly shown here that that steel has 3,000 units amongst them. Does that mean that you won’t pick up some for the search term garlic press? No, you will.

[00:21:13] SV: That’s really the best of both worlds because some people are looking for garlic press, in the name I stumble on your listing or they’re looking for stainless steel garlic press. You really do get a double advantage there if that’s the case. I would be okay with that as long as when I niche that down, or niche that down, if you’re internationally I believe it’s niche, if you are in the US we call it niche or at least I do, whichever. If you kind of niche that down and you’re able to find a keyword that still gets high demand and also sells 10 units a day or more, that’s a good thing.

I would be cool with that and I think that you’re on the right track by thinking that. Now, to answer your next question, when, if you’re looking at you get 10 or maybe 15 brands that are selling the stainless steel garlic press but you’re saying on one listing, there could be five different sellers selling that same exact one. That’s more like retail arbitrage in a sense. If I have a garlic press that I find it’s on a closeout racket Target or Walmart or whatever and they’re selling it for 80% off and I buy a bunch of them and it’s a name brand, I jump on that listing and I sell that name brand and there’s 10 different sellers on that listing. That’s different. Okay.

Now, if you’re doing that, you’re probably you’re product’s going to be positioned a little bit differently than that one, but even at that I wouldn’t treat those 10 different sellers inside of that one listing as individuals. I would look at that one listing as what it is. If that one listing is producing 3,000 sales per month then it’s probably combined amongst all of them so I wouldn’t take that into consideration. I would probably even want to discard that. That’s where I would, again, go back to, if we’re looking at the top 10 or the top 12, I want to find the ones in there that are ranking that I feel as though I could compete with that particular listing or listings. Maybe there’s two or three there that only have a hundred reviews and they’re private labelers or they’re just a brand that has one product with only one seller on it.

Well, I would want to look at their numbers and I would want to reverse engineer what they are doing and do a better job. I would try to make a better listing, make better pictures, get better reviews, do a better job marketing it, all of that stuff, that’s really what I would focus my time on. I wouldn’t take the 10 sellers that are nested into one listing and I believe that’s what you’re talking about. You’re talking about, okay, if the listing at the top has 3,000 units being sold but have 10 listings on it or 10 sellers on it, you would divide that by the amount of sales and then that would still work into the equation. No. I look at that as the number one spot does have 10 different sellers on it, that’s all counted as one to me.

A lot of times, I want to see other sellers that are individually selling versus ones that have a brand that more than one person is selling. Hopefully that’s made sense and I think that I understood it correctly and I believe I gave a good answer there for you to be able to think about that as you’re moving through the product research stage. Alright. That’s going to wrap up that question guys, let’s another one right now. Let’s go ahead and listen and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:24:32] Luke: Hey Scott, my name is Luke. Your podcast ruined my life. You show me how to escape my nine to five job and pursue my dreams, I like my job but I cannot concentrate on work. All I do is think about the coffee I drink could be wholesaled or if there’s a better way to recreate my sticky notes. Thank you for your dedication to this podcast, you’ve changed so many people’s lives including mine. I have a question for you, what is an an acceptable ROI for your private label product? Previously I did retail arbitrage and that’s still what I’m working in but I really think that I could increase my margins if I move into private label. Sincerely, husband of a very understanding wife.

[00:25:18] SV: Hey Luke, thank you so much for allowing me to ruin your life. I thought that was funny. Thank you so much for being, I guess, humorous, that was pretty cool. I get it too, if you are excited about something, I’ve been there, I can think all the way back to when I was working for my father’s company. Again, these entrepreneurial things just started to emerge and I would get an idea and then I would want to act on it. From there I couldn’t really focus on my work, even though I did, I got the job done but I just wasn’t fully there and I get it.

It even happens today, if I see something that I feel like I could take a chance on or that I could capitalize on an opportunity, then it does distract you, I get it but now I guess I do also try to channel that. This way here it’s only going to benefit what I’m working on now, in this realm. I apologize for that but it sounds like you’re pretty excited. You’ve been doing retail arbitrage, that’s a good thing. Retail arbitrage for anyone just starting, I think is a great thing especially if you’re just learning, you want to learn the system and you want to get your feet wet and you don’t want to spend a ton of money to get started, I think it’s a great step in the right direction.

Are there going to be challenges? Of course but it’s a great way to list some products almost overnight in a sense because you can go and find some products launch it and have it there in a few days, you can get started relatively quickly. You can start raising some capital since you can reinvest that into your private labeling. Let’s talk real quick about the margins. Typically, I think we all try to shoot for 50%, 60% would be amazing but that’s not reality all the time. When I first started, I think I was doing close to 38 to 40%, I don’t think I got much over 40%, maybe 41 or 42% depending on the month. Okay.

Since this has all happened, as far as launching and getting up and running and having more than just one product, I’ve also had some products that started great and then they just started plummeting because I had competition and then the competition starts driving the price down. Now, I’m learning from that and I think that everyone else should as well. When you can have a product be differentiated, definitely take the time to do that. If you’re just starting, sometimes you just want to get a product up fast and figure if people start competing on price then they do, I’ll figure out the next move later, and that’s kind of what I did.

Right now, typically 25 to 35 %. Now, I still am okay with that. If you pay a dollar and you get a dollar twenty back, that’s pretty good, it’s not bad. But, it’s not something that I feel like over time is going to be what I want to do. I would say moving forward, you definitely want to look at margins that are 40% and higher and typically 50% is like that sweet spot. That’s what I would recommend. I’m still working towards the 50% margin. I’ve come close but I’ve also kind of went backwards a little bit in some of the products that I sell.

Working on increasing that, I actually got a product line that I’m going to be creating here pretty soon that will be at the 52, almost 60% margin so really excited about that. There’s my answer to that question, hopefully it’s been helpful. Keep doing it though man. Yeah, I would definitely say you’ve got an advantage because now you can look at what you’ve been selling on retail arbitrage and see if maybe you can tap into that market. Good luck, talk to you later.

Let’s listen to one more question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:29:06] Dylan: Hey Scott, Dylan here, I’m calling from South East Asia, doing a bit of traveling and trying to work on my product listing. I have a couple of questions about the keywords and where you put them in the back end. I know you had an episode wit Karon about optimizing your listing and that’s why we use keywords and what not but as I’m looking at it, it looks like there’s a target audience that you can put stuff in, search terms, platinum keywords, style keywords, subject matter and other attributes. I’m kind of just confused on where to put each thing. Yeah, if you can help me out with that it would be great.

The target audience, I’m not sure if you’re supposed to put like adults, children, age groups or really what to put in there and I was kind of confused if you put the keywords and you want to be able to search for your product in under search terms or if you put them under the platinum keywords and if you would just double up on putting and them in search terms and in the platinum keywords.  I’m really not even sure what these style keywords section is. Yeah, if you could shed some light on that I’d really appreciate it.

I’d also like to thank you for your podcast, it’s great. I listen to it as much as I can, I’ve learned a lot from this. Thanks a lot Scott. Take care.

[00:30:35] SV: Hey Dylan, thank you so much for the question. Again, I love it because we’re digging more into keywords here and we just talked about that a few questions ago. Let’s go ahead and discuss this because it is pretty important. I do believe that the back end of your listing is pretty important when it comes to keywords. Now, what I will say is all of the above. Everything that you pretty much just said, you’re going to want to put in there as much information as you can, even if you don’t think that it’s going to benefit your listing, that’s what I do. Okay.

Search terms, that’s probably one of the most important. Now, depending on the category that you’re in, this may be different. Okay. Right now, most of us have five fields and it says one character minimum in length and a one thousand characters maximum in length. If you’re putting in garlic press, you’re going to want to put garlic space press and then from there you’re going to want to hit the spacebar and then go ahead and put your next word in or keywords. Okay. You don’t need to put commas in there, you just need to space them and you want to put as many… You want to fill them in all of the search terms. Okay.

Now, your platinum keywords, again, I don’t believe that this has any effect, but it’s a field there. If you have the option to fill it then fill it. Okay. Now, I wouldn’t use those keywords there as my main keywords but I would definitely put in there, it can’t hurt. Some of you have an account that doesn’t have that opened up, I think it’s a grandfathered in depending on how old your account was and also for other types of sellers. Right now, if it is not grayed out where you can add something, add something in, maybe it’s going to be those random keywords that you found in a Google search that you did, that you weren’t going to include, maybe just throw them in there.

Moving on to the subject matter, what is the product’s subject, what is the product about? Again, give them information. What is the product subject? What is the product about? Tell exactly what it is. Like I said, if you have a place to put in information that can be useful, put it in there, don’t skip it. Again, I’m going to start off with saying that under the keywords tab where it says search terms, that is the one I’d use my most important keywords. Other than that, I would just fill in the blanks with the rest. Okay.

Other attributes, what are additional attributes of the product? Example would be antique, cordless, waterproof, whatever it is, put in there that it could also be triggered for when someone is searching or when they want to relate it to that. Again, this can help also with your pay-per-click. Alright. Now, target audience, for whom is the product intended? That’s what they’re asking. Example, is it for teens, toddlers, cats, adults, kids, whatever, put it in there. Whatever they give you space for, put something in there, that is my advice. Okay.

[00:33:45] SV: Can I say that that’s going to help you? No. can I say it’s going to hurt you? No, but I do believe that if it’s there it could potentially, I’m using air quotes, it could potentially help you so why not take the time to put that in there. Alright. That is pretty much the back end for in the keywords tab itself. Alright. I would definitely recommend doing that, I don’t think it’s going to hurt you, I think it can only help you if at all, but I would definitely, definitely put that in there. Hopefully this has helped you, this has helped everyone else listening that might have had the same question, hopefully.

I did want to remind you guys though if you guys wanted to learn more about what we talked about on those two episodes with Karon Thackston  about optimizing your listings, that was episode 155, so theamazingseller.com/155 and then also 86, so that would be theamazingseller.com/86. Each of those we dig into optimizing your listing. The first one, number 86 that is, that was straight up how to optimize your listing for more sales and then 155 was an update on some new features that they’ve included but also some restrictions that they’ve included as well. We really dive into the updates and just some really good discussion on optimization on those two.

Again, I’ll leave all of these links in the show notes, but definitely check those out. All of the tools that I also mentioned, they’ll be in the show notes, you can always head over to the resources page as well on the blog. That is it. It feels like this episode was a little bit longer than normal but I didn’t want to leave anything out. We covered a ton and a lot of resources that I included as well. If you want all of the transcripts to this, everything that is in writing that I talked about, everything is transcribed that is, you can head over to this episode and download those or just read them right on the blog. Again, that is episode 184, so theamazingseller.com/184.

If you don’t want to have to think about all those other links I just gave you, just go to 184, it’ll all be there for you. Alright. I want to remind you guys, if you want to ask me a question and have it aired on an upcoming show, definitely, definitely head over to the blog and submit your question via voicemail. Just say your first name and a short question or a brief question and I’ll do my best to answer it on an upcoming show. I love hearing from you guys. Alright. That’s theamazingseller.com/ask.

Alright guys, that is officially going to wrap up this session of Ask Scott. I want to say again, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen, it means so much to me to know that you guys are listening and also to hear your voice on these sessions so keep them coming.

Alright guys, that’s it, that’s going to wrap it up. Once again remember, I’m here for you, I believe in you, I’m rooting for you. Let’s say it together, what do we have to do? Take action. Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you right back here in the next episode.

[END]

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[INTRODUCTION]

…get really good results. I’m going to be talking about the short term and the long term advantages of doing it this way and again like I said I’m going to be doing this myself and I wanted to share it with you today because I think it’s really, really important to understand that not every way is the exact way you have to do something. You can always modify it, tweak it, test it, try different things and then from there you can build that into your own little system or your own process. Really excited to share this with you guys today and I really think that you guys are going to get a lot out of this, alright?

Now before I do jump into the discussion of today I wanted to do two things. First of if you are brand new I wanted to say welcome and thank you so much for listening whether on a run or in the car, in the plane, wherever you are thank you so much and all of the loyal listeners out there that are also catching me on Periscope. By the way if you guys are not connected to Periscope go over and find me on Periscope. Go over to periscope.tv on your phone, download the app, search for @ScottVolker, find me and we can hang out over there when I’m not podcasting. It’s just a bunch of fun, we had well over four hundred and I think it was like fifty people on my las Periscope and it was just awesome to be to connect and communicate.

A lot of times I’ll go ahead and I’ll just randomly talk about whatever’s happening that particular day or something that I’m either struggling with or something that I just discovered and it’s just really, really awesome to be there in real time. Definitely go check me out on Periscope. Alright. What I did want to do is I wanted to give you guys that are brand spanking new to this thing, maybe you got turned on by a friend or whatever, I want to give you guys a free resource, okay? That’s my ten day free course and I actually walk you through all of the different steps and phases for picking up products, sourcing a product, launching a product and then promoting that product and I do that in like I said a ten day free course. You can sign up to receive that totally free by heading over to freeprivatelabelcourse.com once again that’s freeprivatelabelcourse.com, alright.

[00:03:00] SV: Now the other thing I want to do is give a quick shout out to one of our TASers, one of our TAS peeps out there because I think it’s pretty awesome that they posted this and it just gives me goose bumps. It just gives me chills being able to read this to you guys because it’s just so awesome. Alright? This here was submitted by Nathan Philip so Nathan you rock man, you rock. Here is what Nathan wrote on the Facebook page for the TAS community, alright? “Sitting here at magic mountain and having a test between rides truly appreciating my business in FBA. I went from zero knowledge in December of last year about retail arbitrage and Amazon selling today. Having my own PL brand, Private Label brand, another brand launching soon and ten SKUs selling, what’s special about today that makes me really appreciate all this?

Having my best days sales ever while enjoying time with my family and screaming like a madman on a rollercoaster after rollercoaster. Awesome. Stop second-guessing yourself. Pull the trigger and make it happen for yourself. No one else will do it for you. The screenshot isn’t some monster number but it’s a reflection of three months of grinding my beep softly, sorry and finally seeing sales trending up the graph at steady pace. Today it continued to work while I played with my family, smily faced with the sunglasses, emoji, feeling fabulous at six flags magic mountain.”

Nathan thank you so much for posting this, by the way the screenshot says fifty two units today so far and $961 sales today so far so really awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that and a ton of people liked it, a ton of people commented. Go over and get involved and be inspired motivated and learn from each other inside of the TAS Facebook group well over twenty five thousand in their current now. Go over, go ahead and request to join, usually within a couple of hours you’ll be accepted and you can go ahead and dive right in. Again that’s theamazingseller.com/fb so go check it out. Alright, great job too Nathan and glad you were yelling like a mad man, love it.

[00:05:18] SV: Alright. Let’s go ahead and dive into this discussion here, right. Let’s talk about these different tweaks. Before I do let’s talk about the traditional launch. Why do we want to launch a product and what does that exactly mean? Alright. First of what I want to do is give you some resources that you can get caught up if you have not but you can listen to this episode if you haven’t listened to these other two but just understand there is going to be in more detail that I go into in each of these episodes. There is episode 101 and episode number 8 so if you go to each one of those, again I’ll leave all this in the show notes, but you can check those out and get caught up really, really fast even on episode number 8. Even though I did that long time ago that launch process is pretty much identical to what you can do to launch a product.

Okay. Here is basically how it looks and why we want to do this, alright? You get a product that is released and it is sent into Amazon FBA. It’s live, it’s ready to go, we want to instantly start getting reviews, we want to start getting sales. Actually let’s reverse that, we want to get sales and then reviews okay. When we get the sales that triggers Amazon to know that we are there it gets us noticed and then we start ranking for certain keywords because people are finding us through keywords or maybe we ran a promotion using a keyword loaded URL or maybe we are using pay-per-click to start driving sales to that, alright?

It’s also going to get us a base set of reviews so this way here when people to land on our listing we are going to start converting. You need to understand that, that even though you can rank page one by doing a big promo, a big blast let’s say you give away a hundred units in a day and you can rank on page one but if you rank on page one and you don’t have a lot of reviews the chances of you making additional sales after that promo dies out after a couple of days. You are not going to stay there. Okay. You’d have to then run another launch to try to get back there after you get a set of reviews. This is where that tweak comes in but that’s it in a nutshell.

Anyone that’s brand new and they are wondering, “Why would I want to give some of my units for free or a dollar or two dollars or whatever, why would I want to do that?” The reason is because you need to almost get into the system. You need to get on the radar of Amazon. You need to start getting yourself into the algorithm of Amazon. Remember Amazon is a search engine for buyers looking to buy products, right? It’s a search engine lets listen to this guys okay and pay attention to this part right here. It’s a search engine for buyers. People go there to buy an item. They are not going there to learn how to cook a certain meal or how to tie a certain knot. It’s not meant for that, okay. It’s meant to go there and find a product and buy so really, really important that we understand that.

[00:08:15] SV: Now we’ve talked about this before but I’m going to talk about it again here real quick. When you are on Amazon and you want to start ranking you have to get sales. Amazon ranks by sales meaning if you start to sell your product you are going to start ranking but it’s not just that easy. You have to start ranking or you have to getting sales through keywords so you can start ranking for those keywords. Everything that Amazon does to rank a product is basically done by sales. The more sales you start to get the more you are going to rank for keywords, okay? An example, if someone is searching for a garlic press they go to Amazon they don’t go to a category in kitchen. Right. They go there with a blank search field or search box and they type in garlic press or stainless steel garlic press.

They are going to see the top listings, okay the top sixteen listings, they are going to see them. Now they are going to look at the pictures probably they are going to scan by thumbnail images and then from there they are going to probably look at reviews even who has the more reviews and then they are going to click in. Once they make that decision to click in now  you are not there yet. You haven’t converted them to a sale. You got the click, that’s the first step. The second step is to get them to buy but if you only have one review it’s going to be hard to convert. You will convert some but you are going to convert a lot more if you have more reviews. If you have 25 reviews versus having one it just makes sense. That’s how we need to think about this. It’s a system as far as that they haven’t placed, not necessarily a system but it’s the process that they go by as far as those different key points, those different match recs are what they gauge the ranking from okay?

[00:10:05] SV: Reviews don’t necessarily rank you, what they do do is they help you convert to a sale. That is what ranks you. Let’s say that again real quick. Reviews don’t rank you but they do help convert to a sale which then that sale helps you rank. Okay. Really, really important that we understand that in the beginning when we are doing our first phase here and I’m calling these two different phases we have phase one which is getting on the radar, getting some sales but then also getting some reviews. Then from there what we want to do and this is again this one here was from Rich Kibble. Rich Kibble shared this on a hangout that we do. Inside of our private label classroom we do a hangout where we meet, we get to share ideas of what we are doing. This is something Rich just shared a couple of weeks ago and this is what he is doing a little bit differently than when he first started.

When he first started he was doing a blast of let’s say 75 units or a hundred units and trying to spike the algorithm getting maybe page one and then from there having to redo that again because he started to slip because he didn’t have the reviews in yet. What he’s done is he has on phase one now of his promotional strategy of his launch strategy is he gives away a small amount of units okay a small quantity. Let’s just say he starts out with between 20 and 50 for that first phase. Okay. Then from there he lets those reviews come in. He’s patient, he’s patient in this. Now, he does in step two while he is waiting for those reviews to come in, he turns on his Amazon pay-per-click okay and he starts to target those keywords that he wants to rank for.

Now some people would say, including myself, is I would like to have at least five reviews before I turn on pay per click but here is Rich Kibble’s philosophy here and his test. If he can start converting even just one or two sales with very little reviews he is on the gold, he is on a good product and then he knows once he gets more reviews he’s going to probably be able to knock it out of the park. That’s like his little test in a sense so you can either say that you would want to do that or you don’t have to do that but that’s what he does okay? I’m a fan of that now because it does give you a good idea of how you’ll do even if you don’t have a lot of reviews but it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to. That’s just, again I’m giving you the play by play that Rich has done and that he shared with our group okay?

Then he turns on the paper click almost immediately but he waits again maybe two weeks, maybe three weeks, as long as it takes for those reviews to come in and he feels like he’s got a good solid base of reviews let’s say twenty five to thirty five reviews then what he does is he does his major blast. Okay. That’s phase two here where he’s going to then give away maybe seventy five or a hundred and fifty units depending on how competitive his space is that’s going to determine how many he wants to give away. Now he’s not going to give those away all at once he’s going to spread them out over the course of five days or maybe seven days because if he knows that he needs to sell fifteen units a day or twenty units a day in order to get page one because that’s page one results that’s what they are getting so he needs to match that if he wants that to be on page one.

Now he’ll use a super URL, at least the last I knew he was, or you can also now if you send out that email to people that take you up on your offer, you can direct them on how to search for your product. I’ve heard of other people doing that so this way here you are not giving them a URL that has the keyword in it you are actually saying ‘go to Amazon, type in the keyword stainless steel garlic press, find XYZ kitchens and then click on that listing and then buy through there and use this code.’ You can do it that way too, a little bit harder for the person doing it but it definitely is going to be effective because it’s like they did the search on their own without using a keyword loaded URL.

[00:14:19] SV: Now do keyword loaded URL still work? For me they do. Does it mean that it always will? No but in the meantime I’ll probably continue to use them but that’s what he is doing here. Again let’s repeat that, phase one he is doing a small promo really just to get the reviews and didn’t even really need to get the sales. Yes the sales is going to be a bi-product of that but he is really going after getting the twenty five, thirty five reviews so this way here when he does that bigger blast of phase two blast three or four weeks later now when he shows up on page one guess what? He’s got a nice set, a nice base set of reviews. He doesn’t just have three reviews. Like we said it’s one thing to get to page one but if you don’t convert to a sale it’s not going to make a difference.

You want to make sure that you capitalize on that traffic that you are going to be getting there because here is the thing, if you can start getting your own ten or fifteen sales a day when you are on page one guess what, you stay on page one. Right? That is the goal. This is just for this one keyword. This can start to happen for multiple keywords or maybe you found a second keyword that you want to rank for. Does that mean that you’ve got to wait now and do phase one and then phase two? No because you’ve got the base reviews already in place so now you can jump right to phase two and do another blast maybe three or four weeks later for another targeted keyword or a long tail keyword.

That is again, that’s Rich’s strategy and I love it because it is a little bit of a tweak. You are not going out there and giving away a hundred units right off the bat and you are spreading them out over five days. What you are doing is you are saying, “I’m going after the reviews right now, I’m going after to get my base set of reviews and then I can do phase two which is running the bigger promotion so I can then land page one and then get organic sales and stay on page one.” Now in the future maybe you slip to page two and you might have to do a little bit of a boost, a little bit of a promo boost. You just got to jump into phase two here. Maybe you are going to give an additional fifty or seventy five units away because you slipped down and now you want to nudge yourself back on page one. That’s an option. Again you need to think of this as advertising budget, it’s part of the process, alright?

[00:16:37] SV: He also is continuing the run pay-per-click doing this. Okay. If you are targeting stainless steel garlic press and you are running a promotion for stainless steel garlic press you should be running pay-per-click especially in phase two for that keyword. At least in the exact, not the exact, you can also run it in the phrase match because then you can get everything else that’s related to that but you could take a small budget and then just run direct exact match keyword traffic through Amazon pay-per-click. Okay. Now, if you to page on in this process, you got there, you made it but now what you need to do is stay there and how do you stay there? You need to keep getting sales through that keyword and if that is your keyword that gets a lot of the sales, that should naturally happen.

Again you always want to be running pay-per-click that’s going to help bump that and keep you on top so this way here you can stay on page one. Just remember okay, the one thing that you need to understand is if you got page one on day three of you launching, you are probably not going to stay there that long. Why? Because you are not going to get organic sales there because you don’t have the social proof of the reviews in place. What Rich is really doing here, what I’m going to be doing is exactly this. It’s going to be a little bit more of a delay because you are going to have that base setter reviews, get your base setter reviews thirty five or twenty five to thirty five reviews maybe over the course of three weeks and then from there you are going to run phase two which is going to be the bigger blast which then you are really trying to get one page one. Then you ahead and run your paper click heavy at that time to try to really get yourself rooted on page one.

[00:18:19] SV: Now the same exact strategy Allen shared with us just last week we did one the week before, no two weeks before and Rich shared that and then it just happened that Allen shared his and it was very, very similar. The difference is Allen has created his own internal list through social media, his website and past promos. He was really smart about having this really hardcore small but powerful list and I say small I think it’s about three hundred or four hundred people on here. Now how did he build that list? Well one way is he went out to find the top ten thousand reviewers. Again this can be done in your pre-launch phase where now what you are doing is really going out and building your own list. If you have this own list it doesn’t mean you are not going to use some of these other groups like Thomason and getBSR.com, Review-kick and any of these different ones you can still use them and you should mix it up but this one here is really how he gets his base.

Okay. For him he is able to build this list over time of the top ten thousand reviewers. He handpicks them because what he does is he blasts this out in a regular email that you would write to someone and then if that person reviews this product or wants to review his product he makes a note in a spreadsheet that that person accepted and then they’ll also say what they gave him as a review. Obviously if you gave out a promo code to someone they come back but it’s a one star review. Okay you got to deal with it, you got to accept that you, you can’t make them change that you can ask them why they gave you a one star. Maybe you can help fix the problem but you can’t tell them to change it, right. What you can do is if you handpick these reviewers in the future you are only going to make that really solid list out of people that gave you some really good reviews so you can use them as leverage. All right.

That’s what he’s done and he’s called that his secret source in a sense because he now has that list that he can go to any time when he launches new product and sometimes he doesn’t have to discount it as heavy as he would so he doesn’t lose any of that money upfront because he can maybe get 50% off because they are on his list when he launches that product. Then from there, again in phase one if he doesn’t get his twenty or thirty five reviews from his internal list after a week let’s say, then he’ll go into phase one which is phase one point one I guess. It will be a second part of phase one is where then he would go ahead and reach out to another list or another group to get his twenty five or thirty five reviews. Okay.

Then he would go ahead and wait four weeks and then go out and really do a hard core blast of a hundred to a hundred and fifty units spread out over time and over a week or whatever so this way here he’s doing exactly what we just said Rich has done which is getting the base set of reviews. That’s the number one thing to do at first and then once that’s in place then blast it out with a bigger promotion so this way here when you land on page one you have a better chance of sticking because you are going to convert higher.

[00:21:41] SV: Now, let me just say one thing here, Allen did exactly that. Mind you Rich Kibble right now I think the last we talked I think he’s doing $60,000 plus a month in revenue. He’s got I think four products, maybe five launched couple more in queue. Allen Haden also has right now I believe two products he is doing just about $30,000 in revenue a month. Here’s the funny thing and the cool thing, Allen did this with his I believe it was his first product, maybe it was his second product but he did it. He did exactly what I shared with you but he left one thing out and he still had great success. Want to know what that is? Yeah you are shaking your head, of course you do. He didn’t turn on any pay-per-click. He turned on nothing. We were all flabbergasted, we were like, “Really? No.”

He didn’t turn on any pay-per-click and he didn’t do it because he didn’t think it was necessary. He did because he was selling enough organically through this process because he has like a small test order like maybe five, six hundred units and then from there he was selling that he knew he was going to run out of stock so if you ramped it up with pay-per-click that would have then made him run out of stock quicker so he just assumed leave off the pay-per-click, get it up to speed with the organic order more inventory, then when he gets enough then he’s going to really dial it up. He’s in a great spot because if he is already doing what he is doing without running any pay-per-click I mean heck when he starts running pay-per-click he should be able to almost I would say at least double that depending as far as how big the market is that he is in but he’s got a good chance that he could I mean at least he can add 20%, 25% more sales to what he is already currently doing.

He could do probably as much as 50% more. But anyway so that is the two different people that I wanted to share with you but there are tweaks and again like Allen has his own little internal list so he’s got a little of a leverage point there than he can use but then he does follow exactly what Rich was saying was getting the base setter reviews then doing the heavy promotion after three or four weeks and they both said that they waited. They waited so they got to that certain twenty five, thirty five so this way here they knew that when they landed on page one they were going to have a better chance. They were going to have a better chance of getting more sales through the organic search now which then will help them stay on page one.

This is something that I’m going to be doing a little bit differently myself. Always in the past what I’ve done is I’ve started right out at the gate giving away seventy five or a hundred waiting to see what happens and then from there I would go ahead and then do another mini promotion, after that I’m going to flip it on its head. I’m going to do the smaller promotion upfront, get the base set, let it really marinade, let it sit there and then from there I’m going to ramp it up with the bigger launch and getting really aggressive with that. Probably even playing around with turning on pay-per-click in the beginning to see if I can get any sales without any reviews. That’s just a good test I think and it’s exciting and for people like me that a little bit impatient it will at least give me something to look at so I can play around with something while I’m waiting for the three or four weeks to take place for those reviews to come in.

[00:24:54] SV: Some people ask me, “Scott when you are going after reviews and stuff how many reviews should I plan to receive or can I plan to receive by running a promotion?” It really does vary, it depends on the quality of the different review groups that you are using. Me personally I’m saying probably around seventy five to eighty five percent is what I’m getting and I talk about the different resources that I use and different groups that I use over on the resources page. I’ll also drop a link to the resources page on the show notes if you guys haven’t been there head over to theamazingseller.com/resources and just go to reviews and you’ll see the ones that I recommend.

I definitely think that no matter what you use make sure that it’s a quality, quality group because you can get some crappy ones out there too and then you’ll get reviews and then a month later they are going to get wiped out because all of those accounts that were on that group got banned and then all the reviews get wiped out as well. Just be careful with that but again this year again a little bit of a launch strategy tweak I love it, I’m going to be playing around with this, I’ll report back as usual. I’m getting excited here because I’m going to be really close to launching a few new products and I’m going to definitely play with this model and see how it works.

That’s it guys. That is pretty much what I wanted to share with you. You guys can tell I haven’t stopped talking because I’m excited this is cool, this stuff works. Alright and for those of you guys that are brand spanking new and you are, “Oh my gosh Scott I just felt like a drank out a garden hose that’s going about a hundred and fifty miles an hour.“ Yeah I know how that can feel but what you need to do is really focus on getting started #juststart or #takeaction. The way that you can do that if you are brand new I’ve created a free resource for you, the ten day course it will actually walk you through everything to get up and running so you can get to this part of the process.

That can be found at freeprivatelabelcourse.com. You’ll have to register your first name and your email address. You’ll immediately get the outline sent to you and then the next day you’ll immediately get lesson one. If you are using gmail make sure you check your promotions tab. Sometimes my mail will go in there you’ll need to drag it out of the promotions tab and drag it into your inbox and then you will get all of the other lessons in those first ten days of delivering that content to you so freeprivatelabelcourse.com check it out if you are brand new and then you can get caught up to speed really, really quickly and getting yourself ready to launch your product.

Alright guys that is going to wrap it up I want to again say thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen. You guys all know that I love hearing from you guys and drop something in the comments if you want to or over on the Facebook group. Go ahead and just be active, help other people, I’m telling you it feels good and it’ll also help you stay connected so this way here you guys can share your stories as far as what’s working and what’s not working and helping each other along the way. I can’t stress that enough, when you surround yourself with like-minded people, good things happen and I want that to happen for you. Definitely get connected inside of the Facebook group. Alright guys that’s it, that’s going to wrap it up remember I’m here for you, I believe in you, I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come one say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, ‘Take Action.’ Have an awesome amazing day and I’ll see you back here on the next episode.

[END]

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…he’s actually a past guest, his name is Ted Luymes who is an attorney, he helps Amazon sellers mainly with hijackers but he also knows about intellectual property and some of the laws and regulations and all of that stuff. I wanted to have him come on really not to give us legal advice because he isn’t really in a position here to give legal advice but he is a friend of mine that is willing to come on and really answer some questions and he is found since the last episode, the last episode that we had him on was 152, which was a great episode by the way, and if you guys want to go check that out it’s all about hijackers and how do you really address them and get them off your listing and all that stuff, that’s episode 152 so theamazingseller.com/152.

Now, again, he’s been kind enough to come on as a guest and really talk about these three topics, patents, trademarks and copyrights but I do have to put this disclaimer in there, he wants me to put this disclaimer in there, so I’m going to put it in here, okay. The information contained in this podcast is not intended to and does not constitute legal advice and no attorney-client relationship is created. Consult a qualified attorney concerning any legal matters that you may have. Okay.

That right there, let’s get that out of the way. I want to be clear on that, that if you are at all in question, hire an attorney. Okay. Like I said, we’re going to go ahead and dive into these three topics and he is really going to shed some light on this for us, not just for ourselves as far as like seeing if we’re violating a patent but also if we have a patent, maybe some of you listening has patents already and you have someone is going against your patent or trying to rip your product off.

Now, most of the time that’s not the case, a lot of times it’s a bigger brand and you are private labeling a product and then they’re sending you a cease and desist letter. He’s going to talk about what we should do if that letter comes and kind of what happens in that process and just some really good stuff. I’m going to stop talking now so we can go ahead and listen to this interview with my good friend, Ted Luymes.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:02:45] SV:  Hey Ted, welcome back to the show, how’s it going, man?

[00:02:49] TL: Hi Scott, doing great.

[00:02:50] SV: Doing good, I heard you just were skiing, you told me, with your kids, how was that?

[00:02:54] TL: Oh my God, spring skiing is the best, isn’t it?

[00:03:00] SV: Well, you know what, we haven’t had hardly any snow here, so in order to get to snow we would probably have to travel about an hour and a half, I would think north, whereabouts are you located again, Ted?

[00:03:10] TL: I’m in southern California, but the kids are in Utah and the snow there was pretty good.

[00:03:16] SV: Was it nice?

[00:03:16] TL: Yeah.

[00:03:17] SV: Yeah. Here we don’t have much at all which I’m not complaining about I got to be honest, I’m running from the snow that’s why I’m moving south but I would occasionally like to, like you said, if I was still skiing, I don’t ski anymore, but if I was and when I did, spring skiing is just awesome, it is totally awesome. That’s cool, spending some time with family that’s always a good thing. Let’s kind of give people a little bit of a recap I guess or maybe we can catch them up to what’s happened since you’ve been on the show. You were on the show episode 152 and on that one there, the title of that one was, How This Attorney Removes Hijackers and Protects Amazon Sellers, and it got a really great response. I guess I wanted to get your feedback and kind of what happened since you’ve been on the show and maybe how you’re working with people and how that has brought us to today’s topic which we’re going to be all talking about patents, trademarks and copyright.

[00:04:15] TL: Yeah, Scott, I want to thank you in the couple of months that I’ve been on the show I’ve had quite a response from the TAS community and a lot of them have been calling me and emailing me not only with questions about hijackers but just setting up their business or dealing with cease and desist letters or sending out cease and desist letters and it’s been a really welcoming response.

[00:04:45] SV: That’s great.

[00:04:45]TL: I think it’s a lot of fun working with these folks. Some of them are very experienced business people, some of them are just getting off the ground and it’s a lot of fun to be able to help them. I’ve seen a lot of confusion out there about intellectual property or what we call IP issues, that’s patents, trademarks and copyright. Of course, you don’t expect lay people to have a clear understanding of these things. Hopefully today, I can clarify that and call to the attention of your listeners some of the issues that I am seeing over and over again.

[00:05:30] SV: Yeah, I know and I think that’s important because these are issues that I think that do come up and I don’t think anyone has a real clear answer as to how we can fix this issue. Now the other thing that I did want to again before we move into this, the patent, the trademark, the copyright and all that stuff is let’s just kind of go back. How are things with hijackers right now, since we last talked, is it pretty much the same, is there any other little tidbits that we can give people that we might have learned of, is there anything that’s changed in that particular problem?

[00:06:06] TL: Well, the hijackers are always going to be there and the more successful you’re listing is, the more likely you’re going to have hijackers on your listings. I’ll tell you what I’m seeing a lot more of though recently are these … Remember when we talked about the high hanging fruit hijacks? Or as I like to call it, the parasites?

[00:06:29] SV: Yeah.

[00:06:29] TL: I don’t know if they all held a conference or something but it just seems like there’s a lot more of them out there and they’re more of a nuisance than anything. Technically, they’re not really violating Amazon’s rules so you have to be creative to take them down. I have been successful in taking those off of my client listings because a large part, they’re not invested in your product or the ASIN and even though they’re selling your product also so you’re getting a sale, the customer service is not going to be nearly as good. Most of my clients do like to eliminate those parasite sellers or the high hanging fruit guys they’ll wave your price.

[00:07:18] SV: Yeah and I think what we’re talking about too for anyone that didn’t listen to the episode which I think all of you guys should because it was a really good episode, that was 152, so theamazingseller.com/152. Really, what you’re talking about here is people coming on, a hijacker, and they’re not undercutting you on price, they’re actually making your price higher and in this case if someone is foolish enough to buy that at that price, then they can just buy your product and ship them your product just at that higher price.

Now the other thing I think that … They’re going out and doing this not just with one listing, they’re doing this with like a 100 or a 1,000 listings and they’re just trying to find a few that are going to actually not pay attention to you. The other thing that I’ve been noticing, if someone goes out of stock immediately they’ll go in and take the buy box now, that’s another part of their strategy, if you run out of stock they’re instantly going to fill the buy box you’re not going to go out of stock and then they’re going to start showing up on your listing. Is that what you’re seeing?

[00:08:17] TL: Yeah, they don’t have a product themselves, they’re just riding on the float and waiting for people to run out of stock to get the buy box or occasionally, they just get the buyer who’s interested in paying a lot more for the product.

[00:08:32] SV: Yeah.

[00:08:32] TL: It’s not merely as pernicious as a true hijacker which is usually a Chinese seller that’s coming in and selling a counterfeit product or a knock-off. That’s much worse because they’re driving down your buy box and really destroying your brand but these folks are sitting there, they’re actually selling your product that’s not a counterfeit and they’re just hoping to, every once in a while, get a bite at their very high price and they do. Apparently, it’s a business model that works for some people.

[00:09:08] SV: Yeah, yeah, it’s sneaky and it’s underhanded but there are people out there doing it, it’s part of that ecosystem but we just got to deal with it and be able to try to get them off and I actually had someone that I told you. Actually I followed up with you to let you know that I had that and used a cease and desist letter that I publicly put out there and you said, “Yeah, go ahead, use it, see what happens,” and it actually worked. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won’t but it did work for me.

Let’s go ahead and let’s dive into this because the real reason why we wanted you back today and you actually emailed me and said, “Scott, there’s three things that we should really discuss that people are confused about and I think it could be helpful and that’s really about the patents, the trademark and the copyrights. I’ll let you kind of kick it off and kind of educate us on these three key points to selling on Amazon.

[00:09:55] TL: There’s a fundamental difference between the law of patent, trademark and copyright. The thing that your listener should be aware of is that there’s a lot of overlap between these two and in fact, we lawyers sometimes are not entirely sure whether a certain item falls between a patent issue or a trademark issue. Usually a copyright issue we are able to tell, it’s generally more distinct but sometimes, something that’s trademarkable is also copyrightable or vice versa.

There should be no confusion as to the basics between these three legal concepts, patent, trademark and copyright. With regard to your listeners or private label sellers, I think it’s important to at least have a basic understanding of it.

[00:10:54] SV: Sure. I think it’s really important and I get a lot of people that say, “Scott, how do I know if a product has a patent or how do I do a search?” What would you tell someone that would ask you that question? Just as a friend, not even as a lawyer but just as a friend, hey, what would you do if you were launching a product today, to make sure that you weren’t violating anything or at least doing your best job to make sure that you weren’t?

[00:11:20] TL: There’s a real issue out there, with regard to patents because they are very difficult to search. Yes, you can go online and you can … As a layperson, you can go online and do some searches through the patent and trademark offices files. The truth is there are specialists out there who charge quite a bit of money, anywhere from $2,000 on up to do patent searches and even then they’ll tell you, “ Well, we’re not 100% sure that your product isn’t going to violate some patent.” It’s difficult because there are millions upon millions of patents out there having to do with what we call design patents that is the overall shape and features and appearance of your product. Or it can be a patent that the people mostly think about which is sort of the new innovation, a new way of doing things or a new mechanical piece.

It’s difficult to know whether you’re going to run afoul of somebody’s patent. I’ll tell you this, what I’m seeing a lot with the TAS community and the private label sellers is that often they’re sourcing a product and it’s a product that is possibly a design patent infringement. For instance, pick any product right? I don’t want to be specific, because I don’t want to disclose any client’s information but let’s say that it’s a national brand and they have a certain shape about their product. Let’s say it’s a kitchen, something in the kitchen that sits on the counter and it’s got a certain shape, a certain feel, a certain look to it.

Well, a lot of times, the folks that you’ll be sourcing from as a private label seller will sort of knock off that shape, they’ll make it similar in size, similar in looks, similar in feel and then they’ll put your brand name on it, of course sell it to you then you get a cease and desist letter because it looks like a national brand’s product. I guess, getting back to your question, what would I advise a private label seller is be careful to do your own research.

With Google and Google images, you can look around online and see products that are similarly shaped, that may be branded, that may be patentable and you should check into those and also talk with your supplier, ask them specifically, “Are you aware of any parties out there who are issuing cease and desist letters because of the look or shape or feel of this particular product?” You got to do your own research on this because it’s pretty expensive to actually hire a lawyer or hire one of these firms to do a patent search for you.

[00:14:46] SV: Yeah, I mean one of the things that I’ve … Again coming back to good old fashioned common sense, if you’re looking at a product that is out there and a major brand is creating this product or selling this product. Then I would definitely say look for patent pending somewhere too or just patent it. That’s clearly, going to tell us if it’s been patented at least that design, style, whatever and right away, if I seen something like that, I would go the other way. That’s me personally and that’s kind of doing that top-level stuff and most bigger companies, at least that I’ve seen, I’ve always seen that patent pending or patented and then they’ll have their patent number and all that stuff. Would you say that that would be good advice or do you think that that’s too basic?

[00:15:31] TL: It’s a little basic because a lot of companies don’t put any patent information on their packaging or on their websites. That’s just the way they do it but obviously if you see that that’s a big red flag.

[00:15:46] SV: If they have a patent, do they have to put that on the product itself or they don’t have to?

[00:15:54] TL: They don’t have to do that. It’s a violation if you wind up infringing upon their patent but I’ll tell you this also Scott, I’m seeing a lot of cease and desist letters coming in from national law firms where they’re trying to bully or scare off private label sellers, “Beware we have this patent or we have that patent.” But me as an attorney, when I take a closer look at it I think, “Wow, wait a minute this is really a questionable call, these people are over reaching and claiming that their patent is broader than it really is..They’re just trying to scare off little guys, little private label sellers who are undercutting their business on Amazon or elsewhere.” I’m seeing a lot of that too. Just because you’ve received a cease and desist letter does not mean that it necessarily has merit.

[00:16:54] SV: Okay but at that point in time when you do receive that and when you do receive that, then your next step is to go to a patent attorney, is that what you would do?

[00:17:04] TL: Well, yeah, you call somebody like me or any IP attorney to take a look at the letter.

[00:17:11] SV: Okay, so it doesn’t have to be a patent attorney or a specialist, it could just be an attorney that can look at the paperwork and see if it holds water?

[00:17:20] TL: Correct. It should be an IP attorney, somebody who has some understanding about trademark,

[00:17:25] SV: Yeah, you wouldn’t want to ask a real estate attorney right?

[00:17:29] TL: Correct, correct.

[00:17:30] SV: All right. That makes sense. All right cool, you have to do your own research, you got to use your head, you got to be smart about it but I will tell people this too. We can go out there and we can do all of your research and we still may violate something or get scared by a letter that we received. Me personally, I’m not going to let that scare me in a sense and if it happens then I’ll deal with it but I will do my best in the beginning to make sure that I’m not going to be violating any patents. Again, it comes down to if you’re sourcing a product, if you can see that there’s specialty to it or specialty design or specialty fabric or certain types of print, then yes, you got to be really careful and that’s stuff I might even stay away from right?

We’re looking at sometimes a generic item that you can find in, I don’t want to say The Dollar Store, but something that’s in a generic form that would be kind of basic, that would be kind of even hard to patent because it’s pretty generic.

[00:18:36] TL: Right, it’s sort of broadly used but again, we’re talking about the overall look, feel of a product. If it’s something that is a unique design or that is part of a national brand, sort of signature look, you want to avoid those.

[00:18:54] SV: Totally, all right cool, that’s patents. Now let’s move into trademarks,

[00:19:01] TL: Well, one other thing before we move on, let me tell you, I’m seeing some of the private label sellers putting on their listings that they have a patent, that it’s patent pending. People, don’t do that. If you don’t have a registered mark, if you don’t have a patent or if no patent is pending do not put that in your product description, that is illegal, I don’t know if you’ll get into trouble with Amazon or if they are patrolling that. If somebody calls you on that it could create problems for you.

[00:19:35] SV: Yeah, that’s good advice, you don’t want to be doing something that’s not true, just to scare other people off.

[00:19:42]  TL: Right.

[00:19:42] SV: Totally agree with that, yeah, good point. Can we move into trademark now?

[00:19:48] TL: Yeah

[00:19:48] SV: Okay, cool, so why don’t you kind of run us through trademarks, maybe start really at the high levels as far as what is a trademark and how do you get a trademark and what does it mean?

[00:19:59] TL: Yeah, the trademark is your brand and it’s usually a combination of your brand name and there’s some kind of symbol or a particular script or font that you’re using in connection with your brand name. It’s what we think of as your mark which is often why we call this a trademark. It’s how you are known in the marketplace by consumers of your product or prospective consumers. Different from patent and also different from copyright and also different from Amazon Brand Registry.

A trademark of course is something that you can register with the US Patent Trademark Office. I certainly do recommend if your listeners are going to be in it for the long haul, they are going to be serious about selling on Amazon and building a business that you definitely want to register your trademark but you don’t have to if you’re a little guy and you’re getting started, that’s a lot of money and perhaps your money would be better spent developing a website and doing those things that you need to get to brand registry on Amazon, which is what I would suggest that you do before you register your trademark with USPTO.

[00:21:32] SV: Yeah, that’s good advice and trademark is a longer process too. I actually went through that a couple of different times and it’s a longer process. For me it was about an eight-month maybe a little bit longer for that process to be official. How does that work though like when you first register your trademark, does that kind of trademark you in a sense to where it’s at least in motion?

[00:21:59] TL: Yeah the good thing is, you don’t have to initiate your registration in order to have trademark protection. There’s common law trademark as well and as soon as you start adopting a brand name or a logo. The common law automatically starts protecting you. The great thing about registration is that there is now a date certain where you can point to people and say, “Look, I have a trademark application in the process, as of this date, I have been using this trademark in commerce as of this day.” All that is now out in the open, it’s searchable, much more searchable than a patent for instance. It puts everybody on notice as to what your trademark is, when you started using it and it sort of establishes your claim. Plant a flag on a desert island.

[00:23:02] SV: Yeah, yeah, totally. It’s your stake and you’re going to claim it. I guess the other thing was how do you protect that? Is there any symbols or anything that you would advise putting on, once you do get that trademark?

[00:23:13] TL: Yeah, you can use the TM symbol at any time, even without having initiated registration. You can put a TM next to your brand name or your symbol or both. You can do that on your Amazon listing, you can do it on your product packaging and I recommend that you do that. It sort of just a … Again, it puts people on notice, that you’re claiming this is just your common law trademark.

The little circle R symbol though, that’s different. You do need to have a registered trademark in order to use that and it’s illegal to just put the little circle R on things. Again, I see that sometimes with some of your listeners, they’ll put patent pending or they’ll use the circle R and I ask so what’s your registration and they say, “Well, I don’t have one or it’s still in the process.” You actually have to have gone through the process and received your registration certificate from the USPTO before you begin using the circle R.

[00:24:24] SV: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. The TM we can kind of use as common law, the R is basically saying that you’ve got your stamp of approval.

[00:24:32] TL: Yes.

[00:24:32] SV: Okay, cool. What are some other problems that you’re seeing with trademarks, like violations and stuff like that?

[00:24:40] TL: Well again, we’re seeing people … I’ve had a lot of clients recently come in with what we call trade dress violations. Kind of a subspecies of the trademark law or something that we call trade dress and as a private label seller you need to be aware of the trade dress law. Trade dress is essentially the overall look of the product. It’s packaging, it’s design, it’s colors, they type of fonts that’s used and the key here is, if your product is confusingly similar to a reasonable consumer then that can be what we call a trade dress violation.

You might have a product that you know is similar to some other national product that is trademarked. You never want to, in your listing, say anything to the effect that well, this is similar to such. Or for that matter, you never want to identify any other product or brand that your product is like or similar to or that it’s associated with in anyway, that’s a big no-no, it’s going to get you to a cease and desist for trade dress violation.

[00:26:18] SV: Got you, okay that’s interesting and it makes sense because you’re trying to capitalize on that brand name. Now my only question to that would be what if you had something that was an accessory to a major brand and you said works well with this?

[00:26:35] TL: That’s okay but again you’ve got to be really careful how you deal with that and how I would handle that in your product listing or your product description is you can use the brand name of that product but I would make a notation somewhere that X name is the trademark of so and so company, no affiliation. It’s important to have that sort of fine print somewhere.

[00:27:08] SV: Little disclaimer, yeah.

[00:27:09] TL: That way, you’re not going to piss them off. It makes it clear that you’re distinguishing your brand from theirs, that you’re not abusing their brand but that your product is an accessory or some kind of compliment to their product and nothing more.

[00:27:26] SV: Yeah, I like that, that’s great advice and I think that you could put that fine print in there somewhere and most people aren’t even probably going to see it but if you ever needed to call it out you could. That’s good advice. What else do you see in here that we can discuss on the trademark? I’m reading some of your notes here, we’ve got counterfeit sellers, hijackers on your brand and listing, cut and pasting and using the ad copy and even sometimes the images which we can talk about in copyright here in a minute. What else did you want to talk about with the trademark with counterfeit sellers, like hijackers and such?

[00:28:01] TL: The hijackers again, they’re always going to be there and if they are doing, they’re using your trademark, using your brand name to sell counterfeits of your product then you got to shut them down. It’s not always easy to do that but we talked about that in our previous podcast. One other thing I want to mention though are these what I call cut and paste sellers.

These are folks that literally steal your ASIN, they copy everything. Often times they copy the photos, they copy your product description and they just create a new ASIN, which of course violates all kinds of Amazon’s rules and of course is stealing both your trademark and your copyright and these people actually do it. I don’t know where, often we don’t know where they are sourcing their product, if they are just getting some kind of counterfeit or some kind of knock-off product but I have seen this and it’s important that your listeners be aware of this.

Something else is often this will happen on foreign Amazon sites. I had a client recently who does business on a number of Amazon sites all over the world and they had their US listings, about 100 of their US listings completely cut and pasted and put on Amazon India. I contacted the operator, the seller and they said, “ Well, we’re selling a legitimate product, we’re actually sourcing through your client in the US and importing it here to India,” and they jacked up the price by three times which was amazing to me but they had this whole business model going on.

Of course I had to inform them, “Look, we have a trademark that is ours, we have a copyright that concerns that are ours, you can’t just cut and paste our listings and put them up somewhere, you just can’t do it.” It took a lot of effort to get those down but we managed to do that. That was kind of a large scale problem but individual ASINs that do well, sometimes, they just get ripped off entirely, they’ll just steal them.

[00:30:41] SV: Yeah, yeah, no that’s definitely something we don’t want to happen and we got to definitely be on the lookout for that stuff but also know how to deal with that. Again, contacting those sellers and trying to be, like you’d say before, trying to be polite and all that but if you can’t get anything then you got to actually hire an attorney or something like yourself to go ahead and address that.

[00:31:05] TL: The good news is, if you can point out to Amazon’s catalog department that there is a duplicate ASIN like that. Usually they’ll delete the other ASIN but you don’t … One time that happened, they just went ahead and merged the two ASINs, this guy is now selling on my client’s ASIN and of course we can’t have that either because we knew in that case at least he was selling some knock off for a cheap product to drive down the buy box, so that became another issue.

[00:31:40] SV: Oh boy, okay, well that’s why you do what you do. You’re good at it now, you’re getting a lot of practice. Okay, cool so let’s move on to copyright. I am an ex photographer. I still I’m a photographer, my wife’s a photographer, we just don’t do it for money any more but I know a lot about copyright as far as like with pictures, that’s one of the big things for us because people, what they would do is they would take our pictures and bring them into CVS or Walgreen’s or whatever and they would copy our pictures and not pay us for our pictures because those pictures were copyrighted by us because we took the pictures right? We had a thing there that said the only people that can print this is us. That’s a little different but it’s still the same idea with copyright because they’re our property because we took them. How does that kind of relate to copyright with your images, your copy, kind of all that stuff in your Amazon business?

[00:32:36] TL: In the Amazon world, again we’re mostly talking about photos here and you’re right, the private label sellers need to be clear that the ideal situation is that they would take their own photos or they are going to hire a professional to take the photos and they’ll get a writing from their photographer that says, “I’m turning over all rights, all of my copyrights to you,” because when a photographer takes the picture, he or she owns that copyright, it needs to be transferred to you, to the person who paid for it. There is something what we call the work made for hire doctrine that I’m sure you’re aware of, which is that if you hire a professional photographer or they are your employee, they’re on your staff, then there’s an assumption that the copyright already belongs to you but it’s a good idea that the professional photographer has this forms to actually get it in writing that you own that copyright. You don’t necessarily need to register it, there’s a common law copyright law that as soon as an expression is made, that is as soon as the photograph is made or something is written down or a musical performance is made, the copyright law automatically attaches to that work. It doesn’t have to be registered.

[00:34:11] SV: Totally. We would always have our clients sign even, we’re not talking about model releases or anything like that but that was part of our process. We had to have some of these things signed. We didn’t register them but we needed the things in writing. I think a good thing to do here too, as an extra precautionary like you had said was even the photographer that you hired to take your pictures just to let them know that they are kind of handing off the rights to you. This way here, you’re able to go if you wanted to print some or if you wanted to just use them on your website or other places because technically if you didn’t have that they could say, “Oh no, every time you post it, we need to get paid.” You don’t want that to happen either.

I think we’re talking more here about people stealing your stuff and then being able to say, “Hey look, they’re mine, they’re copyrighted, I’ve purchased them, I’ve had them professionally shot, they are mine.”Is that correct?

[00:35:04] TL: Yeah, absolutely and you’d be surprised how often Amazon sellers would just steal photos and just modify them a little bit. It’s still your copyright even if they modify things. One of my garment industry clients has a very large catalog of photos that frequently get ripped off and what we often find is that these hijackers will just switch the face out of the model. It will be my client’s photo and garment and everything but the face will be completely different.

[00:35:40] SV: Oh, gosh, no.

[00:35:40] TL: That’s very, very common. Somebody else will put their watermark on your photo. You still have that copyright. My recommendation to all my clients is use the circle C liberally, you don’t have to register your copyright in order to use the little circle C and put on there a copyright and your name. Amazon really doesn’t like watermarked photos but if you put a discreet watermark on a photo, I think that’s a good idea and put it on your product listing and on your product packaging itself or if you have some kind of insert, instruction manual or anything like that, that’s some kind of printed paper, a diagram put that circle C on there as well.

[00:36:35] SV: Yeah. I think that’s a great bit of advice there because if you put it on there, you’re marking it it’s yours and if someone sees that they’re probably going to think twice about doing that. Not saying they won’t, but it’s at least there and I would also say probably to is to … Obviously your pictures are going to be timestamped and all that stuff but that would be even down the road if you had to go that extreme, you can at least show that every that everything is kind of like the time that they were shot and the time the person came online and all that stuff.

A little over the top but that’s something that I even consider, I even take pictures, screenshots of my listing so I could basically have a record of what it looked like now and then if a hijacker comes on and tries to take over I’ve got that as, “This is what the listing is supposed to look like,” and that type of stuff. Okay, let’s wrap up here and I know you have a couple of other notes here, the main problems that Amazon sellers are facing I think is with the copyright, not just copyright, but everything. It’s like everything from content theft and then unauthorized use of the photos. What would you say in closing that we can do to make sure that we’re on the up and up and that we’re doing the best that we can to follow these guidelines to protect ourselves, and our brand, and our products?

[00:38:03] TL: Well, other than the common sense that you mentioned Scott, it’s important for private label sellers to have a good conversation with the people that they are sourcing from because often the folks that you’re sourcing from have been doing this for a while, they’ve been making product or they’ve been printing a product insert and they may be aware of someone who is claiming a patent or trademark or copyright infringement but they’re not telling you that.

They’re over in China or India or wherever they are, they’re not likely to get sued but you are because you’re putting your private label brand name on that product and you’re putting it out in the Amazon.com marketplace and you are most likely based in the US, although not always, and you would be subject to a lawsuit here in the States or at the very least, you’re going to get a cease and desist or they’re going to report you to Amazon. We all know that Amazon is not terrific about responding to IP complaints but when they do comedown it’s like lowering the boom, they’ll suspend your account or even ban you from Amazon.

Have a good relationship and a good conversation about these IP issues with whoever you’re sourcing your product from and if you don’t feel comfortable with who you’re working with and that they’re being above board with you, then you might want to avoid them and go with a different supplier.

[00:39:57] SV: It’s good advice, it’s really good advice and I think a lot of times it comes down to that relationship you’re building with your supplier, your agent and letting them know that you are questioning that. You can feel people out, not saying that it’s always going to work but you can feel people out and get a gut feel if they are on the up and up and doing stuff that’s kind of on the down low. In a couple of maybe a minute or two, if we can cover these last little bits because we’re running a little bit late but what do you do if you find someone that’s exploiting, that’s infringing on your own product and your property?

[00:40:33] TL: Then you need to write a cease and desist letter and of course I’m biased, but I think that we lawyers write better cease and desist letters than lay people do. By hiring a lawyer and going through that process and doing a proper cease and desist letter, it really tells the other side, the people who are infringing that you mean business, you’re not just sitting on your computer and shooting out an email. I think it’s much more effective and you’re going to get the results that you want, namely, that they stop using the product and in appropriate cases, that you’re going to get some kind of settlement, some kind of compensation for the use of your IP.

[00:41:22] SV: Then the last part of that one, let’s flip that around, what do you do if you’re accusing someone else of doing that to yourself?

[00:41:29] TL: Don’t stick your head in the sand and think it will go away. You need to be proactive, you need to address it immediately. Again I think it’s a good idea for, especially if you are getting a cease and desist letter from an attorney not just from a lay person but from an attorney or especially some national law firm is sending you a cease and desist letter, you really need to get professional help from an attorney to advise you about whether or not there has been an infringement and then to respond formally to that complaint. You don’t want to just let it go by the by and again, you don’t want to be bullied either, which is why it’s a good idea to seek the counsel of an attorney and they can tell you whether or not that letter has merit.

[00:42:20] SV: Just one last quick question, if you do receive that cease and desist letter, is it typically that company, their attorney or whatever, or maybe not a company, it’s a small seller with a small brand but they have it patented and whatever and you get that. Is the first step usually for them to send you the cease and desist and then have you just stop selling it or do they like say, “Stop selling it we’re going to sue you for the past use of our product,” I mean what do you typically see there, if you see any type of trend there at all?

[00:42:55] TL: Most cease and desist letters that are written by lawyers, they usually conclude with the following, “We want you to stop selling the product and withdraw from the market entirely and stop using their brand name or their photos or whatever it is.” They also want to know who your supplier is so that they can go after them although in most cases your supplier is going to be beyond the jurisdiction court. They also want to know how much you’ve sold, how much you’ve profited from the use of the product and usually conclude by saying, “We will negotiate some kind of settlement with you or something like that.” Which is again why it’s a good idea to hire an attorney because a lawyer can gauge whether you really have violated the law or whether they are overstating their claims.

If they’re overstating their claims, I usually tell them either pound sand or yeah, we’ll stop doing this but we’re not going to pay you any money. There’s also the question of just how much inventory you have left. Let’s say you get that cease and desist and you got 4,000 units on a ship coming from China that you just paid for, you have a lot of money invested in that product, what’s going to happen with that run out? Is it all going to be destroyed? Well it might have to be if there’s serious violation of intellectual property laws but if they’re overstating their claim, you might say,” Well fine, we’ll change this but we’re not going to be do it until after our existing stock is all sold out.”

[00:44:50] SV: It really comes down to how severe the claim is?

[00:44:55] TL: It really does, the merits of the claim. If it’s a very meritorious claim then I advise my clients to take it seriously and they’re going to have to take a hit and they might even have to pay some modest settlement which you will negotiate but if it’s a claim that’s marginal or absolutely bogus then we treat it accordingly.

[00:45:20] SV: Sure, okay, good, good. Okay, that’s good advice and I’m glad I had you back on to get caught up to where things are now but I think this is important and I think not to scare people but to make people aware and to do the best job they can when looking at products that they might want to private label. It’s important and also not to mention not going out there and claiming that you have rights that you don’t necessarily have because we want to be as honest as possible too because we want to have a brand that’s not just out there one day and gone the next, we’re building something that we can potentially either build bigger or sell in the future, I think this is good stuff. Is there anything else that you want to close with Ted before we wrap this up?

[00:46:05] TL: I hope that’s it Scott, I wish your listeners well and I really enjoy working with them and if anyone has specific questions I’d be happy to entertain them. I just want to underscore I’m an attorney and I value my law license so nothing that I have said here today should be construed as legal advice. If you or your listeners have any specific questions they should address them to a qualified attorney.

[00:46:32] SV: Yeah, that’s great and again if anyone wants to get a hold of you what is your website again?

[00:46:37] TL: It’s tedlawfirm.com and you can always email me at ted@tedlawfirm.com.

[00:46:46] SV: All right cool, and I’ll put them in the show notes as well, so anybody that wants to head over to this episode can check that out and we’ll definitely link that up in the show notes. This has been great, Ted I want to thank you again for going out there and helping people just like this coming out here. You didn’t have to do this but you did and there’s some of the listeners that are going to need your help in the future, whether it’s battling a hijacker or maybe a patent issue. I think it’s good to have someone that’s in his space and you do specialize in private labelers currently. I think it’s really, really good stuff. Once again I want to thank you man, appreciate it and keep doing what you’re doing.

[00:47:27] TL: My pleasure Scott.

[00:47:27] SV: Okay, so there you have it. Hopefully, hopefully, this didn’t scare everyone off because this can be scary. I mean when you think about it and you’re saying to yourself, “Oh my gosh I didn’t know that I was violating a patent.” You definitely want to do your research but me personally, I’m going to do my best to make sure that I don’t violate a patent and that could be talking to the supplier, trying to get a little bit more of a relationship there, hearing if there has been any claims, doing that type of stuff and then if I really want to go after this product and I think that there’s a bigger brand right now selling something identical to that, then I’m probably going to want to back off and I’ll go in another direction.

Again I just wanted you guys to be aware of this, Ted had contacted me and said, “I’m getting a lot of questions about this, it’s a little bit unknown to most people and I really wanted to give some clear guidelines as to what you can do to prevent this and at least set yourself up so you don’t fall into having any type of legal issues hopefully down the road. If you do, knowing also what kind of actions to take to move through that as well. The last thing I want to do real quick is just remind you guys that if you wanted to download the show notes to this and the transcripts, you can head over to the blog post that accompanies this podcast episode. We’re starting to include them and I’ve mentioned this before.

It’s the transcripts and this one here will probably be a good one because there’s a lot of things that we talked about, it will be kind of nice to go through that and even download it and keep it as a little cheat sheet. You can head over to theamazingseller.com/186 that’s the episode. You could also find the contact information to contact Ted if you’re interested or if you get in a jam and you want to reach out to him. He’s so giving, he’s an awesome guy and he is definitely, definitely, someone that you are going to want to reach out to if you ever have any questions so definitely, check out Ted’s website. Again I will put all the information, the contact information in the show notes to this episode.

Once again, that’s 186, so theamazingseller.com/186. All right guys, that is going to wrap up this episode, I want to remind you guys one last time, I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, you guys know the drill, say it with me and say it loud, say it proud, let’s do it, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you back here on the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…first name and a brief question and then I’ll do my best to air it on an upcoming show.

Now you guys that have been listening for a very long time know that this is like one of the highlights of my week, I love listening to the listener questions and then just being able to connect and being able to interact with you by listening to this message and then answering it almost as if we were in that coffee shop that you guys hear me talk about so often. Right. Now if you guys are brand new and you’re listening to me and you’re like who the heck is this guy and why is he so fired up? Let me just say that I just get fired up to be able to sit down and talk about this stuff.

I recently was in South Carolina or actually North Carolina and South Carolina. I was able to meet with about five people in a coffee shop and we were doing just this and it was awesome. When I get to do this on a weekly basis it just really does get me fired up but I’m pretty much fired up all the time anyway. Now let me also talk about a couple of things that I’ve been kind of playing around with, all right. For those of you that are long-time listeners, I’m talking about before the podcast was even created.

We started the Facebook group with no one in it and now we’re up over 25,000 people and I’m doing these periscopes and at any given time we can have 300-400 people on at a time and I love connecting and interacting and it’s becoming a little bit harder but with the social media channels it’s making it easier. That’s why I love doing the periscopes, which Periscope is kind of like an extension of the Ask Scott in a sense so if you guys are brand new and you haven’t watched any of the periscopes yet you can do that by heading over to theamazingseller.com/scope or you can just go to the Periscope, download the app, periscope.tv that is and then just search for me @ScottVoelker and you’ll find me and then from there whenever I do a periscope then you can actually watch or you can be notified and all that stuff.

I got to give you guys a little bit of a story, tell you guys a little bit of a story that is. I was sitting there Easter day and I was talking to my son and he’s talking about Snapchat. I’ve been hearing this Snapchat thing for a very long time and I’ve just been ignoring it, all right. I really wanted to understand like what’s the value in it and was it just for kids and he soon shared with me that it’s not just for kids, that it’s a great medium, a great platform for people that just want to be able to connect and show a little bit more behind the scenes and a little bit more inside of that person’s life.

[00:02:48] SV: I said, “You know what? I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to try this thing and I’m going to see if I can get my head wrapped around it.” So I have and I’ve started to do these snaps as they call them and it’s really just going to be another form, another way for me to be able to connect with you. If you are interested in following me on Snapchat, you have to download the app and then once you do, search for me @ScottVoelker1 so that’s @ScottVoelker1 and you’ll find me on there.

