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…am super excited to be here and I want to remind you if you have a question that you want me to answer on an upcoming show, just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that. Just record your first your first name, maybe where you’re tuning in from and then your brief question and I’ll do my best to get it here on this show so I can connect with you and answer your questions.

Now, before we do jump into today’s questions, you might notice right now, you might not, but my voice is a little hoarse and the reason is, is because last minute I decided to go to a Cavs/Raptors game in Toronto, in Canada, crazy and it was just spur of the moment and we decided my son and I that it is, we decided to meet up with Dom Sugar in Buffalo and then he picked us up there and then we went ahead and went into Toronto, from there. How does that happen? Well, I asked myself the same question. Let me share the story with you.

My son and I are sitting on our couch. It was Friday night, watching the Cavs game and I said, “Man, it would be awesome to be on one of these games.” And he’s like, “Oh yeah, I would love to be able to watch the LeBron play.” He’s a big LeBron fan. If you guys have been following the podcast, you guys know my son who’s 19, huge LeBron fan, so he’s followed him, not necessarily the Cavs.

And Dom Sugar, that is, is from Canada and he’s a Raptors fan. So I went over to my phone and I picked it up and I sent Dom a text and I go, “Hey, any chance you can get us some tickets?” And I was kidding by the way. Totally just kidding and he’s like, “Yeah, you get here and I’ll get some tickets.” And I’m like, “Yeah okay.” So I’m like, “I’m just kidding.” And he’s like, “No, no, seriously get the flight and I’ll get some tickets.” And I’m like thinking about it and I’m like, “Oh my God, how could that even be?”

[00:02:04] Scott: I mean, here it is Friday night, they play on Sunday at 3:30, how the heck is this going to happen? So I started looking at flights. I literally started entertaining the idea. Started looking at flights and going from South Carolina to Canada was just ridiculous. I’m like, “There is no way I would spend that kind of money to do that, I’m just not going to do it.” So I told Dom, I’m like, “No way, the tickets are so expensive to go into Canada, it’s crazy.” He goes, “Why don’t you just go into Buffalo and I’ll pick you up there.” So I started thinking about it a little bit more and I still wasn’t serious in my mind. I didn’t have my mind like nowhere as near that I was going to actually go. So I did that.

The price was pretty darn good and I’m like, “You know what, if I’m going to do this, I should do it right now.” Like we should just do this. I mean how crazy would that be and then maybe what I’ll do is a TAS meetup in Toronto. Like here it is Friday night, I’m going to have a meet up Saturday night. Like the next night. Didn’t even say anything to anybody and well, long story short, we had a Toronto meetup at a hotel. About 15 people showed up which was amazing in such short notice.

We had a bunch people say they wanted to come but they just couldn’t in such short notice. We had one guy drive all the way from Rochester New York. We had another guy that drove six hours from I think it was Quebec. Just crazy, just crazy and we had a blast and we were there for I think we were there for about till 1:30 in the morning and I think we started at 8 o’clock at night. We just got in, we just got dinner and that was a whole other story where we had to go to subway to get some… It was just crazy. But anyway, so yeah, so I met a lot of great people.

[00:03:40] Scott: I want to give a couple of shout outs here for the ones that had actually registered on the page that actually attended. We got Lucas, we got Alan, John, Eric who drove six hours, Javier, Brett, Greg, Sam, Steve and if I forgot anyone which I know I did because there was a bunch of other people there, I apologize but those are the ones that were on the event page and I just want to say guys, thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with me and Dom and my son and Dom’s wife and it was just a really great time to hang out with some TAS’ers in Toronto. So thank you so much for that. So if my voice is hoarse it’s well because we were yelling at the game and plus I did a lot of talking in that meetup, so my voice is just shot.

The other thing is, is we’re going to be doing a meetup which is actually going to be today because you’re listening to this on May 19th, if you are. If you’re not listening to this on May 19th, this isn’t going to apply to you but I will be at Seller Summit today. I’m recording this before that obviously but we’re going to have a meet up there. So depending on if you’re listening this in the morning or the afternoon or even early evening, we’re going to be doing a meetup in Florida, Fort Lauderdale and that will be… All the all the details can be found there at theamazingseller.com/florida and that will direct to the event page for that, so you guys can see how you can come on over and hang out with us and it’s going to be totally free.

Just us hanging out in a lobby of a hotel. And there’s going to be, obviously there’s a bar there and there’s a coffee place, I think there’s even a Starbucks there. So we’re just going to hang out and talk and meet each other. So if you’re interested and you’re listening to this in time, if you’re listening this after the fact, well we won’t be there after the fact obviously. So as you can see, lots are going on in May and a lot going on in June as well. We’re going to have a TAS meetup in North Carolina. If you guys want details on that, you can just head over to theamazingseller.com/live and that will be posted on that page as well.

Alright guys, so what do you say? Let’s go ahead and get this baby rocking and rolling. Before we do though, I forgot I should give you guys the link for the show notes and the transcripts. You guys can head over to theamazingseller.com/361 and you’ll get all the show notes, transcripts over there and even all the links that I just mentioned will be there as well. So let’s go guys. Let’s get into this on this awesome Friday or whatever day you’re listening to. Let’s go ahead and listen to today’s first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:06:02] Josh: Hey Scott, Josh from New Jersey, just want to run a question by you in regards to an item I was looking into. So for example, I’ll just say an Under Armour running suit, a shirt and pants, so there’s a full set. So some of the complaints from people were that they have a bigger top half so they wish they could get a large shirt and still have the medium size pants. But the options are only for the whole suit as a small, medium, large or extra-large. You can separate the shirts and the pants. So what would be the best way to do that?

Is it possible to have it all in one listing? Would you have to meet two separate listings and then maybe put them as frequently bought together? What would be the best way to combat that situation because it seems to be a pain point for a lot of customers and a way for me to differentiate myself? So, look forward to hearing from you. Thanks again for everything that you do.

[00:07:01] Scott: Hey Josh, thank you so much for the question and it feels like we’re kind of like neighbors because I was in upstate New York for well over 40 years and I’ve driven through New Jersey plenty of times. So yeah, we’re like neighbors but let’s go ahead and address your question here. Now I think with what you’re saying, is it’s a really good question, you have like a suit of some kind but the top fits differently than the bottom or some people’s body shapes are different. Let’s face it. I think what you’re going to have to figure out here is probably how to sell them on their own listings and then try to get them in frequently bought together or using the promotion area to lead people over to those other products.

The other thing is maybe you put something in your images, not your main image of course but your other images that show like this is product A and this is product B and then they know that you have those two that go together or that you have different items that go together and then that will lead them to those other things. But you’re right because if you’re going to have a shirt and pants and each of those are going to fit differently, I know myself like it’s going to be hard if you go with a large overall like I might be, I know for a fact my son is larger as far as like lengthwise. So his top needs to be longer than mine but our pants might fit because of different waists or our hips or up higher or whatever.

I mean there’s all these different things that come into it when you’re trying to fit a whole body. So I understand that. So I think the only way that you’re really going to be able to do this successfully is to have two separate listings, one for the top and one for the bottoms and then from there you’re going to be able to do variations off of that with the size and maybe with colors. So maybe you’re going to have four different colors and then you’re going to have sizes for each of those colors. But that’s the only way that I really think that you’re going to be able to do that and also you got to think about this, some people might just want to buy the top or they might just want to buy the bottom.

[00:09:02] Scott: This way here, you’re not locking them into where they have to buy top and bottom. So it might be a better thing. So that’s what I would probably do. The other thing you can probably do in the promotions area, is you can say get 10% off of the bottoms when you buy the top. You can do something like that, so that way there, you’re cross-promoting each one as well and you’re reminding them that you have other things in relation to what they’re purchasing right now. So that’s what I would probably say would be your best bet the other thing you got to think about here is it’s also two pieces of real estate versus one and I don’t normally say to do that unless it makes sense because then you have two different listings to manage and you have two different listings with reviews and ranking and all of that stuff. But the cool thing about this is you will get two pieces of real estate in Amazon if you do it this way.

And then again you’re going to give better choices because you don’t want to get refunds either because then people buy it and then they say, “Well the bottoms fit good but the top didn’t, can I send back just the top and get it a new top?” And then you sell them in a full complete set then that’s not going to work. So anyone else out there that’s selling either clothing or something else that would work like this, that there’s different size, top and bottom and they could vary then you’re going to want to be careful with that and I would say probably break them apart, put them on their own listing and then I would try to make it really known that they go together and then that way their people will be led to that.

I think a coupon is a great thing. You can even put that into an image if you wanted to. I know terms of service, I mean people some people say you aren’t supposed to put that in your image, I say, “You know what, do what you feel is right.” I don’t think it’s a huge deal but again it’s a way to lead people to your other products and even if that’s just to show your top and your bottom on someone and then you have like an arrow pointing to each one or some type of a way to highlight those two but then they buy the top and then of course they’re going to want the bottom so then they’re going to be able to be linked over there through the promotions area.

[00:11:01] Scott: And the other thing that you can do, the last thing that I would recommend here is definitely having an insert card. So this way here, you can maybe give 10% off of the next purchase and then that might show your other items on that insert card. So then if they didn’t even know it in the listing, they’re going to see it over on the insert. So that’s another way to drive people back to your listing because they may be like, “Oh wow, I wanted that.” But pretty much if people want the top and bottom, they’re going to know about it already, they’re going to start looking for it. They’re going to look through your brand. They’re going to find it but if you can make it easier for them to find it then obviously you’re going to do better. Alright so hopefully this helped you. It’s definitely a great question and just keep me posted. Let me know how you make out and how things are moving along for you. So let’s go ahead and let’s do the next question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:11:48] Russell: Hey Scott, Russell here. Hey thanks so much for everything you do. Definitely big inspiration. I started off a company and this month I’ve absolutely crushed it. I’m at about $3,500  in sales in 3 weeks which I did not expect and I’m in my first week of using PPC and I had some questions regarding PPC. My first four days I had about 550,000 impressions. Was running three campaigns, one with a very small bid just for keyword research from some studies I’d done and two other ones. One which was a manual bid set at a little over what the suggested bid was and then the second in automated campaign which is running the same a little over the suggested bid.

So just let’s say just  at a dollar per bid, I was having huge success, tons of sales, rankings were going up every day, can’t stop looking at my Amazon seller app but within the last few days I’ve noticed I haven’t made any changes but my ads have essentially stopped getting impressions. So in doing some research I saw some people have asked on some forums regarding this question. It seems like a lot of people we’re having this problem. So yeah, I think if you can answer that, give me some insight, that’d glorious. Thanks again.

[00:13:33] Scott: Hey Russell, thank you so much for the question and first off congratulations on the success that you’ve had so far and I know it’s pretty exciting and you went into this thing not knowing what to expect really hoping for the best and things are really doing well for you. So that’s awesome and congratulations and thanks for being a listener. I’m glad the podcast has helped you move along in this journey of yours. So awesome job and definitely keep me posted.

So pay-per-click and anyone that’s listening right now and they haven’t even started with their sponsored product ads or their pay-per-click, I’m going to give you guys the resource that I think you guys should all start and that is theamazingseller.com/ppc and that will give you a good roadmap on how to get things started in the beginning and how to start really dialing in your pay-per-click. Now let me just say this as well. Pay-per-click is always something that’s like a moving target. One week you think you nailed it and then all of a sudden things change and then it doesn’t seem like you nailed it anymore. So you constantly have to be keeping an eye on it. We like using Ignite from Seller Labs.

They do a great job of allowing us to see things a little bit deeper without having to dig into everything but the one thing I will say is it’s patience. You have to be patient. If my stuff started to maybe change and there was only two or three days, I wouldn’t panic. I would just maybe look and see why I’m not getting impressions, maybe someone else started to outbid me, those types of things. You got to look at those things, but the one thing I think that you were experiencing here at this particular time that you submitted this question, I think there was something going on with sponsored product ads at this time. Amazon had changed some of their internal workings of the sponsored ads and everyone was complaining about this happening. Like, “All of a sudden my pay-per-click disappeared. I’m not getting impressions,” and that could have just been a glitch or it could have just been a change in how they’re displaying the keywords.

[00:15:38] Scott: So there’s all of that stuff that can happen. So sometimes, what you might want to do just as a test is pause those and then just start a brand new campaign and see what happens and sometimes that could  trigger it to start working again. But it could be, I mean like I said, if you have competition that comes in and all of a sudden they’re going to start showing up, your impressions are going to go away because they’re going to show up more. But in this case of yours, I’m pretty confident that it was probably something that Amazon made a change or they were testing or maybe they were updating or something and I think that everyone felt the effects of that.

So maybe you could even email me and let me know at this point if it’s been corrected but for anyone else out there that’s thinking to themselves like it was working last week and now it’s not working, there’s a variety of things that it could be but I would always go back to the basics and I would look and dig into the campaigns and then I would say, “Okay, like I was getting impressions here, I’m not getting impressions, is everything still in line? All of my keywords, did I change something, did I change something in my listing that might now make it not relevant that I don’t get the… Did I get a category change?” Maybe the category got changed and you didn’t even know it. Like that stuff happens. Like all of a sudden you’re in a category and Amazon just decides to flip you to a different category and all of a sudden you’re not able to get the same search that you got before just because when you’re in a certain category and you want to go after these certain keywords Amazon won’t show you as much as if you were in that category just the way it works.

So there’s not really one thing I can say, it sounds like you were starting to drill in but I also think that it might have already corrected itself by the time you listen to this but I wanted to address this question just because I know people they panic when their campaigns were doing something one week and then the next week they’re doing something different and it might be like totally different.

[00:17:37] Scott: The other thing I would say too is like, is your sales like most of them coming from pay-per-click? That would be the other thing that I’d be like, “Alright, I got to figure out a way to get these to start ranking on their own and start getting organic.” Because from my experience and from other people that I’ve either coached or just people that I’ve worked with or partners, usually 20%, maybe 30% will be sales from pay-per-click and then the other ones will be organic. And a lot of people they’ll say like, “Well Scott that campaign is like a 75% ACOS, like that’s bad.” And I’m like, “Well it’s bad if you’re not getting any organic sales from that push.” If you’re getting organic sales from that push, then what is the cost really on the 75% ACOS that you have.

Like what does that calculate to the organic sales that you wouldn’t have had if you weren’t running the sponsored ads, if that makes sense? Hopefully that makes sense. Does that make sense? I asked you something. Does that make sense? I hope it does because if it doesn’t I would say definitely go over to theamazingseller.com/ppc and you can go through the training over there that we’ve done and have had on Jeff Cohen from Seller Labs and those guys over there and they’ve really helped out with that. We even have a private Facebook group that talks all about the sponsored product ads. So definitely go over to that resource. I think that’ll definitely help you.

But anyway, that’s going to wrap up that question on pay-per-click and I know we could probably go on for over the next for hours on pay-per-click because it’s always a hot topic but hopefully that helped you and hopefully your little issue here has been resolved. So let’s go ahead and listen to today’s last question and I will give you my answer and then we’ll wrap this up and you can guys get on with your weekend and hey who knows depending on when you’re listening to this maybe we’ll see each other tonight at the Florida meetup. So that would be cool too. So let’s go ahead and listen to the last question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:19:27] Eric: Hey Scott, thanks for all the work you do keeping the podcast going. I listen almost every day going to and from work. I have a question about law labels that are required for certain products like bedding and stuffed toys et cetera. I’m new to private labeling and have spent several weeks looking for my first product. I finally decided on something, started ordering samples but I happen to come across some articles on law labels based off of what I’ve found, I’m fairly confident the product I’m leaning towards will need these labels.

Anyways I wanted to see if you have any experience with this and if you could share some insight on that. I took one look at the annual state to state registration costs and all the paperwork and frustration that goes with that and I’m about to kill off this idea and head back to the drawing board. Thanks for any help you can give and keep putting out the podcast. So helpful for me and a lot of other newbies out here.

[00:20:25] Scott: Eric, thank you so much for the question but I need to hear you guy’s first name. Now I’m going to answer your question but I got your name from the email that came through with your voice mail but Eric thank you so much for the question and I’m just busting ya right now. So to answer your question, yes you want to be careful with anything like this especially with kids or anything that’s hazardous or that you think that could be hazardous. When you’re first starting and some people look at this as an opportunity. They’re like, “Well, if I can go ahead and launch something that other people don’t want to launch, then there’s less competition.”

And you’d be 100% right, but you are getting into a more complicated space and you’re potentially at risk because you’re putting a product in the hands of someone that could harm themselves. And if we’re talking about a baby product, that’s a huge thing. So you definitely want to find out what you need to have to be compliant but you also want to protect yourself and this is where liability insurance would come in.

Everyone should have liability insurance anyway but if you don’t you better make sure your product is not going to be able to harm someone and almost any product could harm someone if they don’t use it properly. So then you got to make sure that all of your labeling is correct. You got to make sure if it’s FDA approved or tests have been done and all of that stuff.

So whenever anyone asks me about this, first off I say, “Are you in love with the product and is there something else that you can find that wouldn’t be at this level especially when first starting?” Because when you first starting you want momentum and this is not going to be a momentum run for you because you’re going to be, you’re going to be sitting around figuring out how to get these certain things done and waiting for an answer and then waiting to make sure that this gets approved and then if the testing doesn’t come through and it’s approved.

[00:22:23] Scott: But in your case, you’re just saying like, “Okay, I want to sell these things but I want to get a label on it so this way here I’m compliant and if something comes back or someone does come back and try to come after me, I’m protected and all of that stuff.” So I’m not a lawyer, a legal advisor or any of that stuff so let’s just be clear there. I would definitely contact a lawyer at this point that has some experience with this. I think another step I would probably go, I might even go here first, is I’d probably reach out to Michelle Love.

Michelle I actually met at one of our TAS live events in Arizona, found out that she was a liability insurance agent or broker I’m sorry and she’s been doing it for years and not just liability but just insurance in general but she understands the liability end of things which I think is hard to find especially when I was first starting I was trying to find someone to give me the answers and every insurance broker I would speak to they had no idea what this was or what we were trying to do.

It was just really foreign to them but Michelle understands it 100%. She also knows like what kind of policy that you would want to get but she also probably could direct you to where you would have to go to be compliant and that’s where I would go. I’d go there and then if she might say well you definitely want to make sure these check boxes are done and I’ve got a resource for that. Maybe she has an attorney that she can send you to or maybe direct you to someone that could then move you along in this journey and give you the right things in this. So I would definitely say that and then also I would say definitely figure out what type of business entity you’re going to be using.

Again, I’m not a legal advisor or anything like that but I think anyone starting out should have an LLC which is limited liability business and I think we’ve talked about it with Josh Bauerle who’s a CPA, who’s actually my CPA and he went over all of the different entities and I think that’s another thing I think that everyone should do just as like the first line of defense but it’s not going to 100% protect you. And then liability insurance would be another barrier.

[00:24:35] Scott: But then also knowing what are the things that you need to have to cover yourself or at least the best way possible so you understand what you’re getting yourself into. So all of those things, I would address. Now you mentioned, “Should I just maybe go back to the drawing board?” Me personally, with all of this stuff, I haven’t validated anything, I can’t really validate anything yet because it’s risky. I’d probably myself probably just go back to the drawing board. There’s so many other products and markets that you could probably tap into without these headaches. So the question is, is it going to be worth spending the next 3 to 5 months just getting this stuff figured out?

I don’t know if that’s how long it’s going to take but it could or would you be better off to just go after a product that you feel like you can just move faster and get your feet wet and do a test order and validate and go through the whole process. Like, would that be better? And to me that would be better for me. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be for you. If you want to go through all of that stuff and you think the long term thing is going to be better for you, that’s fine. I’m just a fast mover. I like to get things going and get some results by taking action as I always say. And then I can see and then adjust by seeing what happens.

But in this case, you’re going to be going through a little bit of red tape here, let’s just face it. I mean that’s what’s going to happen. So I know this wasn’t an awesome answer for you. Hopefully it’s given you some direction or maybe even just some insights. Like I said, if I was at the table with you or we’re at the coffee table right now and we’re having that cup of coffee that’s what I’d be saying. I’d be saying like, “Listen Eric, are you in love with this product? And if so then go for it. If you’re not, then move on.” That’s what I would say. So anyway that’s going to wrap up this question. Keep me posted on that Eric though. Let me know how you made out or if you’re just going to move on. I’d be curious to know. That would be cool to hear what you’ve done and maybe even what it took to get through that process if you decide to go through that process.

[00:26:39] Scott: Alright, so that’s going to pretty much wrap it up. I did have a quick announcement, really quickly. We are going to be doing our last workshop that we normally do. We do a five phase workshop where I actually show you the five phases to picking a product to then launching the product and everything in between and it’s going to be the last one we’re going to be doing here on May 25th, for probably about six to eight weeks depending.

I’ve got a lot of things going on in June. I’ve got my daughter getting married in July, so lots happening and our private label classroom is going to be closing as well and we’re going to be doing some updates there and obviously we’re going to be still in our class helping out our students but that’s going to be a time that we’re going to be closing the doors, so this way here we can do our updates, we can add our new content that we’re doing. We’re doing a whole refurbish of our member’s area and all of that stuff. So we got a lot of cool things working there inside of our classroom. So just a lot going on.

So if you guys want to attend our last workshop for May and for June you’re going to want to head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop and we will be on there live and we will give you guys the whole roadmap from start to launch as far as your product goes and we get a lot of great feedback from this workshop. So if you guys want to attend definitely head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop, register and if you guys are listening to this after the fact, still go over to that page because once we start again, once we start doing our workshops, you’ll see the next one there, the registration page, the date, the workshop all of that stuff will be on that page. That’s the page that we keep updating for our workshops. So definitely, definitely do that.

[00:28:22] Scott: Alright guys, so that’s it. That’s going to wrap up this episode of Ask Scott. Again, if you guys have a question, head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and ask me a question and just leave your first name please Eric, leave your first name.

Alright, so that’s it guys. That’s going to wrap it up. Have an awesome amazing day, weekend, whatever time it is for you guys or whatever you’re doing and remember as always, 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, 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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…so we could talk all about 1K Fast Track. What’s going on brother? What do you think about that?

[00:00:19] Scott: I think that’s good. I think we can maybe make this happen. It only took us about 30 minutes to get that intro. Why don’t we tell people about that?

[00:00:26] Dom: Nice, I mean I’m not used this stuff. You’re the host. I’m just a guest. I’m the side show, that’s all. Chris Shaffer…

[00:00:34] Scott: No, it was awesome, it was awesome. You did a great job and I like that you actually did that because you actually now… You can see what it takes to maybe do an intro. It’s not that easy, is it?

[00:00:45] Dom: It’s not very easy especially if you’re going to try and add lib. I probably have a 45 notes. I started with a pen, a marker, scribbled out about 40 chicken scratches and then I thought, “You know what, just let me use WordPress or something.”

[00:01:01] Scott: Alright, yeah, but we are going to talk all about the 1K FastTrack and I wanted to get you back on because our second group has went through and the numbers are pretty amazing. They were amazing in the beginning when we did our pre-challenge and for anyone that is even wondering what the heck I’m talking about or we’re talking about, it’s something that we created. Gosh going back about three months now. I think it’s over three months now and it’s something we call the 1K FastTrack. And what that basically is, it’s for people that are struggling to just get started and how can we get them to 1K in sales and the way to do it really, and that’s why I reached out to Dom because Dom is the retail arbitrage, the RA ninja as we call him, the master.

And he’s been doing it for 15 plus years. Probably closer to 20 but he decided to help me help you with teaching this stuff and we’ve already had two classes go through it. We’re actually evolving every single time and this second time, with this second group has been crazy on the numbers and those numbers just to let you guys know what we’re talking about, we’re talking $30,772.53 and that’s actually higher than I announced in our private group inside the 1K FastTrack because someone forgot to submit their totals until after we finished our six weeks so we added another four grand there. So Dom, what does this say about retail arb? What does it mean?

[00:02:27] Dom: Well first of all, it’s pretty overwhelming those numbers. The first group we thought was good. The second group far succeeded that group. So I’m very impressive and four weeks the source all that stuff and then by six weeks to have it all prepped up and sent to Amazon or do manual sales, it’s crazy. But what it tells you is that, I mean it’s the same thing we’ve been hearing for the last couple years, retail arb is dead now because of gated categories, gated brands and stuff but again we put lots of volume through every day.

So we know on point, on fact, that it’s not dead. Again, it might have not been what it was five years ago because so many people are into it and there’s maybe not so many retailers now because unfortunately a lot of them are closing down but in reality there’s still money to be made if you want to put the effort in. It’s a simple business model too. You buy cheap you sell high, there’s nothing easier than that.

[00:03:18] Scott: Yep, well and I want to talk about that because I don’t want this just to be us sharing numbers and getting everyone excited. I actually want to go back through and we can retrace those steps that this group did, but the first group did and like what you see moving forward for retail arbitrage. Whether that’s selling on eBay or Amazon and I want to highlight that. A lot of people don’t consider eBay when doing this and I want to talk about like why I don’t think that’s smart. And one of the things I want to again mention and some of you guys have heard this story but I go back to my wooden bridges.

I like that story because that was something that I did and if you guys didn’t hear that story, really quickly, my wife and I when we were still in our photography business before we actually even really got that rolling 100%, we were looking for ways to make extra money. So we started playing around with selling things on eBay. Very, very little. Just stuff around the house and then we started to sell these wooden bridges. They were like these little cedar wooden bridges. They were four feet and they were arched and then you can put then in a garden. That’s what they were for. Just a little decorative type of bridge and we were buying them for $25 and selling them for 140 bucks and that’s what really got me excited about just online in general, that’s going way back.

But that was eBay and eBay was around before Amazon. So there are buyers, search engine, there’s still sales happening there every single day, I know Dom you’ve got tons of inventory in there and you do tons of volume through eBay. So when people would say to you Dom right now like eBay is like dead and there’s no one buying on eBay, what would you say to that person?

[00:04:53] Dom: Yeah, I would say that’s false first of all. Again, I might agree with them that the volume is not like it used to be but it’s not like a drop 50%, 60%. It might have dropped, lost 10%, 15$, maybe 20% because of Amazon’s growth. So fast and FBA process isn’t easy but eBay is an easy solution for products that you can’t list on Amazon or stuff that you have multiples. If you’ve got 20 or something, you might not want to send it into Amazon FBA or manually fulfill it just on Amazon, you want to have it on both platforms. A matter of fact, not even two, three, four, five platforms.

We always forget, everyone… We’re all addicted to Amazon FBA but there’s still Amazon U.K that you can sell an amount, fulfil it or Amazon Canada, fulfill it yourself and eBay and a host of other sites that you could put your product on. So eBay and Amazon are two different monsters, but they’re two headed monster and that’s good for business for a retail arb seller, ecommerce marketplace seller. There’s a blue color, white color. Your high end stuff, you maybe want to put on Amazon. Your collectibles or your used goods, you might want to put on eBay. So those are my thoughts on. Again, it’s far from dead.

[00:05:58] Scott: Yeah, I know and again I mean to give you guys a little bit of what you guys can do like right now if you guys are listening to this and even if you’re… I know people right now that are private labeling. I know actually one guy that’s doing over a $100,000 a month and he’s still doing some RA. Dom you know who I’m talking about and they’re still doing it because to them it’s a system you get in place and once you understand what you’re looking for, then you just go find that. The thing is, with the 1K FastTrack the reason why we did this, is because we know people and we had people come into class and say, “Scott I’ve been a listener of the podcast for over a year and I still haven’t pulled the trigger on a private label product, I just don’t know what product to pick.” And I said, for these people we just got to get them started.

So what better way than to go out and find product, retail product that’s discounted, way discounted and there’s strategies behind that. There’s also how you can get additional coupons and money off and all that stuff which we go through extensively inside of the class. But you can go in there, buy it low and sell it high. You can literally do that in a week. Like you can have a product picked and launched on Amazon live in a week. You can have it less than that. If you want to have it fulfilled by merchant, you can have it done the same day which we have students that have already done that.

But what we did and this is what you guys can do like right now and I actually did it on episode 312 and I’m going to bring it back right now, is you can find the stuff that’s laying around your house right now and this is what we had the class do before we even started the class. We had a pre-challenge. We called it a pre-challenge. So seven days and it’s like the time starts now and then seven days from now, you’re going to go ahead and you’re going to report back what you sold and we’re not even saying you got to go out and find stuff, we’re saying only go into a garage, in an attic or anywhere and you find that stuff that’s laying around that you think that you would put in a garage sale. If you would put that into a garage sale, you can put that on eBay, period. And you should be and we had students do that. The first group did over $3,600 or $3,800.

[00:07:57] Scott: The second group did over, I think it was $6,200 or something like that in, we’re talking seven days guys. Like seven days and they didn’t have a product when they started. So my challenge to you would be, do that? Like right now, depending on when you’re listening to this. I don’t care when you’re listening to this, start right now. The time starts now, boom! I just did the stopwatch. Seven days from now, come back, let us know. Go to this blog post. Go to episode 362, theamazingseller.com/362. You’ll also find the show notes, the transcripts and all that stuff there. But go there and put something in the comments there. What happened after that seven days? I want you guys to start doing that right now because there’s no excuses.

Dom don’t you find that… I mean we just did a meetup together. We were in Canada together. It’s funny when I’m recording this because when it airs it’ll be probably a couple of weeks later. I was just in Toronto. We did a last minute trip which was phenomenal by the way and watched the Cavs and the Raptors and got to hang out with Dom for the weekend and stuff and that was a last minute deal, but we did a TAS meetup in Toronto and one of the biggest things there Dom was people were getting stuck on still what kind of product to pick. So would you say that that type of person might even just want to start with retail arbitrage until they figure out the product?

[00:09:10] Dom: Yeah, I think it’s a simple transition to get into retail arb which will lead you to an easier transition into Amazon FBA. Again that’s one of the reasons we started the course. It’s not necessarily you want to stay in an RA for your whole business life but the transition… I find that people just get even confused with just shipping and what’s an FNSQ, how many products you could have in your account. With RA, don’t forget you could also season your account and give it history, feedback history. You can give it sales history. You can get through those thresholds that Amazon wants you to go through and then when you’re ready to release your private label products, you might have a limit of $10,000 or $15,000.

So now you don’t have to be stopped or slowed down because you can’t send so many units in. So the RA helps you do that and again it’s a quick selling process too. If you know how to purchase right or source right, you’re going to buy products that’s going to be flipping every couple days. Again yeah, so easy transaction and to be honest, I would say 50 percent of the private label guys that I work with or that I’ve talked to, they actually started at retail arbitrage. That was their entry point.

[00:10:18] Scott: A lot of them.

[00:10:19] Dom: And then they want to scale. I’ll be the first to say that you have to put a lot of work and a lot of SKU’s, a lot of revenue, a lot of space, a lot of time, if you want to scale to RA to do seven figures like we’re doing in RA in order…

[00:10:31] Scott: But what if someone just wanted to get to $25,000 or $30,000 net a year?

[00:10:37] Dom: Well, yeah for sure they could easily do that. Easily do that. What I mean by that Scott is that private label allows you to scale pretty fast within a year. You could be doing pretty good. Where RA takes a lot more time, more effort. So that’s why even in my situation that’s why I went to private labeling because I’m like, “You know what, I’ve got my  RA business I want to have something a little more lucrative where I don’t have to put as much time a but keep the RA on it.” So like a part time job after my full time job.

[00:11:02] Scott: It’s a side hustle too. You could do it side hustle here, right?

[00:11:06] Dom: Exactly so…

[00:11:07] Scott: And you’re learning through that process?

[00:11:09] Dom: Of course yeah and you’re building your inventory for Q4 like a lot of them in the 1K FastTrack did. The last two groups and the third one and the fourth one will have time still. $20,000, $30,000 is definitely achievable. A year, gross sales for sure, net, that’s achievable too. So it’s an easy process. First of all we taught the group to go thrifting in their house or house hunting, go through and you’d be surprised how much. So I could do it myself and get a whole eBay store if I went through our house.

Like I said, old iPhones and maybe not so good computer anymore or old toys for my daughter, clothing that doesn’t fit us anymore especially me now. All my branding clothes that don’t fit. I can put all those, I can put all those on there and sell them. You’re not going to get retail value for them but you get a few bucks for them and it seasons your account, that’s the best thing. You’re selling stuff for $5 – $6, you’re going to get your feedback for $10 stuff as well. You might not…

[00:12:02] Scott: Maybe before we move on with that, why don’t we talk about why that’s important to have your account be seasoned?

[00:12:08] Dom: Well it’s important because of the way Amazon, especially for Amazon, even eBay, the way they set their algorithm and how they rank you in buy box and stuff like that and eBay with the top rated seller and the free shipping and the 30-day returns. You get discounts on eBay. You actually get 10 percent if you’re a top rated seller and it takes time to get those badges. So the more products you got on there that flips, the more chance that you’ll get those badges and that buy box.

But again if you’re going to transition from RA to private label, eBay is really not going to do anything for you but it’s definitely an asset to have that and Amazon is definitely you’re going to go through all the product. I still get so many people that don’t even know what an FNSQ is but you’ll know that. You’ll know how to print out the labels, put them on your barcode, put them in a box, have to do a manifest type thing, count, ship off your boxes, you’ll know what warehouses your stuff’s going to before you order, you do private label, that kind of stuff. So it all intertwines.

[00:13:07] Scott: Well, again I mean you’re dipping your toe in without a lot of risk, you can get started really, really fast and you can start to understand and learn the process. I think that’s the big thing and once you do then you’re going to see that, what this thing works and maybe I want to keep going in. I talk a lot about that. I talk about it publicly but I also talk about it in any of the classes that we teach and it’s really about like how do we get you started. Like that’s the hardest part and then once we get you started, how do we get your results fast? So this way here, when you get those results it makes you want to keep going and it builds that momentum. Like there’s nothing more than getting a sale and going like, “Holy crap, like this thing worked.”

And then you want to go back out to the stores to find more products or you want to go find your next private label product. Like it just, again it gives you your own internal motivation which we all need but nothing is better than getting that for sale and then from there being able to say, “Okay this thing works, I’m going to keep moving on it.” And that’s really why we decided to do the 1K FastTrack because then it’s going to force you to learn quickly. You don’t have to wait. You don’t have to say, “Well I gotta get freight forwarding, I got to get a supplier, I got to get all this stuff.”

No, you’re just finding stuff that’s currently selling, you’re jumping on that listing because you can as long as that’s not a gated brand which again that’s a whole another thing but you’ll know it’ll say restricted, you can’t sell it and then from there you just move on to the ones that you can. Now, just to bring up that again on a seasoned account. We talk about seasoning your account when you do private labeling. Now when you launch a product, you’re going to be able to rank better because now you’re in their system and you’ve got a good rating on your seller, hopefully you do. A good seller rating and stuff and that’s going to help you when you launch rather than someone that’s brand new.

[00:14:50] Scott: The other thing is and Dom we just discovered this through this last group, where actually my son was looking into selling like certain sneakers and socks and stuff that are designer socks or sports socks and stuff like that, hats and lids and all these different things and we were running across the issue where it was some of these brands were gated. But we also can go to request to get ungated and what we found is, with a seasoned account it was literally one click of a button and then you were approved. That was pretty amazing.

[00:15:21] Dom: Yeah, pretty exactly. I mean we’ve done that and I just did it for fun 10, 12 brands and ungate. It’s stuff that we’ve never sold before.

[00:15:29] Scott: Yeah, Nike, Oakley, Polo, like all those name brands. It was one click and we were approved.

[00:15:35] Dom: NBA, NFL, New Era, you name it. DC shoes, Fox Racing, a million different brands, they can do it. Again now we do try on an account because we had IK FastTracker’s try it, new guys and they couldn’t get it done. Obviously that’s because they… It’s a trust issue. It’s a customer service thing. It’s products they don’t want unexperienced products especially a lot of times because of counterfeit good. That’s why they do it. It’s all about track records. It’s just like a promotion, basically a job. You work for three years, you can apply for an assistant manager. After years the manager liked that. It’s progression.

So Amazon has algorithms in for you and then definitely it’s going to be a lot easier. And if you want, once you get to a private label stage like a few people have already even from or alumni group. I think two or three are already private labeling and our new group actually one or two of them are already private labeling and they want to add retail arbitrage to the crown just to get more income. It’s just a side thing to get more income especially if you’re in the same playground. It’s not like you got to go somewhere else. You can just do two things. I have 2 sets of brands. I have one on this side and I have one on that side but we all hang out in the same area. It’s the same thing.