I’m going to probably be a little bit goofier there. I’m going to probably share with you some rants that I wouldn’t necessarily share anywhere else because they’re only ten seconds long or they can just be an image. It’s a great way for me to kind of like take these little snapshots of my day or of my rants and then I can just put them there. They’re only good for 24 hours, I won’t be recording them so it’s only going to be there and I’ll also be able to give you guys a little bit more like lessons but quick lessons of what I’ve learned, what I’m doing, what I’m struggling with, what I’m trying to overcome, all of that stuff will be happening inside of this because it’s easy. The only way I was going to do it is if it was easy. Just like Periscope, Periscopes are really fun because all you do, is you literally download the app, you have it on your phone, you hit record or start broadcasting and boom, you’re off to the races and people just start connecting and you have that real live interaction.

I love doing that stuff because it does connect me with you and it’s almost like we’re sitting in that room together and that’s what I love and that’s why I love the Ask Scott session which this is here. All right, so that’s what’s happening ,a little bit of a back story there of how it always kind of starting to come to these different platforms but we’re going to play around with them, we’re going to see what happens. If you guys enjoy them, let me know. If you do go on Snapchat, definitely, definitely, send me a snap.

If you’re on there you can send me a snap. Tell me what the podcast is doing for you or what you like about it, what you don’t like about it, let me know. I’d love to hear from you, so definitely do that all right and I’ll respond. Okay, now before we jump into today’s questions which I’m really, really excited about, there are some good questions here guys by the way and keep them coming, I did want to acknowledge the Facebook group. Like I said, we’re up over 25,000 people in there which is awesome, what I want you guys to do as well, I want you to be part of that group if you aren’t already.

If you are, I still want you to do this. I want you to go into the Facebook group, okay. Oh well, I should probably tell you guys the address if you guys are not long time listeners and you don’t know the address or if you’re not connected there in that community which is a wealth of information and a great community, theamazingseller.com/fb you’ll get approved once you request. You just have to accept the request and we’ll go ahead and get a  moderator to approve you.

[00:05:35] SV: Then what I want you to do though is I want you to tag me, just go ahead and type in Scott Voelker, it will come up and then just tag me and then I want you to let me know, what’s the one thing that you love about the podcast. I want you to tell me what is the one thing that you love about it, if you want to also tell me how long you’ve been a listener that would be cool too. This way here I’ll be notified and I’ll see that and I would love to hear from you. Okay. Definitely do that inside of the Facebook group, the TAS Facebook group that would be awesome.

One last thing about the Facebook group. There is a wealth of information there like I’d said, if you search the box there, there’s like a little search box, if you search in that box for whatever you’re struggling with or a question that you have you’re probably going to find the answer because there’s going to be answers that have been already talked about or questions that have already been talked about that now are there. You can’t just find them because there’s so much information, so just go in the search field, okay, there’s a little search box there on Facebook in the community and then just type in your question. If you’re looking for product research or if you’re looking for Amazon Pay Per Click, just type that it in there and you’ll find all of the threads that have been talked about about that discussion. You can even get more granular if you want to so definitely use that resource free, all right? Just do that.

Okay. I think I’ve rambled long enough here, I wanted to talk about the Snapchat thing, the Periscope thing, these are just different ways for me to connect with you and I do want to connect with you so I just thought that I’d share them and yeah, I’m going to stop talking now. Let’s go ahead and listen to the first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[ASK SCOTT SESSION]

[00:07:07] DAVID: Hi Scott, David from Ireland here and thanks a mill for putting all the information out there that you have so far and I’m loving the podcast and my girlfriend on the other hand is not loving them so much because she’s now competing for my attention with some guy named Scott but I’m very appreciative for them. I’ve just started out, I’m still picking my first product and I’ve been using Jungle Scout and I found a product that I think might be good one to start with. It meets all the criteria you list in your podcast. It’s small, lightweight, easy to source and the sales, the top ten sellers would be selling in excess of 3,000 units it would appear. Actually there’s not even ten sellers it’s probably around seven or eight who are selling this particular product.

After all these sellers, the top few have reviews in the hundreds and then after that they drop down to below the 50 review mark. There’s one particular seller who I’ve been tracking, who has reviews between 40 and 50 and that’s where I feel I could start in. He’s selling between 20 to 30 units a day. Now the problem with the product is that it’s selling for around the $10 mark which I know is below what you would suggest. It doesn’t seem to be a race to the bottom with this product, all the sellers seem to be selling around $9, $10. Now as regards to selling multipacks sort of the products to bring the price up, some of the sellers are already selling multipacks and it’s for a similar price.

I guess, I’m just wondering, is this a product I should avoid because it’s only giving me a net of about $5 per unit sold, obviously is something that you think still could be a viable product. I’d love to get your thoughts on this Scott, thanks a million, keep doing what you’re doing.

[00:09:17] SV: Hey David from Ireland, what’s up man? Thank you so much for the question, all the way from Ireland, I love it that we’re global all over the place, this is great. Thank you so much but yeah let’s dig into this a little bit. A lot of people out there are saying like, “Scott, you know since your podcast and since other people are talking about this private label thing and this Amazon thing, it’s just becoming harder and harder to get started.”

You know what? You may be right. I’ll say you know what maybe you’re right. Okay. I don’t necessarily think that there’s not products that you can find out there but whenever you get awareness whether I did it or someone else did it, there’s always going to be awareness when something starts to work, right? Does that mean that there’s no opportunity? Absolutely not, okay.

Now when your prices are that low and your margins are that low, it does make it harder to get in the game because you have less upfront costs so it’s easier to get in the game. It sounds like you found a product that would be a great product to test with, right? Does that mean that’s going to be your only product? No. What I would probably think here, right off the bat is number one, I would want to look at the trends. I would want to see if this is a product that’s trending or is it a product that’s on an upward trend or is it one that’s going to kind of peak and then kind of go back down because it’s seasonal. I would want to look at that stuff first.

Number two, I would also then want to look at those bundles that you talk about or the multipacks, I’d like to see how many multipacks are selling and then that would give me another gauge if there’s a market for that. The other thing I would need to know is, this is just like, let’s call it our test product. This is we’re going to test on a small run, we can go ahead beyond, you say you’re only competing against like, some of them have only 40 reviews. I mean, gosh at that price point you can buy, let’s say 300-400 and then do a 100 giveaway and you can get yourself 40 or 50 reviews almost right?

That would be a great way to get started, you don’t have to have a huge upfront cost but I would want as that next part of this strategy of this plan, is to know that I had another product that I could then sell that would be on an upper end, at an upper price, so this way here, I know that this is just like the gateway, this is kind of like the way to get me started but then it’s going to lead me into other products that could potentially sell at a higher ticket price, higher amount and then that way there you can start looking at products that are selling for $25 or $50 or $75 or $100 right?

I’ll give you an example, there’s a product that I’m looking at right this second. It’s not in my particular brand, it’s in a partner of mine that I have now that we kind of work on the same brand together, we can kind of do a spinoff in that brand but I’m looking at this one item that sells between … There’s three different versions of it, it sells for, let’s see $100, it sells for $150 and it sells for just over $200 for these three different kinds and three different styles of this product but guess what? They also sell accessories around this particular product that sell for maybe 10 bucks, 15 bucks maybe 20 bucks. Right.

[00:12:40] SV: I know that I can either start with the high priced item or I can start with the lower priced item just to see if I can get some traction and then I’ll have kind of like the intel around that market and then I can launch that more expensive product or the other way around. There’s not really one way that this can be done, there’s multiple different ways. It really comes down to your comfort level, it comes down to your risk tolerance and some people would say, “ You know what Scott, I won’t even mess around with that product that he’s looking at. I just wouldn’t even bother with it.” And that’s okay that means there’s more opportunity for you.

Again, I know right now first hand, in my partner that I’m helping with his brand, he has a product that only sells for $10.99, he buys it for about a buck and a quarter, so he’s making a little bit of money on that. Does that mean that that’s going to be the ultimate product? No, but he got started, it’s bringing in sales right now, just the other day, he had 24 sales on two different SKUs. It’s working, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the end all it’s not going to be that but it is a gateway. For me personally, if those numbers look like that and you could create a similar product maybe with a different spin or maybe a different bundle or something like that then I would probably go for it myself personally.

Again, I can’t say that for sure because I don’t see your numbers, I don’t see the product, I don’t know. All I can say is that I don’t necessarily just say, “Oh it’s that low of a price, I’m not going to look at it.” I would have to look and then plan a little bit further ahead. Does it have other products that sell for more that I could potentially roll out in the future or could I start with those and then add this one later as an accessory? Hopefully, that made sense, I know I’m kind of rambling here a little bit and ranting here a little bit but I hear this a lot, I hear a lot of people saying,” It’s becoming harder and I probably shouldn’t even get started,” and you know what, that’s good news for us if that is you.

I hope it’s not but if it is that’s good news for us because it just means people are starting to get out of the game or they’re thinking that it’s too hard so I’m not going to get started. That’s going to happen all the time, people are saying right now that you can’t build an authority website and drive traffic there and get affiliates commissions. Those people that are thinking that, you know what, it makes it easier for the people that are doing it consistently and that are building out those sites because they’re going to make money at that if they stick with it. End of rant, let’s go ahead and listen to the next question and I’ll give you my answer.

You know what before we jump into that I did have this pulled up and I just went over to it when I was switching to the different screen. I had episode 173 pulled up, if you guys want to hear how this guy did it on a small budget on a low ticket price and he’s doing pretty well, it’s episode 173, his name is Joe, it’s a case study I did with him. He had no idea if it was going to work, he did it and he was able to make some money at it. Just another validation point that you can do it on a small budget and with a lower ticket price. You just have to find the right product, that’s 173, theamazingseller.com/173. All right, let’s listen to that next question.

[00:15:43] PETER: Good day Scott, Peter here from Australia, smashing through your podcast, they’re really great stuff. I’ve implemented your email series I’m getting a lot of seller feedback now. The question is, should we be asking for seller feedback or product feedback? Just want to make sure which one is more important, I’ve got an excellent seller feedback score but not as many product reviews. Keep up the awesome work, my sales are up 400% in the last three months since listening to your podcast, really appreciate the great stuff.

[00:16:12] SV: Hey Peter, thank you so much for the question and again thank you for the accent, love it, I love it, I love it that you’re smashing through the episodes. You guys have heard of me in the past when I get the listeners standing there in their message through and they’re like, “I’m smashing through, I’m gobbling it up,” I love that, okay? Just shows that you guys are taking action and you’re consuming.

Now the other thing I want to say Peter is that it sounds like you’re consuming but then you’re also applying because 400% up since listening to the podcast, that’s like crazy and that is awesome and I want you to email me and let me know a little bit more details on that maybe we can get you on the show. We can talk about that because that’s pretty amazing. Anyway, let’s go ahead and answer your question.

What I would like to say is this. Feedback, and people that are brand new, feedback is really on your overall account right? Does that help your product listing, yes and no and I feel again, this is just my speculation. This doesn’t mean that I have any hard proof or evidence of this, other than it makes a lot of sense to me because Amazon treats our sellers account as our overall kind of like authority, how well we are doing as far as being a seller and all of that stuff.

Will they help us rank a little bit better or take care of us a little bit more if we are more seasoned, I think they will. It’s kind of like a website that is 2 days old and a website that is 5 years old. Google gives that 5-year-old website a little bit more love on that domain name. I feel that yes it is important but once you get to a certain point I don’t necessarily think you have to go and grab all the seller feedback before you grab the reviews.

Now, the reason why I’ve talked about this in the past is about why I go and get the feedback first and then I go get the review is because I want to make sure that I can filter that stuff. I might only do this, and I’m actually changing it up a little bit as we speak because once you kind of filter through and what I mean by filter through is, if you get a negative feedback and then in that feedback, they leave you a negative review, in a sense they talk about the product, Amazon will allow you to remove that feedback because it’s product related, they don’t want any product reviews on the feedback so you can notify them.

I’ve talked about that in the past. Now, does that mean that’s always going to be the case? No, but right now, from the time that I’m recording this, it does work so I still do that but once you figure out that your product is going to be well received and you’re not receiving these negative product reviews and you feel more confident then yes, you can go after the reviews and it sounds like that might be where you’re at. Then, because when you do kind of intercept the feedback first and you ask for the feedback first then you ask for the review, you are going to lose out on some reviews because not everyone’s going to do the feedback and then do a review.

[00:19:12] SV: If you can cut out the feedback and then just go directly for a review, you are going to increase your reviews but you have to do that with caution because if you’re brand new and you’re doing that and you start to go through that sequence, well what can happen then is you can start getting a large pile of negative reviews on that listing and those are not going to be removed unless that buyer goes in there and does it for you.

Sounds like in your situation or anyone that is listening in this situation, if you already have a pretty well-established seller feedback score then you might want to just start going for the reviews, especially if your product has already been verified that people are accepting it well because the thing is you may launch a product and not realize that there are certain things that you need to fix until after you get it into the people’s hands. If we can intercept that seller feedback and not have that go on our review that would be great, right?

Again, we’re not doing this to really game the system, we’re doing this so we can filter it so it doesn’t hurt us but then we can also learn from it. I did a whole episode back on, let me see here, I think it was episode 77, let me see here, yes, it was episode 77 and that one there we talked all about feedback and reviews and I talked to Chris Guthrie who he actually did it a little bit different in the beginning. He went after the reviews really hard and then he switched it around once he had some reviews and then he went after feedback and reviews. That was his strategy. We talk all about it on that episode. If you guys are interested in listening to that, go back and listen to episode 77, the link will be theamazingseller.com/77 or you can just go to the show notes to this episode, which this episode is episode 187, so the show notes to this episode will be let’s see, theamazingseller.com/187. I’ve got to think here.

That is the episode that we are on currently right now, that is the Ask Scott session number 54, so 187. You’ll find all the show notes and that link will be there for that episode as well. All right, so that’s what I would do Peter and it sounds like you’re doing very, very well so again, like I said, I would love to hear more about your story and possibly we can share it out with the TAS listeners out there and I think that everyone right here is like, “Yeah, “They’ve raised their hands like, “Yeah, we would love to hear your story.” That’s it, that’s going to wrap up that question, thanks for submitting it by the way. Let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:21:40] GHASSAN: Hey Scott, this is Ghassan from Toronto, Canada. Thanks so much man for all your work. I can’t thank you enough, this has been by far the best podcast that I’ve been listening to and it’s a lot of information. I mean it’s just blowing my mind that this is all for free, so I can’t thank you enough. My question is about sponsored ads and I don’t believe that this has been covered before. Whenever we actually search for a product on Amazon, I can see that there’s two types of sponsored ads. There’s the one that’s showing just above the organic listings and there’s the one that’s showing on the side.

Now, from your experience is there a way for us to choose whether it’s going to be the one that is listed above the organic searches or to choose the one that is on the side. Which one is better for conversion? That’s pretty much it. I would like to know your thoughts about this, whether we can actually choose where to place our ads and which one has a, let’s say, a better conversion rate? Thanks so much man, keep up the good work and I hope to hear from you soon, take care bye.

[00:23:18] SV: Hey Ghassan, thank you so much for the question, all the way from Canada, love it. That is so awesome, thank you so much for the question, yeah let’s go ahead and dive into a little bit of the Pay Per Click discussion. Everyone loves to talk about Pay Per Click, I do I know that. Yeah, this is actually a great point and you’re right, I don’t think I have talked about this but it is something that I look at especially when I’m looking at a product. Now this doesn’t mean that I won’t look at a product if I don’t see paid ads and what he’s talking about is though Amazon pay Per Click ads, anyone that’s brand new, it’s the PPC, the Pay Per Click ads that we can run against our keywords for our products.

In most categories, you can run Pay Per Click, some are gated, some are not allowing any more, some aren’t even able to use Pay Per Click so most of them you can’t but some you can’t. Let’s just say for example, that you’re looking at a product and then you type in that keyword, let’s say Garlic Press. If you type that in, you’re going to notice that there might be an ad at the top, there might be some ads on the side, then as you scroll down you might see some in the middle and then you might scroll all the way down and see some at the bottom. All right.

You are going to want to look at this just to see if people are running ads, that’s a good thing, it’s not a bad thing but also the one thing you have to keep in mind is that Amazon is always testing, so you may look one day at Garlic press and you might see that there’s a banner at the top and then the next day you might see that there’s no banner at the top it’s only on the side. They’re always testing placement that’s the beautiful thing about them is they’re always trying to find the best way to convert for traffic for those particular keywords.

They’re always doing these tests and you don’t really know about it but all you have to be aware of is that they’re running these tests and you can be benefiting from these but you bring up a great point because if we are looking for something let’s say Garlic press and we don’t see any ad at the top, we don’t see any side-banner ads and we only see something at the bottom. That’s not really good because we know that we can’t get on page one unless we rank for page one.

All right. If we want to rank for page one, we have to do some work to get there, we got to get sales through that keyword that’s how it works. Right. If we run Pay Per Click we can force ourselves there in a sense, if we have a good product, if we have a good amount of reviews and if we can convert someone to a buyer through that keyword, we know that we can start to rank for that keyword but if we can’t be displayed above the fold, we call that above the fold so if you land on a page and before you do any scrolling you can see your ad somewhere that’s above the fold.

The minute you scroll now we’re kind of below the fold and a lot of times people might not scroll, they might only look at the top whatever their browser or whatever their screen size is so they may only look at the top five or they may only look at the top ad or the right side of that ad because it has three or four ads being displayed. You do need to think about that stuff, now does that mean that you don’t go after a product if it doesn’t show ads but only on the bottom? No it doesn’t mean that because sometimes you can find a product that you don’t even need to really do a lot of Pay Per Click because it’s so obscure, it’s just not that competitive that you could just probably just show up on page one for getting some sales through a promotion and start showing up and you won’t have to run many ads at all.

[00:26:45] SV: That doesn’t mean that I would like to do that because I like the control of being able to run some ads, it just helps the process but you bring up a great point. If you are looking at a product that would be one thing that I would look at, I would say, “Okay, here’s the main keyword that people are searching for,” and anyone that is brand new and wants to know how you find that keyword. If you’re looking at your competitors, look at your top five competitors, look and see the common theme there of their titles, that will kind of give you an idea of what keywords they’re targeting and then you want to take that keyword and that keyword could be three, four words long, could be stainless steel garlic press.

Then if you search for that in Amazon, then you’re going to see the ads that are being displayed and that will give you a good idea of the competition. It will also show you what ads are being displayed, where they’re being displayed and again, you might want to also check that on different browsers or different computers because then sometimes you’re looking at it maybe at your place and then you might go over to your workplace and you may be on a different server because they’re delivering this from different places and all that complicated stuff because you’re not being fed the same ads that someone else is maybe. Bottom line is you do want to do that, that is one exercise I think that you could add to your product research to kind of see if there’s ads being run.

I don’t think that that would be something that I would say, “If I don’t see ads then I’m not going to advertise or I’m not going to go after that product.” That’s just means that it would be something that I would consider if I thought that it was going to be harder to rank for that keyword. This kind of happened in my partner’s second brand that we launched. It kind of happened and he had already picked a product, I didn’t really help him with that first product, I did a little bit but not a ton and then after the fact, we noticed that the ads were only being displayed on the bottom.

I’m like, “Hmm,” I started looking at this category and I started looking at the keyword and in that category and in that keyword search, that’s all that they were being displayed, it’s at the bottom of this page. It was becoming harder to get traction, we started getting some traction but that one there definitely is harder. Now when we released the next two, we did take that in consideration because we didn’t want to have a product that couldn’t be displayed on top and the bottom or on the side or even in the middle. If you can find one that also advertise in the middle, those are great because now they’re kind of like in the organic search in a sense and a lot of people don’t even realize that’s a sponsored ad. All right.

[00:29:08] SV: This is a great, great thing to add to your product research to also let you know that you’re going to be able to advertise this using Amazon Pay Per Click and like I’ve said before, if you guys are trying to rank for a keyword, the way that you’re going to rank for that keyword is to get sales through that keyword. An easy way to do it and I say easy way, it’s still going to cost you money, it’s going to be time, it’s going to be your consistency, it’s buying that keyword traffic, showing up on page one and then getting sales through that.

If you’re not having a good base of reviews to start, it might not be worth it right away because you’re not going to convert. If you get seen in your ads but you only have two reviews and everyone else has 500 reviews, you’re probably not going to convert that high. Okay so you may need to do that giveaway in order to get those reviews so you can convert. All right, I’m starting to go on a little bit of a tangent there. All right.

That is pretty much going to wrap up this session of Ask Scott, I wanted to thank everyone for submitting your questions, keep them coming. Again like I said,  want to remind you, head over to theamazingseller.com/ask, leave a voicemail there, leave your first name and a short question. I’ll do my best to air it on the show, we have a bunch more in the queue and I want to keep getting them in because it allows me to continue to do the Ask Scott session and you guys know that I love, love, love doing it. Again I want to remind you this, that if you want more of the raw, kind of like everyday type stuff not every day, trying to do like every few days, is where I jump on periscope and I’ll answer questions live. If you’re on periscope and you have a question there, I’ll most likely answer it there like in real time. Definitely head over to periscope.tv search for @ScottVoelker you’ll find me. Go ahead and follow me and then you’ll get any notifications when I do a live feed there.

All right. Then again Snapchat, I’m going to go ahead and try to do some daily snaps, we’ll see how that goes but if you want to follow along over there definitely check out Snapchat. My username over there is ScottVoelker1 so @ScottVoelker1 you’ll find me and I’ll try to do some daily snaps there and I’m kind of looking forward to that. It seems pretty easy and it seems pretty cool, so I’m going to check it out.

[00:31:28] SV: Then the last, last thing that I want to bring up, if you guys are brand spanking new, I’m talking like newbie and you guys want like a crash course on how to get started selling on Amazon, on getting yourself just kind of like understanding the business model. I’ve created a free resource for you and you can find that by heading over to freeprivatelabelcourse.com, again that’s freeprivatelabelcourse.com. That is a ten-day email course that has videos, it has walk-throughs, all of that stuff, everything in between is there for you inside of that so definitely go check that out.

All right guys, that is going to wrap it up. I want to thank you guys, I really, really love the community that we’ve created here, all you TASers out there I look forward to meeting you whether it’s on periscope, whether it’s on Snapchat or whether it’s in Denver on our upcoming event or wherever it is. I really look forward to being able to meet you one day and shake hands and just talk business. All right.

That’s it, that’s going to wrap it up. Remember , I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, get pumped let’s go, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…just bounce ideas back and forth. Now let me just let you guys know, if you guys don’t know Chris Schieffer, he’s a good friend of mine. I actually met him through this Amazon business, since I started my podcast. We were in a mastermind group together in the very, very beginning and we’ve become really, really good friends. He helps me run the live workshops, he helps me run the private label classroom and we just become really, really good friends.

We also decided to recently do a live event, it’s called TAS Breakthrough Live. Alright. Those tickets have already been sold and they’ve already been sold out, there’s no more seats available. We’re doing ten hot seats and we have 20 additional seats that people can be there to kind of witness those hot seats and also ask questions, add their advice. It’s a great place to come together alive and this is going to be our first one ever and I’m really, really excited about that.

Now, we were doing these hot seats on the podcast to kind of get our training down, we’re getting ready for the big day. We’re going to go ahead and kind of do the workouts before the big game. Right. We’re going to do this again, this is our third one, we’ve already done two other ones. If you’ve missed them, you’re probably going to want to check those out, they were really, really good. We got a really good response from them. That is episode 162 and 174. The links to those will be in the show notes to this episode or you could just go directly to them by heading over to theamazingseller.com/162 or theamazingseller.com/174 and those were great episodes as well and actually I’ll read the titles to those and what they were about.

Episode 162 was, Why Are My Sales Slow And How To Increase Them. We actually looked at their product, really looked at their marketing, looked at their strategy and we broke it down and we went back and forth and it was really, really great value for everyone to listen in on that. The other one and more recent one was 174 and that one was, How Should I Launch My Retail Business On Amazon. Someone who already had an established retail business but wanted to then get into the Amazon game and that was another great episode.

Today, we’re going to do another great episode and I’m really excited about this because, well Chris and I love talking about this stuff  and it’s just a great thing to be able to look at a business and really hone in and see exactly what we think can be tweaked if it can be tweaked at all. Again, these are just our opinions, just our advice from seeing different businesses now that we’ve helped other people.

[00:02:48] SV: All right, so I just wanted to give you a little bit of the play by play there and also let you guys know that in the future, we may be doing more live events, I mean in-person events. If you wanted to sign up to our list of notifications or letting you know the details as if that does happen, you can head over to this link right here that is theamazingseller.com/live. Then from there if you sign up on that particular email list, you’ll only be notified when and if we do more in the future in a different city so this way here you can make it to one of those if you want to.

They’re always going to be smaller, we want to keep them small because we know that a lot of people learn better and you get more from being in a smaller group. Really excited about this one coming up and I’m sure that we’ll be doing some Periscopes from there and we will be giving you guys the play by play for sure. All right, I’m going to stop rambling and talking right now, you guys can see that I get all excited about this because the hot seats are so much fun and I really do enjoy them, so sit back, relax and enjoy the hot seat.

[00:04:00] SV: Okay Chris are you ready to do another hot seat session, you and I both love doing this, are you ready to rock?

[00:04:05] CS: I am brother, I’m sitting here with a mug of broth, a big cup of water, sitting here-

[00:04:11] SV: Broth? What are you …? Chicken soup?

[00:04:12] CS: No, it’s just chicken broth I just do that just about every morning, either chicken broth or beef broth,

[00:04:16] SV: Yeah, I know I’ve actually heard some studies about that I mean on bone broth and stuff like that, it’s supposed to be really good for you. I haven’t tapped into that yet. Is that the reason you’re doing that or is that something that you just enjoy, beef broth and chicken broth in the morning?

[00:04:29] CS: It’s something that I’ve been doing for a while and I don’t have a gall bladder and so it’s harder for me to absorb a lot of nutrients and it’s a way to get a lot of that stuff without taking like a multivitamin. It does that and actually it helps, you and I talked about a little bit in the past, I also do intermittent fasting and so it’s a way to satiate a little bit of hunger. It’s a little bit of protein, a little bit of fat, without a whole lot of carbohydrates, it doesn’t spike my blood sugar, it doesn’t do any kind of that stuff so it’s a good way to start the morning.

[00:05:01] SV: Wow, we’ve got a little lesson there this morning from Chris Schieffer, very cool.

[00:05:02] CS: Dropping nutrition bombs.

[00:05:05] SV: All right, cool. We’ve done a couple of these so far, this is kind of our training, I guess you and I we’re kind of getting ready for a live event which is happening here, May 1st which I’m getting very excited about and depending on when this airs, we’ll either be just about ready to do that or we will be doing that. I’m not really sure how far out this will be displayed or, not displayed what am I trying to say here, I guess heard from everyone so definitely getting ready for that.

You and I have been doing these, these are really fun. The audience listeners are really enjoying these, so today we’re going to do another one. What I want to do is I want to play this particular question from one of our students actually, one of the private label classroom students and he had a question and you and I kind of gave him some  answers through email and stuff but now what we want to do is talk about it and really just give our thoughts, bounce some ideas off of each other and really walk people through our coaching strategy I guess as far as how that would look and also what we plan to do here in Denver really soon. I’m excited to do so. Are you ready to listen to the question Chris?

[00:06:12] CS: Let’s do this brother.

[00:06:14] SV: All right, let’s go ahead and listen to the question and then we’ll go ahead and bounce off some ideas.

[00:06:17] AMIR: Hey Scott and Chris, hey classmates, this is Amir calling from sunny Singapore. First off, I want to thank you guys, Scott and Chris for all the guidance and support. Unfortunate for me, I joined the PLC in a bit late stage only after my product was being made in China and this is my only regret that I didn’t have joined sooner I’m sure it would have made me some major mistakes as maybe going to see in a moment.

To give you a bit of the background on my question, last November, I got presents, something that blew my mind and the same period of time I have heard about the private label business from a friend of a friend and decided to try to manufacture and sell my own version of this cool product I found on Amazon. I didn’t really check the market depth or any of the stuff here that I learned here later on. It was more of a gut feeling and an experiment for me because the product is very trendy, it’s a new product and it has kind of a buzz around it right now.

I assumed it’s going to be very competitive market. I was right, it is. It’s kind of like the selfie stick when it was first introduced into the world if you can remember that. However, I planned a strategy to avoid the massive competitor and to find my own place in this market, I decided to focus on a niche inside the new market and my plan was not to compete directly with the other products but to brand and customize my product in a way that I will fit better to a specific group of consumers within my market.

In that niche there is, today there is only one direct competitor, it’s a big known brand, it’s big also outside of Amazon and between the two of us I’m the low cost choice. I just figure that if I can get just 20% of this Amazon pride I will do fine. I started selling my product in February, a month ago. I think I did everything by the book but unfortunately sales are not so good. I believe my title and bullet points, description, images are solid and I have today about 70 reviews with very good rating.

Sales are only one unit a day, some days I don’t sell any. Also almost none of my sales comes from PPC campaign. I’m not sure why but I get very low impressions on PPC. The strange thing is that I have a campaign that runs on my direct competitor keywords, the big brand that I told you about just a second ago and I don’t get any impression from the campaign. I pay less than a dollar for the last month. It feels like either Amazon is locking me from competing with him or maybe nobody is reaching for his product but it doesn’t really make sense because I know he sells… Jungle Scout says he sells 50 products a day. This is more or less the situation, my question is do you think it can be resolved or should I move on to my next product? Thank you very much guys, ciao.

[00:09:50] SV: Okay. Chris what do you think? I am going to let you have first take at this, what are your first thoughts from Amir’s question or situation I should say? It’s not even a question, there are some different things we should talk about here and I have some thoughts I know you do too.

[00:10:05] CS: There’s a couple of things here, it’s sounded like he knew coming into this that it’s going to be a bit of a trendy product. Scott you and I happen to know what this product is just  because he sent us a link to it but the first thing that I did after you and I sat down and started talking about this was I went to Google Trends and looked. It is a very trendy product when you look at Google Trends, it goes straight up and straight down and then straight up the straight down, the interest in it is really, really up and down in terms of the broad category of this product, right?

Not necessarily the thing that he’s niched but the main people that would be competitors of his, with the same type of product, the search volume for those goes way up and way down. That was the first thing that I noticed. While there may have been a lot of volume in the fourth quarter, it’s not necessarily as much volume there now. Another thing that concerned me a little bit about this product is just kind of the overall price point, I know that’s not something that he necessarily brought up and we don’t know what his margins are but just looking at the market in general, it’s probably something that I wouldn’t have chosen because of the lower price point.

The third thing that I noticed and he did what is traditionally good advice and it’s pick a niche inside your product and go for it. On Amazon that can be both a blessing and a curse, while we do want to pick a niche, let’s say, people who want to cook better at home right? On Amazon it’s going to be a broader niche, you’re not necessarily going to tailor your product specifically for one audience inside of a niche, does that make sense?

[00:11:42] SV: Yeah, yeah totally.

[00:11:44] CS: It’s a little bit of a different game on Amazon than it would be in a traditional marketplace. If you were to start a company off of Amazon it’s totally normal to go out and say, “I only want to work with professional chefs. That’s who my audience is going to be.” On Amazon it’s a much broader base than that and you can actually hurt yourself by limiting your niche that far on Amazon and just knowing what the product is I think he may have done that a little bit because the market that he’s going after isn’t really the same market that would traditionally buy this product.

I totally understand how he got to where he is but the main product competitor that I think he’s talking about is a completely different product category. It’s something in a different category on Amazon and it’s something at least if I was looking for it, I would be looking for that specific thing, I wouldn’t be looking for what he has, does that make sense now?

[00:12:39] SV: Yeah, it totally does and I’m just going to cut in here real quick and yes. There’s definitely a search that could be done for this exact thing so with that being said, you need to make sure that you’re definitely targeting that one thing, right? I kind of think he is but I kind of think he’s not. I know you and I both looked at the category that it’s listed in and we do think that it could probably even go into another category. Whether that’s your main category or a secondary category, I believe that you could probably do a better job in the category. I know we’ve said before that category doesn’t necessarily do a better job as far as like search goes but why not be in the right category that could give you more eyeballs. Does that make sense Chris?

[00:13:29] CS: It does and that’s something I also want to kind of touch on here quick is, he talked about he’s struggling in the competitor PPC campaign. It’s the competitor that you and I think it is, that competitor is in a different category and one of the things that I’ve noticed and that a lot of people on the TAS community have pointed out is that, even though you’re going after those keywords, if it’s a category that’s slightly different from the one that you’re in, you can bid a lot more and still not show up for PPC which is probably one of the reasons that he is not seeing a lot of impressions on that PPC campaign.

If he were to put it in the same category that his main competitor is in, the person that he’s going after, he might actually see a little of a better result.

[00:14:13] SV: Yeah, absolutely and I want to go back to what he had said I want to highlight something for people that are listening because I think this is pretty cool to kind of I think pull this out of what he had said in the very beginning and that was, he received this or saw someone that received it, I forget it if he received it or someone received it and he was just blown away, he was like, “Wow, this thing is awesome.” Right? Like,” This is cool, this is something I’ve never seen before.” That triggered his idea to go launch something.

Now should he have did more digging and more research? Yes, but I just wanted to highlight that as we are find product ideas doing stuff like this right here and then taking that information and bringing it over to Amazon and seeing if there’s a market or demand or competition, that’s a great way to find new products. That’s what he’s done here and he did try to put a unique spin on it and I think it’s clever but one thing I want to point out before we even go any further here is the very first thing when I pulled this thing up, I didn’t even know the product was and the very first impression that I got from it was totally different than what the product actually is.

[00:15:21] CS: Yes.

[00:15:23] SV: Is that correct?

[00:15:24] CS: Yes.

[00:15:25] SV: It did the same thing for you right?

[00:15:26] CS: Absolutely,

[00:15:27] SV: The very first thing that I would do regardless if you’re going to sell this and continue to go down this path, you got to swap out the main image. The main image needs to represent exactly what it is, not that cool little new thing that you added to it, right? It needs to definitely make you aware. If I was searching for this particular thing and I was scrolling through the top page, all the top listings and I was scrolling by thumbnails because you guys heard us talk about this all the time. It’s like the thumbnail is what grabs the attention, the title gets you found but if I’m scrolling through here and I’d seen his image, I wouldn’t even think it’s the same device. Okay, I just wouldn’t, I’d just think that it’s totally different. I wouldn’t even think it was related really, I would think that it’s something totally different, I mean I don’t know, I can’t even describe it without giving the product away but-

[00:16:19] CS: Let me just give him a little bit of advice here. If you look at all of the other primary images for the competitors, they do a good job of both showing the design of the product and giving people an idea of what it is, right? They’re showing the top and the side and the back all in the shot, he’s just showing the front and while that is his main selling feature in terms of how he niched out and differentiated, it’s not necessarily what people care about, does that make sense? Like-

[00:16:53] SV: It’s cool.

[00:16:53] CS: It’s the thing that sets him apart and it’s really cool but it’s not necessarily what people are looking for as they’re scrolling through the listings because it doesn’t represent at all what the product is. His second image does a much better job of showing kind of both aspects of what the product is and that it is different from the other stuff that’s out there than the first one does.

[00:17:15] SV: Yeah, I absolutely so that would be the first thing I would say. That could help you to really say that that’s going to make you sell 15 a day, I can’t say that but as I’m looking here too Chris and correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t even believe he’s page one for that main keyword. Now, there’s a bunch of different keywords that you’re going after I can tell there Amir but it doesn’t look like this particular one which I would think would be the main one because every other one has this as almost as their first keyword and if that’s the main keyword you’re going for, I don’t see you here which is fine because there’s other keywords that you could probably be going after and I’m going to jump over to page two and see if there’s anything there even, no page two. Jumping over to page three, so basically you might as well even say you’re not even visible, right?

That would be the other thing it’s like, “Okay, how many units do we have to give away to be page one and if we aren’t page one we better make sure that we’re optimized, we’d better make that that picture is going to explain exactly what it is and I don’t know necessarily if I would go too crazy with the Pay Per Click just yet. I would probably want to get my listing optimized, I would want to get my avatar that I’m targeting a little bit more fine-tuned so I can know who I’m targeting with this particular device because this device could actually, like Chris said, it could go after a wider net and you don’t want to exclude them but you do also want to call out on the one that it’s niched out for but you don’t want to lose the ones that are looking for just the generic one either.

The other thing that I’m looking at too is the price point, I don’t know if the price point changed since the time that you launched to the time that it’s selling now but I mean the most expensive one right now that I’m seeing is like $19.90. I’m not even sure if that’s the same, let me see here, I’m on a hover over, no that’s a different device altogether. The one that I’m looking at that would probably be like the main one selling right now is $16.99 and $16.99, they’ve got 1,520 reviews, alright?

The next one I see is $16.99 again, they have 800 reviews another one is 9.99 almost identical and it’s got 1246 reviews. I don’t know what the profit margin is but that’s a really low price point, it kind of seems like you’re going to start running yourself to the bottom. Those are some red flags right now, I’m not really sure what it was when launched but if we looked at this before we even launched we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation because this product might not have even gotten launched, what’s your thoughts on that Chris?

[00:20:05] CS: Scott it sounded like a [inaudible] he says I wish I would have been in the PLC before I was through the process of selecting this product because I probably wouldn’t have picked it. It’s kind of sounds like what he said but he’s overarching question Scott is, should he just scrap it and pick a different product or is there still some stuff he can do.

Correct me if you have a different opinion, I think there is still some stuff that he can do with this and my first one would be to change the category. Right. We know he’s going to sell like one or two a day kind of which is what he was saying in the category that he is in now but it’s going to be a struggle. If changing that category even gets him to three or four a day, that’s probably worth doing. I would tend to think putting it in that same category as his main competitor is going to get him at least in front of the right people and start to push him in that direction, does that make sense?

[00:20:55] SV: Yeah it makes total sense and I guess the other thing that I would add to that is as long as you can optimize what you already have, you’re selling one or two maybe every other day, that’s fine. If you don’t have a ton of inventory and if you can improve that, even maybe run an auto campaign just to kind of get some data going and then from there may be a low bid, maybe just try to grab some of that low-hanging fruit.

It seems like you have over 60 or 70 reviews now, I think that your reviews are going to be okay, if you’re going to start running some Pay Per Click but you really need to make sure that if you’re running Pay Per Click that everything else is really dialed in. I just actually did a periscope yesterday after I did a coaching call, Chris I don’t know if you caught any of that but I basically recapped what I talked about and it’s very similar to this situation because now after the launch, they’re not really getting the sales. They’re getting like two to four sales a day but very first question I asked this person that I was coaching was, let’s look at the numbers. How much is everyone selling right now today? It was basically about couple a hundred per month.

You’re kind of doing what everyone else is doing really, you’re not too far off. I mean with a little bit more work you could probably be at your seven a day because that’s what everybody else is doing right now. I think you have to look at the numbers and when you first get into this you need to understand that either you’re launching at a time that it’s peak … This gentleman that I was talking to yesterday, he was launching in the fourth quarter, so obviously numbers are a little skewed there, now all of a sudden we come into after the fourth quarter and now we’re wondering why the numbers are down.

You need to look at the trends, you need to look at historical data, go to Camel, Camel, Camel, look at these other products, see what they’ve done through the year with the BSRs and all of that stuff and really do that background check in a sense and I think that even though this thing is launched I don’t think it’s a loser, I think it can still work but my next question to myself would be how much time and effort do I want to spend on this or should I pivot and go to a different market?

I look at this too and go like, “Okay, what other products could I sell in this line, we’re always talk about having at least three to five products and a product line, what can we do here? What other products? There’s probably other products, I just don’t know what they are right now and maybe it’s just something that you wanted to launch because you thought that it’s a cool product and you thought you could sell a few, that’s fine but I would want to see, what kind of future I could have for a brand around this. I’m not really sure you could because I do think this is a trend, that’s my thoughts here Chris, what about you?

[00:23:34] CS:I would agree with that completely, I think the thing that’s interesting is he picked a niche that has a lot of possibility for additional products and if this is a niche just in general that’s interesting to him and I think there’s a lot of products in this space in terms of who he’s targeting with not necessarily with this product or product line specifically that he can capitalize on and then maybe down the road, sell them into these products via an up sale or cross sale or something like that. There still is a possibility of some of those related things and I think the niche itself is good, I just don’t necessarily know that this product fits that niche.

[00:24:11] SV: Well, let’s kind of let’s do this real quick, let’s pretend this is a selfie stick, let’s pretend, because that’s what he kind of equated it to. Let’s just say that it’s like a selfie stick and when it came out, I’m sure people were doing really good with it but guess what now. Now all of a sudden, everyone is selling them or they’re trying to sell them and they’re ridiculously low-priced and you can barely keep your head above water. If this is that type of product Chris, what do you do with it?

[00:24:41] CS: The first thing that I would do is, I would do what we said earlier and change that primary image and the overall strategy here for me would be to optimize it as much as possible and then let it run. I wouldn’t get in and tweak it daily like you might do with some other products, I wouldn’t probably even get in and tweak it weekly like I would do with some other products. I would make sure that my title, my bullets and my images were optimized for the niche that I’m going after. I would change that category and then I would start running that little bit PPC campaign that you talked about just to see what I can pick up.

Chances are if he does those things he’s probably going to maybe jump to four or five sales a day if he’s in the right category. Even selling one or two a day it’s not going to be a total loss, it’s just going take a little bit longer to recoup that money. I would take that time that you’re saving from even worrying about the product once you get it tweaked and optimized a little bit and I would invest that in finding another product in the same niche. Now, with the selfie stick where do you go from there? With this one I would look at the audience that he’s targeting. Let’s just say that we have a selfie stick targeted the teenagers. What else are teenagers interested in?

What are the things that would get their parents to buy them a selfie stick? Right. Not necessarily an accessory for selfie stick but something that may relate to it. Props, masks, the photo booth kit. Right. Scott, you were a photographer did you ever do a photo booth at a wedding? Did you ever see those?

[00:26:19] SV: I’ve seen them actually participated in them but I did not do that. That wasn’t our style Chris that wasn’t our style but they do well.

[00:26:25] CS: They do a lot of things like they have boxes of accessories of things like they have boxes of accessories. If you were selling selfie stick then maybe also sell a box of masks and the wigs and all those kinds of things that people would have if they are sitting around just having fun on time.

[00:26:39] SV: What would be a cool idea with the selfie stick, I just thought of this, maybe that could be a wedding gift at the table and everyone has a selfie stick at the table and then from there they do like selfie shots of their tables. They can do like highs shots and all that stuff. Just a little thought there. You can market that to people that are wedding planners or people that are buying a wedding gift and that that could be a fun little gift to put on the table and then also get some really great shots for …  You can even have people post them on Facebook and all of that kind of stuff. Anyway, just saying.

[00:27:10] CS: That kind of replaces the disposable camera at the table if you remember that.

[00:27:14] SV: I do.. We actually had them at our wedding and that’s a cool little thing but … I think you just got to be creative. I actually know someone that was selling selfie sticks and he has a bunch of them still and now what he’s doing still is he’s taking them and adding them as an accessory to something else as like a bonus. This way here he can still recoup and get rid of them. That’s another option but in this case I don’t think this is really I think as much as the selfie stick. The selfie stick is definitely a lot more and I don’t think this thing would ever become like a selfie stick but I get what he’s saying. It’s more of that thing that is cool right now but it not be as cool a year from now. There might be something different that would replace this.

I agree. I wouldn’t give up on it but I wouldn’t spend a ton of effort. The one thing I would probably do and I actually suggested this yesterday on that coaching call was I would do a reverse search on your top three. I would do that through the simple keyword inspector tool. I would see what they’re ranking for. I’d see how many keywords they’re ranking for. Then from there I would throw them into a campaign maybe a low budget campaign and try to just pick up some of the scraps, pick up some of low hanging fruit and see what happens. What are your thoughts on that Chris?

[00:28:33] CS: That works. The thing that he would have to figure out is whether he wants to go after that main competitor that he was talking about or if he wants to go after the other people who are selling similar products because I don’t think the main competitor is selling … They’re not selling exactly the same thing. If it’s the person that you and I are thinking of. What I’d probably do is I’d run maybe the top three in the same category that he’s currently in who are selling the same product and then I’d also run one on that main competitor who’s in a different category to see what they’re ranking for so that if you chooses to move to that other category … I can’t speak and really go after the market that he’s already targeting then he’ll be prepared for that as well. He can hit it from both fronts in that new category.

[00:29:23] SV: I love it. We gave some pretty good insight here and some good ideas to go off of. I would just say again, treat it also as a learning experience. Treat it as it’s not a total failure. You still could possibly do okay with it and not to mention and this is another thing that I said yesterday on that coaching call was, this maybe something that could do really well in fourth quarter, gift giving and stuff like that so maybe you just keep it going to keep it rooted. Keep the roots growing in a sense and then in fourth quarter you’ll be starting to show up for all of these different keywords as are being searched for and then must make sure you plan for that, have some inventory and then blow them out.

That’s another option. It’s just a longer term play but yeah there’s a lot here that you can take away from this and not just saying yourself you picked a losing product. I don’t think you did. I think you learned but I also think you’re going to pick better products in the future and going back to the product research. It’s so critical and so vital and it definitely is worth spending the time and if you guys are brand new just listening to the podcast, I would definitely suggest to those two episodes that we did on this in depth hence depth of market. You’ve got episode 56 with Greg Mercer that’s theamazingseller.com/56 and then also 161, that’s theamazingseller.com/161. Chris, we’ve got about one minute left on the clock because we’re doing this in 30 minutes. We have to do these in 30 minutes at the live event. Chris, now we got about 45 seconds. What could you give your last parting words of guidance or takeaways?

[00:31:09] CS: Depth of market, depth of market, depth of market. While you’re trying to keep your product unique and different, you don’t need to try to reinvent the wheel and that’s one of the things that handicapped Amir in this situation is he wasn’t necessarily differentiating the product for the existing market. He did create a new market and there is room for him in that new market, he just needs to figure out how to optimize it for that space.

[00:31:34] SV: Perfect. Look at that. Well done with 15 seconds to spare and I will say this. The first thing that I would say to do is change that main image. Number one thing like you can do that like now. Change that image make it so people know exactly what it is and then change the category. Those will be the first two things. Alright. Chris this has been awesome. You guys know that we love doing this, we love talking about this stuff and the hot seats are again something that we’re going to be doing more often so Chris will be coming on with me. We’ll do more hot seat sessions as they come about I guess as we get more in and that we think that are going to be beneficial for the audience.

I just again wanted to say thanks for everyone that’s tuning in. Chris, is there any last little bits of advice that you’d like to give before we wrap up this show?

[00:32:21] CS: I think I’m good for today brother.

[00:32:22] SV: You’re good. You just already said it. Depth, depth, depth. Alright, you enjoy that chicken broth by the way.

[00:32:28] CS: Oh I will.

[00:32:29] CS: Alright guys. That is going to wrap it up. You guys know that Chris also do a live workshop totally free. We jump on. We spend about 60 minutes going through teaching the entire process to pick a product, source a product, do a launch, do a promo. All of the stuff in between. We answer live Q&A and we do all of that fun stuff in a live workshop. If you guys want to attend one of these live workshops it’s a virtual workshop so you will be connecting wherever you are in the world and we have people all over the world. Australia, the UK, all over the place.

You can just head over to themazingseller.com/workshop, once again that’s theamazingseller.com/workshop and like I said, we give work sheets, we hand out, we give downloads, we give all the goods right there on the workshop and would love to have you attend and hang out for an evening or an afternoon. Whichever we decide to do that particular week but you can register at that link.

Alright guys. That’s it. That is going to wrap up this episode. Remember, I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, say it with me and say it loud and Chris get ready to say it with me on the count of three, one, two, three, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day guys and I’ll see you back here in the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…exactly what that is. Now, I want to remind you that we do have transcripts now available that you can download. I’m also going to give you a video walk through on this episode on this episode. If you go to the show notes you’re going to find a video there of me walking you through this process.

You’re looking over my shoulder. That is going to be available at theamazingseller.com/189 again that’s theamazingseller.com/189. I’m also going to include a special cheat sheet that goes over this process. All right. You’re going to want to download that as well. I’ve got transcripts there for you, I’ve got a video walk through and I’ve also got a special cheat sheet for you to download as well. It’s really, really important that we understand this and really don’t get misled by the numbers because you got to look a little bit deeper. I’m going to show you exactly what I look at and what you can look at as well. All right. Now, before we do jump in I want to say hey, welcome. Welcome back. This is again, another episode that I’m really excited to do for you and just hang out. Right. Just hang out with you guys.

Now, if you guys want more TAS, more of the amazing seller, more of the podcast or just hanging out with me in general, you can head over to periscope. If you guys are brand new to Periscope check it out, I’m hanging out over there a lot where we actually jump on and do live interaction over there. It’s kind of like Ask Scott sessions but right there on Periscope. If you want to hang out over there just go to Periscope.tv, download the app on your phone and search for ScottVoelker. You’ll find me. Then go ahead and follow me and then you’ll get notifications, you’ll hear a little whistle that will go, “phew phew”. Then that means that I’m doing a live periscope.

You can also watch a reply there as well. Yeah, I’m having a lot of fun with those and just being able to interact and connect with you guys is just awesome. Definitely come on over and say hello. The other one that I’m playing around with is SnapChat. It took me a little while here but my son did convince me that I should probably give it a shot and that I wasn’t too old to use it. I am using SnapChat. I am snapping as they call it so you can find me at SnapChat and you can get some daily chats or Snaps or whatever they call them, snaps, right. Yeah. Go on over and check out that. It’s SnapChat. Just download the app and then search for me. My username there is ScottVoelker1. If you want to search for me just search for ScottVoelker1. Maybe even leave me a Snap and let me know that you found me. All right. That’d be cool.

[00:03:09] SV: All right. Today what we’re going to be talking about is to do product research for depth and data validation because I think it’s really important.  A lot of times what we’ll do is we’ll look at the numbers and I’ve done this. I’ll look at the numbers, I’ll get all excited because there’s low reviews and there’s high sales. Well, that’s usually a red flag. Not always but a lot of times it is and it doesn’t matter if you’re looking for a product that’s a $10 product or $150 product. It really comes down to doing a little bit more research than just looking at the surface. All right. That’s why you want to be able to do this. Here’s the thing. You could find a product that looks really, really good.

The numbers look really, really good but what you didn’t realize is that they just ran a promotion 30 days ago and they gave away 800 units and now all of a sudden you’re looking at a product that didn’t have any organic sales or even any paid sales and they were just promoed. That’s going to give false numbers and we don’t want that. We want to be able to validate and verify that those numbers are as close as possible but also gives us a little bit history about that particular product or that market, that keyword. Again, I’ll go into detail and in that video I do walk you through one example. Using the garlic press but I give you the example walking you through kind of the different steps and I’m going to walk you through this audio because this is audio, you can’t see me doing it but I’m going to walk you through it and try to have you visualize what it would look like. All right.

You want to be able to do this because, I can’t stress this enough, there is a lot of people out there including myself doing promotions when you first launch and that’s good. That’s what we want to do, right? We want to get the ball rolling, get the momentum going, get some sales in there and start ranking and all of that good stuff but the thing is, we need to understand that other people are doing that too. We don’t want to look at those numbers and get excited and then find out later that we should have dug a little deeper. Alright. We could also look and see what the price is then the price adjustments have been done over time. We can see that and that’s what I’m going to be showing you as well. Also is there a special time that this product’s selling. Is it just now or is there other seasons or is it consistent or is it trending?

All of those different things. I’ve touched on a few of these but I’ve never went through on exact like step by step type thing and I’m going to give you these in four steps. Okay. It’s really not that difficult. There’s four steps. There’s three tools that I use. Okay. Technically you can cut that down only two tools because one of the tools is integrated into the one tool. Okay. That’s what I want to do here. Let’s just dive in. I’m not really sure how long this is going to be this episode. I’m going to walk you through the steps and then from there I will do a little re-cap but then I’m going to try and explain it as detailed as possible but then you’re going to probably want to check out that video because I do walk you through it and you can visually see what I’m talking about.

[00:06:10] SV: All right. Here we go. Step one. The very first step. Now, I’m not talking about finding the product. Let’s just pretend that you’re already there and if you’ve not I should have probably said this in the beginning, if you’re not there yet, if you haven’t found that product or those products that you’re looking at, if you haven’t done your daily touch list or if you haven’t done any type of brainstorming or any of that stuff you really need to do that first. The other thing you can do is go over to episode 56 and episode 161 I did with Greg Mercer and we talk all about product discovery and product research and that type of stuff but right now I’m just going to assume that you have your garlic press selected and you’re looking at that particular product or that keyword. Okay.

Step one, let’s just say that we go to Amazon.com and we search for garlic press. Now, on that page we’re going to usually get 16 results. Okay. That’s usually what’s going to come up depending on whether you’re on mobile device or what your browser is and all that stuff. Let’s just that there’s 16 results and now we’re going to want to look at those numbers and primarily we’re going to look at those top 10. Right. You guys all know that if you’ve already listened to episode 56 or episode 161 or if you heard me talk about this before. This is where we’re looking at the depth of the market. Now the depth of the market basically means, and if we’re going after selling 10 a day or 20 a day, if we’re selling 10 a day it’s 300 units per product that’s selling.

If you found the top 10 are selling 300 each per month that equals 3000 sales per month across 10 products or ten sellers. That would be a good depth of market. Okay. Then we also want to look at the reviews and if we look at the reviews and we see that everyone has 500 or more that’s going to be harder to compete. Again, I’m not going to really cover that in today’s episode but just did want touch on that because those are the things that I look at and then the price but then let’s just say that we look now at the very first page for garlic press and now what we’re going to do is we’re going to want to look and see the number of sales.

[00:08:10] SV:  Now, the first tool that you’re going to need if you’re doing product research, okay, now you don’t absolutely have to but it’s going to make your job a lot easier and this is what I use, so I’m just going to give you exactly what I use and that is Jungle Scout, the web extension. Okay. The browser  extension. The Chrome extension. Okay. This isn’t the web app, this isn’t like product discovery, this is looking at the data so it’s a little icon that sits up in the right side of your browser and from there you go ahead and click on it, once you’re on that page you’ve got your results. Okay. The first thing that I do is I type in garlic press in Amazon. I search, I get that first page and I instantly hit that little JS up in the right hand corner and I click on it.

Then that’s going to populate all of the numbers. It’s going to give me the price, it’s going to give averages too but it’s going to give me the price, it’s going to give me the amount of sales and it’s going to give me estimates and a lot of people say, “How accurate are they?” There’s a lot other tools out there that are doing similar things. I’ve found that Jungle Scout is the most accurate. Now, I compared that to my own numbers but I also compared to other people that I know who are selling that shared their numbers with me. We have really come to the understanding that Jungle Scout is usually, depending, I can’t say 100% but it’s usually a little under. If it’s saying that it’s selling 500 it might be 600. I’d rather have it less that more. Okay.

[00:09:34] SV: I look at those numbers. Now we establish the depth. Okay. In this case in garlic press I’m not looking at the screen right now but always like really like, let’s say like 3000 sales for the first seller, 3000 for the second seller and maybe 2000 for the third and 1500 for the fourth and so on. Then maybe down to the 12th or the 13th position there was someone there that stood to me that only had 63 reviews. Then from those 63 reviews they have like 750 sales, maybe 800 sales. I’m like, “Woah!” That gets you attention. Very few reviews. Right. We’re comparing reviews to the top 5 each of those have like a thousand plus and again that’s when we talk about product research.

We don’t want to compete against people that have a thousand reviews out of the gate especially for product number one. You’re looking at that. We’re looking at those numbers. We’ll say okay, the top 5 all have a thousand reviews and they’re selling like 2000/3000 units per month but then we look down number 12 position and we see this person here, this one seller has 800 sales but they only have 63 reviews. Wow, that’s pretty good. Right. We can compete with that. Okay. Now, what I want to do is I want to validate, I want to verify that those numbers are true, they are accurate because here’s the thing. Someone could have ran a promotion because if that’s a brand new item and they ran a promotion and they gave away 750 units and let me just tell you there are people in competitive spaces that are giving away that many units to compete.

Maybe right out of the gate they gave away 700 units well they didn’t really sell 800 units like that number says. Did they produce a sale through a promotion? Yes. Is Jungle Scout right? Yes. That doesn’t mean that that’s an actual full price sale. Do you follow me? I think you do. You’re all shaking your head. Yes, I get it. Okay good. It’s hard when you’re talking out of a podcast. You want that interaction, that’s why Periscope is so beautiful you guys aren’t following me on Periscope check that out. I love it. Okay. What you want to do now is you want to be able to verify that. You want to be able to say, “Okay, I want to know how long this seller has been selling. I want to see their pricing. I want to see all of that stuff.” Right. Then that would take me to step two. Okay.

[00:11:55] SV: Now, step two, if all the stuff looks good in step one and I found a couple that I want to dig into and I want to verify that they weren’t skewed because of a promotion I’d move to step two. In step what I’m going to do is I’m going to take those sellers that I’m interested in or that I’m looking to do a little bit of investigation on or a little investigative work on. Right. I’m going to bring them over to a site they called camelcamelcamel.com. Now, you may have heard me talk about this one before. If you haven’t it’s a great little site. It gives you some data, some history and all that stuff so camelcamelcamel.com. I go there and then I take the URL. I copy the Amazon listing, I take that URL or you can even take the ASIN if you wanted to and I copy and paste that in there. Okay. I paste it in there.

Then from there I hit enter and I let it come back with the data. Okay. The first thing that I’m going to want to look at is see how long it’s been selling.  Now, it shows you the entire duration. It’ll say all. When it says all, there’s a little slider there on the right hand side like I said, I showed this in the video. If you want to check out the video definitely after you listen to this go over to this episode and listen and watch that video because I show you exactly what I do here in this example. You can set that to a month, to three months, to whatever but I do it for the full durations so I put all. It will tell me if it’s been selling for a year I’ll know that. Okay. In this particular case, this first one that I looked at that had 63 reviews or something like that of a low number I’ve seen that they started selling in October of 2015.

It’s been out there a little while so this number is kind of true. It’s accurate for the most part from what I can see. Right. The next thing I would do is would want to see okay, now let me go ahead and see the price. So now I can look at the price and I can see what they started the price at, what they lowered it to, what they raised it to. I can see if they started running out of stock. I can kind of tell because they increased their price by two or three times and then once they got back in stock they lowered back. I can see all that stuff and it gives me a good idea of what they did in order to be successful. I’m modeling what they’re doing.

[00:14:02] SV: I’m also wanting to see that okay this isn’t just a fluke. They’ve got 63 reviews but they’re selling pretty consistently right now with this particular listing. I can look at that, then I can look at the pictures if I want to, I can look at the title, I can look at all of that stuff. Okay but the main thing right now is to see how long they’ve been selling and then I can rule out if it’s a promotion that got them there and that skewed the numbers or in this case I can say well I’ve been running since October so it’s probably not a promotion. I can’t guarantee it’s not a promotion but there’s a good chance. Now if I went over there and I did that same exact thing and I assumed that they started selling 30 days ago then it’d be a red flag.

I’d say, Okay that’s a promotion. I’m going to discard that one. I’m going to go to a different one. Right. That’s just going to rule out that one. I might go to another one in the top 12 or 15 or whatever find another that is only 100 reviews and maybe they started selling a year ago. Then I get some numbers but that one I wanted to definitely do a little bit of a background search on. Okay.

Now, the next thing again, the second part of that is then I want to look at the price because the price also shows me what they started at, what they’ve increased it to, how they’ve played around with the price if at all and what it did to the BSR. It will show you the BSR ranking over the course of that time. It will show you all of that stuff on a nice graph. So let’s camelcamelcamel.com. Currently, that is free. I would definitely recommend that, it’s a great thing. You could also set up alerts that alert you of your competitors. It’s not meant for this. It’s really meant for people going here and taking a product and plugging it in and being notified if that price drops. Okay. For us what we can do is we can use it as a tool to let us know when our competition is doing so if it goes up or down and we can get an email that says, “Hey, your garlic press or the one you’re looking at just went up by $2,” or, “It just go lowered by $2.” We can see that. That’s another little thing that you can do and another little trick. All right.

[00:15:57] SV: Now the third thing here that I do is that I then I look at the Google Trends. I have talked about this before but this is again part of that process. Then I look at the Google Trends. I look for seasonality. Again, this is only if it passes the test in step two. Right. If it passes those numbers then I bring it to Google Trends. Then I look at the seasonality and in this case if we’re looking at a garlic press, garlic press and a lot of other products too in December is the top sellers. You can see the peak all the way in December for the past like ten years practically. I think it was since 2005 so you can see that. Then you can also see that it goes down but then it comes back up and it goes down and it comes back up but that not as much as December.

Like November December of course fourth quarter it does well especially garlic press right gift, people are giving it as a gift. That’s why that has those spikes but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t sell that. It would just mean that it spikes in November, in December but throughout the rest of the year it’s still pretty consistent. There’s still a good amount of searches being done for that. Really, the way that Google Trend works is not necessarily for sales. It shows you the activity being done on Google for the search term Garlic press. It doesn’t really tell us that that’s what it is in Amazon but it does give us a good gauge on the market as far as how many people are searching for that.

That’s Google Trends. Now, one little side note. If you’re using Jungle Scout as your main tool to do this kind of data research as far as like pulling out the numbers in the beginning stage here in step one, there’s a little tab in the pro-version that says Trends. If you click on that Trends it will automatically show you a screenshot of that particular Google Trend for that keyword and for that thing that you’re looking at. You wouldn’t even need to leave Jungle Scout in the beginning so you could technically do that like right out of the gate. If not, you can always just head over to Google Trends. I usually do the Google trends thing the last. I don’t really look at it in the beginning but you could. This way here you could look at the trend and see if it’s something that’s going up.

You may also see that it wasn’t as popular like five years ago but it’s starting to gradually get more momentum throughout the years. That’s a good thing because we have upward trend but I really like to look at the last 12 months and then also maybe even the past 24 months and then you can see steady trends like in December. Every December it’s peaking because of fourth quarter so we know that if we wanted to do a launch for a garlic press best time would probably be late summer, early fall and that way we can get our listing rooted. Then from there when we do have a nice base of reviews and stuff and we’re starting to rank when there’s a lot more traffic, we’re going to start showing up, we’re going to get more sales.

Now, I said that was step three but actually that was step four. Let me give you the fourth step here. This is something that you don’t have to do but it does also show you if that particular seller is using review groups.

[00:18:52] SV: What I do is I look at the reviews that have come in on that listing. If there was 63 reviews what I’d want to do is just click on their reviews and then I’d want to start scanning and seeing if I see I received this item for my at a discount for my unbiased review or for my honest review. I would look for those things. I’d look for videos, I’d look for images and I can get a sense if they’re promoting. Now, if they’re not promoting and you’re not seeing that, that’s even better because that means that they didn’t really do any promotion to get where they are. Right but that doesn’t mean it’s a deal breaker. It just means that they’ve done that, it’s worked for them so you’re probably going to have to do one or two as well but in this case 63 reviews isn’t really a lot of reviews especially when you’re going up against couple of thousand reviews or even a thousand reviews.

That seems like it’d be hard to compete. Just wanted to throw that out there. Looking at the reviews can also give you a little bit of a sense of how long they’ve been selling. You can also look at like, you can go to the reviews from oldest to newest or newest to oldest and then you can see when they got their first review and you can see what kind of review it was. That can give you a sign as to are they brand new or when do they start selling or again you can just go to camelcamelcamel.com where you can find that there. These are just different ways to a little bit of research in the background, right? Not just looking at the number on the surface.

We got to go a little bit deeper. We got to look at the history and that will help us really determine if this is something that’s just as skewed because they ran a promotion or if it’s something that we feel that has been in there a little while and it’s been doing pretty good and we can feel comfortable and confident at least the best that we can that we’re going to have a better chance of succeeding selling a product like this or similar to this.

Not to mention, when you’re doing this too, when you’re in those reviews look at the negative reviews and really see what you can do to improve it. That’s huge. A lot of people aren’t doing that’s something that I’m going to be doing more of and really understanding those flaws. Then trying to fix those flaws and then bringing them to the surface I think can also help you convert and also have happy customers. Have happy customers, guess what, you sell more. Right. That’s just another little side tip there for you.

[00:21:05] SV: All right. This is the way that I go about reducing the risk by doing some investigating work. It’s like you’re that person behind the scenes that’s like “this stuff looks good but now I got to do all of these other field tests and I got to see if this is all true or at least the best that we can determine is true.” All right. Again, let me just recap what we’re doing here. Number one, this is working when we have a product that we’re looking for. When we have a product or five products that we’re looking we’re going to do the search in Jungle Scout. First we’re going to do an Amazon, then we’re going to pull it up in Jungle scout with the web extension. We’re going to look at the numbers, we’re going to look at the depth, we’re going to look at demand, then from there if all that checks out then we’re going to move into step two where we’re going to take the sellers that we’re targeting, the ones that we feel can possibly compete with.

Again, some people say, “Scott, what if the top 3 sellers are all selling 2000 units? Is that okay? Is that too competitive and they all have 500 reviews, is that okay?” Well you got to look a little deeper. You got to look at the 5th and the 6th and the 7th and the 8th and then look down the list and see if there’s any other sellers that are still selling the amount that you want to sell. If you want to sell ten units a day then you got to see 300 in the monthly sales. Once we get to that point and we say okay, I see number 8 and number 9 they look pretty good.

They have less reviews, they still have good steady sales, they have good selling point, that’s the other thing too. You want to look at your selling price. If you see that they’re 800 sales they got 63 reviews but they’re only selling it for only $3.99 but everyone else is selling it for $17.99 that’s kind of going to make my decision a little bit … It’s going to play a little bit into my decision making because yeah, of course you’re selling more because you’re selling it at a less expensive price. That’s what you also want to look at. I should have probably mentioned that before. That’s another thing. What we want do is we want to look at … Take that one that we’re interested in now that it’s proved itself to us on the surface.

Now, we want to move to step two which is go to camelcamelcamel.com. We’re going to take that URL from that listing. We’re going to copy and paste it into the camelcamelcamel.com and then we’re going to look at the BSR over time. We’re going to see how long they’ve been selling over time. We’re going to look at the trend as far as like … Not the Google trend but we are going to look at the BSR graft and all that. We’re going to see how long they’ve been selling and then we’re going to look at the price. We’re going to look at the different price that they came in at, what they’re at now, what they did in the middle, if they ran out of inventory. You can tell that because of a bump in price because they were trying not to run out of stock. All those things, that’s step two.

[00:23:51] SV: Step three we’re going to look at Google trends for seasonality or when is the peak time for these products or this product. Then step four, that’s a bonus one. Step four is to look at the reviews and see how many are from review groups. Again, this is giving us a sense if this is active seller that is reaching out for reviews. That’s pretty much it. That’s the four steps. All right. This is going to allow you and myself to be able to lessen the amount of risk. Doesn’t mean that it’s risk free and anyone out there thinking that this is risk free. It’s not. There’s always a risk in anything that you do, whether it’s in this business or any business.

This is a way to really validate and really verify before you jump in. Alright. Again, the top tools that I mentioned is number one, Jungle Scout. If you guys do not own Jungle Scout like I said you can go through my link and get $10 off of that web extension and that is theamazingseller.com/JS or you can find it in the show notes as well. Number two is camelcamelcamel.com. Okay and that’s free as of right now that I know. It’s free. Then three, it is Google trends. Again, if you have Jungle Scout, you’re going to have Google trends right inside of that app so you can use it in there or you can just use it externally. Again, that’s free. Great resource. You’ll also get other ideas looking at Google trends too.

If you see that it will show you suggestions around that keyword so that could also give you ideas but little bonus tip here for you. Okay. While you’re looking at these brands inside of Jungle Scout, while you’re looking at these brands, maybe the ones that are interesting to you or that you’re interested in because those numbers look good, what you want to also do is you want to click on the brand name. Their brand name. If it’s XYZ whatever, garlic presses, you want to click on that in the Amazon listing and see what else they are selling. Now, why would you want to do that?

Well, I’ll tell you why. If they have more than one product that’s selling around that garlic press and they’re selling 800 units a month on the garlic press, well those other products could be helping to feed those sales. That also could come into your mind that you know what, they’ve got other products that are supporting this one. That might be part of the reason why they’re successful. Can I still come in here and be successful without having those other supporting products? Here is the big but. If you do that little exercise that I just shared with you and you see that they are not selling any other products, it’s just  the one product that’s doing that, well then that’s a good sign, well that’s a good sign because now you can say, “Well, now I know that there’s only one product right now that’s driving and that’s the main product.” Right.

That’s another way to really do a little bit of research to see the strength of the brand and the power of the additional products that’s wrapped around that brand. Now, if that brand has other products but they’re in multiple different product lines like they sell a garlic press and they sell a tennis racket and they sell bowling shoes, well, we know that the bowling shoes is not going to help sell the garlic press. You understand what I’m saying there. It’s like we want to see if they have other product like a lemon press or a garlic press, garlic bag. These types of things. That would help to sell that garlic press. Again, that’s just another thing that I look at to see kind of like how seasoned the brand is and if that brand is really positioning that one product around other products or nested inside other products to create a product line.

Those are different things that I look at. Again, just kind of running you through kind of these steps and kind of like the checklists I use to go through this when I’m doing product research. All right. Want to remind you guys. Alright. I’ve put together a video for you that walks you through everything that I just went through. Okay, you can find that on this episode which is 189 so that’s theamazingseller.com/189 you can watch the video right there. I’ll embed it right there inside the show notes. You’ll also going to find the transcripts which you can download or you can read them right there and I’m also going to have a special cheat sheet download that will give you this process kind of mapped out for you so you can kind of walk through it. Alright.

That’s it guys. That’s going to wrap it up. I really wanted to do this because a lot of people ask me like, “Scott how do you do more extensive research once you find something you’re interested in?” I’ve explained it but I’ve never explained it on the podcast and I wanted to do it here today and I also wanted to create that video for you as well which took me a little bit more time but I think it’s going to be worth it because when people ask me now I can point them to this resource which should help them and hopefully help you.

Alright. That’s it guys. That’s going to wrap it up. Remember I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, say it with, say it loud, say it proud, let’s do it, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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…just did a Snapchat and posted a little snap of him snoring. He is sleeping hard because he plays hard.

I just wanted to share that with you. If you hear that, I apologize and I want to welcome you guys back to another session of Ask Scott, number 55 by the way and episode 190, I can’t believe it. We’re cruising right along here. I want to thank each and every one of you that tune in every Friday to the Ask Scott sessions or if you’re listening to this on a replay, not a replay, well, I guess after it’s been published day, I guess you would call it. It is a replay all the time, right? It’s a download, it’s an episode.

Wanted to also remind you guys that if you wanted more TAS and just a little bit more interaction with myself you can always head over to Periscope.tv download the app if you haven’t done so already and then just search for me at Scott Voelker and you will find me and then you’ll hear a little “whistles” when I do a Periscope or scope as they call it and we can do more of this but more live atmosphere where we can hang out and that’s what I do and its awesome.

I love it. I’ve just been recently doubling with Snapchat and that’s what I’ve been doing here, kind of giving daily snaps of either what’s on my mind or maybe what Brody’s doing or what I’m doing or just anything. In this case it’s Brody snoring right now so that’s what I was snapping on because I think it’s pretty funny that I’m sitting here in my office, he’s at my feet and he’s snoring away. I guess he’s not interested in the Ask Scott sessions.

All right, we’re going to move on. I just wanted to say thank you guys so much for attending. I really do love doing these Ask Scott sessions and hanging out with you. Like I said it’s like us sitting around a coffee shop, just hanging out and just having a great time talking about business. Thank you for coming back and getting ready to jump in here. Let’s go ahead and listen to the first question for this week and I’ll go ahead and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:02:26] Jason:  Hey Scott, my name is Jason. First of all thank you so much for your excellent podcast, I love everything that you’re doing here, it’s a great show. You’ve heard all the compliments already but yes, thank you again. Thank you very much. My question is regarding Amazon promotional offers. I recently set up a money-off offer in my Amazon seller account that allows my Amazon customers to save, for example $5 when they buy two items of one of my listings. My question is how much can I promote that offer within my listing? I know Amazon adds a little snippet within the listing itself kind of around the middle of the page but I want to really make it prominent and obvious so can I add secondary images to the listing that highlight and explain the promo? Can I add details about the promo in the bullets and can I add the details about the promo in the product description itself?

These are kind of Amazon terms of service questions. I’ve sort of scoured Amazon’s terms of services, service points about promo offers in these areas and I haven’t really seen anything that says that you cannot do this except obviously the main image of the product and the title of the product. I’d love to hear your answer, thanks in advance and thank you for doing such a great show.

[00:03:56] SV:  Hey Jason, thank you so much for the question and very, very clear and clean audio I have to say, sounded really, really good so thank you for that. Yeah, just wanted to say thanks for being a listener, I’m glad that you’re getting value and I really glad that you’re here today asking this question because it’s a good question. I may have touched on it before but we’re talking about terms of service again here and I don’t think anyone knows 100% and I don’t know if Amazon does either but if they even know what the terms of service is, what it is today and what it is tomorrow. Yes, there is some print there and they give you what they want you to abide by but I have to say, a lot of times it’s not that clear.

Even like on their images, they want the image, the main image to be on a pure white background but it also says that very minimal amount of prop, so what is a prop? A prop is a person or it could be a hand or it could be something that’s holding up the item. It’s really unclear exactly what it is but we kind of get an idea. I think the same thing goes with could you have some type of image, not the main image, secondary image that talked about a special offer? You probably could. I don’t know if it’s within the terms of service. I probably would say it’s not but if you ask three different people in the support department, one may say it’s okay, one may say it’s not and the other one might say, I don’t know.

I’m not really sure and I don’t want to give you what I think you should do, me personally I have done it. I had one listing where they contacted me and said that they wanted me to remove it. I have one that’s been running for a very long time and I think I even still have it there. I do have it there. I don’t know if it’s going to get you in trouble. I don’t want to say that it won’t if it will but I would just be careful with that. I’m not really sure of the effect of having it there, if it’s going to be that beneficial. I don’t really have any clear data to tell you whether it is or it isn’t. What I will say is that you are able to put it in the promotion section, right? That’s what it’s there.

They want everything in each part to be kind of like following those guidelines. If you’re doing a bullet, they want that to be within a certain amount of characters and they want it to be bold. They don’t want it all caps, like they have some rules there that they are pretty clear but they don’t tell you, you technically can’t put a certain word in there but they do say, I believe they say this that they don’t want any promotional material in bullets. That would say probably not a good idea to put it in there.

[00:06:35] SV: Now, I did an episode with Karon Thackston. She specializes and is pretty much an expert in Amazon listings as far as optimization and up to date all of the terms of service stuff that she’s hearing but even she said that she’s very unclear on some of them. She’s trying to get more I guess clear answers but in this case I would say probably not put it in there and even though you are going to see this and I know this is very frustrating for a lot of people, they’re going to see that in the title. You’re going to see “Thanksgiving Special”, you can’t do that. You’re not supposed to do that. Then they’re going to have in their bullet, the top bullet it might say, “special Black Friday sale.” I believe that’s not allowed but people are doing it. You may say, “Well, if they’re doing it I’m going to do it.” that’s true but they might just have not got caught yet.

I’ve even heard of people getting contacted by Amazon saying that you’re doing something wrong and then them saying, “10 other people are on the same exact keyword.” and they’re like, “Well, we just haven’t gotten around to them yet.” Something silly like that. I guess my thoughts on this would be try to do your best to stay within terms of service, at least how you interpret them. I can’t say for sure but I don’t think Amazon would like ban you. I think they would warn you and then from there you’d have to take care of it. They could maybe suppress your listing for a period of time. I wouldn’t want to take those chances especially I wouldn’t want to advise you to take those chances. I would say try to stick to where they want you to out that promotion and use some language in that promotion that gets the attention. That might be the case.

Now, I do know in the promotion, it doesn’t work for everyone but when you put certain words in your promotion they will also show up in your description in a sense to where you’re scanning the listing. If you’re searching for something and you see page one results and then you see like there’s a little descriptor on there, sometimes that descriptor will say what the coupon is or that the special is. It doesn’t work for everyone and I’ve got a few listings that it has and some it hasn’t and it kind of picks from where it pulls but that’s another option you might want to play around and until something shows up that looks like it could say “Special $5 off” or something like that and that could show up.

[00:08:55] SV: That could help your click-through rate, doesn’t mean it’s going to help your conversion rate. That’s what I would probably play around with first because then you’re not really doing anything wrong, you’re just filling in the promotions area and then capitalizing on that being fed into that descriptor. Again, that’s going to take some testing to see where they’re going to pull that from.

As far as putting in your description, yeah again, I mean you can put something in there in your description that talks about your business and your offers and stuff. I’m not 100% sure if that’s against the terms of service but I would probably feel more safe there than I would in a bullet or in an image but again I don’t think we have a clear answer. I’m going to leave that one up to you but if you think that it’s going to drive more sales then maybe. I think honestly if you stick to the promotion area and then make that call-out, maybe add more than one, two, I think that might be a strategy because if you add more than one offer then you will see that it will start to list them. It will start to list them to where you will see more than just the one offer so you might have buy two, get this, buy three get this, buy four, get this so this way here you have different promotions running for different quantities and then that way there it will also make the promotion area bigger because you’re going to have more options.

The other thing is if you have more than one product then when you start to sell feed those, that’s going to also show not in all categories but it will show sometimes a “buy now” or “add to cart” button inside of there and that will also draw attention to that or draw the eyeballs there. Again, I know I didn’t clearly come out and say, “Yes, do it.” but I want to say here is just be cautious, be aware and do what you feel is right and also think about if you think it will make that much of a difference when it comes to conversions, all right? Hopefully that’s helped you and anyone else listening. Keep the questions coming guys. If you have a question you want me to answer here on a show like this just head over to the amazingseller.com/ask and I’ll do my best to answer it on an upcoming show. All right, let’s go ahead and listen to the next question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:11:00] Rob:  Hey Scott, my name’s Rob. I’m in Austin Texas, digging the podcast, digging your step by step, digging a lot of things that you doing man. Keep up the good work, you’re motivating and inspiring a lot of people. My question is about when to do an entity formation like an LLC to protect your small business where you do in FBA, any thoughts?

[00:11:23] SV:  Hey Rob in Austin what’s up man? Thanks for digging the show, I love it. We’re digging the show and I got some people saying they’re gobbling up the show. I love it. I love the comments that we’re getting as far as how you’re consuming the show. Cool. I got people that are just slamming through it or they’re jamming through it, love it. All right, cool. I want to thank you for the question and it’s a good question. I’ve touched on this before. I’m going to give you guys some episodes that I’ve talked about it but I am going to put a little disclaimer in here. I am not a legal advisor or any type of attorney, I don’t claim to be and I’ve never even played one on TV. I’ve never, never played an attorney.

I just want to let you guys know I think that you have to go out there and ask a professional and then get their take before you make any decision. I think that would be the smart move. Here’s what I did, here’s what I would do moving forward if I was starting over today. That is what I will tell you. First off, I had a CPA on who we talked about the different forms of a business. You have an LLC, you have an S Corp, C Corp, all of those. That was a great, great episode that was 143, again I’ll link these up in the show notes and that’s episode 143, so theamazingseller.com/143, Josh Bauerly, CPA on fire.

He came on, we talked about all those different entities and which one would be best. Episode 14, all the way back to episode 14 I did an episode that I titled, “What do I need to set up my Amazon business?” trademark, LLC, accounting, all that stuff. That one there is episode 14. Again I’ll link these up on the show notes. Now, here’s the deal, it really depends, for me personally I’m in New York state so to get an LLC in New York state it’s like an 8 to a 10 week process. It’s about $1000 process.

If I was just starting again today I would probably do everything the exact same way that I started. I didn’t have an LLC when I started because it was going to cost me a grand to even think about it and then from there, I was just wanting to test this space and see if it was worth it. Well, shortly after I did form the LLC. I found out how much a pain in the butt it is to live in New York State because they make you jump through a bunch of hoops and paperwork and you had to have a listing in the paper for six weeks, see if anybody contested it and all that stuff.

I formed another one in North Carolina because that’s where I’m going to be moving and that was about a two-week process, not even a two-week process but a week and a half process, had my LLC, good to go. It depends where you live, is how hard it will be. I used Legal Zoom and then I used another one actually my accountant actually set up the other one for me so I was a lot easier of a process. Legal Zoom does a great job too to break it down. But again, I think it’s all about the individual, where you are in this process, how hard it is for you to create one and basically, an LLC to me, what it does is it solidifies that you have a business. It does also, and I’m going to put this in air quotes, from what my attorney said is it kind of protects your assets pretty much as far as your personal assets because your LLC is your business.

[00:14:40] SV: Once you have an LLC you‘ll have a checking account. Any business that funnels into that checking account is technically the business so if you get sued, whatever, they can go after that. That doesn’t mean that they can’t find a way or a loophole to find a way to you so that’s why you would probably want to then look into product liability insurance and all that stuff that helps to protect your personal stuff. You want to make sure that you do that as well. That’s what my thoughts are on that. Do it when you can. I would definitely do it though.

I would say form an LLC because I think it’s an important and I think it will legalize you in a way too. It will make you a real business, it will give you a real checking account, not that you can’t be a step in the right direction. I would say when you feel it’s time, then it’s time. I would probably ask your attorney or your accountant and see what they think as well. Hopefully that’s helped. Let’s go ahead and listen to one more question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:15:43] Nazr: Hi Scott, I recently started watching your podcast and I can only speak good things about it. Recently I have found my niche, my market but one of the dilemmas I have is all the products on the top five or ten, most of them are from the exact same supplier, from Alibaba so onto my question. Is it worth me spending the additional money to get my order customized to set myself apart from the competitors or am I better of just buying the exact same product at a lower price and try to beat the competition with things like pay-per-click or general advertising or giveaways?

[00:16:24] SV: Well, hey there Nazr, thank you so much for your question and you didn’t give me your first name but I knew it because when it came through on the Speakpipe email it said Nazr so that’s how I knew it so hopefully I pronounced it right and hopefully it’s you. Thanks for the question. Yeah, this is a great question by the way and I don’t think it’s one that I’ve really directly answered so it’s kind of cool to answer this because this is my thoughts on this. If you were to ask me this question, which you did by the way, but if we were sitting in that coffee shop that I talk about so often, my thoughts would be this.

I’d be very careful because now you have nothing that separates you. You just have four people that are selling the identical product, nothing that separates you at all and now you’re going to start competing on price and that’s not a good place to be. I know that first hand right now. I have a product that I started with that I’m constantly battling on price now. It’s my own fault because I launched a product not knowing any better and then people came in and I didn’t do much to differentiate it but it’s still selling today and it’s still doing okay. I’m not saying you can’t do that, it’s just going to be harder and it’s not going to be more of a long-term play. I’m right now, currently, finding other ways to diversify and find other products that I can be more unique and I’m trying to learn from those mistakes. I would definitely say be careful.

I would, first off, go into the reviews of those four products or five products and I would start digging into those reviews, especially the negative reviews and seeing what people are saying about those products that they dislike because this is going to tell you what you can improve. I just did a coaching call the other day and let me pull a little side note here too. I get people that say, “Scott, you just said that you did a coaching call. I’ve emailed you before and I asked if you did coaching calls and you said you didn’t.” and that is still true. I still currently don’t do coaching calls but what I do is I do a coaching call for people that attend the workshop that win after they join our class. I have a paid class that people join and if you’re on a workshop you kind of understand what I mean. We do like a virtual raffle that’s a thirty minute coaching call so I raffle off a coaching call to any new student that joins, anyway, just wanted to put that out there.

I don’t currently do coaching calls but I do coaching calls for the ones that win them. I did this 30-minute coaching call with this gentleman and it was very, very similar to this because he was looking at products that potentially could be a good product but how do you differentiate? He was thinking, “Well, I could do this and I could do that. This would be good and I was thinking if I did this, it wouldn’t be good because they would like this.” and I’m like, “Well, let’s just back up here for a second. Maybe what you should do is look and see what people are actually saying they wish the product had or what they were expecting and didn’t receive.” because a lot of times that’s what they were going to say. “I thought the product was going to be much bigger. It didn’t fit like I thought it would.” or “I thought the product was going to have a screw on cap and it was a push on cap. I really wish it had the screw on cap.”

Well, these are things that you were hearing directly from the market. This is what you want to listen too. This is how you want to create your different style product or your add-on. Maybe someone saying that they love the product but they wish it came with this certain accessory, so guess what, you create one that has a certain accessory and now you’ve done it. Maybe you see this one product that four or five people are selling the same thing and then you see frequently bought together and those are a great pair and now you do a bundle. Now when you do a bundle now all of a sudden you’re not just selling the one product, you’re selling the two together and now you are different, okay.

I do think that if you can customize that product without it being a huge deal like I’m talking like not having to create a brand new mold that’s going to cost you eight grand or something like that. If you can do something that can separate yourself with just a  few little tweaks because it’s not that hard for them to tweak it, adding on something or taking something away or making something a little bit larger, something like that and then you can fix a problem that you’re reading through these reviews, especially if you got four people or five people selling that exact same thing, well you’ve got four or five listings that you can look at their reviews and then see exactly what people are complaining about.

[00:20:50] SV: The other thing is not just those, but dig into the other people that are selling that’s not the exact product but does the same thing and see what they’re talking about that they really like or they don’t like and then just starting to learn that. I think if we start to dig into those things, that right there will make it that much better when you go to launch that product.

I’ll give you an example. I’m looking at a product right now that it’s, again, coming from China, so people are getting instructions and it’s saying that they are really annoyed that the instructions are coming, not in Chinese, they’re coming in English but they’re coming in millimeters. They want them to come in inches because in the state that’s how we measure everything, is by not centimeters, not millimeters. We do them by inches so they want stuff done by inches so a quick fix would be to just have another guide that puts this thing together and translate that into inches. That’d be a simple way to fix that and then you wouldn’t get those negative reviews as well.

Just again, you need to listen and you need to look and see what other people are talking about and complaining about especially and then try to fix that problem and then they key is to then highlight that thing that you fixed and make sure that people know that yours is better because it does this or it has this, right. That way you can be a level up from your competition all right. There is my thoughts on that. I know your question was kind of short but my answer was kind of long, right? I think it’s important as we move forward here, we do need to find a way to differentiate ourselves and I think part of that is creating better products and then also a better user experience, I think that’s another one but creating a better product by looking at what the market has already said.

A great way to test products guys is to launch products to people. Years ago you would go and you would drive people to a website and then try to sell them a product or ask them if they’d be interested in a product before you even made it. That’s kind of how infomercials worked. I don’t know if you guys know that. A lot of times why it takes six to eight weeks to get your product and actually Chris Ducker talked about this when I had him on the podcast was they would do an infomercial, they would put all the money in the infomercial and they wouldn’t even create the product yet. They would sell the product, maybe have a prototype. They would sell to however many they had to sell in order to make it a full run. If not, they would just refund everybody the money and say that production wasn’t going to happen or whatever but this way here, they had six to eight weeks to manufactured.

SV: They had everything in place but this is the way they validated and verified before they went and they bought 30,000 units or something. Well, it’s the same thing with Amazon. We can do this similar stuff, even if we don’t launch the product, we can look at other people that have launched and then we can go ahead and take the data from the people that are reviewing it especially the negative ones because if you get positive ones, sometimes those can be promotions. The negative ones, those we know are going to be hardcore because people are giving it a three star, two star, one star, we can look at that stuff and we can fix it and that’s how you can validate a product without even having to launch it. You can just validate that it’s selling and then you can do a better job at it.

I guess a really great thing here would be is if you found a product that’s selling well with three and a half star reviews, right, with people still complaining but people still buying it. Then, you come in and you fix those problems, make those problems go away and now you get a five star product because you fixed all those problems that everyone else was complaining about but no one else has one that, you can do that. All right, so that’s it. End of rant on that. I think that we can be doing that moving forward. I know I’m currently working on that as well. Again, I’m not preaching here. I am just literally telling you what’s going through my mind as I’m going through this with you, moving from here, moving through the landscape of Amazon because things are changing.

It is getting a little bit more competitive, we all know that but when people say, “Is there still a place for me to go? Can I still go launch a product?” Absolutely. It’s just you got to go in there and you got to create better products and that could be, to me it really can go at any price point especially if you go between 20 and $50, somewhere in that range. Obviously, the higher price point products, they are going to be a little bit easier because it’s harder for people to get into those but I still think there’s room for people in there that want to launch a $20 product as long as you can find a product that has a demand and you can make a better product or a better spin or a better bundle. That’s it, rant over.

All right, so that is pretty much going to wrap up this session of Ask Scott. What I want to do is remind you a couple of things.

[00:25:21] SV: First off, remind you that if you want to ask a  question, just head over to the amazingseller.com/ask, leave your first name, leave your question. I’ll do my best to air it on the show and that would be great, would love to hear from you. The second thing is if you want to connect with me on Periscope, head over to periscope.tv, download the app, search from Scott Voelker and then from there you’ll be connected. Just follow me and you’ll get any notifications. We can hang out there live, lot of fun and then Snapchat, that’s my newest one. I’m playing around with, like I said, Brody was snoring.

Recently, I just took a snapshot of him and then going to be doing some daily rants over there maybe, so definitely go over and check me out on snapchat. My username over there is ScottVolker1, again that’s ScottVolker1, you can find me there. Last thing, if you guys are brand spanking new and you’re just tuning in, first off, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. Hopefully you’ve learned something and if you want a roadmap to get started, I’ve created a free resource for you, okay. You can head over to freeprivatelabelcourse.com, again that’s freeprivatelabelcourse.om you’ll sign up with your first name and your email address and then you’ll get 10 days’ worth of lessons. I’ll give you a lesson each day for 10 days and then from there it walks you through the entire process from start to finish and really get your head wrapped around this whole business model. All right. Definitely, definitely go check out that resource I created for you.

All right, so that is it. That is going to wrap it up. This has been awesome. I love hanging out with you guys. Please come back and hang out with us once again or maybe take me on the run with you. Maybe we can burn some calories together, that would be cool. Anyway guys, that’s it, that’s going to wrap it up. Remember, I’m here got you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on say it with me, say it loud and say it very, very proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day and I’ll see you in the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…in part thanks to you’. I opened the email and his name is David and we are going to leave it at that. He doesn’t want me to disclose his last name just for privacy issues and I respect that. I’m just going to read the first part of this email to let you know where it came from. Then also we’re going to dig into his story and break it down and to see what he’s done and what he is doing moving forward.

He says, “Hi Scott. I found your podcast at around Podcast Number 6. Was one of the first in on your Facebook group about 250 members. Ha ha, look at you now, there’s over 26,000 now which is crazy, right? Immediately was implementing what you were teaching as you released episodes. You coached me through the very beginnings of this business. Due to a few failures life both professionally and personally and looking for a better life with more freedom and control I stumbled on the Amazon FBA idea March 18th 2015. Found your blog a few days later, picked a niche, heaps of samples, first order placed shortly after and I was live in Amazon end of June with a thousand units of stock in total three months idea to reality. Alright.’

Pretty pretty awesome. There was more that he shared there as well but we’re going to dig into his story today and I want you guys to understand that and he says this, he knew nothing about selling on Amazon. He heard about it, he was intrigued, he said you know what I’ll go ahead and I’ll give it a shot. That’s what we’re going to share with you today. Now, before we do jump into that, alright, I want ask you for a quick favor. Alright. We’re at 191 episodes and I couldn’t have done it without all of you and your questions and just the communications and being able to really interact with all of you and I really, really love doing it. I get a lot of satisfaction from you just connecting with you guys and putting my stuff out there and hoping that you guys can get some value from it.

What I’d like to do is I’d like to ask you for a favor. That favor is this, alright. There’s actually three little things. One, share the podcast.  Alright. Share the podcast with at least one person today only if you think they’ll get value and only if you think they’d be interested in something like this. You guys all know that I’ve talked about this before. I enjoy hanging around with people that I’d normally want hang around with in life. Most of you listening are those people. I can tell when people are referencing the era that I grew up or things that I’m interested in, it just really shows me that the people that are listening are people that I’d genuinely want sit at that coffee shop or in the back yard having a barbecue.

[00:03:11] SV: Definitely, definitely help me out there and share the podcast. That’d be awesome. The other thing is if you want to connect with me on Periscope and listen to my rants or my random stuff that’s happening. I usually post a lot of this stuff just randomly things that are happening day to day. This way here I can keep you guys in the loop. That’s on Periscope. I love doing those as well because it’s real. It’s live, it’s you and me sitting face to face in the car or wherever I am at that time and you can also ask questions there. There’s really a lot of interactions. It’s very similar actually to the Ask Scott show that I do on Friday. Definitely check me out on Periscope if you’re interested. That’s Periscope.TV and you have to download the app and then just look for @ScottVoelker and you’ll find me there.

Then the last thing, I’ve been playing around Snapchat. If you want to see some daily snaps go on and look me up on Snapchat and my username there is @ScottVoelker1. Alright. Just a few different places where I’m going to be hanging out and I’d love for you to come on over and hang out. We can have that cup of coffee. I’m going to stop rumbling and talking right now so you guys can listen to this awesome interview I did with David and how he went from zero to $100,000 a month in revenues. Enjoy this interview with David.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:04:28] SV:  Hey David. What is going on? How’re you doing my man?

[00:04:32] David: Hey Scott. Good thanks. How are you buddy?

[00:04:33] SV: I am doing really really good and I had a little bit of a mix up there. We set our clocks ahead here in the States and we almost didn’t make this happen but you luckily checked early and found out that we actually had a little bit of a time thing there.

[00:04:49] David: [inaudible] can be an interesting thing, so yeah. Luckily we always check ahead and makes sure we’re doing things right.

[00:04:57] SV: yeah. Exactly. Now, where are you located again?

[00:05:00] David: I’m in Australia. I’m in the south, I’m in Melbourne.

[00:05:03] SV: Okay, okay. Cool. Alright. Good. What I wanted to do here today, you actually sent me an email and it was a nice email by the way. The title of it was ‘Zero – $100,000 a month in eight months and part thanks to you’.

[00:05:19] David: I thought I’d just get to the point and I thought you probably get a ton of these emails and I’m like this is something crazy that happened in big part because it was something to catch your attention and I guess it did.

[00:05:30] SV: It definitely caught my attention. I do get a lot of emails and I do try to answer each and everyone of them but they do go into kind of a priority. Some people they just have urgent things and some people they just have a brief question and we try to get those but yeah this definitely caught my eye and I’m like, “ Okay, I got to check this out,” so that’s when I reached out to you and you kind of emailed me when you emailed me all of that, you kind of were going through the process and that’s really what I want to do here. I want to really kind of dive in, let people know how you got the idea of doing this and kind of like your steps going through it to get to where you’re at now but then also where you plan to go from here. Maybe we can start right from the beginning. First off, do you have any e-commerce experience at all or any online experience before you started Amazon?

[00:06:17] DAVID:  Zero, nothing, so even business experience. My education was more economics background, I studied Aviation as well but business wise I’ve never actually had a business so never really explored e-commerce. It’s something that I always thought other people do, probably about too much, I’d have to mortgage a house if I had one, I don’t even have one. I thought it was just kind of the old too hard basket.

[00:06:44] SV:  I love hearing that because a lot of people think that you have to have this background, this experience. Coming into this thing I did have some experience but not on Amazon but I had online experience kind of the marketing background and stuff like that. That I taught myself but I still had that experience but you don’t need to have a website, you don’t need any of those things upfront to get started technically but you do need to go through the process. Okay, so you don’t have any background in this but you’re kind of intrigued by it. What was your first I guess like, “Hmm, maybe I should look at this?”

[00:07:17] DAVID: Yeah, so initially what happened with me was that I was at an interesting time in my life where I was I guess between work and having a few other things happen to me personally. I was at a point where I took on a lot of debt and work wise I started to hit certain roles that required me effectively, I’d get up at 6 in the morning and be back at home at 7:30 pm at night. The money was kind of okay and I was thinking, “I mean this is crazy, this is actually crazy, I don’t think I’ll be doing this for the next 10, 20 years, they didn’t tell us this at highschool and so forth and so I thought I really got to take control here and figure it out. I just thought, “Well maybe you can make money online, it’s pretty straightforward, it’s very accessible.”

I just started Googling and I started searching on YouTube and I came across a few ideas like all different types of Real estate and investing but you’ve got absolute big at the time. This is about early 2015, so people were talking about apps, affiliate marketing, Amazon was one of them and I found a video by a guy called Chris Guthrie. I saw him talk about how he made six grand in about 30 days and just some guy on his computer at home, seemed quite intelligent, he’s a really nice guy, I’ve actually spoken to him and met him at a conference recently, great guy.

I saw his video and I thought, “Hmm, this seems interesting, kind of makes sense” and then I started, I dove further and the funny thing about me was I was so hungry for it and I was so fed up where I was, just different people go through different points in their lives, sometimes you get really angry and pissed and it’s not necessarily that a bad thing, it’s more like a healthy I need to improve, I need to change this can’t keep on going like this and… I had just gone down that path and basically, discovering the idea I think late March 2015 and I just ran with it, I just went with it and I found your podcast, really soon thereafter and I think you were at episode four, or five or six at the time, if I can recall. When did you actually start your podcast?

[00:09:28] SV:  It was February 4th, I believe 2015, was the official date that I launched the podcast.

[00:09:36] DAVID:  The big launch yeah.

[00:09:37] SV:  Yeah, that was the big … Is anybody going to listen? It was the launch of me publishing something on iTunes.

[00:09:45]DAVID:  Yeah, and that’s why I reached out to you, I wanted to thank you for just taking the time to start, I mean no one really prompted you, it’s just your own thing. I guess yourself and your wife really you thought about it and just went for it but it’s great because I found your podcast in March when I started looking and literally just started smashing through your episodes and I couldn’t wait for the next one to come out because I was kind of catching up and getting steps ahead I’m like what am I doing now? I’m just waiting for you to do your… you’re great, you pump content pretty quickly which is-

[00:10:16] SV:  It’s kind of retracing the steps, then once I got rolling I started getting questions and then answering those questions. It is actually easy to create that content because you’re creating content for questions that are being asked and that’s truly awesome actually.

[00:10:31] DAVID:  What I did is basically from around. I wrote this down on my iPhone, March 18th I kind of came across the idea and I started listing different businesses I could have a crack at. I looked at options training other stuff online but Amazon, I found it March 18th 2015. I looked in my emails, I was basically asking suppliers, basically Early April, I already had a product picked and sourced.

[00:10:55] SV:  Wow, wow that’s incredible.

[00:10:57] DAVID:  I moved pretty quickly and I made sure it was air shipped, which is a big thing that I’ve come to tell people about. If you’ve got to start, air shipping is perfect because it forces you to select a smaller product which is cheaper anyway to get into and you get to market quicker. Your inventory starts turning a lot quicker and you can…  Then if you hit a good market, if you kind of hit a homerun so to speak initially, you can really take off and scale it very quickly or you can go at a slow pace which is okay too.

The main thing is, you can just quickly test the market and see what works. Sea shipping is just, from my experience, 45-60 day experience door to door. Just went with that and allowed me to scale and it was awesome. Basically, I had one product it kind of went well. A second product also went well. Most recently I’ve launched, I’ve got a third with a fourth on the way.

Those first two products really carried me and it allowed me to scale up very quickly to a point where it was funny, I’m at work, some point in about, I guess it was October or so maybe even early September , October and I’m looking at my daily sales and I’m like, “Shit, I’ve actually made more money today on Amazon than I have the whole week at work,” and it’s like on a Monday morning and I’m just sitting there, I’m at work and I’m just laughing and going, “ This is crazy, I can’t believe the numbers I’m seeing on my phone.”

[00:12:20] SV:  It is, and it’s addicting that app isn’t it? You swipe it and you see the numbers, I actually thought about uninstalling it because it’s addicting and sometimes it’s distracting and sometimes it’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing because sometimes you’ll swipe and you’ll be like, “Wait a minute, I usually have 20 at this time of the day and now I only have 5, what’s going on, is something wrong?”

[00:12:40] DAVID:  It’s usually hard to detach yourself from it because it can be kind of like a point of validation where you just want to check and make sure you’re doing it okay, you’re happy if it’s going well, you’re not happy if it’s not going well. It’s a real mind game and it’s really kind of mindset-shift.

[00:12:54] SV:  Oh, absolutely. Let’s go back real quick though. When you’re first getting started you got the idea, you started listening to Chris Guthrie, which by the way, funny thing is just before I got on with you, I was skyping him back and forth, we were messaging each other because we were just discussing a few things. it’s funny that you bring him up, he’s a good friend of mine now through obviously the podcast and this business and everything but he’s a great, great guy. It’s funny that you got started by just picking up just a little breadcrumb from him.

Then from there getting the idea and then from there doing a little bit more digging, finding the podcast and then here we are. From that point, you get the idea, you go through the content, kind of telling you what I did, you’re following those steps. Now what do you do though, just kind of break it down a little bit for like product research for you. What was your method, what was your process to really kind of find that first product?

[00:13:49] DAVID:  What I did is I basically went through the whole… There’s a few tools available now which make it super easy. Jungle Scout awesome, that’s one of the biggest time savers. I guess the more you understand about the business, the more you realize how valuable that tool is but at the time, I just went through the best seller matrix and I just went through and had a look at what appeared where and then from there, if there was a product that was referencing to my niche. I found a product that happened to be, the funny thing is at the time as at the top 100 but it’s no longer in the top 100 but it still sells really well, at the time it was there and I just happened to see it.

I looked at this guy and I see, this guy is doing 70, 80 a day. He’s only got 100 or 200 reviews at the time, quite a new product and then I saw the competition and I’m like, “Wow, they’re all fully optimized listings and everyone else is selling the same unit about half the price which is the funny thing. He’s got a whole heap of competition selling for half his price. He’s priced double everybody else, yet he’s selling effectively more than everybody combined almost and I’m thinking,” Okay, he’s probably one of those people that went through that course or someone similar or someone who’s actually taken the time to do it and I thought, there’s literally room for a lot more here so I jumped in and I guess here we are.

[00:15:08] SV:  Nice, now that product, were you able to … Is it pretty much a very similar product did you have to make a lot of modifications to it? Maybe kind of give us a little bit about that.

[00:15:18] DAVID:  Yeah. It was basically, in function everything was the same, my product’s the same as the competitors but I guess the features are a little improved. I’ve got a product that I sell on health and personal care space and it’s a product where… It’s got certain functions, you can go talk to suppliers and say… What I actually did was I went and had a look at all the other competitors and what they were doing and what the customers were telling us about the problems, this needed to be improved, that needed to be improved, this wasn’t good enough, that wasn’t good enough, then I took all those points and said, “ Okay, this is my perfect product, I know they’re buying a lot, I can see how much they’re buying. This is what they’re telling me they want so I literally took that and I actually made a spreadsheet and I made a spreadsheet in Excel, I went through all the… I had a few issues and then I just put like x’s and crosses every time I saw it in a review, then I’d kind of get a waiting system. It’s a crude way of just seeing what’s most important to people, what gets brought up the most.

[00:16:25] SV:  You were basically going through your competitions reviews?

[00:16:28] DAVID:  That’s right, yeah I was just going through their reviews and specifically, the three and below star and then just having a look at what people were complaining about, suggesting or what they weren’t happy about. Whatever the case might be and I thought if I could just satisfy all these, I should not have issues with my product and I’ll actually have a better product.

I actually went and got a better product and I went through so many suppliers, I hit up dozens of them because I knew that the works done now. I’ve picked the market which is tough as it is, but if I can just get the formula right for this product then that’s going to be a win. All I need to do is position and launch it and I know how to do that and then I knew it would work from there. That was the crucial part to get the product that actually works and that ticks as many of those boxes as possible.

[00:17:19] SV:  Now, what were you going after as far as like, sales volume? What were you looking to, were you going after a product that could do 50 a day or more, or were you going after just some that could do 10 or 20 a day?

[00:17:31] DAVID:  I was happy with 10, 20 a day and to build that portfolio of products that would just be ticking along at 10 or 20 a day. I thought that was awesome. I just wanted to not lose money and to actually just have an experience and to see where it went but I was still determined to work hard, I have always been really full-on when I approach certain tasks and everything and I learn pretty quickly and when I learn I pretty much go all in so I’m like, “ I’m just going to give it a really good shot here. I’m not expecting miracles but I still set the bar pretty high I looked up at the sky and I’m like “ I think I can do better than him.” And by extension that means I can sell more than him which is whatever amount of sales a day, it was a lot. I was always happy with just being a little player in there. I’ll take a few crumbs and I’ll be happy, Amazon’s a big place but I also aimed to beat him.

[00:18:21] SV:  Sure, sure, and I think that’s smart. I think you said that your top competitor like he was charging more where everybody is charging a lot less, is that true?

[00:18:30] DAVID: Yeah, that’s right, yeah. You’ve seen afterwards, there has been a ton of people pile into the space selling same sort of unit, same sort of price. Pretty funny how these things…

[00:18:42] SV:  Oh yeah, and so at that point, when it gets to that point, how do you differentiate it at this point now?

[00:18:47] DAVID:  It’s funny, I’ve had tons of people come in, they’ve ripped off my title, my bullet points , my photos, the way I’ve taken my photos, the specific angles I’ve taken my photos. It’s so funny like people were really funny, I guess it’s flattering in a way, I mean they just … They’ll literally take your listings and say, “ Hmm, this sounds well, okay these are the figures, I’ll get 10,20 a day it’s very popular and I’ll literally get the same unit. Some of them don’t even bother to put their own branding or whatever and it’s quite hilarious but they’ll literally take photos. Some people will have multiple photos all in the same kind of way, so they’re not really showing how it’s being used and yeah, I mean the way I’ve differentiate it is…

It’s hard, I think I’ve built up enough velocity on keywords that’s why I’m ranked quite well now and so what I’ve done is I’ve always try to change and re-optimize the listings maybe I’m improving a few more products but I guess it’s mainly, the volume and quality of your reviews which I’ve really worked on and I guess I’m ranking and the other thing is your ad spend as well.

If you can, it’s a whole other topic, but if you can… I tried experimenting with pushing pretty hard on ads and it kind of worked for a bit, bumps me up and then organically, the traffic will keep you up at a high level in ranking so that kind of helps. At the end of the day, it’s not really a product where someone is going to sit down and have a messy discussion with their wife, they are just going to… it’s just impossible really.

As long as you’re presented really well, you’ve got good reviews, a good amount of reviews and you’re ranked well, you usually do well and there can literally be 40, 50 other people selling them but they’ll never get seen, it’s just a big initial push to get to the top and once you get there, you can work on maintaining it but it’s more of a…

As I said it’s impossible, someone is not going to go through your spreadsheet for 20, 40 products and then just… I think we get into it a lot and we’re pretty forlorn about this. We overanalyze things whereas I don’t think customers really… they’re not going to look at it to a level of, I guess, accuracy that we do.

[00:20:51] SV:  Yeah, now let me ask you quickly about the sourcing real quick. Did you go to straight to like Alibaba, AliExpress and then kind of sort through and weed through there?

[00:21:01] DAVID:  Yeah, I just went on Alibaba and I just went through suppliers and such. It’s funny I actually looked for another related product initially, and I spent some suppliers I just wasn’t happy by that and I got the same for some of these shitty products. What happened is one of my suppliers happened to… I said, “ Look, I’m looking for this type of product which is related,” and they’re like, “ Oh by the way, we’ve got this unit and it turned out to be awesome, and I actually was specifically looking for that first product initially couldn’t find them, when I found them for a related product that happened to be the product that I had said, by the way, we’ve got one of these and it was an awesome unit. It turned out to be really good, so it’s just funny how that works, it’s just funny how that works because actually through the sourcing of two products that I originally came back and found my first.

[00:21:48] SV:  That’s awesome, now how did this second product after you launched that, how did that do in regards to helping the first product if at all?

[00:21:55] DAVID:  It’s kind of hard to say, I think my first product has its own life and the second product although they are related, I think they’re mostly get purchased individually, they both complement each other. My second product that I launched I refined my process and I became more, I guess economical about my launches. I came here both times with 1,000 units for each product.

First product I put to market and I was selling well at 20 a day and I was going well and I took the plunge and re-ordered 3,000. That was before it was really properly validated or before I could actually pay all off organically with the earnings, so I kind of took a risk and I’ve been doubling up with this product for months. With the second product I knew that there was a need for that type of product and I just positioned it well and I was out of stock for like three weeks. I sold out in like three weeks, I just launched it and it was crazy.

[00:23:00] SV:  That was for 1,000 units?

[00:23:02] DAVID:  Yeah, 1,000 units, that will go on for basically two and a half weeks.

[00:23:07] SV: Wow that’s phenomenal. Lead us a little bit through the launch process like, what did you do once you got your product landed into Amazon? What was your strategy moving forward?

[00:23:23] DAVID:  So what I did is, say I’ve built up a listing of photos. Initially I’ll have a look at price point, I’ll put a price slightly more expensive just because you’re low on stock anyway and then I… Initially what I wanted is to get, I guess we all want reviews and ranks and we want to do it with a little product as possible. My specific method is I just use AMZ Tracker, I think. Do you use that?

[00:23:51] SV:  I do use it, I have a subscription to it, to kind of monitor the ranking. I got to be honest, I don’t use it as much as maybe I should, just because I get a little sidetracked when I start looking at rankings every day, but if I’m shooting for a certain keyword and I really want to go after that one or five or whatever, then it’s a great tool to do that, yeah.

[00:24:07] DAVID:  Yes, what I do is I just optimize my listing make sure that it’s keyword relevant and then what I do is I’ll concentrate on a handful of keywords and normally jewel keywords. If you had, like you always talk about Garlic Press, if you had, say your product could also be called a press. From my experience I found, if you try rank for Garlic Press and you push your efforts on that, you get a double effect because you’re ranking for Garlic Press but you’re also ranking for press and also probably for garlic. I went for a jewel or triple keyword and really focused on that and also because it’s a longer tail keyword, you have more of a bang for your buck with the units that you have.

[00:24:48] SV:  Yeah, that’s a good point, yeah.

DAVID:  Usually those shorter tail keywords … There’s so much competition. When you’re coming to the party with a little pistol and everyone else got rockets and guns, you can’t really make much of an impact. You’d rather kind of target in, zero in on an area where you can have more effect, so what I do is I use AMZ Tracker. I simply created a promotion and I just send out units via CPRL super easy. I used a launch service for my first product called Viral Launch and it was good and I needed it, it served its purpose but I found it’s a lot more economical, cheaper and better if I just used AMZ tracker and effectively just gave away my product against the keyword because you’re getting double effect for your money because most of those you get reviews but then also you’re using a super URL, everyone can make their own call as to whether they should use it but it works.

[00:25:46] SV:  Yeah, I agree and I mean there was just the report, sent out about how effective they’re going to be and if they’re not going to be and if people can basically get in trouble for them. I still think that they’re being used, I still think that they’re still effective but I think the fix to that or the workaround will be to actually guide people through finding your product, you know what I mean?

[00:26:14] DAVID:  Yeah.

[00:26:14] SV:  Actually telling them, go and search for Garlic Press, find your brand name and then click on it and buy it.

[00:26:22] DAVID:  The funny thing is about that, say for instance your press is on page 12 and now Amazon sees a whole bunch of people clicking, searching and then magically going on page 12 to finding your product and buy it I mean it’s not organically how it happens anyway, so in every situation there is always a way to uncover. I’m sure they track people’s spending habits and they know when someone goes to page 12.

That’s pretty obvious, I mean that’s another flag… How far do you want to go with it? I mean we’re all doing it, if they came around and slapped everybody would they find out very quickly, I guess the community talks so we’d find out.

[00:27:00] SV:  That is really, really true. How many units generally are you giving away in your first blast?

[00:27:09] DAVID:  Well, I normally come out with a thousand units, so I really cap it at 150 and I’m doing that spread out over a period of time and that will ideally get me ranked and get me some reviews, ideally I’d like to have over 100 for my first batch and it just really depends on how responsive I guess the reviews are.

[00:27:29] SV:  Then as far as like Pay Per Click, how soon do you turn that on?

[00:27:32] DAVID:  About 20 reviews which happened very quickly, the AMZ tracker… people, there’s a lot of people over … It’s funny you get people that review it the instance they get it. It happens quickly sometimes, so within the week I could start Pay Per Click probably late in the week if I have a few reviews and then I just go from there and I just start from small bits and it’s good to actually start early because you can cast a wide net and then you can see what gets impressions and then you can see, “ Okay, these keywords are a bit more relevant, and then you can kind of make a call as to whether you want to compete on those because if you’ve got all of these keywords and you see one of them has normally 80/20 so you have certain keywords that have most of the impressions.

Well then you can re-evaluate, well hang on, what do I want to do, should I change track here? Or if I do a secondary launch, maybe I should launch against that other keyword, it gives you a lot of market information, you can effectively see where the traffic’s going.

[00:28:34] SV:  I love that, I think getting those golden nuggets as I call them, it’s like they’re giving you the data, so why not use that data. Now as far as like starting to see what keywords you want to rank for, is there anything that you do specifically for that to kind of uncover maybe your competitors or any of that stuff?

[00:28:54] DAVID:  Yes, there’s a tool that people can use, they probably know about it, Keyword Inspector. Have you used Keyword Inspector?

[00:29:02]SV:  Yeah, actually I do and actually I have got a link I believe on my resources page if people want to check that out and they can definitely go through that. I think you get extra credit, you can get 20 extra credits because it’s a credit system right?

[00:29:15] DAVID:  Yeah that’s right.

[00:29:16] SV:  You buy credits and yeah you can run a reverse search.

DAVID:  Yeah, you just do a reverse search on competitor’s listings and I don’t know how they do it but they seem to have an okay degree of accuracy. They can reverse ASIN another listing and tell you which keywords they rank for and actually where they’re ranked for those keywords.

It’s very straightforward, I looked at my competitor, I went through his listing and I saw, “Okay, he’s selling so many a day.” You do most of your sales for the keyword you rank highest for, that’s just how Amazon works. You just literally look at what they rank highest for, these are the keywords that you need to target and it’s very simple. The other thing is, my second product launch went quite well I believe also in part because, my first product, because they are complimentary so they cross with keywords. Keywords apply to both.  What  happened is, it was great because I knew  what were the most lucrative keywords because I experimented with adPlus and a few other  platforms and I found certain keywords were a lot more expensive than others. I’m like there’s a whole lot of competition for this keyword.

That means it’s quite lucrative. When I do my launch for the next product I’m going to launch against most expensive keyword because that’s going to be the most economical way because you’re doing the super URL and give away. You’re effectively that’s a really good return on your money because then you have to… there’s more of a push for that keyword and then you can sustain a lot easier. You don’t have to burrow your way through with all the advertising and  push your way out.

[00:30:47] SV: Yeah, I know. That’s a good point, definitely a good point. Now, when you look at the reverse search, do you kind of look at the top 10 keywords or something like that? Let’s say for example they’re ranking page 1 for 50 key words and then they’re ranking position 2 on another 50, so do you just take all of the ones they are ranking between 1 and 10 and then do you take them, compile them and put them in a few campaigns?

[00:31:14] DAVID:  Yeah, that’s what I do. I go through a few competitors, take probably the top 10 words or something and then put them in campaigns. Initially what I did was I just did a massive data dump where I’d actually take all of them, throw them into a campaign and see what happens and sometimes Amazon gives you relevancy for them, sometimes they don’t.

I think I found it a lot more effective and a lot more utilized when I had shorter campaigns, maybe 50 or 20 keywords, I put them in separate campaigns and they seemed to work. That will also tell you what Amazon believes your listing is relevant for. You may want to rank for keywords that your competitors rank you well. Put all that data in a campaign, if you don’t get any impressions for that top keyword that means there’s something with your listing or there’s some issue with Amazon or you may just have to try it again but it’s telling you you’re not ranking for that keyword so it gives you a big clue that you need to do something about it.

[00:32:07] SV:  Yeah, I know, I agree. It totally can be relevancy, it could be if you’re not bidding enough but I think relevancy a lot of the times can play a major role so you definitely want to run that stuff against yours and then see how it goes. One thing I do, I don’t know if you do this. I think it’s interesting to do is you run that same reverse search on your own listing and then go back a month later and see how well you’re doing.

[00:32:36] DAVID:  Yeah and the other funny thing is you find all sorts of crazy keywords that literally make no sense and I don’t know where the data comes from. There must be, I guess it’s a bit of margin of error that it’s actually quite interesting to see how all that works.

[00:32:51] SV:  Yeah, I know it is. It’s totally funny but it’s data but we look at it, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t. Do you have any variations or you’re just single listings?

[00:33:03] DAVID:  Just single listings.

[00:33:05] SV:  Okay-

[00:33:05] DAVID:  No variations. Sorry, that was my alarm.

[00:33:08] SV:  There we go, get the alarm clock. I think that was supposed to let you know that we’re supposed to start recording.

[00:33:14] DAVID:  This is when we should have started, yeah.

[00:33:17] SV:  That was when we should have started, that’s funny, that’s cool. Wrapping up here, you’ve pretty much did I mean everything we’ve talked about. I mean it’s pretty straight forward.

[00:33:29] DAVID:  You just follow it step by step and you just- every phase you just get all the information and you become experts. It’s very quick and you just keep moving.

[00:33:38] SV:  Yeah, I think that’s important and I mean not to sit here and say that it’s easy because it’s not, right. I mean it takes time, it takes hours, it takes the research is probably one of the hardest parts and the sourcing. Right? I mean it takes time.

[00:33:49] DAVID:  One other thing I wanted to mention is a big thing that I discovered myself was the cash in, cash out equation and that’s going to really dictate. People don’t understand how important margins are. They came to get into the business and they came to get a product selling but if you’re making 20 to 30 percent margin that’s literally not enough to scale if you’re successful because if you say you have like a 30 or 25 percent margin, so you’re selling the product say for $10 and you’re getting $2.50 back total, that’s not a lot of money to scale.

[00:34:25] SV:  No.

[00:34:25] DAVID:  You’re not going to get that much back and I just looked at if I put a dollar of inventory and how much money do I get back from Amazon of expenses to be able to buy more stock, my figure is quite high because I source my product quite cheaply and sell it for like around 20 bucks so I have a good healthy margin where initially when I put a dollar of inventory…. So say I land a $1000 of product, I could literally get $5000 back which is insane. It’s crazy as long as you can rank it and sell it well, you got like an ATM, you just put money in and it comes back out.

[00:35:00] SV:  It’s true I mean you definitely got to look at the margin. The one caveat I would say there is when you’re starting your margins could be lower because you’re not buying enough to get the price down or maybe you’re overspending on certain things to try to get the product ranked. You got to figure those things in but if you know in the end when you get up and running, you get ranked and all that stuff that you can bring those costs down, then I think it’s okay but you need to know what that is ahead of time. You can’t just guess.

[00:35:30] DAVID:  Yeah, I know, that’s true but I’m also thinking that you’re quite limited in a sense. Say you sell a product for $20. If you can land it in the US for say $10 and Amazon takes their cut of 5 say, that gives you $5, that’s 25%. You’ve just gotten $15 back all right. You can only buy 1.5 units with that. If you launched a thousand units, if you literally sold all- and I’m not including promotions, if you put a thousand units in, you sold all of them, you can only buy 1500 again. Effectively you’re treading water, you may be growing a little bit but if you hit a market that’s taking off, you can’t supply that demand. You can’t keep up with it.

[00:36:15] SV:  Yeah, I know. That’s a great point and that’s why I think I’ve always stressed too. If you’re selling a product for 20, you should be able to source it for 5.

[00:36:21] DAVID:  Yeah, or less.

[00:36:24] SV:  Or less, you know what I mean? That should be that happy medium time type price point. You know what, this has been really good to walk through this process and I think, I mean, are you okay sharing what you’ve done in a month up to this point?

[00:36:40] DAVID:  Yeah, look, I don’t mind. My best month, I hit over $100,000 a month and the funny thing is that was with the second product launching and faring well but that went out of stock so I’m kind of back down to 100 or there about. I started off initially. I was doing 5/6,000 a month then I’d have like a 10/20,000 a month and then it just kind of took off in November for whatever reason. I think my ranking just kind of boosted for whatever reason. I just took off and yeah, then it got up to a level where there was a lot of, I mean there was just crazy money coming through, money I hadn’t seen before in my life just started first time I’ve got into a business but there’s real potential to have a business that’s quite significant in the sense of supporting myself and whatever I want to do.

[00:37:30] SV:  Yeah, I know. It’s great and I think it’s amazing that you’re at a six figure point in the business. I’m not even there yet so congrats to you man.

[00:37:37] DAVID:  Yeah, thanks a lot. You help me so much. It’s awesome the stuff that you do and it’s crazy you put it out there for free. The internet’s an insane place like the amount of cool things you can do and it’s just all the way out there. It’s really amazing.

[00:37:49] SV:  I know, it really is and the one thing is and I think I said this in the email, you kind of did do that. You thanked me and all that stuff. I said listen, I kind of gave you the fire starter and then you had to pour gas on it, right. You actually got to do the work. It’s all there, we understand it but you got to go out there and do it, not saying that every product you launch is going to be successful either, must be honest.

[00:38:13] DAVID:  Yeah and that’s the thing. You just got to be able to exploit opportunities as they present themselves. The thing is if you’re swinging and missing, who cares. All you got to do is hit it once and then it’s all good because if you make a lot of money in one hit, it’s not like it all disappears tomorrow. If you work on it you can maintain and grow it and so forth but if you don’t swing at all, it’s quite guaranteed what’s going to happen and that’s nothing.

[00:38:38] SV:  Exactly. I also see here you have a goal to hit 300,000 in a month, is that what your goal is?

[00:38:45] DAVID:  Yeah, I wanted to hit 300 in December. If I can get three products of mine at the moment, if I can get them established and running well, I think I can have enough capital there to the point where the limiting factor will be my time which is why I’m building a team now because I’ve come to a stage where I’ve paid off all my debts really quickly. I actually paid myself out of the business like in November, my friends, family, everything and then quit my job, straight away in around January started and I’ve actually gave myself a pay rise, started working for myself and now I’m employing somebody but I believe that if I can get the systems in place and just replicate how I approach the business, if I can have a few people assisting me in working with me and I’ll have enough capital from the sale of the first stock and actually boost up and get my business to a level I can hit about 300 a month.

[00:39:37] SV:  That’s great, that’ a great strategy moving forward and I think whenever you grow you got to have help. You got to have support, you got to have a team and I think that you are on the right track and now you have the capital to do it so you should do it, right and I think that’s it in a nutshell. I want to thank you again for coming on David. I think it’s awesome to be able to share this and I appreciate it. I’m definitely going to follow up. We can go ahead and get you when you’re at that number and we can see what’s changed and what you had to do to get there and all that stuff. Again, I learn and I get inspired by just interviewing people like you every single day so it’s definitely a win-win for everyone and I appreciate you sharing it. If there was one thing I guess that you could give someone just starting right now, if there was one little piece of advice, what would that be?

[00:40:24] DAVID:  I was just thinking about what you just said then it’s all out there on the internet but I always kind of walked around thinking… “You know, I can do something really cool and great, I just wish someone would show me or tell me or I wish I could just discover some sort of system or method or some area of how business works.” I didn’t realize how straightforward it was. It really is quite straightforward and I just wish someone had shown me maybe because I work pretty hard, I’m pretty intelligent so I thought I just needed somebody to take and run with which is what I have done.

If there’s anything I would say to anyone is that it’s quite easy at the moment. It’s all out there. All the information and the mindset and all the tools that you need to attack this and really get into it, it’s all out there. It’s literally just a case of, and it’s really cliché, it’s a case of how bad you want it. Whatever your life situation is, wherever you’re at, it’s just a case of if you can decide with yourself, “Do I actually want this enough to really focus on it?” and if you’re going to do it, just why not be an expert and just kill it? Why not just try and be at the top and I mean it’s a proven concept. We know it works. A lot of people know it works. There’s a lot of material out there.

Okay, so what if there’s competition? Why don’t you put a lot of effort into it? Why don’t you work harder than the next guy? Who knows, maybe you’ll- there’s a lot of money up for grabs so it’s literally it’s worth your effort but it’s a conscious decision everyone makes with themselves and you just really have to decide how bad do you want it. That’s really the only deciding factor because the other tools and all the other information’s all there. Everything’s out there and that’s kind of I guess the hard part too because it kind of starts with your head and then you think, “Wow, is it me?” and the truth is yes, it is you. You’re caught in a bottleneck and it’s just taking responsibility, I think that’s what I said to you in the email. I wanted to take responsibility for my life. I didn’t want things decided for me. I didn’t want to ask like a little kid from a pay rise at work, all that sort of stuff. I’m like a grown man. I shouldn’t ask someone to go on a holiday. I know that’s a really weird concept but it’s like I’m 14.

[00:42:36] SV:  No, I believe in that 100 percent.

[00:42:41] DAVID:  You have kids, I mean they ask you like, “Dad, I want to go here, can I go?” then you’re like, “Yeah, cool.”

[00:42:45] SV:  Yeah.

[00:42:45] DAVID:  What, time off, it’s like yeah, that’s cool because you’re a parent, they’re your child and you just support them. I’m a grown man here. I shouldn’t be asking strangers, “Can I go on a holiday? Can I have more money please, I think I’m worth it?” just forget them. Get rid of them, you don’t need them. Just do it yourself. Just take control and when you take control of things, everything becomes clearer and apparent, that’s the coolest part but it’s also hard because it’s like, okay it’s totally up to you so if this doesn’t work out, it’s no one’s fault but your own.

[00:43:15] SV:  True.

[00:43:15] DAVID:  It’s a double-edged sword.

[00:43:15] SV:  Yeah, no, it is but you know what, with that risk and I say risk not even just losing money but losing the respect that you think that you’re going to lose which I don’t believe that but that is what those mind games play and when you start thinking-

[00:43:32] DAVID:  People couldn’t care less. I mean they’re just interested in what’s happening on Facebook, what they’re doing on the weekend, what they’re eating, they don’t really care about your hopes and dreams. One other thing I want to say is I started reading a lot of self-help and motivational stuff and the funny thing one guy mentioned is some instructor from some other field, he said, “You as a person, all you care about is living and procreating, everything else your body, mind, soul, whatever you want to call it, doesn’t care because as long as you’re alive, as long as you’ve spit out a few kids, that’s enough.

You as yourself, your body doesn’t really care about your hopes and dreams and the things you want to achieve because they’re kind of luxuries in the sense that we all don’t have to do this business. We all can just kick along and do our jobs and we live quite great lives because we’re- most of us are in the western world, we have great lives anyway. We’re not in trouble, were not at risk we’re going to starve. We’re not insecure or anything. Everything’s good, life’s pretty good. We have first world problems as they say but to push yourself to get to where you naturally don’t care about, it requires a lot of effort because you’re always pushing against yourself and you as a person don’t want to do…

Everyone takes the easy way out with everything and that’s like a natural, like a survival mechanism. We don’t want to exert too much effort because there’s no need. We need effort and energy to survive so just understand you’re always going to be pushing against that and that’s why you feel lazy, that’s why you can’t be bothered doing things. That’s why you lose interest. It’s just your body returning to a natural state and you’re always going to be fighting that when you’re doing this.

[00:45:10] SV:  That’s great advice and it’s great to also just bring it to the surface and let us think about that because I do believe that our body it’s our chassis. It’s kind of what gets us around and it kind of moves us along but our mind is so powerful and so important and it really is a choice as to what you want to do. It’s just how much work, how much frustration do you want to deal with and get through and all that stuff. If you do want to do it, there’s really no reason for you. I heard it from someone, I forget who it was but he just basically said that he is too stubborn to fail right. You’re just too stubborn to fail so you have to be too stubborn to fail and if you do that, you’ll do okay. I like the analogy of baseball. You see baseball players go into the box all the time and they strike out but they go back up the next time thinking they’re going to hit the home run.

[00:46:01] DAVID:  I think I read somewhere like I think Babe Ruth is one of your big folk heroes and I think he had more strikeouts than a lot of the other players and he hit the most homeruns so that just tells you.

[00:46:13] SV:  Yeah, it totally does. Hey David, this was awesome and I really do appreciate it and I definitely want to keep in touch with you and get you back on the show later but I just want to say again, thank you so much and congratulations on all your success and I really do mean that. Like I said, I really want to be able to follow up with you so thank you again, I really do appreciate it.

[00:46:36] DAVID:  Yeah, cool. Thanks so much Scott, I do appreciate all the work you’ve done and yeah just keep at it man. Don’t let up, keep going it’s an awesome thing you’re doing.

[00:46:44] SV:  I appreciate it, now go run that team will you?

[00:46:47] DAVID:  All right, will do.

[00:46:48] SV:  All right, we’ll see you David.

Okay, so there you have it. An awesome interview and I’m telling you I get a ton of value just from digging into people’s’ stories and listening to where they came from, how they got started, product research, how they’ve launched, all of that stuff. I love doing it because I love giving it to you guys but I love doing it also because I can hear different angles and different ways that people are just tweaking a few things that we could try with our next launch so I just want to say that I love doing these and I learn myself just as you do I hope.

All right guys, that is going to wrap up this episode. I want to again say thank you so much for being a listener. You guys are awesome, you guys rock and if you can just do me that quick favor and just share the podcast. Share the podcast with someone that you think would be interested in that, do that today, do that for me today. That would be amazing and if you guys have not connected on our Facebook page or our Facebook group that is, it’s a private group, you have to gain access which is totally free to do.

All you have to do is head over to the amazingseller.com/fb, request to join. Usually in a couple of hours you’ll be approved, maybe sooner depending on when the moderators are checking that out and then once you get access, go in there and make yourself at home. Go in the search field, there’s a search box there. Type in what you are searching for as far as like a question and you’ll most likely find it there. Over 26,000 people in there now that are all TAS listeners and I just wanted to say you can get so much value inside of that group. It’s an extension of the podcast and I couldn’t have done it without you guys out there letting other people know about it, making it really, really awesome.

One last thing, if you are brand new and you want to attend one of my live workshops where I actually walk you through the five phases for picking a product, sourcing a product, launching product, promoting your product, everything in between, you’re going to want to head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop, again that’s theamazingselle.com/workshop. You can register for an upcoming live workshop there and I would love for you to attend. We have such a great time over there and well learn as well so definitely go over and do that.

All right guys, that is going to wrap it up. Once again remember I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to, come on say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, take action. Have an awesome amazing day and I’ll see you here on the next episode.

[END]

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[INTRODUCTION]

…on a regular basis whether it’s through your earbuds and you listening to me right now and us being able to maybe interact over on Periscope or maybe on Snapchat now. You guys are awesome and amazing and I just wanted again to say before we move in here, thank you so much. You guys are really, really awesome. Just want to get that out of the way.

But I’m really excited that you are here because today I had, well not today but I interviewed a social media expert and a lot of you have been asking, “Scott do we use Instagram, do we use Pinterest, what’s the best social media platforms that I should be going out there and using?” I don’t really have those answers. I do know how powerful social media can be but I also know that we want to drive them back to our own email list, we want to start building our own following and all that stuff or just get intelligence about our market. I know that there is a lot of great things that can happen with social media but I also know that it could be a time suck. There is a lot of time that goes into social media but there’s ways that you can do it so that way that you are not having to do it all and rather than me dive into this stuff I should probably have Laura who I invited on here as a guest, Laura that is.

She is a social media expert and she also created a tool that helps in this process to make it easier and I actually use the software. It’s called Edgar and I’m going to let her explain all about that but I’m also going to let her give us some tips and that’s what she did here on this interview. She was kind enough to come on, she is a busy, busy lady and she agreed to come on and share a lot of knowledge about selling products or getting people to buy products through social media and not just maybe just direct sales which she says that you can do but more than that. I really love it how she breaks it down for us and I’m really excited for you to see exactly what she would do. That’s what I did I flipped around and said, “Hey Laura what would you do if you were starting over right now and you had a physical product that you wanted to sell or a physical products or you had a brand? What would you do?”