Why would you have one channel when you can have two or three or you can have two streams of revenue? Especially if you’re trying to gear up to make this a lifestyle change. Scott, this is what we’ve talked about? You want to work for yourself. You don’t want to work for the man, you don’t want to have to punch in, you don’t have to wear uniform, you don’t have to get evaluated. Your evaluation and your raise is every month. I gained 20% income or Amazon tells you that you did 30% more this one, 40% more.

That’s your raise and then you also handle, you have your own destiny. The harder you work, the more products you get the achievements that helps you gain your experience and then financially it’ll help you. And then that’s all in your hands. Again, sometimes Amazon has a little bit hands, if you guys are doing again grey market area or black hat stuff, we can’t help you with that stuff. If you stay up and clean and you hustle again like a lot of people like to use that word and find product and then you find your own niche. Sometimes that works instead of just…

[00:17:40] Scott: Well, I was going to say, let’s dig into some things that these guys can actually take away and if they want to get out there and if they want to go and start finding products. I want to highlight a couple things that you’ve brought up a couple times, both privately and publicly actually at our meetup. You were even talking to some people there and you were actually talking to my son because my son came along for the ride.

He wants to narrow down his market to what he wants to do as far as doing a little bit of retail arb and what you told him and some other people that were at the meetup and me privately was like some people are just, they’re narrowing their focus into just like one category or two categories and then just all they do is go in and look for those things and you brought up a good story. One guy and this isn’t even going out and doing retail arbitrage, but he sells hubcaps. Can you tell that story? Is it cool to tell it?

[00:18:33] Dom: Yeah, he sells on eBay and his name is New York Joe, Joe Hubcap. I mean I don’t know him personally but I watched he’s got a lot of good information about selling online. He’s like, they call him the eBay fanboy. So he’s number one proprietor eBay. He doesn’t sell on Amazon and it’s all about eBay for him. There’s technical things that’s changed or how to operate listings and stuff like that but he sell hubcaps and he’s got a business, a retail business where he buys and sells, close out hubcaps or OM hubcaps. OM means like it’s actual original stuff from like Ford or from Chevy and then his storyline is that he actually goes out once a week or so and he drives around the throughway and the thriftway.

And you can actually see his videos online and he actually picks up hubcaps that have flown off the interstate in New York. He’ll pick up a couple 100 here in a month and it’s all free money because he just puts it on. He throws them on eBay as long as they’re good and then he mixes in with his new stuff and again he’s been effective because he has a lot of the overseas offshore hubcaps coming in that are undercutting him.

But he’s made a niche because he’s got good customer service. He does 100% returns on everything and stuff and it’s pretty cool how he’s built the business. I don’t know his numbers fully but he’s got lots of SKU’s and it’s such a, I’d say niche, if you’d like say ‘ni-she’. So they go to him if they’re looking for a 1965 hubcap for their Mustang 1985 a hubcap for their Corvette or 1983 for their Bug or whatever you name it.

[00:20:02] Scott: I know. I mean it makes sense and it’s funny because so many people wouldn’t think of that. I know there’s another story that you could share about the guy with the keyboard. Selling certain keys. So why don’t you talk about that one.

[00:20:15] Dom: So all he’s doing basically you can’t do it now because people caught it on but he was taking Apple keyboards buying them used on eBay or Amazon or could use your Craigslist and he was buying the keyboards for $20, $25 maybe $15. Keyboard sell for about 100 bucks, the wireless or the non-wireless was actually the cheapest ones he was getting and he pulled out all the keys and sell them individually. So like the spacebar was like 15 bucks, the return key was like 18 bucks and the Y was 10 bucks and because people aren’t going to replace a whole keyboard if only one key is gone. So he made a whole business on that. It’s crazy. He put himself through university and college through it. He exploited it.

[00:20:53] Scott: Yeah, so I mean there’s so many different angles that you could approach this and again so many people and I’m not saying that this is going to be your main business. But if you’re struggling, if you’re stuck, if you’re saying to yourself or if maybe you’re saying like I’ve got a couple of products up but I’m just not sure what that third one is yet, rather than just waiting around, this could be something that you could do on the side and then just add it to the revenue numbers. It’s like your net numbers at the end of the year.

Another story that I like to share that you had said was there’s another guy that all he does is he gets ready for fourth quarter with toys. And he just loads up in fourth quarter and then he makes $200,000/$300,000 for the year and he’s good and then the rest of the year he just slowly builds his inventory for fourth quarter.

[00:21:38] Dom: Yeah, that’s basically all he does. He’s a good friend of mine. It’s actually here in Canada. So it’s a little bit of a process but what he does is he buys, but he only specialized in that market. He doesn’t do anything else. So no clothing, no video games, no anything else. All brand new toys from the major distributors. You’re talking Mattel, Hasbro, Fun for Kids, a million different wholesalers and distributors out of there.

They close all the stuff for him, he takes all the toys, builds it up all year round and he sends it in starting November. Beginning of November, truckload of stuff, pallets of stuff and then just cruises right through Christmas and some of it is old toys, but again you’re talking Marvel toys and Barbie and still top of the line stuff. It might not be brand new stuff, it might be two, three years old but for the price he’s paying you can make margins on it. And he’s working on a 20% to 30% sometimes 50% margins and yeah. He’ll gross a million dollars in a month and a half and walk home with $200,000/$300,000, that’s all he does.

[00:22:35] Scott: Yeah and well let me say this though too because you said that they’re not new. They’re new in the box, they’re just not new as far as like this year.

[00:22:43] Dom: Right, they’re not current, I should say. They’re not frontline, mainline…

[00:22:47] Scott: And one other thing that we like to highlight inside the 1K FastTrack when we’re starting to talk about like and really drill into like how to find product and not have to actually go out there and maybe go to the stores because a lot of people say, “Well I don’t want to go out to the stores or I don’t want to go to the yard sales or I don’t want to go to the garage sales.” You can find gold there. I mean a state sales or any of that stuff. But nowadays they’re making it so easy to sit in front of your computer and have that stuff come to you and we talked about that.

I can almost guarantee that everyone out there right now listening has a Facebook group in their area that is a garage sale site. There’s multiple ones. And what will happen is, they’re going to post things just a regular everyday person, a mom is cleaning out their house and they’re going to go ahead and start listing that stuff on their garage sale site. Sometimes free, come pick it up. And that stuff there can be inventory for eBay. Some of it’s going to be maybe new and box. If it’s new and box you could possibly sell that on Amazon. So this way here, you don’t have to actually go out there.

So you can have that as your side thing and once a day you go in and you just look at the feed. And that’s it. If something catches your attention, you reach out to that person, you negotiate, you get a deal, you buy it. I actually sent this to you Dom and I also posted it in the 1K FastTrack group as I was scrolling through one of the ones I belong to up home. It was a guy selling all the Nascar stuff. And it was a whole collection that he’d been collecting for the past 10 years or 15 years and it was like 350 bucks. Now this was a site that was up home so I couldn’t really do it. I actually I reached out to my daughter and I said you might want to check this stuff out.

But like Dom said, you just go through that stuff and see what it’s going for and then the guy I think wanted $350, you could have offered it maybe 100 bucks. Maybe you take it, maybe 150 you might not have taken it but you at least you make the offers but that deal came to me. So this way here I could react to it. The other thing that we’ve talked about is putting an ad in Craigslist and then basically just saying like, “Hey, if anyone has…” And if you’re going to niche down you’re going to basically just say what you’re looking for.

[00:24:47] Scott: Any new inbox, Hasbro Toys. Any new inbox, Barbie. Any new inbox, this or clothes or whatever you want to do, hats and then from there people are going to call you. And then you can decide if you want to have that. And that way you’re not having to go out there, you can almost put this system in place and then you’re only getting calls or people contacting you when they have stuff that you might be interested in, Nerf toys or something. So that’s a great strategy for anyone out there that’s thinking, “You know what, I might want to do this but I don’t want to go out there and go in the stores and scan items and do that whole thing.” So it’s a really easy way to actually do it.

So it’s endless on what you can do and I want to really stress that. I think people get hung up on, well I don’t have time or I don’t want to do that. If you don’t have time to build this business then you’re not really at the part where you need to make that transition in your life. Because to me it’s like, you’ll know. Like when you create that why, that’s strong why of why you’re doing this, that’s when you put in the work. That’s when you put in the time, “Well Scott I don’t have enough time because I work 9:00 to 5:00.” You got a lot of time because I remember working 9:00 to 5:00, actually I was working 7:00 to 7:00, still having time to build my photography business on the side because I wanted to get out of doing my 7:00 to 7:00 job.

So there’s time, you just have to allocate that time. It could be an hour a day. What’s that going to be, your lunch hour? I know my son he was out to school and he would say, “Hey, I got a break in between class, I’m going to head over to a certain store and I’m going to do a little retail arb. He wants to get into it. So he’s out there doing that on his time that he’s not in school. So anyway Dom, I know a little bit of a rant there, but I just want people to understand that it’s not where you have to go in and put all this time but you can put time in and it’s so available to all of us.

[00:26:31] Dom: Yeah, I mean it all depends what you want to put into it. It’s like anything. It’s your job, your current job or your relationships. It’s either your health. It’s all going to be boiled down to what you think you can put into it and then I think that sometimes you just have to, it has to be some realization. Again, I’ll use my, because I don’t want to rant off on top of it but my weight. It’s always the same thing. I’m busy, I’m busy, I can’t lose weight, but you know what? You get to a point where you got to say, “I got to do it.”

And then really focus on that thing. Maybe not have 10 focuses, not worry about going out with your buddies to play baseball or you drinking after work. If you want to build a lifestyle and you want to change your culture, your living habits, your working, you have to just, you have to commit to it. Right Scott? It’s the same thing.

[00:27:16] Scott: 100%.

[00:27:17] Dom: Just like a podcast. You can’t just do a podcast and do one every three weeks. You don’t even have a podcast. You can say how you want it to be a podcaster or have your own podcast as well as you want but if you don’t actually take action which is your coin term which of course is a registered trademark in 52 States and Canada. Well, what I’m trying to get at is that I’ve dedicated 20 years of my life to do this, to build this. And now I’m giving it back to people because I wanted to see succeed and the best people coming to us and saying, “Look, you’ve helped me, we’ve been financially hardened and now you helped me give me a way to do it even helped me clear out myself because I really didn’t know how to list on eBay or Amazon.”

It’s great and we’ve thrown to them all these little tidbits and all these tricks of the trade I’ve been doing for years. Like the ads in the paper number one that’s one of our best things is the ads in the paper. Final overstock, closeouts liquidation less than what you have brand new case lots or let us know or go in the freebie section and finding stuff or the garage sale section like you said and looking for stuff and say, “Hey, I’ve seen you’ve got a bunch of video games, what do you want for.. Okay I’ll take anything that you have sealed for a dollar each.” Okay this is where I live come and pick it up.” There’s a million things. Again, everyone thinks retail arb it’s just going to Walmart and Target and that’s all they do. It’s more than just that.

You need 50 locations to go to. I’m serious you need to 20 to 50 looking and you’re not going to go to them every day because that’ll be impossible. But you do the main three or four then you go to another three or four. You just keep rotating through them until you know the process and which stores have the best stuff and you just maximize that with your time. Again, if you’re working 9:00 to 5:00, we fully get it. I’m working here but I can still find time to go do some retail arb if I really wanted to.

Bring your family with you, bring your daughter, your son, go for supper. Say, “Hey, we’re going to the mall today, we’re going to go eat, I’m going to do some retail arb.” And then your daughter would be excited by her gift, take ten off the shelf and give her one of those troll watches, so she’s nice and happy. Do something like that, maybe go out with your friend instead of going out drinking for the night or whatever. Just go to the mall and get him interested, maybe he’ll do something. I talked about that too.

[00:29:17] Dom: Maybe one guy wants to do books, another guy wants to do toys or you help each other. Guess what, I thought about your toys, I don’t do it here you can have it. That type of stuff. So there’s a million ways to do it.

[00:29:28] Scott: Yeah there totally is and I think also it’s crazy because like you mentioned, like you with your kids and stuff like I have my daughter Alexis who she’s doing it totally part time. Like very, very little and they’ve already generated over $6,000 the last I checked. It’s not all profit but it’s a side little bit of income and they have a ton of inventory in there still that once they sell that that will be pure profit because it’s all paid for through the money that they’ve already generated through their first set of sales. Which a lot of people don’t consider and I think they’re going to have a phenomenal fourth quarter but there’s so many lessons there. Like she’s building a skill set that she can use now to then take to the next thing and once you learn this I think you have a, you definitely have a head start when you start in this.

And when I first started in this, I didn’t have to sell on Amazon. I was already doing well in our other businesses. So it wasn’t like something that I had to do but of course I’m an entrepreneur. I want to tap into other revenue streams and that’s where Amazon came in. And I tried retail arbitrage and I’ve said this publicly for like a half hour and it was just too much work for me at the time. Now if that’s all I knew and that was my thing, I would’ve did it. I did it with the bridges. After the bridges I actually sold these Garageband loops which was basically digital, these little digital loops that went into a program that I recorded and then I put them up on a CD. I sold those and then I sold projectors.

I told you guys that story, where I built these little projectors that transferred 8 millimeter film. Did over $50,000 in old 8 millimeter projectors that I sold on eBay. So I’ve done it. I’ve hustled. I went through there but this business model for anyone that is just they’re stuck and they just don’t know where to go or what they should do, do this in the meantime because I’m telling you you’re going to get results, once you get results you’re going to get momentum, once you get momentum, it’s going to encourage you and boost your confidence and then from there want to keep going out there and doing it and keep pushing.

[00:31:30] Scott: And that’s why we really wanted to do this. I want to share this really quickly though Dom, the one from Richard. Richard Palfrey, I hope I pronounced his name right but he was in our first group and he admitted that he didn’t even get started until after the class ended. I think he had an issue with his account, getting it set up or something. He’s actually from the U.K. So he posted this after the class was over and this is what he had wrote. He’s got a screenshot here and everything but it says, “Boom, nice British bank holiday weekend result.”

And he gives the screenshot and he says that’s about $3,800 last 30 days. “Just wish I could have opened my seller account six weeks earlier, I might have been able to join in the results party with my first six weeks total private label next up for me. Thanks Scott, Dom and Chris for your brilliant coaching and guidance for making the time and putting in the effort to help all of us newbies.” And he goes on to say how it was just such an illuminating experience and it 100% convinced him that he wants to be in this business and he wants to then get into private labeling.

So perfect example. He didn’t start with the class but it wasn’t the class, it was just like he wasn’t ready or maybe something wasn’t right once he like the seller’s account wasn’t, it wasn’t for whatever reason it wasn’t approved or whatever. But he didn’t give up and now he’s got $3800 in the bank account 30 days later. So again, he still pushed on and pressed on as we say. So Dom, before we wrap up, I want to again just, what are the things that you’ve seen, either with the class because there’s like out of the class there’s probably I would say 10 to 15 percent that are really, really hungry and go getters.

What’s the difference? What are you seeing between the 10% and 15% and everyone else? And don’t get me wrong, everyone in the class pretty much contributed and we have some people that made $50 in revenue, they made their first dollar but we have some people that made upwards of $11,000 in six weeks. So what’s the difference? What do you see? What do you look at that and go, “Okay I see this person and I see this person?”

[00:33:36] Dom: Yeah it could be a number of things. It could be a lifestyle thing, where the area they’re in, they might have a sourcing product, the retailers available, could be a busy time in their life, it could be that it’s just something they thought they would like and then they didn’t want to do it once they thought all the work that goes into it, finding the stuff, taking time away because they’re working full time, labeling it, sending it in. They thought, “I thought it’d be a lot easier than this.” It also could be that I finally if you have the entrepreneurs spirit of the sales spirit already, you’re going to succeed probably a little bit more because you already have that drive  to sell whether it’s retail arb or maybe you were selling to other stuff before.

If you’re a distributor or you’re a sales guy already selling pharmaceutical supplies or if you’re selling wholesaling other stuff already as a rep, maybe this is a side thing. So you already understand the business of finding product. So it could be a lot of things. Again, maybe these people just started late and they just got into the course and then first three weeks, they just lost shuffling all and we’ll take it up later. It could be many reasons. Again I think the top guys just take their strengths and they just push through because they want to. People have the top guys. It’s like any business or even in sports or it’s just a competitive nature. Right Scott?

[00:34:56] Scott: Yeah and wait a minute here, let’s just pause it for a second because we keep saying guys, we mean guys and girls because I mean we just refer to everyone as, “Hey guys.” But we got some women in the group too that were doing well. So I don’t want to seem as over just saying that guys are doing it. It’s guys and girls just because it’s how we refer to everyone, “Hey guys, what’s up?” But I just wanted to say that because this to me is for anyone and but the one thing I want to say is a big but here Dom. And I didn’t mean cut you off but I did want to say that  like you said and I want to highlight this, is you might have did this and started it and you’re like, “I don’t really know if the entrepreneurship is really for me.” And let’s face it, it’s not for everyone.

Like there’s other challenges that come along with being an entrepreneur. There’s 100 different things that you have to be okay with and a lot of people say, “Well I like a steady paycheck.” Well you might want that 9:00 to 5:00 job that you punch a clock but just understand this too, it’s not necessarily guaranteed, so many people lose their jobs every single day, but it is a little bit more of like, “Okay I guess I’m going to get my check on Friday.” With being an entrepreneur, you’re pushing, you’re constantly pushing and you’re always having that thought in your head, “What if I don’t hustle enough, what if I don’t get enough sales next month?” I mean I go all the way back to my photography days.

We used to bust our butt in fourth quarter so we could have enough money to live on for the next three months and then we’d be always thinking to ourselves, “I hope we can get enough business in the spring.” As an entrepreneur you’re going to have those thoughts and by doing this, this will allow you to at least see what kind of work it takes for this business model and somewhat to be an entrepreneur. Because there’s other things you can do as an entrepreneur, not just this.

[00:36:39] Dom: Yeah, I get it. It doesn’t have to be a full time operation but it’ll get you to decide if you want to do it full time or even part time and then add it to other stuff that you’re doing. Maybe you have a Shopify store already. Maybe you have a retail store that you want to start moving product and you never thought about selling online. It could be lots of things.

[00:36:54] Scott: Yeah, absolutely. Again, I just want people to understand that wherever you are in your journey, this is just something that I think anyone can do. There’s nothing holding you back, zero. And I mean if someone said, well Dom, what if someone said, “Well Dom, I only got 100 bucks to start with.” What would you say to them?

[00:37:14] Dom: Well, I would first say, see what you have available where you live. What your family has, like we said, I go thrifting for finding all that stuff. And if they didn’t have that option because maybe they just moved or parents aren’t near them or they… I would say the $100, you could easily find stuff at a dollar stores. Maybe you go to a dollar max or a dollar tree, try to find some name brand and stuff that you buy for a dollar and sell them for $8.99 or $9.99 or put bundles together. Maybe take $4 pencil cases that cost you $3 and you put them together and sell them for $14.99.

I mean there’s lots of ways to do it. If not, another way to do it is exactly go on Craigslist in those places and try to find products on their. Guys are clearing out. All the VHS $5 and old  TV VHS combo for $10, a Blu-ray player for $15 and just do it that way and just scale a little at that time or the easiest way where a lot of guys start is books. For $100, you can buy a lot of books. For 5 cents, 10 cents, 15 cents and then manually fulfill them or ship them to FBA. So I’ve seen a lot of people turn $100 into five hundred five hundred, into a thousand, that’s the same way. Again there’s not too many business models that you can take something and make 50% to 1,000% ROI on your product.

[00:38:27] Scott: You always talk about that. You don’t like banks. I mean you like banks but you don’t like the return you get on your money sitting in a bank because it’s like, what does a bank really give you. You know what I mean? I mean not much but like you said, if you can buy something for a dollar and if you really even only get 30 cents back on that dollar, that’d be a great return.

[00:38:52] Dom: It’s still 27% more than a bank or 20% more than a bank. For a year just like your daughter, in a year she’ll probably, she’ll invest $1,500 or $2,000 and make $10,000.

[00:39:04] Scott: There’s not even a CD on the market that’ll allow you to do that that I know of.

[00:39:07] Dom: I mean you’ll never put $2,000 in a bank and make it $8,000 at the end of the year.

[00:39:12] Scott: Exactly, exactly.

[00:39:14] Dom: Unless you’re a loan shark. You want to lend somebody $2,000 you going to have to payback $10,000. That’s the only way you can make money out of your money if you’re lending it.

[00:39:20] Scott: Right, right. Yeah, so there’s just different ways to think of it but either there was one story I had and I’d have to look up the podcast episode but a guy started with very little, but he bought like $60 worth of stickers on Craigslist but it was a whole batch of stickers. This guy just wanted to clear out his garage with these old stickers but there were new stickers. They were for maybe like a popular movie or something. I forget what it was and then he made little bundles with them and he ended up selling those for… He bought them for $60, he ended up selling $1,800 worth of stickers.

[00:39:52] Dom: Yeah, that’s the easy way to do it. A friend of mine went to a garage sale about two years ago and he found literally about 1,200 pieces. He paid about $100 and they were those little pods with little toys inside of the main brand toys that he put into the gumball machines. A guy that used to be a distributor at gumball machines, I just want to get rid of them and he was selling on eBay. He was putting like sets of six of Mario and six of Star Wars and getting like eight bucks ten bucks a set. He paid a nickel for the set. He goes 2,000%, 3,000% profit. I’m not doing me hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

Again that’s out there, but you got to dig everyday. You got to be on Craigslist, you got to be on those garage sale sites. You got to be on slick deals and the forums. Not the deals on the front and the forums and the back end, “Hey guys, I’m moving, I got to clear myself.” Or all those types of stuff. You’ll be surprised what you find.

[00:40:49] Scott: Yeah, I love it. I love it. I mean I love it now that we’ve been through twice and we’re thinking about opening it but maybe even opening it so it’s not open and close. We’re still working the details out. I would definitely encourage you guys to head over to 1K FastTrack.com. Just head over there if you’re at all interested and check that out. If you’re interested it’s going to help you get through this process and I think a lot of times people want the hand holding and then also all of the resources that Dom brings to the game here.

I mean tons of resources, tons of knowledge and so if you guys are interested definitely head over to 1K FastTrack.com, check out the details over there and like I said it’s a way to kick start this thing and really get you started in the right direction. I would also encourage you to take us up on the seven day challenge. Like literally right now, clean out your garage, call someone that you know that might have a garage and he’s cleaning out or an attic or whatever and just start listing stuff on eBay. Like that’s it.

Like you can literally do that before you even get done with today. Like after you get off of here, you can listen, go home, do it. You’ll have stuff listed. Like it’ll be live in the eBay platform and we had people that did that in the class and before the end of the day they already sale and they were posting it, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I sold that organ key” or whatever.

[00:42:17] Dom: Or the Wii Video game system for 250 bucks.

[00:42:22] Scott: So I mean you just don’t know what you’re sitting on. So it’s worth a shot. I would definitely encourage you guys to do that and then report back to us in this episode. Episode 362, theamazingseller.com/362. We’ll also have the transcripts, the show notes, all that stuff will be found there as well. So Dom, I think we’re going to wrap this up for this update. Really just want to say everyone that’s listening that’s in the 1k FastTrack, you guys crushed it and we’re super proud of you guys and the cool thing is with that group too Dom that I’m finding is they’re not done.

Like in the alumni group, those guys are still at it. Like our first group, they’re still at it. Like there’s people, they’re still posting screenshots of their halls and out there hustling every single day and some of them that are starting their first PL product and it’s just really exciting to see how everything is evolving from these guys taking action and getting started with the 1K FastTrack. So is there any last bits of advice you want to give us before we wrap this up buddy?

[00:43:20] Dom: Yeah, I want first of all thank you for both groups that started off the alumni group, like I said it’s kicking some butt and the new group which is the alumni group part now two. So they’re doing really well and whoever is out there listening for that, keep it going guys. Keep it going. Fourth quarter’s coming up real fast. Don’t think it’s not.

Keep sourcing the stuff and then for everyone else that’s not part of the 1K, that wants to try this, go to the 1KFastTrack.com and try to sign up for it and then go from there. Read all the resources with everything that I’ve done for 20 years, I give all the tidbits, all the tools that you need for looking for stuff and tidbits and not just the regular just go to Walmart or Target type stuff. We’re giving you all the insider type stuff that I’ve learned over the years and Chris and Scott’s help, we’ve made it really nice and easy process for you guys. Again it’s just to take action thing at that point now. So yeah.

[00:40:49] Scott: Yeah awesome, awesome. I appreciate it and as always I mean it’s a pleasure to have you as a resource for us to be able to pull from and you’re so generous with your time and in those groups and even not even in that group. I’m even the just TAS the main group even in our class. I mean you’re always very helpful. We appreciate it and so glad that we we’re able to finally meet each other and then align each other and help each other and now become friends and we just went to a Cavs/Raptors game, which was freaking amazing, which was just crazy. So we’re going to be doing some meetups here in the future, so just a lot of cool things happening with you, with us and just want to thank you again publicly for doing everything.

[00:44:57] Dom: Thank you very much for all the opportunities to help your listeners. I mean I’ve always known it’s a space that I’ve always wanted to help with and unfortunately in Canada there’s not too many people you could talk to about retailer arb and private label and my staff and my wife are pretty well… They’re up to their eyes with me talking 24/7. So my wife especially is like, “Oh, thank God you found Scott, now you can talk to him for 24 hours if you want to about this.”

[00:45:22] Scott: That’s awesome. Cool. Alright guys, so that is going to wrap up this episode. I am going to close this down with Dom on. Normally I cut and then I do my own outro but I’m going to do it with Dom on. So Dom, you’re going to actually do it with me. Are you cool with that?

[00:45:37] Dom: Yeah, I’m good. I’m good, I’m good.

[00:40:39] Scott: Alright, cool. I’m going to give you something to do here in a second. Are you ready?

[00:45:42] Dom: Yeah, I’m ready.

[00:45:44] Scott: Alright, here we go. Alright guys, so like I said, the show notes, themazingseller.com/362. All that will be there. The 1K FastTrack. So just 1KFastTrack.com. You guys can head there, get all the information on that and guys I hope that you got value from this. I hope you guys see the potential that is here. If you guys are stuck, if you guys are just not sure what to do next, start here. Like this is a great way to get started and also build that account in Amazon so you have a seasoned account.

So guys that’s it, that’s going to wrap it up. Remember as always, 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, Dom you’re going to say it with me on the count of three, we’re going to say it together. Dom, are you ready?

[00:46:26] Dom: Yeah.

[00:46:27] Scott: Alright, on count of three. One, two, three, “Take Action.” Alright guys, that’s it, that’s going to wrap it up. Take care and we’ll see you soon.

[00:46:41] Dom: Okay, ready?

[00:46:43] Scott: Whenever you’re ready, we’re recording.

[00:46:45] Dom: Hey, hey, hey. It’s Dom Sugar and I’m going to sing you a song for you. It’s going to be to show you a thing or two. You’ll have some fun with me and Scott now, with us and all the gang. Learning from each other. We’re going to do our thing. Na, na, na, na.  We’re going to have a good time. Na, na, na, na.  Going to have a good time. Hey, hey, hey. Everybody this is Dom Sugar along with Scott Voelker here. We’re here for episode number 323 and we’re going to be talking a little bit on a 1K FastTrack and give you some numbers going on, see how everything went and we’re going to start about right now. What’s going on Scott?

[00:47:25] Scott: What’s going on is that you just screwed up the episode number Dom.

[00:47:29] Dom: Okay, we’ll start all over then. Okay, we’re going to do the hey, hey thing. So welcome back.

[00:47:37] Scott: Yeah, yeah. Jump right in there.

[00:47:40] Dom: Hey, hey, hey. This is Dom Sugar. What’s going on everybody and welcome back to episode 362 We’re ready talking a little bit about the IK cash… Oh my God.

[00:47:51] Scott: That’s good. I like it. I like, now you can see what goes into the intro, right?

[00:47:55] Dom: Yeah, yeah.  

[00:47:56] Scott: Right everybody thinks it’s easy.

[00:47:58] Dom: It’s easy, exactly. Okay, we’ll try it again.

[00:48:00] Scott: Ready, in take two. Take three.

[00:48:04] Dom:  Hey, hey, hey. This is your boy Dom Sugar and we’re live here. We’re going to… Man no, not live, we’re not live.

[00:48:11] Scott:   We’re not live. This isn’t Friday.  

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…a conversation that I just had with one of my students, we just had a coaching call and the reason why I want to share this right now is because it’s fresh in my mind and I really think that you guys can benefit from this. Now her issue was she launched, things were going rather well. She ran out of stock, she went back in stock and then the sales had kind of dropped. The she also tried to do her pay-per-click over again and she wanted to know about those numbers and are they good, what should I do next?

Where should I be in this process right now as far as re-launching because my sales are not what they were when I ran out of stock? That’s really what we’re going to be digging into and I want to share with you the play by play like the action steps that I gave her. This way here if you’re facing this or if you ever do you’ll at least hear what I have to say but also give you some things to think about because a lot of times people will come to me and they’ll ask me questions whether they email them or if it’s on a Facebook Live or whatever and they’ll give me like this question but there’s a lot more details that need to be answered or questions that need to be answered. That’s really what I did here. It’s funny because she sent me an email with bullet points of what she wanted to cover so I had a heads up.

I literally made bullet points back as to what I wanted to ask her so I could get more information and I’m going to share that with you. Now if you guys want the show notes, the transcripts to this episode probably you’re going to want to do this one because again like I said, I’m going to walk through exactly what we talked about and really explaining where she is and where she’s going to be or her time spent moving forward the best way possible. That is theamazingseller.com/363. So theamazingseller.com/363. That’s the show notes and the transcripts.

[00:01:59] Scott: Now, little quick reminder before we jump into today’s episode is we are doing a workshop tomorrow night, depending on when you’re listening to this. If you’re listening to this on Wednesday then it will be on the following day, on Thursday. If you’re listening to it after the fact, well just go to this page anyway and see when the next upcoming workshop is. This is going to be the last live one that we do for a while.

We are going to be taking a little bit of a break but if you head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop, you can register for an upcoming workshop there or the recent one that we are going to be doing. If you’re brand new or if you maybe just want to see the road map or the five phases that we use to launch a product or pick a product, source a product and all that stuff, you’re definitely going to want to attend that live workshop. Definitely go check that out.

All right, let’s dig in here. I want to get right into this. Her questions to me were this, and I’m going to read the email now that she sent me before we actually got on Skype and went through all of these different things that’s happening inside of her product and in her listing and stuff. She says, “I launched in January with an auto-campaign for two weeks. I took that data and created a broad phrase and a golden nugget campaign as you instructed.” It’s a good idea. “I also left the auto campaign running spending up to $60 a day for all three.” Moving on she says, “All three were doing really well for about a month. All under 50% ACOS,” which is good especially for just starting out.

“I started running low on inventory so I made an order and jacked up the price to not get as many sales.” We’re going to come back to that in a minute guys. You might not want to do that. I’m going to explain why. The next thing she says is, “I also stopped my campaigns and started doing a broad campaign because I listen to your podcast more and listen to that one webinar that you guys did recently.” Really what she’s talking about there is about how to use the broad to discover and then from there move them into other types of campaigns but we’ll talk a little further through this because she’s switched things up here as we move through.

[00:04:02] Scott: Then she says, “Next thing is I decided to use Ignite.” Now if you guys don’t recall the workshop and all the training we did around pay-per-click or sponsored product ads you probably want to check that out, it will make more sense. That can be found at theamazingseller.com/ppc. It’s funny because she started using Ignite from scratch in a sense because she wanted to start from scratch and she didn’t think her numbers were all that great and then after we went through it they are actually really good. I’ll let you guys know about that here in a second. But then she says, “I started from scratch so to speak on what you instructed on the webinar but in the last month I had been breaking even on the ads.

I’m disappointed because I wish I can go back to doing what I was doing a month or two ago and I can’t seem to replicate that at all. Right now I’m only spending up to $20 a day. At best my ACOS is 65%. I want to get it back down under 50% or less. What I would like is a  specific action step plan from you exactly knowing what to do going forward and I will totally take action even if that means it’s time to get outside traffic, I will now go looking for a second product until this is all squared away with the first.” The very first thing that I want to stress here is and that pointed out to me is I want to go back to where she said she started running out of stock and she jacked her price.

Now, I’m not opposed to raising the price a little bit if you want to slow them down a little bit but not so much to where you’re going to slow them down till they’re crawling because here’s the thing. You’re going to be going out of stock with that conversion rate. So if your conversion rate is really good and then you raise your price and you start to slow down your sales you’re going to also show Amazon that the product isn’t converting that well. People really might not want it as much. Then when you go back in stock it’s going to basically pick up where you left off and now you’re going to ramp things back up again to try to get yourself back up to where you were.

[00:05:58] Scott: I’m not really a fan of raising your price or jacking your price as she said. If you wanted to slowly increase it, I don’t know that I’m totally opposed to that but I would prefer probably just to go out on fire. Just go out and just run out of inventory, I know it stinks, it’s not good but I would rather go out and then have Amazon say, “Okay they ran out with a really high conversion rate.” When they come back in stock they’re going to remember that you had people that wanted your product. Then from there that’s going to help you because now you’ll rank quicker and all of that good stuff. I would not jack the price. It’s going to lower your conversion. Definitely, definitely would not recommend doing that.

She said, “That was my bad. I get it.” Now, she knows and she won’t do that again. That doesn’t mean that she won’t get back to where she was. We definitely found some things that could be an issue here. The very first thing, these are the questions that I asked her, that I actually asked… That I wrote down into my bullet points that I was going to ask her. The very first thing that I said was, and I asked her was, “How many people right now, how many listings are competing right now with that same type of product?” She said, “There’s quite a few but really on the first page it’s not that competitive but there’s quite a few.” I looked and there was 435 results for this particular keyword.

Not that terrible for this one keyword. The keyword is her main keyword. It’s like garlic press. It’s like that one main keyword. That’s fine, the competition is fine. The next thing I asked her, how many sales are they getting per month? How many sales is your competition getting a month because we have to gauge this. You may be thinking that you did really good a month and a half ago but what you didn’t go is your competition was too and then now it’s a slower time of the year or that the trend is starting to decline or maybe it’s seasonal. Who knows? What we have to do is we have to compare. We have to say, what are the sellers doing right now today so I know at least where I can get to if I get in that spot?

[00:08:04] Scott: That’s the first thing that you have to ask yourself. Even if you didn’t run out of stock and you’re wondering how do I get to a spot to where I’m going to get my ten sales a day or whatever sales that you want? You have to look at the competition and use that as a gauge and say if I can get there there’s a good chance I can get those sales but you also have to have a comparable product, you have to also have comparable copy meaning your listing as far as your title and your bullets and all of that stuff, the same kind of benefits, like there are some other variables that come in there but if we at least get there then we can say okay, we are not getting the same amount of sales so now what’s broken with the listing?

Now we have to reverse engineer and look at the listing. We can just keep going down into those things. We don’t have to do that. Her listing looked pretty good, images looked great, the copy looked good so that wasn’t an issue for me. The one thing that did stand out to me though is she was more expensive that almost everyone. The other thing is and this was her first product. She’s actually selling a product that is under $20 which I’ve got a few products that are $20 and it’s fine but you gotta understand, you got less room because you don’t have as much margin depending on how much you’re paying for and all of that stuff.

Because of that other people are selling the same product for $7, $8, $9 and she’s selling it for $13, $14 or $15. Now all of a sudden why is someone going to buy your versus theirs? Now she is still selling some so it clearly shows that people will pay the extra money but that is a conversion aspect. That is something that might make a huge difference but we won’t know that until we get on first page and we can be side by side with those other sellers. We won’t know that. The next thing that I wanted to look at is where is your competition that’s getting 300 sales a month and more?

[00:10:01] Scott: It was really within the top eight. The top eight listings were getting between 300 sales and 1,000 sales per month. Most of them between 300 and 500 I would say. Clearly if we get into top eight there is a good chance that we can grab some of those sales. They were spread out pretty evenly. That’s number one. We look at that we go, “Okay, that’s good.” Now we ask the next question, where are you ranked? Now at first she didn’t even know where she was ranked. She was like, “I don’t even know. Honestly I was just looking at the pay-per-click stuff.” I go, “Here’s the deal. You’re looking at pay-per-click like you want that to be your generator of sales. We can’t necessarily bank on that and we don’t want to back on that.” Our pay-per-click to me is 20% to 25% at best.