She goes ahead and breaks it down for us and that’s what I really love about doing these interviews. It’s I’m able to almost get a coaching call from an expert and then give it to you. That’s really what this felt like because I was doing it as far as myself so really, really cool stuff. Now before we jump into that interview I wanted to again say thank you for all of the people that have been reaching out to me whether its email, whether it’s blog comments, whether its iTunes reviews, whether it’s maybe on Periscope. Where you are I want to say thank you and I want to give a little iTunes love. I haven’t given iTunes love in a long time so I figured I’d give a little love right now and just some of the most recent ones like the titles like thank you Scott, so grateful, taking action guys, found myself taking tons of useful notes, golden nuggets, take action, listen to this podcast, great tips, great help and very motivation, these are awesome and they are just really inspiring to me.

[00:03:24] SV: It motivates me to want to continue this when I’m able to reach you and they hear how it’s making an impact on you and your life. The one I want to read real quick is from Tristan Summerfield so Tristan thank you so much for being a listener and leaving that iTunes review. She says, “Wow thank you so much Scott I’m super grateful that you offer such detailed guides and specific instructions for succeeding as an Amazon FBA seller. The podcast on launching strategies was most particularly useful and I wrote out a long list of actionable steps that I am really looking forward to implementing. All the shows I have listened to thus far have been filled with real steps, with less emphasis and generalities and non-relatable stories, highly recommend and five star.” Tristan thank you so much, thank you, thank you I really do appreciate it.

Alright guys if you guys have not left an iTunes review and you want to do so please go over there and let me know what the show is doing for you and if you are enjoying it or hey, even if you are not enjoying it let me know alright? That’s what I wanted to throw out there and give you guys a little bit of love there on iTunes world and all you Periscope followers too that are hanging out on me there I want to thank you guys as well because you guys are awesome and we see each other quite often. I’m going to stop rambling now and I’m going to let you sit back and relax or maybe go on your run whatever you are doing. I’m going to let you guys now listen to this awesome amazing interview I did with a social media expert and her name once again is Laura Roeder, so enjoy this interview.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:04:53] SV: Hey Laura thank you so much for coming on the TAS podcast. How are you doing?

[00:04:58] LAURA: I am doing great, how are you Scott?

[00:05:00] SV: I am doing real good and I’m excited to have you on because I haven’t really had a social media type expert on that can really talk to us about using social media not just for I guess going out there and connecting with friends and stuff like a lot of people are but really how to use it in a business. Ours is a little bit different because we are selling physical products for the most part and I know that you have a lot of history in helping people in that. Maybe you can just let people know a little bit about your background as far as the social media and how you came on the scene there and I know that now that you have Edgar which I’m actually a subscriber of and I use it every day so we could talk about that and how we use the social media. But I do really want to get behind really what we can do as far as taking our physical products and getting them out there in social media world.

[00:05:53] LAURA: Yeah so my background, I’ve been in the social media space for as long as there has been one. I started working for myself as a web designer and then when social media started to become interesting to small businesses in 2007, 2008. My clients were asking me about that a lot so that’s where I got the idea to start doing social media consulting so in 2009 I switched over to social media consulting which soon became social media training and let’s say online training programs. I did that, train small businesses about social media marketing in Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn from 2009 to … Well I guess I’m still sort of doing it.

In 2014 I launched my first software product which is Edgar which is a social media scheduling and automation tool and that’s just taken off in a huge way, we’ll talk about it, we just do something a little bit different that none of the other tools do allowing you to build a library of content that cycles through over and over again. We weren’t the only ones that thought that was a good idea so at this point we have about five thousand customers. We just launched about a year and a half ago so it’s been our fine fast ride.

[00:07:09] SV: Yeah I know I love how your journey started somewhere and now it’s turned somewhere else because you fill the void in your own business and challenges and then from there I can probably say you didn’t look and predict this like three years ago and say, “I’m going to launch a SAS product.” It happened because of the steps that you took before that. If you never did social media you wouldn’t be where you are today probably, right?

[00:07:35] LAURA: Exactly, there is that Steve Jobs quote about how you can always connect the dots in retrospect but you can’t connect the dots at the time. That’s definitely how it’s happened for me, I didn’t know that I would end up running a software company but yeah we just saw the need for some social media software so we built it now here I am.

[00:07:53] SV: Yeah I know it’s crazy and I look at my story the same thing like how you start and then you trace back to the different things, the different decisions, the different risks or different challenges that you faced and how it does lead you through to where you are and who knows where you are going next. It’s fun to enjoy the ride and I tell it to everyone even people listening right now. You are starting maybe in the e-commerce space or the Amazon space but that just might be the stepping stone to get you to where you’ve got to go.

[00:08:17] LAURA: Yeah.

[00:08:17] SV: Alright, cool so just really let’s dig in. I’ve got some questions for you. One of them is, like I said we are physical product businesses and one of the challenges for us number one Amazon doesn’t give us the ability to get our customer information. We can’t go and get their email addresses, we can’t really technically it’s a little gray if we can actually put insert cards in to get our email addresses and stuff like that. There are some different work arounds and that’s why we do talk about starting on Amazon but then also building your own channel but what I want to do is, how can we use social media? What would you do for the physical product business? What would you say would be like one thing that we could at least to get started and that you think that could benefit a physical product business?

[00:09:11] LAURA: Yeah I think for any business it is important to have your own blog and your own website as a home base. Like you pointed out with Amazon it’s a great platform for selling but you can’t build a list. I know that it happens that Amazon creates their own competitor product so you lose your ranking for whatever reason. You don’t want your whole business to be reliant on this third party channel that you really have no control over. Having your own website, having your own blog where you can talk about your products and promote your products and start to build some backlinks out there because that’s the other thing.

You might have a blog post highlighting one of your products that’s linking to Amazon to buy it but if you get some links to that blog post or maybe you don’t sell on Amazon anymore but those links still exist where someone can find the product on your site and then maybe you can send them somewhere else in the future to buy it or maybe still Amazon. It just gives you a piece of that real estate so I think your own website is always your home base and then you are using social media platforms to drive traffic  both to your own site and directly to your product hostings.

[00:10:16] SV: Yeah. Now that makes sense that makes a lot of sense and it seems very standard and very basic but it’s true. We want that home base and a lot of people say, “Isn’t blogging dead?” I don’t believe it is, I still think it’s the place where your content resides it’s a matter of how do you get people over to that content. If I’m hearing you correctly, it’s like you want that home base with content so I think what you are saying also is content is probably important to start talking about your product in helping with. Maybe you can go on a little bit about that. If we are selling a physical product, what are the first stages? Building the content?

[00:10:53] LAURA: Yeah content is really, really important because content people link to and actually with physical products you sometimes have a bit of an advantage because in a services business no one is linking to your pricing page ever. You have to create content if you want backlinks. Products depending on category can be different because people often do link directly to the product especially if we are talking about Pinterest there are often links directly back to the product. If you have nice photos of your product that people would actually want to link to but whether or not you are in a category where people link to you, you want to create content so that you have great shareable content.

Looking at Pinterest as an example which I think can be a really valuable platform for e-commerce, creating blog posts and images where you are like showing different ways to use your product. Say you sell something really boring like paper clips so people aren’t pinning your paper clips to their wish list that often…

[00:11:52] SV: Wait a minute Laura do we have something that we share on the show because in the Amazon space we don’t really share our products because it gets out there where people are trying to all sell the same thing but we do have something where we always say and this would be fun like a garlic press. Let’s say I have a garlic press, I’m selling this beautiful stainless steel garlic press, what do we do to make this garlic press sexy in a sense?

[00:12:14] LAURA: Yeah so a few ideas that immediately come to mind for me. One you can go the direction of recipes like create with garlic in particular you know there is that chain restaurant the Stinking Roast that’s all about garlic you could create content like garlic lovers if you like an insane amount of garlic in your food these are the recipes for you.

[00:12:33] SV: Yeah I like it.

[00:12:33] LAURA: People are pinning them being like, “Oh my god I can’t believe anyone would eat this much garlic.” You could also do like what are fifty different ways that you can use a garlic press. You can probably like press play-doh through it with your kids, you can find some craft projects, there is other food that you can mince with the garlic press so yeah. I think you can get really creative looking at what type of content can I create around my product that actually would be funny or interesting or beautiful or compelling enough for people to share?

[00:13:05] SV: Yeah I know, I think that’s really, really  good. It’s comical but it’s actually good because like you said you can find I think fifty ways to use the garlic that’s great the recipes obviously, garlic lovers, that’s good stuff. From what I’m hearing though you are saying Pinterest is probably a really good channel for a physical product.

[00:13:25] LAURA: Yeah and again it does depend on the category. I think a garlic press would work because it’s related to cooking, obviously anything that looks nice. If you are selling clothes or jewelry or home goods or anything like that it’s just really huge on Pinterest. It’s such a cool opportunity because like I said people do link directly back to your product which to have people sharing pins that just link to buying you on Amazon is a pretty cool opportunity. In my space in the software space we don’t have an account on Pinterest for Edgar because it’s really not so compelling for software but I think for e-commerce it can be a really important part of a strategy.

[00:14:04] SV: Okay. What are your thoughts on Instagram for physical products?

[00:14:07] LAURA: Instagram is also is definitely one that is often more successful for physical products. It’s the same thing so for software we don’t instantly use Instagram I mean you can, I’ve seen people get very creative with it. Instagram in particular I would say even more heavily towards those beautiful products so you have the same spaces of fashion, home decor, stuff like that are huge on Instagram. I guess recipes people post on Instagram as well or in health and fitness or stuff like that. Instagram is tricky because what I hate about Instagram is you can’t put links in individual posts which just like kill me as a marketer. You can only put links back in your profile which is pretty hard to get to.

People are starting like I’m blinking on the name. There is a startup now where you can tag things in the image and now link back to products so people are getting more innovative with it. Instagram is tricky because you can’t schedule it like the scheduling tools that say … Instagram all they really do is like send you a reminder to pull up Instagram on your phone and post it so you can’t get that savvy marketing-wise. Instagram is a great platform and it’s huge but you have to be all in with Instagram because you have to be doing it live, you have to create so much content so I would honestly not go there first for those reasons.

[00:15:32] SV: Okay good, good I’m glad that you said that. From what I’m hearing interest is probably, depending on the product of course. Like you said you are in software but we are talking physical product for the most part if we are talking of sporting good type thing if you are selling a tennis racket then you would probably have some tennis lessons or this, that or the other thing. Okay cool, now Pinterest also they have, I don’t use it personally right now for my e-commerce stuff, I want to but aren’t they running ads now too that go directly…

[00:16:01] LAURA: Yes.

[00:16:01] SV: Okay can you talk a little bit about that, do you know a lot of that?

[00:16:03] LAURA: I don’t actually, I don’t. You should have a different podcast.

[00:16:07] SV: Okay and I want to, I want to actually have a Pinterest expert come on at some point because I think it would be fascinating to figure out a strategy to deploy that’s not really overwhelming too because we could throw all the stuff out there and the people get paralyzed because there is so much to do.

[00:16:23] LAURA: Yes.

[00:16:23] SV: But you are talking more on the sense about creating the content on your blog and then writing about, maybe putting the recipes on but then having maybe a snapshot of the recipe and a beautiful image on Pinterest that links back to your blog post.

[00:16:34] LAURA: Exactly and yeah we’ve been talking about Pinterest but Facebook and Twitter are still really important tools as well and the cool thing is if you are being more image heavy, images are really important on Facebook and on Twitter. Especially on Twitter a lot of people still don’t use images and for that reason when you are looking through your tweet stream an image is going to really stand out because most tweets don’t have them. If you are already thinking about images as you create your content I think that can make your content on Twitter and Facebook even more compelling because you already have those images to share.

[00:17:06] SV: Okay so now that we are talking a little bit about Facebook. What’s your thoughts on creating a fan page? Is it still good or is it still something we should be considering or should we just be looking at add ads?

[00:17:17] LAURA: One I would never create ads without creating a page because ads are going to just slowly increase likes to your page. For whatever reason when people see an add that certain amount of them click like on the page straight from the ad so you might as well build … Even if you didn’t have an organic strategy like just build up those likes through ads because why not. I just see Facebook, I don’t see it just being focused on ads. It’s still a great place to have kind of a piece of online real estate for your company and Facebook changes so much too. It’s the other reason I really, when people are, “I’m shutting down my Facebook page” I’m like, “Grrr.”

I feel like you might regret that because they are just constantly experimenting with how are we going to determine reach, how much are we going to encourage people to do ads and I just think we never know what the mix is going to be for Facebook in the future but it’s one of the most important sites on the internet. If you just ignore it entirely I would just at least like have some sort of small presence there.

[00:18:22] SV: My thoughts on the Facebook stuff is yes right now the reach has kind of went down a lot since we started but the way I look at it is if you are building that fan page you are also building a list that you can target in your Facebook ads because you can then target those and a lot of people don’t look at that. They’re like well, “I’m building this thing and it’s not really giving me the reach”, but if you want even for five bucks a day you can start showing that up to your thousand or two thousand Facebook fan page followers. What I don’t like right now currently is that you can’t, at least from the time that I am recording this, that I believe you can’t target your ads for a group.

[00:18:55] LAURA: Right.

[00:18:55] SV: That stinks because a group does have more engagement now at least for me that I’m finding even with a podcast it’s like we have a group and it’s like the reach there is so much greater I think because people really raised their hands and wanted to join they requested to join. What’s your thoughts on Facebook fan paging group?

[00:19:13] LAURA: Yeah I mean groups have great engagement right now and the reason is just because Facebook is really trying to discourage marketing on groups. On it truthfully as more and more marketers embrace them we’ll probably see the reach drop and that’s because people come to Facebook not to be advertised to. If Facebook was just a huge stream of ads people wouldn’t visit anymore. I think as marketers people are frustrated like, “Oh my reach has dropped, they make it so complicated.” If they didn’t do that there would be no one on Facebook at all which would be even less people. Yeah groups are a great format now and that’s why I just think you want to keep your options open like maybe at some point they would let you convert a page to a group. Who know what they are going to do? That’s why I just wouldn’t ignore the whole thing entirely.

[00:20:02] SV: Okay, okay, that’s good stuff. While we’re still on the Facebook group on all of that what’s your thoughts on Facebook on the videos, videos now in the stream for as far as whether you’re creating one putting on the fan page or if you’re creating one for an ad. What’s your thoughts on the new video option.

[00:20:20] Laura: Do you mean like live or just-?

[00:20:22] SV:  No not live. Let me ask you this while I got you, maybe you know the answer to this, maybe you don’t. What I’m not liking with the live is it’s on my personal profile but if I have a fan page or if I have a group, what if I just wanted to go with them on  a live feed and not my personal profile. Your personal profile at times is your friends and family. Right?

[00:20:41] Laura : Right, they just changed  something about that.

[00:20:46] SV: I was thinking eventually they probably would because I don’t want to broadcast all my high school friends but I want to broadcast to my podcast listeners or even my physical products business if I’m like at the forefront of that. That’s kind of interesting but I would imagine eventually they would but that would be very powerful but right now I’m not using it because it’s on my personal profile.

[00:21:07] Laura: I think they’ll change that. They just sort of started making some change but I’m not sure exactly.

[00:21:11] SV: Let’s go back to the garlic press for a second. Let’s say we’re doing a recipe  or something and we’re going to create a recipe, showing how to use it and we’re going to be showing our garlic press and then from there we’re going to take that and put it either on our Facebook fan page. Let’s start there. What if we put it on our Facebook fan page, do you think that there’s more reach because you’re using a video now versus an image or just a straight up text?

[00:21:32] Laura: It can be but honestly it’s not worth chasing Facebook’s algorithm. Sometimes they favor videos, sometimes they favor single image, sometimes they favor galleries, sometimes they favor really long post, sometimes they favor the short times. It’s constantly changing. It is smart to take a look at your page and kind of notice, “Okay, what is getting reach? What is getting text? What isn’t,” and you might see the videos are doing really well. What I would caution is small business against is getting too carried away chasing it like saying like, “I’m going to spend $50,000 creating all these professional videos just because that’s what Facebook is favoring today,”  because it can be something different next week.

It’s not part of your strategy like a video is a great part of the social strategy. If that’s part of your strategy overall it’s very smart to go that way and put on Facebook but I would caution people against doing that because video is hot right now. I’ve just seen everything come and go.

[00:22:32] SV: Yeah. That makes sense. Like you said you kind of got to go out there and mix it a little bit and not really chase the SEO game as you did in Google and all that stuff. Okay, before we jump into learning more about the software that you made, which is amazing by the way, what I want to do though is let’s just play it as if you are brand new right now and you just launched a brand new e-commerce business. Okay. Let’s just say we started on Amazon because it’s so easy to get started and then we’re also starting our own brand on kind of like off of Amazon. What’s the first thing that you would do in the social media space but then obviously we say we create the blog but what would be like the first thing you’d be like okay this is what we need to do first?

[00:23:18] Laura: After I’ve made the blog you mean?

[00:23:19] SV: Yeah, let’s just you have the blog, it’s created but now okay do you create that piece of content first and then do you go and start creating the social channel so that you can  direct it over. Give us just a run to like what’s the, okay this is what we’re doing the first month. You know what I mean? Kind of like get started.

[00:23:34] Laura: Yeah. We did this for Edgar because we launched the whole new brand on new social channels. What we did for Edgar is we actually started on one social network. In our case it’s Twitter even before we launched the blog. I would say it kind of depends on the product that network it’s going to be. It can be twitter, it can be Pinterest but it’s great to just start in one place and what I love about Twitter is that you can actually talk to people. That’s what’s different about Twitter and a space like Facebook or Pinterest. It’s that on Twitter you can follow much of thought leaders industry so maybe it’s like chefs, cooking people, cooking magazines if you’re doing the garlic press. You can follow all those people and you can actually build relationships with them.

You can let them know that there’s a new gourmet garlic press company in town that they might be interested in. That’s what’s so cool about Twitter. We started on Twitter, we built up like a small following there just sharing. We didn’t have our own content at that point, so just sharing content from the industry, you could also start to create your own images or kinds of smaller bits of content to share. Then once we had a blog that was nice because we actually had like a distribution channel for it. You know what I mean? We had even if you have like a few hundred followers. At least there’s few hundred people that kind of start to spread the word on. Then we were on Twitter for a few months before moved to Facebook.

I also really liked attacking one channel at a time and starting to build a small base because then you have people to go over to the next channel. If you start Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook all at the same time it sucks when you starting your account. You’re like why am I posting there’s like seven people following, this is humiliating.

[00:25:21] SV: Yeah, you’re right.

[00:25:22] Laura: It sucks. That’s just part of it. It just sucks for the first few months. It takes time to build up the audience. If you’re doing that in three places it’s kind of sucking in three places where if you’re just doing Twitter it kind of sucks on Twitter for the first three months but then once you launch on Facebook you have the following on Twitter where like a certain amount of those people are going to follow you to Facebook. It’s not as [inaudible] as long.

[00:25:47] SV: That’s good. You’re saying, starting on Twitter following some thought leaders and then from there you can even just like even repost other people’s stuff that just industry type tool information.

[00:25:57] Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. What are your customers interested in? Recipes, cooking news. There’s no shortage of content on the internet for any industry. It doesn’t need to be your own content. That is where I would start. It depends on your product and it also depends on you. If you’re a huge Pinterest person and you just love Pinterest and you think it’s super fun then that’s going to be a good outlook for you. You’re actually going to enjoy doing it.

[00:26:25] SV: Yeah, I agree. I think you should focus on one and then move on to the next when the time is right. With Twitter now for people to understand, how would they find thought leaders in their space? Is there a way that they can do that?

[00:26:39] Laura: Yeah. On Twitter there’s something called lists and a lot of people have already made lists on every type of industry. Another just really easy thing to do is look at who people follow. That’s a big way that we found people to follow especially a lot of influential people have like smaller lists of who they follow a few hundred people or less. I actually will just find an influencer and I’ll just look at who they follow. I’ll just like follow, follow down the list anyone looks kind of mildly related.

[00:27:09] SV: Okay. Then what’s that going to do then is they will potentially be able to see your stuff that you post or will you add tag them kind of like.

[00:27:18] Laura: A certain amount of people do check out who follows them and follow back so you’re going to get some follows that way. Then it’s just more for you to have content to engage with so that when you sign on Twitter you now have this list of people that are sharing content about your industry so you can retweet them, you can talk to them. It’s just also an easy way to find content to share. They’re on another platform. It kind of gets you into that social mix of your industry very easily.

[00:27:46] SV: Okay. Cool. That’s great. That’s again for anyone listening starting I think the big thing here is starting on one platform especially if you know that you’re really good at one, if you maybe are already currently then go with that one for right now. Twitter like you said is a good one and I am literally just started, not even about a year ago, started to really to start to focus a little bit more on Twitter. I’ve kind of fallen in love with Periscope myself for my podcast. Then just now SnapChat which I never thought I’d do and now I’m kind of, like you said, taking people from Periscope and letting them know about SnapChat. You know what I mean? It’s kind of exactly what you just said and that’s awesome.

Now that we have all this stuff going on let’s start getting on different social media platforms, now we got to manage it. Now we have to find content and this is where Edgar comes in. Let’s talk a little bit about this and why you created it.

[00:28:34] Laura: Yeah. Originally I was in training before Edgar so obviously as a social media training company we’re very heavily own social media marketing. I had developed this process and it’s workflow to manage our social media because it’s a big complicated task as anyone knows. The process I created I had this giant spreadsheet and I divided all of our updates into different categories . Each column was a different category full of updates and then we would like cycle through them even mark them off as we went so we had to copy and paste each update into the social media scheduling tool if there’s an image that was just like a disaster. There was no easy way to do that and to keep track of what we posted. There’s no easy way to get the right next.

In copying and pasting I’d be like, “I’m going to choose one from this column and two from this column,” and like hope the day turns out the mix that I want. There was so much manual labor and it just seemed really … There were a few things that seemed really odd. One was always like why do I have a spreadsheet of my social media updates when I pay for a social media tool? Why can’t the tool hold the updates? That just seemed so weird to me. Then being able to cycle through content was the other big one because 5%-10% of your audience at any given network sees any update that you post. To put your blood sweat and tears in creating this updates sending it once and never again it just doesn’t make sense.

For a long time we’ve been cycling through our updates just creating a bunch of content one category and then just going through it so repeating the same content and the tools didn’t and still don’t, except for Edgar just have a really easy way to do that.

[00:30:23] SV: Yeah. I think what I really liked about the tool itself is number one like you said you can recycle it because let’s face it you’ve had new people coming in all the time to your social media but you also have people that are in your social network like you said that don’t see it. Most people don’t see it. For you to put something back that you’re like I don’t want to bother people but really you’re not because if someone else seen it even a week from or two weeks from now or even four weeks from now, they’re probably not going to remember that they seen it. They have so much that they are seeing but also you’re going to get a lot of people that haven’t seen it before. It’s like new to them or it’s like, “Oh I must have missed that.”

I really liked it because when you create this content all of you’re paying to have the content created, which we didn’t even talk about because a lot of people are like, “How am I going to create content?” Well, you can pay people to do it for you and actually create that content or put it on your blog. When that happens it’s there and you create it, you spend time or you spend money on that. Why just bury it. Right? Bring it back to the surface. I love it how you can put them in categories. Why don’t you talk a little bit about the buckets that you kind of created and in the software so that way there it kind of picks, you don’t have to really say I want to do blog post number fourteen. You can just say I want something in this category and I want to pull something out of that category and plug it in on that particular day. Why don’t you talk a little bit about that.

[00:31:45] Laura: In Edgar all your content is divided into categories. We have some pre thought ones to help you wrap your mind around it, or you can change them to whatever you want. The categories are things like my blog post, my podcasts, other people’s content, promotional content and then if you want to get more detailed you can say, “Here’s my post about e-commerce, here’s my blog post about advertising,” you can divide it up however you want. You create a library of content within that category. Blog posts is always just like the really easy home run like almost everyone out there would get the return on their investment if they just loaded their blog into Edgar. What we see all the time people come to us and they are like, “Oh my God, since I started using Edgar, I quadrupled my traffic from social to my blog.”

I’m like, “I know why. It’s because you post links four times as much.” It’s not that complicated. People don’t think of it that way but yeah if double the frequency that you’re posting links to social you’ll get double the traffic and we just see it very consistently with our customers. Those are the categories. You fill them up with content and then you go to your schedule and you create a schedule based on a category instead of based on an individual update so you go in and you say every weekday morning I want to share a post on my blog, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I want to share a promotion to my book. Edgar just goes through and pulls the content for you.

Instead of like a queue that runs out and you have to refill or manually scheduling, copying and pasting each update Edgar goes in finds the content for you and posts it for you.

[00:33:20] SV: That’s brilliant because like you said maybe there’s only five posts into a category that you’ve already got there because you haven’t created more in that. Once it goes to the bottom of that list it just goes back and picks again or goes to the top of the queue. That way you never run out of content in there and you’re not just standing still. Let me ask you this, how many times … I know it varies but is four times a day too much? Is it too little? What would you say, like someone in e-commerce they created some great content around recipes and they want to post it on Facebook or Twitter. How many times should we post in that they’re pulling from their bucket and then posting in these different platforms?

[00:34:05] Laura: It’s actually hard to post too frequently, believe it or not, just because of how quickly these feeds go by. If you’re posting something to Twitter, let’s say you’re posting it like every single hour all day, most people sign on Twitter in five minute increments. The weird thing about Twitter is you’re just hoping for some of the circumstance they are signing on during that same five minute window that you’re sending something out because otherwise they won’t see it. The frequency really depends a lot more on how much content you have. What I like to aim for, with Edgar you can think of how often things repeat. I like to have like three months worth of content that’s being cycled through because then I only repeat four times a year which is nothing. We also have customers who repeat things a lot more. I’ve seen customers that have content that repeats every two to three weeks.

You would be surprised they get the same engagement on it every time even if it was only posted two or three weeks ago because I’ve looked into the account and I’ve seen it. They post the exact same tweet two weeks later, it gets the same re-tweets, same clicks. It’s fascinating. Again, people are scared of repeating too much. I found that you really have to get like pretty obnoxious, like if you repeat the same, exact same update every hour all day that is too much. Most people can repeat a lot more heavily than they do, without anyone noticing or caring. We have this weird idea like what happens if they see something I’d already posted.

What happens is no one cares. No one cares if you posted that a few weeks ago. Why would they care? Maybe they didn’t click on it before. They did this time, maybe they already clicked on it and now, “Yeah, yeah I like that article.”Maybe they share it this time because they liked it. All we see on the internet is the same content repeated over and over and that’s kind of how the internet works. That’s how people decide if something is good is if they see it repeated a lot. People have this weird idea for their own content like the crowds are going to revolt and that just doesn’t happen.

[00:36:11] SV: Okay. What social media platforms currently is Edgar supporting?

[00:36:16] Laura:  With Edgar we’re on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

[00:36:19] SV: Okay. Then if we go Twitter, we got that. Now on Twitter, let me ask this real quick just randomly. Do you think it’s best to have as a company, a company brand name if that’s your thing or do you think it should be more of the person that’s supporting the brand.

[00:36:37] Laura: Either one. If you’re having the brand. A person is kind of like a thought leader that just works well in marketing. People like to connect to the person. In Edgar we’ve done it under the company name because that’s what makes sense for our positioning. I also have my own social media accounts. You can go either way. I do think it’s always really on any channel it’s always a little easier to get traction if you’re positioned as a person rather than a company honestly.

[00:37:03] SV: Okay. Right now Pinterest isn’t really in the plans because that’s really like you Pin it and you like done.

[00:37:12] Laura: Well, the thing with Pinterest is just a whole different beast. Our customers ask us a lot like, “When are we running Pinterest?” Then when we talk to people that actually do marketing on Pinterest they always use like TailWind or one of the dedicated tools because Pinterest is just like … Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are all more or less the same like you post a text this update to the network. Pinterest, one you have like 50+ boards you have 3 boards that, you need to pull natively from a site. Repeating is just different because people often are looking through a board rather than their feed. You can repeat on Pinterest. It’s just a different animal.

[00:37:53] SV: The strategy then would be to then just link over to your Pinterest whenever your page or your board or whatever if you have that in your feed if you have a link that goes over to a certain board like just updated my board or something like that. Okay cool.

[00:38:08] Laura: Exactly.

[00:38:08] SV: One last thing and I know that you got to run but one of our biggest struggles as physical product owners again is building an email list. Do you feel like using social media is still a viable option to build that email list?

[00:38:25] Laura: 100%. Yes. Social media is a traffic driver and something that I’d recommend where Edgar is creating a list building category so having a category in Edgar where you’re driving people to specific like list building landing page pages whether it’s signing up for your newsletter, for your report, whatever that is.

[00:38:45] SV: Recipes. We can do our garlic press recipes. Okay. Yes so basically taking someone from social and then like you say you can have like a whole category that’s just kind of list building. You can filter them in and cycle them through so that’s like one of your buckets, one of your categories. Okay. Cool. That’s awesome we can probably talk to ours about that but to respect your time, I want to say thank you once again Laura for coming on and sharing some of your expertise. If you do know of any one that would want to come on and talk a little bit about Pinterest I’d love to reach out to someone in that field as well because I think that’s a huge driver for traffic. I want people to understand though what this is, this tool which I love. It’s like you hired a VA that’s actually doing the work for you. Right?

[00:39:32] Laura: We actually get like guilty emails, people are like, I feel like I shouldn’t say this but, I’ve fired my VA since I bought your tool.

[00:39:39] SV: You could hire a VA to manage Edgar.

[00:39:42] Laura: Yeah they won’t have a whole lot to do. Loading the content is the part that takes most work but you can use our access feeds, you can use spreadsheets. Edgar really replaces the manual labor of scheduling every update.

[00:40:00] SV: I love it, I use it and it is. It is brilliant and I probably should be going in there and updating how often I do post that. I don’t think I post as much as you said I probably could. I might just test and play around with that. Totally appreciate you coming on. Is there any last little bits of advice that you would give someone that is planning to start using social to drive traffic to their e-commerce business.

[00:40:20] Laura: Let me just dive in and experiment is the biggest thing. I think people like we said get very overwhelmed by social. People are often are very all or nothing which is another problem we wanted to solve. With Edgar they’re like really gung ho and posting five times a day for two weeks and then they are like I can’t keep that up and they get burnt out and they don’t post anything. It’s much better to figure out how you can do it in a way that’s actually sustainable for you even if that means just one network, if that means posting less often. It’s better to like do it consistently than it is to be in everywhere online.

[00:40:55] SV: I love that. It’s kind of like the compound effect. Just a little bit of the time slow and steady and that’s what wins the race. I appreciate it Laura, I really do and I know that the listeners are going to be able to take something away here actually apply it. If anyone wants to get in touch with you or learn more about Edgar how would they do that?

[00:41:15] Laura: Yes. You can find Edgar at MeetEdgar.com or find us @MeetEdgar on Twitter or Facebook. You can find me on twitter @LKR.

[00:41:23] SV: Okay. Cool. One last question I should have asked you this before. How did Edgar get it’s name?

[00:41:28] Laura: Edgar got it’s name was … It was a code name we were  using internally while we were figuring out if we’re going to do the project to come up with a name. We just called a person’s name that we thought sounded sort of like an old man name. Then we went through a kind of a formal branding process and as a company we brainstormed a ton of names and we just didn’t like any of them as much as Edgar. We were like maybe we’ll just call it Edgar. It seems to work. People seem to remember it.

[00:41:59] SV: I think it’s brilliant. I love it. Actually I do. That’s a cool story because a lot of people don’t realize where it came from. I was curious so there you go. Alright. I appreciate it Laura. Have amazing rest of your day and look forward to catching up with you sometime in the future.

[00:42:15] Laura: Thank you.

[00:42:15] SV: Okay. There you have it. There is another great interview, a great coaching call I guess you could say. We’re able to learn together by me having someone like that on. I do in the future want to have people that are even more specific in an area like maybe a Pinterest expert or maybe an Instagram expert or a Twitter expert. I want someone else to come on in these fields so this way here we can really drill down and hone in on what we can do inside of our businesses. Let me just put the little time out thing. You guys can’t see me doing this but I’m like, “Hey coach. Time out, we need time out right now.” We got to time this out right now because if you’re brand new and you’re just starting and you just listened to that a lot of that isn’t going to pertain to you right now.

I don’t think it should. I think that stuff there is down the line. I think that there is when you start to see that a product starts to get some momentum, you start to see that you validate it, you verified a market and it’s worth you going into deeper. That’s when you start thinking about these social media channels or building an email list or any of that stuff. I always tell people, if you listen to something like that and you get all overwhelmed, don’t. Time out it. Right. Time out. You do not have to do that. Alright. The great thing about Amazon is being able to take a product and launch it to an audience of people that are already buying products. You can test and validate really, really quickly.

Then once we test that, yes we can start thinking … Once we get momentum of course then we can start thinking if we want to be able to build our own channel on e-commerce. That’s kind of what the TAS is going to be starting to do here eventually. I’m going to be sharing with you some of the other  things that I’m currently doing which I’ve kind of already done a little bit but I’m even going to be going further in that direction because that’s where the direction is going for me as well. Why not share that.  I still always even right now to launch a product to test the market is going to start on Amazon. There is no reason to not do that because the traffic is already there. Why not do that? Alright.

I just wanted to again say just time out if you’re feeling like overwhelmed or we just covered a bunch of stuff that you’re like you don’t want to have to learn, don’t worry about it. Alright. If you are at the level where you have validated and you have verified and you’re like okay, I want to start taking this thing to the next level. I want to start building out some social media channels. Pick one that you feel like you’re audience would be on. Pinterest is a different market place or a different platform for different products. Go over there. Start doing some investigation work over there. Maybe go to Instagram, see what that’s doing, see what your audience is doing over there. Then just start listening to the conversations. Start being part of that community and from there you can start to learn how you can make your products better or your services better.

See what other people are doing. See what you can do better. All of that stuff. It’s a great way to be able to tap into your market without you even being in that market yet. I would say there is a lot of different things we can use it for but again don’t get overwhelmed with social media at this stage. When you do get ready to get social media I would say go after one channel to start and then dominate that channel. Just like Facebook all of that stuff. Right.

All right guys. That is going to wrap up this podcast which I think was amazing. Now, let me just remind you. If you guys are brand new and you wanted to get caught up to speed like really fast as far as like how to test and validate a product. I created a free resource for you. It’s a free ten day course. You can sign up totally free by heading over to freeprivatelabelcourse.com, okay that’s freeprivatelabelcourse.com and what that will be is a ten day course that will run you through, exactly what to do from start to launch of that product. Then it will also give you some things to do once you get launched. Again, I’d just love to extend that to you, if you want to come over and go through that ten day course you’re more than welcome to it and I created that for people that are just starting.

[00:46:17] SV: Definitely, definitely a great resource for you to take. Then get caught up to speed relatively quickly. Alright. The last thing I just want to say is thank you once again to everybody that is listening, that is giving iTunes reviews or that is commenting on Periscope or Snapchat or Facebook, wherever you guys are connecting. I want to say thank you once again. Keep the conversation going and you can always do that over one our Facebook page as well and that’s at theamazingseller.com/fb and there’s a great community over there of over 26,000 TASers. Definitely go over there and join in on the conversation.

Alright guys. That’s it, that’s going to wrap it up. Remember I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have awesome amazing day and I’ll see you right here on the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…I listen to them and then I do my best to answer them as if we were sitting in the local coffee shop. I say that quite often because that is how I’m imagining we are right now, we’re in this local coffee shop, we’re sitting there just talking business, Amazon, e-commerce, whatever about business and we’re just having a great conversation.

That’s what I want you to envision as well, right? If you are at your home right now and you can go make a cup of coffee. Pause this, go get some coffee or maybe swing in to Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts or your favorite coffee shop. Grab that cup a cup of coffee if you drink coffee that is. All right, so just want to say I get really excited about doing these because I love being able to interact and listen to these types of questions. In about, let’s see, two weeks from now, by the time that this is airing, I will be doing this live, I will be doing this with about 30 people, actually a little bit more than 30 because I’ve got people that are coming in that will help me with the event as well so probably closer to 40.

We’re doing our very first TAS live event, it’s called TAS Breakthrough Live and it is going to be amazing. I’m really, really excited to do this and I can’t wait. Any of you that are listening that are going to be at that event, I can’t wait, this is going to be amazing and if you guys are not attending and wanted to or it was already sold out or whatever and you want to learn more about it you can always sign up for the registration page for a future one. You can head over to theamazingseller.com/live and you can get all the details there.

We’re going to try to do a few more of these in the future and we’re just going to see how this first one goes. I think it’s going to go very well, but hey, you never know right? It’s something brand-new that I’ve never done before. I really wanted to create this atmosphere of us sitting around a table in a sense, this will be in more of like a bigger room of course and then we’ll just be able to talk about business. We’ve got 10 hot seat sessions where we have 10 different people come up with specific issues within their business that they’re struggling with.

Then we’re going to bring our brains together like a mastermind formula. We’re going to just really talk about each other’s businesses, it’s just going to be amazing, I can’t wait and this is why I love Fridays, this is why I love the Ask Scott session because it’s very similar to that. All right, so you guys can tell, I’m excited. All right. If you guys want to ask a question though and have it aired on the show, I should’ve said that in the beginning, just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask, and then just leave your first name and a question and I’ll do my best to answer it.

[00:02:50] SV: All right, that’s what we’re going to do today. Now, before I do jump into that, again I want to say thank you to everyone that’s been following me on Periscope. Periscope.tv, which is the actual website address but it’s actually an app and what really makes it cool is, I can just randomly go ahead and hit live and I can broadcast live and then all of a sudden, we’re connected. At any given time, I can have 350 or 500 people on it once, and we can just be talking. We can all be having this conversation or other people can just be sharing their questions or thoughts and it’s just a great way for me to connect.

If you guys are not connecting on Periscope with me, I would urge you to do that. If you want to get more of this and you can see all of the past scopes that I’ve done, that’s what we call them Scopes, you can find them at theamazingseller.com/scope and you will find all of them. I’ll also leave these on the show notes if you guys want to get these links on the show notes, that will be this episode which is 193 and you can go and get all of the transcripts to this is well and you can get all of those links.

Alright guys, I’m going to stop rambling now and that’s usually what I do on the Periscopes too. It’s just like a way for me to give you what’s going on in my mind at that time and yes, a lot of the time it’s about business but sometimes it’s just about keeping your mind right so this way here we can continue to burst through any roadblocks. I mean let’s face it, business, life, whatever, we’re going to have roadblocks. You guys all know that I’ve talked about this and you guys know it. We’re living right. You’re always going to have roadblocks and I kind of go back to that 97% and then that 3%. What that means is there’s 97% of the people that they will work for the 3% because the 3% are the ones that will actually burst through those roadblocks. The 97% will hit a roadblock and then they retract and then we’ll just go work for someone because it’s easier right?

There’s nothing wrong with working for someone, entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone right? It’s not, I mean it’s hard. It takes a different mindset and I will say though that you know there’s a ton of rewards with because it does give you the flexibility and the freedom. All right. Again here’s what happens on Periscope, I kind of go on a little bit of a rant there and I apologize to anyone that doesn’t like the rants but a lot of you say, “Scott rant on, rant on.” Well, I’m going to cut this rant short but I will continue this over on Periscope I’m sure. Let’s just go ahead and listen to the first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:05:22]  JARED: Hi, Scotty, this is Jared from Australia. First of all mate, I would like to thank you very much for all your guidance, the material you give us, your podcast, all the information. Whatever you do, it’s been really great. It helped me start from nothing and now I’m doing about 20 units a day, so without you never would have happened. Thanks very much.

Buddy, my question is, I started with very limited funds, only a few hundred dollars, I managed to source or locate a product, sourced a good supplier, got it in Amazon for about $2.60 per item. They’re selling really well, I sell about 20 a day, quite a good profit margin on them. The problem is, I know they’re not very good quality, they are a bit below par, I am trying to build a brand now because of the success of the sales. However, I’m getting about 8% return rate.

I’d like to move on to bigger and better things but it is really hard to let go of this other product which is selling really well. My question is, should I get rid of it, will these returns influence or affect my selling account, will Amazon not like it because of the return rate and will it be detrimental in the future? Should I just get rid of it or can I hold onto it because it is selling? Any advice will be greatly appreciated buddy. I love your work, I love you, I love Amazon woo-hoo.

[00:06:46] SV: Hey Jared from Australia, thank you so much for the question and the upbeat energy. Man don’t we feed off people’s energy?  Right away, I’m pumped up just talking to you and I like it that you said Scotty in the beginning and it’s funny because I call my son Scotty, like that’s kind of my thing. That’s how we identify me and him, my name is Scott, his is Scott’s, so we call him Scotty. Growing up, everyone called me Scotty so it’s funny that you know when you hear someone say, “Hey Scotty,” it’s just kind of funny because it brings back old childhood memories but right now if someone said Scotty I be looking for my son. Anyway, thank you so much for the question and also the upbeat energy. I think it’s amazing right? I think it’s amazing that you started really not knowing anything about this business, listening to the podcast, decided to go for it, give it a shot, started with not that much money and then being able to have a product that’s selling 20 unit a day, that’s awesome let’s applaud that.

Okay, we just applauded. Everyone let’s applaud for Jared, okay? Good, all right awesome, so Jared you just got thousands of claps. That was huge, all right? Awesome job. Now there are a couple of things that I want to discuss about this because you’ve got some momentum, you’ve proven that a certain product sells. That’s like, that’s to me that’s gold, we just stumbled on the gold. Now, what do we do with that, that’s the next question because there is a couple of things that concern me?

Number one, like you said, it’s not really the highest of quality. Okay that’s a problem but can be fixable, we can fix that okay? But having a high refund rate can hurt you and can get you suspended. I know that for sure because it’s happened to me recently. Recently, I had a, and luckily I had bundle and inside of that bundle one of the variations was getting not a bundle actually, the bundle was the one that was getting the refunds. The other variations which were single units were not, but if this was just my own listing one product on one listing and I got suspended, that listing would have went down.

Now what I did, and you guys heard me talk about this a little bit, I instantly switched it to merchant fulfilled. That way the inventory that was in there wasn’t technically being sold and that’s what they were more concerned with. But because I had a higher refund rate because my manufacturer missed a key component inside of there which I should have this inspected, China side which I’m looking into now but from what you’re saying though is it’s the quality of the product.

Maybe you have something that some thing’s breaking very easily or maybe something isn’t … may be it’s Velcro and it’s not really holding that well, right? I would look at the problem and I would try to fix that problem. I would try to fix that problem because you could still sell that product and probably even better if you make that problem go away. I would hone in on that problem. Then I would also look for other products that could surround that that I could spin off of the success of that one product.

I’m kind of jealous, you’ve got a really good opportunity here Jared and I think then you should take advantage of it. Now maybe there’s something there that you can’t improve, I don’t know, I don’t know the product but I would really, really try to focus on making that product better. Making the reason why it’s getting refunded, I would make that go away or at least reduce that. If you do that, you’re going to be able continue to sell that. It’s like you have this revenue coming in and all of a sudden you’re thinking you might have to turn it off because you don’t have the product up to par. You don’t have that problem that people are complaining about, you don’t’ have that fixed right?

I would really, really focus on fixing that problem okay and if you can do that then you will do very, very well and especially at 20 unit a day man congrats on that. That is spectacular, so really excited for you, thanks for the upbeat energy, good luck. Keep me posted, send me an email, let me know you know how you’re going to, I guess overcome this and what your thoughts are from this answer would love to hear what you plan to do and then maybe even an update on what you’ve done and maybe we can even get you on the podcast and we can talk about it. That would be cool, all right? Let’s definitely catch up in the future all right so let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:11:21] REBECCA: Hi Scott, my name is Rebecca and my husband and I went into FBA January 10th, almost two months now. Thank you so much for all that you do and all the free information that you give us to get started. My question is, we have a product that we started selling, like I said January 10th, we’re already now getting ready for our second shipment, we’re almost through, we don’t want to run out, so we’re in for our second shipment. We have created a logo, we’ve done pictures, hired professionals, hired a professional [inaudible] to update our listings and we’re trying to sell to breakeven.

Some days we get like 12 sales and another day we make like 3 or 4. We haven’t hit the zero like we were on the first month but it’ a little discouraging to see that we’re not hitting where we want to be. Our competitors are pretty much getting the majority and bulk. Their images don’t look any better, their listing doesn’t look any better in my opinion, but obviously they’re making really great sales just seeing from their reviews and their seller feedback. What are some suggestions that we should do, what kind of stumped at what we should do, just to keep going?

[00:12:52] SV: Hey Rebecca, thank you so much for the question and congratulations to you and your husband for being a team and doing this together. My wife and I can definitely relate to that, we’ve always done things as a team and it’s great when you do come together and kind of go at this thing as a team. It does make a little bit easier because you have someone else to lean on. Now anyone that is listening to that and they’re thinking, “I could never work with my wife or my husband.” I get it, there are some times that you just can’t make that work and I’m fortunate I can make it work and it sounds like Rebecca you can as well.

This doesn’t work for everyone but I just wanted to say congratulations and I think then you’ve already gone through everything kind of that we talked about in the past and not everything is going to be a success, so let’s just throw that out there right guys? You may have a product you do all this work to and you get it to 10 units a day and that’s going to be your max without really just going all in and trying to get this thing put all that energy into that to get it to more than 10 units a day.

Now you say you’re selling 10 units a day on average and again I want to highlight a lot of people look at it and go, “Okay, I only had 5 sales on Monday but I had 15 on Tuesday and then I had 13 the next day and then I had 6 on the next day.” You got to figure out the unit average for the seven-day week. You have to because every single day is going to change, you’re going to start to see patterns over time, on the certain days for your particular product in your category of when they’re up and when they’re down or maybe it’s a holiday or something like that.

You have to look at those averages, so if you’re saying right now, you’re selling 10 units a day consistently on the average but you’re breaking even then I would say, “Well, okay what are we doing there that as far as our margins. Are our margins to light, do we need to increase our margins are we spending too much money on Pay Per Click because all the sales are coming from Pay Per Click if that’s the case then we got hone that we got to fix that.” I guess my first question also would be like you said your competitors are all selling really well, first thing I would say is, “How many competitors do we have?” I mean big players, are we talking three? Are we saying that we looked at the depth of the market and there still people eighth, ninth on page one that are still doing a lot of sales where are you ranking in that mix?

If you are ranking on that same page as these other people, what is the difference on the surface level, that’s the one thing we can definitely look at, and you’re saying the images all look similar. Your copy is similar, your listing quality, your bullets, all that stuff is similar. That must mean then something in the back end is probably different so your keywords, if you are not optimizing your keywords in the back end, you want to do that. You definitely want to make sure you’re taking advantage of that you can rank.

Then from there, the other thing you want to look at is your Pay Per Click, you want to see are you are you maximizing your Pay Per Click, are you spending too much on your Pay Per Click on these keywords that aren’t converting? Maybe you’ve been running long enough since you said January 10 so with that January, February, March, you’re talking almost four months, four months of running. You should have some good Pay Per Click data so I would do my take all of the keywords that have produced results especially the ones that have had sales and I’d want to look at those and pull them out and put it in my own separate campaign and probably a phrase match and then I would then want to take a lot of my budget and apply to that because they’re proving keywords, that’s what I would want to do there.

[00:16:14] SV: The other thing I would want to do if you haven’t done so already, is that I want to take those to three competitors that are doing so well and that I would want to take their listings and do a little bit of a reverse scrape on those and what that means is you go to a tool like keyword inspector and that tool there you can take the ASIN drop it in there and then it’ll do a reverse scrape on that listing okay and then from there you can go ahead and start to see some of those keywords. Now this isn’t perfect but at least it can give you a good idea of what keywords are showing up for your competitors that you might not be showing up for. That would be one thing.

Now the one thing I am starting to realize a little bit more as I’m even myself learning this whole system right, you’re always learning more every single day and things are changing and they’re always going to be changing so you have to adapt, but the one thing I’m noticing with Pay Per Click especially is you’re going to have a solid handful, maybe you’re too handful, you can take two hands and hold him up and you have probably those are going to be your main driver for keywords that you’re going to want to rank for.

Those are the ones that you’re going to want to convert for and those are the ones you want to get the most sales through so those are the ones are going to put into your primary campaigns. This way here you can drive more traffic by increasing your budgets on those and really making sure that your ACLS average cost of sale, you want to make sure that it stays where it’s at least a breakeven because if the break even then we know the working sales through there, then we’re going to start getting organic sales because we’re going to rank for those keywords okay and that’s really it in a nutshell. Now if you’re thinking yourself, “ Scott, I’ve done pretty much everything that you said to this point but I’m still not able to get on page one.”

Well then what we got to do is we got to think about this. We got to say if I get on page one am I going to be able to double my sales and if I am, then what do I have to do to get there? Well you to get more sales, how do you get more sales? We can either run a promotion or you take that keyword that you want to rank for and you just pump money at that keyword. Then that way there, you can start ranking for the keywords you’re just pushing sales through that keyword. You’re going to lose some money in the beginning for sure but if you can get the page one. Now once you get to page one if your sales are not increasing now we have a conversion problem or maybe we have a product problem.

Those are the different things without seeing the product, without seeing where your ranking, without seeing the depth of the market, the demand, all that stuff, it’s really hard to pinpoint but that’s just my first initial thought process, you guys can see how kind of crazy I just went there like  on all the different aspects because there is a lot of different aspects that go into it but I can usually take something and then reverse it back and see that there might be a problem in this area that’s where we want to focus right now.

There’s not just one simple solution and that’s one thing you guys need to understand, is that you’re always going to be like reverse engineering. You’re going to be looking at something and then knowing how the system works and then saying to yourself, “How are they ranking better? What are they doing differently? They’re getting more sales how are they getting more sales? Well because there on page one and I’m not on page one,” so what’s your main goal here? Get on page one?

[00:19:23] SV: How do you get on page one? You get sales through that keyword, bottom-line. All right. Now some people think while I get more reviews I’ll get more sales and rank, that’s true but getting more reviews doesn’t help you rank by itself. What it does is it help you convert that viewer, that person that’s on your listing to a sale. All right. Anyone that’s thinking, “ Well, if I get another 50 reviews I’m going to automatically rank on page one that’s not true, that just helps you convert to a sale because it’s social proof. What we need to understand is to get to page one we need to get sales and those sales need to be through that keyword and the easiest way that I can tell you to do that, the most legit way to do it is to run Pay Per Click for that keyword and gain that way.

All right. I know it’s kind of like a long-winded answer but I get kind of a fired up about this because there is a lot of different things we can do but you go through all that stuff and you’re like, “I’m just not sure what to do to this point,” you may need to now just back off a little bit, sometimes you can let that go a little bit. Keep the Pay Per Click running keep your stings going keep your 10 a day and then all of a sudden it can just take off. There’s been a lot of situations where people have done that and then all of a sudden it just takes off for whatever reason and then that happens.

Could be the change the market maybe your competitor out of inventory for a week now you jump in on that spot. There’s all different things that could happen there. At that point you might want back off on the pedal and start thinking about product number two because you’re not done, you’ve got a product that’s doing 10 units a day. You’re not done. That’s success in my book so now you would then pivot and go to product number two and test it that way and test another product. Anyway, I know it’s a long-winded answer Rebecca. I think that you’re on the right track. You’ve done like you said you done all the work up front, so now it’s really the tweaking and that’s really … To me that is the fun part too because once you start getting sales and you can start to tweak, at your point, the point that you are right now, you are at that level, where you starting to tweak and you’re starting to see if it makes a difference or not.

The other thing I guess I would have looked at you is seasonality but you’re saying that your competitor is already, are still selling so again I would kind of rule that out as well, maybe look at camelcamelcamel.com maybe look at Google trends, all those things I talked about the past I’m sure you’re already familiar with. Alright guys, one more question let’s go ahead and listen to the next question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:21:50]  JAMES: Hey Scott, this is James from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am just getting to the end of my retail arbitrage career and I’m excited to start private labeling my own products. I’m wondering though if you had any recommendations for bookkeeping apps. I tried freshbooks at the recommendation of Pat Flynn who I know we all I know and love and appreciate but freshbooks which is really more for people who do client work for invoicing and that sort of thing. I’m wondering if you have any tips or whatever for a bookkeeping app for an Amazon seller. I really appreciate everything that you do and I look forward to hearing your answer. Have a good day.

[00:22:31] SV: Hey James thank you so much for the question and it’s a good question and there is a lot of different I guess bookkeeping apps out there, FreshBooks being one of them, the other was QuickBooks, I’ve looked at both of them. I’ve actually used QuickBooks in my other business is it’s a good program but it doesn’t necessarily integrate with Amazon and I think that’s what you’re saying. You want something that will take your inventory and bring that in and do all of that stuff. I got to be honest with anyone listening right now I’m not that sophisticated, I got to be honest, maybe I should be but I am just not.

I do rate currently right now as I use and I got an app called a Waveapps.com, and it’s a free bookkeeping at its cloud-based, it works just as freshbooks would or QuickBooks would. it’s super simple to use, you can connect it to any type of banking account, if you want to, PayPal, any of that stuff. You cannot you can then pick a picture of the receipt. it’ll transcribe the it’ll also keep that picture in a file storage system all of that stuff but it’s not going to integrate directly with Amazon, you would have to have someone or do it yourself as far as taking those numbers. I would say anyone that’s just starting I don’t necessarily think that you have to go with Amazon-based accounting software. I think you just a software that can do the accounting like you would for any business right. There is one though that I’ve heard about having used it. I’ve heard a few people that have and again to when you get that certain level that might make sense but it’s called XERO.com and I’m not an affiliate for it but I have never used it I know a few people that have on but I do know that once you get to a certain level this may be an option for you.

There’s different plans, different pricing, and it probably I’m guessing it probably goes off of how many units that you are selling and it’s importing and all that stuff. It does probably more than you need when you’re first starting but it is an option. I would look into that. It’s called XERO, X-E-R-O . It looks a great piece of software, but there is a lot that goes into it that again, it can connect with I think other programs like QuickBooks and you can do Excel sheets and all that stuff but again it can also be used for if you had employees and stuff like that but waveapps.com, that’s the one I’m currently using and I use that in three different businesses and it works really, really well I’ve even turn my daughter into it, she has a small business and she’s using it she loves it, my CPA loves it when I send him the reports.

Me personally when you’re first starting to over complicate things but anyone that is at that level where you have a few SKUs and you’re bringing in some income, and you want to be able to really integrate all of that stuff into one place then I would check out Xero that’s the one I would look into if you guys are listening to this session of Ask Scott and you guys have a solution that you guys are trying, you guys want to share just head over to the blog post of this and share in the comments. I would love to know. Again I don’t have anything firsthand that you can use one so I wouldn’t be able to give you my 100% honest answer to that because I don’t have one that I can get you but I can say that a few people that I know that have used Xero and they’re happy with. That’s what I got for you on that. Again going over complicate things guys if you’re just listening right now you don’t necessarily need that, but I would say at the very least is to use something like QuickBooks or Wave apps and at least keep your bookkeeping straight because it’s going to make your life a lot easier when you go to get your taxes done.

All right so guys that is going to wrap up this session of Ask Scott. I want to thank you again for hanging out with us and just being so awesome and hanging out on periscope and Facebook and all the different places that we’re hanging out I want to thank you and I really do appreciate each and every one of you if you guys have a question you want me to answer on an upcoming show, just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask. You can record your voicemail there and I can’t say how quickly I’ll get to it because I have a bunch of them in the queue but definitely submit it and I’ll try to get to it as soon as I can.

Then the other thing that I would like to remind you guys about is if you are brand-new and you want to get started in this business, maybe you’re just kind of feeling this thing out and seeing if it’s for you, if it’s the right fit. I’ve created a free course for you that you can go through. It’s a 10 day course, you can find that at freeprivatelabelcourse.com again that’s freeprivatelabelcourse.com totally free. Just enter your name and email address and you’ll be sent the first lesson immediately and then you can start going through that and I’ll lay everything out as far as the business model and then you can see if it’s for you or not. It’ll give you everything that you need to know about starting an Amazon business. Alright, guys that’s it, that’s going to wrap it up. Once again I want to thank you guys, I also want to remind you guys that I’m always here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, you guys know the drill say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

This is going to be a little bit of a personal story and I’m hoping that because I’m going to share it with you that you’re going to learn from it and you’re also going to see that no matter where your business is today, you will have challenges period. You will have challenges I will guarantee that, all right? You will have challenges. I’ve been  in business with my father, with my wife, I’ve managed other businesses that I’ve been associated with, either working for them or just being a part of that company, and I’ve always seen challenges. There is never going to be just smooth sailing and if it is, you might want to take another look at the business and see if you’re really pushing it to its limit, to where you can get the most out of that business, all right?

Now before we jump into today’s discussion and some numbers that I’m going to share with you, I wanted to give a little shout out to my Periscope peeps. Why? Because you guys are awesome, and you guys know that I hang out on Periscope quite often and really it’s a place for me to share the ups, the downs, the challenges, the things that we’re excited about, the things that we’re looking forward to, certain rants that I go on. That right there is happening on Periscope and a lot of you were over there already and if you’re not, definitely come over and join the party. It’s a great platform, I’m really loving it right now because I’m able to connect with you more on a personal level.

If you guys have any questions or anything like that, that’s a great place for you to connect with me and get those questions answered and we can do that in real time. If you guys are not Periscope head over to Periscope.tv, look up @ScottVoelker, you’ll find me, follow me and then you’ll get any updates when I go ahead and click that live broadcast button,  definitely go over and check me out on Periscope. If you guys want to see any of the past periscopes that I’ve done, I record usually all of them, I have them uploaded to YouTube, you can check them out theamazingseller.com/scope, S-C-O-P-E.

[00:02:32] SV: Also want to remind you guys that we are including show notes now to all of the episodes. Doing that for you by the way because you said that you wanted them, so we decided to include them. You can download them on this particular episode or on any future episodes. This one here is episode 194, so you can head over to theamazingseller.com/194, you’ll find all the show notes there, you can read them there or you can download them. We also have show notes with kind of bullet points of what we covered here and all of that stuff, so definitely go check them out if you’re interested in grabbing those show notes and the transcripts.

Alright, so let’s go ahead and get into it. Let me go ahead and  before I share any numbers or any kind of lessons learned or things that I’ve learned over, let’s see here, we’ve got February and March. Those are the two months that I’m going to be covering and what kind of gave me this realization of things that I need to be aware of, right?  But let me just say that the podcast in the very, very beginning, I had no idea what it was going to grow into. I didn’t know how many people I would be reaching, and I didn’t really care at the point. I was doing it I still am, is to just help people and share my journey and then now other people’s journeys because now I’m helping people that are doing better than I am, which is great right?

I never wanted to be that guy that said like, “Look at my numbers and they’re always good, they’re always great, there is no downside. Scott never has a bump in the road.“ That’s the farthest thing from the truth, I never want to be that guy, I never will be that guy and it’s kind of like you take it or leave it okay? I just want to stress that because there’s a lot of people out there that are saying, they’re only showing their best. To me that’s not authentic that’s not real. We all have struggles you will have struggles.

If your business is doing well now you probably will have a dip and you need to know how to mentally deal with that and I’m going to share with you how I’m mentally dealing with it and what I’m doing about it. I just want to put that right out there and I never want to tell you something that doesn’t work or that I haven’t tried. I don’t want to do theory. If I’m going to share something it’s either something I’ve done or something at some else is done and that I know that has either worked or hasn’t worked. Sometimes if you share something doesn’t work that’s also helpful because now we know not to do that or maybe we got to be more cautious.

Bottom-line is guys, I want to be an open book and that’s what I’m going to do here today with you as well, I’m going to share with you what I’m going to do to hopefully get through this. I’m to share with you my current issues my struggles that I’m dealing with. One of them right now, one of my big ones right now and I haven’t shared this really with anyone is that since doing the podcast, since starting this thing over almost 14 months now, 15 months now, my Amazon business has slipped a little okay and the reason is, and I know why, it’s because my time has been spent away from my Amazon business.

[00:05:36] SV: I kind of went on cruise control right, things were going good, so guess what? I let off the gas pedal little bit because now I’m focusing on over. I’ve got this podcast which is great and I’m reaching a ton of people and people are getting tons of value and they’re starting their own businesses and are doing 10,000 a month or 20,000 a month and in some cases 60 or $80,000 a month and they are all doing great. Some people are figuring out if this is the right business model for them and so you’re helping a lot of people but then something is sacrificing.

There’s time that goes into everything and since I’ve kind of realized this I’ve been trying to put things in place that allow me to focus on all of it but it’s not easy right? It’s not easy and you’ll find that if you have a 9-to-5 job and you’re trying to build this Amazon business on the side, you know that something is going to suffer somewhere, either you’re going to spend too much time on your Amazon business and then your boss is to say you’re not paying them enough attention to your job.

We know that, something has to give so you got to find that balance and that’s really what I am struggling with right now but that doesn’t mean that all of a sudden I say, “Okay guess what? I’m not going to do the podcast anymore, I’m not going to help anyone, I’m just going to focus on this thing here.” That’s just not me and I don’t think anyone should that. I think then you should look at what you’re doing and then figure out a way or figure out those weaknesses and then have other people either help you with those weaknesses.

In this case I have reached out, a lot of you know that I have a second brand that I’ve started with a partner. That partner now is helping me in my regular everyday business as well with the daily operations. I’ve been totally open with you guys about that. I think anyone that can leverage someone else should do so, if it’s the right fit of course. You have to understand that if you are focusing all of your attention somewhere and you’re not paying attention to your other side of things then something is going to give.

I believe that that’s part of my issue. I’m going to go over all of the things that I’m going to do to fix this situation and hopefully this’ll help you by me being open and honest and really being transparent is allowing you to see what I’m doing but also know what I’ve learned in, and kind of like what I’m doing to fix these different situations. Let’s go ahead and just take a quick glance at the numbers. I’m not going to drill down into the nitty-gritty as far as like I bought a ream of paper and all that stuff.

[00:08:02] SV: Basically, the numbers look like this, so February 2016, actually January I had a pretty good month is like 35 grand in revenue. That wasn’t profit but that was pretty good. February, we took a hit, this is the one brand, $21,500 was generated through that brand. It was 1328 orders, 1495 on the units, so about 1500 units sold. Our Pay Per Click was at 2500. Our margins went down, and again I’ll get into this in my lessons learned, about 22 to 25% margin and one of the big, big reasons you guys heard me talk about when I had that issue that I had to pull my inventory because I had a problem with one of the bundles? I had to pull that inventory, well guess what? That took a lot of profit out of there because I had to pay to get that pulled and I got to pay to get it reshipped back again. We’re trying to also liquidate some of that but again, it’s like a breakeven on that.

You lost but you didn’t quite lose because you haven’t sold it to make your money back out again if that makes sense but that’s part of the reason I’m saying that that month there the numbers were down on especially that product because well we had an issue there so we had to deal with. You didn’t want to but you did, so that was that.

Brand two, $6119 was generated which is pretty good and after cost of goods and all that stuff that was there was 1000 bucks.

Basically, between the two brands we’re able to still do about $27,200 in revenue, and again about between the two about 25 to 28% margin. Again not great, not where I want to be but again you can see that we have diversify, we have another second brand going, that kind of help pull things along. Then the other brand, we’re still trying to figure that stuff out. Again just to be totally 100% honest with you guys and showing you guys like this is like the inside look. Now March 2016, the numbers for the one brand was $19,831.52, we had 1243 orders, 1407 units, 1407 units sold total Pay Per Click was about 1800 bucks there.

We are still about 23 or 25% margin again because we ran into that issue. We had to pull that inventory and now trying to liquidate it as well and trying to just get rid of it because we had that issue with it. Get rid of it in a sense that we had to take it back, we had to repackage it in a sense and then ship it back in. You’re eating into your profit whenever you have to do something like that, that’s why it is important that you either get a third-party inspection company or you inspect it yourself.

I personally did not go through all of my boxes and a lot of you know that I have my stuff shipped to me, now I have it shipped to my partner and then he can go through it but we don’t go through all 2000 units but an inspection company they can do more of a thorough look like this. We are looking into that. Again, then second brand we did 6675, so combined, if you took those two and combined those two, we’re still right over, what was that? That was 27,000, again about 25% margin, may be upwards to 28% margin. Still trying to work on those margins after we get through that liquidation that kind of what we had to pull that inventory, now trying to get that money back out again.

[00:11:29] SV: Just to let you know these past couple of months have been a little shaky right? That’s why I really had to have this look. I had to say, ”What the heck is going on here Scott?” We got to go ahead and we got to figure this stuff out. What can we do to fix this situation alright? That’s what I want to go through here with you and this is like the lessons learned and then also what I’m now doing about it. Okay to help grow the businesses. Number one and this is a big one and I’m learning this in brand number one, is I didn’t differentiate the product as much as I should have in the beginning.

Again, this was something that I learned in the very, very beginning because I was kind of like that rapid-fire guy, I went to test out this product, I test it, it did really good out of the gate, did really well, I kind of just let it ride, I’m still letting it ride and still doing okay and that right now that is coming back to bite me a little bit because I got comfortable. I put that on cruise control in a sense, right? My biggest thing here is don’t just slap a label on something okay? You need to make it different, you need to add features, you need to bundle and these are all things that I’m doing currently right now that I’m trying to implement myself. Okay.

Some people will say, “Well, Scott is it harder now than it was when you first started?” And the answer is yes it is in a sense that you can’t just put your label on something and then expect to sell it without differentiating it. That’s the big change I would say, and it’s not a huge change but yes, you have to look through people’s reviews, see what you can change, see what you can fix, see what people are complaining about. Make your product better and so that’s one big take away that I would say.

Number two is, I’m finding that adding more SKUs can definitely help your brand. Now I don’t mean just go through a bunch of stuff out there and see what sticks, that’s not what I’m saying but I’m saying is having a plan in place to launch more SKUs. Now that could be, maybe, and I’m kind of playing around with this as well, maybe wholesaling a few products to get more SKUs in there, your margins are less, but maybe doing a wholesale almost like you’re doing AliExpress method, where you can test a product at a lower price okay as far as inventory goes, seeing what does stick on that. See if you can get some momentum and then private labeling that and making the product better than another.