The other part of the sales are going to come organic. Those sales that are coming from pay-per-click are going to help us rank organically. People that say, “Well, my ACOS is 50% or 75%.” If you’re getting organic sales from those keywords that are being generated through pay-per-click then that 50% or 75 % isn’t so bad. That right there is going to help us rank so we get exposure on page one. Does that make sense? Ask yourself that please. Hopefully you’re shaking your head and you’re saying, “Yeah, Scott makes total sense. Makes total sense.”

Understand that and when I explained it to her she was like, “Okay, that makes sense. It makes 100% sense. I’m not necessarily just looking at the ACOS although we do want a perfect world is we can get an ACOS at 20% all day long or 10% that would be amazing. If that’s the case that’s great but right now we’re in the early stages. Since she’s redid her campaign. She’s only been running it for three weeks with Ignite. I’ll get into that in a minute because she didn’t think she was doing as well as she is after I seen her numbers and I was like, “Okay everything is working perfectly in Ignite. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing.”

[00:12:00] Scott: Moving on, we basically figured out what the top eight or ten different sellers are doing right now and we said they’re selling between 300 and a 1,000. The next thing we asked was where are you ranked? At first we didn’t know so then I went ahead and I typed in her main keyword and it’s funny I just jumped to page two, three and I’m like, “Oh my gosh I can’t find you.” We didn’t know she was on the bottom of page one. She’s at number 15 on page one for the main keyword. This is exciting in itself because that means that yes we are not getting the sales that we want so what do we have to do. We got to get more sales so we can increase the rank, so we can move up the ladder.

There’s something in the marketing world and direct response marketing world is really is you want to be above the fold. What that basically means is when someone lands on a page, when someone loads a website page, any page, not just at Amazon, we want to be able to not have to scroll and see whatever we want to see. If there is a call to action to be made, we want to be on that page before we have to scroll. Same thing applies here on Amazon. If you’re within the top five to eight somewhere in that range depending on your screen resolution and all that stuff, generally that’s going to be on the top part of the page and that’s where we want to be.

She’s at 15. We just got to do a little bit of work to get some sales so we can get up higher in the rank. As we are going through this she is getting even more excited and she’s like, “Okay, this is making sense. I’m liking this. This is good.” Then the next thing was I asked her, “How many reviews does your competition have on the average?” Because if we are competing with some that have 1,000 or 2,000 and we rank higher, it’s going to be still hard to convert. That’s a conversion thing because now people are going to tend to go to the higher ones. Well, to our surprise most of them were between ten and 300. It wasn’t that bad. It was really not that bad at all. I was pleasantly surprised. I’m like, “Okay, so that’s really not going to be a factor.”

[00:14:01] Scott: Again, we’re just too far down on the page. We got to get you up the page. Well, let me ask you this, do you know how to get better rank? Ask yourself that question. If you do, say in the car, say in the run, say wherever you are. Say yes, this is how. Well, I’m going to tell you how. You get more sales. If your listing is optimized which here’s is, her keyword is directly in the title the best spot it can be. If you get sales you’re going to rank for that keyword. Even if you didn’t get sales through that exact keyword it’s going to help you rank because your listing is optimized. It’s already telling Amazon what it is. The review thing, not a problem so we get that out of the way.

I X that out of the way. Now, do you see how I’m asking these questions? As she gave me her first problem. Her first problem was, “Scott, I ran out of inventory. I’m not getting the sales that I want to get.” We went through this whole process in basically 30 minutes. I did a 30 minute coaching call with her and we went through all this stuff just as I’m going through it right now with you guys because I want you guys to see that you have to go through and ask these types of questions to figure out where you can move the needle and where you can improve. So just I want you guys to understand that. The next thing I asked her was, “Do you have a launch list?” She said, “No, I don’t have one yet.” I said okay, because what would I say if she didn’t have one?

We got to get sales through that launch list. Let’s run a promotion. Let’s do a promotion to get sales. Again, if we look at the top eight and we say that they are selling between 300 and 1,000 and honestly we looked at like the top like positions like three through five, they are selling between 300 and 500. That means that we got to get between like ten to 15 sales a day and we can get ourselves bumped in that spot. If we get 20 that’s going to be even better. Our goal in the next week or two has to be to get sales. This way here we can move up in the ranks. That could be through a promotion, that could be through more pay-per-click, that could be through lowering your price.

[00:16:01] Scott: The next thing I asked her was, “Okay you don’t have a launch list, we’re going to have to work on that. Have you reached out to other list owners, other people, other influencers in maybe Facebook or Instagram or YouTube?” And she said not yet. I said, okay, well we got to do that next. Then she said, “Well, how do I collect those emails.” Then I directed her over inside of the class because there’s training in there because she hasn’t gotten there yet but basically this is the way it works because she asked me, “How do I deliver the code and how do I direct people to my listing? Do I send it to my website, I don’t have a website yet, how do I do this?” I said, it’s very simple. You create a landing page in any software that you want, doesn’t matter, or a website. We have a plugin that we used called Give away Boost for giveaways but you can just give a click funnels page.

You can just use Lead Pages, you can use any service that you want but it needs to be a landing page with… A landing page for anyone that doesn’t know what that means it’s basically just a page that you land on and the only option is to give your first name and your email address in exchange for that code. Then once they enter the name and email address they click submit and then the next page is going to be the thank you page. That thank you page would be a code that would give the 50% off discount and then from there it would gave them the link to the listing. That simple. We don’t send them directly to the listing until they give us that because then they are more qualified and we just don’t drive traffic there because that will also a lower our conversion if it doesn’t convert.

Again, we talk all about that on our build list workshop which you can find at theamazingseller.com/buildlist. You can see exactly how we are building our own launch list which that was my other task for her was to build that launch list. That’s everything we covered there. A lot. We went through all of that stuff but we figured out that there’s definitely an opportunity for her to improve her ranking, there’s room for improvement for her to be able to potentially get sales just from maybe running maybe more pay-per-click.

[00:18:04] Scott: Now, let’s talk about pay-per-click really quickly. She said when she first started she was breaking even on the ads and it was great. She’s like awesome but the thing is she didn’t realize that by doing that that’s also going to help rank organically. It’s amazing that she’s ranking organically already her having, I think she’s having like right now as she got back in stock like maybe two to five sales a day, something like that. That’s fine but we have to increase that. The other thing is with the pay-per-click that she mentioned was that it was working really good and then after she ran out of stock, she got back in stock and it didn’t work as good. So she went ahead and she started from scratch with Ignite.

Now if you guys don’t know what Ignite is it’s also a tool that we use to manage our pay-per-click ads or our sponsored product ads now. Then also what it will do is it will give us suggestions and it will also start to separate some of our data. What we do and just to not complicate it because it can get complicated but we did a whole training on it theamazingseller.com/ppc, break it all down. Basically this is what it is. We use a broad keyword, that keyword is really just to go out there and attract search terms. There’s search terms that your customers are actually typing in.

Then what happens behind the scenes is once it starts to have some data, some impressions, some clicks and some sales it will make suggestions to then take that keyword, or that search term and either put it in a phrase match campaign or an exact keyword, technically search term campaign. There’s really like three buckets. There’s a broad, there’s a phrase and there’s an exact. Then she went on to tell me, she goes, “Scott I don’t know if it’s doing that well. My broad campaign, I’m following all the suggestions it does,” really to implement all the suggestions you do is click accept. It gives you the suggestions and then you say or no. She’s been running it for three weeks.

[00:19:59] Scott: The broad match right now is currently 120% ACOS. Not great because again it’s just collecting data but, this is where it gets interesting, the phrase match after some of that data has come through, some of those sales have come through, it then takes the phrases and then we’ll move it to campaign. That campaign now, she said was just over 25% or 28% ACOS. I might be off a little bit with that number but it’s under 50. That one there I think she’s like converted like five or ten sales already. The broad campaign, the 128% ACOS, the one that looks really bad converted over 20% or 25% but then here it’s where it gets really interesting.

The exact match campaign, all this was done in automated through Ignite. That one there has had 30 sales and the ACOS is like under 30. She’s like, “So I don’t even know, are those numbers good.” I’m like, “They are phenomenal. Those are phenomenal. Right now for as early on as you are three weeks in, you gotta let this stuff run,” but it’s definitely doing the job. It’s out there, it’s finding these search terms from the broad which is the keywords and then from there it’s starting to sort them and put them into buckets after they’ve proven themselves.

Really, really powerful. She’s going to continue to do really, really well but one tip I gave her which she wasn’t doing is I said, well, how many keywords do you have in that campaign as your broad and she said I have about 20 to maybe 30. I’m like, okay, that’s good but let’s maybe expand on that. So she wasn’t aware that inside of ignite you can actually take your competitors listing, the ASIN and then you can just go in and plug that in and it will go and it will scrape their listing for keywords that are relevant to yours and then it will say all of the keywords and then you can make decision to add the or not to add them.

[00:22:02] Scott: It’s totally up to you. She did that and she’s like, “Oh my gosh. I had no idea. You literally have like a keyword scrape tool inside of ignite which is pretty powerful. That was one of her tasks that she was going to start doing because now she’s going to broaden out hence the word broad. She was actually going to expand out that campaign of the broad and then that also gives her more opportunity to find more search terms that then get moved into phrase and then get moved into exact. That’s how it works. That there can just be running in the background. Right now she’s running $20 a day and she asked me if she should bump that up. I said I’d wait until that exact match and the phrase start converting better.

It’s doing good but if it gets to like maybe like 20% or something then maybe add another $10 per day and see what happens. That’s what she’s doing, that’s really, really awesome. If you guys, even if you’re not using ignite you have to understand that you want to be able to start looking at the keywords, the search terms that are performing well and then start to put them in their own campaigns. This way here you can drive traffic to just those specific words and search terms. That’s that. I don’t want this to be a whole pay-per-click session because I don’t have enough time but I did that and so did Chris with me and Jeff Cohen from Seller Labs.

We did a whole training on that. Again, theamazingseller.com/ppc. Again just to kind of wrap this up, that’s what we talked about. Tons and tons of stuff as you can see but I said to her, this is one thing that I would do right now. Right now I  would probably lower my price to $9.99 or maybe $10.99 and the only reason I would do that is because that will also allow me to start getting sales without even having to do a promotion. You gotta remember, I said back in the day to her, I said back in the day eight months ago we used to give away product either at a deep, deep discount for like 75% off or sometimes 90% off and sometimes free just to get sales volume or sales velocity.

[00:24:08] Scott: In this case all we are doing is lowering the price a little bit to get that momentum and to get that sales velocity. That was like her first, like that was my first thing for her. I would do that like immediately so this way here you’re already there, you’re already getting the traffic, you’re already getting paid traffic and you’re already on page one. Let’s see what that does. That’s like an easy thing you can do and see what happens. Let’s just cover the action steps that I gave her. Action steps number one was leave Ignite campaign running.

Because at first she’s like, “Should I turn it off? I’m not sure if it’s doing that well.” I’m like it’s doing fine. Let it go. Number one leave that ignite campaign running. I would also, this is step number or action step two is add more keywords using the add ASIN feature inside of ignite. I would definitely, definitely do that and she seen already from what I showed her. She was like that’s crazy. That’s really, really awesome. You can expand on your keywords and then really start to broaden out on those. Then action step number three was lower the price for a few days and keep an eye on sales. That would be like the easiest thing to do would be that. Then four is outreach and build a list. Do you email capture like I talked about, all you have to do like I said is create that landing page, create a thank you page.

That thank you page will then give them the group code for 50% off. We’ve done that recently and actually I did a podcast episode just a few episodes back where I talk about the results from that and they are just awesome. We’re not giving away product for free, we’re not giving away product for even 75% off. We’re doing 50% off codes and we did that to our list and we were able to get 152 sales in five days and we bumped our BSR and we started ranking for keywords. Actually the last I looked for that particular keyword we were on the bottom of page one, I believe.

[00:26:01] Scott: It was bouncing between there and top of page two so we are on the right track. We may have to do another one of those but we haven’t even really started pay-per-click because while we are doing these promotions with our emails list we’re not running pay-per-click because we don’t want people to jump on that page and then see our ad on the right and then click on it and then we get charged for it. So that’s a little tip for you guys too that are doing launches within your own list. If you’re going to do that, you’re going to drive people to a listing, do not have your pay-per-click running because they can just see it somewhere and then click on it and then you’re going to get charged for this. We don’t want to do that. Hopefully this has helped you guys.

I love, love, love going back and reversing what’s happening but then also digging into the questions. If you guys ask yourselves these certain questions you’re going to find answers or solutions or things to test. I’m not saying everything that we went over but you can here there’s a lot that we can still play around with. The other thing I didn’t even mention was, because she was like I don’t even want to think about a second product until I can get this figured out. I said well maybe this isn’t the product that’s going to be that big winner. Maybe this is a product that’s going to lead people to that second product because maybe your margins aren’t as good as they are in this one but it’s going to bring the traffic.

The she was like, “I didn’t think of that.” That’s another thing that you can do. While these things are running, while these things are being tweaked, while you’re letting them run and collecting the data it might be time to start looking at that second product. She does have a second product that lends itself well to this first product. I said to her, that would be one that you probably want to start at looking at getting it sourced and can you do a small run of that. Then that might be the one that could be the one that has all the margins. Then you have a lead product that comes in because the other cool thing you can do and I told her this as well, is you can run that little promotion inside of your listings. Say if you buy this get 25% off of these other products.

[00:28:00] Scott: Then from there people will click on that and then they have the option to buy your other products and they only get the discount if they purchase product number one. It’s a great way to cross promote your own products internally and bring more awareness to those products. Guys that’s pretty much going to wrap up this little recap of our coaching call that I just got off with and I just get fired up for doing these or from doing these and hopefully you guys got value from this. If you run across this and I think the one big thing just to understand is please do not jack your price if you’re running out of inventory. It’s going to make it harder for when you get back in stock. To get ranked again you’ve got to put more effort in than just to go out on fire and just let Amazon pick up where they left off with your listing by you just doing a small little mini promotion or even  just turning your pay-per-click back on.

Like that’s it. That’s what I would do. All right guys. The transcripts for this episode theamazingseller.com/363. All the show notes that I talked about which there is a ton of resources there for you guys and I’ll give you guys one last quick reminder about our workshop happening tomorrow night depending on when you’re listening to this. That can be found at theamazingseller.com/workshop. Go register for that and if you’re listening to this after that is over and it has ended you can still go there and you’ll get all the information for upcoming workshops. Again theamazingseller.com/workshop.

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, 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 <<

…if you have a question that you want me to answer on an upcoming episode, just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and do that. Just do me one small favor, I’ve said this over and over again and some of you are still forgetting to do this. Just leave your first name as you’re recording your message. I want to be able to address you by first name and be able to say, “Hey what’s up John or Sue or whatever.”

Then leave a brief message there and maybe even if you want to do this you could let us know where you’re tuning in from. That would be cool too. Again guys, that is theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that. Ask a question there and we can hang out for a minute and we can have that cup of coffee together as I always talk about. Now if you guys are listening to this after Friday well then whatever time of the day it is, the week it is hopefully you’re having an awesome, amazing day and a week and I’m here to give you your dose of some of these questions that you  might be asking right now.

That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to jump to that. Now I have a couple of things that I wanted to discuss before we jump into today’s question. You guys always know too that I always have what’s on my mind this week or what I’m thinking by just listening to other people and all of that stuff. I want to give you guys a little bit of some of those thoughts here before we kick off today’s first question. The other thing is the time that you’re listening to this I would have just gotten back from Seller’s Summit where I’m going to be in Fort Lauderdale. I’m saying this like past tense now because well, I’m going to be there. Let’s see, it’s the 18th through the 21st I think it is.

[00:02:01] Scott: I am going to be arriving there, we are going have TAS meet up so I’m sure we’ll have some updates there for you guys too in the next few episodes. I’ll be giving you guys a full update of that Seller’s Summit, what I learned from it, what I took away, so look forward to hearing about that on upcoming episode. It’s going to be a blast I know. As you’re listening to this it’s already going to be in the past but I just know it’s going to be amazing. So getting excited about that. The last thing is we are going to have a TAS meet up in North Carolina and that’s going to be on June 23rd. This is the first time I’ve done one in North Carolina, not far from where I live now in South Carolina.

It’s just outside of Charlotte. If you want the details on that, the day, the time and also the location, you can head over to theamazingseller.com/NC for North Carolina. So theamazingseller.com/NC and if you wanted to attend that it’s totally free. All you have to do is really just let us know that you’re coming by going to the event page and then just saying that you’re going to be attending. That’s it. It’s going to be free, we’re going to be hanging out at a coffee shop. I think it’s going to be a coffee shop as of right now. We pretty much haven’t nailed down but by the time you listen to this it will all be worked out. Definitely go to that link if you’re interested or if you’re in the area and you wanted to come hang out with us for a cup of coffee or drink or whatever and that would be really, really cool.

The one thing I wanted to talk about before we jump to today’s question is kind of what’ on my mind. I’ve been through a lot of different start and stops and I’ve also see a lot of other people that start and stop and I see… I mean start and stop anything it doesn’t’ have to be just business. Just why do people start something but then they don’t continue? I get it. Like life gets in the way. It happens to all of us. I know as far as my fitness, my fitness went off the rails for a little while.

[00:04:01] Scott: I was in great shape about three years ago and then things just started to slip out of routine and out of my commitment to myself and all of that stuff and I got kind of lazy to be honest with you. Maybe I even spent a little too much time thinking about my businesses and stuff. Some of that stuff can start to creep into your daily activities, your daily life and that happened to me. I’m proud to say that right now that I’m totally locked in. I have been now for over three months now and feeling amazing and the diet is in check, I mean the diet… I’m still eating food, I’m still eating good stuff it’s just it’s better choices.

I’m working out daily and all that stuff. The thing is, now that I have that momentum, now that I have… I’m seeing some of those results, it makes me want to keep pushing and the same thing goes when you are starting a new project or a new business depending on where you are. We have a class called the IK Fast Track and that group has just been amazing because so many people that have gotten started have started to see results. When they are starting to see results they want to go out there and do it more and more. That really, that class is really about how to get started superfast using the retail arbitrage model. If you guys want details on that you can always go to the… Actually it’s the 1kfastrack.com will be the link.

I’ll put all the links to this episode too which will be 364. So definitely go check out the show notes. I’ll have all the links there. What really made me think about what I want to share here with you it’s like there’s four parts to it. So many people that were in that class they got started, they started to see a little bit of traction, they made their first dollar and then that motivated them to want to go out and do it again. It’s the same thing. If you work out for three weeks, four weeks and you start to see results it’s going to make you want to go back in the gym but you to get over that hump. Here is the four things that I want to address here.

[00:06:00] Scott: Number one you have to start. You have to start. But sometimes it’s hard to start if you don’t commit. That’s the second part of this. We’re going to start, we’re going to commit and then we’re going to commit to doing what? You guys probably know what I’m going to say, it has two words in it, take action. We have to start something, we have to commit to something and then we have to take action on that thing. Then the other critical thing is we have to adjust along the way. We might do something that might not work as we planned or something changes, we didn’t have something on our schedule that would have allowed us to do something or maybe it’s something that you did and you got a certain reaction, or maybe you launched a product and it didn’t’ do exactly what you wanted it to do.

Well guess what, you got to adjust. I just did an episode, I believe it was the last episode where I went through a coaching call that I did with one of my students. It was all about just asking these questions that if you don’t zoom out of your situation, you might not be able to seize. You really have to kind of see yourself or whatever you’re doing at a higher level and then start to dig into the different things that’s happening within that project. For that case it was like her product was not selling after she ran out of stock. She ran out of stock and when she went back in stock the sales weren’t what they were before.

One of her biggest things that happened that I took away that she didn’t realize was that she was raising her price just to try to slow down sales so she didn’t run out of stock. Well that’s countering as you come back in because now all of a sudden Amazon says, wait a minute here, you just left and when you ran out of stock you had a really low conversion rate. You had a good one but then it went really bad. Are people not liking your products? When she went back in stock, they just said well we’re going to put you where you were. Again I figure that out by listening and that’s what one thing off the bat.

[00:07:58] Scott: If you guys didn’t listen to that episode definitely go back and listen to that episode because it just shows how you can go in and start asking yourself these questions so you can start to understand maybe where there is an issue and then you can work on that one issue. Again so start, commit, take action and adjust along the way. You might even want to write that one down. That might be a writer-downer. You guys have been hearing me say that quite a bit. Writer-downers. You might want to do that. I think it’s important. Hopefully you guys do that and if this has been helpful guys shoot me an email if you want. I want to know if this stuff kind of maybe is something that you need and it’s something that I like talking about a lot it’s because if we don’t actually figure out the mental side of things it’s like anything.

80% of your diet is the results, the gym is just a very small part of it. It really has to do with the diet and the nutrition. The same thing goes into your product and your selection and all that stuff. If your product is not fixed properly or your market and you go to launch, it doesn’t matter what you’re going to launch. It’s not going to work or it’s not going to work as well. Just remember that the mental side of things of this game in life not just business is huge and that’s why I’m a big, big advocate of just trying to figure that out and trying to get life balance and try to figure out a way to get us to get over those humps.

Anyway, let me know if this resonates with you guys. Let’s go ahead and let’s dig into today’s first question and I’ll give you my answer. What do you say, let’s do this, let’s rock and roll. Let’s go.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:09:38] Brian: Hi Scott. It’s Brian from British Columbia Canada here. Quick question here about choosing a product before you start selling on Amazon.com. I have two products in mind. One of them, the leading sellers on Amazon.com will say ‘sold by so and so and fulfilled by Amazon’. Then another product I’m looking at the lead sellers are Amazon.com. It says ‘ships and sold by Amazon.com’. So if I’m selling a product and the lead sellers on Amazon are Amazon.com am I going to have a harder time competing rather than if I go with another product with a lead seller as just a company fulfilled by Amazon. Just wondering this before I jump into the FBA world. If you can give me answer it would be great. Thanks.

[00:10:38] Scott: Hi Brian. Thank you so much for the question and yes I have been asked this question quite a few times. I have got an answer for you. For anyone that’s just tuning or maybe just getting into this Amazon world what we’re talking about is Amazon actually being the one that’s selling that product. If you look at exactly where Brian was saying he was looking, where the item is sold by, if we see fulfilled by Amazon that just means that they are fulfilling it for that brand. But there is a lot of products that are sold by Amazon. Meaning that Amazon now manufactures that product or has it manufactured or bought someone’s brand.

There’s been people that I know that have been reached out and contacted by Amazon and said hey, I would love to buy your product and they settle out for a lump sum of some kind or some type of agreement and then they now are the ones that are selling that product. But, let’s not talk about that so much. What I want you guys to understand is when we’re looking at generally the top ten, let’s just use the top ten of a keyword search, and you come to that page and you see that there’s 16 results, generally 16 results depending on your browser, depending on maybe you’re looking at on a phone it’s going to be different.

Let’s just say that the top ten listings and let’s just say that there’s two of those that are selling by Amazon or that are sold by Amazon or that are sold by Amazon, not even selling by Amazon. FBA is fulfilled by Amazon. You would think, well is that the same thing? No, it’s not. What we’re looking at is Amazon is actually the one that is the manufacturer in a sense where they are selling that product, they are actually making money from that product and then from there we are looking at FBA sellers and then we are also looking at FBM sellers. FBA is fulfilled by Amazon that means that I ship my product to them as XYZ brand and that is the brand and then it is fulfilled by Amazon, FBA.

[00:12:43] Scott: Then the other one is FBM, fulfilled by merchant.  I don’t send my inventory in, I have it here and then if someone buys it I ship it to them. That’s how that works. Now Amazon selling the product you would think well, I can’t really compete with Amazon.” I think you can. They don’t really do a great job of marketing their product with everything that goes into a listing or even pay-per-click or any of that stuff. Not that I have seen. Here’s what I always tell people. I want to look at the top ten listings that are selling that garlic press. Let’s just say that Amazon is two of those. Let’s that they are the top two.

Let’s say that they are one and two. I would just get those out of my way for second. I would say, all right now let’s look at depth and demand because that’s what we always talk about. We want to know that there is enough depth and demand for sales lowered down in that ranking. If they are someone selling in the five spot is there still enough demand there even though Amazon is selling it and we would think, “Well I don’t want to compete with Amazon because they are going to crash me,” which isn’t true. But let’s just say that you did that. I would rule out those top two and then I would just go ahead and take the eight below those, or the eight that are left and then I would use those as my depth and demand gauge.

So, again an example would be if everyone else is selling 300 or more then I’m okay. Now if Amazon is selling a thousand then their second listing they are selling a thousand and then the next FBA is selling 800 and then the next one is selling 600, the next one is selling another 500, the next one is selling 400 and they are still 300, that means there’s still depth there for me. Even if I don’t getting the top spots, it’s okay. Now, the only time I would think differently here is if Amazon was that entire page which I don’t think I’ve ever seen.

[00:14:43] Scott: If that was the case I might say to myself, “I don’t want get into that right now, let me see what else is out there.” I would not let Amazon scare you as far as like should you sell against them because I’ve seen listings including my own that have actually outranked them. I don’t see that as being a huge deal. But, I always do this to be on the safe side. I just take those two out of my calculations. I say, well yes that shows me that there is more demand than I even need really but I’m looking at again ten listing or eight in this case that are 300 sales each, at least and collectively they are selling 3000 units a month.

That gives me my ten units a day. That’s how I would break it down Brian or anyone else listening. That’s how I would do it. I always look at depth and demand. That’s what I need to look at. Again in order to look at that stuff you need to understand how to do depth and demand searches and do a little bit of that background check. I did that in episode in 189, all the way back to 189, can’t believe it’s been that long. I’m probably going to do an updated one for that showing the depth and demand but it’s pretty much the same I just want to go and do it again live and then record it and then share that.

But it’s pretty much the same thing. I’m going to go out there and just validate that those numbers that are being reported through Amazon and through a tool like Jungle Scout. I’m going to make sure that they are good, that it’s good information and it’s not being skewed because someone just did a major giveaway of some kind. I also want to look at trends. I want to look at that stuff. So that’s the other thing that I do with depth and demand. To answer your question simply, no I don’t really worry if Amazon is selling as long as they are not dominating that page. I feel that I can still find a spot there that I can still get my ten sales per day. That’s it. That’s what I do. Hopefully that helped you and anyone else in this situation or thinking this. Let’s go ahead and listen to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:16:49] Mike: Hi Scott. This is mike. I am new to your podcast, absolutely loving it. I’ve been researching FBA and looking into, looks like something that I think would be perfect for me and I’m really excited to get it. I’m kind of doing all of my homework and your podcast has been a Godsend. Thank you so much for it. I have a quick question and if it’s already been answered then maybe you can direct me to which of the 300+ podcasts it was on because I’m still… I think I’m on number ten. I am an American citizen with a permanent address in the US in California. I have social security all that.

But I am currently living overseas. I am in the Philippines about six to eight months of the year. What kind of challenges can I expect in terms of paperwork, taxes, legal stuff as far as you know? I know you’re not a lawyer or an accountant but just as far as you know. I’m not worried about the logistical stuff because I do have associates based in the States to handle, receiving, testing, repackaging and reshipping the inventory. I am more concerned about the paperwork and the legal tax stuff and what I could expect to encounter. Thank you again so much for this podcast.

Oh, I’m new to your podcast and so I am still working my way through so if you could potentially email me when this goes live so I can kind of skip to the front to listen to it before going back to whatever first season episode I am still on I would really appreciate it. Thank you again so much. I absolutely appreciate you and your show.

[00:18:44] Scott: Hey Mike, thank you so much for the question and thank you for being a new listener. So glad that you found the podcast, I’m so glad that you are getting value from it. I appreciate that. I am going to say this and you kind of already said it. I’m not a legal advisor, I’m not an accountant, I’m not an attorney, I’m not a doctor but I’m more than happy to just talk about this. If we were sitting at that coffee table having a nice cup of coffee. This is pretty much what I would say. Number one you are living or you still have a residence in the States from what I gather.

I don’t’ know all the legal stuff as far as like how long do you have to stay in a certain country in order to be declared a citizen and all of that stuff. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to be honest with you. I wouldn’t think so. I guess my first step would be I would probably want to reach out to an attorney and I would want to ask them, “Okay, my residence is here, I’m over here, what do I have to do?” Now, you said logistically you are not really concerned with that but I guess my question would be to myself if I was in your situation. It’s like do I have to have a bank account set up in another country if I’m doing business there?

I don’t believe you do. Now I did have a guest on Jason Magee from World First and he really specializes in helping ecommerce sellers kind of figure this whole thing out. We had a great conversation on episode 360. I would say definitely go check out that episode. Then probably reach out to him. I would ask him, if he doesn’t know the answer which he may not, he can direct you. He handles international ecommerce sellers every single day of the week. He’d probably be someone that I would reach out to and ask those questions. I personally think because you do have a residency here in the States it’s really just about then how are you going to set up your flow of money.

[00:20:48] Scott: Then also if you are going to have an LLC which you should where is that going to be set up and where are you going to  operate the business from. That’s really the big question. I didn’t really have a straightforward answer here for you because I don’t know to be honest with you but I would reach out to Jason for sure, 100% and I would even just go and listen to that episode because that might even help because we do talk about if we’re living in the states or if you’re living in another country what should you do or what are the things that you should be thinking about when you’re going to do this?

Hopefully that’s helped you. Again, I want to say thank you for being a listener Mike and yeah keep plowing through the episodes. If you have any questions you know where to find me and you can always go to theamazingseller.com/fb and there is over 40,000 other TASers over there that can help you out as well. All right, let’s go ahead and listen to one more question for today, then you guys can get on with your day, I can get on with my day and we can rock and roll. We can crush this thing. What do you say? Let’s do it.

[00:21:50] Luke: Hey Scott. Luke here from the UK. I just want to say I love the podcast. I’ve binged on it for the best part of the year now. I’m pretty much up to date. So grateful for all the content you’ve shared and to be a part of the Facebook group with like-minded people who are so selflessly willing to share and help you over every hurdle. My question is about enhanced brand content. At the moment our put up listing has quite a few product related keywords plugged into it. I’m worried that if I switch over to enhanced brand content which I’m really looking forward to doing and talking about the brand story a lot more, I’m just worried that the keywords about the product are going to disappear.

Even though that would still be in the back pages product listing description. Are they going to still look at that or are they going to see that I’m using less keywords related to the product and essentially bump me down the listings because of that. It’s probably just a small worry and you probably answered it somewhere else. Any light you can shed on this would be amazing. Thank you very much and I look forward to your answer. Keep up the good work.

[00:23:06] Scott: Hey Luke from the UK what’s up man? Thanks so much for being a listener. Thank you so much for the question. This is a great question and there has been some buzz out there that the enhanced content is not being indexed or maybe it’s not being indexed as much as they thought it was going to be or maybe they are doing an update. I don’t’ know. 100% to be honest with you I haven’t seen any major drop in ranking from switching over to enhanced content and now I haven’t switched over to enhanced  content so I can’t say for sure but I know others have.

I haven’t heard anybody saying that they lost rankings because here’s the deal as well. With the enhanced content, and I can’t see that forever if it is the case of not being indexed for those. I’m not sure that that will always be the case but you said that your keywords that are in the description are also in the back end, then it technically is still in your listing. The description I’ve always looked at as secondary. I’m going to plug that stuff in there but I’m not really going after like main keywords in there because we all know that it’s weighted the less, at least that’s my understanding.

You have your title which is weighted the most then your bullets, then your backend and I think even the backend might be a little bit more than the bullets and then you have your description. I don’t necessarily know that I would really worry too much about it but here’s the deal. You have to ask yourself this, if you update your description with enhanced content, is that going to help you convert people that land on your page? Let’s face it, if you get less people on your page but it converts higher who cares? In this case we don’t want to lose rank of course.

[00:25:02] Scott: But those keywords that are in the description if you’re thinking that those are the ones that are going to drive all the rankings for your searches I’m not really sure that I would buy into that. What I would say is make sure all of your important keywords and search terms are in your title or in your bullets or in your back end. The enhanced content area or your description area to me is just elaborating on all of that other stuff. Again if it’s in there Amazon is still got…  To me it’s about being relevant. If I’m going to run sponsored product ads, I want to make sure that my listing is relevant and it aligns with the keywords that I’m going after.

I can’t see that Amazon wouldn’t be able to see that in their enhanced content. Now if we’re talking about you’re using an image and you’re like, well I used an image and that there was explaining something so yes, you’re not going to have a word there because it’s an image. But that’s always been the case. Your images don’t necessarily help you rank for garlic press if you label it “garlic press.” Now used to be like that in and still maybe in Google if you’re looking for images that you load on your blog or your website, that was a trick years ago to put your keyword attached to your image.

Garlicpress.jpeg, something like that. But we are not talking about that. You have to ask yourself that question. You have to say enhanced content is that going to help me convert better and to be honest with you, I’m not sure a lot of people scroll down unless you have a product that needs a lot more like deciding. Is it an impulse buy or is it something that someone is going to be researching and trying to figure out if this is the right fit for them. Usually then they are going to also look at your reviews if they are that into figuring if this is the right thing for them but I get it. The brand and the story and everything is great is I think the enhanced content is a great thing to have.

[00:27:07] Scott: If you can have make that work definitely do it. I’m not sure I’d worry about if I’m going to lose indexing on those keywords because those keywords are pretty much going to be other places so I really wouldn’t worry about that. Let’s be honest. You probably only have a handful of keywords that you know are like the golden nugget keywords. Those are the ones and those other ones are like long tail and you’re still going to get picked up for those in the back end which they give us plenty of room there. The bullets, your title and all those other places.

If you guys are like listening to this and you’re like, “What the heck is this enhanced content?” We did a whole episode on that, myself and Chris Shaffer that is. That’s episode 294. I would definitely recommend listening to that because we talk all about it. That’s when they started to roll that out and we started talking about the pros and the cons and it’s evolved since then. But it really gives you kind of like how do you use and how you would want to use it. That’s episode 294, theamazingseller.com/294 and you can listen to what we talked about there on enhanced content.

Hopefully this helped you. Hopefully it helped anyone listening to this and again if we hear anything else and we have maybe anything that comes out of Amazon that says, “Yes, we are not indexing that,” then I’ll let you know for sure. We’ll have a podcast episode on that or I’ll email everyone on our updates list but I wouldn’t really worry too much about it but I would ask myself that question. If 100 people land on my page is that going to help me convert more people to a buyer? That’s kind of pretty much giving your answer I think as far as if you should use enhanced content. I don’t’ think everyone has to use enhanced content by the way. I think it’s a nice to have feature but we have talked about this before.

[00:28:59] Scott: A lot of people don’t even get down that far in your listing. They just look at the pictures, the title, the reviews and then they might go to the bullets and then from there the description if they even get that far. Usually by then they might already be over on the checkout page, who knows, hopefully they are.

All right, so guys that’s going to pretty much wrap up this session, one thing that I forgot to mention which I should have mentioned in the beginning here but I got so excited to get on here with you guys and jump into some of those questions is we just wrapped our five phase workshop last night which was awesome by the way. We did it live and what basically is if you haven’t attended one of those in the past is where we take you through the entire process of picking a product, sourcing a product, doing a pre-launch, doing a launch and the promoting that product to get more sales and to really get the ball rolling.

We went through the entire process, we did it on a live workshop last night. You can actually listen to and watch the replay right now it’s available. If you’re listening to this May 26th or before June 1st. So if you want to check that out head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop and that replay will be there for you. We also give some downloads and some notes that you guys can have so that way to help you go through that entire process. The other announcement I want to make really quickly which I  never really do here on the show is some of you know we have a private label classroom, where we actually take people through the entire process and we have a community.

We do coaching, we do hang outs, we do all that stuff inside of a private group. That there is also going to be closing by May 31st. So if you’re interested at all in that program, go to the workshop, watch the workshop, go through all that material and from there we’ll actually show you exactly what it looks like inside of the class, if you’re interested awesome and if you’re not, if you’re not ready or maybe you don’t need it, that’s cool too. All right but just go over to the workshop page and you’ll see all the details there at theamazingseller.com/workshop.