[00:13:46] SV: That’s another option, I’m not sure if I’m going to go 100% down that avenue but I’m thinking about it, alright? Currently, right now, we’ve got two products, actually, let’s see, three products that are in line. One of them just went live, two other ones are about four weeks out, we’ve got about five other ones in the hopper. Now that’s another thing, okay, and this is another part of the lessons learned is while you’re sitting back on cruise control as I was, you probably want to have some research being done on a regular basis. Now I was doing some research here and there but it wasn’t scheduled.

I think once you get up and running because you guys know that I’ve always said this, that once you’re starting, that’s the most work you’re putting into this thing. Once you get up and running, you know the system, you know how that the launch process works and all that stuff, then it’s really just a matter of ring some repeats, right but you still need to be doing that research. This way here you can have a hopper of different products that you can just go, “Okay, which one’s next? That one.” Then you can go ahead and let’s just validate it really quick, let’s verify it and let’s boom, let’s go ahead and launch it.

I’m talking about doing the research but then also get the suppliers lined up so you don’t have to do all that work, you can just go ahead and pull the next product and get ready to start launching it okay? And that’s what I’m working on right now, I’ve got like I said I’ve got three in line, I’ve got five others in the hopper and I’ve got maybe even about three or four other ones in the next hopper because I think that that’s really important, to schedule that time to do your research so you can start to have these other SKUs that you can put in place okay, when you’re ready.

I think when you have more SKUs, you don’t necessarily have to be banking on one, two or three products and that’s kind of what I fell into the trap of because I had three or four products that were doing okay but now if one of those goes down then it kind of takes everything with it, but if you have 5, if you had 7, if you had 10, if you had 15, if you had 20, you can see what I’m saying the more you have, without again diluting just by you out there throwing out crap, we don’t want to do that. Throwing out products that you feel are going to be added to your product or your secondary brand or however you want to do it all right? But by doing that, you diversify the products and the SKUs so if you have 3 sales over here, 10 sales over here, 8 sales over here, they all start to add up.

I’m starting to see more of that now even within my own business and that other brand and I’m seeing other people I’m working with that that also makes a difference, so that’s that. Again researching, having that part of your, I guess, it doesn’t have to be in your day to day but it has to be in your plan. It has to be in your weekly plan. Maybe you set aside an hour or two, or three and do that product research so this way here, you’ll have those products in place. Don’t get comfortable all right.

[00:16:32] SV: Now the last thing I want to mention here is something that I am also experimenting with and I’m pretty close to where we’re almost ready to start doing it but I have to wait because the product isn’t here yet. Once it is, it definitely fits the criteria of building an outside sales funnel. This is kind of what we’re looking at, so let’s say that we go and we identify the market or the place that our market is hanging out. Let’s just use Facebook right? Let’s say Facebook has a fan page that is all talking about cooking and Italian cooking and everything around cooking. It’s my market because I’m selling garlic presses right. I would then take and create a Facebook ad that would target that Facebook fan page or that audience and then I would create a piece of content on a blog that I can then send people from the Facebook ad over to the blog post that gives them information about this particular market.

If it was Italian cooking, it would be the top five quick recipes for the busy mom. Something like that and of course you would have your garlic press nested inside of that content or wrapped around that content, or inside of that content and then from there, people are getting value and they may want to buy your product, especially if you’re making mentions of how beautiful it works. The concept here is to find the audience, run an ad to that audience, drive them to a free piece of content on a blog, have a place for them to opt in and give you their email address so this way here they can get on your email list, so you can then send them more information about what they just signed up for, what they just requested for, could be 5 recipes, could be 10 recipes.

Then every week you send them another five recipes. You’re able to communicate with them and then you can either point them to your Amazon listing or you can point into your e-commerce store, so that’s what we’re really starting to work on as an external channel, so we’re not so dependent on Amazon but again, I would always start on Amazon, validate, verify, once we get momentum then we start building up external channel and that’s what we’re looking at doing, again I’ll be reporting back on this because this is an experiment that I will be running and I’ll be sharing it with you. If it works, great, if it doesn’t, I’ll let you know that too.

That’s really everything that I wanted to share here on this episode and to let you know that there’s going to be ups and there’s going to be downs. If you just sit back, once you start to get some momentum and you just sit back and take your foot off the gas, you will lose in that game because what’s going to happen is you’re going to get really comfortable and then you’re not going to be trying to expand or you’re not going to be trying to add. Then what’s going to happen is, if you start to see a dip in sales, everything is going to be affected rather than you continually growing.

[00:19:21] SV: You almost need to put a plan in place that says every quarter or every month, we launch one new product right and if you do that, think about that at the end of the year you’d have 12 products and that’s kind of like my mentality now, is like every quarter, I want to have at least three new products launched. If I have more, great, if I have three than that’s what it’s going to be. At least this way here I know the process, I know what I need to do in order to make that happen but the deadline is each quarter there needs to be three new products, three new SKUs that are in there.

Then from there, the other part of that would be once you get that product up there, once you get it validated, once you start getting some momentum, once you feel like you’ve exhausted the Pay Per Click and all of that stuff then you can say, “Okay, now let’s start building up this external funnel so we can start getting an email list and also some other outside traffic that can bring people back to Amazon or even sell on our own e-commerce store.”

That’s like the big overall picture of what I’m looking at, I think everyone should be but you have to start small right? You have to start somewhere all right. The one thing that I want to share with you guys, one little tip here I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V that is. He said this one thing, it really stuck out to me, it really like made an impression on me and it makes a lot of sense because I’m kind of like feeling this in a sense but you need to, this is what he said, “You need to pretend that you were going out of business every single day.”

Pretend you’re going out of business every single day and what that will do is it’ll make you hustle, it will make you always need to go out there and grow your business. If you’re not doing that again, you’re just like a week goes by, you’re good, a week goes by, you’re good, you put in these little tentative goals, okay, cool, whatever. If you pretend that if you don’t do what you’re setting out to do, you will be out of business and then what right, then what?

I think that’s a great thing to implement into your thought process ,that’s what I’m going to currently doing that, that’s what I’m currently doing now even I’m not going out of business but I do want to think like, “ Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get a hold of this thing because I want to grow this thing. I want to grow this thing to be the best that it can be.” I don’t want to just settle, I don’t think anyone should settle.

[00:21:42] SV: Depending on where you are in the process if your brand-new, then just understand that it’s a process okay, and you got to get started. That’s the first thing for you is to get started alright? The second thing to this is people that are already making some money, could be 5000 a month, could be 10, could be 20, could be 50, 100 whatever it is. Even though you’re at those different numbers, you’re still facing the same obstacles because of that, you just need to understand that if you get comfortable, your business will slip eventually and you do not want that to happen.

Again pretend that you’re going out of business every single day and it will force you to hustle, it’ll force you to grow your business, your brand and take you to the next level and that’s currently what I’m working on as we speak, as we record this. I’m actually excited about it. I’m actually excited that this actually is happening in a sense because it does force me to be aware, it forces me to pay attention, if my numbers just stayed consistently every single month, I wouldn’t think anything of it, I would be like, “ oh, that’s cool, okay, we’re good, we’re good, we’re good,”  but if you want to grow you have to pay attention to the numbers and if they don’t move, well then we don’t know if we’ve grown or we don’t know if we’ve kind of like went backwards right?

We need to pay attention to that stuff but whenever you start to slide, guess what? You wake up in a hurry. I’d rather make it so we can grow, slide back a little, grow, slide back a little, grow, so this way here you’re never coming back down under what you started at. I’m kind of rambling here guys but I just wanted to share with you kind of my experience. Kind of being totally transparent with you so guys can see that someone that could appear to have everything under control doesn’t necessarily always have everything under control and this goes for people that are multimillionaires as well. They have problems as well, they have ups, they have downs, it’s just different levels right? It’s different levels and we’ve always heard that, the more you make the more problems you make and that’s true because you can afford more but same thing happens if you’re the small guy.

You still have problems, if you’re trying to get that first product to market but you’re running into a customs issue that’s a big problem for you but the person that has a business $200,000 a month and they run into customs issues they have problems too. Same, just at a different level. All right so hopefully this is been helpful again, I just wanted to kind of put it all out there for you, let you guys know that business is about ups and downs, it’s kind of a roller coaster ride and you just have to be willing to adapt, you have to be willing to accept it and also see it and then be able to react.

Again, I just want to leave you with that what Gary V. had said which was, “Pretend that you’re going out of business every single day,” and if you do that it’s going to force you not to be comfortable. It’s going to force you to take action, it’s going to force you to grow, it’s going to force you to do all the things that you need to take your business and make it more stable and also grow and go to the next level. Then just by learning through these experiences will help you in the future when you face these other certain problems. Okay.

[00:24:55] SV: Again I’m glad that this is happening to me, I’m excited because it’s forcing me to wake up and get out there and hustle and that’s what I’m doing. I’m going to try to balance everything like I said for you guys because it’s something here now that with the podcast I don’t want to ever give up I want to be able to still go out there and help people and at all different levels and this podcast has definitely allowed me to do that. I want to thank each and every one of you that have reached out and then have said, “Scott I love it that you share everything with us, don’t stop and this episode was definitely for you because I know that myself personally too, I don’t want to just see all of the glory, all of the good I want to see the ups and the downs, the struggles, the things that happen in someone’s business every single day.

This way here, we realize that it’s normal and it’s okay and that can help us and push ourselves when we go through one of those obstacles. That’s it guys, that’s going to wrap this up I think that I’ve talked long enough and I wanted to once again just say thank you so much for being a listener of the podcast, you guys are awesome I really, really do appreciate each and every one of you and thank you so much for sending the emails, the blog comments, iTunes reviews, wherever you’re connecting with me, thank you so much I do appreciate it and I read each and every one of them. I just wanted to say thank you.

Remember I’m always here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you back here on the next episode.

[END]

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[INTRODUCTION]

…a case study and there is a whole lot of information that he shares with us that allowed him, this information he’s going to share, it allowed him to actually start with very, very little and kind of  learn the system and then from there, start to build out his private-label business.

That’s what I’m excited to share with you, it’s a longer episode and there was no reason for it other than we just kept diving and digging and just really getting into his story. There is a lot that we covered. If you’ve ever thought about retail arbitrage, this is going to be talked about. If you’ve ever thought about how to make money quicker so you can get started, this is going to help you. If you want to also hear about how to differentiate yourself when private labeling, this will be for you. There is a lot that we talked about inside of his story.

Again, I want to remind you guys, that’s why I love doing these stories because I learn from here, from doing these stories, I learn every single time because there’s things that I don’t know about certain parts of this business, I’ve never went down that path and he shares with us some really clever ways that he was able to get started with very, very little money. If you guys are thinking to yourself, “I’m brand-new, I’m not sure if I even want to get into this thing, I don’t have a lot of money to invest upfront.” This could definitely, definitely help you so you’re going to want to listen to this episode.

Now his name is Ken Willard, he’s a regular guy just like you and me and if you’re a woman, he’s like a regular woman. While he’s a regular man but you get what I’m saying, he’s a regular person, nothing special. He just went out there and found a way and you’re going to hear how he did that. I want to remind you guys too that if you guys are brand-new to the podcast, if you’re brand new and you don’t even know anything about this business or maybe you’re just starting to learn about this business, I want to invite you to a free workshop that I do.

[00:02:15] SV: It’s a live workshop where I jump on and we actually get to hang out for an evening and what I do is I breakdown the five phases for picking a product, for sourcing a product, for launching a product, for promoting a product. Everything in between we cover in this free workshop and I would love for you to attend if you’re interested in learning more about this business. Again, if you’re brand new, this is perfect for you and I would love to invite you, so just head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop, you can register over there.

All right. I’m going to stop talking now because we have a lot to cover here inside of this interview I want you to listen, I want you to take notes, you may want to also download the transcripts for this which we now have included if you head over to the show notes page which is theamazingseller.com/195 and you can get the transcripts there, you can get the show notes and all that stuff.

Definitely head over and check that out once you’ve done listening you’re going to want to have these because well there is a lot that we covered. Alright, so I’m going to stop talking now, sit back, relax and enjoy this interview I did with Ken Willard.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:03:32] SV: Hey Ken, how’s it going man? Thank you so much for coming on the show here. How’s it going?

[00:03:36] KW: I’m feeling excellent today Scott. Thanks for having me on and I appreciate you getting back to me and having me on your show here.

[00:03:43] SV: Yeah, I’m excited to dig into your story. I think it was a great email that you sent me, and you had a lot of cool twists and turns in your story which made me really want to talk to you about your journey. Why don’t we just kind of catch people up real quick as far as like who Ken is and kind of like how you got the idea of even get into selling on Amazon and this whole FBA thing?

[00:04:12] KW: Sure, sure, it was probably early 2015 when I realized that all those people that I was buying stuff from on Amazon for all these years because I was a pretty heavy Amazon buyer especially around Christmas time and stuff like that. I always knew that you either bought from Amazon or you looked for the sellers that was fulfilled by Amazon. I never really realized that that was something that a normal person could do with the right motivation. I assumed they were pretty much business, brick and mortar type businesses that you were buying from.

Early 2015, I came across an explanation of what Amazon FBA was really like. I really don’t even remember what it was, it was probably another podcast that I listened to and I just started looking into it and it intrigued me because I was probably such a heavy Amazon user and I had such a trust level in that platform for buying things. I thought, “This could be something, this to be an interesting opportunity.” I looked into it, shortly after that I discovered your podcast which was pretty new at the time. It had been around for a few months already.

I was trying to catch up on some of those episodes and listening to it. I was looking at more things to sell on Amazon. I also looked into the book area which is where I actually got started, while I was looking for something that had kind of a low-barrier entry which I didn’t know what that was at the time. Listening to your podcast more and more and learning more things, that really was a thing, I just didn’t know what it was. That’s actually how I got my feet wet on FBA was selling books.

[00:06:00] SV: We’re talking physical books though?

[00:06:03] KW: Actual physical used book market. These books are something that I love, I’ve always love and it just seemed a natural fit for me and actually still do it since it’s pretty hands off. That’s how I got my start. It was fun, it was low barrier to entry and the idea was I’m going to use this to raise some capital so I can eventually have my own product out there that wasn’t a book, whatever it was, I didn’t even know what it was going to be at the time. Just my own private-label product, something I can do to earn some capital while I am doing this product research and figuring out what to do.

[00:06:44] SV: How was that process, just real quick, so you get this idea, you’re like a low barrier to entry? I’ll go out there, I’ll find some books, what kind of books are people looking for if they did want to even go down this. I have heard other people say like even college books, books that are pretty expensive, books could be good ones or they could just be a novel, what kind of books were you thinking that you could sell?

[00:07:08] KW: In my research, I looked at it pretty well. I kind of took the right path on it, when you’re an individual seller, if you’re just like me, like a guy selling stuff, you’re going to want to look for text books, you’re going to want to look  for books that are specific to a particular niche, maybe history books, sometimes art books. Novels and things like that those are … Anything that’s pretty much non fiction. Those are the things that are selling for a penny plus shipping on Amazon and the big shops that can sell several thousand of those, maybe 10,000 even a day because they have this huge operation behind them.

So far for the average person, you’re looking for textbooks, you’re looking for books with some specificity to them, they have to do with a specific market like Fly Fishing in a certain part of the country. The history of a certain type of art or a certain even city or something like that really almost … It’s kind of funny because you think, “ The books that nobody wants, those are the books that you want.” If everybody wants it, you’re probably not going to make a penny out of it, if nobody wants it, you’ve probably got something there. That kind of a whole these system, like niche books, no mass market  stuff or anything like that.

[00:08:31] SV: Where were you going to find these?

[00:08:34] KW: My biggest source for this is yard sales, when I was, doing for myself. Some sources they go out and buy stuff for me now but yard sale are huge. Smaller thrift shops in your local area are good. Some of the bigger thrift shops like Goodwill stuff like that. Those are dried up now because they are doing this as well, they’re taking the good books and they’re listing them on Amazon themselves. You’ll see Goodwill all over the country and their own Amazon accounts sort of like Salvation Army but smaller places, local church-run places.

People that tend to get esteemed by those stuff like that state sales, yard sales because people are getting rid of books. These are maybe professional people that have had these books for their career or as part of their hobby for a long time and now they’re just getting rid of them. Those things persist, other people have those hobbies and these books tend to be pretty sought after even over time. Then if you live in a College campus, you can easily get more than the College bookstores going to give so you have plenty of room to resell it on Amazon and make a tidy amount on it just because of the range, the college books plus some of these kids is almost nothing.

[00:09:57] SV: I was going to say you can even , I’m just thinking off the fly here,  you could probably even put an ad even in Craigslist or one of those just saying, “College student, you want to sell your books you know call us first before you giving them back,” or something like that. You could have a flood of college kids calling you, they’re hard up for money they want to sell their books from the year is over so maybe they’ll cash the books in and you can get then be the middleman and resell them on Amazon, it’s probably a good strategy.

[00:10:24] KW: Oh yeah, there’s people out there that absolutely do that, even go to Craigslist or any College town around the finals time or end of semester and you’ll see those ads out there for sure.

[00:10:35] SV: That’s cool, that’s really cool. Okay, so we won’t drill too much in this. I think there are people that are listening that are like, “I need a ton of money to get started,” and that whole thing that we hear a lot and I always tell people the only person that’s stopping you is you and that’s because there’s opportunity out there, whether it’s selling used books or other used items that are being sold on Amazon right now. It’s a great way to start just raising your capital, whether it’s stuff laying around your house or apartment wherever. Let me ask you this real quick before we jump off of this and kind of get into your private labeling stuff.

Okay, so what were you doing though to really, I guess validate that you could verify, that you could potentially sell these books if you’re sifting through, like if you’re at a yard sale, are you taking your phone and keying in all of the ones that are interested or interesting to you and like you said they might not be that popular of a books or are you just kind of taking a chance because you think that it’s rare and it could be. Give us a little about that?

[00:11:36] KW: There’s a number of products out there just like in FBA, people come up with data services and product services. There’s the same thing in the book market, there’s a number of scanning tools that you can get for your Android or your iPhone that really makes it a viable way to go. If you had to key stuff in or you had to search on the Amazon Fire app or something like that, it probably wouldn’t be viable at all because of the time it would take. I use something called FBA Scan, a lot of people use, there’s Profit Bandit.

There’s different ones and everybody has their favorite for whatever reason. You go in there and you scan everything with your camera or you can get one those like a little Bluetooth device that has a little laser scanner on it and you scan it on your UBC codes on your phone and it will bring up all the data, all the sales data. It will go to Camel Camel Camel if you want. It will show you what the highest FBA price is, who gets the buy box price on the existing stock and then it will show you the BSR.

Then there is just a combination of BSR and what the selling rate is which gives you a yes or no and whether you’re going to buy it. Then pretty quick after doing it for a while, you just get an eye because low can go no, no, no. You get an eye for what you can do and what you can’t do and honestly it’s not that hard after a little bit because 80% of what people sell are novels, fiction books and stuff, so you don’t even see that anymore, it’s just invisible to you and you’re going to pick up that book about cabinet making or something because it’s going to jump right at you, becomes easy. Then you have these guys, more just a validation of that eye that developed.

[00:13:30] SV: One last question is okay, when you have these used books is there any type of packaging you have to do to prep them to go into Amazon?

[00:13:38] KW: No just the evidence that you have to put on a back, you have to cover up, just like any other product, you have to cover up the UPC in which your ASIN sticker.

[00:13:49] SV: Okay.

[00:13:49] KW: Then if you’re selling a book that’s maybe oversize or it’s kind of fragile or it’s older or you want to make sure that it’s in a good condition, you can bubble wrap and anything like that but for the most part, you don’t do anything to them. Just on the ones that you think, “This could get damaged and I will get bad review because I’m saying it’s in a good condition but it’s got a bad corner when they get it. You can bubble wrap those. For the most part, just slap a sticker on it, make sure it’s clean, make sure there’s no labels, no writing and you pack it well and ship it in.

[00:14:26] SV: Okay, so yeah, that’s not too much work and it sounds like it could be worth it. Yeah I mean not like a huge amount of what you have to do to get it ready but there are guidelines of course. Okay so now let’s talk a little bit about … Now moving into private labeling, you’re doing this, you made a little bit of money and now … Take me through your next step like what was the next step for you or the next aha moment. Take us through the next part of your journey.

[00:14:57] KW: Well, it goes back to something you said just a minute ago about the only thing that’s stopping you from doing it is you.  I found out about FBA, I’m looking at it, I’m thinking about it, I’m trying to get all my ducks in a row. I’m just waiting basically, you’re just waiting, you’re putting it off because you need to know that information, you need this, you need that, so you’re waiting. I come up with this grand scheme of selling these used books. That’s my plan I’m going to get some capital, I’m going to do this while I’m researching products. Then, even though you had talked about it in the episode before, the $500 products episode.

[00:15:37] SV: Yeah, yes that was episode 68 I believe.

[00:15:43] KW: That was something that was actually groundbreaking or new because I think you had talked about it way back in like 35 or something like that. You had mentioned a similar thing. I heard it before but I think before somebody actually did it and kind of slapped me on the face with it that I realized my whole plan of earning capital and doing this so I can do something, it was just a different form of waiting. It was a different form of keeping myself from doing something that I wanted to do and like you said, taking action. It wasn’t a bad thing because I was getting some money and doing that but I was putting off something that I didn’t need to put off.

The $500 project test kind of drove that home for me. That’s when I started really looking and I said, “you know, whatever I have now  that’s what I have and we’re going to go for it, and we’re going to start looking,”  and I was looking pretty much everywhere the same people other people were looking, AliExpress, Alibaba and some of the other import sites for some products and I had an idea of what’s based on what I want to be in. I’m looking around and at the same time I’m still looking around on Craigslist for some books and some other  things that I was looking at and one of those things that you can easily look and say, “Oh, it’s just dumb luck,” or you can say, “ I never would have found it if I hadn’t taken action. “ But I found an item on Craigslist of all places. I didn’t have to import it, I didn’t have to make it, I didn’t have to do anything to it. It was a close-up item.

It was an item of printing, actually they’re all gone now so I can say it was like a sticker set for kids. Some printer had made them up a couple of years prior. When we ordered them, they were paid for. The seller were just sitting around trying to get rid of them and so I see this sticker set, he’s got like 1,000 of them and he’s asking like 65, 70 bucks for them. I thought I’d have a look at them and they were actually really cool. They were a set of stickers, they were sets of stickers. They weren’t doing this guy any good in his factory. He’s trying to get rid of them and at first you see the sticker set and you think nothing of it because you’re not going to sell that on Amazon because it’s this little finite sticker set, plastic wrap, there’s nothing, it’s not viable but because of the things that I’ve learned from your podcast or from listening to other places, I knew what bundle was, I knew how to decide whether something is going to make the grades or doesn’t stuck so I don’t get stuck with an add-on item.

I thought it had merit and I was only going to give it $65 to get these so I bought them. I took them home, I looked at them, I opened them up and they were actually pretty cool, so I went through the process. I had some pictures taken of it. I bundled it together and figured out what would be a good price point was. I put them in packs of four, I looked around through the Amazon categories, I ended up posting it in a couple of categories. I used the main category was party favors which people out there, don’t sleep on the party favors, that’s a good category. Really it is and I posted them and you know what? They absolutely took off.

They ended up because I was selling them for $15 for a pack of four. My first listing, actually thought I would sell for like $6.99 and I listed them and I posted them for that and I got stuck with an add-on item but I learned what the criteria was for that size of that weight was $6.99 because I upped it up a little bit, I played around with the price and I figured out what would get it out of add-on status. At first I played well with some promotions raising the price and then giving like a percentage off to bring the price back the price to something that was sellable.

I wasn’t selling too much at that price because I think that just the current price was scaring people, so I just lowered the price down and figured out kind of what the gateway was to get it out of add-on status and that worked great. I learned a lot along the way about PPC because I did launch my PPC campaigns right off the bat. I think that helped a lot actually.

[00:20:24] SV: How many campaigns did you start with?

[00:20:27] KW: I just started with the $1 based on the experience from the show and given that as a resource to identify what keywords we’re going to hit for this. I kind of just went down the line on that one. That’s something I just went right down on the script. I started the auto campaign, I picked out what keywords were working, I put them in their own campaigns with their own budgets. I had it on auto the whole time on all the products. I liked auto. I think by the end I had the auto going at the same time and I had two separate campaigns for specific keywords that I wanted to kind of monitor their specific performance and we’re doing well so I wanted them to have their own money attached to them, so something else wouldn’t eat it up.

The money would always be there for that good producing keyword. I did good, I mean in the end, I think it took me a little under, a little over 90 days when I sold almost all 246 after the ones that I used for taking pictures and the ones I gave out, so it’s stuff like that. I sold everyone of them and from that choice to take action instead of waiting and that $65 investment that made me make something that looked like a sloppy item into an FBA because I knew I could bundle it. I knew I could put some ads together for it, get some eyes for it.

[00:22:12] SV: What was your selling price on that, that you that you finally ended up with that you found the best results?

[00:22:18] KW: It was $7.99.

[00:22:19] SV: $7.99, okay, so-

[00:22:20] KW: $6.99 got it as an add-on, $7.99 got it as a FBA.

[00:22:26] SV: What was your bundle costing you in far as taking $65 dividing that up I guess by 250 units I guess is what you would do then right?

[00:22:36] KW: Yeah just sourcing for materials for the product and the bargain and the stickers. Everything I think my total cost for a bundle was somewhere around 54-56 cents.

[00:22:47] SV: Okay. About 54-56 cents somewhere in there and then how much do you feel like you spent on Amazon Pay Per Click?

[00:22:56] KW:  Pay per Click was pretty close to $250 all said and done.

[00:23:01] SV: Okay, so basically you’re talking 250 bucks total across the board and then get your FBA fee so what was your net profit, do you know what that was?

[00:23:11] KW: After all that stuff, it was just a hair under $1100.

[00:23:15] SV: Nice,

[00:23:15] KW: It was… Least to say, it was much better than I ever would had expected it could have been. It’s one of those things like you said, it’s easy to look back and say, “Oh what luck, what a great stroke of luck.”

[00:23:29] SV: Yeah, but the luck wouldn’t happen if you didn’t see that ad and if you didn’t take action on that ad when you see it and enlist it. Now think about all of the different things you learned from that allowed you to do Pay per Click, you basically got an education and got paid 1100 bucks to do it.

[00:23:44] KW: You can imagine, I learned everything about promotions, I learned Pay per Click, I learned about good product photos because I tried to go easy on the product photos at first while we were working, they were awful, they really were awful. I noticed when I got a decent set of product photos in there, it really did make a difference on the sales. It isn’t that the photos were awful, they didn’t have good color saturates and stuff like that.

[00:24:19] SV: They were just flat-like,

[00:24:20] KW: They were flat-like, they didn’t have a good, clean, white background, they didn’t have the 3d effect with the shape behind them. Once I did that, it also helped PPC kicked in, I learned a lot of stuff on what to do what not  to do, which I think probably everybody goes through on their first product.

[00:24:39] SV: Absolutely, and let me ask you this, how much competition was there when you were looking at this like when you’re looking to sell these, not that it even matter at this point you like you I just bought 1000 units for 65 bucks, I’m going to throw them up and see what happens but like was there other people selling what you were selling that was comparable to what you’re selling?

[00:24:57] KW: Not really, there was some similarly themed items but this really was truly a unique product because this actual product and this actual brand, which I think it’s defunct now, it wasn’t existent pretty much anywhere else on Amazon or on the web. So, this product and the way it looked and the design, there was nothing really similar to it, so it did stand on its own. There wasn’t a lot of choice as far as like this one or this one because it was unique look and it was actually a bundled sticker set, I think that helped.

There was competition in the fact that there’s a lot of people selling party favors and whatnot but I think it’s always a strong thing selling year round. People are always looking for themed-type parties and this was a good one for a good theme sticker so it worked that way.

[00:25:55] SV: I think that’s great and if we break that down, let’s just say it was 90 days and you went through there and you were able to get 1100 bucks approximately back I mean if we’re to break that down, that’s just under 400 bucks a month. That’s not too bad to go ahead and learn something. I think a lot of people listening would say, “You know what 400 bucks a month would be nice right now for me.”

Again I think you got the book thing going, you kind of got that thing so people that are listening, I want them to understand that a lot of people say, “You have to start with a lot more money,” and I don’t believe that you do. Will these results always result like this? No, but you are going to pretty much learn through the process and you don’t have to invest a lot to kind of learn the system and then you might stumble across something, like right now, like you said you’ve stumbled across this market in a sense that it looks like it’s a pretty cool little market that a lot of people might not have seen or you might not have seen if you didn’t have this Craigslist ad and then you kind of dig into it and say, “What the heck, 65 bucks.”

That’s really, really awesome, I’m glad you shared that. Now, let’s talk about moving forward past that, so I’m sure in the process here you’re not just sitting around doing nothing during those 90 days. What are you doing during those 90 days like today are you looking for your own like private label product now because after the styles are gone like you said they’re kind of gone right?

[00:27:18] KW: Yeah, they’re gone, they’re gone.

[00:27:19] SV: That’s the problem with retail arbitrage, and I’ll say problem but to me it’s a constant, you got to keep finding new inventory when you’re on a private label product, you can focus on that get it really up to speed and just keep replenishing it and really market behind it, so what was your next move?

[00:27:36] KW: Well, after obsessively checking myself like 25 times a day that was silly until I started doing it. Yeah, I was definitely using this time. I know I didn’t want to do RA because it is a grind, everybody says so. I wanted to do something PL. I had already pretty much decided what area I wanted to be in so I used this even running off the bat when I was selling, when I was making money I was like, “ Hey, this is good, I need to get off the slide here and get moving.” I was really more actively researching products, I know where I want to be, I’m in sports and outdoors, I don’t mind saying. I found my first product and I didn’t get any new products going until these stickers were pretty much wrapped up.

I had talked to so many factories, got some samples sent to me, pretty much picked out who I wanted my manufacturer for it. I started out my first product pretty much, within the, I don’t know if it’s the same month but it’s within a 30 day period of when the stickers ran their course. The money that I got from that really helped in me being able to get maybe a little better product than I usually would have started with and have them do a little customization to it, some things to make it stand out, you need to have some differentiation for what’s out there. What it also did was help me get a product that held a higher price point than I probably would have been able to do before.

I still went on the $500 project challenge kind of model. My first order was pretty small but I was able to go to an item at a higher price point because I knew I wanted to do that because even then because when a lot of new sellers were coming in and the lower priced items was getting harder to sell, was getting more competition, there was more people coming in with those $20 range.

[00:29:49] SV: What was this price point that you were trying to target now?

[00:29:54] KW: The first one, I wanted to go something that was at least $40 for my first one and then currently as we sit here, I have three products that I’m actively selling and my experience with the first one was encouraging enough and there was enough space in the market’s part that I was in, where I actually went up from there and $40 that’s still my least expensive item…

[00:30:21] SV: What is it costing to source a $40 product?

[00:30:25] KW: Altogether, counting [inaudible] I’m clearing about $23 per unit, so it’s not bad. It’s actually a good little seller for me and something… It’s surely the most mass-market of my items, I tend to go towards items that are a little more specific as to who is going to buy them because I find and I found it to be true, those items are going to go for a higher dollar amount. I’m not selling stuff that’s just anybody is going to find and go, “Oh, I want one of those.” And buy it because you can’t get the price you want for the kind of business that I wanted to build. Just because, my situation, as far as my career, my family everything like that I don’t want to be turning over thousands and thousands of $20 items. I went to more kind of specific niche and it was-

[00:31:38] SV: Are you air shipping these or are you shipping these by boat?

[00:31:42] KW: At first I was air, but now that I kind of got a cycle going on my sales, it’s not something that’s real seasonal, it kind of sells at a predictable rate. I’m going by boat now. At first I started air, the first shipment actually everything that I sold, just because I’m impatient I think, I went by air, but you know, it gets expensive.

[00:32:12] SV: I think the important thing here for people to understand too is yes it’s more expensive, it does get it here faster, it gets you to be able to test it,  but we know too in the back of our minds that it’s something that we can reduce the cost if we want to. We know that right? I mean even if it cost an extra $2 or $3 to get it here and for you you’re selling a $40 product. Let’s say you air shipped it that and instead of making $23 you made $20 or you made $18. It’s okay right now because we’re still making a pretty good margin on that but the same breath we know that we can reduce the cost in the future if we go by boat.

[00:32:51] KW: Yes,

[00:32:52] SV: That’s important.

[00:32:53] KW: My item’s a little bit bigger than that not necessarily heavy but they’re a little larger, they’d take some more volume so air gets expensive-

[00:33:01] SV: Is it oversized, is it an oversized product?

[00:33:03] KW: No, it’s not quite oversized, just that 100 of them take up a lot more space than a hundred [inaudible].

[00:33:11] SV:  With your first product though that you took and you brought to market what was that price point, about $40 price point?

[00:33:18] KW: Yeah, it was actually $39.99

[00:33:20] SV: Okay, so $39.99 and at that point when you got it there, just to take this quickly through that process. How did you launch? How many did you start with and how did you launch? Maybe just give us like a 45 second view of your launch.

[00:33:38] KW: Sure, the first order that I put in for these items was 100. I got 100 and this was the only actual product that I went to a review group to get some reviews. It worked out okay, I ended up giving away 25 of them over a period of I think I was giving away five a week. To try to trickle in the reviews, I was going that route so they would all come. I wanted to get some sales over time rather than just a huge boost, giving all 100 away and whatever real quick. That worked out pretty well. What I’m going to say is, I wasn’t unhappy with the review group but I moved away from them for the reason that review groups are good and there’s a lot of drama with them now.

Review groups are good for general consumer items, something that anybody is going to buy because you’re just getting general consumers that are doing these reviews. They don’t have any investment in their product, maybe they don’t really know what it’s for, more or less they just want it at the price they’re going to review, then do whatever they’re going to do with it, sell it or whatever.

The products I sell are a little more technical, they have a specific market, a specific area like I don’t sell technical backpacks but I know somebody who does and people that are going to buy a serious type of a backpack they want to know if it’s going to have a lot of cool pockets and it holds all my books, which is a reasonable review that somebody who’s not going to use it for an intended person is going to give you. People who want to buy this product are going to maybe drop $100 on it.

They want to know what the weight to volume ratio is, they want to know the abrasion resistance is, they want to know how it performs here and there, does it have lid, they don’t want to know how many books it holds. Those are the kind of the reviews, I got good reviews, they are good quality, I think they helped because I got those little stars on the bottom that show people like it

[00:36:01] SV: I’m sorry to cut you off but how many reviews were your competitors having on this product that you were trying to compete with?

[00:36:11]  KW:  The first one, I think the top seller had somewhere between three or 400 and 350 or something.

[00:36:18]  SV: Okay. And what about moving down that list?

[00:36:21]  KW:  I think after that it dropped to under 100.

[00:36:23]  SV: Okay perfect. If you get 20, 25 reviews you are going to be fine.

[00:36:30]  KW: Yeah. It wasn’t like I was getting something to have a couple of four digit review people and climbing an endless mountain.

[00:36:38]  SV: When you were doing your market research on this product, what were you seeing for sales across like the top seven to ten? I mean, were you looking at those numbers to see if you’re going to be able to sell a certain number?

[00:36:53] KW: Oh yeah. I was looking at the sales from the top seven to ten. I wasn’t necessarily looking at it on the same scale that we tended to talk about on the Podcast and everything because I know this isn’t just someone is going to walk in and buy just because. But there was good strong sales. I think the number one was selling somewhere around- I can’t remember now… 30-40 a day.

[00:37:19] SV: In your head were you still thinking to yourself if I could sell even five or ten of these a day I’d be happy?

[00:37:25]  KW: Absolutely. I was shooting for five but actually over time it’s settled into what I’m doing between six and eight a day. It isn’t bad at all.

[00:37:36]  SV: No. It’s a more expensive product. So it’s almost like getting double the sales if you’re selling a ten unit product that you want to sell per day.

[00:37:43] KW:  Right. I mean, fluctuation in the market tends to affect you a little more because you know one less sale is a bigger chunk. I guess I wasn’t looking to do huge volume. I wasn’t looking to do something that was going to take over everything because I had some other concerns going on in my life. It’s something that’s going to eclipse everything else.

[00:38:05]  SV: Yes. Now were you launching the next few products along the same lines of this product?

[00:38:12]  KW:  I wanted to see how the first one would go. I had some ideas of the things I wanted to sell. But I really wasn’t quite pursuing them as far as really getting that [inaudible] and seeing what they were because I wanted to get a little feedback on this first one first and see if it was received well. If my big plan was really going to work out or if anybody really even wanted it. It turned out to be okay. So it wasn’t much of a delay. Maybe a month and I figured okay, this is settling in well. The PPC is doing good, I keep them around. They fluctuate but they go between 18 and 22. Which isn’t too bad at all, really. It probably doesn’t even matter. I was ordering some samples, actually my next two. I didn’t know it simultaneously but I knew I had a whole path, kind of brand that I wanted to set out they’re all related in the same area so it was easy to branch out from there. Right now I do have the three. The third one is going and I have two more kind of identified which are a little more on the custom side stuff that isn’t going to have a lot of competition.

[00:39:30] SV: Are you using the same supplier for this as well?

[00:39:35] KW: Actually my first two come from the same supplier, my third has it’s own supplier and then the two that I am working on, one of them is from the first supplier so that will be three and then the other one what would be my fifth item is from a completely new supplier. I just want to have- I’m not even sure if I want to have three of those items from the same manufacturer just because I like to spread things around but at the same time they’ve been good to me, I have a good relationship with them so I probably will be willing to partner with them.

[00:40:12] SV: Okay. No, I’m loving the story. I’m loving how we’re starting with the book or books and then I love it how we’re talking about stickers on Craigslist and then we’re moving into a private label product and now we’re almost launching up to six products here. I also like it that to differentiate yourself a little bit is not just differentiate but also separate yourself from some of the competition or some of the more competitive products is you went a little bit higher and I think we are going to be moving in from or away from the lower ticketed price products. I still think there’s a market there, I just think it’s going to be a little bit harder.

I also think that in your case if you’ve got these more expensive products, you kind of have the flexibility. If you want to add an accessory to that really easily at a lower ticket price and just add to your product line, you probably got that option there as well.

[00:41:07]  KW: Yeah there’s exquisite outdoors, pretty much anything you make there is like 10 auxiliary items to go with it-.

[00:41:13] SV: Yeah, so you can build that up very quickly.

[00:41:17] KW: People all about toys and tools, stuff like that. I’m really glad I did go to the higher price point because I think a lot of the heartache that’s going on right now is people talking about market saturation and competitors from bad reviews and competitors eat up your PPC, all those stories are coming from where everybody is selling and so I think no, I didn’t consciously do it but I’m really glad that I went to a higher price point because I think it kind of, at least for now, insulates from a lot of that heartache and the shenanigans that are happening with people. They’re all fighting for the 20 to 25 dollar price point and going after that hot item, that hot niche that’s why a lot of shady people are coming in and really cause the heartache for the honest people that are just trying to make something.

[00:42:15] SV: I agree and I think right from the beginning I think I talk about that even in my workshops and stuff. I look for products between $19 but all the way up to $45 but I’m also now expanding that and I think anyone getting started when they think to themselves capital wise if they need to start with a product that’s 45 bucks I’m going to need to spend 20 bucks on a product or even 15 and if you buy over a couple of hundred units it’s going to add up faster than if you were to buy the smaller items.

I just think with anyone out there, just listen to the book story that Ken just shared, the Craigslist story, I mean those are very easy ways to get started to get some capital but then it’s really going to be a decision on the person and as far as the amount of risk that you do want to take but I do think that you are separating yourself because you are going after a different part of I guess the Amazon sellers because the people that are starting in that price point, there’s less of them naturally.

It’s definitely, I think moving forward is probably where people are going to want to go but to some people it’s going to be not even possible because they just think that they have to start there and then they won’t start at all. When people start talking about saturation, yes, I think it’s going to be harder but I also think that you just have to start, you know. Depending on where you are if it’s selling books or selling something off of Craigslist right?

[00:43:37] KW: Exactly, exactly, you just have to go and do it. If you’re having an issue whether I should do a or b or e or b, pick which one just feels best to you, which one personally you like the most because then when the problems happen and when the work happens and you got to roll up your sleeves, you’re not just going to be chasing a dollar, you’re going to be doing something that is interesting to you that you like, you’re selling a product that you have some kind of personal investment in and it’s just going to be easier to deal with whatever problems come along the road. I mean if it’s some random thing you can care less about.

[00:44:17] SV: I agree. I agree 100%. Okay, so now, we’re going to wrap this up we’ve been going quite a while here.

[00:44:26] KW: I talk too much.

[00:44:27] SV: No, you’ve got a great story and I didn’t want to stop because there’s so much to your story. What I love about it is the simplicity in the beginning and then how we’ve kind of graduated to this in a very short time really. I mean it hasn’t been that long but now let’s talk a little bit about something else that you’re working on and that you’re doing which you’ve kind of seen a void in the market. I think by your own vision as far as seeing what’s out there but talk a little bit about your new venture which is myfbapartner.com. Talk about what that is and what it offers and why you decided to even do it.

[00:45:04] KW: Sure. Well, I just launched My FBA Parter at the end of last year. I’ll tell you right off the bat, it’s nothing exotic and it’s nothing new but what we provide is a high level of fulfillment services strictly for FBA sellers. How I came across this was just looking at all the podcasts and the Facebook groups and all the newsgroups that I monitor for the area and it doesn’t fail that every several weeks across one of these I’ll see somebody saying, “Hey, I’m looking for package, ship services. I’m looking for fulfillment. I’m looking for somebody who can take this off of my plate. Who do you guys know? Who do you guys use?”

If you search around you’ll see almost every single time you get a couple of people saying, “I used this company over here, they were alright. I used this guy one time did okay, did good.” I thought for the business people out here taking chances putting their money that they could be using for something else to chase their dream, there should be somebody out there giving them some the service that gets a little better review than that. You should walk away from anything you do with a really good feeling and the people out here that do services like Mercer and stuff like that, they put together a great product that works good and they treat their customers right and people rave about them. That’s what I was thinking why isn’t there anybody like this?

I tell you right now there is no lack of people that are going to do fulfillment for an FBA seller, so why isn’t there anybody that stands out as somebody that provides really good customer service and makes the seller feel important? Makes them feel like their items, their products were treated well and they couldn’t have made a better choice. There should be somebody like that out there like that.

[00:47:07] SV: Yeah and honestly I don’t even have anybody that even comes top of mind. I’ve had a few people tell me of a few different places but I haven’t heard of them but I haven’t communicated with them personally and usually if I’m going to make any recommendation I got to know the person or I got to know the people or I got to have other people tell me these people are awesome. I haven’t needed it and that doesn’t mean I won’t need it in the future but I haven’t needed it but there are people that do need it.

What it basically is, maybe you can break that down exactly, what actually it means when you have someone that can fulfill your products for you in a sense and maybe even again packaging or maybe even bundling and that type of stuff? Why don’t you talk a little bit about what the different services that your company provides and then also maybe just a little bit more about it?

[00:48:04] KW: Sure. All those things you said that’s exactly what we do, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for the last few months. We’re going to do complete fulfillment services for you and your product. Anything after the ordering of a product and arranging for it to ship it to the mainland here, anything after that all the way up until getting it into Amazon is what we will take care of for the customer. We will receive the shipments. We will unbox them. We’ll make sure everything that went well in shipping and there’s no product damage. We’ll do the same thing for the internal packages. We’ll unpack everything, make sure nothing got damaged, make sure it is manufactured the way that you’re thinking it’s going to be manufactured.

We’re going to do whatever processing per item is necessary whether it still needs a sticker, whether it’s an expiration date, it needs polybagging, it needs bundling, it needs bubble wrapping, it needs to be repacked into proper cartons for shipping to Amazon because international ones weren’t good. If you want your own special packaging, if you want manufacturer inserts, if you want your own information inserted into the item box or bag, anything you want or need done is what we’re going to provide to you as far as those manufacturing process.

[00:49:32] SV: Yeah and you know what I got to say here, I was actually and actually I have  product right now that I kind of did a little soft test on and it does okay. The reason why I kind of backed off is because of exactly that. I was receiving three different components and I was having to put it all together here and to find a co-packer was just another obstacle I didn’t want to have to look into. What you’re telling me is if I wanted to ship everything to your facility, you guys will pretty much take care of that for a fee of course and then ship it off to Amazon for me?

[00:50:08] KW: Absolutely.

[00:50:08] SV: In a sense you’re almost like a co-packer?

[00:50:12] KW: Yeah.

[00:50:12] SV: Yeah, okay. I mean that’s huge.

[00:50:17] KW: Yeah and we’ll do bundling if you’re selling multiples of a single item or you have a single item that’s a composite of these three different products we’ll pack them together and put them in your custom if you have a custom box that you want made because chances are they’re not all from the same manufacturer and then the problem of getting all those three items in a box where the presentation is nice perhaps you need something like that, perhaps a polybag is all you need. Whatever you want, whatever you need is what we’ll do. If you have a custom packaging that you have printed from even a fourth place, you ship that to us, when we get your product, we’ll arrange everything in the package with that and however you want it to look, pack that up and get it shipped off to Amazon for you. Like you said, you had these three items and it was pretty much of a drag for you to keep up and all this stuff together-

[00:51:13] SV: Okay, I mean that’s huge.

[00:51:16] KW: The time you spent was really worth a lot more than what you’re going to get off of this product.

[00:51:20] SV: Yeah and I think it’s going to come down to this. It’s like if you have an idea that you could bundle these things together and again maybe get that price point up like we talked before, you’ve got more profit in there that you can play around with to hire a service like this and then you obviously have to figure that cost in your final cost that is going to be for cost of goods. The thing is this also has been an obstacle for a lot of people that don’t want to ship two or three or four different things to their location and then have to do all the co-packing and then shipping it. This is going to simplify that process and that’s something that I may be doing in the future as well, definitely would be using your service when I would go ahead and do this co-packing because I do think that just takes a huge weight off of anyone’s shoulders that’s looking at doing this and it also gives you more leverage in a sense because now you don’t have to do that part of the process. Really, really cool thing here that I think that you’re doing.

I’m not really sure, I’ve seen a few out there but I haven’t seen any out there that are I guess doing- maybe there are I just don’t know of them but that they’re actually doing all of that nitty gritty. There are some yes that they’ll re-label, yes they’ll pack in a different box but to really be I think like you’re saying, customize even that experience is going to be huge.

[00:52:42] KW: Yeah. We will offer basically a full concierge version of what is out there already and we’re not going to nickel and dime people over. A lot of companies have a whole menu of services. If you want your insert on that, that’s a certain price, if you want a polybag that’s more. If you want it to have a bundling sticker, that’s even more. It’s just at a point where if you’re going to do all that and nobody’s going to rave about you, there’s something wrong with that service. We’re going to treat you and your products like they were our products because we’ve been here, we sell this stuff. We know there’s a lot riding on that little widget that you’re selling.

[00:53:23] SV: Yeah, that’s great.

[00:53:24] KW: There’s a lot of things that you want to do in your life, and our service is not going to be for everybody. Like you said, some people don’t need it so they don’t want it but we have some special things that we’re doing for new sellers, for international sellers and really aimed at those sellers that are pretty experienced that are filling out their product line which this activity is almost becoming a burden for them because they’re selling five or six different things. Maybe they’re selling high volume things feel like, “I didn’t get into this so I could spend eight days of my month packing stuff up”

[00:54:02] SV: Right. I think it’s great. Why don’t we wrap up here and let people know how they can get a hold of you but also you’ve agreed to give six lucky TAS-ers, the first 6 that do fill out the contact form and request more information, go ahead and talk about what you’re going to give the TAS community.

[00:54:25] KW: Sure. Just because this is where I got my start and I have a lot of good experiences and memories from the TAS community. The site is myfbapartner.com. There’s a contact form on the contact page. First six people that sign up on the contact page indicate that they heard it from here the TAS promo I’m going to process their first 500 items at no charge. That’s whatever services we provide that they need, not just certain things. If they need everything we’ll do everything. If they only need a certain thing, we’ll do that certain thing. We’ll do 500 of them for free. We know everybody’s shipping schedules are a little weird so it’s not like you’re going to get it to us in next week or whatever.

If your shipment’s coming in a month, that’s fine, we’ll schedule it and we’ll take care of that with no charge to you. In addition to that, anybody who does sign up at any point or fills up the contact form because it’s not a sign up, it’s not a subscription service or anything like that. As long as you mention that you are a TAS member, we’ll always give you 10% off of all of our services and that’s an ongoing thing and that will be good for everybody who comes through our shop.

Then for first timers, just because the taking action is the biggest step to getting going and doing it and we want one less thing to hold people back because it was one less thing holding me back. If it’s your first time, if you’ve never sold on FBA before, this is your first shipment coming in, we’ll talk about that and we have what we call taking action bonus and we’ll do whatever you need to do and we’ll do it in half of the normal cost just to give that one more step to help you get it done and get going and get your bus going to wherever it is you want it to take you and that’s about it.

[00:56:24] SV: Yeah, that’s awesome. Ken, I want to thank you again for coming on, number one, sharing your story because I think it’s awesome and it’s really cool to hear how you can start from literally almost nothing, no excuses by the way and then just taking action and moving yourself through and every single thing that we just covered, anyone can do. There’s nothing holding anyone back. Now, moving forward in this new venture and this new addition to your portfolio is My FBA Partner. I mean I’m a huge fan right now and I haven’t even used this service yet but I know who you are and I know you’re a good guy and I know that you only want what’s best for people in general, not just the TAS listeners.

The TAS listeners, they are going to get treated a little bit better. Number one, the first six that sign up on the contact form are going to get it done for free and then after that, 10% if you just said you’re a TAS listener, all you have to do is just put in there that you are a TAS listener and then if you’re a brand new seller, you have never sold anything and this is your first shipment, we’ll, you’re going to get 50% off on that order as well. I mean Ken, I couldn’t ask for anything more and I did not even know about those extra little bonuses that you threw in there so I just want to tell people definitely check it out, whether you use his service or not, definitely just reach out to Ken and I’m sure he’ll answer any questions that you have whether it’s about this or it’s about this interview that we just did. Ken, I just want to say again thank you so much and is there any last little bits of advice you’d like to give. What would be one thing that you would like to tell our listeners to do if they are thinking about getting into this business?

[00:58:05] KW: It’s just get into the business. I don’t care if you live your whole life and you never visit My FBA Partner, that’s not the primary reason I am here today. The primary reason I am here today is to say just take action, just go and do it. If you’re thinking about it then do it. If you are in a situation where you’re waiting, try to figure out why you’re waiting and whether you really do need to wait or not, just make it happen.

[00:58:31] SV: I like it, I like it. Just make it happen #justmakeithappen. All right guys that is going to wrap it up. Ken I want to thank you once again. This has been awesome. I really do appreciate it and good luck to you. We’ll definitely probably have you back on the show, we’ll do an update. Your product line sounds like it’s really thriving and doing well so we’re definitely going to do catch up with you at a later date, so once again thanks Ken, I really do appreciate you coming on the show.

[00:58:55] KW: Thanks for having me.

[00:58:56] SV: All right, so there you have it, another great interview. I want to thank Ken once again, what an amazing story and I just love it how he didn’t let anything get in his way. If you guys are brand new and you’re just starting, you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, there’s this reason why I can’t.” or “There’s this reason why I can’t.” those are just excuses. If you want it bad enough, you just need to figure out a way to make it happen and get started. That’s what Ken did and I just love diving into his story and there’s so many different ways you can get started by just listening to his story so you might want to go back and listen to this one again or you may just want to go grab the show notes or the transcripts so you can make sure that you take those notes and you apply them and take action.

All right guys, that is going to wrap up this episode. I wanted to remind you guys one more time though if you wanted to attend one of my live free workshops, head over to the amazingseller.com/workshop. We’ll cover everything it will take to get started all the way from picking your product, sourcing your product and then doing a launch and then doing a promo, everything in between, we’ll cover that on this live, free workshop. I’ll also answer live Q&A while we’re there on the hangout.

Alright, that’s it guys. That’s going to wrap it up. Remember, I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]
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[INTRODUCTION]

…questions today. You guys all know at least all of you long time listeners that is, you guys know I look forward to these Ask Scott sessions because it’s you submitting questions. It’s like us sitting around the coffee table or the coffee shop or wherever we are just hanging out talking about business so I’m really, really glad you are here and I’m really pumped up. I’ve got a couple of things I want to share with you, personal things actually which I’m really, really pumped up about.

Depending on when you are listening to this it’s fairly new because it just happened and before I jump into that though let me just say this, thank you so much for hanging out with me again today. If you want to ask one of your own questions, I should have said this before, just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that. You can record a voice mail, leave your first name and a brief question and I’ll go ahead and try to get it here on the show. I can answer it for you the best that I can. All right. Let me just dive right in and give you guys a little bit of a personal cool thing that just happened to me and it’s really exciting. For those of you that know I am a father of three children and they are spread out all over the map.

I have an eight year old daughter, I have an eighteen year old son which is crazy he just turned eighteen and then I have a twenty year old daughter who’s also going to be twenty one and my wife and I have been married for twenty two years. I got married young, I was twenty one and guess what, I went to a Yankee game the other day and my daughter’s boyfriend proposed to her. Now, we knew this was going to happen, we were helping him along as far as how to set it up and my wife helped him pick out a ring and all that stuff so it was really cool. It was really exciting and a beautiful sunny day and the Yankees won so all of you Boston fans out there or anyone that’s a non-Yankee fan please don’t send me the hate mail. We had a great day, they won four to three and it was just a beautiful day and I’m really excited for my daughter and I was about her age when I got engaged so it’s weird in a sense because I don’t feel as though I should have a daughter that’s twenty years old going to be twenty one and an eighteen year old son, I just don’t.

I still feel like I’m in high school and you guys may also feel like that around my age around your forties or even in your fifties but I just wanted to share that with you guys. I’m really excited for them and I’m excited for the next chapter of our lives and again this is why I do what I do because I want to be able to share with my family. I want to be able to be at these events, I want to be present, I want to be with them and depending on what your Y is in business or in life pushes you for business I guess is what I should have said it really does depend on the individual. For me my Y is my family and the freedom that the money from a business provides and then also being able to help people within a business that you are creating. Right. If you are creating an Amazon business you can still do that, you don’t have to be a podcaster or this person that’s a public figure.

[00:03:19] SV: You can do it by creating great products that serve a market and I think that’s really important to understand because if you can do that it feels really, really good that you are doing something that you believe in and that you are also making money at. Then from there money can also help you live the life that you want to live. Alright so I’m going to stop rumbling on that, you guys can tell I’m a little excited today and I haven’t had that much coffee but I did want to share with you two little victories. I say little because they start out little and they grow from here but these are two victories that were posted inside of the TAS Facebook group. I want to share them with you real quick, real, real quick just to give a couple of shout outs because I think that it’s really cool that they shared this in the Facebook group.

This one here goes out to Christopher Pratt Hale, Christopher congratulations. He posted this here. He says, “Posted earlier that my product went live today and already an organic sale, 35.99 so thirty $35.99 is his price point and he sold one.” Congratulations on that Christopher really happy for you. Then the other one that I want to share with you is Ed Davidson. Ed congratulations this is what he wrote, “My private label item in FBA is starting to take off thank you Scott Voelker,” and some people went in there and commented and said, “Way to go” and all that so Ed congratulations I’m really happy for you.  Again I want everyone to understand that we have to start small and then we have to grow and as you are growing you are going to have bumps and you are going to have things that come up, different obstacles that you are going to have to face but you have to get started.

These right here are representing people that have just got started. All right. Now they started at this phase but they had to work up to get to this point. Right. In the beginning we’ve got to start just by finding a product or finding a market but then from there that next victory if you want to call it that is getting a sale, just one sale and then it proves that the model works and then you can scale from there. Just wanted to throw that out there. Congratulations to you two and anyone else that has posted in the Facebook group congratulations it does mean a lot for you to post it in there and then share it with people because a lot of people see that you know what, you’ve got to take action in order to get results, period. You’ve heard me say that time and time again. Alright guys so I’m done now I’m ready to start answering some questions so what do you say? Let’s go ahead and dive in to this week’s first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:05:41] John: Hey Scott this is John from St Augustine Florida the oldest city in United States and I have a question about PPC. I sell many products that all are related. They could use the same keywords basically you could think of them as different SKUs not necessarily different variations because they are different products but they are the same. They are the same object but different variations but they would be in theory like different companies like sort of a variety of garlic presses but from different places. That sort of thing. What I’m trying to do at PPC is dominate all the slots for a given keyword search so right now when I search for it, if I search for garlic press for example I have the top two and I’ve also got the right side top square so that’s really good. But what I really want is all of them so I want the top two I want the right top square and then I want the two below that as well.

What I’m trying to figure out is how do I do that? Do I need more campaigns or more ad groups within campaigns? For example if I want all five slots if I had let’s say eight campaigns using the same search terms and the bids set very high, would I then be able to dominate and get all five of these slots or is there another way that I need to structure it? My main concern surrounds in how to structure this in terms of campaigns versus ad groups. Do I do a campaign for each? Then also within the campaigns you can have multiple ads which then can feature those products which I assume are being rotated within its given slot. For example if rather than having on a campaign multiple ads if instead I just had one ad but multiple campaigns would I then be able to take up more slots assuming that I’ve bid plenty high such that I can take off the competition?

That’s my question, it’s a little bit different than the standard private label where people have one or two products. I’ve got many and so what I want to do is get the most exposure for all my products with generic search terms and hopefully that helps you. Again I know you like the name in there my name is John from St Augustine Florida. Thank you and by the way your information is excellent you are so generous thank you for everything you do.

[00:08:18] SV: Hey John thank you so much for the question man I really do appreciate it and this is a question I have not been asked and it’s something that I really haven’t even used myself but I do like this idea. Really what John is talking about, anyone that’s brand new or may not be here yet, but he’s really trying to dominate that page with all of the ads that are displayed on that page. You want position top and then you want the position on the side and you want the position in the middle and maybe on the bottom. Now Amazon is always rotating these anyway so one day you may see that your page for your keyword that is, is starting to show up on the top and they have top ads. For some days they may not have top ads because they are always split testing as well so I don’t think there’s a real clear way to say that you are going to be able to dominate all those positions.

It’s a great idea, a great thought. What I would probably say would be your best chance of doing this is to create those separate campaigns, not necessarily ad groups in a sense. I would do separate campaigns personally and then I would designate a budget for those for that SKU and then I would start to bid on all of those keywords. Here is the thing though, you are going to be competing against yourself and you know what, in some cases it’s okay because you are only going to really pay as if someone clicks on it. If your impression is there all the time your ad is there because that’s your impression, you may have two of those ad spots that come up and you are only going to get charged if someone clicks on one of them.

You have a better chance and I see what you are doing here, you have a better chance of someone clicking because if you take up the first spot and the side spot, or the top spot side spot and bottom spot even maybe middle spot well there is a pretty good chance that you are going to be able to dominate that keyword. But then again we want to make sure that our conversions are doing well because we can show up and that’s great but if we get clicks and we don’t get sales and that can hurt our listing as well. You’ve got to be careful that’s a little bit of a balancing act. I would play around with like your three top products and then I would go ahead and create those separate campaigns, use the same keyword list if that’s what you want.

If you want to go after those keywords that are your primary gold keywords in a sense or your really solid keywords and then you are going to want to bid on those. I’m not really sure that you are going to be able to say, “Okay well I’m going to bid higher on this one because I want this one to display higher,” that’s getting a little technical and I’m not really sure if that’s even possible. It’s worth testing but I think right now what you are saying is you just want your products to show up on that page and that’s what I think that you are doing. If that’s the case and if that is what you are doing then I would recommend exactly that.

[00:11:07] SV: Create three different campaigns let’s say its three products that you want to rank on that same page. Then you would create three different ads, three different campaigns with three lists of keywords that are identical inside of those and then you are going to start bidding against each other really and then what’s going to happen is you are going to start displaying on different parts of that page. I would want to test this, I would test… its going to take some time it’s not going to happen overnight. The other thing you have to consider here too is if you are not converting but you are willing to spend more sometimes the one that’s converting but isn’t spending will actually rank better. That’s another part of the equation that you might not have control over.

I would test it, I would take those three budgets, I would bid higher so this way here I can see if it’s even possible to get all three of them to show up on the same page and I’d give that a day and see what happens but that’s really what you are going after. That’s what I think I took away from your question, that’s what I would try. I have not personally tried that so I can’t really say personal experience here but I can say logically that’s what I would think. I would think that you are going to have to create three different ad units or ad groups and then you are going to have to bid on those keywords on each one okay? It’s the same thing as this guys, everyone that’s listening, is if you want to take up more real estate and you have three different products you want to rank those three products organically.

If you can take up three spots on page one organically, well then you’ve got three times the chance or two times, no three times the chance that is. You’d have three more chances right, you have got three chances. Actually if you had one listing you’d have two extra chances, I don’t know what I’m trying to say here you guys get what I’m saying. If you show up once you get one chance, if you show up three times you get three chances. That’s what I’m trying to say here. I got confused there for a second. What you want to do though and the same thing is what you are saying here John is you want to be able to take up three spots of the pay per click somewhere on that page if possible and that may be possible and it may not be possible.

I’m not sure but that’s what I would do in order to take up more real estate. All right. Hopefully that’s helped, I would say anyone that’s wanting to know more about pay per click I did an episode with Chris Sheiffer and that was episode 119 so if you go to theamazingseller.com/119 you can listen to that and that’s all of the new features that they’ve put into Amazon pay per click which is basically being able to do your broad match, you are able to do your phrase match, you are able to do your exact match and then also negative keywords. All of that will go in there and then also a basic plan to get started but what we are talking about here this is a little bit more advanced.

We are trying to then dominate the page by creating more ads for these other products so this way you can show up so that’s really what we are trying to do here. Hopefully that made some type of sense I hope it did and let me know how that works also John I’d really like some info back on that just to see what you did and what the results were. That would be cool to give a little bit of an update. Let’s go ahead and jump to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:14:16] Ken: Hey Scott, this is Ken from Texas I wanted to thank you for all that you do on the podcast and everything so it’s so much great information. My question involves colors, if I have a product that can be in different colors like a coffee mug and I want to do a coffee mug in black and then I want to do a coffee mug in yellow, in green, in pink such and such how would you go about choosing what colors to offer? I can’t offer all the colors because that would be too much inventory at this point. I just want to offer like two or three colors so I’m trying to decide which ones to choose. Any advice on that? Thanks a lot.

[00:14:57] SV: Hey Ken. Thank you so much for the question and this is a good question too. I’ve answered it before but I’m going to answer it again right now because it does come up quite often. If it doesn’t come up in your mind it should because a lot of people will say I think that I want to launch this product in five different colors. It would be just kind of cool to offer five different colors, I get five different SKUs, I have five different variations, that’s really cool, right. The problem is as you may find and you will find that you are going to have dominant colors that people are buying within this product. One way that you can kind of look and see from other people that are already selling is to do a keyword search for that product. Let’s just say the garlic press again, right. Let’s say again that we type in stainless steel garlic press.

Let’s say for example we see that the results that come up and the one that we’re looking at that we’re going to compete with or the three or whatever and we see that there’s a red one that’s coming up all the time. There’s this red one that’s coming up. Now, I click on that red one and inside they have five different colors that they offer. They offer yellow, blue, silver, black, whatever. If that red one is showing up that’s usually the one that’s selling the most because Amazon wants to put the one that’s selling the most on the front end. They want you to see what people are already buying because it’s already been proven to sell. All right. That’s what you’d want to do. You could also in Jungle Scout, it will also show you the variations of the sales that how it’s being broken down.

Now again, Jungle Scout is a tool it does some really cool stuff in the back end. It kind of does projections and it does history and it rolls all that all up into their little algorithm and their data points. It’s pretty close but you can get an idea. You’re going usually see one or two colors is going to dominate then the rest are just extras that could pick up some sales. I’m not saying that you would not want to pick up these sales because you would because you’ve already done all the hard work. You’ve done all the hard work of finding the supplier, getting the product made, manufactured, you have it shipped, you have your listing created, you have all that stuff. When you add a color to the variation or a variation into the mix it makes it a lot easier now because you are giving more choices which is great and now you can cast that web a little bit or that net  a little bit wider because now you’re offering more choices

Then someone that didn’t want the black and they are like I really want a red one, well now they have the choice to get a red one. All right. Now you picked up that sale that you might have lost. Right. In the beginning we want to cut down the expense and we want also cut down on the risk. Right. I wouldn’t guess, I would go and look and see what is already selling and then I would take one or two of those colors and start there. I know a lot of people that started with black because that was like the dominating variation or whatever. Then from there they seen that there’s other colors and they would add the next most popular color and then the next most popular color and then just keep building it out that way.

[00:17:52] SV: That’s how I would do it. The other thing that you can do is if you are going after a market in particular and you have access to a  Facebook page or a fan page or maybe a group or any of that stuff, you might want ask people, “Hey, I’m getting ready to create this new garlic press. What is the best color that I should have this thing made?” You could survey them. You could survey that audience or maybe you already have an email list you started building this market, you could survey them. “Hey, I’m thinking about this. What are your favorite colors, what is the color that you’d want to see it in” and people will tell you and then that would be a good indicator. That’s another way that you can do it, it’s kind of survey that audience or that market and that really can give you a lot of insight on that

You can also do other things. What would you like to see in a garlic press? What type of handle? Then you’ll get feedback and then you can make that product better but again I’m going off a little bit off course there. Really we’re talking about how to know what product color to launch with and really it goes back to the data and you really have to go back to the data. Don’t guess, know. And you can know by looking at the other people, the competition that are already selling and then from there basing your decision off that to get started. Hopefully that’s been helpful, that’s what I’d do and good luck to you as well. All right let’s go ahead and listen to one more question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:19:20] John: Hi Scott, this is John in Virginia. I just wanted to say that I found your podcast on iTunes and I absolutely love it… I just subscribed to it so thank you very much and keep up the outstanding work. I really appreciate it and I’m sure others do too. My question is about Amazon listings. First I just want to say that I’ve not sold anything on Amazon under my current brand, I hadn’t created my seller central account yet and I’m not selling on any other channels with this new brand at this time. But I do have one product that I sold on Amazon not related to the brand I’m getting ready to launch. I do have a little bit of experience selling on Amazon. I also do understand that Amazon’s going to ask… I’m going to have to get permission from them in order to open up a second account.

The brand that I’m wanting to launch it is trademarked with the USPTO. It took about 9 months to get that through the process but it’s complete now. I have about four products under that brand all with customized packaging and bundled accessories and each with it’s own UPC code that I’m wanting to launch and three of the four products are very, very similar. They have very different functions but the appearance is similar so my question is should I create… When getting ready to launch this, should I create a listing page that has a variation of those three products or it’s just one listing with all three products on the page or should I create product pages or product listings for each individual product that I own. The keywords for each of those three very similar products are going to be relatively similar. There’s going to be some variation on the keywords but as far as traffic is concerned going to these individual listings would be better to create one page with the variation of the three products or three individual product listings.

I appreciate your time and answering the questions again great work, very professional, I’m very impressed and jealous that others are getting the same benefit that I am and keep up the work. Good work. Thanks again. Talk to you soon. Bye.

[00:21:36] SV: Hey John down in Virginia. Thank you so much for the question and congratulations too by the way. By going out there and creating your own trademark and doing all of the really intricate stuff that a lot of us don’t do right out of the gate but you’ve had some experience like you said and also I think now other people that are listening can see that to do the trademark and to do all that stuff it does require time and an investment. Right. You’ve been around the game a little bit, you kind of know what you want to do here with this additional brand or this new brand and it’s really awesome that you did that and now you’re ready to launch. What I would say here in this… I can’t really say for sure. I got to be honest. It’s going to depend. If I depend on your listing are these going to be like things that I can say it relates but no I wouldn’t want that because it’s something that’s totally different that what I’m looking for.

It really depends on that, I guess. It’s like if I’m going to land on a listing, am I going to look at those and go, “Oh, I’ll take this one versus this one? Or am I specifically looking for something that has a certain size handle.” Let’s say. Like if it was like I need this thing is or this handle is going to be thirteen inch because that’s what I’m looking for. Then the other one is a nineteen inch… Well yeah, you could have like the main garlic press let’s in an every size handle could be a variation or you could then list them separately on their own listing and then have more real estate in a sense. Even though you have a variation, you have more real estate in a sense it’s just not visible real estate. I want people to understand that. When you have a listing, unless there are… To me a variation makes a lot of sense when you have colors or you have quantities. Right.

If you have something that’s like a ribbed garlic press and then a smooth handle garlic press I would put those on two separate listings personally. Okay. Now if I had a garlic press that had red, blue, yellow and silver well then yeah, I would put those as variations because it’s the exact same product just with a variation of it or you could do the size thing.  Now, again I just talked about the size depending on how much of a demand there is for those specific things. If I was going to buy a thirteen inch there is no way I was going to buy the other but it might make sense to do it’s own listing. In this case, let’s say that you had a garlic press, it was identical but it had an inch longer handle on each variation. One was an eight inch, one was a nine inch one was a ten inch one. That might make sense.

Without really knowing the product it’s hard to say exactly what I would do. For the most part I would say probably and it’s like you said they are similar but they are not the same. If that’s the case, then I would probably do independent listings. I would still create a variation underneath that listing just incase I wanted to add those other variations of the main product. Right. This way here it does allow you, it does allow you to have three different pieces of real estate out there that could take three different listings spots. We just talked about having a product that can rank on the first three spots or the first ten spots somewhere in the first ten spots. That’s going to be really, really huge because now you’re taking three spots on that same page.

[00:25:05] SV: Just like we were talking before about doing that with pay per click. It’s the same idea but you’re just doing that using pay per click. It’s not that easy to do that we can say that we can do that for sure but if we know that we can rank those three different products on the same keyword on the same page our chances of getting sales on all those goes up. The benefits of doing a variation as you guys probably all know is know we can share the reviews and we can share the ranking. All right. There’s really not one set answer that I can give you unless I seen it and I said yeah, this is what I’d do. It doesn’t make sense that if I go there you’ve got one that’s round and one that’s square. That might not make sense for me. I would never buy a square one. Why would I even want that to be even brought up to me.

It’s a little tricky but I hope that this was helpful to where you can say to yourself yeah that makes total sense Scott because mine I wouldn’t want people to be confused when they got there, right. Again I think it makes a lot of sense if you can kind of envision that. You’ve got something that is the same thing like let’s say garlic press but it just in different colors or maybe it comes in a different width. Like maybe if I was going to go and have a garlic press it might be that the press area is an inch but for a commercial one it might be an inch and a half. That might make sense. We’re just talking a small variation of that exact product. Hopefully that makes sense. Good luck to you and congratulations on going through the work to get the trade mark and to get your product really ready to go to market and then from there having a plan to get it to market is also pretty important.

Really, really great job. The other thing is to remember this as well is that now if you had had three different listing you could also then piggy back off on each other so you can then promote the one listing inside of the other listing and vice versa. You can kind of piggy back back and forth which is pretty helpful too. There’s pros and cons to both but hopefully this is made it a little more clear and then you can make a decision moving forward. Congratulations and good luck to you as well keep me posted on that. All right guys

That is going to wrap up this session of Ask Scott. I want to thank you all for hanging out with me. I know you guys have other choices out there and for all of yous that are coming back and listening, I want to say thank you and if you guys could do me just one quick favor is share this. Share the podcast with people that you think would get value from it. Only people that would get value from it. I don’t you to just invite it to random people that you don’t think would get value. If you think this is valuable and you want to invite people please let people know about it and I would really truly appreciate that. Also if you guys want to connect with me on Periscope you can head over to Periscope.tv and search for @scottvoelker. If you want to head over to SnapChat and I’ve been hanging over there a little bit. You can hang out with me over there as well and that is … I can be found on there @scottvoelker1. That is my Snap Chat profile name. All right.

Then one last thing, anyone that’s brand new, first time listening or maybe you just started listening if you guys are brand new, you guys want to get caught up to speed really, really quickly I created a ten day free course for you to go through. It’s an email course with videos and it will walk you through exactly what you need start to finish to find a product, to source a product, to launch a product, and to promote a product, everything you need to in between is there for you and you can find that by visiting freeprivatelabelcourse.com again that’s freeprivatelabelcourse.com and you can find it there. Just register, you’ll get your first lesson immediately and then from there you’ll get one every day for the next ten days and it will give you everything you need to get started.

All right guys. That’s it. That’s going to wrap it up. Remember I’m here for you, I believe in you and I am rooting for you but you have to, you have to… Come on say it with me, say it loud, “Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]

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Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…we take someone’s question or their certain situation in business, a struggle, an obstacle that they’re facing and we try to help them here on the podcast. That’s what I want to do again here today and I’m really excited to have a good friend of mine come back on again.

His name is Chris Schieffer, you guys probably have heard me talk about him quite a bit. Him and I are good friends but we also share a lot of similar ideas as far as this business goes and e-commerce and all of that good stuff, so really, really excited if you couldn’t tell, that you’re here, I think this is going to be valuable for you. Now just to let you guys know we do have show notes and we have full transcripts now to these episodes. If you want to download the complete transcripts or go to the show notes and get all of that good stuff, head over to theamazingseller.com/197, that’s episode 197, so again, that’s theamazingseller.com/197.

You’ll get all the show notes and you’ll also get all of the transcripts whether you want to read them there or therefore download them, they are there for you any links we discussed will be there as well. Alright so I’m going to stop talking now. We’re going to go ahead and get into this hot seat. Chris and I had a great, great conversation here and just to let you guys know, we’re kind of in training here because as at the time that this is being aired, actually it’s not in training because we’re actually going to be doing it. This is going to air on May 2nd I believe and we’ll be doing a live event with real hot seats live in person on May 1st.

I guess we’re training now because we’re not doing it but we’re going to be doing it so if that makes sense. We are getting warmed up for the big day which is May 1st but you’re listening to this probably on May 2. Anyway you’re going to learn something from listening to this I’m sure and I’m really excited to share it with you, so here is the hot seat session I did with Chris Schafer.

[00:02:14] SV: Well hey Chris, what is going on my brother, how are you doing man?

[00:02:19] CS: Doing good man, sitting here starting my morning off right with a little conversation with Scotty V, doing a hot seat, looking forward to it man.

[00:02:27] SV: Yeah this is fun and actually it’s kind of crazy because we are going to be doing this live and depending on when people are listening to this, we’re getting close to where we’re going to be doing this for 10 people, actually hot seat sessions that is, and there’s going to be another 20 people attending sitting in on this and also hopefully adding some of their bits and pieces of experience but yeah I’m really, really excited about this live event. The TAS Breakthrough Live that is and so this is again is like our warm-up, getting our I guess our game on right?

[00:03:02] CS: Our training montage if you will.

[00:03:04] SV: Exactly, now you and I have done a few of these already and I have to say the response has been really, really good. People are really enjoying them, I think people like real life examples and also having us kind of brainstorm back and forth as if we were helping him one on one. This one here was from one of our students actually in the private label classroom. He actually reached out to us and he had some questions and he already had a product launch before he joined the class okay and what he said here and again I’m not go through the whole story and all that stuff but I just want to kind of get right to it.

The one thing that he said here, he didn’t record a voicemail for us but he did give us his issue and his struggles, kind of like what he is battling with right now. One of the big things is that he’s launched a product, it was doing okay and then he just started losing sales and now what he wants to know is, how do I re-launch that product, is there a way to re-launch a product to get it going again, is it worth it or should I just abandon that product altogether and start from scratch? That was kind of like his questions. The other thing that he wanted, was us to take a look at the product, the listing and maybe even just the market, give our opinions and maybe pull it up in Jungle Scout, see what the numbers look like. That’s what I want to do here for Daniel. Chris are you ready to dive in here? I know that you’ve kind of taken a look at some of his stuff that he’s already put out there, some of the numbers and stuff but are you ready to dig in here?

[00:04:40] CS: Yeah, let’s just jump right in.

[00:04:41] SV: All right, cool, so first off, let’s just go into the numbers okay, as they are right now like pulling up his main keyword and it was very obvious right away his main keyword, which perfectly done, as far as in his title and all that stuff. Knowing what the main keyword is we pulled it up in Jungle Scout and let me go ahead pull it up now so we can both look at that together once again.

First glance Chris, looking at the Jungle Scout numbers and again we can’t show you guys these numbers but we’re going to walk you through them because it’s audio obviously but Chris looking at the numbers in Jungle Scout, pulling them up today, what’s your thoughts?

[00:05:19] CS: There’s a couple of things, the first thing that jumps out is that average sales number, right. The volume in the market looks really, really good until you start to dig into it a little bit further and you realize that a lot of those products are actually different styles of the same product. Some of which seem to have a higher perceived value to begin with, does that make sense?

[00:05:39] SV:  Yeah, it totally does.

[00:05:42] CS: The next thing that I’m seeing here is that the price points are a little all over the place, you know that the top two listings number one and number two, $27.99, 57 bucks, that looks really good. The guy that’s selling $27, $28 is doing almost 4000 sales a month. That looks awesome until you realize that it’s a different style from what a lot of the other people that are selling in this market have.

[00:06:06] SV: Let’s just talk about that real quick though because when people, when they look at the first page and then they’re looking whether looking in Jungle Scout or not, when looking at the first page, you don’t see unless you hover over the product to see exactly what the product is, and I think it’s really important to understand that when you’re looking at a product, you want to be comparing apples to apples. You don’t want to say, “Oh the numbers look great and there’s a $27.99 price point,” but the one that you’re going to be really selling is really more like this one that might be $17.97.

Just want people to be in a really clear on that. When you are looking at the stuff, you might look at the top 16 results but there might only be four or five of those products that are what you’re going to be selling, they’re similar. Does that make sense Chris?

[00:06:46] CS: Yeah, a lot of times Scott what you and I say is, “Well if it serves the same function you probably want to count in those results,” right? In this case it is a very different style of product. There’s two different people who would buy that and this is one of those things where it’s kind of like a gut, that’s my gut reaction is there’s two different people who would buy this style. It’s not like a garlic press where one presses up and one presses down, it’s a completely different style, it’s a different material. It would appeal to a different kind of person. One would appeal to more like a higher-end taste and the other one would appeal to someone who just needs the thing to get it done and the style that we have here that he that he has two different variations of, appeals more to the people who just want to get the thing and do what it’s designed to do.

That’s kind of the gut feel when we look at this and again generally we say if it serves the same function, you’re probably good to go but when you’re looking at the different materials on this and the different makeup, it does make a difference in this case and that’s why it makes sense to at the very least hover over if not scroll through that first page of results and just see what the differences are in the products.

[00:08:05] SV: Yeah and I want to go now to okay so like if we’ve done that like we’ve figured out that maybe one is plastic and one is stainless steel, let’s just say that. Well, in this case let’s say that the first three results because that’s what I’m looking at or actually the first two results are that let’s say that they’re plastic and the next one is made of the better material in a sense but yet the plastic one’s selling better but there’s other components that which we can’t describe but just to get a little bit of a visual.

If we moved to position number three, it is basically the same product, right? It’s the same product so now let’s look at that. We’re number three they’re ranked number three for this keyword okay and they’re selling for $17.97, their sales rank in home and kitchen is 3,519 and the estimated monthly sales is 998. That’s about $17,934, they have 246 reviews and a four and a half star rating and it’s fulfilled by Amazon. Okay. Now that all sounds great on the surface but the other thing that you want to look at there is okay was that 998 part of a promotion that they ran, that’s when we would do, like that back searching we would want to look in Camel Camel Camel or in Keepa, I believe it’s Keepa right, isn’t that what it’s called now? Yeah Keepa and that’s built into Jungle Scout now.

If I’m looking at that, it looks like this data is being pulled in since January 16th so that could be a fresh listing. I would then want to go into Camel Camel Camel and then see if that product was selling longer than January 16th because I think that Camel Camel Camel definitely has a little bit longer history out there. Besides that I would look at that and I go, “Okay, that’s cool, 1,000 they are selling a month technically at 246 if all the numbers check out.” Let’s move on to position number four, that is very similar to the first and second, so it doesn’t compare to the one that I’m selling.

Move to position five, it’s the exact product that we’re selling okay, so now we look at that one that was $25.99, same category and they are selling 403 per month technically and 476 reviews. Now if I click on the rank on that inside of Jungle Scout I can see it’s back in January 16th. So Chris, do you see that? I’m also noticing that I think people just while doing this live here, on Keepa.com I’m noticing that, and I’ve noticed this myself before we even did this today Chris, is that a lot of their date is only going back to like January of this year, so I’m just wondering if that something has to be updated or if you go over to Camel Camel Camel you’ll get a different result which maybe we should do that just to verify that.

[00:10:42] CS: Well, I took a look at listing number three and it’s been selling since June of last year.

[00:10:47] SV: Okay so that’s huge. That is huge, so I don’t know if I’d necessarily even look at that. I mean it’s a quick good glance to see inside of Jungle Scout but then I would probably hop out and go over to Camel Camel Camel. So if that’s the case though with number three so that we can say okay this is a pretty seasonal listing right? That 998 is probably accurate, it’s probably close to being accurate 246 reviews not too many but let’s now look at his listing. He’s got 76 reviews okay 76-ish, something like that, but here’s the strange thing… Chris now when we talk quickly about what we noticed from the two different listings that he sent over to us to look at? Why don’t you talk about that?

[00:11:26] CS: There’s two things that immediately stuck out and he sent us both listings that he wanted us to look at which appeared to both be his products. The first thing that I noticed is one, it’s two different colors of the same product and we don’t have them set up as a variation listing. Now as I have heard Scott and I talk about parent-child listings, variation listings in the past, my general rule of thumb is there’s never a reason not to set it up that way. You can and I understand why you may want to take up two spots in the search results, does that make sense?

[00:12:05] SV: Yeah. I lost you Chris, you back?

[00:12:10] CS: Yeah, it said Scott Voelker went off-line.

[00:12:16] SV: I’m here. We are back, all right Chris. What are you saying now? You were saying it was about two listings, we were talking about variations, kind of dig back into that.

[00:12:24] CS: Yeah. If you if you heard Scott and I talk about variation listings in the past, my stance on this is there’s not really ever a reason not to set it up as a parent-child listing. I understand why some people may not do that because they’re trying to take up two spots on the search results page but in my experience, unless you’re going to actively promote those and do a lot of extra work to try to get that second spot, it’s not really worth it because you can drive all of that traffic to one listing, let the person pick the one that they want to buy and you actually see a higher conversion rate.

The other thing is, you get to combine those reviews right? It looks like one of these has like 76 and one of these only has 3. Maybe the one with three is actually a more popular color if you combine that with one at 76, you now up to 79 reviews, yes that difference of three doesn’t make a big difference for the first color but for the second color, it can make a huge difference, right?

That may actually end up being the one that sells more and he’s actually got that one priced higher which to me means either he thinks he’s going to sell more or it cost more. Either way you want to justify that with a higher number of reviews, does that make sense?

[00:13:35] SV: Yeah, it does and let’s talk about it really quickly, we won’t go off of that too much but as far as his numbers like right now we looked at his numbers pulling up in Jungle Scout and what did we figure he’s selling per day approximately or per month?

[00:13:48] CS: Just under eight a day between the two listings.

[00:13:52] SV: Okay so about eight a day. Now we know that this is a pretty competitive space, from where he’s in and the depth right now that the demand and the depth and all that will change because it could be I think a fourth-quarter product as well, but I think it could sell pretty well throughout the year. Again, we’re looking at his situation and kind of what he’s up against.

We move down the list a little bit further and we can see there’s other people again $19.99 with 860 reviews, selling 855 a month. We’ve got another one here that’s different, then we go to position eight $13.91, 612 sales, 127 reviews, so clearly it looks like they’re new and they’re trying to get sales organically now, which they’ve gotten to page one, they are in a price target organic sales and their price to sell.

I’m not sure how they can make a lot of money at $13.91 for this particular product but like again, it might be a strategy that they’re trying to do to gain position and it’s worked whatever they’ve done because they’re page one. Again you’re battling with people that are doing the same thing right now to try to get page one because clearly they only have 127 reviews and then if we go down a little bit further, we have someone in that ninth position, same idea $14.99, very similar product, 509 sales at 350 reviews. Again seems like probably doing a promotion of some kind and trying to gain it by pricing lower than anyone else, here’s kind of like the race to the bottom right?

This is what can happen. The next one position number 10 very similar product $23.99, they’re selling 903 at 324 reviews. That’s kind of interesting, I’m not sure if they’re a bigger brand or not, I don’t think they are but they’re definitely selling more and they’re priced higher, so maybe people think that it’s a better product right? Once you get on page one and you price it higher, that might work, something to test but you got to get to page one first, right? Then we can go to the next one, position 11, very similar product $24.99, selling 862 with only 75 reviews.

That to me is a standout, It’s probably a brand-new product that’s being promoted and again we can do some research going back to see how long they’ve been selling. If I go to Keepa right now, February 1st so yah, fairly new. Again I can just keep going down the list we go around at position number 13, same product $21.90, 564 sales, 586 reviews. 14 position is again a private-labeler, $14.99, 568 sales, 340 reviews. Let’s see, one more let’s go to position 15 that’s different, position 16 the same product $10.99, 573 sales at 137 reviews. With that all being said Chris what’s your thoughts on what we just went over?

[00:16:46] CS: Looking at this, there clearly is enough room in the market for people of all different price points. One of the initial things that you and I had kind of talked about was man a lot of these guys have a low price point but going through this, there are a couple who are selling stuff, it’s a very similar or the same product at a higher price point. The thing is, at this point he’s not review competitive, right? He’s got 79 reviews, the guys who are selling at that higher price point have 300, 400, 500 reviews, that’s kind of something that sticks out to me.

The other thing that I’m noticing as we’re scrolling through this is he’s not showing up for PPC, I don’t know if he is not running it or if his bids aren’t where they need to be or what’s going on there. The two things that really stick out to me are it does look like there’s a lot of depth in this market. It just kind of scrolling through here. Even when you discount that other quality, that other kind of product. I wouldn’t necessarily cast this one aside but I would do probably a more constructive re-launch if that makes sense and maybe do another giveaway to try to get to 200 or 300 reviews and start aggressively running PPC, does that make sense?

[00:17:57] SV: Yeah it makes total sense and let’s kind of talk about that a little bit because I want to give him some action steps as well and anyone else that’s listening that might be in a similar situation and actually something right now that I’m currently doing myself, which we talked about and it’s kind of similar because I had a product that was not as competitive in the very beginning days. His sense become kind of the garlic press of my market and now because of that it’s really hard to differentiate so I’ve created a variation off of that with the less of one item to hopefully get people in on price but then see the better value as they come in.

I think with what you’re saying too is, if someone searching for a certain color and you have that variation underneath that one listing then that’s going to help you because it’s going to build out that particular listing as far as getting it more rooted. When you put all that energy into a listing, it’s going to be easier to put all in the one versus to scatter out amongst two unless they need to be separated. In this case, we’re just talking like color, so in this case and again talking about action steps and what I’m even currently doing is, I would say to kind of come up with a launch plan and then go ahead and aggressively turn on Pay Per Click and really only target those handful of sales.

Right now, if you’ve been selling for a good amount of time, even three months, you’re going to have the data, right? Take the data from your Pay Per Click and then look at the ones that have converted, only the ones that have converted to sales, bring them out, pull them out of those campaigns, put them into one campaign and aggressively go after those keywords. Put them in a phrase, don’t put them in an exact. I don’t think I would do that know Chris made you have other thoughts on that, but I’d put them in a phrase at this point and then from there I would start aggressively sending traffic to those keywords because that’s going to help me rank. Especially for this main keyword. That’s the one that you really want to again spend some money, you might break even, you might lose a little bit of money, but if we can get to page one then we know we’re going to be able to get the sales in the future.

Then from there as the reviews build, that’s why the promotion is really in place and the promotion is necessarily just to get page one, it’s really to get the reviews, so when you get to page one you’re going to convert higher. Does that make sense Chris?

[00:20:21] CS: It does and something that I’m noticing, one of his products is on the second page for his main keyword. Granted he’s at the bottom of the second page right? But the thing that I noticed when I found this listing is that it really does stand out because everybody and he did something that we kind of glossed over, he did differentiate, even though it’s the same product that a lot of these other people are selling he did differentiate it from something that everyone else is doing. Everybody else just went with the stock manufacturer version. He did do some things to make it look at least a little bit higher-end and so if he can get onto that first page with that it’s going to make a difference.

[00:21:01] SV: Then we should probably think about putting a lot of energy to push that to page one which would probably be Pay Per Click.

I would say the best way in and especially now we’re talking about you people saying that the Amazon’s cracking down on super URLs to get yourself up to page one, even if you don’t do something like that which I think right now, it’s a judgment call. If you want to do it fine, just be careful and there could be some consequences but the safe way of doing it is to run Pay Per Click because if you get sales through that keyword, through Pay Per Click, it’s going to help you get on page one and once you do that promo that is going to help your overall BSR and then that will also trigger some things inside of the algorithm. What do you think Chris?

[00:21:47] CS: I think that’s spot on and I think what he needs to do is what you just kind of walked him through which is take a look at that search terms report, see it if you’ve been running PPC, if you haven’t please, please, please, please turn on PPC.

[00:21:59] SV: Start that, start that.

[00:22:02] CS: Customer search terms report is one of the most powerful things you can have in terms of Amazon. They don’t show us a lot of analytics, they don’t show us what organic keywords are contributing sales to our listings but they do show us what paid terms drive traffic and drive sales. If we can look in that report and find out the exact words that people are using to drive traffic to our listings and to drive sales to our listings then we can use that maybe we go in and modify the title of the listing, maybe we go in and modify our keywords in the back end and that’s another thing. If he set this up a couple months ago, he may not have had the expanded search terms section in the backend of his listing when he did that and I’m noticing a lot of sellers have still not taken advantage of that expanded keyword section. If you haven’t taken advantage of that, fill that out completely.

[00:22:53] SV: Even if you don’t think that you’re doing it perfectly, just fill it. Even if you-

[00:22:59] CS: Even if it’s filled with was and the, and some of those kind of things at this point,

[00:23:03] SV: Exactly.

[00:23:03] CS: Fill it out and then come back and go, “Okay, I have 100 characters worth of filler words, let’s find 100 characters worth of other words that actually make more sense.”

[00:23:12] SV: Yeah and I mean a simple way, while we’re talking about that, a simple way to do that and it’s something that I’m actually refining right now, is just do exactly what you would do if you’re going to run in all those keywords for your Pay Per Click campaign, do a merchant word search, do a Google planner search and use maybe their ASINs, do a keyword scrape inside of, what is it simple, keywordinspector.com, use that one, just use any different research tool you can just get variations of ideas off of your main keyword.

Then from there just drop them in there. I’ve talked to a few people Chris that have been saying that they have been seeing a difference when you have those keywords make sense rather than just dropping them in there randomly but my thing is, it can take hours if not days to really think about how to position them and structure them in such a way. I know you and I both said that we believe that Amazon will just pick the ones that make them make sense but someone that I recently talked to said he tested and he’s seen a difference especially in the first sentence of that or in the first line of those keyword search terms. That it was making a difference but when he had them more exact in the backend.

[00:24:29] CS: If you put garlic and press next to each other…

[00:24:31] SV: Yeah, then it would give a little bit more weight than if you had garlic and had four other words and then you had press at the end of that. I think he was saying something like, the most keywords that he found that he could do that with was two in between, so it would be garlic and then maybe bag, stainless and then press right? Then you’d still come up for garlic press, not saying you won’t come up it’s just he found that it for his anyway that it did make a difference. It’s something to experiment with. When that’s being said that makes us doing this work say, “Oh my gosh, I got to sit here and think about how to position all of these, so they make sense and they sound what are the best ones?”

Me personally, don’t worry about that right up front, just get related, relevant keywords in there. This way here you have a greater chance of being pulled up for different terms.

[00:25:25] CS:  Well and filling that out is critical and I tossed out the strategy that I’ve started using for that at least upfront and I actually am going back and cleaning that up a little bit when I remove those filler words just because it helps me organize my thoughts so I may be doing what you just described without thinking about it.

But my strategy is I’m going in and scraping the three people who if I could take out and if I can take their spot I would make my product. The same thing that I would be doing when I run the initial PPC campaign where I’m running against the competitors. I’m going in and I’m grabbing those two or three ASINs, I’m running them through a keyword inspector and I’m taking all three of those lists and then running them through a de-duplication tool, the one at SEO Book and I’m finding that actually, for most products it takes three or four full lists of keywords to reach that character that-

[00:26:19] SV: It does, it does, it’s a lot.

[00:26:22] CS: You don’t realize how huge that limit is until you actually try to fill it out compared to what was it like 500 or something before and it’s now it’s 5000. When you’re removing duplicates you’re not going to have garlic in there 100 times, garlic’s only going to show up once, will have a different ways to talk about a garlic press? Turns out there’s a whole bunch and so that’s kind of the initial strategy is just dump it and try to fill the 5000 characters with those competitor keywords and then come back and clean it up and so that would be the very next thing that I would do if I was him.

First, consolidate the listings, second set up PPC or refine your PPC through the customer search terms report, third kind of do a relaunch promo to try to get yourself review competitive and Scott on that you know correctly if you feel differently I would say he needs to get probably at least another 75 to 100 if not more reviews to be really competitive with some of the people on the first page. Some of those guys are 127 which if he got 50 or 100 more he definitely be competitive with a lot of those are 250, 300. If he gets that 100 than he should at least be somewhat close to them because he’d be at 180 give or take a which would put him more in line with that.

Then after you set up that promo make sure you filled out all 5000 characters of the expanded search terms in your backend and that should move you at least a little bit. Scott, I’ve run some numbers recently and it looks like filling those out on listings that didn’t have those filled out has increased sales about 8 to 10% on average.

[00:28:07] SV: It’s the same, yeah.

[00:28:09] CS: I can’t attribute that to anything else because I haven’t changed anything else on those listings and it’s across multiple products, across multiple categories. You just end up ranking for more stuff and you’d be shocked at some of the things that people type in to get to your product even if they make no sense to you. It’s something somebody’s searching for and if I can get one sale from that a month, I’m going put it  back there and see if I can rank for it.

[00:28:31] SV:  Yeah. If you think it’s complicated and you can’t do it just put something in there that’s related. That could be just be again if you want to use the keyword inspector tool and you just want to use merchant words or use Google planner, just take your competitor’s URL put it into keyword planner and have it spit out related keywords and then just go off of that. It’s better than nothing and you’ve got a better chance of ranking so why not use that space. I would not abandon this product because that was the other question he was like, “What do I do? Do I just give up on this thing?” No, I would not give up on it, I would still get behind it and try to push it but I would also be looking for other products around this market that I could roll out.

I would definitely be looking at that, I’ve talked about this recently kind of like building out your pipeline of products, you should always have those anyway. The other thought that comes to mind real quick and this is just a random thought because I can guarantee almost guaranteed that competitors in this space, in any market out there aren’t really doing this but if you had a little bit of… I don’t want to say, aggressive but you went out there, you steadily did it, even if you didn’t want to do it yourself. If you could contact bloggers out there, legitimate bloggers okay, that were in your space and then try to connect with them and give them like one to test and to try like legitimately and then from there if they love it there going to write about it and they’re going to put it on their blog and now you got there audience that’s going to see your particular widget.

I think that’s a strategy. It‘s a slower strategy but if you can get on someone’s blog that gets pretty good traffic you are going to start getting people to click over to your listing on Amazon organically. Again that’s something that you can’t  really plan that as far as like, “Okay this is how many sales I’m going to get from doing this,” but it’s a long term almost like building back links to an authority website, it’s a slow steady thing, but if you do that over time, you can have a nice steady stream of traffic coming to your listing off of Amazon and then that’s going to obviously take you and put you up above your competitors. Chris what your thoughts on that?

[00:30:45] CS: I love that strategy, the only thing that I’d probably say I probably wouldn’t do that for my Amazon products because I can’t track it so I’ve no idea what the ROI of that is, I have no idea if one, I’m helping that blogger, obviously they’re going to use an Amazon affiliate link and drive some traffic but in that type of relationship, I would want to know just as a business owner, I would want to know if one that’s making me money and two if that’s making them money because if it is and I have other products then I can easily go to them and say, “ Hey write about this one, hey write about this one.” They’re going to want to do it because it benefits their audience and it  benefits them financially, I mean it sounds bad but it helps them out and it’s going to help their audience and they know that.

That’s probably something I personally would save to drive traffic to my own site because then I get both values out there. I get the values-

[00:31:36] SV: Basically Shopify type site you can drive them to something like that an e-commerce story to get your own authority blogger that has your own product on it with an e-commerce store.

[00:31:45] CS: Absolutely it’s a fantastic strategy and it works really, really, really, really well. The only downside to that is if you’re driving traffic to the Amazon listing you have no idea how those people convert. Do they convert better? Do they convert worse? All of those kinds of things. Then the other thing is if they don’t convert for you and they’re dragging your conversion rate down that may impact your overall search rank on Amazon and that’s just something I haven’t personally done enough testing on to see if conversion rate plays a role in and how well you rank on Amazon.

Theoretically, it would because they want to show the person who’s got the highest likelihood of selling whenever somebody searches for something. I would be careful with that it’s a great strategy and it can drive a ton of traffic. If you have a market that you know like his market, there’s a ton of people who would like his product is worth at least testing and if it correlates to a rise in sales then you keep doing it.

[00:32:40] SV: The other thing I guess you could do, I mean again brainstorming outside here that’s what I love doing these is because the kind of think like what else could you do. We’ve already talked about what we would do inside of Amazon but the other thing you can do to is if you did want to give them to a popular blogger or someone in your space or a Facebook fan page, someone that’s in your market that’s blogging or talking about this is you could even then offer to give their audience a discount and then you can collect emails from those people after you drive them to a page.

Now you can decide, “Okay, I’m going to drive them,” because you got them I can drive into my own site or I can drive them to Amazon if you wanted to do a promotion in a sense in the future, so would be a long-term thing were you going to keep driving traffic there but you’re in control of that traffic.

[00:33:26] CS: That’s not a bad strategy either and that’s also a way to make it somewhat trackable, right? You’re at least going to know how many people redeemed that promo code. That would give you an idea of your total ROI. It still bugs me and it’s because just because of the way the Amazon set up they’re never going to give you those traffic numbers, and they’re never going to give you that full conversion rate you know we do have access to the conversion rate of the overall listing but I can’t say if they come from this, they convert at this rate because the only way that I can track that is with that promo code but if you do it that way you’re getting an email and you get to track that a little bit, that’s not a bad idea.

[00:34:06] SV: Exactly, exactly. No I love it, I think we’ve given some good advice here as far as what we would do in this situation. I don’t think it’s a product that I would abandon. Again especially if he’s on page two already for one of those listings, I would do exactly what we said that would be the strategy moving forward. I have to say the product looks great, the pictures look great, the listing looks great so you got a good piece of real estate there that I think that you could get a little bit of a higher price like people are charging $21, $23. You can get that, I really do on with a little bit of effort.

The last thing I would say to is to make sure, if you don’t and we didn’t know this because we don’t have you on here live but make sure that you have some type of follow-up sequence in place too because even if you’re only getting eight sales a day, 10 sales a day, those are people that can go through that sequence to help you continually grow your reviews over time. You may want to switch up and get a little bit more aggressive with the reviews instead of doing the feedback to review thing, maybe go after the reviews right now just to kind of keep bumping that up quicker than going feedback to review.

That’s the other thing I would say is make sure you have something in place whether it’s a sales backer, whatever you have or that you’re using, hopefully you’re using something because even if you’re running a promotion, you want that to allow them to be followed up with and then that way you can increase your reviews on that as well.  Chris is there anything you want to end with here before we wrap up this hot seat?

[00:35:42] CS: I think the last thing I just want to stress is man, if you really are doing the sales numbers that it looks like you’re doing, if you are doing eight sales a day, if you’re not running a promo while we’re looking at this, eight sales a day is not a failure.

Yeah, you have two different variations to get there but it’s still eight sales a day, that’s pretty good. If you do a couple other things that we that we talked about you can probably double that if not more. It is going to take some pushing, it is going to take some effort and the key ingredient in this and something that we often miss because we hear stories like [Bill’s and Rich Kibell] who just destroy it right out of the gate, is that the key ingredient for 90% of this is time.

[00:36:24] SV: Yeah, time.

[00:36:24] CS: Right? Three months, six months and Scott, I know I’ve said this on the podcast before, Amazon is not like a straight up, straight down kind of thing. It spikes and plateaus. You’ll be at eight for three months and then you’ll jump to 16 with no rhyme or reason other than you hit the next spot up on the page or whatever and it’s like a day to day switch and then you’ll be at 16 for two months and then you’ll be at 20. It doesn’t go 16, then the next week 17, the next week 18. Most of the time it goes 1, 5, 30.

[00:37:09] SV: You have to figure that over time. You have to figure that stuff out on at least on 7 day or a 30 day rolling average. You can’t base it off a day so yeah. Totally agree with that and even when you’re doing a test of any kind, like if you go and change all those keywords don’t expect that tomorrow you’re going to start ranking. It’s going to take time for it to get into the system, it’s going to take time for them to index, it’s going to take time and it’s okay. You do want to see what it is before you and then give it … Maybe then look at how many not just the day but how many visits did you have that you’re basing this off of so you can do it like, “Okay we had 1000 from this point to this point, now let’s go and wait till we get to another 1,000 after we’ve made that change and let’s see what the numbers look like there. Did it increase or did it decrease it?” That’s kind of how you’re going to go in and do the split test.

This was great, this was really, really good. I think we nailed to as far as on time we want these to be about 30 minutes because that’s about the time… That is the time that they’re going to be at this live event.

If you guys are coming to the live event, there’s got to be 30 of you and your listening can’t wait, this is going to be awesome and we’re really excited to get to hang out with you guys. If you’re not coming because you weren’t able to grab a ticket, we are going to be doing more of these in the future we just don’t know when but if you did want to be notified when we do them, head over to theamazingseller.com/live and you’ll get updated when we do decide to another one in another area. We’re going to try to make this event in different area or allow it to be in different areas and will be keeping everyone up to date on that as well. Chris, I think this is going to wrap it up, any last little bits of advice you want to give me and let’s give you 30 seconds.

[00:39:05] CS: Consistency, consistency, consistency. I think the ingredient of time is the thing that we really need to pay attention to here. Do the things that we outlined, make sure you are checking that customer search term report, you guys aren’t running PPC I’d love to know why because I have yet to find a product where we can at least break even on it and it at the very least even if you’re lose a little bit of money, it gives you the data that you need to move the listing forward. Take what we talked about today apply to your listing if you’re in the situation and then let us know what happens.

[00:39:38] SV: Now that’s great and you did it man, you did it in 30 seconds. What a guy, you did awesome

[00:39:44] CS: There’s a first time for everything.

[00:39:45] SV: There is. All right so that is going to wrap this up. I want to remind you guys to if you wanted to hang out with Chris and I, we do a live workshop. You can register for that we walk you through for free, we walk you through the five phases for launching a product, from picking the product, sourcing the product, doing a pre-launch, a launch and doing a promotion. We run through all that, we answer live Q&A just like this in a way and you can register for free by heading over to theamazing seller.com/workshop. Once again that’s theamazing seller.com/workshop.

Chris this has been awesome, let’s wrap it up like we usually do on the podcast. I want everyone to remember that I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, say it with me, say it loud, Chris you say it too on the count of three, one, two, three, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day guys and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

Test, test, test, test, give me a test Chris.

[00:40:54] CS: Test, test, test, test, test,

[00:40:56] SV: Perfect, the levels are perfect, perfect, are we ready?

[00:41:01] CS: We are there’s a first time for everything, so let’s do it when we got good levels.

[END]
Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…currently from Amazon that they were withholding that I didn’t even know about. Okay, now you going to also hear how at the time that I was doing the interview with him, which was a couple weeks ago now doing this intro two weeks after I did the interview, that’s about how far usually I’m out with my interviews, but at that time that I was recording it and I was telling him this live on that interview that I had $605 that was credited back to my account.

Well currently, since that time that that interview was done and then now, it’s $958.05. Every single day it goes up just a little bit and I am not going to go into exactly how this is happening but just understand that Amazon has money from us as sellers that’s kind of held in, kind of like an Escrow or like a holding tank in a sense and until we ask for it back, we don’t get it back. All right, so he’s going to share exactly how he figured this out, also how I got introduced to it and how I’m using it now, super easy, you only pay if you get money back and I’ll let him explain everything it’s really awesome. I’m loving it. It’s kind like an autopilot type thing.

His name is Jacob Heinz, again, he is an Amazon seller and he also figured this thing out and now created a software tool which he’s going to share with you if you want to use it. Now you can do this manually and he’s going to explain exactly how you can do it manually and it won’t cost you anything at all. All right, so really, really awesome interview, I’m really excited to share this with you. It’s really awesome to be able to get money back that you didn’t know it was there like free money right coming back to you.

All right guys I’m going to stop talking now so that you guys can listen to this awesome, amazing interview I did with Jacob Heinz so enjoy and get ready to be blown away.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:02:12] SV: Hey Jacob thank you so much for hanging out with the TAS community how is it going man?

[00:02:18]JH: It’s going great, I appreciate you inviting us on.

[00:02:20] SV: Yeah, I’m excited to have you on and just to let people know a little bit more about what we’re going to be talking about. I discovered you… I think a couple of listeners might have given me a link to your software that actually does a recovery and kind of like the inventory salvager and all that stuff which we’ll talk about, but really what we’re talking about is and this is what really intrigued me was being able to recover money back from Amazon that you not necessarily would’ve known you had coming back to you.

[00:02:50] JH: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:50] SV: Right, is that pretty much what we’re talking about?

[00:02:53] JH: Yeah, the big thing is letting people know that that money is out there and then also how to actually recover that money.

[00:03:01] SV: I think that’s going to be great to kind of dig into because I had no idea I got to be honest, I had no idea that this was even possible. Then once I said, “You know what? I’m going to go ahead and give this software a try” before we even talked about getting you on the show. I said before I even mention it or talk about it, “I want to see how this thing works.” Before we talk about the software and how I can automate it, why don’t we talk a little bit about what’s happening and how this is even possible?

[00:03:30] JH: Yeah, no problem. There are a lot of ways that Amazon… Amazon has all these automated systems in place when it comes to the accounting and the inventory and the refunds. What we found though was overtime little slippage occurs and when that slippage occurs over time it can turn into big money for your average salary. We started selling online with Amazon a few years ago and we didn’t even know this was a thing.

A couple of years had gone by and we’re buying  and selling in the pet space and I’d come across a few articles about how to reconcile your refunds and how to ask for reimbursements for damage inventory and at the time I didn’t even know it was a thing. I just assumed Amazon’s system was bulletproof and everything was working the way it should. I started going through these guides and I started realizing like wow there’s a lot of money left over. Just on our personal account we recovered over $7000 in reimbursements as money we wouldn’t have even known that we were missing,

[00:04:31] SV: That’s crazy, that’s crazy. Okay, so what are we talking about? Let’s talk about like your first step in this that you’re figuring this thing out. What did you do? Did you just manually email them on certain … What did you look for?

[00:04:45] JH: Yeah. Let’s go over an average scenario,

[00:04:47] SV: Yeah, let’s do that, that’s great.

[00:04:48] JH:  An average scenario is you’ve sold your widget to a customer. Customer for whatever reason they decide, “I don’t want this anymore.” They contact Amazon and ask for a refund. Amazon takes that money from your account and puts it into a holding account waiting for the customer to ship their product back into Amazon. Once Amazon receives the product, the refund is given to the customer. Now a lot of times that, and it happened to me as an Amazon shopper. I asked for a refund, then the idea of having to put it in a box, do the labeling and bring it down to the post office… It’s in my closet.

What happens is after 45 days, Amazon is supposed to release that money that they took from you, they’re supposed to release it back to you, but a decent percentage of time it just gets stuck in that holding account. Amazon’s happy to give it back to you because it is not Amazon’s money, it’s the customer’s money, they’re happy to give it back to you but if it slips through the cracks, the other burden’s put on the seller to figure out what’s missing. The first step, if you wanted to find this missing money is you need to download your refunds report and you have to look for refunds are over 45 days old because that’s the window in which the customer has to send the items back.

You need to download your refund report and look for orders that are over 45 days old and then there is a separate report that will show the inventory where the refunds that are being returned. So what you are looking for is the discrepancies between those two reports. Let’s say it’s around 10 to 12% right? From that 10 to 12% you need to check your reimbursement reports, which you can actually search by like the transaction IDs from your refunds and see what’s been reimbursed, what hasn’t been reimbursed.

Now if you come across one that wasn’t reimbursed and it’s been over 45 days and the customer hasn’t returned the product, you just have to open a case with Amazon sellers support tell them, “Hey, it’s been over 45 days, here’s the order ID, I’d like to request a reimbursement,” and over like 85% of the time they will reimburse you right there no questions asked.

[00:07:09] SV: Now that’s for refunding okay right? And we’re not talking about inventory at that’s been damaged or any of that stuff, you’re talking more of the refund okay. That’s like a refund like you’re saying that money goes into like a third-party, not third-party, like a holding tank and then from there if that item is sent back, then that money is refunded, if not, then you get it you’re supposed to get back but a lot of times it doesn’t come back to you, it just sits there. What you’re saying is you find that in your reports and then from there you figure out which ones have not been reimbursed back to you and then you have to send in a request to support request to Seller Central or Support to actually tell them that they need to basically give that back to you.

[00:07:48] JH: Correct, exactly.

[00:07:50] SV: To find these reports, where do we find these reports, our refund report? Do you know? In the seller central?

[00:07:59] JH: Yeah, they’re all in the seller central, if you go under your reports and then go under fulfillment.

[00:08:05] SV: Okay, fulfillment.

[00:08:07] JH: They’re pretty much there, you’re going to see things like… That’s where you find your reimbursements under the payment section you’ll see the returns under the customer concessions and then those are the two reports that you really need to look for. Then you check your returns against your transactions, so if you take the order ID from a return, you search for it in the transaction section, it will show you if it has been returned or not.

[00:08:38] SV: Okay, and if it hasn’t been returned then that’s when you can get your money back.

[00:08:42] JH: Yeah,

[00:08:42] SV: Got you.

[00:08:44] JH: It’s actually three steps. So you take the order ID from your return and search for it in your transaction history. If you see that it hasn’t been returned, then you want to take that order ID and look for it under reimbursements. As long as they haven’t automatically been reimbursed then you want to open a case.

[00:09:03] SV: Got you, got you. To open a case, is that pretty much as simple as just going there and sending them a support ticket?

[00:09:11] JH: Yeah, you just go to the help, you do the contact us and then you’re submitted under your selling on Amazon, I believe it’s customers and orders, you put in the order ID and then you can request a refund right there.

[00:09:28] SV: Got you, okay cool, so that the refund side of things now let’s talk about the inventory kind of like opened or damaged inventory so what’s that part of this?

[00:09:39] JH: The real simple thing is that Amazon is huge. They have these huge warehouses and it’s very common for them to damage inventory. Now what we found is that the warehouse employees are terrific about noting when something is damaged but the automated reimbursement, getting payback for that damaged inventory doesn’t work as well as it should. What you have to do is go in and… There is a report specifically for like damaged inventory right?

The inventory is a little bit harder than the refunds only because the reports don’t necessarily tie together. So, when you download your damage inventory report, you get… each damage inventory has like a warehouse case number and it’s is not a number that as a seller you can search for under your reimbursements. It’s kind of interesting, Amazon Support has it on their end but as a seller you can’t search for it. We even reached out to Amazon Support when we originally got started like, “Hey, I’ve got this number what do I do with it?” and they’re like, “You can’t do anything with it. It is an internal number.”

That’s where it’s a little trickier so what we do is, we look at like a week at a time. Let’s say the first week of March, we look for any damaged inventory right? Let’s say we had two units that were damaged the first week of March. What we then look for is warehouse damage reimbursements 10 days later. They have up to 10 days to reimburse you for any warehouse damage inventory so what we’re looking for is 10 days after the first week of March did we receive any reimbursements? If we didn’t receive any damaged warehouse reimbursements, we go ahead and open a case and say, “Hey, it’s been after 10 days, we had two units damaged that first week of March. I believe that we haven’t been reimbursed.” We usually went around about 80% of the cases using this methodology but it is kind of taking an educated guess because you don’t have the reporting that you really need like you do with the refunds to know okay, this was returned, this was reimbursed, this wasn’t.

It’s vague. I don’t know why they don’t give you access to that transaction ID searching feature but it is what it is, so we make our best educated guess using this methodology.

[00:12:20] SV: Okay, that’s interesting so okay, we’re talking… This is stuff that is kind of happening that again because Amazon is so large, there’s things that are happening there that we could just be… Not even being aware of it and losing money because it’s money that’s actually ours but it’s just kind of sitting there and what you’re saying is if we went and we were being I guess conscious of this, we can go out there and submit tickets ourselves manually. Now you guys were kind of doing this in the beginning before you decided to create a solution, which I think is brilliant. Why don’t you walk me through how that kind of happened because obviously it was probably a tedious task.

[00:12:59] JH: Yeah. There’s actually three modules in AMZSuite and every module is to automate tedious tasks. We we’re doing it on our own. We we’re going in and downloading the reports and doing the reconciliation and then having to manage the cases, making sure that you got reimbursements for the ones that you got reimbursed for. If you are a seller that’s doing under like $10,000 a month on Amazon, it’s pretty easy to do manually. You’ve got maybe 200 transactions, out of those 2/300 transactions you’ve know you’ve got a return rate of 2%, it’s something you can manage. But once you get over like $10,000 a month, it really starts accumulating. It’s tough to go in and try to reconcile 2000 transactions a month.

We started building out… As we grew, it became too large for us. We started out manually doing it and then it just became too tedious for us to do it consistently so we started building automated tools to do this. As our tools became better, we realized, “Wow, there’s probably a ton of Amazon sellers that could benefit from this.” We packed it up and gave it a really pretty website and rolled it out.

[00:14:19] SV:  I got to be honest, it’s really cool. I was a little, I guess like anybody would be skeptical, like this is legal? Is this okay? Is Amazon going to get mad? But it’s really an automated tool of doing like you said those tedious tasks on your behalf and I think that’s what I really liked about it. Just to let everyone know, as we’re recording this, I have only been running it for about three and half weeks maybe four weeks tops and so far I’ve recovered $609.35 and that’s just from the Inventory Salvager. I guess my question would be here and I’ll go ahead and ask you here on the podcast maybe you can give me an answer, is like the Refund Rescuer like that hasn’t done anything as of right now, is there a reason for that or is there something I’m not doing correctly or is it just mine isn’t accepting that?

[00:15:13] JH: Yeah, I could actually look right now and see.

[00:15:18] SV: Because again, I didn’t know if it was because they were slowly dripping out the different tickets and they didn’t want too many tickets because you didn’t want to overload the amount that you’re sending in your company?

[00:15:32] JH: Well you do actually bring up to two good but different points. First, we do drip in tickets. One of the key things that we do to make sure that there is never any issues is, we only allow AMZSuite to have out three open cases at a time. It is a slow and steady process but you’ll eventually recover all your money and then once every… Actually we go back 365 days. From the date that you start up we’re actually going to go back a year and find all that missing money. Once you’re up to date you’re fully reconciled, then AMZSuite just continues to constantly monitor your account and anything new that pops out they open a case for it. What we do is we only allowed three open cases at a time so it is a slow and steady process.

[00:16:22] SV: I noticed that it is, it’s right there though. It’s like every couple of days I log in and refresh and it’s up 100 or something.

[00:16:31]JH: Yeah, yeah.

[00:16:33] SV: Which is kind of nice.

[00:16:34] JH: What we do too is… To answer your question about the refunds, a lot of sellers have communications with their customers and kind of work out arrangements and everything  when they issue a refund, so we actually monitor for customer communication. If you as a seller have contacted with the customer, seller initiated the refund, we don’t open cases for those. That’s probably a part of why you haven’t seen many of the refund cases just because you’re probably on top of your customer support.

[00:17:13]SV: I totally am and I’ve got someone that does help with that as well, so I’m totally on board with that. Okay yeah, I was just wondering how that was kind of working and if they were both working side by side deal as far as… I did notice that like 3, 4 tickets at a time is max. Just to let people know the other thing that I really liked about this and I like how you structured this, because you didn’t do it like it’s a monthly fee or anything like that more less per ticket so it’s kind of like you only pay if you get if you get that claim successfully gotten your money back.

It’s kind of like, you have these tickets or these coupon, I think you guys give away some credits as well but it’s based on a credit system. If you if you submit a credit and you get 20 bucks back you’re only going to take a very small portion of that on so it’s really like it doesn’t really cost anything.

[00:18:10] JH:  When you sign up, we actually give you 20 credits so you don’t put a credit card in or anything, you just set up your AMZSuite account and then you’ll set up your Amazon seller… You’ll invite a user for AMZSuite to use to reconcile all of your accounts and everything and we give you 20 credits. Usually what users do is they’ll sign up, they’ll register, they get their 20 credits. You’ll receive money back and reimbursements before you ever even buy a credit from us.

[00:18:42] SV: No that’s a great way to do it because people are actually seeing that it’s working and then from there they can decide if they want to continue which I think anyone that has a business that’s having transactions go through and that has inventory in there, you’re probably smart if you do it. You’re losing money if you’re not.

[00:19:04] JH: We try to stay ahead of the curve, so you’ll get reimbursed say like $600 from Amazon, you’ll pay us like $60 in credit, sorry, you’ll buy like $60 in credit, so you’re always getting more money back than you would pay us anyway so it’s a win for everyone.

[00:19:21] SV: Now let me ask this on the inventory when you get it reimbursed is that is going directly back in a… You’ll see that reimbursement on your statement when you see the amount that’s been paid to you?

[00:19:33] JH: Yep, if you keep an eye open you’ll start seeing more of those FBA reimbursement notifications coming from Amazon.

[00:19:42] SV: I have noticed that.

[00:19:43] JH: Yeah, Amazon’s the one that actually reimburses it and it goes right back to your seller account.

[00:19:47] SV: Got you, okay cool. Just to let people know too. I signed up here totally like everyone else, I didn’t even get any a free account or anything like that and I ended up buying I believe it was 60 credits and those 60 credits, I still haven’t used them all, I’ve only used 46 and out of those 46 I’ve gotten $609.35 back, definitely worth the investment.

[00:20:14] JH: A lot of people ask us like “What percentage does it come out to? What’s the recovery percentage that you charge?” We charge a $1.50 for every successful reimbursement so you’ll get reimbursed for a unit for $30, $40 and it will cost you a $1.50. It’s between like 5% to 7% depending on your average ticket size, so we try to make it as inexpensive as possible so that it makes sense no matter what your average ticket size is and then you know we want to prove that the system works before you even have to pay us.

[00:20:50] SV: Yeah, I love it, it’s a great model on your guys end and talk a little bit now but the feedback century as well. That’s another element that in there on that people can use and that’s like the negative feedback removed. Can you kind of talk a little bit about that.

[00:21:05] JH: Yep. There was another tedious task that we felt like we should just automate. I’m sure most sellers are aware that if you’re using Amazon FBA, Amazon takes responsibility for the customer experience. If a product comes damaged or a product comes late and a customer leaves you a negative seller feedback, if you contact Amazon they’ll take responsibility for it and remove that feedback. As well, if someone leaves you a product review on your seller rating, that violates Amazon’s feedback terms of service, they’ll remove it.

What we did is we create a module that goes in and monitors your seller feedback for any negative feedback and if one pops up, it opens a case with Amazon to remove it. Most people do it on a weekly basis, like every couple of weeks, we were doing it like once a week but then I got thinking, “That’s a week that I’m losing out on the buy box because of negative feedback or somebody clicks on my seller profile and sees that negative feedback.” Our system goes in and checks like every three to four hours.  At most you got a negative feedback on there for three to four hours versus a week.

[00:22:26] SV: Yeah, yeah that’s helpful for sure. That’s definitely helpful. Now this has been great, I mean it’s totally eye-opening and I think that there’s a lot of people out there that could use this service and again it’s kind of running in the background you don’t even know it’s happening other than you might get those occasional emails, unless you want to filter them into another folder because you might get a bunch of them at a time because they are coming in steadily. You can always filter them to another folder in your Gmail account or whatever but yeah, it just kind of runs, just have to make sure that your credits are up so it can continue to keep submitting the actual cases.

I like it too, the dashboard is really easy to kind of navigate now and also it shows you the cases that were submitted, the successful ones and then the cases pending and also show the unsuccessful cases and again those you aren’t charged for. It shows you how many credits you have remaining and all that stuff, so really, really good job, clean, simple. I like the interface of it and just really, really good job on that.

[00:23:27] JH: I appreciate it, thank you.

[00:23:28] SV: Yeah no problem. If anyone wants to check this out, number one, it’s totally free to check it out, you can just head over to theamazingseller.com/recover and that is a pretty link that is an affiliate link that actually… If you go through that link, I will be able to buy some more coffee which you guys know I love and again, I would not be saying to go use this if I did not believe in this. Again, I’m showing you right here on my dashboard and I’m looking at $609.35 and every single day it seems it goes up a little bit which is which is kind of cool.

Jacob, you also said that you’re going to give the TAS listeners a 10% discount on their credits purchase if they use coupon code what was that, TAS?

[00:24:15] JH: TAS, correct.

[00:24:19] SV: Yes, just use TAS but remember, you can go there actually free right now and get 20 credits by just going to theamazingseller.com/recover and again I’ll leave the link in the show notes to this episode. Then when you’re ready to buy those credits, which I’m sure you will because you’re going to start seeing that it’s making you money or getting your money back I should say, just use the coupon code TAS and you’ll get 10% on all of your credits when you purchase them, so that’s pretty cool. Jacob, I want to thank you for coming on and giving us the insight I guess and actually going through in building this thing because it makes life a lot easier and really I’m not sure if somebody would go through the trouble to submit those tickets.

[00:25:00] JH: Yeah, once your volumes start increasing, it’s one of those things you’re always like, “Oh, I should do that. I really need to go do that,” and it just kind of always falls by the wayside.

[00:25:11] SV: Yeah it’s totally true and it’s almost like that refund you said it’s sitting in your closet, it’s like you don’t send it back when you don’t send any open tickets for this just a lot of work and you have to hire a VA to go and do it all.

[00:25:23] JH: That is exactly it. Yeah.

[00:25:24] SV: That’s awesome. All right. Well hey, I want to thank you so much. I appreciate it and again they anyone wants to check it out head over to theamazingseller.com/recover and when you are ready to purchase your credits just use coupon code TAS and you can get 10% off those future credit so Jacob once again, I want to thank you appreciate sharing this and I appreciate you building this software.

[00:25:47] JH: That was great, I appreciate it, thank you.

[00:25:48] SV: No problem. Okay so that’s pretty awesome right I mean you have to agree. That’s amazing that this is money again that I had no idea was out there and here’s the thing, it goes back 362 or 65 I think it is days I forget what he said it was exactly but it goes back over 300 days. If you’ve been selling for 300 days or even six months, it doesn’t have to be 300 days, I’m just saying, it will go back and then start dripping out these different support tickets really is what you’re doing is you’re putting in these support tickets and you’re automating the process to where you’re doing three or four a day and then it just slowly drips back in and then once you finally get caught up with all of the money that’s been paid back to you then it’s going to be again just always sending out these tickets and kind of analyzing your account. That’s what I love about it.

The only time that I’m paying, is if a ticket is brought through and if I get 15 bucks back they get a portion of it, a very small portion like $1.50. I would pay someone $1.50 to go out and find $15 for me every day of the week rather than me having to go through. I’m really, really a huge fan of this software and the other thing I’ve to say is he has created just a really easy to use software as well so again I tip my hat to Jacob great job on making it just so easy and really, really simple to use so this way here, you don’t have to really think. You just kind of set it up and let it run and also to look at your numbers in the backend is really easy as well.

If you guys are interested again I’m going to remind you, head over to theamazingseller.com/recover. That’s R-E-C-O-V-E-R or you can just go to the show notes of this page which is episode 198, so that’s theamazingseller.com/198, the link will be there and also all of the show notes and the transcripts will be there as well on episode 198. I would say go over there and check those out if you’re interested in downloading this episode. I do think it was pretty valuable and he also walked you through if you wanted to do it manually, how you would do that so you can actually see that in the show notes as well.

All right, so that is going to wrap up this episode I mean I’m still blown away by this every day or two I go in, I login and boom! There’s a little bit more money that’s brought back to me that I didn’t even know was out there so it’s crazy. You can use this for more inventory, you can use it for your Pay Per Click. It’s money that you didn’t know was out there. I am going to stop talking about this because I get excited about it every single time that I think about it. All right guys, that is going to wrap it up, I wanted to say thank you to everyone that has been listening, that has been giving iTunes reviews, if you guys have done that, great, that you so much. If you guys have shared the podcast, you guys are awesome, I appreciate you and just everyone that’s listening all over the world. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Remember this, remember this, you guys know what I’m going to say, the longtime listeners remember that I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on, say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you where? Right back here on the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<
…here on an episode like this one right here. You guys know that I love, love, love doing these and it’s like us just sitting around just talking business whether it’s at the coffee shop or wherever it is it’s just awesome. I like being able to do this and this is the closest thing that we get to do it here and that’s why these are so awesome and you guys love them so much as well because I get a lot of feedback from these. Keep them coming, all right. If you guys have a question that you want me to answer on an upcoming ask Scott session just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that.

You can record a voice mail just include your first name, maybe where you are tuning in from and then a quick question or a brief question and then I’ll go ahead and try to air that on the show and give you my answer. The other thing real quick I want to do is remind anyone that is brand new or maybe just someone that’s seeing if this is the right business model for them or even if they want to entertain the thought of it because I get a lot of people that do that which I think is great because you should know what you are getting yourself into. I created a free ten day course it’s called the free private label course and you can find that at, get this, get this it’s going to be a really clever name, freeprivatelabelcourse.com, easy to remember freeprivatelabelcourse.com.

It’s a ten day free course I deliver it through email so you’ll get an email every single day for ten days and it will have a video and it will have instructions inside of that email of what to do and really explain everything in a whole and I’ll give some examples and all that stuff. Definitely check that out if you are brand new and you are looking to get started in this and you want to see if it’s the right fit or not. All right. The other thing is real quick I want to give a little shout out to my Periscope and Snapchat peeps. You guys know who you are. Thank you so much hanging out with me over there and if you are not hanging out with me over there we can do a little bit of this kind of ask Scott session on Periscope or Snapchat. Again Periscope is… You can find me there at periscope.tv just find me @ScottVoelker or Snapchat my user name there is @ScottVoelker1.

You can find me there. Would love to connect with you. I’m getting a lot of people snapping me over there and showing me where you are listening or showing me what you are doing and it’s really awesome to be able to see how you guys are taking action. It’s really awesome. Alright let’s go ahead and, oh wait a minute, before we go ahead let me remind you guys one thing. I’m sorry but I have to remind you this. We have transcripts. If you guys want the transcripts of this episode or the show notes head over to the show notes page which can be found at theamazingseller.com/199. Alright. That is it alright let’s go ahead and listen to the first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:03:01] Edgar: Hey Scott my name is Edgar. First of all I want to appreciate what you are doing for the all advice for trying to make things happen on Amazon FBA. I have a question, how I can add one more or two more subcategories to my product. Right now I’m selling my product and it’s in home and kitchen and what I want to do I just want to add one more subcategory. My question is how I can add this second category to my listing. Thank you so much I really hope you help and have a great night. Bye, bye.

[00:03:48] SV: Hey Edgar thank you so much for the question and this is a good question and I do get asked this quite often so I’m going to answer it here and I think I’ve already answered it before but I’m going to answer it again because there is a couple of different things we have to think about these categories or these subcategories. All right. Because what you are doing is you are trying to list your product into the main category which we talked about right. What is your main category? And then you want to have subcategory of that or even in a completely new category and there is advantages to that.

Now, I don’t think there is a ton of benefits of just being listed in categories because I don’t think people search for products through categories but it can help you in search and it also can help you once someone has already done the initial search and now they are in that category and now they are doing more searches inside of there.

There is benefits to that and there is also benefits to finding, and this is kind of another strategy that anyone listening can do, find that second category even if it’s a sub, sub, subcategory, find that category and then see if you can dominate that category. Then what will happen is if you get number one in that category as far as ranking goes you’ll get a best seller’s badge and if you get a best seller’s badge that can help your conversions. Now you really should test that to say for sure, I still say it can’t hurt but I don’t think that you should spend all kinds of time and effort figuring out a way to get that best seller’s badge although I have done it. I have seen a slight increase but not as much as I would have thought but it is another option there because if you find a category that is really like a sub, sub, sub subcategory of your main category so you could be listed in the same category but then want to be listed into a sub, sub, subcategory

All you need to do to make this happen is let Amazon know that you want to be listed in that sub, sub, subcategory so all you need to do is let them know. You contact seller support you tell them that you want to keep your main category but you also want to be in this other sub, sub, subcategory. By doing that it will allow you to be placed in there and they’ll usually do it no problem. Usually within twelve hours you are able to get that change made alright? There are advantages to doing that I really wouldn’t focus too much on the second category as being more of a driver of sales more as if you can get into a sub, sub, subcategory and then get like a best seller’s badge and dominate that or even show up higher in the search for that in that category. Because here is how it works too for anyone that is listening that might not know this but let’s say you go to Amazon, you haven’t even gotten to Amazon for the day, you haven’t even logged in or you haven’t even went on to your computer today.

[00:06:39] SV: You walk up to your computer, imagine this, you are walking up to your computer or on your phone and then you type in amazon.com or maybe you had a bookmark. You go there, you have a search field. The search field now is going to show all the departments you are not in a category you are just going all departments. Now let’s say that you go and search garlic press. You search garlic press it’s going to show all of the listed things that come up for garlic press. Ninety five percent of them most likely are going to be in home and kitchen so once you click on one of them now you are in home and kitchen, now you are in that category. Now when you do another search if you look up by your search bar it’s going to say, “search in home and kitchen”.

The only way that you are going to go back to the main page, which most people aren’t going to do, is you are going to go back and click on that Amazon logo and it’s going to take you back to the main page that says “all departments” or you can just click on that little drop down that says “all departments, home and kitchen”. You can directly search in a category. Most people are going to just go to Amazon, go to search field and search. Once they are in now they start to follow or start to drill down into these categories not even knowing it so that’s where being in another category could be of benefit to you because now once you are in that category if you are there and you are ranking higher you will be more visible. All right.

Hopefully that makes sense but it really is as easy as finding that category and then just letting seller support know about it and letting them know that you want to do that. One thing you want to make clear to them though is, do not remove me from the main category, I just want to be added to the secondary category and that’s how you do it. That’s how I’ve done it and it’s worked every single time. Hopefully that’s been helpful. Good luck to you and let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:08:27] Philip: Hey Scott this is Philip [inaudible] I loved your podcast with Josh Bauerle and myself like many others went to Google him find out how do I use his services but you spelled his name wrong in your description and its Bauerle with an E at the end not a Y. Just thought you may want to fix that in your product or whatever your podcast information for that one episode at least on your blog. Love your stuff man I created a business myself with a friend out here in California and we’ve been doing just fine every single month so you rock. Thank you.

[00:09:08] SV: Hey Philip thank you so much for the heads up and congratulations on your business success and thanks for being a listener. The reason why I aired your heads up because at first I was like, “Do I really need to air that I guess I can just fix the link, not even the link, the name of Josh,” but what I wanted to do is bring attention back to episode 143 and that was killer tax tips and what business type to form LLC, do I do an s-corp? That was the episode 143 with Josh Bauerle who’s my CPA also John Lee Dumas’s for EOFire, CPA on Fire is what he calls himself so it’s Josh Bauerle and what we are going to do is we are going to update that show notes page.