[00:31:01] Scott: 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, say it proud, say it with convection, “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 something that just kind of happened and I actually recorded it which all of my Skype conversations are generally recorded because either I’m doing an interview, or I’m just doing a coaching call and sometimes we’ll play that back for that particular student or the person that I’m speaking with and this is exactly what happened. Now, let me just kind of explain how this whole thing kind of came about.

I received an email from Matt Fichtner who said, “Scott, I’m a listener of the podcast and I’m actually in college and I am doing a project right now. And we have to interview other entrepreneurs, people that have started in business or have been a business for themselves and really just have a conversation with those people and really dig into the mindset of what makes those people a little bit different, and kind of like the ups and the downs.” And then they were going to compare notes and it was going to this whole project. So I’m like, “You know what, that sounds kind of cool I think I would love to do that.”  So I reached back out to Matt and I said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

So we figured out the time and I had no idea that you know he was an ex-marine. I didn’t even know that going into this thing. I thought it was going to be a younger guy, to be honest with you. I thought I was going to be like a twenty-year-old kid. So I get on and you know we went through this whole conversation of him kind of asking me questions and really just trying to pull out all of the information that he needed, but then it soon turned into a coaching call.

And he was asking me questions about his business which, by the way, he’s grown to about $9,000 per month, and he’s got plans for two more products that are already in production I believe and they’re going to be launching. And we go through the entire process that he went through and it’s just a really great story because he was an ex-marine and I didn’t know that like I said until I got on this call and then he told me his whole back story and everything.

[00:02:06] Scott: So anyone out there thinks to themselves, “I don’t have time for this business.” Wait till you hear this interview because you’re going to hear like he didn’t have a lot of time either like a lot of us.

Now, the call starts out with him asking me questions and then me answering them and my kind of talking a little bit about my backstory again. And again, why I decided to start being an entrepreneur or wanting to be an entrepreneur going all the way back to when my wife and I started on photography business and all that stuff. So you’re going to hear all that. But like I said it, soon turned into a coaching call and we actually go through how he can grow his business, we also talked about partnerships, because I’ve started to get involved in partnerships now and he had some questions on that as well.

And while we were going through this I’m like, “I just got to let you know like this is really good content would you mind if I share this with the audience?” And he said, “Absolutely.” And I had no intentions of doing that and it’s just when you get off and you say, “Wow if people could have just heard that conversation, they would have pulled a ton, a ton of useful information out of it.” And that’s why I want to give it to you guys. It’s really awesome it’s funny too because his baby was in the background making some noise and he’s like, “I apologize for that.” I’m like “Hey, that’s what it is.” Again I didn’t even know at that time I was going to be sharing this.

So you know, again I just realize this was a live deal here between him and myself not planning on being recorded. So if you hear some noise in the background, just understand that this was just spur of the moment like we weren’t planning on any of this stuff and it’s real life. The show notes in this episode which you might want to download and get the transcripts can be found at theamazingseller.com/365 and everything will be there. I just want to say though, I mean this is really, really awesome. And this is what fires me up is when I able to get on with someone like Matt and really dig into their business.

[00:04:01] Scott: But what’s really cool also is, I was being interviewed by him to bring it back to his class, and you will hear about what they’re going to be doing with this information and stuff. So anyway guys, I’m going to stop talking to you guys can listen to this private call that was actually recorded and you can kind of listen in on our conversation. So sit back, relax and enjoy this conversation that I had with Matt.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:04:21] Matt: I really appreciate you putting aside a little bit of time to talk to me.

[00:04:25] Scott: Yeah, no problem.

[00:04:27] Matt: I’m finishing up my MBA at USC right now. we’re actually graduating this week but we’ve got one more kind of class session here in a couple weeks we’re going to go over some stuff you know people kind of going over future plans your and things like that. And one of the aspects of that discussion is they want us all to reach out and talk to some entrepreneurs that we either know or follow or kind of like really enjoy their businesses or whatever.

So I’m trying to get kind of an entrepreneur’s perspective of what opportunities and things are out there. So I was actually been listening to your podcast for a few months now probably. I don’t know if I’ll cut all 400 episodes but I’ve definitely listened to quite a few and I launched my own little Amazon private label and business a few months ago, it’s starting to pick up. So I thought you’d be a great person to reach out to and hear about your experience and get some advice for the class and some advice from me as an Amazon seller as well.

[00:05:24] Scott: Yeah. So how will this be used? Is this going to be heard by other people in your class or is it just for you to do the research and then kind of put it into some type of summary?

[00:05:36] Matt: Yeah we’re kind of summarizing in a kind of roundtable discussion, things we learn, the common trend across all the different people that people have talked to. So I’ve talked to some people that have… Somebody talked to the founder of Ruby’s Restaurant chain, we got some people that founded some tech startups, some people that have done the individual consulting firms. So really just a wide variety of people that my classmates have talked to so if we’re going to really give perspectives to talk about.

[00:06:02] Scott: Nice, nice. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, all right so fire away or whatever you want to do, let’s do it.

[00:06:09] Matt: Awesome. I appreciate it. So I’ve definitely heard some of your podcasts, kind of your history from launching a photo business with the wife and selling on eBay, then you eventually on Amazon. So I’ve got some background of your journey a little bit. But I kind of want to get your perspective of it like how… I think one of the big questions that a lot of people will have is, how did you make the decision to kind of leave a full-time job and commit like 100% and talking about some of the decision making and some of the fears that go along with that decision?

[00:06:40] Scott: Yeah. Well, let me just say too it’s kind of funny because I didn’t come from a background like you’re going through schooling. You’re going through schooling to further your education to then get out there in the world and then decide what you want to do. Right from the beginning, I just had different perspectives going into real life out of high school than a lot of people did because I did have a college experience. So I really was, growing up it was always about you know you got to basically get a job, figure out a way to support yourself and your family, and that’s how I was raised.

My father was an old time farmer, grew up on a farm, they had nine kids, I still think they had kids just for another hand on the farm. But that’s a whole another discussion. But yeah, I think that really helped me not saying that… maybe my father should’ve pushed me into college, but if he did, I wouldn’t be where I am today. So I think for me personally like when I started working in right out of high school, I was working for a cable company and then I soon started to work for my father, his business, which was really small at the time only two employees, him his partner and then well, three employees counting me. So basically, we built that from nothing to a pretty sizable company and I was part of that.

So by doing that, I learned a lot about people, a lot about how I would create partnerships, and how I would treat employees, how I would create an atmosphere like for the employees and all that stuff. So I learned a ton. But I also learned that I didn’t want to work for someone because as I was working for someone, I was also you know I had a kid when I was 22, so I was 21 when I got married, I was 22 when I had my first kid. I soon found out that I didn’t want to have to only get two weeks off, three weeks off you know what I mean? To get three weeks off, I had to you know be there five years or whatever.

[00:08:44] Scott: You got to earn your three weeks off which is kind of crazy. So, me personally, that’s really what drove me and I think it’s drive. It’s like the drive for me to know that there was something else out there was not wanting to work for someone else in creating my own lifestyle.

And even to this day, I’m going to be 45 this year in July, I’m 44 now you know through those years it still always came back to, “How do I create a lifestyle business, a business that supports my lifestyle?” Like how is that going to happen? So going now into okay like well, how do you make that decision to make that leap? Because I had a decent job at my father’s company. In my head, I was going to own that company one day. So I might have been making at the time we’re going back close to 20 years now making $20, $25 an hour was pretty good wage back then and I was doing pretty well but I was working my butt off.

So you know I had to make a decision. My wife and I you know how do we work for ourselves? What do we do? All I know is construction, at the time. So she talked me into starting our own little photography studio on the side, just a little part time deal and fast forward it grew into something that was really, really good for us. But it was scary as heck because here I was going to leave something that was supporting us 100%. So it’s funny because on episode 300, if you haven’t listened to that one, definitely listen to that one.

Chris Shaffer actually interviewed me on my own show about my whole story and it really does explain that like, and I didn’t realize until I was going through, I was almost like going through like a therapy session because it was like pulling stuff out that I wasn’t even aware of. But I guess I’ve always treated like little safety nets for myself. So it’s kind of like you know what, “If the photography thing doesn’t work, I’ll go back and I’ll do my construction thing I can always go back to that.” There is always a job there.

[00:10:43] Scott: I mean I can go out and do it again. But that never happened but it was my safety net. Then when I was doing photography and then we wanted to make the leap to well, do we do… Because we were doing you know client work where we were you know having families come in and we were doing family photography stuff and everything. But how do we… I was starting to get into the digital space where I was starting to sell my templates and my Photoshop training and stuff. How do I do both? Well, it’s not that easy. So I got to make a decision. “Do I leave my photography business 100%?” I would like to because then I don’t have to be you know locked in again, not that I was working for someone but I was still working for them. Meaning that I had to be there at seven o’clock at night because the lighting was perfect and I couldn’t schedule anything around that other than that session.

So I was still locked into what I had to do I was still committing to someone. But again, we made another decision that we said, “You know what, we’re going to try to only do very, very little work on that. We’ll try to support ourselves with our digital business.” And the safety net was well, I can always go back and do photography. We can still go back and do that and we never had to. So we left that and moved on to you know teaching Photoshop tutorials and how to edit pictures and all that stuff. And we were also supplying people with templates and stuff that they could use within Photoshop for photographers.

So to answer your question, it’s always been really like it’s always been scary. It’s still scary even to this day whenever you’re doing something new. Right? Like those things right now that I’m working on right now. I’m like, “Oh, man. I hope that works.” But I think more so now because I’ve been out and I’ve done it so many different times, I always know that there’s always enough things out there that I can do to support myself. Again I don’t live above my means, so I’m pretty smart that way. But I just think that it’s always the fear of, “What if it doesn’t work?” And then the thing you have to ask yourself is like, “Well if it doesn’t work, well what else could you do to support yourself or your family?”

[00:12:40] Matt: All right. Now, do you have any like specific moments along the way that you… Sorry, the kid’s screaming in the background.

[00:12:47] Scott: That’s alright.

[00:12:48] Matt: Do you have any specifics like moments along the ways that you thought like, “Well, this isn’t going to work. I’m going to have to… I made a big mistake maybe whether inventory purchase,” or something like that or just felt like you know, “This is it. I’m going to go back to the construction thing.” Like it’s not going to make it doing this entrepreneurial thing anymore. Do you have any moments like that?

[00:13:07] Scott: Yeah, yeah 100%. And I mean you know no one really you know ever hears all of the ups and the downs, they always hear the highs but yeah I definitely had a lot of those. Like when we got to the photography business, we soon found out that we had like definitely different times of the year that were busier than others. So we would go and for us, it was like Christmas time, the holiday time was our big rush of people and we would do really well there.

But then we would bank that money and then we would say, “Okay it’ll hold this over for three months and then you know we’ll start getting some people coming in for Easter.” It’s like we just kind of had those seasons. But there was always that money would start to get a little tight but again I could’ve went out and did a construction job but I’m like, “You know I’ve already not done it for so long I don’t want to.” It’s like you get to that point be like I don’t want to do that. Yes, I could go out and do a remodel job and make 10 grand but I just don’t really want to go back to it. That means I didn’t win here. I didn’t make it you know.

So I would do everything I could to not do that. But there was many a times that you got close to where, “Okay, we’re going to be out of money there so we have to figure out something to keep everything running.” So there was a lot of sleepless nights even in the photography business. Now, we eventually build that up to where it was pretty much you know we knew the money that we were going to make and if we wanted to make more all we had to do is just kind of advertise you know a small little weekend special and we would be able to generate an extra $1,000 or $2,000.

So, that got to that point but in the beginning definitely not. There was definitely many times where it was like, “Is the phone going to ring? Are we going to get a client? Are we not?” So there was definitely a lot of those especially in the beginning and then, yes the thought crept in my mind like, “Okay, does that mean that I should probably just go out and do some side work?” But I never did but it definitely was in my head to do it for sure.

[00:14:59] Matt: Yeah, that’s awesome. I wonder how you… Because you got multiple kids. Right?

[00:15:05] Scott: Yeah, we got three kids. They range right now 9 years old, 19-year-old and a 21-year-old.

[00:15:11] Matt: Okay. Awesome. Now, how I just kind of wondering, because we actually just had our first daughter about eight months ago.

[00:15:17] Scott: Okay, congratulations.

[00:15:19] Matt: I appreciate that. I was thinking as soon as I had her the whole perspective changes as you know. I always kind of wondered and I’d like to hear from people that started their own businesses like what you’re kind of vision for involving your kids in the business, how much do you involve them in the business or let them do their own thing, or do you look to kind of build a business with the end goal in mind being like actually passing that business onto your kids, or is it just kind of how you handle the family interaction with the business?

[00:15:47] Scott: It’s great question. I think that, as your kids are growing up in the household, they’re going to hear. They’re going to hear what’s going on. You’re talking with your spouse, you’re talking with a partner, whatever. They’re going to hear it they’re going to pick up on it. Even though they don’t know that they’re hearing it it’s like we’ve always said like kids they listen. Even though you might not think they are. And then they’re going to see by the actions that you’re taking. A perfect example is right now, my daughter who is 21, going to be 22, she got out of high school, didn’t want to do the college thing. In my head, I’m thinking I should probably push it to the college thing because everyone does it but I didn’t do it but should I? I don’t know. And she really wanted to go into hair.

So we signed her up for Paul Mitchell School, she did like 13 months there and then from there she went out started her own business. And she specialized in hair and makeup for wedding parties. So she carved out a little niche for herself and she’s done really well. But in the same breath, she’s going to be moving here soon. Her husband to be is going to be here, he’s in the Navy so they’re going to moving. So she can’t really take her clients with her.

So she’s like, “Well in the meantime, I see what you’re doing dad is there anything I can do in this business space?” I’m like, “You might not want to do private label right this second because you guys are tight on funds, this, that and the other thing but maybe guys do retail arbitrage. Maybe you guys start there just to get to give you a little update on that, like she started out about three months ago and they’ve already done over $6,000 in revenue in… So it’s a little side gig, it’s a little side business but she’s got that entrepreneurial blood I guess. Like she’s seen it, she has it in her DNA but she also has seen it.

She already knows. I didn’t have to tell her about like opt-in pages and landing pages and the email list and like she kind of already knew that stuff. I mean to set it up maybe but my son who is 19 I mean he’s doing the same. Now he’s seen what she’s doing and he’s like, “I want to go out there and I want to start doing some of the retail arbitrage stuff.” So now he’s doing that stuff and always constantly asking me about business, asking me what I think about this certain thing. So they’re always asking so they have a different mindset because of the way that we’ve done it.

[00:17:53] Scott: It’s probably bad but I’ve never really highlighted just the schooling aspect of things. Because I think so much more happens from the learning and from the watching, than just learning in a class.

I mean you probably can relate to that that’s why they do internships a lot. Right? I’ve always said that, if you want to be a doctor, you better go shadow a doctor for a week or two. Because do you want that to be your lifestyle? I don’t know maybe you. Do you want a pager on you at the party and you’ve got to get up and run? I don’t know maybe you do. You know what I mean. But you got to know what the job is like. I know so many people that have done the whole schooling thing and they’re out $300,000 and they still don’t know if they want to do what they went to school for.

[00:18:32] Matt: Still don’t know what they want to do.

[00:18:33] Scott: Yeah. You know I got someone right now I know that’s in our family spent $300,000 to be a physical therapist. And she’s like, “I don’t know if I really want to do it.” I’m like, “Well, you better do it because you’ve got $300,000 sunk into that baby.” Anyway, so I’ve always wanted my kids to be well rounded but I also like to lead by example. My son he sees what I’ve done and what my wife has done and my daughter and even my youngest, it’s funny my youngest who’s nine, she picks up something and starts, “Dad, what do you think retail arb on this one?”

Like you’re talking nine years old, you know I mean? Like how many kids are talking… And doesn’t even say retailer arb she goes, RA because that’s the short term for it. She goes, “Dad what do you think? RA on this?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I hope the BSR is good at that one.” So it’s a natural thing, her wanting to wash the golf carts as they go. We live in a community that has a lot of golf carts that run around here. So she’s like, “Maybe I’ll put a sign out, I’ll watch golf carts for five bucks or something.” I mean it’s yes, I do think that them being in the household with myself, my wife and that being our lifestyle, I think it definitely it shapes them to what they’re going to want to do moving forward.

At least it gives them the vision of what can be made and what can happen and I’m always stressing lifestyle. To me it’s not about just the money it’s about the lifestyle. The money is what you need to live the lifestyle but what do you want in life? I always tell my son it’s not the Corvette, it’s not the big boat, it’s not… Like that’s not the…

That’s cool and all. But that’s not what you truly want, you want freedom and you want happiness and it’s funny my son’s 19, a lot of his buddies are out partying and stuff and he’s like, “Dad I want to work towards being able to have a family and do what you did and be able to go to the baseball games and to be able to coach a team, and be able to be at all the basketball games. I want that.” And I’m like, “Well, in order to do that, you have to create your own lifestyle business.” Or you know he’s going to be a physical education teacher so he wants to get into physical education and then be a coach. So and he can do a little business on the side if he wants to. So hopefully that answered your question.

[00:20:40] Matt: Yeah for sure. And that’s some really good perspective because I really didn’t bring up my background a whole lot something I didn’t talk about. I was actually in the Marine Corps for… I just got out about six months ago, after about eleven and a half years. So I went to school. I grew up in Ohio, went undergrad and Chicago and I got commissioned in the marine corp right away out there I flew helicopters, flew Cobra attack helicopters for the marine for the last 11 years or so. Some multiple deployments and…

[00:21:11] Scott: Thank you for the service too by the way.

[00:21:13] Matt: Thanks. I appreciate that. So that really, really cool awesome job obviously very challenging at times.

[00:21:20] Scott: Of course.

[00:21:21] Matt: And as part of my transition plan decided to do this. So it’s an executive MBA program so basically we would go to school on weekend so we could all still work full time. And it’s a cool opportunity because a lot of the guys in the class they work for big corporations out here in San Diego, Qualcomm and the big biotech firms. And then we got a lot of people like myself coming out of the military and figuring out. They’re like, “Okay, I’ve got you know 10, 12 years of this really cool experience but dreaded move on to the next thing, I don’t know what that is or how to do it yet.”

And it’s funny that I hearing you talk about to shadow people in different jobs and stuff like that. I’m 34 now and finishing up this MBA program, even now I’m like I feel like a freshman or sophomore undergrad again. Like, “Okay, what am I going to do next? Am I going to go into this? Am I going to that?” So it’s at this stage you know I don’t have the exact path decided but I really like your kind of mentality of just always have multiple things going on, multiple streams of revenue, multiple interests that you can potentially monetize and things like that.

[00:22:25] Scott: Yeah, I mean it’s like anything. I mean you’ve got a ton of experience in a lot of different things that I’m sure you know you might not even be aware that you are as of right now until that comes to where you need it. It opened your eyes up in a certain situation and I kind of always have said that. It’s like when you’re going through this journey, you’re starting to as you learn something new you’re also trying something new and then that might open your eyes to something else. Just like the podcast like that happened because I started an Amazon business, and I started to have some results and I wanted to share those results. But I also had a lot of background in building an email list and connecting with an audience with my photography business. That’s kind of where I learned that but I adapted that to the podcast.

And again the podcast was actually something that I doubted doing. I thought I didn’t think I was going to do it I was like, “Maybe I don’t know. Who’s going to listen?” And my wife who’s always been my biggest supporter said, “Just do it. You have a message out there to help people that are like you, that don’t believe in themselves because they don’t have this degree or they don’t have the skill set that they think.” And so that’s what pushed me to do the podcast. And then the podcast led into something completely different and it’s something where now I may able to help so many more people and that’s a really awesome feeling.

So I agree with you man. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You have to be willing to change and pivot. But you have to have a somewhat of a direction. I don’t know maybe I’m speaking for you but I’m sure that you would love to have a way to make your own schedule, be able to spend their time with your family, and not have to say, “Hey, can I get time off?” And they say, “No, I’m sorry that’s already been blocked out for someone else you can’t take that week.” I’ve got a buddy of mine who’s a pharmacist, he is you know great job, making good money. But you know we were going to want to trip in Mexico here in about three weeks I invite him and he goes, “I can’t get time off.” Danm, that sucks. I just decided. Well, I’ll give another example, I just what was it last week? No it was this weekend, this past weekend.

[00:24:27] Scott: My son and I are sitting on a couch at let’s see about 11, no 10:30 at night. The Cavs and the Raptors were playing, they just got done, and I said to my son and go, “Oh, man. It’d be awesome to be at that game.” He goes “Well, they do have one more game left you know.” I go, “Ýeah, but that’s in Canada.” And he goes, “Yes. So, reach out to your buddy Dom.” My buddy Dom Sugar lives in Canada. And I asked him just kiddingly I go, “Hey, can I get tickets?” And he goes, “I don’t know. I probably could.” He goes, “You got to get here though.” I’m like, “I’m just kidding.” He texts back he goes, “No, no, no come on. If you fly out, I’ll get tickets.” So I start looking to flights, long story short, I was in Canada the next day.

[00:24:59] Matt: Nice. That’s awesome.

[00:25:00] Scott: We went to a Cavs game, went to watch Raptors. My son and I great experience and we were back in two days. But you know I’m in South Carolina. So we flew to Buffalo, them from Buffalo, he picked us up we went to Canada to Toronto watched the game went back that night, got in a flight the next morning because I can. You know I mean?

[00:25:19] Matt:  Yeah, because you can.

[00:25:19] Scott: But if I had a job you think I could, I’m going to go ahead and tell them I may be gone for three days just out of the blue? Probably not. I would have to lie and say I was sick or something. You know what I mean? So anyway…

[00:25:33] Matt: Where are you guys going to Mexico?

[00:25:34] Scott: We’re going to Riviera Maya.

[00:25:37] Matt: Okay. Nice. We’re actually going to Mexico in three weeks as well. We’re going to Cabo.

[00:25:41] Scott: Really? Nice.

[00:25:41] Matt: Kind of a post-graduation trip with me and the wife.

[00:25:44] Scott: Nice. That’s awesome enjoy yourself. We’ve been now about three or four times, our honeymoon were at Cancun and that’s going back 22 years now. But then we’ve been back with the kids a few times. We haven’t been back on like four or five years. So yeah, we’re going to… Actually a bunch of us will go. My father is actually going to be able to which he’s I’m so grateful to have him still around. So he’s going with us, a couple buddies of mine and their parents and it’s going to be like I think about 15 or 16 of us. So it’s going to be fun men so I’m looking forward to it.

[00:26:16] Matt: Yeah, funny you brought up Dom, because I was thinking I’ve been watching your round table thing that you guys have been doing recently. And I was actually wondering about that. So my Amazon thing… So I got my first product up about three months ago and up to about $9,000 a month in revenue around now. I’m finishing up my second month. And then I actually got two new ones coming out in about a month or so, similar products but they’ll have enough variations that I’ll do some new listings and stuff so. But one thing that you guys talk about a lot when you guys do your roundtables, I was kind of wondering about. So it seems like there’s a definitely a difference, the business model wise and the idea of going after, I’m going to go after one product niche and really build a strong brand and then kind of use that brand to build externals to Amazon as well.

And then there’s the other kind of it sounds like this is a little more what Dom does kind of the open brand concept like anything that fits my model for something that’s going to sell well, list it and just build an open kind of like a general store almost online and so kind of want to hear your perspective of the two different ways of doing it, and if there’s… If you do both like if you, I don’t know if you can even have like separate seller’s account, do one sellers account for an open brand and one for individual brands or kind of what your experience is with that model.

[00:27:40] Scott: Well, I’m a fan of both, to be honest with you. There’s different places of where you are and where you’re starting. If you’re just starting out and you don’t have a clear, I guess vision of a market that you want to go into and you want to tap into, I think the open brand is the way to go. Because then you don’t feel like, “I got to have it all figured out.” You don’t have to have it all figured out, you just have got to get a product out there and get it selling. So I say that’s what I would do. Now, Dom, we talk a lot about the open brand.

The open brand is something that we’ve kind of partnered up with so I am actually involved in that brand with him. So it’s able for us to kind of go in there in test certain markets or trends. If we see something that’s going to be trending we can get on it get it get first to market, we’ve got an edge we might ride that for six months and then that trend kind of dissolves, and then or maybe get a trickle of sales. We’re okay with that but it also allows us to test different markets faster. And then if we want we can then build a brand outside of that.

Now, we don’t really talk a lot about which no reason why we don’t but because we always talk about the open brand with Dom, but you know he’s got three other main brands that are private labeling that are successful like seven-figure successful. So he’s got that and he’s got a ton going on that guy but he’s basically, he started with the brand idea. But the thing that he doesn’t do with the brand that we’re starting to do is building the actual presence, building the person that’s going to be the advocate for the brand and building out a true brand.

What he is doing is he’s building a brand on Amazon, for the most part, and then there he’s just launching all those products that are related underneath that brand. And to answer your question, you can open up multiple sellers account but you have to have approval by Amazon. So if you and your wife are going to each do your own brand, you’d have to notify them, ask them permission, you don’t have to separate checking accounts that’s usually just all you need that and maybe even a DBA.

[00:29:37] Scott: They don’t even actually request that I don’t think but at least a checking account. And then from there they’ll usually say yes. And you want to definitely at… You could do it without asking him but then the thing is if you don’t and then they come back and say, “You’re not supposed to do that, we didn’t give you permission.” Then you can get suspended and then you have problems. This way here you’re asking for permission and most of the time if you tell them a good reason like, “I’m married, we’re both doing our own thing, we have two separate businesses, we live in the same household. So we just want to make sure that we’re doing everything on the up and up.” And they’ll most of the time say, “Yes, no problem.” So yeah if you wanted to do that.

[00:30:13] Matt: Yeah, because that’s one of the things that you know at this stage I’ve watched so many of your videos and so many  Ryan Moran videos ,all those big contents. I feel like I’ve good a pretty good grasp on like all the different aspects and all the different business model types, but now I’m struggling with just like with some of the small mechanics stuff like how do you deal with a separate seller’s account, how do you drive traffic to your website and build an email list? It’s like I understand I need to do that but the how of doing that it’s kind of where I’m at right now I’ve done a research and those kind of things.

[00:30:46] Scott: Yeah. I mean if you’re at that stage of want to build a list, I don’t know if you’ve watched that workshop that we recently did, but I would definitely encourage you to watch that one because we actually show exactly how we build a list and we’ve done it multiple times now and actually we’ve got one that we’re doing with our current brand that we just started. And we’ve already released three products to that brand and it’s helped us launch the product. So I would definitely say…

[00:31:14] Matt: Is that one of your podcast episodes or was that one of the round table ones?

[00:31:17] Scott: No. It’s actually, it’s a workshop it’s on a replay right now it’s going to be up for a while. I’d just check that out. It’s theamazingseller.com/buildlist. And it basically that’ll take you to the replay page and it’s just Chris and I kind of going through that the strategy but then also how to do it, how to set things up. So I would definitely recommend doing that. To me, that’s the best way to do it right now. We’re not just going out there and attracting anyone we’re attracting people that are in our market that we can then market to again in the future but also create content for them or find content for them and then from there also let them know that we have something to offer them for a discount or whatever, and that’s been working really well.

We did one just about two weeks ago now on the first product that we launched this brand, we sent out an email to only 594 people. The list was about 8,000 or 9,000 but what we did is, we said we’re going to send the offer to people that actually click on the link inside the email that say that they already have this style of a product. So out of that list, we had 594 they said, “Yes, I have this.” And then from there, we sent them the offer and by doing that, we sold in the matter of five days, we sold I think over 150 units at 50% off by the way too. So it wasn’t like we say, “Well we’re going to give away for free,” or anything like that. We made I think was $160 profit just from doing that which most the time you’re losing money on the first set of giveaways. So works really well but I would definitely recommend that we’re excited about doing that now.

[00:33:01] Matt: Yeah. It’s very cool. Now, so it sounds like… Again, kind of been watching you, I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while now it sounds like there’s kind of a shift in like the long strategy from used to be, and I see this even with other sellers, you used to be able to give as much of this away as humanly possible, do that for a while, give away 200/300 units and then hope that can kind of rank. So I don’t know whether it was this dumb luck on my first product or just worked out, but I basically sent an email to my classmates to some former Marine buddies, those people on my current job, family stuff like that, I got about 30 or 40 full price sales in the first week, basically 100% from people I know, and then I got to about 10 reviews and then turned on PPC and then started kind of ranking from there.

It took about three weeks to get up to like page four or five and then actually I was listening to one of your podcasts specific to PPC spend. And I think you had mentioned you’re like yeah it’s not really worth it to spend anything less than about $25 dollars a day and I was only spending with $10 or $12 a day and literally the day I heard that I brought my campaigns up to 25 bucks and in like five or six days I was up on the first page and I’ve been there ever since. And so that was huge. So I don’t know whether I got lucky with that first launch without having to do any giveaways or email blast or anything like that.

[00:34:33] Scott: I think it also comes down to you know like the product that you picked probably and I don’t know but it probably wasn’t like super, super competitive where you had to had to giveaway like you know a ton of units to rank and to start moving the needle. You know I mean? So that’s really what we’re… We’ve shifted recently I’d say in the past like six to eight months, to where we’re only looking at products that we feel like we can rank well for without having to dump a ton into like a push to get it going. Like if we can just get 20 sales a day for five days and 50% off sales, then I think we’re going to be okay and then turn on some paper click 25 bucks to get started and kind of go through that process and that’s been working well for us as well.

So did you get lucky? I don’t really think so. I think that you went out you got 40 sales somehow some way who cares. Right? You got those sales and that just got you kind of you know seeded into the rankings but then it took a little while for you to start moving up which that’s normal. I always tell people you’ve got to wait at least five to six weeks before you can determine if you’re moving up as long as you’re not just sitting back trying to let the phone ring. I guess some people say, “I launched and I’m not getting any sales.” I’m like, “What do you do to launch?” Like, “Nothing. I just listed my product.” “Well, you didn’t launch.” So we got to spike to sale volume a little bit and get things moving. But anyway, I think that’s a great way that you did it, and it’s working so congratulations on that.

[00:36:14] Matt: Thanks, appreciate it. Now the last big ticket thing I was wondering about is… So you guys talk a lot especially recently I feel like driving external traffic, creating a website that pushes all the content, kind of building that user base and things like that which I think is awesome. I totally agree with your guys kind of theory that you know that that’s a long-term success play is to build a successful multichannel brands. I’m trying to kind of dabble and all that stuff at this stage, struggling my way through building a website, been trying to figure out social media pay-per-click on Facebook all I can do stuff kind of stuff but I kind of wonder if it’s especially I know Ryan Moran he kind of does, he is like, “Hey, for year one just get products to Amazon like it’s all about Amazon don’t worry about the rest of the stuff.”

And then you kind of start to build other channels. So I wanted your perspective on whether you would have started earlier with some stuff you’re doing now, if you could have or if you think you know kind of focused the first year just on getting some products on Amazon and then after a year of success maybe you worrying about the other channels. I want to hear your perspective on that strategy from that standpoint.

[00:37:34] Scott: Yeah, I would say that the thing that I would do right now if again if I’m going to be launching a product, number one, I need to make sure on the products selection side of things that I’m picking a product that I don’t have to do a crazy, crazy launch thing. So that’s the first thing and that means low reviews with still enough sales. And for me, 10 sales a month is enough. A $100 profit per product is what I’m shooting for. Okay? If it does more net, it does more net that’s great. But what I would do no matter what the product is, is I would build an email list for that particular product in that market.

Even in the open brand, that we talk about, we’re building email lists for those different product types in those brands. Because what we want to do is we want to be able to tap into like five markets let’s say. Let’s say we have one in home and kitchen, we’ve got one in toys, we’ve got one in sports, we’ve got one… I don’t know in camping like whatever. Right? Well, we can then build these little mini lists and to build these lists, we’re not talking you have to do like a ton of content either, we’re talking like we just want to get people that raise their hand that we know are our ideal customer or potential customer, and the way that we’re doing is, we’re giving away something to those people in exchange for their email.

So for example, if you’re in the fishing market, well you would just give a big package away like maybe two fishing rods and a net and a vest and maybe you just happen to sell tackle box. So then I would take that stuff and I would do that from day one like I would do that from day one, it doesn’t matter if it’s an open brand, it doesn’t matter if it’s a main brand, and I would do that and then I would build up that email list. And we’ve done it multiple times in multiple markets and every time generally we let it run for 30 days we spend probably about a grand, probably about a thousand bucks, and we generally get between, I’d say 4,000 to 8,000 emails from that spend. Yeah and these are people that raise their hand because they’re interested in winning this thing. Now some people say, “Well yeah but they want to win something.” But yeah these people are also people that want to win stuff in our market. That’s the big thing.

[00:39:34] Scott: You know when we’re talking about like belonging to a deal site or a review group, it’s always about people that are raising their hand to just get a deal, a discount on anything. We’ve taken that part out of it now we’re saying we’re only going to focus on these people. Now the second part of that is like you said like, “Well, then I got to make a website, then I got to do content,” you don’t really have to. You can do like something simple. Use click funnels or use Lead Pages or just use a little WordPress template and then just start collecting emails there with a little, thank you page. It doesn’t have to be that complex. The only thing I would say is, I would definitely send those people different things that can help them in that space.

So again maybe I don’t have content. Well, I’m going to go out and I’m going to be the reporter and I’m going to find that content and then I’m going to let those people know. Be like, “Hey you know I just found this awesome fishing video of you know this guy and his son and they caught like I don’t know a three pound bass or something.” Right? “And it was crazy on what they caught it on you’ll never believe it.” And then I would go ahead add a link to that video. That’s it. So I’m just giving them some content.

And then maybe in the PS, I might say, “Oh, by the way, we’re having 25% off sale on all of our tackle boxes.” That’s it.? So again I would do that and send out at least one email a week. And maybe it’s like maybe like I said, maybe you’re the reporter in the market right now because you don’t want to create that content then that’s what I would do just so you can engage with those people and let them know that it’s yes they signed up for a contest but you’re also the one that they’re going to want to pay attention to because we’re going to deliver you know information in this market.

So you don’t have to worry about going out there looking all the social media channels. The other thing with social media is I would say, okay figure out the number one place where your customers are hanging out, that would be the one I’d focus on. I wouldn’t do Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. If they’re all kind of hanging out in those that’s fine but there’s always one platform that they seem to be hanging out more. And that would be the one that I would probably focus on the most if you’re going to create your own content. But in the beginning, again, you don’t have to create your own content, you just have to be the one that’s going to deliver the content. So that’s what I would do.

[00:41:36] Scott: No matter if I was starting and thinking I want to build a big brand or if I was going to just do an open brand, I’m doing that. I’m going to figure out what I’m going to give these people and then from there, I’m going to attach my product to it and if all the people that didn’t win, guess what they’re going to get as a, “Hey, sorry you didn’t win the email? Sorry, you didn’t win but what I want to do for you guys because everyone’s a winner is I want to give you guys 25% off of my tackle box.” Something like that.

[00:42:01] Matt: And you’ll still get a sale.

[00:42:03] Scott: Yeah and you’ll get a trickle of sales. To me, that’s what it’s all about. Then the other cool thing is you do with that list, that email list, now we can upload that to that to Facebook and we can start running Facebook ads to these people. We can also do a lookalike audience of these people. So we don’t just use these people as they’re going to just buy from us they’re also going to help us share our content, they’re going to also be able to see other products but they’re also going to see all of the other things that we post and we publish.

[00:42:33] Matt: So from this list of just kind of generic email addresses, how do you use that to find your Facebook targeting metrics?

[00:42:44] Scott: Yeah, well I mean I think what you’re asking is, “How do I find where my market’s hanging out?” Would that be?

[00:42:49] Matt: Yeah.

[00:42:50] Scott: Okay. I mean well, I would go to Facebook groups and I’d see where they’re hanging out. I mean if you type in you know like bass fishing, you’re going to probably find groups or you going to be on Instagram. Maybe yours is on Instagram. So then you say, “Okay, we’ll have to go to Instagram.” And we actually did this as a case study we did it at one of our live workshops and we found that our market was hanging out for this case study was on Instagram. So we basically went out to an Instagram page that had a couple hundred thousand subscribers or followers, and we offered to pay them to put a post-up and they said, “Sure.” And they took our money and then we posted it.