I’m also going to drop the show notes or the link in this episode this way anyone that does want to reach out to Josh can do so and they can find him. Just to let people know that the show notes was done by my show notes guy so he must have just misspelled it by accident. We’ll go ahead and get that fixed and I will leave the links obviously in the show notes episode or the episode, the show notes to this episode I think that’s what I’m trying to say. That’s what I’m going to do here. I just wanted to bring attention back to that episode because it is a really good episode if you guys want some killer tax tips and also if you’ve been thinking to yourself, “What type of business entity do I form?” That is going to help you this particular episode that we did with Josh that is episode 143 really, really great episode, a lot of feedback on that. Definitely check that out.

Philip I wanted to just say publicly congratulations on your business success that you and your partner have I’d love to hear more about it sometime so yeah definitely keep me posted. Let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:10:55] Brandon: Good morning Scott my name is Brandon and I’m a long time listener and first time caller about taking action and I’ve been researching a product on Alibaba. I’ve noticed when I’ve been doing my research that the deeper I get into Alibaba further from page one that I’m noticing that companies are coming up multiple times and the MOQs are different. I feel that in my research process that I’ve sent multiple emails to the same company asking the same questions. Do you know if there is any way to filter that out by company or do I just have to go through and hand write notes for all the companies that I have contacted? Thanks and looking forward to future podcasts.

[00:11:47] SV: Okay. First of all Brandon thank you so much for being a long time listener that means so much because when I was first starting this podcast I didn’t know if I was going to have two people listening or a hundred people listen. Now this has grown into thousands which has just been amazing and I owe it to all of you first time listeners that started with me from the beginning. Thank you, thank you and yeah. What I want to say here is on as far as taking action is you are listening, you are getting all this information I just want to say this to everyone that has been doing that, “We need to consume the information but we need to take action on it.”

Pick one thing that you can do to really move yourself forward and I know that it gets overwhelming at times because we have a lot of things coming at us but the one thing that I’d like to insert here into this session of ask Scott is really, “Take this information that you are learning or that you are absorbing and then pick something that you can do.” In this case we are talking about sourcing, we are talking about you are at a stage where you’ve done your product research. That’s great, let’s give you a round of applause on that, that’s awesome. Now you are into the product sourcing stage, now you are into Alibaba, now you are starting to get a little bit confused which is fine but now we’ve got to get you through that. How do we get you through that?

Well this particular question that you are asking I really don’t pay too much attention to that stuff I’ve got to be honest with you. Yeah you might be wasting a little bit of time but I’m just copy and pasting to anyone that has a product that is related or that looks like it’s the similar product just to get that conversation started, that interview process started as you guys have heard me talk about before. Yes you are right, what they are doing is multiple agents are listing for that same manufacturer so you may be sending five or ten different emails to those different agents or maybe one agent has gotten clever and created ten different listings in Alibaba with the same product. That’s fine. So you are going to show up in their inbox five times or ten times. It’s going to make them say, “Hey you better get a hold of this person.” Right.

There might be a way to filter that out inside Alibaba but I’ve got to be honest, I haven’t really paid too much attention to that because I’m just firing off emails. I’m just like contact and then just copy paste, copy paste and then waiting for the results to come back to me with whoever emails me back. Again it’s one of those things that I don’t spend a lot of times figuring out a way that I can eliminate that from happening I just keep trying to drill down and trying to find that one supplier or two suppliers that I’m going to be able to work with. It is a numbers game at that point but then once you find that agent then from there you can start drilling down in their catalogue, you can start drilling down into their resources and all of that good stuff. Hopefully that has been helpful to you but again I just want to go back to talking about consuming the information and we have so much information out there, so much information.

There is something that I heard from Pat Flynn who actually he learned it from someone else and basically was talking about “Just In Time” learning. Whatever stage you are at in your business right now learn that, do that and then move on to learning the next thing. Right. This way you are not trying to learn the entire process and then being overwhelmed by it. Yes you want to know the overall picture so this way you know where you are going towards but then once you do that don’t worry about figuring all the things that could potentially come up when they might not even come up. That makes sense, hopefully it does. Alright so let’s go ahead and listen to one more question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:15:32] James: Hey Scott, my name is James and I’m a total newbie at FBA and when I say newbie I’m only at the starting phase where I am thinking of getting into it. I’ve been binging on your podcasts and I’ve been stumbling over a lot of things but I stumbled upon you through a podcast. I’ve been listening to a lot of sports stuff and I said, “I’ve got to do something that’s like being creative and bring some value to my life.” and of course how can you do that by being in a monetary aspect of things? I really appreciate your show and the time that you put into it just like everyone else I really appreciate it but let me just ask my question based on for me being a total person who was only reading about FBA.

All my life I’ve been a consumer and now it’s time for me to take my family to the next level. I asked a few questions online to a few folks but I didn’t get the answers but like I said prior to this I stumbled upon you and I love your podcast. My question even in your resources tab on your webpage you have a resource called AmaSuite and my question is, should a person use Amasuite even though I see all the value in it but at $297 with a hundred dollar discount is a smart for a person like me who is just about to get into it, add that to his resources. Thank you.

[00:17:03] SV: James what is up thank you so much for the question and I love it how you described how you are a consumer of content and you are receiving that content and you weren’t even looking for a business type thing right but you were listening to a podcast. You were in that space and then you got curious and you started to look around and you stumbled across this. Right. I love it that right now what you want to do is you want to see if this is the right thing for you and I think you’ve discovered that through the podcast. Now you can see all of the different moving pieces, everything that it’s going to take to get started here because that’s what we are doing. We are getting started and then from there we can see where it goes.

I would be lying to you if I told you that you are going to start this business and that’s where your business is going to end because I don’t believe that. What I believe is that you need to start somewhere and whether that starting on Amazon and then growing from something else that opens because of that well then that’s where it leads you but you have to get started somewhere. I go all the way back to when I started and if anybody hasn’t heard that episode, that’s episode one twenty five so theamazingseller.com/125. You’ll hear how I started from working for my father to then starting a photography business and then from there teaching people online about photography and then that got me introduced to the online space and dabbling in eBay and then starting a little bit of real estate then going back to the online space.

There is always twists and turns but you have to get started and I can say this, that as you move forward and I’m going to get to your question in a minute by the way but I think it’s really important for people to hear this. I think it’s really important for people to understand that this isn’t the only way but it is a way to get started and to me it’s a simpler way to get started so this way here you can start to get some momentum and you can start to learn the process. Alright so you are at that stage where you want to get started this is what I would say especially because you are in the product research stage, you are at that point you have to start there. Episode 56, again guys these are going to be listed in the show notes and the transcripts for this episode, these episodes that I’m going to give you right now are going to be there linked up so you don’t have to remember these if you are driving or riding your bike alright?

Episode 56 that’s theamazingseller.com/56, episode 100 which was really good because it was myself, it was Rich Kibble, it was Chris Shaffer and Danny Brewer talking about what product research and what different ways we are looking at moving forward in 2016 and beyond for product research and I guess launching products in that new year because things are changing. Right. The other episode is 161 so theamazingseller.com/161 that was one which I recently did with Greg Mercer who is also an Amazon seller but also the creator of Jungle Scout. The other one is episode number 189 so that is theamazingseller.com/189. That’s a more recently one but that one there was more or less how to look at the depth and the demand of not just looking at the surface numbers…

Those are the ones that I would say to start with. Anyone that’s in the product research stage. Now, when you’re talking about software tools and the resources to use. Let me just break those two down real quick. They are both valuable but in a little bit of a different way. If was to just pick one. I get that question a lot. “Scott if you’re going to just pick one to start with which one is it going to be?” For me personally it’s going to be Jungle Scout. It’s going to be the WebApp and it’s going to be the Chrome Extension, okay. They both serve a couple of different purposes. Okay. Number one, when you’re looking at the Webapp, the WebApp brings products to the surface so you can see by certain criteria and it brings into the surface you can kind of get ideas without actually having to scratch your head and wonder what is selling and kind of like what should I look into for markets.

It’s going to kind of give you just an idea of what you could potentially sell. Then from there you’re going to take those ideas and then you’re going to start drilling down and that’s where you’ll start using the Jungle Scout Chrome extension. That’s what you’d do. Now, talking about Amasuite, Amasuite is great for a lot of different reasons. They do have a product research module in there which it does something very similar to the WebApp which it brings data back in looking at the BSR, looking at reviews, you can search it by different criteria but I found that the WebApp is a little bit more visual, that you can see the stuff but I would say Amasuite for me personally I use it for the keyword research. They have a keyword research module in there which will help you discover and find keywords around your C keywords

[00:22:15] SV: If you’re looking for Garlic press what’s it’s going to essentially do it’s going to take garlic press and then it’s going to add a letter to the end of it and then give you everything with that letter. It’s kind of hard to explain but basically it’s like if you typed in garlic press in the search and then you hit the spacebar and the you put an A next to that, everything with a word that begins with an A after garlic press it’s going to scrape and find all those keywords. Then it’s going to go to B and then it’s going to go to C, then it’s going to go to D, all the way through the alphabet. It will even do it with the numbers. That’s a really, really useful tool for just finding keywords. The other module inside of that that they have, that I like, that I use is finding reviewers, top ten thousand reviewers.

It’s a easy way for you to go out and find these reviewers and then you can reach out to them manually and then start building your own email list of these top reviewers. All right. Again, if I was going to recommend you a tool in particular the I’d say you are at a stage where you are just going product research. I would say Jungle Scout would probably be the one to go to. Now if you’re looking at down the line you want to add another piece to your tool box or another tool to your toolbox then Amasuite would be great because it’s not only going to do the product research which then again you can piggyback on that as well, you can use that as another way to discover products and you can use those other components inside of Amasuite.

Again, to answer your question the first tool that I’d put in that toolbox for you in particular James would be Jungle Scout. Okay. Then from there you can add other tools down the line if you want to. All right. Hopefully, this has been helpful but I did want to share a little bit more of the mindset that goes into this business or any business for that matter because it is to me a starting point. From there it will help you get moving. Once you get moving then it’s up to you to decide okay when’s the time that I’m building a website? When is the time that I’m going to build my own ecommerce store? When is the time I’m going to start building an email list. All of that stuff and then as you’re learning that stuff, guess what, you’re the learning stuff that you can take with you to another business model. All right.

[00:24:27] SV: Again, I’m not going to keep talking about this too much. I can go on forever. It’s so important. All of these things that we’re learning right now to start this type of business can be carried over to any other business online. All right guys.

That is going to wrap up this session of Ask Scott. I want to remind you that all of the show notes, all of the transcripts, all of that stuff is ready for you on the show notes page. All you have to do is head over to theamazingseller.com/199 and you’ll get all of those show notes. All right. Just a little reminder for you. Also, if you guys wanted the free resource that I talked about in the beginning, the ten day free mini course you can head over to freeprivatelabelcoursel.com and you’ll get access to that. All you have to do is register and you’ll start getting lessons every single day for ten days and it will walk you through the entire process, start to finish.

All right guys. That’s going to wrap it up. Remember I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to… Come on, say it with me, say it loud, say it proud,
“Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]

…“Maybe, just maybe I’ll do something special. What can I do special? I’m not really sure what would I want to do? What could I do that would be a different thing that I can do?”

I got thinking, maybe because this thing is being recorded right now before my event but this is going to be airing after my event. The event that I am talking about is a live event that I am going to be having with thirty TASers that we’ve invited and it’s actually a paid event. It’s going to be us just really masterminding and right now I’m recording this it hasn’t been done but this is going to be airing it’s going to be over with which is going to be exciting. It’s kind of scary but exciting at the same time. We are really excited, it’s this weekend that I’m recording this it’s this week that is coming up May 1st, besides that, and I’ll stop rambling here for a second, because again I want this one to really, really be good so what I decided to do is I’m also going to be speaking in Denver this weekend. I’m going to be delivering a keynote at a conference which is called the Rocky Mountain Reseller’s Conference and it’s in Denver Colorado and I’m going to be speaking.

I’m going to be doing one of the closing keynotes at the end of the conference and I got thinking to myself, “Okay you are going to a conference,” which again guys I think conferences are really, really valuable not just for the speakers. I think that’s just a bonus. I think the real big thing that comes away from any type of conference or any time that you can get face to face or rubbing elbows with people that are like-minded is really that right there. It’s the relationships, the connections, the insights into someone else’s business that stuff is really, really powerful. If you get a chance to go to an event in the future not just one that I do or one that I’m attending but just anyone that you think will bring value to yourself or that you can surround yourself with like-minded people. Like I said I mean I’m going into this thing with an open mind saying I’m going to make some really great connections, we are going to be learning together and really just have an awesome time.

If you get a chance definitely take advantage of that. What I decided to do here is say, “You know what, I’m not just going to go up there and give my insight as far as selling on Amazon or what I think someone should do if they are just starting or at a certain level in their business,” because a lot of people are going to be talking about that. Before I even get on stage there is going to be a lot of people already talking about different ways to get started, there is going to be people talking about more advanced stuff. There is going to be people talking about how to sell and form markets so it’s going to be a whole bunch of different discussions so my thought process was, “There is going to be a lot of information coming at us,” so as we are sitting there there is a ton of this information, “Okay we can do retail arbitrage, we can do online arbitrage, we can do wholesale, we can do drop ship, we can do foreign markets, we can do private labeling, we can do e-commerce, we can build funnels.”

We can do all of this stuff, right and you guys probably say all that I mean there is a whole bunch of different ways that you can go about this. It really does depend on the individual, it really does, that’s what it comes down to. When you are having all this information come at you I think it’s great but then we have to really separate it and come up with our own plan because if we don’t then we are going to be paralyzed or overwhelmed and then not do anything. My thought was, “Let me go ahead and create something that can help at this stage of the conference.” What I want to do here is I want to do this presentation right here, right now on this podcast so I’m going to do a full on keynote like I’m going to be doing it at this conference so this way here I can practice and I can also see how it’s going to flow. If there’s anything that I’m just not doing good I want to be able to practice so you guys are going to see this and hear this or hear this not see this.

You are going to hear raw in a sense and I’m just going to go through it and I think it’s going to be valuable whether you attend the conference or not. It’s really just about getting this information that’s been thrown at us, all of this noise and really deciphering and seeing what we want to apply to our own plan, our own business and everything that goes into because I think it’s more than just business. I think it has to do with a lot of different elements as far as your own situation. Hopefully by me going through this it’s going to help you but it’s also going to help me right now because I am practicing for this event that’s going to be coming up here real soon but I’ll be able to give you guys the presentation. Let’s go ahead and do this, why don’t we alright? Let’s just take a quick little second and do a little sound effect.

[00:05:32] SV: Okay so first of I want to ask you guys a question, I want to ask you a simple question and that question is, have you ever, ever felt overwhelmed or like you’ve had so much information thrown at you, you don’t know where to start? Have you ever felt that? I want you to answer yes or no, I want you to say it loud and I also want you to either raise your hand or don’t raise your hand if you have never felt that. Myself personally I felt like that and I still feel like that a lot in different situations, in different circumstances I feel like that but there’s different ways that you can get around that. What I want to do here today is, because we are talking about building a business for your lifestyle or for whatever reason you want to do this which we’ll get into in a little bit because I think it’s really important to understand that but I want to share with you how to simplify the process and take action.

Alright. Because there is a lot of different information that’s getting thrown at us and that’s normal but I want to give you what I do in order to really break it down so this way here we can take action. First off I want you to congratulate yourself, I want you to give yourself props. I want you to give yourself a pat on the back for taking action and showing up right now to this podcast because there is a lot of different choices out there as far as podcast go or information that you could be consuming. I want you to give yourself really a pat on the back, I want you to reach over, pat yourself on the back and say, “Congratulations or good job Scott,” or whatever your names is, I want you to do that. I think it’s important that we acknowledge the things that we do that are moving ourselves forward and this is one of them okay because I do believe that after you get done with what I’m about to share with you I think you are going to see a whole another picture and I think it’s going to make it really, really clear at least that is the goal for me to share with you today.

Understand this too, most people including myself get excited about a certain thing and they get excited and then they start to take action and then from there they run into an obstacle and then they usually stop. Okay. You can be different, you can be different and what I’m going to share with you today is going to help you do that. I want to give you tools and a plan to execute because let’s face it, there is hundreds of ways to make money or start a business. You can open a pizza shop for heaven’s sake right? You don’t want to maybe, I don’t want to but you could. You could open a bar, you could do that if you wanted to but let’s get serious. We are talking about online stuff so selling on eBay, that’s a great way that you can get started. You could sell on Etsy, if you haven’t heard about Etsy it’s a really cool site like eBay a lot of handmade stuff. That’s how it started but now they’re starting to branch out but Etsy is a great channel. It’s a buyers’ channel. You can sell on Amazon, that’s why we are here, you want to sell on Amazon.

You could do retail arbitrage, you could do online arbitrage, you could do private labeling, you can sell on the UK market, you can sell on the Canadian market, you can sell in Germany, you can sell in all different international markets. But the big thing that you need to understand is that yes there is all of these opportunities but you have to pick one and you have to pick one and you have to just start #juststart. You might want to right that one down, that’s a big one. We need to start because we can get this information overload and then from there we don’t know what to do so we do nothing. It’s just an easier way, we usually push away from pain. If we see pain which pain is a lot of times a decision that you have to make we push away from that. You need to pick one and then you need to focus on that and I’m going to help you get clear as to what one maybe you are going to want to focus on because I think if we can become a lot clear about this then it’s going to make  it a lot easier.

But you need to pick one thing and that one big thing will help you succeed in business and in life. I want you to ask yourself this question, this question right now and you may know you may not know but this question right here will make things a lot clear and it will also help you stay motivated and really push you. I want you to ask yourself this question… Why? Why do you want to start a business? Why? Ask yourself that question. It’s amazing, when you ask yourself questions your mind starts to work on giving you an answer and you need to become clear with this because if you become clear with this you are going to understand the why which is then going to push you when times get tough. If the why isn’t strong enough you might not push hard through those times and then you are going to give up so it really does come down to your why, how strong your why is and all of that. Why do you want to start a business? Is it freedom to spend more time with your family?

[00:10:24] SV: That’s what mine was, that’s what it still is. I want to be able to go to the ball game for my son in the middle of the afternoon, I want to be able to go for that school play at one o’clock in the afternoon at my daughter’s school if I want to. I want to be able to go on vacation if I want to and not worry about if I have the time coming or not. That’s my why, I have a strong why. My family every single day and just a little short story here for you guys. I’m a forty three year old guy but married twenty two years and I’ve a beautiful family, three beautiful children. I have my kids scattered as far as the ages. I’ve got a twenty year old daughter who is going to be twenty one in July, I’ve got an eighteen year old son that just turned eighteen and I’ve got an eight year old daughter. The beautiful thing for personally is my kids they grow so fast. We’ve heard that our parents say, “Oh you are going to see time flies, you are going to look back and ten years is gone.”

You know what, when you are a kid you don’t really believe it but it’s true, I’m going to say to my father, “You were right, you were right,” and that kills me to say that sometimes. I don’t know about you guys but to tell your parents that they were right is sometimes kind of hard but it’s so true and now because of that my eight year old daughter it’s almost like it makes me even feel my why even more because I want to slow down time in a sense but I also want to be able to have more time available so I can just spend time with her and my other kids as well. She really does keep us young but who knows? Maybe you are just looking to find a way to pay off your student loans, earn a few extra bucks to pay that or maybe you are working sixty hours a week and you want to cut that down to where you only work forty hours a week. Believe it or not there is people out there that actually enjoy their job so if you enjoy your job but you don’t want to work sixty hours but you are doing it because maybe you want to maybe go on that extra vacation or maybe you can do this part time.

You need to understand what that why is and if that why is strong enough it’s going to help you weather those storms when they come into your business because you are going to have them. For example you may face something like this, your first shipment gets lost during shipping. That would be terrible but guess what, it could happen and if it does you might give up right at the beginning and say, “You know what I’m done this is too hard this is too much headaches I don’t want to deal with that.” If that’s the case your why isn’t strong enough. Your listing gets hijacked, “Oh my gosh what am I going to do?” Well you are going to fight it then you might see that it’s not going the way that you want it to go and you might have to continually talk to customer support and that’s not fun and if you do that guess what, you might give up after you get that kind of settled or maybe just give up on it. The other thing that might happen is your supplier forgot to add a critical part in your bundle and then you start getting complaints about that. That’s a headache.

[00:13:07] SV: If your why isn’t strong enough you might give up and say, “This is just a business model I don’t want to go after.” Maybe your shipments gets held in customs and you are waiting for it to get there, you are waiting for it to get there, “This is just too hard.” Anything that you do in life is going to have its share of obstacles. We just need to figure out a way to get around those obstacles and to me the best way is to have a really strong why. Now I promise I’m not going to keep going on on this why thing but I think it’s really, really important that you understand that you want to become crystal clear on your why because that will help you move forward through this. If you can get your wife or your spouse on board with the why, maybe you sit down together and you talk about that why, that right there can help you guys help each other. All right. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a little while about how like minded people can help with that as well but when you get that why, man oh man it changes everything at least it did for me and I think it could for you. Alright.

I’m going to give you some exercises that you can do to figure this stuff out as you move through this but I really do want you to understand that the why is really, really powerful. I’m going to share a story with you and the story is when I was twelve years old I think it was twelve, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. I was watching the movie ‘Rocky’. Who has watched Rocky? Raise your hand if you have watched the movie Rocky or say that you have out loud. Say yes if you have. I did a Periscope recently on this and just about everyone on said that they had already seen Rocky and who hasn’t seen Rocky and that type of thing. But when you are watching that movie you are into that movie, at least I was as a kid and I know that a lot of others kids were as well. You are hearing the music rights [da da da ta ta ta ta] “the eye of the tiger” you got it, you are feeling it already. I got you back in that rhythm, in that pump state, you are getting excited.

I’m sitting here and I’m watching Rocky Sly he is looking all big, he is working out in the gym, he’s got trainers and everything. Right. Me and my buddy we used to watch this movie, we used to watch over and over again and we would watch it then we would go working out for the next week. We’d go home and we’d get out those … Remember those cement weights that they had, not the cement weights, the weights that had the plastic and then inside it was sand that was filled really looked like a lot of weight on it but it really wasn’t that much but do you remember them? I just had a vivid picture of them, I can see it in the garage right now and they were funny. Anyway get back on track here, basically we were sitting there working out, we are getting big we’re thinking we are and we had no idea what we were doing but it got us excited.

That’s business, you get excited about the business model. I know a lot of people that I talk to, I talk about Amazon and the business and what I’m doing and they are all, “Wow you can do that? I didn’t know that, that’s awesome. Can you tell me more?” They are excited, they want to know more. The big thing in the beginning is getting excited, that’s one thing but then from there you need to see what that why is. Right. Here is what happened after I would watch Rocky. We would work out for a week, we wouldn’t really see really results because we only gave it a week so then after about a week we’d start to peter out. We would stop working out maybe because we just didn’t see the results. The other thing was it wasn’t really a strong why. Why was I doing that? Why were we doing that me and my buddy? Why were we working out? In my head I’m thinking we wanted to look bigger for maybe the girls maybe on the block and show them our muscles. It’s always about as a kid to have the muscles I’m going to impress the girl, maybe that was my why. Now is that a strong why? Not really.

[00:17:06] SV: Now let’s just say for example that I was in a real fight. Let’s say that I was a little bit older, I wouldn’t want to be in a fight at twelve thirteen years old but let’s just say that I was Rocky, I was a fighter that was going to be going into this big match of mine and my title was on the line but even more importantly my face was on the line or my body was on the line or my brain was on the line. That’s a pretty strong why so I would think that after a week’s time I wouldn’t give up on working out because I know if I stopped working out I’m not going to be as in good shape for this fight, I’m not going to be as sharp, I’m not going to be able to dodge the punches, I’m not going to be able to throw harder punches because my component he is training. That’s like your competition, your competition is out there training every single day. At least the good ones are, those are the ones you should be focusing on. You see where I’m going with this?

If your why is stronger you are going to get up every day and you are going to put in the work because you know if you don’t then what is the alternative? Well, in this case we are talking about getting your face bashed in by maybe Mr. T or maybe we could be talking about having to get up every single day, work for a boss that you don’t like or maybe the job that you are doing you don’t like and you just keep doing it because you have to, because you feel as though you have to. That doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the case because I believe that everyone has a choice but you need to have that why and if that why is, “I want to stay home with my family, I want to be able to go on trips with my family, I don’t want to be away from my family as much and work sixty seventy hours a week”, that’s a pretty strong why because life is just clicking by.

Life is just clicking by and if you don’t get a hold of that, well then life is going to be gone and then you are going to look back and say, “I should have did that, I should have fought a little harder, I should have trained a little harder.” I just wanted to use the Rocky analogy because I’ve always wanted to because I just love that movie but I also wanted to paint the picture that if you have a strong why it will definitely, definitely help push you through those tough times in business especially because that’s what we are talking about here is business.

Now it goes in life too. Let’s talk about weight loss for a second. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight you probably know how it feels when you get excited about maybe watching one of those infomercials on TV and I’m raising my hand I’m one of those guys. I watched, I’ll never forget it, I watched that Insanity from Beach Body I watched that one for probably four or five times before I ended up buying it and I bought it because it was a program, it made me feel as though I followed it, all I had to do is just do what they told me if I followed that I would get the results and guess what, I made the commitment to do it and I did it for sixty days.

And I lost like 18, 20 pounds. I was in the best shape of my life. It worked. If I didn’t have that program maybe, and just I tried to motivate myself in the basement, which I’ve done before  by the way, I might not go through with it. And guess what? I’d start for a week and I’d stop. Then I’d go back to looking myself in the mirror and feeling like a slouch because I didn’t look as in shape as I wanted to. It was just that my why. I knew that my health was kind of slipping on the inside, not just on the outside because as you get older, that’s what you think about. All those things come into my why now and that’s why I try to eat better now. I want to be around longer for my family not just be fit so that I can impress the girls, because I’ve already got my girl, for 22 years now, my wife.

[00:20:47] SV: So I don’t have to worry really about impressing so much but I do have to worry about being here. That’s a different why than when I was younger just wanting to get in shape. I hope that that paints a picture for you to understand that our why is a huge part of our success. And you really need to have yours, so definitely, definitely figure out your why and then from there, you can make it very, very clear as to what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And then when you run into these obstacles, you can move through them.

So bottom line is, do that. Alright. Because most people fail and give up in business because they don’t know their why. Or here’s another reason, they just go after the money. They don’t know what the money’s going to do for them. They just know that if I make more money, my life is going to be better. Right. Or they randomly decide to start a business just from an idea. “I think it would be cool.” Right. Then they have road blocks and then they get frustrated, then they give up and then they go back to normal life. And then they’re depressed and they have low confidence. And then about three months later they are starting to get upset with themselves and then they look to find an easier way to make money.

Then they go through that same cycle again. Right. And they try it. It’s a little bit harder than they thought. They didn’t get the results. They came into roadblocks. Get frustrated. Give up. Boom. Back to their old job or their old life. Depressed, low confidence, and it just keeps getting lower and lower and lower. So you need to be able to set yourself up for success. And the easiest way to do that, I say easiest but it’s not easy. But it will help you get through those tough times if you have a strong why. Now I’m going to share another quick story with you because I think it does illustrate how a why can change your life. Alright. Now, some of you know that when I first started right out of high school I was construction worker. I was a 19 year old kid construction worker. Worked for my father’s business learning a trade. We were basically a construction outfit that would remodel homes and all of that stuff. So I had to learn all the different facets of construction work. How things are done. So I learnt all that. I worked my butt off at 19 years old. I was married at 21 and I had my first daughter when I was 22. Alright.

Now after I had my daughter, things did change for me in my own mind. I’m working 60 plus hours a week so my wife could stay home. We made that a decision too. We wanted her to stay at home. She wanted to. I wanted her to be able to do that. So I had to work more to do that. And I was fortunate enough to be able to work more because some people want to work more but they can’t. So I was fortunate. But I started to feel burn out after four five years, I started feeling the burnout. I also felt defeated because I felt I trapped myself. I locked myself into a career that the only way that I’m going to be able to make more money and be able to get more freedom was to work more hours. That was the only out for me. I didn’t have an education. I didn’t go to college. Again, I don’t feel embarrassed about that because I feel it really did help me really create the path that I am on now and created the person that I am now. Which I wouldn’t trade that for the world because I think I have a ton more experience and knowledge than I hadn’t gone to college than if I had.

[00:24:08] SV: So what I did though is, after I was burned out and I was talking to my wife, we were having a heart to heart. We started searching for a way that we could create a business that could possibly support our why which was our freedom and our family. That’s what we were after. So we had a very, very clear picture because I wasn’t home as much as I wanted to be. I was always leaving before my daughter was up and coming home when she was going to bed. And it was really upsetting to me. That’s what I knew. That’s what I could do. That’s all I could do, I thought. So we really had a heart to heart. We decided to try this new business idea that my wife had which was a photography business.

We knew nothing about photography but we figured we could learn. I knew a little about business and marketing from my father’s business when I was in there. So we ahead and said, “Let’s give it a shot.” And we did that. We found the why. The why first. That’s what came first. Then we started getting creative as far as what business model could we pick that could potentially relieve me from working 60 hours a week. In the beginning we we’re just thinking about supplementing the income. We were just thinking about getting 20 hours back so I could only work 40 hours and not work the extra 20. But then she could do a couple of photography sessions during the week and make up that difference. Right.

What we soon found out by taking action and doing that, that that was starting to grow into something that we could potentially turn into a full time business. So then what we needed to do, and this is the next step in figuring out the next part of this is figuring out the exact amount of money that you would need to leave your job. You need to know that. So this is the second part of this. You have your why and then you need to figure out the exact amount of money to create that freedom lifestyle that you want. Or whatever the goal is. You need to figure that out. So ours at the time, this is going way back, was $100 per client. For ten clients would give us the number we were looking for so basically $1000 a week. It’s about what I was earning for my construction job that I was doing for my father’s business. I was earning about $1000 a week. So that was $4000 a month which was basically what we needed to earn in order for me to cut out of there and then go full time.

We focused on this and we focused on this. And guess what? Within 18 months, we achieved that and we surpassed that. And I left my job from my father’s construction company. By the way, my father was okay with it. He was actually a little bit relieved because he always felt a little bit responsible in that he wanted to make sure that I always had that job. So I did relieve a little bit of stress from him. It definitely worked out for the better but we did this after we figured out our why. Then we figured out what that number was. Then we focused on the numbers as far as getting there. The bottom line is we created that strong why because we knew that we would have hard times. Now, we didn’t know that back then but now that I look at it we definitely followed this system. Because we did have some tough times. It didn’t all of a sudden just we launched our business and then all of a sudden we had our ten clients and they were steady throughout the year. We had dips in the market because we were really busy around the holidays, kind of like fourth quarter in Amazon and then things would dry up for a while.

[00:27:20] SV: So we had to figure out how we could stretch that through the year and also be creative as far as how to get other photography clients throughout the year doing different type of events and doing certain types of photography for other markets. We got creative and we did that. And we build that into a six figure business. So again, I don’t want to bore you with my story but just to understand that everything that you do does come down to having a why and then knowing your numbers. If you know your numbers you can reverse it back. And then if you reverse it back it’s going to make it that much easier for you to understand what you need to do. Alright.

So, let’s move on now to some action steps because I don’t want to just come up here and tell you, “You need to know your why and you need to know your numbers.” I want to sit here and give you action steps. I want to give you exercises that you can do. And I really want you to take some time with this because it’s really really important that you do. It’s important that you become real with it. Some people don’t want to know how much in debt they are. It’s important to get all that out. Put it out. Flush that all out on the paper. What is the number? You need to know the number or else you can’t strive to go after that number. You’re just guessing. You need to know the target. Number one, your action step number one is this; figure out your true why. What is your perfect day? What is your perfect week? Go through. Have fun with that.

Write every single thing down that you would want in your perfect day. Some people would say, “I’d love to just sit on the beach and sip pina coladas.” Let me tell you something that sounds great for a vacation but you’re going to get bored. You want to be able to do stuff that you can do with your family. You also want to be able to do stuff that you feel as though you’re adding value back to the world. At least that’s what I want to do. You want to be able to create a business that you enjoy doing and that you’re excited to work in. So that’s another thing to. You can go out there and make money at just about anything. But you do want to be able to enjoy it.

That’s a whole other topic but really you want to be able to do stuff that has meaning for yourself and for others. So why not make that, especially when you’re first starting, why not make that really solid all the way through. I think it’s really, really important that you do that. But again, a lot of people, “Well I just want to make a million dollars and then just go sit on the beach.” I just don’t think that that’s a plan for success. You don’t have any specifics. You don’t have a why. You don’t have an exact number other than a million dollars and you haven’t even figured out how you’re going to trace that back to how much you need to make per day.    

I think if you do that it makes thing so much more clear. Now, let’s go into step three, action step number three.

[00:30:12] SV: Create a plan and timeline to achieve what you’re going after, that number. You’ve got a three month, six month, a nine month and a twelve month. Those would be the ones that I would shoot for. Alright. Now, number four, just start. Okay. You can’t plan everything. There’s some people out there that have to know if this happens what am I going to do here? If that happens, what am I going to do over here? If that happens, I got to have that. People tell me that I have to have this. Just start. You can’t plan everything, you shouldn’t plan everything, you just need to come up with your plan to get started. Alright. Then you’re going to pivot and then you’re going to adjust the course.

I can’t stress that enough. Just start. That’s why I always talk on Periscope or SnapChat, #juststart.

Number five, this is a big one. Everyone that’s listening right now can do this. Surround yourself with like-minded people. Surround yourself with like-minded people because if you’re not going to surround yourself with like-minded people you’re not going to strive to do better. I always want to. Always want to surround myself with people that are smarter than me. I also want to surround myself with people that are hungry, not hungry like going to eat a Big Mac, but hungry so they want to go out and they want to keep building their businesses or they want to keep pushing the bar a little bit. That’s going to help push me. I’ve always told my son who’s a pretty good athlete, I’ve said, “Listen, you don’t want to be the best kid on the team always. You want to be the kid that isn’t the best player so this way here you can strive to be the best player. It’s going to push you to limits that you didn’t know existed.”

It’s the same thing with working out. Right. If you think that you can do this certain weight and then you start to do it and that’s all you allow yourself to do, that’s what you’re going to do. If you expand yourself and you say, “You know what, I’m going to expand my weight, I haven’t done this weight but I’m going to try it and try to instead of 10 I’m going to try five.” When you do that, you surprise yourself. I’ve done this with my son. Him and I work out and he’s always trying to get his ten or twelve reps and I’m like for the fourth set that we’re doing this, if you’re getting ten to twelve, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. That last set you should be getting five to six max. That means that you’re pushing your muscle to the max.

It’s the same thing in business or in life. Surround yourself with like-minded people and that right there, I’m telling you can really help you. Again, you’re listening to this, you have access to the Facebook group, if you are at a local meet-up you have people there, if you have maybe a conference that you’re attending, you have that there. Connect with people and really surround yourself with like-minded people that are also wanting to build and create their own business to have. Again, a similar outlook would be nice to be able to say, “I want to go out there and create freedom lifestyle business for myself right?” You want people that are kind of on the same page with that as well. Alright.

[00:33:20] SV: The next thing I want to discuss is removing excuses okay? If I can do this, I promise you, promise you, that you can do it too. I have no college degree, actually I have no experience at all in college. I have never even spent a day in college, I mean I might’ve visited a college but I never went there. It wasn’t really a big thing when I was growing up with my family, my father came from a farming community, so they didn’t really… You are in eighth grade you were put on the farm. My father was lucky enough to go to 12th grade and graduate and then he went into the military but his brothers and sisters, a lot of them, they only went to eighth grade it’s all that was required and then they just went on and worked on the farm right?

It wasn’t something that was instilled in me and I’m really glad that it wasn’t, to be honest with you because it really did build my character, it also gave me the entrepreneurial bug if you will because I love having the control of my own destiny and if someone had to tell me how much I was going to get for a raise that would really bother me. I had that happen once, I was working for a cable company and they told me I was going to get a $0.10 raise everyone else was doing not as good work and I was doing good work but it didn’t matter we were all going to get $0.10, that kills me.

I don’t ever want to have someone telling me my work ethic should determine how much I get paid, that’s something that you can have as well. I’m also bad with direction guys. I’m terrible with directions and again it’s funny because my wife always tells me, “You’re so smart.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I can’t find my way from here to there unless I have a GPS, I can’t remember even if I have been there six times.” I lose direction, so I’m terrible with directions and just so you know if we go somewhere together, I’m going to leave it up to you to get us there all right?

I had bad grades in school, I was terrible at history, I was good at math, but I was terrible at history. English I was so-so, science not good at all. I believe it was because I just wasn’t interested in that, I wasn’t interested in learning that, I wish I could’ve been a little bit more just so that I could have expanded my mind in that sense. The only thing I wish, the only thing I wish that I would’ve done in high school was actually taking a typing class because right now I’m a terrible typer and I believe if I was a better type I wouldn’t mind typing as much. Again little side note there for you, but bottom line is this guys, I’m a regular guy, nothing special. I do have one superpower though, one superpower, but I think you have it as well, and I’m going to tell you what that is right now okay?

Do you know what it is, do you know what my superpower is and maybe what you’re superpower could be? Well this is what it is, it’s the ability to take action and create your own lifestyle that you want, that is a superpower, taking action. If someone asks you, “Hey, what’s your superpower?” You’re like, “I take action, I don’t just learn, I apply and I take action and I’m proud of that.”

[00:36:26] SV: I’m not concerned so much with the consequences, I just want to go out there and execute, yes I know I’m going to make mistakes, yes I know that everything I do isn’t going to work, I understand that, and it has been happening to me since I was 19 years old when I entered the workforce. It’s been happening but it’s created the path to get me to where I am. I want you to ask yourself right now, “Do you have a superpower? Is it the taking action that superpower?” If not, you should adopt it now. Go ahead and grab it because it can be yours, you can have it, so definitely get that superpower working because going to allow you to do the things that you need to do to move forward in this.

Again, I have to say there’s some people out there right now listening to this that being your own boss isn’t easy for you and it’s scary to you because now there’s no one telling you what to do. You want to be told, “Go here, go there, do this, do that and just leave at the end of the day.” You know what, if that is you then recognize that now just understand that that’s what you’re cut out to do and that’s fine. But me personally, I love being my own boss because I can create my own schedules again I am diligent on that but you have to be, all right? Again, it’s up to you, I do believe it’s a choice.

Now, I just want to do a little quick exercise here. I want to do a quick exercise, like I said I don’t just want to appear and talk about your why, and your dear freedom numbers that you’re to be able to get and all that stuff. I think that’s cool but I want to give you a real example on how this could look. Let’s kind of do this exercise together here right now. There’s a guy by the name of Bob, he’s 36 years old, he’s working Monday through Saturday 7 AM to 6 PM as a construction worker. Kind of similar to me, he has been married to his wife for 13 years and they have three kids, and his wife by the way, her name is Mary, and by the way this is just fictitious I’m just making this up, I figured it would be cool to come up with an avatar of who this person is because it’s very similar to a guy like me.

He’s been married to his wife for 13 years, they have three kids. He only sees them at night for a few hours if he’s lucky and keep in mind, working those hours, and he’s got to keep the yard up, got to mow the lawn, he’s got to fix something if it breaks around the house, also has to go maybe on the weekend to a soccer game. There’s still things that have to be done on his off time but again he’s working his butt off. Now he makes $50,000 per year, and he wants to replace his income and spend more time with his family. Do you see that picture? You need to get your picture, you need to see your picture and exactly what you have in your life right now and what is available to you okay? Now we know the amount that he is making so you need to know the amount that you’re making of course, you also need to know how much time you have. He right now doesn’t have a lot of time, he’s working 60 hours a week.

[00:39:20] SV: If we took those numbers, we took $50,000, that’s what he’s making per year okay and we can divide by 365 days that gives us $137 per day or $4,110 per month that’s it broken down really, really simply. Like I said in school, I loved math, I loved basic math I didn’t like getting into trig and all that stuff. The basic math, and mathematics, and economics and stuff, I loved that stuff in school. This is easy, $50,000 divided by 365 days equals $137 per day or $4,110 per month. Now we know exactly what Bob needs to earn per day if he wants to leave his job. We have a clear picture, we have a clear goal, we also know that he has three kids and we also know that he doesn’t get time to spend with them. We know how much time he has available, all that stuff, so we’re very, very clear.

We could even get deeper than this too, if we want to and I think you should, I think you should get into that perfect day thing that we talked about. Let’s move on with this exercise okay? Again, we know that he makes exactly 50,000 and we know what he needs to leave his job. There’s another option here for Bob. Let’s say that Bob says, “You know what? I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do his right out of the gate. I want to test this whole thing and maybe just do this part-time, maybe what I could do is still work my 40 hours week, but maybe I could free up 20 hours okay. What I’ll do is, I’ll do this part-time and will see if I can get some traction and if I do that I might go ahead and turn it into a full-time gig right?”

There’s different things, there’s different options here for Bob, and there’s different options for you, you just have to figure out what your options are. Again, you need to figure out what that is and then figure out your plan okay? You need to also ask yourself questions, it’s so powerful to ask yourself questions because your brain will work very, very hard to figure out the answer, it’s crazy. Ask yourself questions, your brain will help to find the answer for you, ask questions, you will get answers. Alright.

Now let’s take the Amazon business model for example, we want to give an example, of course we’re talking about Amazon business all the time. Let’s use that as our business model. Now let’s say that Bob is going to need to spend two hours a day or he’s going to commit to two hours a day, well where is he going to get those two hours a day? I get a lot of people that say, “Scott, I don’t have a lot of time, how do I find time to build this business? How much time am I going to need?” Well if you figure two hours a day, especially in the beginning until you get rolling here that should be enough time. You could go an hour a day, might take you a little bit longer, but let’s just say two hours per day all right? But you need, you need to make a commitment. Maybe it’s in the mornings, maybe it’s at night okay?

[00:42:07] SV: Now for me personally, if I have that schedule it would probably be at night, I’d wait for the kids to go to bed and then I would probably work from 9 to let’s say 11, maybe 12 and then I’d get up early. Little side note, when I was working my construction job, I was only at the time probably 24 or 25, I was building my house that we lived in, a big house probably about 2800 ft.² I built that at night after I would get done working my 60+ hour a week job and I would work Sundays. I would be up till 1 o’clock in the morning and get back up at like 5:30 then I’d go to work, come back home, did for a very long time. I did it for 11 months.

Again, it does come down to your work ethic, it comes down to your hustle, comes down to your why and how bad you want it. That why for me on the house was I wanted to build my own house, so I can have my family live in the house. I’d save a lot of money by building it, that was my why, pretty strong why. Once you start a house you really need to finish it, so there’s some repercussions there as well if I didn’t. Okay, so you need to figure out that schedule you’re going to be able to commit to, it’s like a workout schedule. You’re going to do an hour in the morning, an hour at night or maybe two hours a night whatever it is, you need to commit to it.

The next part of this is you need to give yourself goals, so what are the goals and timelines that you can create for yourself? If it was me and I was Bob I would be thinking this, goal number one is I want to start with $100 per day, I want to be able to make $100 per day towards my goal of $137 per day because I know that I did $100 per day, it would prove that I could do this, it would validate and it would teach me along the way because a lot of times people don’t realize you’re learning as you’re doing, as you’re doing you’re learning. Then from there, you’re going to be able to make changes the next time you launch a product or whatever else you’re doing in your business.

Goal number one would be $100 per day to start. Now there’s something that I’ve talked about publicly on my podcast, I’ve done workshops, I’ve taught this thing called the 10 x 10 x 1 strategy, and what this basically is, is if you have one product that does $10 profit per unit per product and you sell 10 of those a day that’s $100 per day okay? 10 x 10 x 1, again I get a lot of people last-minute really explained that. One more time, it’s $10 profit ,10 units sold per day and that’s one product so 10 x 10 x 1 that’s $100 per day and if you were to calculate over 30 days that’s $3000 a month. It’s not our $4110 per month but it’s darn close right? Again it’s a target for me to shoot for and it’s totally doable all right?

[00:44:49] SV: You need to create that plan or the milestones, this way here you can strive towards it. Now what you want to do, is you want to put that on a timeline and then you want to structure all of the different steps it’s going to take to get from point A to point B or point Z however you want to look at it. If we just took and put ourselves on the left side of a timeline. If you have the ability right now to draw this out, this is what it would look like. If you took a piece of paper you turned it horizontally and put a little stick figure on the left-hand side, you drew a line all the way to the other side of that page and you put another stick figure over there, like you traveled from one end to the other, and let’s say on the left side you’ve got a frowned face and on the right side you have a happy face because that means that you met your goal.

What you do then is you would put little lines of the different things inside of that timeline that you’re going to be able to execute. You see where I’m going, I’m painting this picture for you, that you have a timeline, an actual timeline where you have yourself starting on the left and then moving through to the right. Maybe the very first part of this is going to be product research. If we’re talking about private labeling which again, this can work for any different goal that you’re going after but let’s just use this as a real example, let’s see where we’re private labeling.

Our first step is product research, it’s our very first step. Now there’s different things that happen inside the product research, we’re not going to break down that granular, but we’re going to say, right now product research until we move past product research we’re not going to move on to the next thing. What you might want to do though is map this whole thing out before you get started so let’s just walk through these real quick, as far as how this would look if you were to do this on a 90 day timeline.

First step, product research then you would move to another little line in your timeline and say the next thing would be product sourcing and then you move over a little bit, put another line in and you say the next step is product samples, and then the next step would be product ordered, and the next step will be listing created, and then the next step will be product sent to Amazon, and then the next step will be run promotion, the next step would be start PPC, and then the next step would be optimizing tweak.

There’s different things inside of each of those but really we just need to put out, to really label the ones in an order that we can go ahead and check them off, and then inside of those you can have a list inside the product research that’s going to have different checkpoints to that as well but to keep this thing simple, just imagine that you have that timeline with all of those different things on the timeline in order that they need to be done. Remember how I talked about people overcomplicating things. Well this happens right? Where you’re looking at where you are right now in the very beginning but you see Pay Per Click in and towards the end you’re like, “I am going to start learning about Pay Per Click, Amazon Pay Per Click,” or “I’m going to start learning about that. Or I’m going to start thinking about optimizing and tweaking.” No, you don’t go there yet, you only stay on the timeline where you are, you can’t move ahead until you get this one thing done. Really, really understand and grasp that concept. I’m telling you it’s a game changer.

[00:47:54] SV: It also eliminates any distraction that you might have because you’re only going to focus on these particular things inside of the timeline. As you move through you’re going to be able to check these things off, also going back to the hour limit your use of a couple hours well for that couple hours that you have available, you’re only focusing on product research. Do you know much more you can get done if you’re just focusing on one thing versus focusing on research, how to order a product, your samples, your supplier, your listing created, all that stuff that you can’t even do yet until you get the product picked.

Do you see how you can be scattered and the two hours can turn into not a lot being done. Again need to really, really think about how this works and really, really do this. I think it’s going to help you immensely and then once you get done with that timeline then you can just go back and rinse and repeat, okay, because you have been through that process but guess what? You’re probably going to learn a lot through that process so things are going to run a little bit smoother next time because you learned from some things that you did, that I couldn’t even tell were going to happen because for years, your specific product, it might be different than what I’m going after because while it’s a different product, a different category, maybe you got ungated in Amazon that I didn’t have to, I can’t give you the step-by-step for that, you got to learn that as you go.

Again it gets easier as you do it but you just lay out the 90-day timelines and then you check them off your list as you go through these and then rinse and repeat and you’re going to learn, like I said, you’re going to learn along the process and it’s going to help you eliminate any noise. Don’t worry about all the other stuff that you might be hearing about people saying, “Oh, you’re going to build a funnel and get Facebook ad traffic over here, and then you’re going to put them into a sequence, and you’re going to do an autoresponder, all the stuff.” You’re like, “Oh my gosh, all the stuff that I can do but I guess I’m not going to do anything because I just don’t know what to do.”

But if you can come up with a plan like this, I’m telling you, you will execute, you will take action and then you’ll start getting results. Only focus on these steps in your plan and do it daily, make a commitment and stick to it all right. I want to share with you a book that I have read a couple times now and actually I didn’t read it honestly, I listened to the audio book. One other little side note on me, I don’t like reading much, it’s just hard for me, again I’m distracted a lot by my thoughts in my head in that I guess part of the entrepreneurial problem that a lot of people face is because you’re always thinking. But with audio it really helps me because I can be in the car and not distracted and just listening and driving on so anyway Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. It’s all about doing small things consistently every day to build momentum and get results. That’s what it’s about.

[00:50:44] SV: For example, like a weight loss example, and he’s used this, it’s like, if you commit to cutting out just one bad thing from your diet every day like let’s say for example soda, you do that  for a period of time you’re going to see results. They will be slow and steady but a lot of people just want to go after, “Okay, well if I just stop eating for three days and you lose a bunch away,” Yeah but you’re going to feel like crap, you’re going to start doubting this thing, you hate it and you’re going to give up and you’re going to go back to your old habits. If you can commit to something you know that you can do and then just slowly add to it, it’s so much more powerful and he totally breaks everything down inside of this book, The Compound Effect Darren Hardy, I love it, I recommend it to anyone that I can and I think that it would be a great read or a listen for you definitely, definitely huge impact on my life and on my business.

He even talks about surround yourself with like-minded people and how they’re like dirty water as far as like people that are negative energy, they just bring you down, the morale and all that stuff. Really, really good lessons there as well. Just to kind of bring it back to the weight loss example, now if you did it like where you are doing something like the cutting soda back, you won’t see results in a week right but you will after a month. It kind of goes back to that whole thing of slow and steady wins the race, slow and steady, slow and steady. It’s like a runner, if you’re running and you just go out of the gate and you sprint and you’re doing a 10 mile race, you’re probably going to peter out but if you slowly pace yourself, you’re going to get there at the end and you’re probably going to win the race. Alright.

The other thing I want to mention here is you want to be learning and growing every single day. All right learn and grow every day, that doesn’t mean learn and grow on everything, learn what you need to learn and then you’ll grow from there every day naturally. Learn what you need to learn and then you can grow. You can learn by doing,  not just consuming. That’s another huge thing that I want to say here is that when you do something you learn from it you see what happens it’s like a reaction, you get a reaction from it without whether it’s good or bad right. You want to be able to take all the information from a conference or a podcast or whatever you’re consuming, you want to take all of that information and take what you need to take from that and apply just do it.

[00:53:07] SV: Take that thing that you’re learning about and that you know that you can apply to what you’re working on and then do it, and then see what happens. Now just to wrap things up here I want to give you some advice that was given to me by people that I look up to. Now number one, you guys have probably heard of Pat Flynn, from Smart Passive Income, I’ve been following Pat for a very long time, I think he’s a  standup guy and I think he’s doing a  great thing in the world, just from giving so much and just being an all-around great guy, he’s a family guy so again I definitely jell with Pat, but he mentioned something at a podcast movement and a conference that I attended and he mention one thing there that I’ve heard other people say but he kind of said it in a way that resonated with me so I want to share that with you and that was, “Just in time learning.”

I’ve kind of alluded to that where you’re only want to be learning stuff as you need to but like he said, if you try to really focus on too many things, you won’t be able to focus on anything. Only focus on what you need to learn, when you need to learn it. After you decide on your plan and your goals, learn what you need to know now, not what you need to learn a month from now or six months from now, learn what you need to know now. Just in time learning. And the other thing I wanted to share with you which made a huge impact on my life and also my family’s life because now my kids all know this it’s something called CANI and CANI C-A-N-I which was taught to me by Tony Robbins and he said this thing called CANI and I had no idea what it was but it made total sense and I shared it with my kids and all my kids know it even my youngest, my eight-year-old daughter and it’s basically an abbreviation for Constant And Never-ending Improvement, Constant And Never-ending Improvement.

He said, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” You always want to be learning and surrounding yourself with smarter people than you so you can always be growing, like I said, you can sit there and say all I would take $1 million just sit on the beach for the rest of my life. That would get boring, I know some of you are saying, “I would love that.” Maybe for you but for me personally that’s not what I’m after, I want to travel, I want to be able to see different people, I want to meet people, I want to see what they’re up to, I want to see how they are impacting the world, I want to help impact the world, I want to be able to spend more time with my family, I want to be able to do things that make me feel whole. In this way here I can give back, I think that’s huge and that’s what we all would want. But just understand that if you’re not growing you’re dying.

[00:55:55] SV: You always want to be able to grow and think about that, have you ever said to yourself, “Once I get this one project done, I’m going to call it quits, I’m good,” I’ve done that when I built my house. I’m like, “Soon as I get that done, I don’t care if the driveway doesn’t get finished for three years I’m done,” I get everything else done, the driveway sitting there all crushed down, guess what? I want to get that thing paved because it’s bothering me. I get it paved, and then after I get it paved guess what? I want to put new shrubs in, I want to go ahead and I want to cut these three trees down because their shading this certain area, there’s always something that you’re going to want to do so don’t ever think that you’re done because there’s always going to be something else.

The reason it is good always need that almost like that thing to shoot for, that thing to strive for, it helps us grow and as people we want to grow, we want to grow, we want to learn, we want to, so just embrace it. That’s why CANI to me is really important and I want to thank Tony Robbins out there, and just say publicly that that really did make an impact on my life because I always revert back to that constant and never-ending improvement and when you surround yourself with people that are smarter than you, or that are like-minded it definitely, definitely helps you grow and always improve your life, your business, anything else that you’re working on.

Let’s go ahead and do a quick little recap here, give you some action steps again, number one figure out your true why, your perfect day. Two, figure out what your freedom lifestyle money goals are. Three, create your plan and timelines to achieve three-month six-month nine-month and 12 month goals. Four, just start, you can’t plan everything and don’t try to, pivot and adjust the course. Five, surround yourself with like-minded people like you are today on this podcast or in the Facebook group or at the conference wherever you are surround yourself with like-minded people. It is so very powerful and to prove that point, I want to share a story with you. Since I’ve started my Amazon business and how relationships in taking action has helped me meet some really awesome people and also created opportunities.

Chris Schafer is a good friend of mine now I met him through a Facebook group before I even had a podcast, before I even had a Facebook group, before I was even the amazing seller podcast Scott, before any of that was even there I met Chris. We actually reached out to each other through a Facebook group, so again I would recommend to you guys if you’re in a Facebook group that’s with like-minded people, reach out to people, private message people that you think that you would jell with and reach out and say, “Hey, would you want to meet maybe once a month and we can discuss our businesses, and maybe we’re on a similar level or maybe one’s a little higher than the other or vice versa?” You hit it off.

[00:58:34] SV: I did that with Chris, him and I were conversing inside of this Facebook group and then I reached out to him and said, “Hey, would you want to set up a mastermind just you and maybe 4, 5 other people?” “Yeah, all right cool.” and we’ve done that. Since then we’ve become really, really good friends, he’s helped me in my business, I’ve helped him in his business now, since I’ve had him on the podcast and he’s introduced me to other cool people and he’s just had an awesome guy that I would never would’ve met if I didn’t connect myself with like-minded people, so again the power of like-minded people and taking action.

Another example is Danny Brewer, he’s a good friend of mine we call him Danny No-BS Brewer. He’s just a piece of work, he’s just  an awesome guy because he’s just again no BS, he’s just going to get it done, he’s a take action kind of guy, that’s why we really jell but I met him by having the podcast. I had a podcast, started it and took action again by the way, started the podcast and he reached out to me, “He said, Hey, we’re very similar, you want to just talk someday the phone and we talked on the phone and didn’t even mention having him on my podcast or anything and maybe a month or two later I decided to have him come on and talk about his story and now we’re great friends.

Again because of the podcast because I took action, I met a guy like Danny Brewer. Danny’s introduced me to some connections and I’ve done the same and again it’s one of those things that you can’t put a price tag on taking action and getting these connections. Just because I started the Amazon business and then I started the podcast and I’ve connected myself with other like-minded people, it’s opened up more opportunities for me. Actually more opportunities than I can even take advantage of, it’s introduced partnerships, it’s done just a whole bunch of things but it’s all because I took action.

Now, I’m going to turn it around to you. Now it’s your turn to take action, it’s your turn to create your own freedom lifestyle that you deserve, and I’m going to leave it at that okay? It’s totally up to you I believe that it’s a choice as to what we want to do in life, don’t feel as though you have to do something because you feel as though you have to do something. You need to make that decision and understand your why and then understand how you’re going to do it and then just create that plan, execute and take action.

That is it, that is going to wrap up this presentation for how to simplify the process and take action and just get it done. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this, I hope that you got value from this. I know that going through this myself really did kind of make it real for me. I wrote this whole thing down because like I said I’m presenting this particular keynote and I wanted to go through and work out the kinks I think I found a couple spots I might rearrange some things but again the concept is there, the idea is there, and my message is there and I hope that you understand that I really do believe that if you create your why and if you create your plan and you take action, you’ve got pretty good chance to create the life that you want.

[01:01:35] SV: I just want to say thanks again for everyone for listening, for sending in your emails and your comments, and your iTunes reviews and just making this podcast a great platform for me to be able to go out there and connect with people like you. I just want to say again 200 episodes and I’m looking forward to doing another 200, I really enjoy this. I’m looking forward to meeting so many more of you in person one day, whether it’s at the Denver event or whether it’s in an upcoming event or a conference, I would love to shake your hand and get to know you a little bit better as well.

That’s it guys, that’s going to wrap it up. Remember, I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to, come on, say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, you got to know what I’m going to say by now, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]
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[INTRODUCTION]

…your Amazon listing, all right? I know you think you do and I did too until you learned that actually Amazon owns that listing because you put it on their property, you’re creating a listing in their catalog.

As long as you are the brand owner which is fine, then you’re the only one that should be able to sell that on your listing. Now here’s the thing, let’s say someone buys your product and let’s say three years down the line they want to resell it. They can resell that under your listing. Now it would have to be used or if they’ve never opened it then they can sell it as new. Technically, that’s why Amazon wants that ability to do that because now other people that want to sell that can, on the same listing, because it’s the same brand. It’s like if you bought something that was Nike and you wanted to sell on their particular item listing, you could do that as long as it’s the same one and it’s not counterfeit so it’s okay to do that.

Now, the problem is people are starting to see success with a listing and then what they’re doing is they’re jumping on a listing and they’re creating a counterfeit one. Okay. They’re creating one that it might look just like it or maybe they got it from a similar supplier and now what they’re doing is they’re just jumping on there.

They’re really cutting in line in a sense to where they’re taking over a listing by winning the buy box and for those of you who don’t know by winning the buy box means that the first option that they’ll have is buy through them if they’re winning it and the way to win that buy box usually is by price. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail there about the hijack we’ve done other episodes on that will leave that on the show notes, but I invited on John Havre who actually has been battling this but he has been very successful, he has got about 100% success rate with getting rid of these hijackers.

He’s also, after his wife kind of figured out how to do it, he’s also came up with a solution which he’s going to share with us today and talk a little bit about and he’s also going to talk about how he has recently started to go down the road of selling his Amazon business and he’s actually looking to build and sell these, he’s not looking to hold on to them so we’re not going to talk about that as well. Just wanted to say that I’m really excited to have John back on, he was on episode 158 we talked about brand registry and how to build a website for that and authority websites and all of that so if you’re interested in that you’re going to want to check out episode 158.

Again I’ll leave these in the show notes. We’re also going to have the transcripts to this episode as well, we include the transcripts now with all the episodes. You’re going to want to head over to theamazingseller.com/201 to get all the show notes and the transcripts to this episode. I’m going to stop talking now because John and I have a really great conversation talking about hijacking, how he was able to come up with this system to really get rid of them and also monitor them so now his wife can get sleep because she was up throughout the night with their newborn baby but she was also checking their listing and it was just becoming a hassle but they figured it out so he’s going to share that with us.

Again this is John Havre and he’s going to explain exactly what he’s doing to get rid of these hijackers and hopefully it can help you so enjoy this interview that I did with John Havre.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:03:52] SV: Hey John what’s up my friend how’s it going my man?

[00:03:55] JH: Yeah, really good Scott, happy to be back on here and always happy to be chatting with you.

[00:04:02] SV: Yeah. I’m excited to have you back. A lot’s happened. You were on episode 158 and a lot’s happened since in your business and in my businesses and the podcast and all that stuff but really looking forward to catch up with you because lots happened.

[00:04:17] JH: Yeah it’s been continued to be a very, very wild ride and it’s a fun business.

[00:04:22] SV: Yeah it is a fun business but what we’re going to talk about today is something that isn’t too fun and that is hijacking and I really want to hear how you started, well not how you found out because you found out when it happened to you, kind of how you figured out a way to fend off these hijackers and then we can also talk a little bit about this cool software that you created for yourself and now that you’re going to be making it available here very, very soon. Why don’t you lead us through how you got hijacked and then from there what you did to take care of that and then also fend them off.

[00:05:00] JH: Yeah. Sure thing. I started relatively recently within FBA. I started selling on September on FBA business in September and then I put the idea to building it up to selling it and that sale was going through and it almost didn’t go through due to hijackers and I’ll try not to swear on here but it is an incredible pissoff when you get hijacked. You’re trying to build a business to support your family, add value with a decent product and then you get hijacked, man does it really piss-

[00:05:38] SV: Takes the wind off your sail that’s for sure.

[00:05:43] JH: Yeah and so what had occurred was going through the sale process and being hijacked and with that hanging over I was very scared that that sale wouldn’t sell and that the FBA business wasn’t going to happen.

[00:05:56] SV: Wait a minute let’s cut in here real quick because some people are saying like what are you talking about selling. Like you’re actually in the process right now of selling that FBA business right?

[00:06:06] JH: Yeah that’s correct,

[00:06:07] SV: Let’s lead people again a little bit to maybe people that are tuning in didn’t hear the last time of how you acquired your FBA business, why don’t you lead people real quick on how you actually did that, you don’t have to go into great detail but just how you did that, how you got it running, you started making a profit and now you’re selling it.

[00:06:25] JH: Sure thing, yeah so I had an affiliate website where I had been driving people to Amazon, using that traffic built my own private labeled FBA business off of the back of that traffic and then packaged both the website plus the FBA brand together and now we’re going through the process of closing on May 1st with the sale of that business. Nice little kind of multiple six figure price tag on it, a very nice little business sale that’s in the works.

[00:07:02] SV: That’s awesome and congratulations to you too by the way. That’s an awesome strategy and to kind of wrap it up for people to and to really wrap their heads around how that looks. It’s like you found a website that was already generating some traffic driving people to products on Amazon but as an Amazon affiliate so very low commission maybe 6-8% somewhere in that range and then from there you decided to switch out those products with your own products and then start building your own brand.

You’re getting external traffic and you’re getting Amazon traffic and then from there. Once you were able to get that up and running now you said, ”Hey does anybody want to buy this?” And then be able to really get a multiple return on that really, really nice return. For some people listening this could be a business model on itself. I mean if you go out there and find these websites and then convert them to a private labeling business and then sell that?

[00:07:54] JH: Yeah.

[00:07:54] SV: And that’s kind of your plan moving forward right?

[00:07:57] JH: Exactly my plan. Yeah and then right back to the hijacking, let me first start with what is the hijacking. We found out that someone had been on our listing, selling what we can only assume was a counterfeit lower quality product which would hurt us from both losing the sales but also get terrible reviews because they were buying a crappy product that were taking four weeks to get there. What hijacking is, is when someone claims that they have the same product for sale and jumps on your listing often at a lower price and then they could win the buy box and start stealing sales away from you with a crappier product. It really hurts the business both from a reviews plus loss of sales and we had resorted to some pretty extreme measures of fighting them off and it was tearing up at my wife’s sanity with working on it every hour of the night kind of thing.

[00:09:01] SV: I can imagine and I’ve only had a touch of this happen to me on a couple of occasions, luckily I was able to fend them off with a little cease and desist letter that I was able to send and they did jump off but it was kind of scary because actually one time my pictures were changed so they went in and started to kind of edit the listing itself which kind of was scary but then I went in and I kind of changed everything back but to make a long story short, it’s not fun and it’s scary and you kind of went about it pretty aggressive way as far as getting them off. Let me ask you what could someone do before, now that you know what you know, what could someone do to prevent this from even happening if it can be done at all?

[00:09:49] JH: Yeah. Absolutely and I know you say it, anyone that… If you focus on being successful on Amazon, you will be successful on Amazon. This is just one of the bumps on the road. I know you say it all the time and I fully agree. What people can do up front is to help hijack-proof their listing is have a customized product or create some kind of unique bundles, not as easy as saying, ”I can find that exact product on Alibaba.” That’s one and the second piece is getting set up with brand registry so having your website and to having your product correctly branded so that you can set up brand registry. There’s a bunch of other stuff that you can do but really if you do those two things, you’re setting yourself up to be in a pretty good position.

[00:10:43] SV: Let’s talk a little bit about brand registry because I know that that doesn’t fully I guess prevent it from happening it is to make it harder in a sense when you go to now to prove that you are the, I don’t want to say, I guess I should say, like the legal seller. You’re the one with the rights to sell that particular product because you’ve brand registered it and whenever you brand registry or you enter brand registry, you also register your products as underneath that brand so first thing you need is a website right? I mean that’s the first thing that you need. Talk a little bit about the brand registry process, just quickly to kind of get people caught up in how that works.

[00:11:20] JH: Sure, so what the brand registry process does is that, you apply to Amazon to say that I am the manufacturer of this private label brand and through having a decent website plus having images with your branding on the product they say, “We agree, you are the owner of this brand,” and they will register that brand under your user ID. It won’t stop people from jumping on your listing in the short term but it will mean that you do have the legal sort of backing within Amazon to fight them off over the long term. If your initial strategy is getting them off your listing has been unsuccessful, at least you’re in a strong position to be able to get them off over the longer term.