And I think we did one for 25 bucks and we did one for 125 bucks. The $125 spend was a million people that were following that page. So yeah again it’s just figuring out where they are and I think if you just go into those platforms and you kind of already know. But when you start to run Facebook ads, that’s when it really can tell you who your market is because you’ll see 35 year old you know men that make between $40,000 and $60,000 a year. You can see the data. Then really start to narrow down your target and then start spending more money on the ones that really matter versus saying, “I’m just going to target everyone from 20 years to 40 years old or 20 years to 60 years old. And then you can start to understand your market that way too.

[00:44:06] Matt: That’s awesome. So with that giveaway, I’ve already kind of mentioned that before, I think it’s an awesome idea. How do you actually launch that giveaway? Like you do that giveaway on Facebook or do you somehow drive traffic to your own website where the giveaway exists or..?

[00:44:24] Scott: Yeah. Well, the first thing is, like I said, if you don’t already currently… if you’re starting from scratch you don’t already have a Facebook page or a group or anything like that, then you have to start on an advertising platform or you have to reach out to someone that has an established page already or an Instagram account or whatever and then you’re just going to drive people back to a landing page on your website or just all that is a landing page it could be just Lead Pages, Click Funnels or just a WordPress blog with just one page on it that’s it.

And then from there, they would land on that page the minute they would enter the name and their email address, then they would go to a thank you page. And on that thank you page, it would then encourage them to share the contest with friends and if they do in exchange for everyone they get to sign up, they get three people to sign up, they’ll get an extra entry or something like that.

So that’s kind of how that would work. But if you already have one, like we already have like in our new brand we already have about 3,000 Facebook people following us but we also have about 700 in a private group.

So now immediately we’re going to just the next contest, we’re going to send out to those guys so this way here they can start it you know kind of get it moving and then we’ll fire up Facebook ads. But if you’re just starting and this is what we’ve done in the past is, we’ll take Facebook ads we’ll find whoever they follow or what they’re into and then we’ll target those pages or those different types of people and then we’ll just start running an ad to them and we’ll see how it performs. And then once it gets rolling you’re going to see it’s going to start to shared and once it starts getting shared not on Facebook, on your own platform, the contest itself that’s where it can start to get some viral reach.

[00:46:03] Matt: Okay. So you can actually post… So let’s say you had you know if your fishing example, you find the ‘We love bass fishing Facebook page’ or whatever with 50,000 followers you can specifically run an ad within that group? Is there a way to do that?

[00:46:19] Matt: Yeah. Some you can, some you can’t. It’s weird. It’s like some pages it will show up and you can target it and some you can’t. So an easy way around that is to just once you go into your ad settings you’re going to be able to go into targeting and then you can start just putting in like, bass fishing, and then things are going to start to give you suggestions. So it can almost kind of help you through that process if you don’t know where to start. Or you might know a well-known fisherman that’s on TV you might go to that or maybe it’s the fishing channel you know. Or maybe it’s a certain TV show like if I was going after something for like the show Gold Rush I’d put in gold rush on Discovery and I would find that and then people that follow Gold Rush would also be able to see my ad.

[00:47:03] Matt: I see. So you figure out kind of the psyche of the person you’re targeting and then you can use those groups and those keywords on Facebook to make sure the ads make it to them?

[00:47:12] Scott: Exactly, exactly.

[00:47:16] Matt: That’s awesome man, that’s awesome. I know you said you had half hour, sorry I took up some extra time here from you but you had so much good information.

[00:47:27] Scott: Yeah. Is there any other last questions you wanted to ask before we hop off?

[00:47:31] Matt: Yeah. I’m sure I would have talked you for hours if I could, but now I think that’s really great perspective. I know we kind of did some stuff up front that I’ll definitely share with the class kind of entrepreneurial kind of stuff. I appreciate you also taking the time to talk through some of the Amazon stuff as well specific to me. Now, I watch all your podcast stuff I swing by your website from time to time. Is there any other stuff of yours that I’d click on? Are any other groups or things like I can follow and support you and just kind of keep getting some of the content as you guys are coming out with it?

[00:48:08] Scott: Yeah. I mean the only thing is really to make sure you subscribe to the iTunes channel you know and sounds like you’ve already done but just subscribe that way you get updates. And then as far as like you know where we publish I mean everything it’s kind of published on the Facebook group for TAS and that’s pretty much it, that’s how people kind of get into the world of TAS is really they start with the podcast, then they want to either go through those so they will either do it on their iPad or iPod or iPhone or whatever they’re consuming it with, and then use it generally go over the to the blog and go through that stuff, and then maybe go to one of our workshops that we’ve done in the past. So yeah I’m just about creating an experience for people to kind of go through and kind of like the motto of like just-in-time learning so just you know don’t consume everything just to consume, but consume what is going to help you like right now.

[00:49:05] Matt: At the time.

[00:49:05] Scott: Yeah. I think that’s the best advice anyone can receive from anywhere for that matter. But I mean theamazingseller.com is the main home base and then the podcast is really… I mean we get a lot of listeners. So you know that’s kind of where all starts and I love that because then people can decide if they really want to consume more of what I have to offer or my guests by listening and what better way to do it than through a podcast. Because you kind of, like you said, you’re only doing that one thing you’re not like bouncing around on YouTube.

[00:49:39] Matt: Yeah. That’s all. I was tuned from my driver I’m working with. I got about an hour commute each way so this is so I get to listen to a couple of hours a day of good content, so it’s awesome. I always see a lot of these guys kind of monetize their training programs or stuff. Are there any thoughts from a business standpoint for you growing this into a monetized course or like a closed group where people kind of share ideas and things like that? I know it seems to be a lot of sellers take once they kind of get a big online following.

[00:50:11] Scott: Yeah, Well, we’ve actually already done that. So you know we have a private class called, The Private Label Classroom. It’s been out there now for just over I think almost two years now. So yeah it’s funny because we don’t really publicly put it on the podcast, we don’t we don’t really put like banner ads out. The way that you usually get introduced to that is by attending one of my workshops. And when you get on a workshop, I teach you for probably about 60 minutes and then we talk a little bit about the class and if anyone’s interested they can jump in and if not that’s cool too. That was all created because I had people asking me to coach them. Like, “Would you coach me?” Would you do one on one? Would you do group?” And I was always like, “I don’t know if I want to get into that.” So I said if I was going to do it what would I want and then people said they wanted accountability.

So we have a Facebook group that’s just for the class. We do monthly hangouts where we jump on and we go through any questions and we answer them or anything that’s updates or anything like that. And then we update that stuff and actually, we’re getting ready right now to do a close on that. We usually keep it open all year but we usually close it down a couple times just to do updates and get things reorganized, we also have some updates inside the members area to make it easier to learn and consume. So we’re always doing that stuff. So that’s been something that we’ve been doing for a little while now and yes… I’m always about giving and I love it that you haven’t even really heard about that because I don’t push it on you.

[00:51:42] Matt: Yeah, I’ve probably listened to 60 or 70 of your episodes at least, if not more.

[00:51:45] Scott: Yeah. And most people would be like, “Oh, man you should just be mentioning that all the time.” My biggest thing is I want you to really consume the information and when the time comes, you’re going to either ask me if I have something or you’re going to find it by being on one of the live trainings that we do. Other than that, I don’t really mention it because again I don’t want to be one of those guys that just pushes it down your throat. It’s there if you need it and if you don’t just keep consuming the information.

A lot of people want it organized and structured and that’s what the class does and it also gives you a more interaction with me and we get out to hang out like I said live every single month, and we record those, and I have special guests on and all that stuff. So I do have something that does that now I do have that brings in revenue for the podcast. So yeah and again it’s something that was never planned when we started the podcast it just kind of happened.

[00:52:38] Matt: Yeah. Very cool.

[00:52:39] Scott: So let me ask you this. Generally, these Skype calls come in and they’re recorded. Would you care if I shared any of this with my audience?

[00:52:48] Matt: No, not at all.

[00:52:49] Scott: I think this was pretty cool actually.

[00:52:51] Matt: Yeah, I think was awesome and I think the interesting thing coming from… And I’ve told people since I got started. I have so many people that are literally trying to like give me money so I can invest in this. So that’s kind of interesting to hear about your partnerships and stuff like that because actually, I guess that is kind of one parting question I had was from a partnership standpoint. Because I literally had people, people in my business class kind of hire up exec of big companies and stuff, they’re like, “Hey, I got $30,000, $40,000 I’d love to invest it somehow and I’m trying to figure out how because I’m not quite ready to take on investors yet,” but I’m trying to figure out to, do I you know launch a new brand under a different seller’s account and go 50/50 with a friend just on our own brand or do I kind of you know “Hey, I’ll give you know if you invest $20,000, $30,000 for my next merchandise purchase and give you a return at X rate or whatever.” So I was kind of wondering how you structure since you’re kind of dealing with some partnerships now. How you kind of structure that kind of thing, whether you do it as like a debt thing or like going to shared equity kind of thing?

[00:53:57] Scott: Yeah it’s not an easy thing, to be honest with you. When I first started this again one of those things I said to myself I’d probably never partner because I had a bad experience with partners. Actually, my father did in that business in the construction that was a big lesson I learned from that. And I swore I would probably never going to a partnership other than with my wife. Now, with that being said, I also started to see opportunities that I could potentially capitalize on and also help someone else that might not have the strengths of mine and I don’t have theirs. So it is a little challenging because you got to figure out how you’re going to divvy it up in kind of like who’s going to do what.

But it’s been pretty easy for me to decide if it’s the right time or not because they kind of worked themselves up by just a casual conversation and then from there saying like, “If we were to do this is what it would look like.” And I’ll just give you one of the more recent ones. I partnered up with someone and the reason why I did this was because I’d seen the potential in this brand long term and I’d also seen that they were someone that could be really good as the front person. So I’d seen that they could drive the business, they could do Facebook lives, they could get an audience built, people could fall in love with them, okay. And then from there, the product would just be like, “Yeah, sure I’ll buy it because it’s part of you.” It’s kind of like Oprah promoting something just not on that bigger scale.

[00:53:21] Matt: That’s a huge asset to have.

[00:55:22] Scott: Exactly. So when I’d seen that I’m like, “Okay, now this person doesn’t really know all that much about the marketing side of things and how to do things externally and even really even to optimize it fully on Amazon.” So that’s when we came on and I said, “You know what, we’ll do this but if we do, it’s going to be 50/50.” So that was the terms. And also the other stipulation was that we’re going to reinvest back into the business until, I think we said like six to eight months, but then we want to also take a look at it and see if that’s the time that we’ll start pulling or if we just continue to roll it back in until we build it to where…

Now, there is a good friend mine, Mike Jackness, who did the same exact thing that I’m doing right now with a partner and they built… They’ve got a brand that’s a seven figure brand they did it in less than two years. But they haven’t really pulled any money out of it yet. So you know what I mean like and I think this year they have to because you know they have some profit in the business, and their accountant’s saying, “You kind of have to you, gotta start doing payroll,” all that stuff. But the thing is like you’ve got to have these rules and stuff up front you’ve got to have a good relationship with that person. I wouldn’t say just do it for hey loan me $30,000 and I’ll give you know 10% of the return and that’s fine and all but I don’t know. I want that person to have as much interest in the business as I do so that way there they’re willing to push it not just…

[00:56:44] Matt: They’ve got to buy in.

[00:56:45] Scott: Yeah. So that way it’s not as you pushing forward. You know I love it…

[00:56:50] Matt: Now, would you structure that under, for example, you just talked about the example with your friend. So they’ve got this multimillion dollar business now. Now, if they had built that under like one person seller’s account, now you get a business that’s maybe kind of hard to sell, kind of hard to unwind that from other products so I kind of wonder would you go like a partnership like either an LLC or something like and then a brand new sellers account, and this kind of completely separate everything out before you got started or would you kind of grow that under the account you already have and then try to maybe spin that off later?

[00:57:28] Scott: I would probably try to do it wherever it’s going to make the most sense for the both of you. Like you already currently have something, so if you have something but you’re going to start into a brand new market and that person isn’t already selling, then I would probably start one in their name and start from scratch so that way that you don’t have that problem. What we kind of did with this partner is they were fairly new in the Amazon game, really didn’t have a lot of movement, a lot of you know a brand established.

So we just kind of went in that brand kind of like rebranded it in a sense. So that way there we were kind of already rolling but at this stage of the game it doesn’t really matter because there’s not a mixture of products it’s not like an open brand. So I think it’s going to depend and I know that’s not really an answer 100% of what you have to do it but it is. I mean every situation is going to be different and you got to do it what you’re comfortable with.

I come from which I probably shouldn’t but I come from you know the old days when you know a handshake was a deal you know what I mean? But you know nowadays, just to be smart you got to get something written up and you know depending on how much risk you want. You know if you’re like, “You know what… and I’ve heard by the ton of stories about people not just in this space but just business general where they had a handshakes and then it just went bad. So I think you just have to go…

What are you going to be willing to be okay with, and sleep at night, and how much trust you have in that other person? But I would say definitely in LLC you definitely should do that and then and you might maybe want to just have something drawn up. You know simply that states a few of the things that are important to both of you and then you go off of that. But I don’t know a lot of times I think that that stuff can get in the way of something that could be great. So that’s why…

[00:59:23] Matt: Yeah, that could be in the exact same thing because I got some friends close friends former fellow Marine Corp officers trustworthy people that I would certainly have a lot of trust in and one friend of mine. We already looking at some products and we’re going to order in some samples and I think about that there’s I really want to do this and is going to take off and run with it but I’m also going to focused them on, I go we’re going to set up an LLC which is actually kind of time consuming and expensive in California.

We’ve got to set up a joint checking account, we got to set up by all of this and something like just the mechanics of setting up the partnership is kind of keep detracting from finding a product and getting it to market. I think it’s probably important to do a lot of stuff up front but it is a little daunting thinking they like I could probably get something up and selling in six weeks if I didn’t have to spend the next month or two worrying about all this like structuring kind of stuff….

[01:00:16] Scott: Yeah I get it.

[01:00:17] Matt: A little patience upfront will pay in the long run but’s it’s kind of hard when you just want to get more product online and get up and running fast.

[01:00:25] Scott: Yeah. I hear you, I hear you. Sometimes it does it does feel like that. I was fortunate like I said because they already had something in place that we were able to just kind of go into but if we had to start from scratch we would have an earlier era right it would have taken probably an extra six weeks. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t really like get everything lined up. We could still get our products picked and do our product research and do our sourcing and maybe even put a down payment. In that way it’s getting in production, so that way there were ready to go live when we’re ready we don’t have to wait until that’s done, because there’s a lot we can do in the meantime. Anyway, but partnerships, they can be very powerful but they can also be a bad thing if it doesn’t work out. But again if you got to be aligned.

One little tip I would say for anyone thinking about partnership is just making sure that there’s an equal amount of strengths like you have strengths they have strengths. There’s things that this one partner does that I either can’t do because I’m busy with other things or that they’re just better than me. And there’s things that I do that I might be better than them at some things because I’m more experienced. It’s funny I talk to my good buddy Dom you know Dom Sugar and he’s always like, “I got to learn this funnel thing. I have to have you guys sit down and really show me how to do.” I go, “No you don’t. We got that. You worry about finding the product, the sourcing, you’re good at that. I don’t want to work on that I want to work on the funnels.

That’s what I want to do. I love that stuff, we want to do that stuff don’t worry about it.” “But I want to know how it works.” I go, “You can know it works but just don’t worry about having to implement it. Let us handle that.” But I get it because I’m a lot like that too. I want to know how everything works, how everything operates so that if we have something happened, I can jump in. Again it’s that safety net that comes in. If that guy doesn’t show up to work, that job doesn’t get done, well I got to step in and then get the job done. I totally get it but yet it’s funny story with Dom. So is there anything else? I mean I think we’ve got to wrap this up here pretty soon. But is there anything else said that you had that you wanted to discuss?

[01:02:35] Matt: No. That’s awesome. I think I got a whole week’s worth of research and to do lists just from this conversation. That was a huge help for the class that we’ll kind of discuss this stuff and for me to grow the Amazon brand and stuff. But I look forward to checking out the… I don’t think I’ve seen any of your workshops yet, so I will definitely check out some of the videos there and get signed up for the next one and keep following your stuff. I hope to keep in touch and pick your brain from time to time and do whatever I can to kind of help you out if there is anything I can do as well.

[01:03:09] Scott: Absolutely, Matt. I definitely I would say, keep in touch, let me know how you’re doing. It sounds like you are doing amazing, and if you have any questions or anything you know where to get in touch with me and I think it’s awesome that you launched a product as you’re going to school and all that stuff you’ve got a new baby, you’re married, all that stuff. So I just love it because so many people say, “Scott, I don’t have time.” I’m like, “Listen.” I was going to say, listen to what you just said you’re up to Matt. Like I mean come on like you don’t have time, but you made time you figured out a way and you got it done and now you’re at about $9,000 a month so that’s cool man. So yes, this has been great. So like I said, keep in touch. Let me know how you’re making out if you need anything else for the class or whatever like that. If anybody had any questions or anything on your studies let me know and if I can help, I will.

[01:03:59] Matt: Awesome. Thanks so much for everything Scott.

[01:04:01] Scott: All right Matt. Take care bud.

[01:04:03] Matt: All right. You too.

[01:04:03] Scott: All right. Bye. All right. So I hope you enjoyed that. You can see that it was a private call between him and I. You can even hear in that interview where I asked him if it would be okay if it were to air this, and he said, “Absolutely. Definitely share away,” and he was blown away too because he was like and I didn’t plan this thing turning into a coaching call it just kind of did and well you guys heard it.

So hopefully you got a ton of value from that and I just want you guys to understand like you could hear everything that I was saying in there before I was even you know knowing that this was going to be aired. Everything I talk about is exactly the way I feel, I build and I want to build a lifestyle business or businesses that support my lifestyle, that’s what’s important to me. And if you really understand that, you can do the same whether it’s this business model or another business model it really doesn’t matter you just have to understand why you’re doing it that’s why I always go back to figuring out your, why.

So if you know why you’re doing it, it’s going to be a lot easier to push through and when you say you don’t have time, go back to this interview or this conversation, this private call that I recorded with Matt, and listen to what everything or everything that he is doing. Going to school full time, still working, having a kid, having a wife and all that stuff. Just go back to listen to that if you ever think of yourself you don’t have enough time. So that’s it guys that’s going to wrap it up. Remember as always I’m here for you I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have 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]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…update on the new brand that we are working on behind the scenes here. It’s pretty exciting and today what we are going to be talking about is something that we experimented with and we had pretty good success and I think you guys could probably replicate this if you have someone that can either do it for you or if maybe you are even representing your own brand, you can do it yourself. We are talking about using Facebook Live to sell products and boost your sales and also you guys know what happens when you boost your sales it’s going to also help your keyword ranking and that’s what we are going to talk about here today.

I’m going to give you guys the play by play, not sure how long this episode is going to go it’s going to go as long as it needs to but I don’t think it’s going to take that long to go through this entire process that we actually did and I want to lay it out for you. Now this is really for someone looking to build a brand and what we mean by that you guys hear us tossing around this open brand concept and then like a brand concept, a brand that has multiple products. If you think about a brand there’s different things you can take away from building a brand. It can either be something that has a story behind it, a mission behind it or it can just be a product line. That could be a brand.

It’s where you are really focusing on that market. We talk about the fishing market or the garlic press market. If you were in the garlic press market you would probably want to also have other kitchen products related to that garlic press so that way there is they need a garlic press they might also need a colander and they might also need tongs. Those types of thing, knives, whatever. It’s the same thing, you have a product line. What I’m talking about is if you have a brand that has either a story like I said or someone that is the spokesperson for that brand.

[00:02:00] Scott: If you can have that you will definitely have an edge above your competition. No matter what they do it’s going to be hard to compete with you. Number one, you can build your own email list a lot faster. We’ve done that in this brand and we’ve done it with other brands as well but this one here is the most current and the one that we are using right now to launch products with. If you guys did not listen to episode 356 and 357 I’m going to recommend that you go back and you listen to both those episodes. 356 was ‘How to compete in a saturated market on Amazon and win’ and there’s a seven step plan that I gave you and it’s all about this right here pretty much. Not about Facebook Lives and stuff and how to use that channel but it’s more or less how to go in there and dominate that space with a presence.

357 was actually how we did it with a product, our first product in this brand and how we launched and sold 154 units in five days and we actually made money, not a ton, I think we made just over a $150 but if you guys remember, back in the day we are talking like eight months ago or so depending on when you are listening to this, you’d give away product. A lot of people were giving away hundreds of units to get sales out there, to get a BSR bump and to get reviews coming in.

That’s what they were doing and if you were to do this you would have to number one give away the price so that’s your cost of goods. Let’s say it cost us $5 a unit to get it landed, that’s five bucks we are going to give that away. Let’s say we did it for free or we did it for $1, it’s almost free. You would do that and then from there you would get a BSR bump, that’s awesome, you might get some reviews trickling in but the other thing that you’ve got to remember is that you are also paying for the FBA fees.

Those aren’t going to go away so let’s say on average you are spending five bucks for FBA fees, pick and pack, all that stuff. We’re at $10 a unit. You give away 100 units, we are talking that’s going to add up; 100 units, 1000 bucks if my math is correct alright?

[00:04:09] Scott: It’s $1000 you’d give away. We’ve reversed this, we spend $1,000 but we spend $1000 building a launch list and we talk about that. I actually give the exact steps that we did this in 357 so I’m not going to go into that in this episode. This is really just an update of another way that we are building the brand and then we are also able to reach people without even emailing our list. This was a great model of that or a great example of that because we did it because we just launched a product before this one and we didn’t want to hit the list again so we ended up saying, “Let’s just do a Facebook Live, demonstrate the product, talk a little bit about it, again connect with the audience, the audience is starting to like the person that is the front person, people are commenting, the video is starting to get shared and all that stuff. We are starting to get some viral reach now and we’ll see what happens.”

Well, long story short on that, I’ll give you guys the play by play here in a minute but the long story short is we did a Facebook Live, we did not email the list and we sold before the end of the day we sold 33 units. Now to some people that might not be much but 33 units from a Facebook Live which was not a hard sales pitch it got us on the map, 33 sales. But that is not all, like one of those infomercials, but that’s not all. Actually from there the next day we sold an additional 12 just from that Facebook Live. We did not mention it yet in the email and since then we’ve been selling on the average, just yesterday I checked we had nine sold but it’s been averaging between five and 10 per day and all we did was announce it on a Facebook Live. We did not even email our list about this as a promo.

[00:06:02] Scott: Now the other thing I want to go back to is this also was not a giveaway like a free giveaway. It wasn’t a dollar giveaway, it wasn’t even a 75% off discount. It was 50% off so we still recouped our cost of goods, we recouped the FBA fees and we were able to put some money in our pocket. Now we are not putting that money in our pocket right now, we are reinvesting it back in the business but the point is we broke even and even came out ahead and we are now ranking, I believe the last time I looked on page two for our main keyword and our main keyword if we were selling a garlic press it would be garlic press. It’s that good of a keyword. A lot of the long tail ones will rank in page one so for us we got some good movement from just a Facebook Live.

Now you may be thinking, “Scott I don’t have a presence on a channel like Facebook. I don’t have anyone that can do that.” Well that’s where you would have to go out and start recruiting, start finding someone and now Facebook has introduced where they will let you invite a guest on your show. Even if they are not an admin of that you can invite them to come on and do a Facebook Live on your fan page or in your group which is pretty cool. That’s another way for you to get reach. Let me just give you an example of this, one of our partners that’s in this business with us they actually were asked by another group if they would go ahead and do some demonstrations of the products because they have an audience that wants these types of products.

Now they are an affiliate, they can potentially earn some revenue from this so that’s what they are thinking but they also do not want to be on camera. They are just not comfortable on camera and if that’s you if you are not comfortable on camera that’s okay you can find someone that is or find someone that’s already doing it in another space that might not be a competitor of yours and they may be happy to do it because they are going to get some exposure.

[00:08:05] Scott: You are going to let them mention their page and it’s like one hand washes the other. It’s definitely working and they were actually a guest, I say they are partner in this business. They were also a guest on another page and they were able to get for us to get people aware of our brand, over 20,000 views on that video in less than three days which is crazy. That’s just a little side note. Depending on if you are a brand that has a presence or maybe you don’t have one yet it might be smart for you to find someone that could be that front person.

All of the businesses that I’ve seen that I really, really love have a couple of different components and that is they have a front person that is the person that is the leader in that industry, not even that they have to be a leader of an expert but they are learning and sharing their experience through learning and through testing things and experimenting and doing these things but they are a trusted advisor in a sense. That’s what I’ve seen and then also why they are creating their own products and then from why they are creating their own products you explain that to your audience like, “Listen, I developed this garlic press because for years I couldn’t find one that fit my hand.”

I’ll give you a perfect example, actually I was watching Shark Tank the other night, I know, I know I still watch Shark Tank even though I was told in one of the past episodes that it’s fake. I don’t think that it’s all fake I think that yes it’s hyped up Mr. wonderful, it’s over the top just like Simon Cowell was in American Idol and all that stuff. You need personalities, I get it but this guy was a high level chef like very well known in the space and he had a really, really good job in a lot of these high end restaurants and just worked himself up the ladder but he made this bowl, you guys might have seen this if you watch Shark Tank. He made this bowl that had this little pore on the front of it but then also had this little squeegee that was built in.

[00:10:03] Scott: It’s hard to explain but imagine a little half circle that you can use like a squeegee to wipe up the bowl. As you are pouring it then you want to get the rest of it out of the bowl you don’t need a spatula you just swipe it and then tip it and then it comes out. He made this because it was something that he wanted and he’d seen that there was an issue in the kitchen and he couldn’t find something so he would make-shift one and then try to use it because it would speed up his time. He made one and he pitched it to the sharks and I believe it was Lori that actually invested in his product.

He’s a little bit of a personality, not a big, big following but he is the guy that would be on camera. He is the guy that would be selling, he is the guy that would be sharing his story. He also had a great story too. He worked in soup kitchens, he is raising money for these different charities which the second part that I always look into a brand is if we can add some type of charity aspect to it. Some people use that for getting more sales, I look at it as yes you’ll get more sales but you are also doing something good. That’s something that I want to definitely include in this new brand. We haven’t gotten there yet, we are getting things rolling and that will probably be an added piece. I actually met someone in Toronto Canada, was just recently in Toronto Canada, had a TAS meet up there it was a last minute decision there if you guys didn’t read that email I sent out about that.

I was sitting with my son on the couch watching the Cavs and the Raptors game and it was game, I think at the time it was game two or three I forget and they ended up winning. If they won one more the Cavs were going to just basically sweep them so I… I know this has nothing to do with that story but I have to share this if you didn’t hear it and how I got to Toronto. I was sitting on the couch with my son Friday night and I had my phone on my hand I was texting Dom Sugar and I said, “Hey, any chance you can get is some tickets for this game on Sunday?” And I was just kidding totally kidding, totally joking and he goes, “Yeah just get a flight here and I’ll get the tickets,” and I’m like, “Okay I was just kidding,” and he goes, “No, no seriously, book a flight here you and your son and I’ll get tickets.”

[00:12:10] Scott: So then I started thinking about it and then he threw in, “And we’ll have a TAS Toronto meet up,” and I’m like, “Okay maybe it’s starting to sound a little better now because now it’s not just going there for a game I’m actually going to go there and meet some of you.”  And long story short is we did that. I actually booked a flight, he picked me up in Buffalo New York we travelled about two hours to Toronto, we had a meet up that night and then we went to the game on Sunday and I flew home on Monday. It was crazy but anyway the guy that I was talking to at the event his name is Lucas by the way and he’s got a great business and it definitely supports a cause and what he said instead of doing like every single thing that you buy every single day of the year what he’ll do is special weekends.

So this weekend if you purchase XYZ we are going to donate a dollar to this cause, something like that. It’s again another way for you to get people to want to buy then support that cause and then from there feel good about it. I always go back to The Profit with Marcus Lemonis when he had flex watches on there and they had a great story about a charity and how they rolled that into the business and they were supporting breast cancer and then from there it went on to clean water and then it went on to meals and just all kinds of great causes. The watches were great, people liked the watches but they were also buying it because it was supporting a certain cause and they even made those watches represent the cause.

Like if it was blue watch it was for water so again I didn’t want to go on a rant here about charities but that is something that’s important to me and I definitely will be trying to include that in this brand because I think we definitely could make that happen. Anyway, going back to the Facebook Live thing I just want to go through play by play and how we did this. There’s a few steps that went into this and I’m going to go through into exactly how all this all unfolded so you can hear how we did it and if you want to model it then go for it.

[00:14:05] Scott: Number one, step one is that we created a Facebook fan page and we created a Facebook group so you have two different pages. Why would you do a page and a group? Number one, groups are becoming better because they get more reach with the people that are belonging to the group because those people really signed up to be in a community aspect or a community versus it just being a page that I like. But the Facebook fan page, there’s a couple of benefits to having it. Number one you are going to need that if you are going to run Facebook ads. You have to have a Facebook fan page as of right now. So that’s number one.

As you are running Facebook ads you will naturally start to get likes to that page so now you are building up your likes. Well that’s exactly what we did. We started this brand from scratch, we started to run a contest as I’ve talked about in our build list workshop. If you guys have not attended that definitely go check that out at theamazingseller.com/buildlist and you’ll hear all about that. It’s exactly what we did so we put something out there, an irresistible offer where people would want to win this complete package and then we built a list. In that process we also had a Facebook fan page that we were posting to regularly and we had a group but we drove Facebook ads to our contest and then during that time we were also gaining likes.

As of right now I think and as at the time that we did the Facebook Lives and stuff I think we I think we are rated on 2,700 or 2,800 close to 3,000 likes and then I believe like just about a thousand people in the group so pretty good. Not bad numbers and we really didn’t do much to promote it other than we run some Facebook ads and we had a contest and we were posting. That was like step one. Now step two was we were delivering value ongoing. Like I said if you do not have that person you can still be the reporter and then just keep reporting to that page so people will want to come back and go, “Oh I wonder what today is in there.”

[00:16:02] Scott: It’s like you have updates and you have different tips and tricks and people will want to keep coming back. If you have an email list, if you’ve been building that email list which we did you can then even email those people and go, “Hey I just posted something on Facebook or in the group go check it out.” Again it’s a way for you to deliver value and be that influencer. And then step number three is start using Facebook Lives like starting getting on camera. Again if it’s not you find someone that can do it and just start delivering tips. Don’t even sell anything. We were doing tips, videos and tips and stuff before we even had a product available.

We’ve been doing this now for just over three months so we didn’t have any products ready, didn’t have anything to sell them yet we just delivering value over and over and over again. It goes back to what we’ve talked about in the past with the book that I like is Gary Vaynerchuk ‘Jab, Jab, Jab Right Hook’ you are jabbing, those are your delivery of content and then you have the right hook which is the ask and it sounds a little worse than it is ‘Jab, Jab, Jab Right Hook.’ So deliver value, deliver value, deliver value and then ask and it’s okay most people are cool with that. That’s what we did, that was step three, kept doing some Facebook Lives using one a week.

Now the one tip here is if you are going to do Facebook Lives I would post it to the Facebook fan page and then I would share that link inside the Facebook group. We are doing this with TAS as well. The reason why you do this is because if you are in a Facebook group you cannot share that video in the group as of right now. Maybe they will change that but you can’t share and it makes sense. If it’s a private group you can’t share that outside of the group so why would you want to share it in the group? It doesn’t make sense. The Facebook fan page you can share it if you like the page but if anyone else sees it you are going to be able to still see it, you will have to like the page to engage with it. The Facebook fan page allows you to get more reach.

[00:18:00] Scott: And there’s been plenty of videos that we’ve surpassed 3,000 people viewing it which we only have about 3,000 fans on our page. We even have had as many as 14,000 or 15,000 within two days. That means it’s getting shared and the reach is getting bigger, the page is growing, the group is growing all because of that. That’s a little tip for you, if you are going to do Facebook Lives post it in a Facebook fan page and then grab that link and then post it in the Facebook group. Big tip there.

Guys I’m going to link all this up too and have these in the transcripts and the show notes. I should have mentioned this in the beginning, this episode is 366 so its theamazingseller.com/366 and this is again all about Facebook Lives and how we used it to launch a product without even email our list, pretty cool stuff. Step four is then you are going to do a Facebook Live and this is what we did. We did a Facebook Live demoing the product and then saying, “Hey, because you guys are part of our awesome community we are going to give you guys 50% off for the next two days”

You always want to put a deadline on it, you always want to put an end day because if it’s open ended people are just going to say, “I’ll do it this weekend,” and then they never end up doing it. I mean we all do that. I know my wife if she gets something from Coles she’s a big Coles shopper. If her Coles cash is going to expire or whatever they do there, her coupon for 30%ff or whatever she is going to get there by before close of that day.

It’s like you need those deadlines. We need them in life just for getting stuff done but to really get people to act you need to have those and if you can remind them through email or through Facebook Lives or through Facebook page or group then that’s even better because we need to be reminded all the time. We demoed the product and then we just gave a simple call of action, “Hey guys I just want to say thank you so much for being part of our awesome community. I want to say thank you and I want to give you guys something special that we are not offering to the public. We are only offering it to you guys that are here in our community and we are going to give you guys 50% off until the end of the weekend.”

[00:20:03] Scott: Something like that. That’s all we did and we got, like I said, 33 sales in less than 24 hours. We really in this particular market 10 sales will get us ranked. It’s proof of that. Our BSR shot up, we did really, really good with that. We already started ranking for our main keyword which yes it’s back on page two and it was top of page one, the bottom of page two and I haven’t looked recently and then our long tail ones were starting to rank page one. That’s going to start happening and we’re starting to average between five and ten sales a day already on that one.

Which I think that one can be even bigger. But anyway let’s get back to these steps. Step four was demoing the product, 50% off discount. Step five, if the video does well here’s the cool thing you can do with Facebook Lives, you can run Facebook Ads to it. You can start to run Facebook ads to it to gain more exposure. You might just run 20 bucks to it. Say, “Hey you know what I’m going to take this video, it did pretty well, it’s getting rich, it’s getting shared, people are liking it, let me put 20 bucks behind it.” This is a money producing video. This isn’t just a free share video that has not call to action. If you’re going to promote a video through Facebook ads or any ad platform for that matter, you need to have a way to monetize it on the back end.

In this case, it’s driving people to buy the product. That’s what we did there or that’s what we want to be doing there. We actually haven’t really put that in motion yet but that’s definitely something we’re going to be doing the next phase because that one video did get a pretty good amount of reach. We’re going to be definitely turning that on. The problem with us right now is we had three products come in almost the same time. Rather than just saying, “Hey, we got three products. Buy this one, buy this one, buy this one.” We are trying to slowly drip them out and to try to use different channels to get those initial sales and to get those reviews start to come in slowly.

[00:22:05] Scott: Then this way here we are not bombarding our list or just our email list. We’re trying to spread it out. The next thing is in step six is then start running sponsored product ads pay-per-click, Amazon pay-per-click. Okay, do not do this. This is what we did not do and I don’t think you should do either. If you’re running any external traffic to your listing and I only suggest you do that if it’s really, really targeted and if they’ve already opted in to either be on your page or to be in a group or better yet to be on your email list.

We always like before we give a code for a coupon we’ll generally put that behind an opt in. That basically means that if you get the code you got to give us your email address. That’s pretty much the exchange. This way you can pretty much follow up with you. But you do not want to have your product or your sponsored product ads, you do not want your pay-per-click running while you’re driving traffic to your listing because if for some reason they jump on that listing right now and they try to come back it or maybe on that page that they go there, hopefully you’ve sent them to the actual listing but if they seen ad for your pay-per-click they may click on that just to get to your listing.

I would definitely say if you’re going to send them directly there, send them directly to the listing. Do not try to do a super URL or any of that stuff, just basically send them right there but definitely just turn it off. The other reason why you want to turn it off is you want to see what the Facebook Live did. You want to see what the email blast did. You don’t want to mix up so you can you say well I think the pay-per-click says I did three sales but it has only been running for two days. You don’t want to get that mixed up. I always say wait to turn on the pay-per-click until you’ve got done with your launching through that.

[00:24:04] Scott: Now, that’s pretty much everything we did and that we do through a Facebook Live promotion. But now that I’m looking at my notes I kind of made a mistake. I gave you the wrong totals for that launch. That launch there was better than 33 sales on day one. That was actually product three. We did the same exact same thing with product three because like I said they all showed up at the same time. Product two did 63 in day one. Then the third product that we did this, we did 33 sales in day one. All with the same 50% off.

So again it was better than I said in the beginning. It was more than that. It was double that for that particular one. I also should mention that the third product was a little bit more expensive. The second product was less money, the product three was one of the more expensive products right now. When I say more expensive over $20. Whether that had anything to do with the different sales numbers it could have been just the products, who knows but I’m still happy with that. I’m happy with our product number one, if you go back and listen to episode 357 and listen to those numbers, 152 units in five days and you can hear exactly how we did that with email and how we did it with the sending out the emails and all that stuff, I go through that in episode 357.

But then product number two did 60+ sales in one day from a Facebook Live and then product number three Facebook Live to a direct sale did 33 sales day one with a 50% off discount and all of them started ranking. Now I should say we lost some sales during this whole thing because generally when you have a product launch you start bringing traffic to a brand it’s going to also expose your other products to that customer and increase adding more items to the cart which then it spikes sales in some of your other products which is great. That’s what we want.

[00:26:02] Scott: Here’s what happened though. We had a little bit of a problem. Amazon decided to take our first product that we launched, that we had over 150+ sales on in the first week and they ended up taking it down for no reason. Like it disappeared. It literally disappeared. They still don’t even know why it disappeared. We have no idea. So we had to contact them, we were on the phone for two or three days, different times and emailing back and forth and so that product was not even available for three days, which is crazy.

During these three days part of that was the other sales that was coming in through these other launches. At least one of the launches. We definitely lost sales. We were averaging on that one over there over five to seven sales a day after we had already launched. If we brought more traffic to it we probably could have doubled that. So things happen, things are going to happen but I can’t even give you an explanation to why that happened. They didn’t give us a reason. All I know is it was a real pain in the butt. They then got the listing back up and running but it had not images and it had no reviews. We had nine reviews on it at the time. By the way too, that first product after it was launched we had nine reviews.

We didn’t’ go to a review group. We used our own list. We didn’t even ask those people in the email to give us one. We just let them go through our Salesbacker Campaign. We got nine reviews so far out of a 150 sales. Not too bad. Take that all day long. That is kind of the recap here with the Facebook Lives and this update with the launch and  what we’re doing here and I just want you guys to understand that if you’re building a brand and you can do this stuff, if you can do Facebook Lives, if you can do a Facebook Group if you can do getting more trips and tricks out to your audience and bringing awareness to your products by delivering the value, man I’m telling you, there’s nothing that tops that in my book.

[00:28:02] Scott: That’s what I’m really, really excited about this brand that we have started here and that I’ve partnered with because we have all of this stuff at our disposal and it’s just really exciting and I can’t wait to share with you more of the play by play and I’ll give you the ups and the downs. I’m going to give you guys the ups the downs. I’ll give you guys the months that are great and the months that aren’t so good. But I just want to kind of lead you through what we’re doing and how we’re managing and the things that we’re doing now that we have an influencer in our space that we can utilize and we can really get that content out to new people. Then from there build this into a good brand but also scale it.

Really super excited about this. Guys, episode 356, 357 those are two you definitely should listen to. Then this one here is episode 366. If you want all the links, the show notes, the transcripts, head over to theamazingseller.com/366 and you’ll get all of that there. I’ll probably be doing some updates with these Facebook Lives stuff too because it’s doing really well. As we learn more well I’ll be sharing it of course and I’m definitely, definitely excited about these Facebook Live stuff. With TAS we do that on Fridays. You guys know that. We do Facebook Lives, if you don’t know that we generally do them on Friday afternoons, 2 o’clock PM Eastern Time on our Facebook fan page and in the group.

If you guys are not subscribed to that head over to theamazingseller.com/fb and you’ll be notified when we go live or you can always watch a replay. You can always ask questions there and all that stuff. Anyway guys, that’s going to wrap up this episode, as always  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]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…to be here on this Friday. Now if you’re listening to this on Monday, well happy Monday. Doesn’t matter what day of week it is. I just want you guys to be fired up and go out there and get the week, like go out there and figure out what you need to do to attack the week and go out there and go it. Get it, there’s nothing stopping you other than you. I’m going to talk about my thoughts this week in a minute here.

It’ll really tie back into just that. Go out there and get it. Get what’s yours, get what you want. There’s no excuses. Just go out there and get it. If you guys want to ask a question on an upcoming Ask Scott session head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that. You can ask me a question there and I’ll do my best to answer it and air it on an upcoming show. I’ll remind you guys too, the show notes can be found at theamazingseller.com/367. The transcripts, the links, the show notes, everything will be there. All the goodies so head over there and check them out. Now, today we’re going to be talking about what market place should you start in or should you if you’re in different locations like we’re going to talk about that?

We’re also going to talk about high risk products. We’re going to talk about annual fees or monthly feels that you can expect as being an Amazon seller. Then also writing emails and delivering content to your list if you have a list and we’re going to talk about all of that stuff inside of today’s episode. Now before I do jump into that I have a couple things that I wanted to address here. Number one all of you guys that are listeners I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you. You guys are awesome and whenever I get to do a meetup or a hang out of some kind I love it because I get to meet people in person just like here in these Ask Scott sessions.

[00:02:07] Scott: I like it because we can sit down and I can hear your voice, I feel as though we’re together. We’re connected a little bit, a little bit better. We get to do these on hangouts. I also like it when I get to read inside of the TAS Facebook group what you guys are up to. I needed to give a little shout out, a little love to Andrew Van Kirk and I hopefully I pronounced your name Andrew but Andrew submitted a screenshot of, trying to paint the picture for you. It’s his laptop with episode 212 up, 212 was ‘The simple process to get ungated to sell your products on Amazon’ with Chris Shaffer, my good buddy.

That was a great episode. He had his laptop open with that up on the screen. He also had a cup of coffee. He had a few bags of it looks like some type of blueberries, I think they are little snap bags like some nuts and just some energy, kind of like some super food type stuff and this is what he wrote, “Kids are napping, coffee is almost gone and I’m continuing the challenge of getting ungated. The best is yet to come.” He has a little emoji and it says, “Feeling determined.” I love that Andrew.

I love it that you’re sitting there and you’re focusing on the one thing that’s in your way right now. That’s the one thing that’s in your way and you’re figuring out a way to get through it or get around it and move on. I just want to say that’s really what my thoughts are this week because a lot of people don’t stick with something because they run into a wall or they run into an obstacle and then they stop. Or maybe they put it on pause and then they come back a month later and like where was I? Then they lose the momentum. So my word of the week is this or my words of the week is ‘stick with it’. Like stick with it. Do not let off the gas.

[00:03:58] Scott: As you’re going through this thing you’re going to have ups, you’re going to have downs. It’s just a part of the process. If you started a brand new business and it was a brick and mortar business you would have your set of challenges there. You’d have to get code approval for this or that or you’re going to have a grand opening and you have to get it approved by town or maybe you have to figure out how you’re going to do the grand opening and then  you order some stuff and then it doesn’t come in some time. Whatever it is, you’re going to run into these little obstacles. It’s part of business. It’s part of the process. My word of the week is, my words of the week, my thought of the week is just stick with it. Set your target, we talked about that in the past.

Set your target and don’t stop. Set that target. What is the target? For him it’s getting ungated. That’s like that mini sprint. The sprint is get through that. Once we get through that then we move onto the next part of this. Then we get to get our listing up and then we get up to optimize it then we focus on that. Now, when you do these mini targets, or these mini little sprints as I like to call them, they are like one thing you’re going to focus on and you’re going to stick with it until you get through that one thing. Don’t worry about everything else that’s down the line. Then the other thing is, some people will get through the entire process, they will get a product launched and then they’ll come to find out that the product really isn’t a winner.

It’s not even a base hit. I think I just didn’t pick the right product. I rushed it or I didn’t understand what I understand now so product one could be a fail but you know what, usually you can liquidate that. It’s not really a fail you’ve learned a ton through that. You know what, product two you might even not find a winner there. That’s product two but if you’re determined and you’re going to push on, you’re going to learn from this you will find that winner or that base hit as we like to call it. I’ve got so many people that tell me, “Scott I picked my first product, it wasn’t a winner. I sold some but I just liquidated it. It wasn’t good. Went to product two did the same thing, didn’t work,” or maybe it did work, maybe the second one did but sometimes I will be the third one and then all of a sudden, boom! You hit it. You hit the ball.

[00:06:00] Scott: But you can’t get a hit if you don’t in the game if you don’t get back in the box. I always relate it back to baseball which by the way Yankees are doing phenomenal this year and I love that new player they have, Judge who they have just crushing it. Anyway, I won’t get off on that. I’m really enjoying the new Yankee line up this year. If you guys are Boston fans out there or anything, please don’t send me any hate mail. I love you guys too. I love Boston and Yankee rival games but yes, I’m a Yankee fan. Sorry and Met’s fans as well. I like Mets I just like the Yankees better.

Anyway I just wanted to really, really stress that because so many people get frustrated or sometimes you’re going to go through this process, you might find it’s not for you. That’s okay. It’s not for you, it’s fine but if it’s for you and if you want to give it your best chance you have to stick with it. That might be another t-shirt guys, ‘Stick with it’. I’m loving that. There’s another one that I’m probably going to be probably getting printed for myself and that is ‘BYOB’ Be your own believer. That’s another great shirt but anyway I won’t go into these. I love having these things remind me every single day because you know what, we need to be reminded. Hopefully I can be that little person in your ear every now and then that says, “You know what, this is expected, you’re going to have these ups and downs, stick with it, push on. Press on as we like to say here in TAS land.”

All right guys. Let’s go ahead and get this baby rocking and rolling. Let’s go ahead and kick off today’s first question and I’ll give you my answer. Let’s do this.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:07:37] Bree: Hi Scott. This is Bree from Houston Texas. Firstly I want to say your podcast is absolutely amazing. Thank you so so much for all the great content you put out. Currently in the process of launching my first product. Just about to make my first purchase, my first shipment. I’m super nervous but I’m really confident that things will go well and if not I know there’s steps to follow due to my great mentor. I have three questions hopefully you can answer all of them. My first question is what are your thoughts or can you elaborate more on launching a product or an accessory of a product which will be considered sharp or dangerous.

Just to give you an example maybe a pocket knife or I’ve ordered some of my competitors’ products and even just with poly bags I see the put on there ‘dangerous to children’, ‘may harm’, suffocation warnings and such. Does this even matter? Is that going to help me at all if something does happen or should I just steer clear from things at all that maybe considered super sharp? Just looking for some direction on that.

[00:08:44] Scott: Well hey Bree thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for submitting your question, glad to have you. Number one, should you launch or should we launch a product that’s sharp or dangerous? My thoughts, no I would not personally. I think there’s a lot of liability that is there and I don’t want to be a part of that and I’m not sure that you would want to be a part of that especially just starting. There’s so many other things that you could be doing that you could be selling that wouldn’t be falling in this really high risk area. I would personally stay away from it. Again it’s one of those things that Amazon can have issues with your product and then shut that product down.

I’ve got a friend of mine that does have products in that type of space and all the time his listings are getting suspended and then suppressed and then he has to go and get it cleared and then it gets opened and then the starts selling it again and all of a sudden it gets suppressed again and just an ongoing battle back and forth. I personally wouldn’t even want part of the stress of doing it. Then the liability again, man God forbid something happens you’re going to be liable because you’re the manufacturer. It’s not like you’re selling a knife on some other brand and it’s their responsibility which I still think that they can come back and tie to.

A lawyer can probably figure out a way to come back and sue any of us which is the way that that works and it’s unfortunate. I’m not saying that all attorneys are like that. I don’t want to get any hate mail on that either. I love attorneys. I got a lot of friends that are attorneys but I’m just saying if it gets it gets into the wrong hands something could happen. I wouldn’t want to see that for you. You could probably come up with other ways. Like think about this, if you’re selling a knife, I would sell a knife holster or something like that. That would be because it’s not technically the thing, it’s the thing that could support the thing. A lot of things there. You get what I’m saying though. I would stay away from it.

[00:10:45] Scott: The other thing is if you are  going to ever go down that road I would definitely speak to  an attorney, I would definitely reach out to Michelle Love who’s on my resources page for liability insurance and I would have her direct me and I don’t even know if an insurance policy will issue one depending on the company and how long you’ve been in business and you’re definitely going to make sure that your LLC is set up or your S-Corp or whatever. Trust me, it’s a lot of legal stuff there too. You’d never want to leave yourself exposed to where you could be liable and then all of a sudden you lose all of your assets, your home, like who knows.

I personally would like to stay away from that especially if you’re just starting. Like I said, if you’re going into that market or that area, I would say that accessories that aren’t the risk ones but the ones that could support maybe the product might be okay. You got to use your common sense there.

Actually Bree asked three questions in her one message. What I’m going to do is listen to the second question now and then we’ll go ahead and address that and then we’ll go ahead to the third and then we’ll address that. So let’s go ahead and listen to this next question.

[00:11:56] Bree: My second question would be could you go over some of your recurring or annual fees. I know it will be different for everybody especially depending on what part of the process you’re in but I know you’ve talked about it in the past. You have Tax Jar, I know that’s a monthly fee, probably Feedback Genius, I know that’s a monthly fee. So any of your monthly fees that you can probably go over that maybe some people can expect or would be interested to know.

[00:12:23] Scott: Okay. So yes, I do get this question quite often and I got to be honest with you guys. You don’t need a ton in the beginning especially that you’re going to have an ongoing basis. Now number one wherever you are in this process you’re going to probably own Jungle Scout. You’re probably going to have, well I would say at least the chrome extension and then from there I would say the web app just to track. You can also discover other products but more importantly not just the product, that product will lead you to other markets. That’s how I like using the web app and for tracking purposes over the course of time.

The must that I would have in my, which I do have is the Chrome extension, the pro version. That’s what I do have. If you guys are brand spanking new definitely go check out theamazingseller.com/js and you will go over to that page which has some resources on it and it explains Jungle Scout. I am an affiliate for that. You guys already know that, that are long time listeners and you guys buy me a cup of coffee if you go through my link which would be awesome and if you don’t that’s cool too. Just want to throw that out there. Jungle scout definitely is one that I think is, depending on where you’re in the process I think everyone should have it regardless because that’s where you’re starting.

From there, the next thing is you are going to want some way to follow up with your customers so that next thing would be Salesbacker. That’s the one I currently use. There’s also Feedback Genius and there’s a few others. I think even Jungle Scout has their own version which they actually do which is Jump Send, I should know that. They all pretty much do the same thing. They send out emails on your behalf through your Amazon seller’s account. This is not a standalone email provider which we talk about in our list building stuff. This is more so for if someone buys a product it’s scheduled to go out after it’s been delivered and then you can deliver a pdf and you can give them more value and then you can also make sure that your customer service is there.

[00:14:28] Scott: That’s what you’re able what’s you’re able to do with sending out automated emails but you write them to your customers through Amazon. I keep stressing through Amazon because that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re just using this little, it’s kind of like a plugin, it’s an app. It’s a little program that’s hosted in the cloud and then it’s connected to your Amazon seller’s account. The minute that you get an order, if files an order then you go ahead and it will automatically send it through your account. It’s like someone logging into your account technically and then writing the email and then sending it to that customer.

That’s how that works. I think that’s really, really important for getting ongoing feedback and reviews which I think is going to be even more important for feedback moving forward because that’s going to strengthen your account and give it more just a more authority in Amazon. That’s one. The next one I would say would be you definitely want to look into liability insurance, which we talked about before. I think everyone should be looking into liability insurance depending on where you are in the process. Now, Amazon as of right now says when you make $10,000 per month revenue three months consecutively they are going to make you have it. That may change, it may be a new seller has to have it right off the bat. We don’t know that right now but that’s something again Michelle Love I’ve had her on the show before, I’ll link up her episode in the show notes as well which is theamazingseller.com/367.

You can go to this episode and I’ll link to that episode. Lot of linking to episodes there. She has her own agency. She’s been doing it for over 20 years. She knows a lot about liability insurance. She can even point you in the right direction if you have any other questions about liability type issues. That would be a yearly fee. The other one is Tax Jar. That’s definitely one that you’re going to want to have because it makes that process a lot easier. Then the other one is a CPA. I would hire a CPA or just an accountant that’s going to be able to help you with this throughout the year because you’re going to send in your quarterly taxes and stuff. Depending on how much money you’re generating you might be doing, once a year you might be doing, quarterly.

[00:16:37] Scott: Right now I’m doing quarterly. I’ve been quarterly forever now but it’s really important to have a good accountant or a CPA because they will know your business inside and out and then they’ll be able to help you so you’re not at the end of the year behind the 8 ball where you’re like oh my gosh, I didn’t know I owed $20,000, you should have been saving money out of that which is a little side tip. When you’re doing your numbers at the end of each month, you should be looking at your net and then from that net you should be saying I’m going to take let’s just 30% or depending what tax bracket you’re in, 28%, maybe 35%, whatever it is. Your accountant will tell you that and then you can just slide that to the side.

Then just put it into a savings account. Then when your quarterly becomes due, you’re hopefully within range. Usually a good accountant will get you close to that and then you just send that in and then all you’re doing is sending in so at the end of the year you’re not like hit with this humongous bill and then you get penalized because you didn’t send in enough and that type of stuff. That’s why it’s good to have a good CPA. I know that my CPA is also really, really good with the Amazon sellers now since I’ve been working with him and if you guys want to know more about him, again I’ll link him up to the show notes page.

It’s CPA on Fire is Josh Bauerle. Great guy. Just he knows a lot about this business now that he started working with me and a lot of sellers from The Amazing Seller Podcast. The other one is Fetcher. Fetcher is one I’ve just recently, I’d say recently in the past six months been really, really loving. I’ve got three brands that I’m working in right now that we’re using one account for Fetcher. It allows me to go into Fetcher, it allows me to have all of my data there and I can see exactly where I am like this second. It’s really good too because they also punch out a profit loss statement at the end of the month or whenever you want to select it and then it will give you the break down; what’s the cost of goods? What was your pay-per-click?

[00:18:38] Scott: You don’t have to go in and try to figure all that stuff out. It’s done right there. The only thing you have to do in the very beginning is putting your cost of goods and the shipping. If you pay $5 for an item you’re going to put $5. And if they cost you $0.20 to ship it into Amazon you’re going to put $0.20 or maybe you don’t pay anything because that $5 includes that. Then once you calculate that and you put that in there it’s going to start to collect all that data even in the past and it will tell you what your profit margin is. It’ll take out the promotions that you’ve run, it will do refunds, it does all that stuff automatically within your account. It goes in and finds all those fees and it brings it to the front end of it.

This way here you can see the actual number. Your accountant will love this. The other cool about that which I didn’t even know this until I had Greg back on the show, Greg Mercer that is. You can actually put in your other expenses like travel, you can put in maybe Tax Jar, you can put in Jungle Scout as a monthly fee, you can put all that stuff in there so it’s like an accounting program which I wasn’t aware of that I always just thought in the beginning that it was just Amazon stuff. No you can put all that other stuff in there. I’ve been using that instead of Wave Apps now for my Amazon business. Definitely check out Fetcher, theamazingseller.com/fetcher and you guys will get I believe it’s a 30 day free trial there and if you wanted a one on one session with one of their lead guys that can kind of walk through your accounting and where it is, and how to get you set up they actually do that for you as a little bonus for our TAS listeners.

So definitely take advantage of that. But that’s really the main ones. Like I said, if you’re just starting like jungle Scout, Sales Backer, the other one that I would say too, is Ignite. I’ve been using Ignite now and I’m on a monthly subscription with them. And what Ignite is, is it’s a program that helps you with your sponsored product ads.

We did a whole training on that. If you guys want to check that out, theamazingseller.com/ppc and that will give you all of that. So that’s another ongoing fee, a monthly fee but well worth it because it manages all your pay-per-click for you.

[00:20:40] Scott: But again, that’s when you get down the line a little bit. Like if you’re just starting, like Jungle Scout, Sales Backer and then Ignite would be good if you’re going to start running sponsored product ads which you should. And then the other one that is an annual fee, is Scope and that’s part of Seller Labs which is Ignite and that allows me to do a lot of keyword digging and research and that’s an annual fee. But these are not a must, must have. I would say the must haves are like Jungle Scout, Salesbacker.

I would probably say Ignite too, if you’re running sponsored product ads, liability insurance, TaxJar, a CPA and Fetcher, I would say for sure. Scope is just a nice to have. It’s going to make that a lot easier and I’m sure I’m missing a few of those extra little tools but again I don’t use all of those tools all the time. The ones that run the business are the ones that I just started with here that I just lead with her. So hopefully that helped you and I know it was a mouthful but I don’t want you to get overwhelmed with tools. I don’t want you to think you have to buy all of these tools because you don’t. You do not.

But again guys, I have all that linked up on my resources page, theamazingseller.com/resources and you can go check that out and anything that I update will be there. So check that out. Let’s go ahead now and listen to the last question from Bree and we’ll go ahead and answer that and then I’m going to answer one more from another listener. So let’s go ahead and do that.

[00:22:06] Bree: And my last question is, do you pay someone to create your emails for your list? And I ask that because it seems if you even have two or maybe three products, that can get quite tedious creating a single email even if it’s just on a weekly or even a bi-weekly basis. So how does that work? Hopefully you can answer my questions. Looking forward to hearing you back soon and thanks again for everything.

[00:22:34] Scott: Okay, so now what Bree is talking about and Bree, I think this is what you’re talking about, is we talk about building your own launch list. And when you’re building your own launch list, you want to be able to deliver content to that list. You’re not just going to just blast them with like product offers after product offers. You’re not going to do that. You shouldn’t do that. And you want to be able to write emails to these people and deliver value. So the big question I get asked a lot is, “Well Scott, what do I write to these guys, what do I give them?” Well you give them value. I always like to push people towards like being the reporter. It’s so easy for you to just be the one that went out there and found all of this great content and then shared it.

It’s like think about the news. I mean I know the news is a lot of times bad news but we don’t want to be just that. But you want to be a good resource. You want to be a resource that is always finding the good articles or the good blog posts or the good YouTube video or whatever. You want to be the one, that’s the easiest way to do it. So it doesn’t have to be this elaborate email with this amazing email copy. It just has to be you writing as if you are writing to one person. I like to always tell people, pretend like you’re writing to that one person. Like who would that one person be and then just write to that one person.

And that’s what we call establishing your avatar. Knowing that person and you might not know that right now. It might take some time. A great way to know this though and to figure this out is go over to a Facebook page or a group in your market and see who’s hanging out in there. See who’s doing a lot of the conversations. Like who’s doing a lot of the conversing back and forth. You’re going to start to get an idea of who your market is, then once you start running Facebook Ads eventually, you’re really going to be able to dial it in because then you can see that, wow, 35 year old the 45 year old women are tending to click on my ad and sharing my ads. So that means that that’s probably my market. You’ll start to know that.

[00:24:34] Scott: So as you know that, you’re going to be able to write to that audience better. The other thing is comb through the reviews of certain products of your competitors and see the type of people of what they’re using the product for. So now you can start to use their language. There’s a lot of different things you can do there but it doesn’t have to be this huge task. Like you can sit down right now and go out and find a ton of great content and then just link to one piece of content over the next few weeks and let’s say that you’re doing the contest model. If you guys did not check that out, you guys really need to check that out as far as how to build your own launch list. Chris Shaffer and I just did a full workshop on that.

I’m actually going to be, well actually by the time you listen to this it would have already been done but I’m going to be going through that whole process at Sellers Summit in Fort Lauderdale at Steve Chou’s event and I’m going to be sharing exactly what we’ve done and some of those updates that I’ve been sharing with you guys as far as like giving away product at a discount and then getting sales and all that stuff like all the good things that come from that. But you have to understand that process. If you guys have not checked that out, head over to theamazingseller.com/buildlist. Again that’s theamazingseller.com/buildlist and I will also include that in the show notes for today’s episode.

But then you’re going to, like you said Bree, you need to understand how to write that email. One email a week is really all that you need to send and the reason why I say one, at least one is because you want to stay present. You don’t want to just email them once every five weeks. You want to be able to let them know, “Oh this is Bree again, she’s sending me some really cool things, I’m going to keep opening up the emails from that person.” So that’s what you want to do there and again don’t over complicate that process. Just write very simply like you’re writing to a friend and that’s it and be the reporter. That’s the best advice. I wouldn’t say hire it right now, hire it out. I would say do it yourself. Learn a little bit about your market. I think you’re going to learn through that process as well.

[00:26:28] Scott: So anyway hopefully that helped you. I don’t want this episode to go too, too long, because it is an Ask Scott session. I like to keep these within 30 to 40 minutes or less but let’s go ahead and listen to one more quick question. I’ll give you my answer. We’ll wrap this baby up and you guys can go out there and attack the week. So let’s go ahead and do it. Let’s listen to that last question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:26:50] George: Hi Scott, this is George from Romania. First of all I want to thank you for all the value you give to us the listeners. It’s very easy to understand and very, very motivating. So please don’t stop doing this. My question is, where it’s more convenient for a beginner to start an Amazon private label business? In the U.K. market or the U.S? Taking in consideration that U.S. market has more demand and could get sale much easier but higher competition and UK has less competition but less demand as well. Thank you again, looking forward to hear answer.

[00:27:25] Scott: Well hey George from Romania. Thank you so much for submitting this question and it always gets me fired up when I connect with people from all over the world like you George and everyone else that’s already submitted their questions or sent me a voicemail or posted in the Facebook group. You guys rock. I love it because it just shows that TAS is all over the globe and you guys are just awesome. So alright, this is to me a pretty easy question. And this is what I’m going to say and again this is going to be that one answer that some people be like, “Alright but give me a little bit more, a specific answer here.”

Well the thing is, it depends and Chris Shaffer uses this all the time another t-shirt that we probably should have made. ‘It depends’ but it does depend on this, where are you located? Is there a market place where you are located most? In most cases there are. I would say go where it’s easiest for you to launch a product. Like where is it easiest for you? If you’re in the U.K. market and you’re in the U.K, the UK like send it there. Start there. That’s where I would probably start. Now some people want to jump over that because they know that there’s more people hanging out in .com, in Amazon, in the U.S. Like there’s, it’s just where it’s known. But guess what, there’s more competition there too.

So if you have a good product and you want to eventually launch it in the States but you’re also in the U.K. or Germany or wherever, launch it in that country. That’s going to be the easiest way for you to get started and then you can send that same product and then go to the States or if you want to, you can jump right to the States. That’s up to you. So I don’t really have like a set answer other than, what is the easiest thing for you to do right now? Like that would be my question to you if we’re sitting there at that table having that nice cup of coffee that I love having with friends.

[00:29:27] Scott: What would I say to you? It would be like, “Well what’s the easiest thing for you to do right now George? Is it to launch in your own country, is there a market there?” There’s not as much traffic but maybe yours can still sell 5 or 10 a day and without really having to go out there and do a massive launch or to really dial. Maybe no one’s even really using pay-per-click that much. So many people say that their pay-per-click works really, really well internationally because there’s not a lot of people that they’re competing with like you are in the U.S. Like it’s just the way it is. But you also have to have a product that that country is going to be looking for or that it’s going to use. So there is some of that that goes into it. I don’t know, like does that only really sell well in the States? Well if that’s the case, then it might not work.

So these are the questions you have to ask yourself. But again I go back to that one question, “What is going to be the easiest thing for you to do and anyone else out there listening?” Where are you located right now? Where is going to be the easiest way for you to get started and get a product launched? And then you can still look at those numbers. You can still look at the numbers and do exactly what you would do if you were going to launch in the States. Do the exact same thing. We still want depth. We still want demand. Just might not be as big of numbers. But right now we’re just looking at a way to get started and I mean I’ve been hearing, Germany’s like doing really well.

I think that’s going to be a marketplace that’s going to start taking off if it hasn’t already by the time this thing airs, which I think it has. It’s one that I’m going to be looking into for sure. But I did the U.S because that’s where I am. It’s the easiest thing for me to do right now. It’s easy. So again, I just go back to that and I think going back to just what I talked about in beginning. Like what’s going to allow you to have the least amount of resistance to get started? Like what is it? So whatever it is, do that. Set the target and go after that target. Head down, go for it.

[00:31:28] Scott: Hopefully, this helped you George and anyone else listening that has that question. Like what marketplace should I start in? If I’m in Germany, where do I start? Well, start wherever it’s easiest for you. That’s where I would start. So guys that is going to wrap up this episode of Ask Scott. So theamazingseller.com/367 is the show notes and you guys can always ask a question by heading over to theamazingseller.com/ask. And one little mini announcement that I want to give you guys right now depending on when you’re listening to this, we are going to be having a North Carolina meet up just outside of Charlotte and if you want details on that, head over to  theamazingseller.com/nc for North Carolina.

Head over to theamazingseller.com/nc and you can get all the details over there that will be the unofficial meetup. Meaning, it’s going to be just us hanging out, having a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop and it’s going to be a blast and if you guys are in the area, we are more than happy to hang out with you and that will be just for the day. The date on that will be Friday, June 23rd, and we’re going to be doing it at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon to about 8 o’clock at night. And again, like I said, got a nice little spot there. We’re going to be doing over in a town just outside of Charlotte and it’s going to be a lot of fun. So if you guys are in town, you want to come by, hang out, definitely go to theamazingseller.com/nc.

Alright guys, so that is it. That’s going to wrap it up. Remember, as always, 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]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…launch your products with no incentivized reviews or without needing incentivized reviews. I’m going to actually let you guys listen to my live presentation that I did at Sellers Summit out in Ft. Lauderdale, which was amazing by the way and I got, to be honest, I’m totally pumped to get back on the mic. A lot of you that are listening, that were there got to meet you in person, Man oh man, I’m telling you to listen to those stories, to listen to where you guys are coming from, and kind of how the podcast has helped you or just even guided you a little bit to get to where you are today is so, so rewarding and I told you guys that when I met you guys.

If you guys are listening, you did not attend that event it was awesome. So anytime you get a chance to maybe attend a live event, like Sellers Summit, it’s all about the networking for me really. I mean, there was a ton of great presenters and it was just really, really mind blowing. A lot of things that I walked away with that I want to implement like right away but the networking there’s nothing like it. And I have to say Sellers Summit, they do such a great job. Steve Chou, that is, and Tony Anderson they do just a great job because they make it small, they keep it small. So this way here, you feel as though you like know each other after the day or two that you’re there, you literally feel like you know everyone there. All the speakers are mingling with each other, they’re hanging out with each other, and some of these bigger events you never see the speakers.

So I love it that we’re able to sit down at a table, have a lunch with people, the networking parties, all of that stuff, it was just really, really awesome. So, if you guys get a chance to attend the next Sellers Summit, I’m not even sure if Steve has announced that yet, but when he does, I’ll let you guys know but it was just awesome. I will say this, okay? My voice is just coming back. It was going towards the end, good thing I spoke on Friday, not Saturday, and I got back home and I had just a terrible chest cough now.

[00:02:07] Scott: I kind of blamed that on speaking too much but I just think it’s something I caught and it was just coincidence I guess. But, I am still coughing a little bit but I’m going to try to get through this pre part of the podcast because I’m going to actually let you guys listen to the Facebook Live that was recorded while I was doing the presentation. Everyone said and they got a ton of value from it and it really just breaks it down exactly how we did it, and how we are continuing to do it, how to launch products without needing the incentivized reviews. All right?

So you guys are going to be all listening to that. Now, before I do, talking about Sellers Summit that is, some of you asked, “Scott how do I get recordings? How do I listen or watch the entire summit?” Well, you’re in luck. Steve Chou has actually recorded everything and made like a virtual pass. So you guys can check that out by heading over to theamazingseller.com/summit. S-U-M-M-I-T. So, theamazingseller.com/summit. You’ll get all the recordings, all the resources.

It was two days, intensive two days by the way, where we talk about growing your ecommerce business not just Amazon. We talk a lot about Amazon but it’s about how to build your ecommerce business. We talk about automating and scaling, external traffic, Facebook traffic, Instagram traffic. We actually had a girl on, which I’m going to probably have come on the show, Rachel, who talks all about, “How to get stuff to go viral, and how to capitalize on that in your ecommerce business.”

We also had someone there that was talking about, “Videos and how to use them to push traffic to your listings or to your ecommerce store.” So talk of all about traffic. We also talked about or we, I say we, they did. They actually taught all these up suspension and prevention. We also got to, and I did, I really love this, as being able to listen to seven and eight figure brands, explain exactly how they did it and what they learned from it.

[00:03:58] Scott: The crazy thing is, as I sat down with an eight figure business owner and we talked all about his business but the crazy thing was is there was there’s things that I’d seen that he can do differently and you would say, and I would say to myself is like, “How can I even help this person already eight figures?” But there’s a ton and they were actually asking me questions on how they can do that. So it was really awesome to be able to kind of sit alongside these seven and eight figure brands and kind of talk about business and see how I can actually, maybe even give them a couple of tips here and there, to move forward in growing their business even bigger.

So, pretty awesome stuff. So definitely go check out those recordings if you’re at all interested. The last thing I want to mention here, a little update on our North Carolina unofficial meet up, it is finalized. I had some people say, “Scott, I already heard you mention it before, I went to that link that you gave us and nothing is there yet.” Well, that’s my bad because I didn’t confirm it yet, but now it is confirmed. So if you go to theamazingseller.com/nc, that’s North Carolina, you’ll go right to that page where you can actually let us know that you’re going to be there.

This is totally free, we’re just going to be able to hang out and kind of do a little meet and greet. The only thing I ask, anyone that does attend, just maybe buy a coffee not necessarily for me, but buy coffee for yourself or a drink because I want to definitely give back to the community and also the business that’s allowing us to have this little unofficial meet up there, which is actually Rush Espresso Café which is in Ballantyne, North Carolina. And all the details, like I said, will be on that page. We’re going to be doing it at four o’clock in the afternoon June, 23rd, that’s on a Friday, and yeah.

Go over to theamazingseller.com/nc and let us know that you’re going to be there. Just say, yes I’m going to be there, or maybe, or no, or just say, yes, or no, it doesn’t matter. But, anyway, just let us know on that page so we have an idea of how many people are going to be attending that all right? So, that’s enough chit chat let’s get to it. Let me go ahead and play this recording for you, that you can listen to, that I did at this year’s 2017 Sellers Summit event where I talk all about, how to launch your products without needing incentivized reviews. So sit back, relax and enjoy.

[SELLERS SUMMIT RECORDING]

[00:06:09] Scott: Yes, so today we’re going to be talking about how to launch your private label product without having to go after these incentivized reviews which you guys if you guys attended Greg Mercer’s… His presentation today. He talked about that and how that kind of changed the game a little bit, and we all kind of felt it, we all got a little nervous, I should say, but it’s not the end of the world. And I’m going to show you the old way, the new way, and kind of what we’re doing to launch products. I actually have a case study I’m going to share with you really recent. We did this entire thing I’m going to share with you guys to a team, I’m going to share exactly what we did to spike sales because that’s really what it comes down to.

For a lot of people, they think about reviews are sales. Reviews are a great thing when you’re trying to get a conversion. But if you pick products that don’t really compete on reviews, it’s not that big of a deal. So I just want to stress that. But it does come down to sales velocity. If sales velocity happens, we will get reviews organically. We’re not talking about saying, “If you buy my products for a discount or if I give you my products for a discount I’ll give you, a discount for that review, and that’s not what we’re talking about.” That’s what we did. And really I always looked at the groups as like, they were classified as reviews and groups for those but, I always looked at it for me personally it was a sales velocity little mechanism. It wasn’t necessarily to just get reviews that was like a secondary part of that.

But anyway, what I want to do your really quick though is let anyone in the room that doesn’t know my story a little bit, I’m not going to go too deep because I’ve got a lot to cover and I also want to give a little bit of time for Q&A because I think we’re going to have some questions. How many in the room right now have listened to the podcast that I have, The Amazing Seller podcast?