[00:12:08] SV: Yeah absolutely, and actually in episode 158, the episode that you were on, we talked about building a branded website, basic one all the way to an authority website. Anyone that’s listening that doesn’t understand what’s the authority website or your own website to really build out your content. That’s really what it is, you’re building your brand using a website and really as you grow you’ll want that but in the beginning you’ll want that basic website just to do the brand registry, and I know that you have a service also that helps with that, you’ve got some people on your team that actually do that now and they can find out more about that…. Head over to episode 158 is what I would say to do and you’ll find all of the resources there or on the show notes to this episode as well and we’ll go ahead and give you all of those resources for that. Yeah, really when you’re building out just a basic website though just again what is needed in that website just to give people just a quick glimpse of what that looks like.

[00:13:08] JH: It can be as simple as a one page website that has pictures of your product with your branding on it and some description of that product and then in an ideal world also includes some of your UPC codes with your skew numbers and that really helps with the brand registry process.

[00:13:28] SV: Okay, okay. I didn’t have much of a problem with it. Took me a couple of days.

[00:13:32] JH: Yeah and if there’s a bunch of, we won’t delve again into too much details, but there’s a bunch of resources at brandbuilders.io that people can go over and check out if they want to do it themselves or get the team to do it.

[00:13:48] SV: Yeah. Awesome I appreciate that. I’ve said the publicly I’ve hired your team to actually build out our authority website for the one brand and it’s been phenomenal, we’re slowly starting to get some traffic and it definitely is some good quality content so I’m definitely a raving fan. Okay, now let’s just say that we’ve done those things we think we’re protected and boom,  out of nowhere we get hijacked. What’s the first step, what does John do, what’s the first step?

[00:14:16] JH: Take a breath and not throw anything at the wall but no, it is an unfortunate part of the business. The very first step to do is to get notified. Doesn’t do you any good if you don’t know and that’s really where, we’ll talk about listing, but that’s really where that tool that I had built came in to help. The key is to get notified as soon as possible that there’s another seller on your listing.

[00:14:47] SV: How were you getting notified before you had come up with some type of solution?

[00:14:51] JH: Yeah. That’s where my wife’s sanity was starting to wane. We have a newborn and so when she was getting up in the middle of the night, when we’re getting hijacked plus going through the sales process it’s like, ”Holy crap, if we don’t solve this hijacking problem this is going to derail the sale process.” And so she resorted to tracking throughout the night whenever she was getting up to take care of the little one or whenever she was just staring, she was starting to check all the time.

[00:15:21] SV: Yeah. I get that and you’ve got a couple of different reasons why you need to keep on checking that. Number one, like you said you don’t want a hijacker because your sales are going to be lost and then what’s that going to do is it’s going to affect the sale that you’re going through right now with the person who’s purchasing the business.

[00:15:33] JH: Yeah exactly. Every dollar profit is worth much more when you go through the sale process because it’s been multiplied out with the multiple so each dollar was the lost profit was hurting. Getting notified was the pinpoint that we solved so now we simply get, as soon as it happens with minutes of it happening we’ve got a text saying that there’s a potential hijacker on the listing.

[00:15:59] SV: Okay. Now what happens though… Let’s say you didn’t get that alert but let’s say that your wife woke up in the middle of the night, and went out and checked and she found out there was a hijacker what was her first initial thing other than want to reach into the computer and strangle someone, what was the first action step?

[00:16:19] JH: The first action step is a quick email so the general strategy is rapidly escalating aggressiveness to the hijacker gets them off your listing quickly. That first email it doesn’t need to be anything complicated, whether it’s a cease and desist letter or whether it’s just a simple kind of one paragraph email saying, “You’re in violation of Amazon’s terms and you’re selling counterfeit products,” and then saying “You have x amount of time to get your products out off of this ASIN numbers or else you’ll be getting a letter from our lawyer.”

[00:17:01] SV: Okay, okay that’s simple, basic, right? Let’s say that doesn’t work?

[00:17:06] JH: 12 hours later follow up with a cease and desist letter, and then within 24 hours out of 15 hijackings we’ve had 100% success rate that they’ve…

[00:17:16] SV: Wow, nice. Really, so really just those two steps?

[00:17:20] JH: Yeah, and if someone’s still there after 24 hours, we’ll follow up again and just continue aggressive following up. There is the joke, two guys are crossing a river they get to the other side, get their shoes off and run into a bear and they say “oh crap”. The one guys starts putting on the shoes and the other guy asks him, ”Why are you putting on the shoes are you going to outrun the bear?” And he says, ”No I just need to outrun you.”

[00:17:46] SV: That’s right.

[00:17:50] JH: That’s the same kind of logic that these hijackers are applying. They’re looking for the soft targets and as soon as they jump on your listing, if you add a note in their inbox within 30 minutes or less that, ”get off my listing or lawyers will follow up.” That’s rare for them and so they’re saying, ”Let’s go find an easier target, this guy’s clearly not messing around.”

[00:18:17] SV: I think that’s important, I mean speed. If you can get that done like really soon it’s like you’re watching or you have someone on your team or in your business that is looking out for people that are counterfeiting your product and by doing that like you said, it’s not the low hanging fruit for these guys they want to go after the ones that are easy targets. There’s a lot of them out there, there’s a lot of them out there. You’re saying like 100% success that’s crazy, that’s really, really good.

[00:18:48] JH: I mean and there are… The Amazon recommended way is if that is unsuccessful there’s nothing stopping a hijacker from staying on there other than they know that you’re going to be fighting them. It’s in their interest to get off and keep doing their shady business elsewhere but if that doesn’t work, the Amazon recommended strategy is still in play and that is to have friends order the product, the offending product and get that product shipped to yourself so that you can then show Amazon why that product is counterfeit. The really big downside to that and why it’s very frustrating as the seller is that it can be up to a four week process and so you don’t want to be without your product for a week. I mean that’s crazy.

[00:19:32] SV: Now I’ve got other friends of mine that sell on Amazon and it just seems like sometimes other products are more susceptible to hijackers. I don’t know why. What is the price point of your products, are they a lower ticket price or…

[00:19:49] JH: The one that gets hit the most is around the $30 sales price.

[00:19:56] SV: Really? Yes I would think that that would be as much of a target but I guess it is because it just depends on the product because I’ve got a friend that sells less expensive between like 10 and $15. I would think that they’re easier because they don’t cost as much to get and they can have them shipped a little lighter, they’re not going to cost as much but they choose a $30 product, it’s interesting.

[00:20:17] JH: Yeah. Seems to be all over the… Certainly I’d imagine the higher price point you’d be [inaudible]. Maybe I forgot to mention one item but with a strategy, assume as you get notified that you’ve been hijacked you never want to give up the buy box. That’s one of the keys is to never let them get the buy box. We’ll go down to even be selling at a loss to make sure you don’t give up the buy box.

[00:20:43] SV: I was going to say and that’s a great strategy actually but what do you do then? Do you like instantly when you send that letter do you also immediately lower your price?

[00:20:53] JH: Yeah.

[00:20:53] SV: Okay. That’s like a two part process therefore that one step.

[00:20:57] JH: Right. It shows that it helps communicate that… Again we’re not messing around. You’re not going to get any sales plus you’re going to have a fight on your hands. Move along.

[00:21:11] SV: Now, give me an example of that. If you sent that letter, if you’re selling a $30 product what do you lower to like right away.

[00:21:18] JH: Whatever I need to do to continue own the buy box. I won’t go down to necessarily compete on price but I will make sure that we continue to own the buy box. They come in at $20 plus $6 shipping. Probably I’ll sell beyond in the buy box at that stage but I’ll lower to maybe $28 to ensure that the buy box is still mine.

[00:21:43] SV: Okay. You determine that by what they’re going to be selling that for.

[00:21:49] JH: Yeah.

[00:21:47] SV: Okay. Then you just lower a little bit at that time but you have to look for that as well. Now, have you had them actually take over the buy box and then you have to go ahead and try to get it back?

[00:21:58] JH: Yes. When they’ve lowered it substantially, so if I’m at 30 and they’re going at 16 that seems to take over the buy box. Whenever, I don’t fully understand the algorithm of who owns the buy box but certainly price is a big part of that. If they come in lower enough they will win the buy box and we will quickly compete on price to make sure that we’re meeting that ownership.

[00:22:25] SV: Got you. Got you. That’s critical. Now, have you ever had it to here they’ve taken up editing of the listing?

[00:22:32] JH: No. Never had that and that’s where the brand registry really is key. Is that that editing, you can quickly correct that editing with your confidence core being higher or if you’re brand registered.

[00:22:45] SV: Got you. Okay. That’s an important part too to understand for people I think there is that hijacking or hijacked proof for your listing is being able to go through and make sure you’re brand registered as soon as you can. That’s huge. Then to lock down that content in a sense.

[00:23:02] JH: Yeah. Exactly.

[00:23:02] SV: Yeah. That’s really good. If I’m hearing this correctly number one you have to be monitoring your listing like all the time. We always are, a lot of us are, depending on how many products you have. If you have a handful of products it’s pretty easier to go in there and to look at things but you’ve got to be in there looking at things. Once you notice that someone’s on there selling your product trying to compete with you on your same product then from there you send a letter immediately letting them know that they are not able to sell it because they are not the owner of this particular product. Then from there you also look at the prices if you need to lower the prices and you give them like twelve hours and then you give them twenty four hours if they don’t respond from there.

[00:23:49] JH: That’s correct.

[00:23:50] SV: Okay now, let me ask you this, sometimes you have someone that bought your product, they relisted because I don’t need it. It wasn’t what I wanted, I’m not going to refund, I’m just going to sell it or maybe I bought it off someone on Ebay and I’m going to re-list it. How do you treat that?

[00:24:04] JH: We haven’t had that yet and that was kind of also part of this reason for the first letter isn’t, it is maybe a little bit scary but is not for blown lawyer talk. We can’t tell that but if someone writes back and says, “I just had bought it though  promo,” and again that hasn’t happened yet but then that’s perfectly legal. There’s nothing, that’s great, you’re fully allowed to do that. That’s also kind of one of the benefits of that first email not being very aggressive cease and desist letter by just kind of the, “Hey, we’re watching you. Get off please because you’re selling counterfeit,” then they write back it’s not counterfeit, we bought it from you then that’s okay.

[00:24:49] SV: Yeah, I know it is. Of course if it says it’s new then it has to be sealed and in the package. If it’s open it got to be sold as used so again it could be something maybe someone received it as a gift and they don’t want it for whatever reason but yeah, that can happen. I just wanted to be clear on that. Is that pretty much the process though that you’ve following and you’ve been successful with justifying those two steps.

[00:25:10] JH: Yeah, that has really been it with hijack proofing as best we can and then fighting as aggressively as we can, as quickly as we can is the key so far to success.

[00:25:24] SV: Okay, now let’s walk now into you coming up with a solution because your wife was up at like different hours of the night with the baby of course but obviously probably still thinking about I got to check this throughout the day and all that. What was the thinking behind that? Now, you and I personally had some conversations about this because I was having friends that were having hijacked and they were frustrated because it’s just a frustrating thing. Wanting to be able to find a solution so they don’t have to keep monitoring that and then when they do have it, having something in place that they figured was going to be sent to Amazon so this way here you can have a plan in place and a strategy in place. That’s when you and I both started talking about because you were saying like you know what I think I have got a way that we can do this but I’m just not sure how to get it developed when we do we got to see if it can all work…

Then we had a beta group go through it after you and I both kind of talked about it and I was really intrigued by it and I thought it would be a great service. It’s kind of like creating a watchdog or some type of monitoring system. Almost like you’re monitoring your home for a break in or something like that. That’s kind of how I was thinking of it. That’s when you came to me and you said, “You know what I think we could possibly do something. Let’s look into this because you’re kind of already thinking about how it would work. Talk about that process.

[00:26:43] JH: Sure. Yes. Exactly right around where the idea was out of desperation and an opportunity with that this is a problem and we got to solve for ourselves and talking with and throwing it around with some smart people such as yourself and then some developer friends and say what can we do here that get’s us notified as fast as humanly possible and then how people walk through the process of fighting off the hijacker and then with your insight plus awesome group of people that came over did some beta testing plus the developer. Got service up and running. Now we’re just about to launch and we’ll do an exclusive launch with your audience but it really focuses on speed of notification so you get email plus text as soon as you get hijacked so that you can start that and then helps you walk through that process.

It’s kind of security monitoring but then it also is your guide to help you get rid of the hijacker even if you never experienced it. That first time you get hijacked you kind of sitting there, deer in the headlights, “what do I do, I got to do some research” and then fight them off, whereas this helps people monitor so you know as soon as it happens but then also helps walk people through that process.

[00:28:09] SV: Yeah. Why don’t you walk through exactly like how it looks and the name of it is Listing Eagle, correct?

[00:28:15] JH: Yeah. That’s correct.

[00:28:15] SV: I love the name. Love the name. Why don’t you walk people through kind of like what it will look like when you hook this thing into your listing.

[00:28:26] JH: Sure thing. Sign up and then there’s a bulk upload option so you can upload all of your products and then you enter a few details around your email and your cell phone number and you’ll get an email everyday saying that Listing Eagle is monitoring and everything checks out okay, there’s no hijacker activity on your listings and then as soon as it detects something it will both send you a text and an email that one of those listings have been hijacked. Right now we’re checking within ten to fifteen minutes every listing so that no one gets to sit on there for very long. As soon as you get that you can go over and then we help walk through that process of executing that.

[00:29:13] SV: How do you help walk through that? Again I’m kind of going through the process. I kind of already know this but I want to walk through it as if someone doesn’t know how this will look. Let’s say I get that notification, now what does Listing Eagle do for me to help me walk through that process?

[00:29:28] JH: Yeah, you can click on… We got set up so it kind of has the full workflow. To get that first email custom created for that listing with the information you’ve already uploaded with yourself and your brand that you just click on a button that you’ve automatically copied in the email that you need to send off and then you click over to Amazon and contact seller and then paste in that email and then the twelve hours later if that person is not going, he’ll get a reminder to send the next cease and desist letter which again is going to automatically created it specifically with the ASIN number and so it’s, we try make it as sort of one click, trying to walk through the whole process as possible.

[00:30:17] SV: Yeah. That’s awesome because I know some people would be like, including myself, would be like okay I know that they are there but now what do I send them and what’s the process and what should I do? What’s worked for you? You’re kind of using what’s worked for you and putting that in a sequence so this way here all you really need to do is click a few buttons and it’ll populate and then copy and paste and send.

[00:30:37] JH: Yep, exactly.

[00:30:39] SV: Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about what we’re going to do here. What are we going to do here for the TAS listeners? This is brand new, it has been in beta, we had a small beta group go through it and use it and got all the kinks worked out of it. Now what we’re going to do is an official release for just a week for the TAS listeners. If you’re listening to this, then you’re going to want to definitely check this out if you’re interested in getting your listings monitored because you’re going to get a really sweet deal. Why don’t you talk a little bit about this launch that you’re doing right now for the TAS audience and then after the fact, if you’re listening to this later it’s still cool, you can go over and you’ll still get a nice little discount.

[00:31:24] JH: Yeah. Sounds good. Super appreciative of the support that you help provide and then the beta test that came through. Awesome feedback from them to how to make it better. It was through one of them around that idea of the auto populating the notes and that was a pretty good simplification. For the next week due to appreciation for the TAS community we got a substantial discount for anyone that goes to listingeagle.com/TAS and there you can get signed up. The bottom of… the fewest SKUs offer is very reasonable from a security monitoring standpoint. It’s certainly not… It’s one more tool in your tool kit and it’s not meant to be massive priced product that you’re going to worry about. It’s just nice addition to help monitor and lock in your business. For the next week the TAS community can head over to listingeagle.com/tas and then throwing in substantial discount for the community plus you can get access to our ultimate guide on both how to hijack proof your listing upfront and then the process that we use to fight off the hijackers.

[00:32:48] SV: Yeah, I love it and I mean when you and I first talked about this before it was even a product or before even it was service we really talked about like what would it look like. I remember you asking me like, “Do you think this is something that people would want?” And I’m like, “Yeah, because this is like if you’re living in a high crime area, you’re going to want an alarm system for your home.” Amazon is kind of like that in a sense because it’s your business and people can come in and now as they please unfortunately Amazon technically owns that catalog page, we don’t. We just sell on that listing page because we created it but anyone else with that same brand can sell on our listing. That’s what hijacking is and what people are doing is they’re jumping on. They’re jumping on saying, “I have the same product” and they really don’t. That’s a problem.

I think this here was a great solution. You had the expertise as far finding a developer and finding a way to really systemize this to make it easier process and also be helpful. That’s when I said if I can jump on board I would love to and be able to then open it up to a beta group to then help test it and tweak it because there is other people in my audience that are more susceptible to being hijacked just because of the product type. I’m fortunate right now that I have not but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be using this service because to me it’s something that is like… You would not put a lock on your front door. You just would do it. Right. I just think it’s preventative maintenance in a sense to where you don’t have to deal with that.

Anyone that does want to check this out definitely, definitely check it out. ListingEagle.com/tas and from the time this is airing right now for a week you’ll get a substantial discount for being one of the first official Listing Eagle subscribers. Definitely, definitely check that out. If you’re listening to this later it’s still fine. You’re going to get a nice little discount as well. Just to be 100% honest and clear and upfront I am an affiliate with this program because I helped actually in the process and now I kind of vested in it so I really do believe in it and that’s the only reason why I would want to be a affiliate for that. If you want to join through my link you will get a discount and you’ll buy me a cup of coffee of course which all you guys know I love. Is there anything else that you want to add with the software or just the process in general?

[00:35:24] JH: I mentioned at the start but it’s, anything you mentioned as well around. It’s home security kind of peace of mind for your listing and something that it allows you to focus in on the value added work of building your business. That’s what really attracted me to being able to try and provide a solution here to get people to hopefully… People being, my wife stopped worrying about the hijacking and really focus on the value added activities that we can be doing to continue to build the business. I’m happy with the feedback, very appreciative of your input into the process to try and create something here that will help people. Exciting process, excited to get the audience into here even more feedback and even make it better.

[00:36:16] SV: Yeah and that’s great too for people to understand too as you’re building something, like you’re listening to the users now with the beta group and now with people that are subscribing after this airs. Then you’re constantly refining and tweaking and listening and then making it even better. That’s really important so definitely if you’re using it John wants to hear like what would you want improved? What would you want added, what would you need more information about to make it more user friendly? Whatever it is, he’s totally open to listening to that stuff. Yeah, like I said just go over and just check it out and see how cool it is because I do believe that you’ll see that if you’ve ever been hijacked or heard other people being hijacked it’s something that you definitely want to look into. Maybe you can just give it a test drive and see how it works. How awesome is that to be able to have your phone on you and then have something alert you immediately so you can get on it as soon as possible.

That’s really, really cool stuff. John, I want to thank you once again. This has been awesome. If anybody wants to look at getting a website built for their brand as well you can also check out brand builders and what is the actual URL for that John?

[00:37:26] JH: It’s at brandbuilders.io.

[00:37:29] SV: Okay. We’ll put all this in the show notes too so you can go ahead and head over to the show notes to this episode. We’ll have all this linked up and just again. One last thing I’d like to say or maybe ask you John, you’ve been at this FBA thing a little while now do you still think there is a great opportunity on Amazon right now as we sit?

[00:37:49] JH: Absolutely. As competition grows we all need to up our game but also increases the opportunity as far as there will be a winner and… There will be a stand out brand in all of the different products that are sort of being easily sold as FBA products or private label products. The only thing that competition does is it raises the floor to being moderately successful but it doesn’t change how successful people can be. As Amazon grows, it will continue to grow and we all just need to continually be better.

[00:38:36] SV: I agree and same thing with the software tools, it’s the same thing with building niche websites or authority websites. It’s like it does come down to quality. It comes down to quality and when you have competition it raises the game, it raises the bar. Was it easier a year ago? Yeah. Was it easier two years ago? Yeah. Things always get harder but it doesn’t mean that it means it’s not possible or that it’s way too saturated. It’s like the Google slap that’s happened, how many different times. It used to be easy to link websites. Well, now it’s not easy anymore. You got to find other ways, creative ways to build better stuff so that way it can perform well in that environment.

I hear that so much John. I hear so many people saying but, “Scott isn’t it saturated now, isn’t too much competition.” The answer is there’s a lot of competition but there’s still a lot of opportunity.

[00:39:26] JH: For me the thought exercises, if somebody is starting right now that is going to be more successful than me in a year. Probably… Right there’s probably somebody else that hasn’t started. I’ve got a head start right now that a year from now is going to have a bigger FBA business. Why shouldn’t that be me? Someone is going to do it, why not us? Why not the person listening?

[00:39:50] SV: Yeah, I agree. All right John. I will let you go but this has been awesome. I want to thank you once again as always it’s great talking to you. It’s just great to hear how far you’ve already come in such a short period of time in the FBA space. Having or not having a business and then buying a website and then converting that to a private label business and now having a sale just about ready to finalize here. It’s pretty exciting stuff. I can’t wait to catch up with you again and hear what your next venture will be and how you did it. That will be cool. That will be another episode.

[00:40:24] JH: Right on Scott. Always happy to talk to you and again thanks again to you and the community. Awesome job on building by far the best community online. Well done.

[00:40:34] SV: Thanks John. I appreciate it and we’ll be in touch man.

[00:40:37] JH: Right on. Bye.

[00:40:38] SV: Okay. There you have it. Another great conversation with John Havre, I want to thank him once again and he always brings really, really a lot of value. He’s a smart guy, a lot smarter than I am and when it comes to this stuff it’s really cool to have someone in your corner that you can talk and figure these things out and really talk through a big problem like this in coming up with a solution. I really again just want to say thanks John, thanks for everyone listening and giving their feedback as well, all the beta testers for Listing Eagle when it was in it’s beta phase. Now that it’s kind of open to the public if you want to take John up on that offer and get in at a really, really low price head over to listineagle.com/tas. Once again I am an affiliate for that because I am part of it. I actually walked through all of the different stages of this that I would want into it that I think other people would want to see within it so I do feel as though I was part of the building process in this and feels good to be able to see it kind of come to life.

Again I am vested in this and I do believe in it. Definitely check that out if you’re interested. All of the show notes to this episode and the transcripts are over at theamazingseller.com/201. You can get all of the show notes, all of the transcripts just in case you missed anything or if maybe you’re driving. You can just head over to that when you get put here whether it’s at your job or maybe it’s at you home when you get back from that run. Whatever it is. Go over and check that out theamazingseller.com/201 and you can grab all of the goodies over there. That’s it guys. I hope that this is helped. I hope at least it shows you exactly what you need to do in order to get rid of hijackers but also how to protect your listing the best that you can before they even come around because they are looking for easy prey if you will. They are looking for the easy targets.

First off you want to make sure that you cover yourself there and John talked all about that but he also talked about in depth on episode 158 which will also be linked up in the show notes. That’s it guys, that is going to wrap it up once again I want to say thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen. I know you have a lot of choices out there, a lot of you have been leaving iTunes reviews, letting me know how much you’re enjoying it so I appreciate each and every one of them and each and every one of you and all of the comments, the emails and everything you guys are sending thank you so much. Just again just want to say thank you, it’s really really awesome to hear from you.

That’s it guys, that’s going to wrap it up. Remember, I’m here for you and I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to… Come on, say it with me and say it loud,
“Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]
Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…really, really awesome. I was able to speak there and do a closing keynote. Really, really a lot of fun, I was on a private label panel, really awesome time and I’m really excited to dive back in and start recording some more episodes here.

I’ve got a lot of content that I’m going to be sharing here in the next few weeks, so yeah, I’m really, really excited. Now if you guys are brand new to the show and you want to submit one of your questions to ask or for me to answer here on the show just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and what you’ll do is you’ll say your first name, a brief question and ask a question and I’ll go ahead and do my best to answer it, all right?

You guys that are long time listeners, you guys know I love doing these because it’s literally like us being in a room together or a coffee shop just hanging out and I was able to do that in Denver. I was able to have lot of great conversations with a lot of great people and a lot of listeners and I also was able to have my very first live event, where we actually had 30 people come to an event called TAS Breakthrough Live which was amazing by the way. We did 10 Hot Seat sessions and it was just a lot of fun, I met a lot of great people and everyone that was there if you’re listening right now, you guys rock. It was amazing and I’m really still excited and I can’t come down from that high because we had such an amazing time, just the conversations even after the event, at dinner, whether it was in the lobby, wherever, we were just hanging out, having drinks, it was an awesome, amazing time.

We actually recorded the little pre-party on Periscope. If you guys want to check that out head over to the show notes of this page which is episode 202. That would be theamazingseller.com/202, go there, I’ll have that video up there where I Periscoped it, yeah it was just us getting ready to kind of get to our live event and it was just awesome. We were just hanging out in the lobby, so really, really awesome stuff.

At this event, we talked about some really advanced stuff as well, not just the basic how to get started stuff, we talked more high level stuff in some cases, not in all cases but in some cases and it was just awesome. People’s heads were spinning in a good way. I had a lot of people say, “Scott, I didn’t know what to expect coming here but after coming here, my head is spinning in a good way. It means that I have things that I can still learn and that I can still grow upon.” Just wanted to say we had an amazing time, wish you all could have been there but I am going to be bringing you some highlights in the next few weeks and I’ll be sharing those with you.

Again, I just want to give a shout out to everyone that attended and just say really nice meeting you guys and even people that were at the Rocky Mountain Reseller’s Conference. I want to say thank you to Travis for putting that on, amazing show, a lot of work went into that but again, I want to give a little shout out to him and his team because they did an amazing job there as well.

All right guys, so I am going to stop talking here because I’m so excited. What I want to do here is go ahead and listen to today’s first question and then I’ll go ahead and do my best and I’ll give you my answer. So let’s go ahead and listen to that.

[00:03:46] HERSEY: Hey Scott, how is it going? My name is Hersey and I’ve been listening to you for about two weeks now. Just want to tell you, I am very appreciative of what you’re doing, listening to you every day during my commute back and forth and I have really learned a lot, it’s almost like you’re my private mentor that has all the answers literally. I feel like I’m getting new answers for every episode that you write, so just thank you very much for that. I’m sure everybody else is very much appreciative of it.

There’s just one thing that I’ve been kind of unclear about as I’m starting my FBA journey. Let’s say I pick a product and I’ve contacted the supplier, I got the samples, I really like what I’m seeing and I reply back to them saying, “Okay, we can go ahead and go through with our first order.” Now how does that work as far as packaging or with my UPC code and branding, how does all of that work, am I emailing this stuff to them and do they have to print out my logo and whatever the case might be and stick it on the package? Like I said, I’m new at this so I’m not sure how it all works out. If you can answer that for me I’d really appreciate it and keep doing what you’re doing, thank you.

[00:04:59] SV: Hey Hersey thank you so much for the question and we’ve talked about this before and I know that there’s a lot of stuff that we already covered on the podcast but I’m going to answer this briefly here on this episode but I would urge anyone that does have questions to even go over to the blog and use the search field and just type in like your question. Like in your case it would be UPC codes or FNSQ or packaging and you’ll get anything that was discussed in these blog posts.

We are also, I should have probably mentioned this earlier, we are also including transcripts to all of the episodes now, so you can even search the blog and if it’s something that was said in the show notes, it will come up. It makes it easier to search the stuff as well. Again, I just want to say that if you guys wanted to check out the show notes, this episode is 202. That will be theamazingseller.com/202 and then the transcripts are there for you as well.

Okay, but let’s go ahead and answer this question because I do get this question quite often especially from people that are just getting started. The quick answer is this, it’s like, if you’re just testing a product, you don’t necessarily have to brand it okay? Because if you’re doing a test order, you don’t necessarily have to do that. Now, you will need a UPC code in order to create your listing that you will need. Amazon will only allow you to create a listing if you have a UPC code, you’ll need that but you don’t necessarily need it on the package.

I believe that you should have it on your package because this way here, if you ever wanted to go retail you could but also it identifies your product better from a hijacker, so if you have a hijacker it’s another mark on your package that you could claim as yours okay? You can even have it printed on the inside of the box, all right, so the UPC code, you need to create the listing, Amazon requires that but you don’t need it on your box but it’s a good idea.

Now, if you are going to directly ship it to Amazon or even just ship it in, without directly shipping it but you’re going to ship it yourself or whatever, you’re going to have an FNSQ number on there. That’s a number that Amazon gives you for that product. That’s their UPC code in a sense, that’s their identifier. Now you can have them label it, it will be 20 cents they’ll label it for you, they’ll label it right over top of your UPC code so that they don’t get confused. If you have a UPC code it’s going to be covered up by this label.

Or if you know your FNSQ number which you can find in the back end of your listing once you create it, you can then just print that bar code on your package from your supplier and then you’re off to the races. They’re going to go ahead and be able to scan that. Okay. To simplify things, you might just want to have them do it at first. To answer your question though as far as branding goes, those are things that you’re going to have to create, okay. You can have them print it, right on the box, right on the packaging, and it is a good idea to do that because now again, it creates your unique package to your brand. This way here, if someone is going to jump on your listing as far as a hijacker or something like that, you’ll be able to prove easier, not always easy, but it’s easier if you have a mark on your packaging or if your packaging is unique.

Moving forward, you’re probably going to want to have some type of unique packaging or insert card or something that identifies your product to make it more unique. Now, again, you don’t have to have this, Amazon doesn’t require it at this time. I was talking to a few people at the event that we were at and some people were saying like, “I think eventually Amazon is going to start cracking down on people just submitting stuff in a poly bag and that maybe the case.

Probably, sooner than later you’re going to want to go ahead and have some type of unique packaging. Okay. For you if you’re just starting, you want to get some product in there and you want to get it tested and you want to see if this thing is going to move at all. Then simplify that process, use one of their stock boxes, one of their stock packaging and then just dress it up with your logo, with your branding. This way here, you at least have it marked with your stuff.

In the beginning, if you ordering samples and stuff, they’re going to charge you an additional fee to put your mark on it even in a sample. That may not need to be, you may just have them send you a sample, so you can see the quality of the product and not necessarily have to go through and have them spend the extra time and the money to brand your logo on there.

[00:09:20] SV: If you have something that you’re afraid that if you mark it, like let’s say like you put your brand name on the plastic, let’s say on a handle and you’re afraid that it’ going to rub off, then yeah, you might want to have them do that so you can see the quality of it when they print it, that may be something. If you’re just printing something on a box, you don’t necessarily have to have your stuff on there. It may be a good idea if you’re going through some custom boxing and stuff like that at that stage but right now, again we’re trying to get product to market so we can get it there to see if we can get some traction. All right.

Hopefully that’s answered your question, again on the blog, there’s a ton of information that we’ve talked about this in the past, just go there and search for whatever you are asking questions about or whatever, write there in the search field and I’m sure that there will definitely be some blog posts or podcasts that we’ve talked about certain topics that you might be interested in at this time. That goes for anyone listening right now not just this one question but again, thank you so much for the question, hopefully that’s helped you. Let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:10:24] ADAM: Hey Scott this is Adam, I had a question I’ve never heard you answer before. The nature of my product lets me add SKUs almost indefinitely and I can very easily do them all as separate listings, all as variations of one listing or I could try to categorize them a little bit and have a variety of the listings with multiple variations and because I could so easily do this any of the three ways, I’m trying to decide what the pros and cons of each option are.

I have one listing already on the front page so obviously adding a variation to that puts it on the front page but I also feel like doing a number of different listings with different keywords and different images that are all on the first one to four pages might also get more eyeballs. I just thought I get your perspective on individual listings versus variations for a product that could go either way, thanks.

[00:11:28] SV: Hey Adam, thank you so much for the question and you’re in a good situation man because you’ve got like you said, a ton of options here with SKUs because what you’re talking about is taking a product, having it as a parent and then having multiple child’s underneath that parent right off that listing. The beautiful thing with that is like you said, if you’re already ranking on page one that’s where I would start, right. You’re already ranking there, so now add those variations to the mix so this way here, people that are already coming to that listing are going to see those other options.

Now you bring up another good point, if you have a way that you can categorize these in different ways so you can come up on page one for two or three different listings, I wouldn’t go crazy, I wouldn’t say like, “Okay, I can do 12, so I’m going to go ahead and do all 12.” Unless it makes sense. I would probably stop and try to shoot for two or three and then be able to put those variations underneath each one of those. It’s easier for you to focus on getting those three listings to rank, also the reviews and to manage right?

It’s going to be that much easier. The nice thing I like about this though I have to say Adam is you’re able to create these different SKUs underneath different listings but also on their own listing and it also makes it almost like you’re independent, right? As far as each product goes, so what I mean is, let’s say for example you had a problem with refunds on variation number one on product one or listing one, well it’s only going to interrupt that one variation, not the entire listing.

Even at this, let’s say you have three listings created and you have one of your listings get taken down for whatever reason or maybe it gets hijacked, well the other two are still there independently on their own, they’re not dependent on that one, so you have a lot of different options. My personal opinion if it was me, I would take that one that’s already ranking and I would try to optimize that one right now because it’s the easiest thing. We want to do the easiest thing that we can do right now the quickest, and that would be probably step one.

Step two is I’d pick the next one that I felt that I could rank and that would also be independent and it would make sense, again, that’s the key word here It needs to make sense. You can’t just throw up these listings to try to take up real estate, it needs to make sense. Right. But you could bring up another good point, you could have multiple images now. For anyone listening and this is a little bit over your head don’t worry about this stuff just try to understand that a listing that has a product or a parent-child that’s how it works, underneath that you can have multiple variations, whether it’s sizes, whether it’s colors, bundles, any of that stuff.

The beautiful thing with this here like I said, is you’re able to have multiple ones show up on page one possibly and then you also get to have different images like you said. You wouldn’t want to have the same garlic press show up three different times, right? That just would be kind of redundant but if you had one that was red and one that was yellow and maybe one that had a black handle that was a certain style. Right. You’ve got three different ones that could attract three different buyers or types of buyers and that’s what that image does. You guys have heard me talk about this before. Your title gets you found because that’s what helps you rank and that’s also what people search for, they see that right?

[00:14:57] SV: That’s what gets you found, that’s what gets you on page one, that and the back end and there’s other factors. Your image gets attention. Well when you get attention guess what? People click on it, and then guess what happens? When they get in there, now the listing has to sell them in a few different ways, price, that might be one, so if you have variations, you might be able to have different price variations.

It could be a low price up to a higher price. The other thing is you’ve got reviews, your reviews are then going to help convert that to a sale because people look at that as “Oh, people are already buying this, they’re already happy with it, they’re giving me the pros and the cons okay good, they convinced me, the other people that bought it have convinced me to actually buy this thing.” The other thing is, you’ve got the benefits and the features in the bullets, you’ve got the benefits and features in the description.

Our goal is to get found, get on page one and then once I get on the listing you want to then convert them and how do we convert them? A lot of times it’s by the reviews saying if the product is good or bad. All right. I know that’s a little bit off-topic there but I just need people to understand that those images like you’re talking about Adam, that you can show up for multiple images on page one, that could be a huge driver for different people. It can catch people’s eyes differently and it can definitely, definitely get you more click-ins or click-throughs.

I think you’re on the right track, I think you kind of already know what you’ve got to do, just by what you were kind of telling me but I think you just kind of needed validation on that. I personally think you’re on the right track, I would go with the one that’s already ranking on page one, I would really try to get that one honed in and then I would move to product two, do the same thing, try to rank it, try to spread out the variations a little bit and then I would do one more and then I would try with three and see what happens.

I’d give myself those guidelines as far as, “Okay, I got to get to page one before I move on to the next one.” I wouldn’t want to try with all three of these all at once. Okay. Hopefully that helps, I think that’s a great, great thing that you brought up and you’re right we didn’t really talk about that a lot on the podcast but we did now, so thanks for that Adam and good luck to you and keep me posted on how that works for you, I’d really, really like to keep in touch with you and see how it’s working. All right, so let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:17:09] SPEAKER: Hi Scott loving the podcast. The question is how do you handle negative product reviews? Do you try and contact the customer that left it? Are you able to ever get Amazon to remove them? Do you comment on the negative review? Thanks and I look forward to hearing your answer.

[00:17:28] SV: Okay, well that’s a great question, I wish I could call you out by name but you didn’t give me your name and I didn’t see it in the email, so I apologize but thanks for the question and thanks for being a listener of the podcast. This is another great question and I do have some thoughts on this. Okay. We’re talking about product reviews, we’re not talking about feedback, I’ve talked about feedback in the past and the way that I feel about feedback and again we talked a lot about this at the event that I was just at TAS Breakthrough Live event and a lot of the people there that are selling, all agreed that your seller feedback is really, really important for a few different reasons.

The one big reason that your feedback… And we’ll talk about review thing here in a second and answer that question but I did want to highlight this right here because everyone there was saying the same thing, that your feedback score on your account does have something to do with the health of your account. Meaning if your feedback score is low or if you don’t have a lot of feedback but you have a ton of reviews, it’s out of balance and when it’s out of balance, it could actually draw a red flag meaning like you have tons and tons of reviews but why isn’t anybody leaving feedback. That’s part of their system in a sense right?

If you’re selling products you should naturally be getting feedback, so my strategy all along has been really getting the feedback and then from the feedback I get the review, that’s just the way I’ve done it and it’s a slower process in a sense but it’s been working and I’m getting steady feedback and steady reviews. All right, so let’s move on to the next part of this. The next part is, what should you do if you get a negative review?

The first thing that you should do is respond to it. You can directly, which I think is important that you directly go into that review and then you say, “Hey listen, I’m sorry that you had an issue, send us an email, we’d love to take care of it for you.” Some people have said that in that review, they’ve said stuff like, “Notify us and we’ll give you a refund.” I don’t think that you should do that and actually a couple of people at the event said the same, exact thing because then it opens you up to having people say, “Oh, this company is easy to give refunds, I’m just going to contact them and get a refund.” Then your refund rate will go up, you don’t want that either.

Just basically reach out to them and let them know that you want to make them happy and then to contact you and you can make it right, I think that’s the best thing. The other thing it does is the social proof of this thing is when other people reading that review and maybe it’s a negative review, and it’s a negative review, let’s say it’s a two-star review well you’re showing them that you’re there, like you’re the company that you can even say there, “We’re a small family business and we take care of our customers and you are our number one concern, please contact us. We want to make sure that you’re happy that we get you the part that was missing or the piece that was missing,” and then behind the scenes if you want to give them a refund and then tell them to just keep it, then that’s fine.

Then you could possibly get that two-star converted into a four or five-star. Now I wouldn’t ask them directly to do that, number one it’s against the terms of service as far as I’m concerned but I would still do everything I can to make them happy and just reach out. A lot of the times, that right there will take them from a two to a four or five star, they’ll do it automatically, but if they don’t, they don’t. Don’t worry about trying to convert that over 100%, if you can’t, that’s fine but just publicly it’s almost, I don’t want to say as good but it’s better than nothing to have you publicly saying like, “Listen, we’re so sorry that your product didn’t come with this part, we’re going to make sure that you get that, send us a support email and we’ll be glad to take care of you.

[00:21:34] SV: Our customers are number one to us and as a small,” I always say this guys, you always hear me say this, “as a small family-owned business we want to make sure that our customers are treated right.” It just makes you more real and communicate that in that email as well. That’s what I would do, again, you guys have heard me say I use Salesbacker to automate this process kind of because what it does is it notifies me if I’ve got that negative review. It will email me and I can directly email them through… or not email them, I can go directly to that review other than try to go sift through, especially if you have multiple SKUs.

If you guys want to check that out you can always head over to theamazingseller.com/resources and then go down to the section there that talks about feedback and reviews and you’ll see my affiliate link there and you’ll also get a 60-day free trial with no credit card and you’ll also get a few extra bonuses there as well if you go through my affiliate link and you’ll buy me a cup of coffee. If you want to just go do that, if not just go directly to Salesbacker, awesome. All right.

That’s pretty much going to wrap up that question. I think that’s going to be all the time we have today on the show. I do have a bunch more and keep them coming in guys, you guys are awesome that are submitting these questions. Just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that, ask a question there and just leave your name so I can go ahead and give you a callout, keep the questions like they’ve been, kind of short, to the point. This way here we can kind of knock these out relatively quickly and you guys can get the answers that you need and I can do my best to get them to you.

All right, so again, that is pretty much going to wrap up this session of Ask Scott. I did want to remind you guys again about Periscope. I’ve been hanging out on Periscope, if you guys want a little bit behind the scenes like if I’m at, like that event that I was at I did a little pre-party. You can head over to Periscope.tv and just search for me, @ScottVoelker, you’ll find me there. Just subscribe to my channel or my whatever they call it there I don’t know if it’s a channel, whatever it is, my account and then any time that I fire a Periscope or do a live broadcast you’ll be notified, or you can watch the replay and I believe it’s like for 24 hours so definitely check it out over there.

I want to remind you guys too that all of the transcripts and downloads or links, anything that was discussed in today’s episode or any of the other episodes is now located in the show notes. You can head over to this episode, theamazingseller.com/202 and you’ll get all of the transcripts, the downloads, links, anything that we mentioned is in there for you guys to take advantage of.

One last thing, if you guys are brand new, brand spanking new to the podcast, you guys have never attended one of my live workshops, I actually break down the five phases to picking a product, sourcing a product, doing a prelaunch, doing a launch and then doing a promotion for that product. Actually taking the product from start to finish, to bringing it to market and we do that on a workshop, a live workshop where we get on there and we teach that stuff there.

Where you can actually do something, it’s not just theory it’s actually doing stuff, I just said actually a lot but it’s actually a lot. All right. Head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop we also do live Q&A there, so any questions you have, we’ll answer them there live on that workshop. Yeah, come on over, hang out with us, we have a blast over there, again that link is theamazingseller.com/workshop.

All right guys, that is it, that is going to wrap up this episode of Ask Scott. Remember I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to, you have to … Come on say it with me and say it loud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome, amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…and what people responded to this post, some of their thoughts, I thought that it was interesting and I didn’t want it to just be buried inside of the community because there is so much activity that goes on over there

If you guys are not part of the TAS community that’s growing which is just awesome and you guys that are listening that are podcast listeners and community members over in the TAS community you guys rock, you guys are awesome. Anyone that’s not over there and they want to get involved head over to theamazingseller.com/FB. It’s a great community, there is a lot of people in there that are doing some amazing things they are sharing, they are helping each other. We do have a strong policy to keep spammers out of there so I have a full-time admin that’s over there so anyone that is posting spam they are getting banned immediately.

If you guys see anyone over there spamming all you need to do is to flag the post my admin will see it boom they are gone. If you are in there keep helping us clean it up it’s been pretty good actually lately and we’ve been keeping a hand on it. Just head over there, make yourself involved. I’m telling you if you guys want to connect with likeminded people go over there. It doesn’t mean you have to connect with everyone, find two, three, four people that you want to follow or that you want to reach out to. That’s a great way to be able to connect with these like minded people. I’m going to stop rambling here because I get excited about the community because I think they are awesome.

I just got back from the event which you guys heard me talk about in the past episode or the last episode. I was in Denver and that was an amazing time and I met a lot of listeners and a lot of people that are in that Facebook community and it just really excites me because people are awesome. There are really still a lot of great people in the world and I was able to see that first hand. All right. Today what we are going to talk about and I’m going to share with you I’m going to be reading to you what he had wrote but then also what other people are writing and I’m also going to give you my thoughts on it because there are some things that I agree with and some things that I don’t.

We are going to be talking about how he turned this frustration, this product dud into success and he didn’t even really know it was success until other people started to chime in. I want to share that with you. Before we jump into that I did want to remind you guys that we have full show notes and transcripts to the episodes now so if you want to download the full transcripts or maybe just the show notes you want to go check those out anything that we add to this show that we talk about and links any of that stuff can be found at theamazingseller.com/203 so that’s theamazingseller.com/203. You’ll find everything over there and yeah if you have any other questions or anything like that you can always leave comments there, just get involved like I said.

[00:03:28] SV: Also I’m going to be putting the Facebook post that I’m referring to in the show notes today so you can go directly there and see what other people are saying and I’m sure more people are going to chime in now that this has been aired on the podcast. Let’s go ahead and dig in, what do you say? Let’s go ahead and check this out. What I’m going to be doing, again I’m doing this on the fly, I just logged in and I’m looking now at so this post that I’m going to be sharing. It’s a little different than I’m normally doing so bear with me but I promise this is going to be useful. This is what Alex Strener, I think that’s how you pronounce your last name Alex I apologize you guys all know if you guys are long time listeners I’m horrible with names and I apologize.

Alex Strener s-t-r-e-n-e-r I apologize again I know I probably put you down. I apologize. This is what he wrote, “Just sharing a non-success/ frustration story. Hey guys just want to share my story. I’ve been at this for like six months and I’m not doing very well. I have my first product up it’s doing barely anything, six a day with pay-per-click on and two days with pay per click off. I’m set to be receiving fifteen hundred and sixty more units in a week so I’ll try to do another give away to bump the BSR and hopefully it stays high but that looks like awash but maybe $1000 per month in profit if I’m lucky aka a dud. Got a $10,000 interest free loan for product number two and I’m having problems finding something decent. I know I’m in a good spot but I got into this to escape the rat race and work for myself. It looks like that at least another one year away and I’ve already been doing this for half a year.

Frankly it drives me up the wall to see these screen shots of ‘hey look, I’m doing forty sales a day with zero reviews, while I’m struggling to even get five sales a day. Sorry just had to rant. I’m just extremely agitated a dud and another three months to wait at least before I get product number two going. That’s what I’ve got and half a year of goddamn effort.” Alright so that’s what the frustration. You can tell just by the way that Alex is writing that he is frustrated. Alex if you are listening to this I feel for you, I totally do and again I haven’t had all of this success consistently. There’s been ups and downs in anything that I’ve done not just this business but other businesses. It’s just part of the game and I talked at the Rocky Mountain Resellers Conference I did a live keynote there and I talked about creating your success plan and what you need to do it for and how you figure that stuff out.

It sounds like your main motivation is just to leave that nine to five and I get it, I get that but you are also have to have that plan in place. You do have the plan and you are executing it but you are getting a little impatient in my opinion and I get it though. It can get frustrating, it’s like working out. You are working out for a solid month and you are not seeing the results yet. It gets frustrating or maybe you are seeing a little bit but just not what you had hoped for. It’s true that that happens. Let me just say this though and I always share this whenever I do one of my workshops or whenever I can but there is a percentage out there that there is like 3% of people that technically succeed and there is 97% that don’t succeed.

[00:06:45] SV: They start something but they don’t finish and what they’ll do is they’ll end up working for the 3%. The three percent are the ones that they hit a wall and they keep pounding through until they get through that wall or they’ll pave it and go around the wall or over the wall or under the wall. Those are just … They are just growing pains. That’s just what happens and what I can say is I guarantee, I guarantee you Alex that you have a lot more knowledge and a lot more experience than a lot of people out there because you took action and you’ve been through the process. Don’t look at this as a complete failure and you are going to hear it by some of the people that had commented they don’t think that it’s a failure I mean a thousand dollars profit per month?

Even if it was eight hundred dollars a month or even five hundred dollars a month that’s a car payment for a lot of people. It could be more than a car payment, it could be you can think about it as your kids’ tuition if you go to a private school, any of that stuff. A lot of people shortchange themselves, they are looking for the home run, they are looking for the home run day one and you can’t do that. You are going to get frustrated if you do that and you are probably going to get let down so don’t go at this thing like you are going to hit a home run. Go up there and hit for a base hit a base hit or bunt for a base hit. You don’t have to go out there and hit it out of the park. I know that you want to get out of your day job, I know it, I get it but it does take time. It takes patience and it takes consistent action. You have to do it over and over again even if you fail or you think you fail.

You need to rinse and repeat but then just learn from what you just did. Most businesses go out there and they fail the first two three four years and sometimes then they just give up but if you keep at it you have a greater chance of succeeding so you can’t stop. Now you can learn from what you did but you can’t stop. It doesn’t sound like you are going to but I just needed to say that so let me chime in here and say what some people said. One person and this is Allen, he chimed in and he just basically said, “It’s hard to know the problem without seeing your listing but it would appear to be a conversion issue if you are sure that there is demand.” Again which I’ve talked a lot about guys, we need to make sure that there’s demand, “In which case you really need to focus on trying to improve your images, your copies and your reviews. It work in most cases if you change your images and your copy meaning your bullets and your benefits, your features, all of that stuff and then follow up on customers for reviews.”

That was Allen’s suggestion which I agree with. I think that if you have a conversion problem then we need to fix that. If we have room for improvement then let’s work on that. Don’t just think about finding the next product yet. If there’s things that we can still do to improve the conversion, now the conversion could be fixed by reviews. If you have a low amount of reviews but your competitor has more reviews like quite a bit more reviews that can be a huge conversion problem. An image could make your conversions go up or down. Here is something for you guys, I was at the event the other week, again really excited about being there. I learned a ton and just like this little nugget here there was someone in our, he wasn’t even on the hot seat he was just in attendance but the guy was doing… I think he was doing about 80 to $100,000 a month which is crazy, crazy.

[00:10:05] SV: I’m jealous but I’m excited for him and I’m excited to learn from him but he was there to learn from us and he learned a ton from us that day which was crazy too. How can someone that’s doing 80k or 100k a month learn from us that aren’t doing that much? Well there’s things that we are doing that could take his product and bring it to the next level but that’s a whole another topic. The one thing he shared that they tested was in his image you could put up just one image with the product lined up evenly so if you had a product that has three components to it you can line it up nice and evenly or you could take and throw them around on the image in multiple, kind of like a scattered look. He tested that and he tested it with the same amount of traffic and that’s the other thing.

If you are going to test anything you want to go ahead and test over how many people visit the listing not just how many days it goes. Right. You want to see how many sessions that you had so if you’ve had let’s say a hundred sessions, then you want to test that with another hundred sessions. I’d probably go more like five hundred to a thousand so if it takes a week then it takes a week, if it takes two weeks it takes two weeks but you need to measure it with the same amount of sessions. What he did is he tried it with the one image for let’s say five hundred, I forget what the number was but let’s just say five hundred sessions and then he tried it for another five hundred sessions with a different image of those pieces of the product scattered and one of them being more lined up evenly. The one that was scattered converted I think he said like 10% higher or something crazy at least 6%, it was higher, a lot higher.

There is one product that I have right now that I could do that with I’m going to test that. I haven’t tested yet, I haven’t had enough time since I’ve gotten back but that’s one thing on my list that I’m going to test. Right. Again these are things that you wouldn’t think of maybe but they could make a difference so conversions are definitely a huge thing. You’ve got to look at your traffic, you’ve got to look at your sessions, your sessions are going to tell you a lot. If you are getting the sessions but you are not getting the sales there is a problem there. We need to fix that problem. We need to fix or we need to bridge that gap somehow and it could be reviews, it could be images, it could copy, it could be any of that stuff. Let me just move on now to what Nick Graham says, “First question, where did you get the $10,000 interest free?”

He wanted to know that and I’m not sure if he said that in here or I would say but you can go over to this post and you can read through and see because there is a ton of comments. Basically he said also, “Also, $1000 would make up the pay cut I just took for a job closer to home so one man’s dud is basically another guy’s treasure in a sense.” Then another guy Gary says, “A $1000 profit is great that’s more than most if I had ten of those you are set or if you had ten of those you are set.” Now we are starting to think right, maybe and someone else just chimed in and said, “Exactly,” so you might be thinking to yourself, “Wow there is just this one product and it’s only doing $1000 profit if you’ve got four of those that’s four thousand right? If you’ve got five that’s five.” That why I talk about the ten by ten by one, ten sales per day, ten dollars profit per sale one product.

[00:13:13] SV: That’s $100 per day, that’s three $3000 a month so maybe that’s what you go after or maybe in this case it’s a thousand dollars per product so if you’ve got five products that’s $5000. I agree with that so Gary highlighted that and he is right on the money and then a few other people chimed in and said exactly. Let me see here. Then Nick he chimed back in again and he says, “You have no idea how much your post has encouraged me. If you are profiting $1000 on a dud then I just need to find three duds and my wife can be a stay at home mom. I’m not being sarcastic either I love this group.” Basically he is just saying like to him that would have been awesome. You know what I mean?

And then Alex chimed in and says, “Nick you in turn have encouraged me as well but finding three sounds great in theory than you realize that if you are launching products one by one launching three takes about a year and probably well over.” I see what Alex is saying here but it doesn’t have to be. Right. Again I can’t stress this enough you have to try to find products that you don’t have to wait three months to get to market. Right. Even if you test on a smaller scale be able to test three or four products quicker by not going after doing customization, like full customization.

I’m not saying generic either I’m saying small tweaks that can be done quicker and then not going by boat right away. That’s why a lot of people say, “Well Scott why don’t you go by boat, why don’t you do freight forwarding, why don’t you do all that stuff yet?” The thing is I don’t want to do that yet because I’m still going the route of air. It takes a lot less time and I can get things to market to test them quicker, I can do small orders I don’t have to do a full boat, a full container and all that stuff. That’s just me but again I’m listening to Nick say, “But I don’t want to wait another three months.”

Well don’t wait another three months, do something that you can get to market quicker now even if it’s more generic that you can maybe customize with a custom box that won’t take that long and then maybe get something that’s small that you can air ship and not sea ship right now or maybe split it up and do half of the order by air make a little less money and then do the other half boat. I’ve heard other people do that so there is other options there for you Alex. You don’t have to wait three months but I get it. If it does take you three months well then it takes you three months then now you are at two thousand or maybe that next one will be the $2000 product a month or $3000. You won’t know until you do it but I do believe and I haven’t seen your listing or anything like that or your product that you are selling but I think that there’s probably things you can do to get that number to go up, I really do.

Again Nick pipes in here and says, “Also if you are having to pump a lot of time into pay-per-click and search that’s  sort of defeating the purpose then again an hour or two a day managing pay-per-click campaign still beats eight hours a day at a job and I like my day job.” Nick likes his day job so he wouldn’t rather be doing that. I personally wouldn’t mind playing around with that pay-per-click. And then he just goes, “You might seek out a consultant or coach for a one on one time call to help him with the pay-per-click stuff.” Again reach out to the group, reach out to other people that you think can help you if you are struggling with the pay-per-click stuff. The pay-per-click stuff to me will help you not just make more sales to make more sales it will help you start to rank and I think that’s the big picture.

[00:16:26] SV: You really should be thinking about how you can rank for more keywords by using pay-per-click but not just depending on pay-per-click. I don’t want to rely on pay-per-click for all my sales I want that to help push organic sales. Again going down the list here ton of threads Jeff says, Jeff Nelson says, “Just spiking your BSR does nothing FYI so don’t do giveaways just to spike your BSR. It’s a waste.” I agree. So I don’t look at doing a promo to just spike my BSR. That’s like an added benefit in a sense. To me it doesn’t do anything really to help you to rank necessarily unless you are using super URLs or keyword URLs which I’m hearing are less effective as we move forward and they probably even will become more less effective.

To me it’s more about getting the review started and yes you get on the radar of Amazon because there’s been some sales but to me it’s not about the BSR bump. It’s not about that, it’s about the reviews. The reviews that are going to allow you to convert higher and if you convert higher you are going to get more sales you if get more sales you are going to rank higher. Let’s think about that, you are doing pay-per-click because you want to get sales yes but you want to get sales through keywords so you rank for those keywords. That’s what I think that you should be focusing on, anyone focusing on. The reviews are going to help you convert higher so let’s just take for example, let’s say that you are running pay-per-click right now and you have one review and let’s say that you get five hundred people to come over to that listing let’s say that you convert at 5%. What did I say?

Let’s make it easier, let’s say we get a hundred people over there. That’s going to be five sales and you’ve got one review. Let’s say that you run that same pay-per-click and we have fifty reviews. Now let’s say that we convert at only 10%, I think you can convert higher but let’s just say 10%. Now you’ve doubled your sales with the same amount of ad spent because now you have more reviews and reviews are social proof for the people that are viewing the product. That’s where your conversions can jump so that’s where your pay-per-click comes in. Again let me, there is a bunch of replies on that one there, Alex says, “I’m on page two for my main keyword I’m trying to get on to page one. What else can I do to get there? I’ve optimized everything professionally including copy and images.”

Well I would number one look at my back, make sure that your keywords are in the back end you want to rank for but the only thing that you can really, really do to help rank for that one main keyword, which I don’t think that there is a lot of people trying to rank for their “main keyword” and I’m putting up the air quotes, because they think that once they get there boom the sales are going to go over the roof. They may but there is a lot of other keywords that you are probably leaving out or you are not focusing on that you can start ranking for easier than trying to rank from just number one. But if you want to rank for the number one keyword the way that you are going to have to go about this is number one you have to have a fairly decent converting page listing and you are going to be able to look at that in the back end you can see your conversion rate right there, your sessions and then it tells you your conversion rate.

[00:19:37] SV: If you look at that then it’s going to give you a good understanding is, “Okay if I now start running pay-per-click for that exact keyword now you can do exact match. You can do phrase match, I would start with phrase match and then I would put in my main keyword and then I would see what other extenders on there or keywords that are on the front end. I would start to see what other people are searching for with the main phrase in there like garlic press but it might also be stainless steel garlic press. That’s what I would do but when you start to get sales through this keyword or let’s say you start to get clicks through this keyword if you’re listing is converting well, then there’s a good chance that you’re going to start selling through that keyword. Then guess what, you start ranking for that keyword.

You want to start pushing sales to that keyword as much as possible even if you’re spending more than you’re making at first because that’s going to push you to page one if that’s what you think it’s going to take. The only way you’re going to know that is to give that a shot but I personally think that it shouldn’t be just one keyword that you’re shooting for. It should be at least five and upwards of ten, that are like your main bread and butter keywords. The other thing is if you’re running an auto campaign start looking and seeing what the keywords are searched for from your actual customers. Like look at that stuff. It’s right there in black and white. They’re giving you that data if you’re on auto campaign. If you’re running a broad match campaign.

If you’re running a broad match campaign, now you’re going to be able to see all  of the keywords that you’re getting clicks through but then more importantly when you pull that report you’re going to see that that one keyword that was broad triggered ten other keywords off of that one broad. That’s how that works. If you guys are kind of lost on the whole pay-per-click thing we’ve done episodes in the past if you just go to the blog and search PPC, you’ll find it or sponsored ads. One that comes to mind I believe is episode 119, let me see here if I can find that for you guys while I’m  here live. Bare with me. I’m not even going to pause. I believe it’s 119. Let me see here, real quick. I’m doing this on the fly guys, with you guys. 119, I just searched for it. Yeah, it is. Pretty good memory. That’s episode 119, ‘How to use the new Amazon PPC to receive more sales step by step plan’. I did that with Chris Shaffer.

I broke everything down with all of new features and everything. Definitely check that one out if you haven’t. That will definitely help with that. Then Jeff comes in and says, “Hey Alex, how about the other 100 key words besides your main one?” See? So Jeff gets it too. Again, that’s what I’m saying. I mean, I would definitely, definitely look into that. And I’m not going to go ahead and read through this whole thread but there’s a ton. There’s a ton in here. Yeah, there’s a ton. So definitely check this thread out guys. Let’s see, Todd comes in and says, “I was making less than a $1000 a month on my own website for three years stuck in a rat race job struggling to stay positive until last year. I was able to drop the nine to five. Just stick at it. Find something that works. And repeat it over and over again. Eventually your time will come.” I love that Todd. If you’re listening Todd, thank you for that encouragement. Now Alex comes in and says, “Thanks Todd. That’s the goal I always love hearing. I grinded away at it for three years. And now I’m successful stories way more than hey it’s my first day and I sold 90 stories, those that frustrate me.”

[00:23:06] SV: Yeah, I agree. I agree with that because you know what, I don’t think anyone just out of the gate all of a sudden starts getting sales. It takes time. It takes work. You’re going to maybe come out of the gate. Maybe you hit a double. Maybe you hit a triple but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be always hitting those doubles and triples or home runs right? You have to understand that it does take time. I mean perfect example is I launched my first product. It took a little bit to get it going. Once I got it going it kind of took off but now since then, we’re talking almost two years later now, that one there is dipped. Right?

But that doesn’t mean that the other products that I launch I haven’t learnt stuff from and I’m going to do things differently.  You just need to learn through that process. Then Todd comes back in and says, “Yeah. The super immediate success stories are annoying. As others have mentioned.” So just basically duplicate it and do it again. Todd says, “I’ve got about 15 SKUs on Amazon that do over 1000 a month. Some way over and I’ve got about 20 that do less than that. It all adds up and I’m scooting under the radar because no one is going after these duds.” I like it. Yeah, go after the duds guys. Go after the $1000 per month duds, I guess, is probably one big takeaway here.

So again, there’s a ton inside of this thread and I just wanted to share with you some of it. But there’s a ton here. Travis Long comes in here as well says, “Like many others here making $1000 a month would be welcome here. My goal with my first product is actually to make $1000 a month. It may seem low but I rent out two rooms in my house for that amount. Anyway my first product I chose not to go crazy into super competitive niche that would require giveaways which is why I’m okay selling and making less. I needed to pull the trigger on a product to get myself out of the product selection that I had been in for months. Now that I have my product and my photos listing set up, all I have left to do is finish my keywords and mail it to Amazon.

I’m excited to have learnt the other part of this business that is not product selection and once my listing is active, there is still a ton for me to learn all which will help my second product. Thanks for your post. Even though you were posting in frustrated, it motivates people like myself who are still getting started.” Then Nick chimes back in, “That’s exactly where I’m at. I’ve let myself get stuck trying to find the perfect product and I’ve got nothing to show for it. I’m beginning sourcing this week.” Nick I think you nailed it. You don’t have to go after that perfect product. I think it was the guy that created LinkedIn. He had a quote that he said that, “If you’ve launched your product and you haven’t gotten people or that you’ve been embarrassed by-” or something like that I think it was-, “and you’ve launched it too late–”  Now I’m not saying go out there and launch crappy products. All I’m saying is a lot of the successful people out there say, “You know what, get it to market. See what the market says and then adjust, make it better and then learn from it.”

[00:26:08] SV: And we can learn from other people’s reviews. Right? If we’re looking at our products that are just mediocre and then we’re looking at the reviews we can find out what we should be improving upon it. I’ve talked about that before but I wanted to say that again, because it’s really, really important. All of that stuff is there for us publicly. Think about that. Could you ever imagine years ago opening up a pizza shop and then wondering what your competitors are saying about, you know, negative remarks that they’re saying about that company? If you could, you could have went in and been better at that, right? People complaining about how the pizza tastes or how the service was or how it wasn’t clean. Or whatever.

You could have picked up on these things that now it’s just like we’re used to it. That’s just common. Just understand it’s a huge opportunity. Huge. Let me just say here another person chimed in here and says, “Big things often have small beginnings.” I like that. Then Justin popped in here says, “Partner with someone for help or research more. 10,000 is enough to get a great product that can get you like 30 to 40 more sales or more per day.” Yeah I agree but I don’t necessarily think that we have to go after 30 or 40 sales a day. I think what we’re talking about again is going after smaller sales volume but getting more SKUs. I think that’s good.

Someone else chimed in here and just said, “Patience.”  Torrence says, “Slow down cowboy. Going from the rat race to fully sustaining yourself on your start-up in under a year is pretty lofty and nearly achievable goal. Don’t set the bar so high that you set yourself up for failure. You’ve brought a product to market. That’s more than most people can say. Now learn from it. Move forward and keep growing. My first market was flooded between the time I placed my first order and the time I went live. I get two to four sales a day at five dollars each profit before pay-per-click. Basically a break even or loss, most of the time. A total dud. Second product, faster and easier to source, easier to brand. Costless in pay-per-click, got moving faster with no reviews and it averages $50 to $60 a day in net profit on six or seven sales. You can do it. Just pick yourself up and try again.” I love it.

Then Alex says, “Thanks. I really needed to read this. Think I expected too much too soon. Lesson learned.” I love it. Lesson learned Alex, that is sweet. Then let’s see here I’m going to give you just one more. John Walter says, “Get four more products like the one you have and you’re off to a good start. The notion of one product and now it’s my full time job is a bit unrealistic. Diversify, having a line of products, keep adding to the line. Good luck.” I think that that is perfect. Then Andrea says, “Exactly.” There’s a bunch more, there’s a ton more here guys. I would definitely recommend you going over there and reading this. Someone piped in here, I’m just scrolling, “You poor thing. Only profiting $1,000 a month with one product. Ugh. Ungrateful whiner.”

I think he was saying it to be funny. Again, just wanted to say thank you for posting that Alex and putting it out there. It really resonated with a lot of people including myself because a lot of people I think want to hear more about not always having a home run. We all hear, “Okay he’s’ making $100,000 a month or he’s making $50,000 a month after he just started like two days ago.” I get it. It’s not realistic. I don’t expect that myself. Slow and steady growth is what we’re trying to do here. And again, I believe that Amazon is the starting point. Right.

[00:29:44] SV: This is where we start. If you have a product that’s selling well on Amazon there’s most likely a good chance that you can sell it off of Amazon on your platform. Which we’ll talk about more as we move through this. Even including myself that’s why I’m going to be talking about moving forward. I just wanted again to just say, thanks for posting that and everyone else that came in and chimed in and made him feel better but also pulled together as a community and that’s why I love the TAS community. If you’re not a part of that, you’re missing out. It’s a great community.

I wanted to just again publicly say to everyone that is in that community that’s adding value, that’s helping each other willing to share, I want to thank each and everyone of you. There’s enough to go around and I believe that. Definitely keep sharing that. Again, if you want to go check the Facebook group out you can head over to theamazingseller.com/FB. And again I just wanted to say you guys are absolutely amazing. If you guys are listening to this for the very first time this whole business can be overwhelming.

There’s a lot of different moving parts and if you guys want a better idea of what it takes to find a product, to source a product, to do a launch to do a promotion, all of that stuff, I actually do a live workshop. Where I’m there live teaching exactly the steps that I took from start to finish and also now a lot of people that listen to the podcast or are in my class are following exactly and they’re getting results. You can do the same. If you want to attend one of my live workshops where we talk about this stuff. We also go through some Q&A. Head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop. And there again, I’ll be there live to answer any questions you have after we run through the five phases for launching a product.

Alright, so that’s it guys. That’s going to wrap up this episode. I’m want to say one more time and remind you guys another time, because I’ve done it many times, now I want to do it one more time. And I’ll do it again. I just want to remind you that I’m here for you and I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to you have to… Come on, say it with me and say it loud and say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.        

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