[00:08:00] Scott: Not bad. Over 50% probably in the room. That’s pretty cool. So anyone that hasn’t listened, I have a podcast called The Amazing Seller Podcast, it’s just over two years old, we are at 360 episodes. I publish Monday, Wednesday and Friday and it just received over seven million downloads in iTunes. The reason why I say that is because I started that podcast, I started with my dog, Brody which is my sidekick. And I’m telling you if a dog could launch a product on Amazon, that dog could launch a product on Amazon.

Because he usually lays below my feet as I’m recording or as I’m working, and he hears a ton about this business, he just can’t talk well or type well. I can’t type well either but I can still launch a product on Amazon. But, my point is I started a podcast really because there wasn’t that information out there really for myself, and I just wanted more. I want to consume more, I want to consume more. So I said, “I’m going to go out there document my process.” Because I was getting some success at the time that I started. I think I was about six to seven months in, had over $120,000 in revenue generated with one product and that kind of opened my eyes.

So I started kind of going on the Facebook groups and kind of trying to figure out my way and everything and then I just started hearing people asking… They were asking questions, I was here answering questions and then I was like, “Maybe I’ll do this thing, I’ll document my journey, I’ll also be able to reach out to other people that are into the space, I can learn,” I’m always learning from other people. I’m here this weekend to learn along with you guys. There’s a ton of the great people here, a lot of great speakers and presenters.

But, that was the main reason and then this thing just blew up into seven million downloads. And a lot of people. So with that, I have been able to help people. These are not necessarily my screenshots, these are people that I helped not in this room a bunch more. Actually, last night, a short little quick story here, I was at the little networking party and a bunch of people came up to me saying, “Scott, I’m a big fan of the podcast. I got to let you know man, that since I’ve been listening to your podcast, I listened since like episode one. And like that, I’ve launched my product.” I’m like, “Cool, man. How is it going?”

[00:10:08] Scott: And he’s like, “It’s great. We just did $500,000.” I’m like, “Dude, why aren’t you emailing me that stuff? I got to hear that stuff.” That keeps me like going to the microphone and keep speaking about this stuff. And I get those messages but really to see someone and talk to that person, it’s really just, it’s an amazing experience. And I had a bunch of other people ask me, another guy was $60,000 in revenue, another guy was $500,000 again, another with $250,000.

So I learned a ton. And the reason why I’m saying this is because I want you guys not to just realize that I’ve done it, but I’ve helped people do it through my podcast. And for me, that’s like really awesome because I get to actually see other people’s businesses. People will email me, they’ll show me what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working, and that’s why I’ve seen the old ways, I’ve seen the new way, and I’ve also seen… I’ve got my own kind of hunch of where things are going. What I’m going to share with you today, I believe will be an asset you can create that will help you launch products from now and in the future.

I’m hoping anybody won’t take that away from you. But, again, just to kind of let you guy know, and I’m also experimenting all the time. This is a recent test brand. I say test brand it’s an open brand concept, very similar to what Greg Mercer is doing and we launched some products in November, we had an amazing fourth quarter, it was over $90,000 a month. And what the open brand concept really is, is like you have a main brand that’s like XYZ wholesale and then you have like a garlic press, tire iron and a mouse for a computer. You can launch anything that you want underneath that brand. That gives us the flexibility to kind of test and play and kind of see these different markets. But I’m also a big fan of creating brands and that’s another brand that we just recently started. This is actually not even a full month-old… Just over a month old.

This was what we did it with two products, I believe. The first product launched just over a month ago. We did a launch, which I am going to share with you guys what we did, this is brand spanking new. Like do you see the screenshot that was from April 16th to May 16th? That’s when I was kind of prepping for this event.

[00:12:05] Scott: So just to let you guys know, this is what I want to share with you because this is like the most recent thing that we did. So that’s what I’m going to be sharing with you guys. Now, Amazon changed the rules and they said, “No more incentivized reviews. No more incentivized reviews. We’re not going to allow these anymore.” And if you guys don’t know what that really means, again, I’m going to repeat that because I think it’s important. It’s where we would say, “Hey, listen. I’ll give you this product at a discount if you leave me a review.” Now, there’s groups out there that were also allowing us to do this. And all that that group was, and still is, is people raising their hand and saying, “I would like to receive products in exchange for a review, or just at a discount.” So all of these is a list of people that said, “I like getting products at a discount.” And then you would say, “Here’s a garlic press.” “Sure, cool. It’s only $2 I’ll buy it.” And then they would give you a review.

Well, since this whole you know review thing has changed a lot of these groups now, they are a deal site. Which is nothing wrong with that. The only small little problem with that is that these people have been conditioned and trained to leave reviews. And the little tagline they used to put in there is like, “I have received this product at a discount for my unbiased review.” Like that’s really what kind of set Amazon off to say, “You know what, we don’t want this because customers are seeing this and they are like, ‘Wait a minute, what is this? They’re influencing the reviews?’ We don’t trust this platform anymore.”

So they’re going to do away with that. And that’s really what they did. So, again, what does this mean? Well, there’s no more discounts in exchange for reviews, like we said. It’s also going to be harder to launch new products in theory, I guess, it’s harder to boost sales which again, let’s go back to what we talked about, sales helps you get ranking which also gets more sales and then reviews will be a byproduct of that. And then it’s harder to rank for keywords. And I say all this stuff with that’s what it meant for a lot of us when we couldn’t do this anymore. So it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, what are we going to do? How are you going to launch a product?”

[00:14:00] Scott: It’s harder in a sense to do that. So who is guilty of that in this room that’s done a launch? Raise hands. Come on, there is probably more of you. You guys are not alone I’ve done this myself. This was my first launch ever. And this is going back a couple years now. And that huge spike there that you see was a giveaway with a group of reviewers that were willing to do that. I gave away 147 units. I didn’t plan on that by the way, but it was like a hundred units but the list was just, they just scooped it up like crazy. I had like literally like put my inventory in reserve in the whole thing.

But 147 units… and one thing I want to point out is, it the cost me $1,800 dollars to run that promotion for one product. And that cost comes from your hard cost, cost of goods. So it cost me five bucks for the product, FBA fees, let’s just say five bucks, ten bucks and I had to pay for the service. So most people were like, “Man, that’s crazy, that’s a lot of money.” It is but look what it did, okay? It helped me start to get sales velocity and then get reviews. And then that’s really what kind of gets the momentum going. So just understand that depending on how you’re going to do it, you want to get sales velocity out of the gate. And that kind of like gets gives you set into the algorithm of Amazon and then we start to rank for keywords.

So I know we’re all here like, “How do I get reviews?” It’s not about getting the reviews right now, you want to understand how it actually works and then all you have to do is figure out how to get those initial sales. So, again, I want you keep an eye on that number. 147 units, $1,800 cost. Now, let’s just kind of go back to the old way. The old way again so you guys understand. They would build the email list in these groups for reviewers and they would raise their hand and say, “We want discounts.”

So understand that. The new better way of doing it is to create that type of list in your own market. And you’re not going after someone who already built it that’s going to share it, this is going to be your list.

[00:16:08] Scott: This is going to be your asset. And it’s funny I’ll share a little story with you guys. After this happened, I was right along with everybody. I’m like, “Holy crap.” Like, “What do we going to do?” Like, “This is going to be hard.” Like, it was so easy before. We would just go and say, “Here, I want to give away 100 units.” You put your little ticket in, you pay the money and boom, people would start buying it. But the thing is, I would get the sales and I would possibly get some reviews, but then I had nothing else to hold in my hand. Nothing.

So I sat down with my team, I’m like, “Let’s kind of think about this.” Like, “What’s the way that we can still do this?” It just felt like the light ball came on and it’s like, “Wait a minute here. All this is is an email list. It’s an email list of people that want to get products at a discount. Wouldn’t it be better if we build our own email list in our market? And then when we have products that are ready to be released, we can give them that stuff.” But even more importantly than that, there’s other cool things that I’m not going to get into today because it can get a little technical.

But, you can do a lot of retargeting with Facebook with an email list, you can set pixels on that page, just a whole bunch of cool stuff that you can do and it’s not that complicated to set this part up. But, I just want you guys to understand like this to me is the new way. Build an asset that you have that you control and then from there, you can launch products. But also you can just keep communicating with that list and then also get new ideas, you can do surveys, there’s a ton of great stuff that you can do with building your own targeted list in your market.

So the good news is, this does level the playing field for all of us. Before it was like whoever had the deepest pockets, just go up and just keep hammering. And there’s still people using groups. And I’m not saying all groups are bad, I just think that if you, and just to let you guys know to a little side note here, I know people that were also on the other end of the group where they were the people that raised their hands and said, “Hey, I would love to receive products at a discount and I’ll leave reviews.” Those people can’t be reviews anymore. Amazon banned them for leaving reviews.

[00:17:59] Scott: They’ve literally traced them back. So that doesn’t tell you something. So Amazon is aware of certain groups, certain people, if we go out and recruit our own people, we’re not telling them we’re looking for reviews, we’re not telling them we’re doing anything other than giving them a discount on our product. That’s it. And more value in our market. So we can build our launch list, that’s what we’ll be talking about. We can launch products easier, which I’m going to demonstrate that, we can boost sales at any time and we only can control our own asset. You got to remember this is an asset. If Amazon goes away tomorrow, you have that asset. If I have my own ecommerce store, I can drive from there.

So just understand that it’s not bad news, it’s good news actually. And Google has been doing this for years, Google Slack. I’ve seen people build businesses on Google, they do this all search engine optimization, you manipulate it, and then all of a sudden Google comes up, slaps them in the face, they lose their business overnight. The people that play by the rules, they rise to the top. So this is a little bit of a longer strategy but to me, it’s a better strategy, and the asset is there for you forever, and there’s so much you can do with that asset.

Like I said, you can upload it to Facebook and you’re retargeting and just a bunch of really cool stuff. Surveys, just a lot of really good stuff. This is what I want to show you. This was the most recent one that we did. Like I said, that right there is product number one. They can see 40 sales, overall almost 77 the one day that I think it was, and then we dropped about 50. That was in a three-day span when we launched to a list that we built. And we built an email list of over 5,000 emails in 30 days. And we did all white hat, there’s nothing black hat about this not even gray hat. So, product one.

Product two, if we have time, I’ll share with we did with that one which we didn’t use all of our potential because we just launched a product back to back. We didn’t realize that we were launching products or that our products that were going be landing so close together and they ended up coming in. So we had to make a little bit of an adjustment there which we did which still sold… I believe it was over 77 units when it was all said and done.

[00:20:02] Scott: But product number one, we got ranked really well really quickly and we also didn’t lose money, we actually made money on product one. So the old way, like I said is to go to groups that have reviewers that you are able to you know give away your discount, and then spike your sales, get reviews. All that. The new, to me, this is my opinion, is basically doing your own email list and your own people. And that they’re not trained to leave reviews. So a little bit of more good news. You aren’t going to risk your account for suspension.

There’s always that thing, “Well if I use one of these groups and they can traced back, it could potentially come back to me that I did something wrong.” Boom, suspended. You’re doing $30,000 a month, gone. Now you got to wait get unsuspended and all that fun stuff. You’re going to spend less money doing it this way because, in end, you’re going to have an asset that you control and also you’re going to cover costs in the beginning, and I’ll demonstrate that here in a minute. You can generate a profit during launch, which is kind of unusual when you’re doing a giveaway, and then you’re walking away with your own launch list which to me is the ultimate thing.

So, just understand that the product launch really looks like this. Give Amazon what they want, and they will help sell your product. And you guys have probably all seen it ‘frequently bought together’ and this person looked for this, looked for that, sort of seeing your ad showing up where your other products… So it all kind of tangles itself together which is good, but it starts with getting the sales. The ranking comes from the sales. So if we get sales out of the gate we’re going to start to rank. If we start to rank, we get more sales. If we get more sales, we naturally will start to get reviews.

So a lot of people go, “I want to get a hundred reviews.”  You got to get the good sales, you got to get rank, you got to get sales to get the reviews. A lot of people say, “Well, you can’t go out there and ask your customers for reviews anymore.” That’s not true. You can go out there and say that… The one that always kills me, I order a product from Amazon and I’ll get the card and it will say, “If you had a great experience and you want to give us a five-star review, go here.

[00:22:07] Scott: If you think it’s anything less than a five star, email me.” Can’t do that. What we do is, we email our customer after they’ve received the product, we make sure that everything was delivered fine, they’re happy. If they have any questions, we usually attach a little PDF of some kind of resource. Then from there what we’ll do, maybe four or five days later, we’ll email them again, “Hey, we’re just following up with you, we’re a locally owned business, we’re family owned. We just want to make sure that our customer’s taken care of. If you can be a good favor and head over to Amazon to let them know how we did, that would be awesome. Take care, Scott.” And that’s it. No coperate-y, none of that stuff.

So well just keep in mind rank, sales, reviews. That’s kind of how we go. Now the secret source, again, is sales. You’re gonna hear me say this over and over and over again. In the beginning, we want to get sales. Everything happens when you start to get sales. The momentum starts to go. And again, I’m going to repeat this because it’s really, really important, the two big things is, it increases your chance for keywords to rank. Okay? And I’m going to show you in a second here too because you know you’re going to say, “How do I rank in these keywords like?” Well, number one, you have an optimized listing which we’ll talk about.

But, you also increase your chances for reviews. Through that promotion that we did recently, we got nine reviews from that promotion. It’s not bad. They’re organic. So and that stuff will just continually rise. And again, the keyword ranking gives you more exposure to buyers and the result equal sales and again it increases your chance for reviews. So again, going back to that example or it in all through that time you know 178 units sold through that. This is what I’m going to share with you, the breaking down exactly how we did that. So the first question you have to ask yourself, I can show you everything right now that I’m showing you if you have a terrible product, it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work.

[00:24:02] Scott: If you have a terrible product, if you have a product that is not desired by people or it’s just a crappy product, you can either get you know initial sales give you a terrible reviews and all that stuff. So you also have to understand what depth and demand is. You have to understand what depth and demand is and I’ll show you an example here in a minute. But the big thing is, is what are the top 10 sellers doing? And if you understand what the top 10 sellers are doing, you can see what the potential is. And then you can say, “How many units do I have to sell in order to rank?”

And as soon as you understand that, you have a target of what you need to shoot for and now we can gauge how many units we want to sell throughout this launch process. So an example of good depth and demand looks something like this. If I was to show you this screenshot and up the first three have all the sales and everybody else had like one hundred units sold per month, that would be top heavy. We call that, top heavy. That’s where the top three sellers are taking all the demand and there is no depth. In this case, we’ve got depth spread out throughout this entire thing.

Now, my strategy also is to sell 10 units a day or more. It’s not going after the products that are selling 100 units per day, that’s just not my style. I’d rather go after products that not everyone is looking at. Like it’s not that big of a deal, 10 units that’s okay. Ten units a day, $100 per day profit you multiply that by five now we’re at $500 per day profit and we can kind of keep working that strategy. That’s my strategy. But, you can see here there’s a pretty good amount of sales running through the top 10. We’ve got 4,696 sales if you were to collectively add all those together. So this tells me also, “Okay, well, let’s divide that up and let’s see how many sales you need to generate to rank in the top 10.” So an example of that would be like let’s say that it was 10 units per day that are selling on average. You basically have to beat this number or at least come close to it.

[00:26:02] Scott: And from at this point, you say, “Okay, well then I go to get 10 units with.” Maybe you give 20 units away for five days. Now you’re going to boom, boom, boom, boom, you’re going to get up there. But, again, it comes down to picking right products, your competition level, your reviews. I always tell people, “If you want to have products that have thousands of reviews, it’s going to be harder game for you. If you go out for products that have 300 or less reviews, it’s not going to be that big of a deal. We’ve launched products with zero reviews. Actually, we have one product right now where we have, that we launched in the open brand, it has three reviews and it’s selling between 30 and 50 units a day. And we’re only shooting for 10. So it’s clearly it’s not driven by reviews, people are not buying it because it’s review driven.

So first up and for some you this might be like, “Okay, I kind of already know this,” but I need to go through this because it’s important. You need to understand how the platform works. People search for keywords, in this case, the garlic press. Does anybody know the garlic press and stuff? All right. So the garlic press is like my product and people still launch these products. Please do not launch a garlic press. Please. A garlic press, a barbecue mitts and the brushes do not. My biggest tip, biggest walk take away do not launch a garlic press. And I do not sell them. Everyone thinks, “Yes, Scott, you just don’t want people to sell because you sell them.” I don’t sell a garlic press. I probably should though. I think about even having one just to kind of do it as a joke and see what would happen, I don’t know. Keep an eye off for that. That might happen. That’s a good idea. So garlic press.

So if we search for a garlic press, Amazon is going to list the relevant products. The keyword is the relevant products. Very important that you know that. Buyer lands on first page or page one, buyer clicks on the product, buyer purchases the product and the sale’s made. And then guess what, Amazon gives us a little bit of their love. They go “Oh, okay let’s see.” Some searched for garlic press, they’ve seen a listing, they purchased, boom. We should probably rank these guys for garlic press. It makes sense.

[00:28:03] Scott: So that’s what you need to understand is that, it’s very, very simple if you break that down but it’s driven by sales. You guys are going to hear me say sales, sales, sales. Greg even said it this morning. “The people that are not succeeding in this business are the ones that don’t take a loss in the beginning.” And I’m not saying you have to take a loss but you have to understand that you’re not making money upfront, you’re driving a business. And I always use this analogy. If you open up a brick and mortar store and you want to get customers, and what do you usually do? Grand opening, you have bouncy bounce for the kids and free hot dogs and this. That costs a lot of money to get people to that bank that weekend, but it brings awareness to it. The same deal. It’s very, very simple if you think about that.

So the big question is, how do you rank page one? “Scott, what’s the secret?” Sales and relevancy. You have to get sales and you have to be relevant. If you’re not relevant then sales don’t matter because then Amazon doesn’t know what you’re selling. So feed Amazon what they want and they will help you sell your product. Like I said, they’re going to give you the eyeballs, they are also going to give you additional marketing. They are going to say, ‘frequently bought together’ and you’re going to start to spike more sales. If you have other products, that’s going to help pros promote your products.

So everything kind of comes down to sales. And again, here we’ve got some tackle boxes. So how to rank, how to get in the third position. If you look at the depth and demand, we know how many units are selling and how many units we need to match to have a chance to be there, and we need it to be optimized. So step one is that optimize your listing before you launch. Do not launch unless you are optimized. Now, I’ll go through some points as far as optimizing. Listen, it’s really not that difficult it’s pretty much common sense. But before you launch, make sure that you’ve done your homework and you’ve done the optimization. And a lot of people say, “Well, Scott you know I’ve got my product, it’s coming, it’s a boat or it’s in the air, and it’s going to be coming here. What do I do?”

[00:30:01] Scott: “It’s in manufacturing, it’s going to take 30 days what do I do?” You work on optimizing your listing. Like you do keyword research. You get as much, much information. You build that thing out of the best that you can.

So basically, this is what it looks like to me for the key components to optimize your listing. Keywords included in the title. This does not mean stuffing your title. This does not even like, “Oh, that sounds good.” Like it doesn’t read well, no. If it’s a stainless steel garlic press, that’s your keyword that’s in that title. Now, you can add things. Six inch, rubber handle, whatever. But you want to make sure that your keywords are included in the title. The title is weighted the most. That’s what’s going to kind of like tell Amazon what you have to sell.

The other thing is, your images are very, very, very important because when you get the eyeballs, you want people to be interested enough to click in. So there’s like different parts of it. We’ve got to get eyeballs on our listings in the top 10. Now that we’re in the top 10 we got to get eyeballs to say, “Oh, that looks interesting, click on it.” Then when people click on it, we are going to probably get them to read our bullets which we’re going to be talking about benefits and features. I always lead with benefits and then features. A lot of people like to say that all the cool things that it is but you want to talk about the benefits it’s going to do for the person.

And then four is your description. Very similar to the benefits… I’m sorry, yeah the bullets. But the thing is this, you’re really telling Amazon not just your customer. I would probably bet that not a lot of people even go the description. But, it’s another location for you to fill out to give information about your product to tell Amazon what you’re selling. Like you’re telling them all of this different stuff and then back end search terms as well. And the one thing I want to say about back end search terms, a lot of people are like, “Oh, cool. They just increased the amount that we can put in there, cool. Let’s just stuff it with everything.”

That can actually hurt you because if people start showing up to your listing and it’s not relevant to what they’re looking for, they’re not going to buy it. If they don’t buy it, your conversion goes down and now your rank goes down.

[00:32:01] Scott: So all that plays into it. So do not try to game the system by stuffing keywords till they say, “Oh I would love to show up on page one for a garlic press but I sell a baseball bat.” That’s not going to work. So that’s really important to understand that as well. But that’s your optimization pretty much. So, again, your title is very, very important. You thumbnail images or your images in general because that’s what’s going to draw the attention, is very important. If you’re going to spend money, it’s going to be on your images. The one thing I see people doing is trying to do their own pictures. Ex-photographer here, I didn’t tell you all my story. If guys have not listened to my story you know, episode 300. Go check that episode out. It tells you everything about my whole back story.

But I was photographer with my wife and I for years. And there’s one thing you can’t like create a good image if you don’t have the background as far is like lighting and… I mean lightning is a big deal. Like people don’t know how to light their images probably. But you want to really professionally…That’s like the value… That’s like that the representation that you’re doing of your product. It’s like the closest thing that get to touch your product. So make sure that that’s really, really high quality. I can’t stress that enough. And then again your bullets, really important, lead with the benefits and features and then optimize your listing end of description.

Again, just filling it out, building it out. Don’t do anything crazy here with a ton of HTML like they don’t want you to do HTML inside of there. This actually, they actually did a little bit with vaulting and stuff. I don’t really see a huge difference in it.  I mean I don’t see people getting hurt by that if anything, they would just get rid of it. But just stay above board on that stuff. Don’t try to game the system with descriptions stuff it’s not worth it. But just if you have the characters in there, if you have the words in there that’s going to help you.

And then in the back end of your search terms, the same thing. You want to lead here… And there’s been some new stuff happening within the search term and phrases, and all these different stuff that we’re not 100% sure on yet. But, one thing I would say no matter what, is just lead with your most important keywords in the phrase order that you want them to searched for.

[00:33:59] Scott: So if it’s stainless steel garlic press, make that stainless steel garlic press and then maybe black handle, blue, whatever. That’s what then you would want to go with. But try to keep your phrases together the best that you can. Again, there is some stuff happening right now that we’re not 100% sure what’s happening but they’re talking about phrase matches and stuff in the back end but we’re not going to get into that. So again guys, Amazon ranks for keywords from sales. But the sales get their optimization and all that stuff to kind of build off for that. And then again, just to remind you guys because it’s really important is, you have to understand that your sales will help you rank for keywords and that will help you get the reviews.

So just understand that. So the old way of launching again was giving away your product for free or deep discount. I mean a deep discount like 90% or more and I’ve done it. And that’s where I spent $1,800. The thing with the review groups is, and the reason why I feel that they are bad at this point in time is because number one, they only focused on random deals. So they’re not like necessarily my audience, they’re just an email people saying, “I want to see receive a discount. Send me a discount.” They are already trained for the most part to leave a review because the old days, eight months ago or whatever it was, was like, “Yeah, discount, review.”

That’s what I’m obligated to do. I’m signing up to this group because I’m getting discounts because I get reviews. It’s hard to untrain that. So I don’t want to be involved in that. And then also Amazon you basically, they can be on their radar as far as like the group, so we want to make sure that we stay away from that. So the new way to launch products is to create your own launch plan and to get your own sales. And the new way really starts when picking less competitive products. So maybe you already have products and it’s competitive you can still do what I’m going to share with you, but if you’re starting and you’re just starting to kind of get into the game or you’re picking your products, go after less competitive products. It’s going to be less headaches for you. And you’re going to be able to do exactly what I’m going to show you and it’s going to work.

[00:36:05] Scott: Look at good depth and demand, look at low reviews, I mean 300 or less and a little bonus here. If you see a possible new trend, you can jump on that trend because you’re going to be first to market and then kind of when you get rooted in there, it’s going to be hard to knock you off of that because you already have that momentum, you’ve already seeded yourself inside of the algorithm. So the launch plan looks like this. Optimize your listing, build your launch list, email list. A little actual thing here is if you have a brand that you can create a Facebook page or a Facebook group, you’re going to have a bigger advantage because you are going to be able to reach out to those people as a list as well.

Now, you can kind of do both simultaneously, that’s kind of what we did but it’s optional you don’t have to do the stuff. The main thing I want you guys to understand is you can build that watch list like now, you can start that without worrying about, “Well, I got a Facebook page what do I post?” It’s the content like you’ve been doing this without even having to do that. Then announce for discount for 50% off. Remember what I said, people are doing and that including myself, 90% off and sometimes even more free to get those. And I guarantee we can have did probably double or triple the sales that we did on this last one if we did it for a dollar or free. We wanted to test it at 50%, we did good we actually made money from it.

The basic funnel looks like this, this is step one. Create the plan, create the roadmap. What’s it going to look like for you? Traffic? We use a contest page. We’ll talk about that. We do, a thank you page, which is also a share page. That is like one of the most powerful parts of this little plan is that thank you/share page. And then the email capture comes after they’ve kind of went through that process and then we follow up with an email. Like that’s as simple as I can make it for you. Now, can this be more elaborate? Yes. Got Mike Jackness in the room. He’s got a really… He started this way in a sense but he’s now built out these really in-depth funnels from a giveaway. Built a seven figure business on this model. So pretty awesome. So this was like, we did a case study for our live event, we did a live event in Arizona.

[00:38:12] Man 1: November.

[00:38:13] Scott: November. That’s why I bring these guys with me. It was in November. We did a live case study. Before we did it, we were like, “Okay, we’ve got to build this email list because we’re going to show how easy it is. We want to go build a thousand people on an email list.” We actually built an email list in 30 days to about 10,000 emails. And we did it in a market we weren’t even in. We just wanted to prove that we can do it. So I have a list in this sneakerhead mark. My son is 19, he is into Jordan’s and all these sneakers that are between $250 to $1,500 and more and I’m like, you know, let’s just do a raffle.

So I’d said, “What’s the big sneakers, Scotty?” My son’s name is Scotty. “What’s the best sneaker?” He goes, “Let’s do a James Jordan Air.” I said, “All right.” So we got a Jordan Air, we put it up there, we put it up on our landing page, we drove traffic to it to this exact type of page. Hit enter to win and, boom, as soon as they hit that, they go to this. You have one entry in this giveaway, share buttons and then we have a nice little trackable link. And in that trackable link, they can get extra credit for everyone that they refer back to the contest.

So for every three people that enter their email address through their link, they get one extra entry. We’ve had people share it on all things of groups and pages and to their friends. But these people are usually also in other Facebook groups that are in this market. So we’re getting in front of other people that are in this because if they give it out to their aunty Mary, their aunt Mary might not do it. So like, “I don’t want those sneakers.” But if you give it out to the right people, it’s going to start to spread and start to grow from there.

This page right here is gold. It really, really works. Then from there, step three is the email follow up. So this case was like, “Hey,” First name. “I just wanted to reach out and say thanks for throwing your hat in the ring to win your own Kobe 11 sneakers.” This was for the Kobe one. “If you want to increase your chances, don’t forget that you can share the link to some of your friends, click here get to your referral link, get three more entries for each friend you get to enter. Good luck, Scotty.”

[00:40:08] Scott: Boom, that was it. They would be reminded, “Oh, crap that’s right. I should probably do that.” There’s the trackable link done. Done. So that, again that’s just part of… It’s a system now. We built the system now we just have to get the traffic which will talk about here in a minute. That’s just right here. Some people will say, “Well, I don’t know how to get traffic first.” No, you have to build the system first then go get the traffic.

So find Facebook pages and groups. That’s what we did. Instagram pages, we did. YouTube channels, we didn’t do that but we could. But our market wasn’t really there. And then other social media channels. Real quick story. Instagram pages people say, “Well, how do I run ads in there?” We didn’t run ads. What we did for the sneaker thing is we went out to an Instagram page that had… The first one was 300,00 followers, I reached out to Michael, “Hey can I put ad up on your page or I think…” “Yes, 25 bucks.” So I put a post up with one image for 25 bucks to 300,000 followers. I think that we had like 300 likes and I think we got like maybe, I don’t know, 75 or 100 emails for 25 bucks.

Then I found another page that had a million followers. I’m like surprised if they’ll respond to me. Like an hour later, yeah it was $100 for one post. If I wanted it to stick forever and not come down, it was $125. So I said, “All right. I’ll take the $125.” My son was blown away. We literally had emails pouring in. We had over 3,000 to 4,000 likes on the post. And then from there we actually drove them over to our page and we got… We had maybe 600, 700 emails. They were flying. I was refreshing the page and I was like, “Now we’re 50, another 75.” I just kept compounding. It was insane. So that works really, really good we did that in that space. This new space that we’re in we didn’t use Instagram because our audience isn’t there. We used Facebook ads.

[00:41:58] Scott: We just found the Facebook groups. We just targeted them and then we just started driving our little contest page, here is the bundle. The one thing about this here, and probably I have it here somewhere, let me go back. The biggest thing here though is your offer. You have to have an offer. I get a lot of people say, “I got a tackle box and it sells for 25 bucks. I’m going to give away my tackle box.” It’s not enough. We say $100 or more. Now, I don’t know, Mike, you’d like $40? Was it yours like $40 or $50.

[00:42:26] Mike: I do delegate.

[00:42:26] Scott: You do delegate away? Okay. Go to his presentations right after this. Isn’t that, look at that, look how easy that was. We didn’t even plan. Yeah. So basically, I’d like to have a really, really great offer. We do it for 30 days because we wanted to kind of give ourselves more time. And we did for 30 days and again, this one here did over… It was over the first one to like 6,500 then the next one did like 12,000 or something, crazy. And the most recent one the launched to a product to that one I think we did 5,500 emails in 30 days but the offer was about $175 value.

And that value is really you going out and finding products that are related to your products, that could be an accessory. So an example, if you’re going to go to the fishing market, you would go and find a top fishing pole that bass fisherman are looking for. And you get that fishing pole, you buy the net and then your tackle box will go in part of that. And then down you would go ahead and do this giveaway for 30 days, gather everybody and then you announce and you will say, “Hey, Sue sorry, you didn’t win but you are still a winner. We’re going to give you 25% off of our tackle box.” Boom, sales.

Now, the other cool thing is, and I’m getting a little deeper than I want to go but I’m going to do anyway, you can also drop a Facebook pixel on that page, on the landing page you know you can start creating a Facebook custom audience. So even if they don’t opt then, you can still know that, “Oh, they clicked on my page. So they’re pretty much interested in bass fishing. So now I can give them ads back to maybe offer or maybe to my other products.” So that’s the other cool thing. Those are tons that you guys can do. I don’t have a lot of time. Case study, results for our product was this. This is exactly what we did to a T.

[00:44:00] Scott: We are lucky enough to have in this brand a face to the business. If you guys had the opportunity to have a face to the business, someone that can drive the business, do it. If it’s you, if it’s someone else you know, if you know someone with extra teeth and they want to be the face of business, it’s really awesome because we were able to do Facebook lives. We did a lot of Facebook lives leading up to what we were going to do on our Facebook page.

Now just to let you guys know you all familiar with Facebook ads. In order to run Facebook ads, you have to have a Facebook fan page. It’s just part of it. And in the process, we’ve got 2,000 likes to our Facebook fan page just because. We didn’t ask them to, we just had to run it through our Facebook fan page. And so while we’re doing this we’re also doing Facebook lives. And we’d have you know around 50 people on and then maybe you know maybe 800 views and it we just started gradually going up. Well, we announced this to our Facebook live. We said, we have a special just for you guys in our community, thank you so much. Here’s the discount, you know XYZ, 50 off or something, and then they can go buy it.

Then we follow up with an email to our list and we sent three emails, actually two and a half. Because we send out one email, we let it go for 24 hours and then we sent to the unopens. We said, everyone that didn’t open the email, we’re going to send it to those people we’ll remind them about the offer. And then the last day we sent out a, “Hey, this is your last chance to get the 50% discount.” And that day really spiked. That was our best day actually.

So 152 sales in four days at 50% off. Not 90% not 100%, 50% off. And I would probably want to experiment with that. I’d probably even want to try to do maybe 75% off and see how much of a difference it is. It’d be interesting to see. We ranked on page one from one of our top keywords on the bottom of page one and we got nine reviews pretty quickly. And I got 10 minutes left, okay. So the extra bonus, I’m almost done, the extra bonus is after you launch, you might even get invited to a lightning deal. Not even your audience technically but to Amazon. Amazon is going to say, “Hey, you guys are doing awesome, you’re selling units, let’s help you some more.”

[00:46:04] Scott: Lightning deal. We launched three products in the past month, we’ve got three offers for lighting deals right now and around prime day. For anyone who doesn’t know prime day, it’s like huge, it’s like Black Friday for Amazon sellers. July 15th I believe it is. And you can run a lightning deal that week. They charge you $500 for that lightning deal. Regularly it’s $150.

We already signed up this morning we’re like, yup, yup, yeah. Because now they’re going to help us get sales to get more velocity and we only had a discount and our product was selling for like 18 bucks, we had a discount to 14 bucks. Still making money and they’re going to drive all the traffic, sales velocity, organic reviews. So that’s the mindset that I want you guys to have. So our next step is to really drive Facebook ads to Facebook Live because now we have a Facebook live, the good thing about Facebook lives. It’s basically an advertisement in a sense. And it it’s already converted well guess what, I can drive traffic to it now.

You’re going to be able to email capture from that Facebook live, you might say, “Hey, to get your discount code, go to xyz.com/special and you can get that.” They go there, they go on a learning page and on that learning page, they enter their name and email address for the discount code. Boom, you’ve got yourself another email list capture happening. And then you can build a bigger email list or a launch list during this process and growing your Facebook page and group. That’s the other thing that’s going to naturally happen, organically happen which to me is so powerful because it’s a sense of community if you have a brand and supports that.

And if you don’t have a brand that supports it that’s not as important. The important part is growing that email list so you can continually stay in touch with these people. And one little tip, definitely make sure you’re not just hammering them with offer after offer after offer. Lead in with Gary Vaynerchuk. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. If you guys have not read that book, it’s a good book. Jab, Jab, Jab, that’s all they give, give, give. The hook is, here’s something at a discount for a special or an offer. Value, value, value, ask. It works trust me.

[00:48:04] Scott: So the contest model break down really quickly, is one, enter the win ultimate fishing package. Two, promote using Facebook ads are other channels. Three, 30 days and pick a winner. Four, email non winners special 50% off or whatever you want to do, and five deliver value to that email list. There’s the breakdown, there’s the model. Just literally I’m telling you that rate there is everything we did and everything we’re going to be doing moving forward. So your action steps are to find your audience in your markets.

It doesn’t take anything right now, any money out of your pocket, just some time locate your audience where they’re hanging out. If it’s Facebook fan page go find it. Groups, Instagram, Pinterest, wherever, YouTube. Find those markets, find out where they’re hanging out. Creating amazing offer. And then create your lead capture page that can be done in a variety of ways. Lead pages, click funnels, we’ve got of a plugin that we just created called give ways boost there’s all different ways that you can do it. Collect the emails, add value tips and specials. That’s literally as simple as it is.

So I am done. I do have a free resource, no opt-in required. You to go there we actually did get an entire workshop showing exactly how I put everything together. We break down that sneaker funnel that I was talking to guys about and we also show how we set everything off and that’s there for you guys at theamazingseller.com/buildlist. So if you want to check that up totally free and it’s just for you guys to go and check it out and see exactly how we put all those pieces together, it elaborates a little bit deeper into those different things. So yeah, questions? Any questions good?

[00:49:48] Speaker 2: Say it with me, say it loud, say it proud. Take action.

[00:49:54] Scott: I love it brother, that’s good. Thanks, man. I needed to do that, I didn’t do it right at the end unless I do that.

[00:50:05] Speaker 3: Scott, for the Facebook or I guess the other platforms, are you creating your group around the product or more of a lifestyle type group?

[00:50:11] Scott: No. It’s more about the market. I’m going after the market. If I’m selling a fishing pole, I’m going after the fish market or bass fishing or fly fishing. I want it to be about that not the product about the market that supports the products.

[00:50:30] Speaker 4: Is 50% the max that you can offer and still get it verified.

[00:50:35] Scott: No. I got mixed feelings on that too. Some people said that they’ve seen you know verified versus… You know I don’t really know, I don’t really care. Like people think, “Oh, if it’s not verified, it’s not going to rank.” I don’t care about that. I just care about the stars lighting up. That’s all I care. People don’t look. I mean normal people that are you know in our space they don’t go, “That’s verified, that’s a better review.” It’s just that maybe it wasn’t qualified because of that. I’ve seen a mix on that. I’ve seen some people discount even less and get verified so I don’t know.

[00:51:07] Speaker 5: Do you have to do this for each product that you do like most of my friends do pet products. Do I have to do this for each time or wouldn’t there be a [inaudible]

[00:51:19] Scott: No. Well, here’s the deal though, if you have a pet product in your training a pet brand, then you want to do this. Because then you want to be able to constantly be letting them know if you have… If you have a product that you can show people how to use, or maybe yours is a tool, maybe if you’re cooking you have a garlic press and you are like, “Hey guys, I have this new garlic press I just created it for myself that is why I use it. Now, today I’m going to create this beautiful meal, this awesome meal, the next day you’ve got something else that you are using as part of yours. So it’s a way that you also integrate your products into your content. So yes, I think that you should be. If you have a brand that has multiple products, 100%. Anybody else? Now Tony is going to let me go all the way to the end, yes.

[00:52:07] Speaker 6: Can you clarify the portion about driving traffic Facebook pages, groups in IG? You’ve mentioned about promoting just specific… Is there a specified account or how do you…

[00:52:18] Scott: No, if you have a Facebook… Sometimes you can target the page itself, the Facebook page. But a lot of times when you go into the targeting, you’re going to be able to just select certain areas, certain groups or TV shows. If you know that you’re into fishing and you wanted to do a fishing show that’s popular, you would go and target that fashion show. So you can do that too. But Facebook fan pages, sometimes you can target them, sometimes you can’t. You just have to go and type it in, if it comes up, you can target it, if not, you can’t.

[00:52:41] Speaker 6: Instagram, the same thing…

[00:52:42] Scott: Instagram is different. Instagram, the way I would do Instagram, I would just go after the pages that have influencers right now and ask them to put a post up for you.

[00:52:49] Speaker 6: Okay.  So you are actually covering that…

[00:52:51] Scott: 100%. It will say, “We’re having a buyer.” It will say, “Contact me for advertising moment.” Thanks.

[00:52:55] Speaker 6: Thank you.

[00:52:59] Speaker 7: You talked talks about going all in and optimizing from the get-go, and I was wondering sometimes now when you are launch, you send in the FBA, sometimes it’ll take like a week for it to be received and fully like sellable. So you get that message, that sucks, that says, “Available on this day.” You have the buy a box, you have people do it, but they’re probably going to go to pick the better I would assume. So that would hurt your conversion I will assume. Do you have a strategy for that?

[00:53:24] Scott: I wouldn’t do it yet. No, you wait until you’re live in stock. Yeah, the other thing and that we’re going to be maybe playing around with is you also have a pre-order. If we have a preorder and people can preorder our product, and then ones we go live, we let them all have it, now we have an instant rush of traffic. But I actually like the dispersing out of the sales amongst like three-four days anyway. But yeah. So I wouldn’t do it until you are live. Wait until you’re live and you’ve gotten enough units to get away because you don’t know if you’re going to do 50 units, 100 units, 200 units. And then if you know that you have a big list that’s going to gobble everything up, you might want to just send it out to 500 today, 500 tomorrow, 500 the next day. Spread that out but wait till you are live.

[00:54:13] Scott: Okay. So there you have it. There’s the presentation that I did that was live. If you guys want to actually watch that live, that Facebook Live that is, I’m going to post that in the show notes of today’s episode. You can head over to theamazingseller.com/368. I have the show notes, transcripts and I have the video embedded in there as well just in case you kind of wanted to watch. I had a great time doing that, hopefully, I get invited back, that’s my second year being there.

So if you guys did enjoy that head over to, My Wife Quit Her Job with Steve Chou, and just request that maybe I show up again next year that would be pretty awesome. I had a great, great time meeting all of you that did attend. If you didn’t attend, well, you guys missed an awesome summit and maybe you’ll come next year or maybe at one of the other events that I’ll be attending this year. But there was just so much value that I learned from people there and sitting alongside other people that are just doing things a little bit differently, and then learning through that process is what always again gets those light bulbs to start to come on and get more ideas coming.

The one thing that I did, I did advise everyone in that room and just at the event in general was, you’re going to leave with so much stuff that you can do. You need to pick one or two things that you can do right now that’s going to get you results the quickest. So this way here you can implement and then see a result. The other thing is, I said you know we can learn all this stuff, we can consume all this stuff but we have to do something in order for anything to happen. It’s what I always say, take action. But it’s so true I mean we have to actually do something to see a result and we have to give it some time. We have to do something, wait a little bit wait for the results to come in kind of thing.

[00:55:56] Scott: All right, so that is going to wrap up this episode. I will remind you. If you did want to receive all the videos and all of the different resources that are available for that virtual pass of Seller Summit 2017, head over to theamazingsellar.com/summit and you’ll be able to get all of those recordings, and all the resources over there which I feel is well worth the small investment in that virtual pass. So definitely go check that out. And guys that’s it. That is officially going to wrap up this episode.

Hopefully, you got value from that and yeah, let’s go ahead and wrap this thing up. Like one of my audience members did, remember guys, I’m here for you, I believe in you, and I am rooting for you what 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. That’s it. My voice holds out it should I got through that ending pretty good. Anyway, we’ll see you guys later, bye.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

… Well not too much. I’m going to hopefully talk about mindset, give you some other things to really set that so this way here, you understand the power in it. I’m also going to talk about the nine step secret formula to being successful. And I thought about doing this I’m like you know what, how can I really convey how important I feel it is because I didn’t always have it and I’m still working on mindset. I think mindset is something that you’re going to always be working on.

But I started realizing this as I started meeting people in person, and I started hearing their stories, and I started hearing about what were people saying that were successful, and what were people saying that were still kind of waiting until everything was perfect before they actually got in the game? I always kind of talk about sports because that’s kind of my background. I like basketball, I like baseball, I like all kinds of sports but, it kind of always comes down to that like if you don’t raise the bar, if you don’t have the right mindset you’re not going to be good. If you have the confidence to go into that game, you’re not going to be good or you’re not going to be as good as you could be.

But, I got a couple of things that I want to kind of I say rant about, but kind of get into because I think it’s important. I wrote an email not that long ago about it. It was received really well, got a really good amount of feedback and all that stuff. Again, like I said, I just got back from Seller Summit, I met a lot of great people, and I had seen where people were struggling and I’d see more people that had actually made it or at least are on their way and it comes down to, a lot of it is mindset.

And yes, you got to pick the right products, and yes you got to pick the right brand and all that stuff. Yes, yes, yes. Like all that stuff is important as well. I’m going to kind of talk to you about the nine step secret formula that I believe isn’t really a secret, but everyone wants to know the secrets or the hack or the shortcut.

[00:02:08] Scott: For me to get the most opens on an email, I need to say like, “Check out this new hack, that’s going to get you ranked overnight, that would get a ton of opens.” And who knows maybe I do find a new hack and I give you that it’s short lived and cool, you get a shortcut for a day.

I’m here to really set you up and myself up for success not just now but in the future. And I think everyone that’s out there looking for the new hack or the secret or the shortcut are people that just aren’t really 100% committed to this process. Yes, there’s ways that you can jump into this game and make money pretty quickly, we’ve done that in the 1K FastTrack, we’ve done that. We’d had people come into that class with zero sales and in seven days, our first class, did over I think it was $3,800 or $4,200. Something like that. It was over $3,000 in revenue basically profit, in a sense, because it was stuff that they cleared out of their house.

And then the second group did over I think it was $6,500, which is crazy in seven days just because I said, “Listen, here’s what we’re going to do. Forget everything else right now, I want you to go and do this. Don’t think about anything, just do this. And from now till next week, and only focus on that. Again, focus on that. The mindset was you can do it, you’re going to go out there and do it.” And guess what, people did it. And now a lot of those people are going on to either do more retail arbitrage or build a private label business. Because, again, the mindset was, “I can’t do this.” Or, “I’m stuck.” Or, “How do I move forward?” You got to get started. Like if we don’t get started in this game, we’ll never going to go anywhere. I get people that say, “Scott, I’ve have been doing this now, I’ve been listening to the podcast for 12 months, and I’m just not sure yet.”

[00:03:59] Scott: My advice to you is do something. If you do something, something is going to happen whether it’s a positive thing or a negative thing. But, however you look at that, it’s going to be a learning experience. And everyone that I talked to that was successful or at least has had some type of success in this process and I’ve talked to a bunch of people at Sellers Summit, and the constant thing I keep hearing from people, the constant feedback from people is, “You know what, I said I’m just going to jump in, I might do a small order, we’ll see what happens.” And then boom, that’s what started their journey. And some people, I’ve got one guy that comes to mind, that I was talking to, I actually had dinner with him at our VIP dinner at Seller Summit and he told me, “Scott, I’ve been listening to a podcast.

I launched a product, I followed everything but I kind of messed up on the product stuff. I got a little too excited, I jumped into the game, and my first product flopped but I still liquidated it. I got out from under it but I kind of feel like it wasn’t it wasn’t even a single. It just did okay.” And then he just chucked it up as, “You know what, I’m just going to move on. I’m going to go and move on to the next thing. Find another product, do better product research, pick a better market, whatever.” So he pivoted. And now he’s reporting to me that he’s done over $250,000 in less than a year. That’s pretty awesome. But, he didn’t stop and he got results, and he learned from that first experience. He learned what not to do again.

So if you’re one of those people that you sitting here and you’re thinking to yourself, “But I’m just…I’m not technical. I don’t know all that much about the tech side.” Well, with Amazon, you don’t need to know the tech side or even eBay depending on what platform you want to start on. That’s why I always say start on one of those two platforms or even Etsy. Start on one of those platforms and take all that out of the mix, they’re going to handle all that stuff for you, all you gotta do is find your products, and sell it, and do a little bit of optimization stuff.

[00:05:59] Scott: And I’ll go through my nine steps secret formula here and I classify that as a secret formula because that’s what people want to hear. I’m being kind of funny about it too because I don’t think that… You know you hear these gurus out there. Even people in our community. I’m not going to mention any names and you’ve probably heard them. And I actually met with some people in my audience, they are TASers and they asked me about these people. And again, no comment it’s kind of like my answer generally but you can kind of see through that. I’m not sitting here telling you that it’s going to be easy, it’s not going to come without struggles, it’s not going to come without you being frustrated at times, right? It’s going to happen.

But the other thing I also say to those people is, “Is it going to be easy when you go to get a job for someone?” You going to have to learn that job, you’re going to also maybe have to live up to your quota on sales for that month if you’re a salesperson. There’s all those things that come into it. So what’s the difference if it’s for yourself or someone else? But anyway, not to go off on too much of a tangent there but there’s people in our in our space, in our community that are saying like, “Look at me, I did $2 million in a year. You can do it too.” Yes, you can do it too but you got to start with 100 bucks.

You got to start with the first 100. You got to start with the first 1,000. And again, and it’s always about, “Oh, look at this new secret that I just did.” Or, “This new shortcut.” Or “This new hack.” I don’t know, that stuff it annoys me and you can hear it in my voice right now and I get a little upset with that because, I can’t stand that those people out there, I know there are other been for years that are trying to make it out as like, “It’s this easy thing if you just follow the secret formula.” The secret formula is actually doing something and learning something, and then building upon that. If you listen to my story back in episode 300, if you haven’t, go back and listen to that episode theamazingseller.com/300.

[00:08:00] Scott: Listen to that because it goes through like all of the things that I learned. I learned email marketing way before I got into the Amazon game but I can take that knowledge and bring it over to this new business or if I start another business. If I went into the automotive business, the first thing I’d be doing is figuring out a way to build an email list around my potential clients or customers so they can see more of my business and what we represent in our customer service and all that stuff. You guys have heard me say this time and time again, right?

So I’ve learned so much through the business going back to my father and my brick and mortar experience. And having that experience I learned about employees, I learned about what it takes to run a brick and mortar business. I learned all that stuff as a young guy. I was only like 19 years old when I was in that business but I learned a ton. And a lot of that stuff is already translated over to how I work with VAs now, virtual assistants, how I treat them. Because I know that they need to be treated with respect and they need to know that they’re appreciated.

So, again all of these lessons that we learn are moved over to that next thing. But again, let’s dig into the mindset there really quickly. That’s something that we’re always going to be working on and you’re always going to be going to be working on that. If there’s one thing that I think you should always be working on, is mindset. How to get yourself in a state of confidence of when you know that you’re going to go in there, you’re going to give it all you’ve got but you’re going to also give yourself a little bit of a safety net in a sense and I’ve talked about that too. I’ve always kind of set up these safety nets mentally so I know what’s the worst case if this doesn’t work for me, what am I going to do?

So going back to my construction days when I left my construction company or my father’s construction company, I was going into a completely different market. My wife and I were going to be photographers. “What? A photographer? Scott’s going to be a photographer?

[00:10:00] Scott: Scott, you’ve never taken any photography, you’ve never went to school for that.” All of these doubts are in my mind. “How are you going to do that? You don’t have degrees. You don’t have this schooling.” It’s funny. I met a guy out in Seller Summit, a photographer. His name is Bob. Bob, if you’re listening man, thank you so much. Also, Bob took some pictures ironically that he is a photographer took him with his iPhone or his phone, I don’t know it was an iPhone or not, but Bob took some pictures.

But him and I were talking he said, “Okay, Scott. I listened to your podcast and I know that you are a fellow photographer so am I. Did you…” I forget what club it was but there’s some major club with all professional photographers. They join it’s like a national thing and all this stuff. And I said, “You know Bob, my wife and I when we first started we didn’t want to get into that because we didn’t think the technical stuff really had a ton to do with the final result.” What does that mean?

Well, what it means is, we wanted to deliver a really nice picture that a family was going to treasure. They don’t care that our settings were maybe, I don’t know, too off for talking about F-stops or for talking about shutter speed. They don’t care that we might have miscalculated a reading as long is the final image came out okay. But if we were to give that to a judge on a photography pro-panel, they would have ripped us apart. But to the everyday person, the person we’re selling it to, it was okay.

So, just understand that as you’re going through this process, you don’t have to be perfect. And I don’t even know where I’m going with that. I met Bob, Bob brought that up and I said, “Bob, we didn’t even care about that.” So again, I think just going back to the mindset like if I didn’t think that we could deliver the final goods to our customer, I never would have did it. Where would I be today if I never trusted my gut and said, “Let’s just do it.” I know it was, the safety net.

[00:12:01] Scott: So my safety net was, I could go back and do construction if I had to. So I’m going to leave, I’m going to go ahead and say, “I’m going to give my two weeks’ notice to my father’s company, I’m going to go out on my own. We’re going to go ahead.” I think at the time, it was in November, we knew that the fourth quarter was coming up so pictures were a big deal in fourth quarter, and I said, “You know what, let’s just go all in here and let’s figure this thing out, and let’s see what we can do.” And guess what, we did really well, for us and it proved to us that we could do it.

So I didn’t have to go back and do the construction thing that I kind of laid in there as a safety net. So my mental state was, “You aren’t really risking.” Even though I was still scared to death. Don’t let me fool you, I was still scared to death but I was able to create that safety net that allowed me to take that chance. Because what was the worst thing that was going to happen? I was going have to go back out in the real world and work with my hands again doing construction. But guess what, I never went back and did that.

Then, go to the next thing, my photography business. My wife and I, she was more the creative, I was more of the technical. I learned through books. I didn’t really learn through YouTube at the time because it wasn’t really even happening yet with YouTube, that’s how long ago. Still using 35-millimeter film until we graduated to our first digital camera, which was a whole another experience, Photoshop, all that stuff.

So I learned all that stuff and now I’ve got this knowledge, that I didn’t even realize I was sitting on, that people were asking me for advice. I was in forums, at the time, there wasn’t really Facebook groups or anything like that. It was more or less forums, and the people were asking me like, “How did you do this? How did you guys start? You are a husband and wife team. How did you do it? How do you work together?” All that stuff. And then I started helping people and I built an email list around that market and then I started to sell products to those people that would help them in their journey.

[00:14:00] Scott: But my safety net was now okay. Wait a minute here, we’ve got our photography business that’s a full-time gig, we’re meeting with clients at times that we really necessarily don’t want to because it’s in the evenings because it’s when the lighting is best and all the stuff. If you guys have listened to my story? You’ve already heard this. But it started to become a job where we’re starting to lose the lifestyle business. So we said, “Well, maybe we can go in kind of do 50/50.

We’ll do some online and we’ll do some offline and we’ll see what happens.” And the online thing just took off, we started really doing well. Now, we had to make another decision. Do we leave that? So, again, the mindset was, we’ve already got something here secure, we know what our income is going to be, we’re doing a six figure a year business. We’re going to go over here, we’re going to risk this. What was my safety net? Mentally, I’m setting up that safety net. I could always go back and take pictures, you see?

So the mental state has to be right. The mindset has to be right. So whatever it is for you, you’ve got to figure out what is that safety net? What is the mindset for you? What is tripping you up? Ask yourself. Ask yourself this question right now whether you’re on the run, whether you’re walking, whether you’re laying out on the back deck enjoying some sun. Oh man, I’m wishing I was doing that right now. I will be later. I’ve got a new chair that my wife bought me for our anniversary. One of those zero chairs on the back deck which is awesome.

So ask yourself that, if you’re stuck right now whether you already started your business and you’re stuck, maybe you launched a product and it wasn’t as successful as you are so now you’re doubting yourself, what is that one thing right now that’s that barrier? That thing that’s holding you back. Is it that you don’t believe in yourself? Is it because you don’t think you have the experience? Is it that you don’t think that you can grow a business? Is it that you don’t think you know enough about marketing? What is it? Because I can assure you there’s probably something there that’s tripping you up that if you figure out a safety net for that or a way to work around that, I’m telling you, you can do anything you want.

[00:15:58] Scott: And take it for me, someone that never went to college felt really embarrassed about that for the longest time and now I’m proud of it. Because, man I did it. I’m not done, don’t get me wrong. I mean, after meeting with people at Sellers Summit just recently, which is really why it’s so fresh for me and hearing people say, “Scott, I tune in just to hear you get me fired up like to take action. I was thinking about bailing and now I got a second wind.” And that’s what this podcast is really about. I know this isn’t like a hack for you or a secret for you, although it could be I guess because you might not even be thinking about this stuff.

Maybe it’s that one trigger that gets you over the hump and you’re going to email me or you’re going to see me at a live event. You’re going to say “Scott, I listened to episode 369, your rant and your mindset, and your 9 step secret formula. And from that day forward, I did everything you said and it just got me over the hump and now I’m doing $250,000 a year or a million a year.” Whatever it is, whatever your goals are. That would be amazing for me. So I know that this isn’t like sexy. This isn’t like sexy because it’s not like a hack or well it is, I think it is. The mindset is that it can be a hack. I think people, I think it’s overused.

But a lot of people said. “Scott, I want more of this stuff I want you to really speak about the mindset because I think it’s important as well. Because that’s things that you’re being hang up on.” You already know what you got to do. Now, to I’ll give you the 9 step secret formula here in a minute which is really kind of basic. But you know all you need to do is to have the right mindset and then take the action, and then get the results, and then decide what to do next from the results. That’s what we’re doing.

Like I said, I wrote an email not that long ago after I got back from Seller Summit depending on when you’re listening to this, and I talked all about I was there, I met a ton of people, and my voice was starting to go because when you’re at these networking events…

[00:18:01] Scott: And again surround yourself with like-minded people is powerful. If you’re not doing that, you should be doing it. I mean the energy is just higher, and just the creative juices are flowing, and you get ideas and you get motivated, and you get inspired, and then also you take more action, which again gets you more results. But, you can hear it in my voice right now I almost want to clear my throat but I’m not going to because we’re here live or we’re recording this.

But, you know I was losing my voice, at night time they had music playing, the whole room is packed, you got everyone’s talking, so you have to bring your voice up. My voice is short and I’m telling people I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a podcaster and I don’t have a voice left.” But I was dedicated to stay there as late as I could with these people because I wanted to hear their stories. I wanted to give them advice where I could or kind of push them over the edge a little bit to where they weren’t comfortable in a sense because that’s kind of where to me, that’s always been where you know big things can happen is when you get pushed over that edge a little bit where you’re comfortable. But I talked about how…

I just pushed through or “I pressed on”. You guys that are longtime listeners you hear we talk a lot about, pressing on, we kind of relate that back to the garlic press or whatever. So we press on and that’s what I did. I pressed on, I got back to work and you know I’m actively working in the Amazon space with the Amazon brands. I’ve partnered with a few people now, we’re really excited about this new brand. And I got back and I was kind of tired, my voice was kind of a shot, but I still had enough in me to press on. Because my mindset was I have to actively do something every single day towards the goals that we’re going after and you have to do the same exact thing.

But the one thing, I’m kind of going to go through these six different things that people that I took away. From successful people that I met here at this past event. Number one is they learned and then they took action.

[00:20:00] Scott: So they consumed something and then they did something.

Two, they didn’t expect everything to work perfectly. They expected there was going to be issues. There was going to be hiccups, there was going to be problems. That was okay. We’re going to work around them. Three, they kept taking action. They just figured things out.

And you know I go back to Pat Flynn as mentioned before, ‘Just-in-time learning’. But don’t worry about learning everything down the pipe until you get down there. Only worry about things that are concerning you now that you have to fix or you have to deal with. So, again, that was number three. They kept taking action, they figured things out as they went.

Number four, they surround themselves with like minded people like being at an event or in a Facebook group. Surrounding yourself like minded people is powerful. Surrounding yourself with not like-minded people or negative people, can be harmful, be toxic. So understand that too. You may need to trim some of those people. And I’m not saying you got to get rid of people, I’m just saying you got to have less activity with those people maybe. You know who they are, you know the people that might be raining on your parade. Those are the people.

Five, they just never gave up, he’s kept pressing on. I’m going to make this thing work because this is what I want. My why is big enough that I’m going to keep going and keep going and keep going. You’re just never giving up. You realize when I left my construction job back when I was about twenty four-ish, twenty five-ish, I think it was, I have to go back and look at the exact age I was. I have never worked for another person and I’m going to be 45 years old this year. That’s pretty crazy but you know what, my why, was there, my lifestyle business that I wanted to create was there. So understand that you don’t have to have it all figured out but you can’t give up.

[00:22:06] Scott: You can’t give up if you really want it. Now, you may be like, “You know what, I would rather just work for someone,” and that’s cool. I respect that. It’s okay. Be honest with yourself. Be honest with yourself. Now, number six they believed they could do it. “But how do you believe you can do it Scott if you don’t believe in yourself?” It’s a great question. The way you do it, is you surround yourself with like minded people. It’s contagious. Have you ever seen a baseball team that’s doing really well? They’re hitting really well, everyone starts to hit well. You ever noticed that? Maybe you’re not a baseball fan.

If you aren’t, well that’s what happens. Maybe you just relate that to something else. You ever notice when you’re around people that are like minded and someone starts to do something and then it starts to kind of just… Everyone starts to do the same kind of thing and they start to get the same kind of results? Negatively, that can happen too. Maybe everyone sitting around talking about how negative things are, then you’re going to be in a negative place. But you can. I believe you can manufacture this by surrounding yourself with like-minded people or listening to a podcast like this one right here. Hopefully, this is going to know that you’re not alone in that we believe in you, meaning the TAS community. To me, it’s all about how can I let you know that I was exactly where you are right now, maybe, in the mindset of not believing in myself.

If you can’t believe in yourself, someone else has to believe in you. Where do you find that? You have to surround yourself with those people. Do a local meetup, create a local meet up and have people come in that are also talking about this. Start there, do a local meet up if you want or do an online meetup. Do it on a Facebook page or a group. Where you can surround yourself with… I’ve had people drive six hours to come to a TAS meet up because they want to be surrounded with other people that are like-minded and they knew that that would help them mentally.

[00:24:12] Scott: And also it would help them give them other ideas, and maybe even bounce ideas off of each other. There’s just a huge amount of, to me power in being around like minded people. So, that was like number five. But number six was, believe that you can do it.

The only way you can believe you can do it is number one, believe it. But how do you do that? Well, you got to get results. If you get results, that’s going to be like… Even like a mini win will prove to you that you can do it. And if you believe that you can do it, that’s going to then spring you into wanting to do more. It’s going to motivate you do want to do more. That’s why we came up with 1K Fast Track. To be quite honest with you guys, I wanted to figure out what’s holding people back from jumping into the private label game?

Well, the fear of not picking the right product. So let’s skip that for a second here. Let’s start where we can actually get a result like in seven days and prove to yourself that you can make a dollar or you can make $100 or you can make $1,000 in a short period of time. So we did the 1K Fast Track. If you guys are there if you’re in that place, I would encourage you to go over to 1kfasttrack.com go over to that page, check it out, you’ll hear exactly what I’m talking about there. And at the time you go there, it may not even be open.

So I’m not pushing you there to have you join, obviously in the future. If we open and you wanted to join, I would say it’d be a great place for you start. If you’re stuck, you get a ton of support there as well from other people that are in a similar situation. You also get to see where people actually were at that place and now they’re not at that place, they are further ahead now. Because people would say, “Scott, I was stuck. I went ahead, I did the seven day challenge.” That’s what we do in the very beginning, we do the seventy challenge. “I made 800 bucks, 500 bucks, 300 bucks, 100 bucks whatever, in seven days and it motivated me to want to go out there and do it again, and again, and again,.”

[00:26:03] Scott: I’m telling you results motivate you to want to do more. Makes sense, right? So you have to believe that you can do it. And the only way to do that is to have people that can actually help you with that and be their supporters and also you do it yourself by you getting results. Look, I went back I was a construction worker. I graduated to being a photographer, I didn’t believe in myself. I did it and then I said, “Holy crap. I can do this.” And then I said, “Okay, I’m doing well there let’s go ahead in photography. Now let’s teach it online. Let’s actually have programs and let’s have a community around what I’ve learned through the past eight years of my photography journey.”  I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if it’s going to work I don’t know if people are going to really listen, boom fast forward, I’ve got a six figure business, doing exactly that.

But I didn’t believe it at first until I proved that I could do it. And the same thing has went on. I don’t think I can sell things on eBay, I don’t know if I know everything about eBay that I’m supposed to know. You know what, the best way to learn, put something up and see what happens. That’s the easiest way to learn that. But I did that and I got results. And, “Oh, boy. Look at this thing, this eBay thing kind of works.” Try this Amazon thing. Holy crap. First six months did $120,000 in revenue, not profit, validation. It works.

First year, $300,000, wow. Now I’ve partnered with a bunch of brands. I’ve helped a bunch of people now and I haven’t done a total. I probably should total up everybody that I’ve helped so far, with just the podcast or my class, and see exactly what the number is. It’s got to be millions. It has to be. I have screenshots right now that I know is over a few million just from people that have sent me emails, that I’ve kind of collected a little bit to kind of keep as a reminder of what I’m doing is helping other people. But you know I mean, you gotta understand that doing this, you’re going to have those doubts. It’s normal.

[00:27:58] Scott: But you have to have a mental mindset to be able to push through and surround yourself with those like minded people. I met a couple at Sellers Summit. I met a couple. They came up, funny story too. The wife came up first, introduced herself, I didn’t see the husband didn’t know who he was, didn’t even see him. And she came up, told me her whole story, and she’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve listened your podcasts since the beginning. I didn’t know anything about selling online, didn’t know anything about Amazon. I took your advice and the podcast. All we did was follow the podcast, and we did, I think it was like $500,000 and now we’re on track to do like over $1.5 million in like 18 months.” Am like, “Holy crap. You got to share this with me. You would have emailed me this.” She says, “Oh, I don’t want to bother you.” I go, “No, I want you to bother me with that.” That motivates me,that inspires me to continue to want to help.

Anyway, so I talk to her, awesome congratulations, high fives. Everything. I went in the other room and another guy approached me. He goes, “Hey, I just want to let you know I am a huge fan of the podcast. I listen to your podcast. My wife and I…” And basically, it was her husband. He came up. So then we brought them together, we met, we had a great conversation and just awesome people. But again, they told me, “It started slow. We had some issues in the beginning. We had product issues. We had shipping issues. We had maybe…” I think it was customs issues. They had all kinds of little issues but they pushed through it. And they kept believing in themselves and they probably had a good support network between the two of them.

Now, I had a landscaper that I met there. And he listened and he said well he was… He was actually on his own business, a landscaping business and he knew that that wasn’t what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. And he was a young guy. And I think I’m going to even have him on the podcast too. Great story, great guy. Actually, he lives in Hawaii which I want to go to Hawaii. So he said, “Yeah, come on over we’ll make something happen. Maybe we’ll do a will do a TAS meet up in Hawaii next year maybe or something like that.” But anyway, he came up to me and said, “I listened to the podcast, I did it. It wasn’t perfect all the time but I did it and I pushed through and I’m on track to do over $500,000 in less than a year. “Holy cow, this stuff is crazy.”

[00:30:01] Scott: I kept hearing this over and over and over again from people that were listeners of the show or just people in general. And it came down to them just continuing to take action, to learn, to understand that everything’s not going to be perfect and to learn as you go. And that’s huge. That’s really a big thing. So that’s all you take away from this episode. That’s going to be a huge one. You’re probably going to want to write that one down. Whatever that thing is that’s blocking you right now, you got to figure that thing out. Figure that thing out and that thing could unlock the keys for your success.

So let me just kind of… Again I can go on and on here and I am just about approaching the 30-minute mark and I try to keep these so this way here you guys can get through these. But there’s no limit as far as how long I can talk here, you guys know that as long as my voice holds up. But, again, there’s people out there in our community that are saying like, “Oh, here’s the secret. Here is the nine steps. Here is the three steps, here is the hack.” And you know I kind of want to address that right now because I know that a lot of times I’m not like giving out those really catchy, hooky, headlines or subject lines because that’s just not my style, number one. But number two, I don’t really believe it.

I don’t believe there are secrets that you guys don’t know that I haven’t already revealed. So I kind of want to break that down for you guys really quickly and to me it’s really simple. For getting started, and we’re talking about Amazon right now. This could be your own ecommerce, it could be anything you want. But number one, this is the nine steps, okay? The nine secrets, we’ll call them secrets for today’s episode.

Number one is finding a market that’s looking for products to buy. It’s pretty simple, right? It’s no secret. I just watched Shark Tank again last night I know… I had a guest and he said, “No, that’s fake.” It’s probably not staged in a sense but then they know they make it a show, I get that.

[00:32:00] Scott: But the one common thing that they keep saying over and over, and over again is, “What are your sales?” “Oh, I’m in pre-launch right now, we haven’t had any sales yet.” “Bye, see you.” We need to find a market that’s looking for products to buy and we need to validate them, this is step two, secret number two, validate they’re selling on Amazon.

Just use Amazon as your validation tool even if you don’t sell on the Amazon you want to validate that there’s actually a market there for it. So it’s there for us. It hasn’t been any easier ever to be able to do that. Is to see what your competition is selling and then you to decide if you want to go into that market or not.

Read Reviews which is step three, by the way, I am doing this off the top of my head and then I’m going back to my notes and I go, “Oh, that’s step three.” So number one is, find a market that’s looking for products to buy. Two, validate they are selling using Amazon. It’s just a tool if you want to.

Three, read competitors negative reviews, make yours better. And then four, have your product made with great packaging. Now, in the beginning, it doesn’t have to be like custom, it just has to be unique. And if you can use their standard packaging, to kind of speed up that process then from there you can do that and then you can always upgrade it or enhance it later but hire someone to do some nice graphics, all of that stuff. Again, I’m not going to go into all that in today’s episode. That’s that step.

So four is, have some nice packaging, and try to put that packaging in your image if you can. So if you have your first image, you might want to put your product and your packaging in there. I think that’s good anyway to prevent hijackers and stuff like that because hijackers are going to see that and it’s going to be hard for them to replicate that.

Five, create an optimized Listing. We talked about this plenty of times. I’ll give you a quick little recap. Images, title, bullets, description, search terms in your back end. That’s creating an optimized listing and that’s something you’re going to do over and over again.

[00:34:01] Scott: You’re going to make better and better by looking at some of your other stuff as far as like pay-per-click or maybe competitor stuff, all of that. So five is, create an optimized listing.

Six, launch to a list. Okay? Whether that’s your own email list or a deal site that you that you trust, just get the products out there and launch them. So many people want to make money on the first run. I always tell people, “You know what, your first run you’re probably not going to make any money. You should be happy to break even. So, many people they’re like, “But Scott, I don’t want to give away my product at a discount. I want to sell it at full price because I want to make my 35% or 50% margin rate out of the gate.”

And I go back to well if you were to open a brick and mortar store, would you do a grand opening sale? And if you say, No, then I say, “Well, you’ve got some learning to do.” And I met a guy actually in Seller Summit that he said, he’d done plenty of grand openings for brick and mortars. It’s generally like a $10,000 grand opening budget.

So understand the launch is really, really important. But, number six like I said, is launch to a list, get sales. Amazon is all about sales. So there’s your secret. Get sales. And like I said, you can use your own email list which we talk about in… The workshop addresses, theamazingseller.com/buildlist. Check that out if you want to start building your own launch list. And then seven is turning on pay-per-click. Pay-per-click, sponsored product ads, Amazon pay-per-click, whatever you want to call it. Turn that on, and start generating sales through those search terms or your keywords.

And then from there, here’s the big one. Ready? Here’s the big secret. You’re going to look at your data. You’re going to look at your data and start seeing what people are actually searching for. Now, I’m not going to go into this, this could be a whole another topic which we actually did a full week on pay-per-click, theamazingseller.com/ppc. Go there, tons of resources, explains everything, go check that out if you’re at all interested.

[00:36:05] Scott: And if you’re at that stage, if you’re not at that stage yet, don’t worry about that. Don’t get there yet. So pay-per-click is great for getting sales but also in the beginning, it’s great to get intel about your market, about what they’re actually searching for. Because you’re going to put in a keyword like garlic press but they’re going to actually type in, stainless steel garlic press and you’re going to see that in your report.

And number eight, follow up with customers after they purchase. You can do this manually or you can use a tool. I use Salesbacker. There is also Feedback Genius. There’s other ones out there but I’ve have used Feedback Genius in the beginning, and I switched to Salesbacker. I’m using Salesbacker currently right now. Nothing wrong with either of them. Good tools.

And then nine, rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Now, are there going to be other things that have to happen in this process? Yes, there are. But you’re going to do those as they need to be done as you grow, as you scale. Very simply guys, it’s nine steps like nine things that you need to wrap your head around. There’s no secrets out there. I’ve given you everything that you need and it’s proven because the people that I’ve met Sellers Summit that came up to me and said, “Scott, I’m doing $500,000. I’m doing $60,000. I’m doing $250,000. I’m doing half a million dollars.”

Like all these people come up to me, they followed exactly what I’m sharing with you. So understand that you don’t need the secrets or the hacks, or the shortcuts, if you want the long-term success, and you want to do it right, that’s how you do it. So guys, I went a little bit longer than I wanted to. But this was a little bit of something that I wanted to get off my chest a little bit in a sense. A little bit of a rant, in a good way, I think. And guys let me know if you want to do more of these. If you want to do more of this mindset stuff? I’ve done this before and I’ve asked and a lot of people said, “Yes.”

[00:38:12] Scott: That’s why I’m doing another one and even people in person said, “Scott, I love them. I want to do more of those. Those are awesome.” I may even do something maybe even weekly or maybe every couple times a week. I might even jump on Facebook live and do something about this because I think it’s so very, very important and so very powerful that I want to be able to get you to be able to get through those sticking points, so you can get the potential out of you. Because there’s so much probably that you have deep inside that you don’t even know are your strengths, until you start down this road, and you start to learn more about yourself as you do this.

Take it from me someone who, again, going all the way back to when I was a 19 year old kid, I did not have that believing in myself as far as in business. I was a young kid, didn’t know a lot, didn’t go to college. Now, if you go back to my high school days when I was playing sports, I was confidence heck. I was a pretty good athlete because I had confidence. Because, again I practiced. I played a lot of sports when I was a kid. But I also played with a lot of older kids. Another tip. Raise the bar. Raise the bar higher than you think. It’s funny. I was talking to my good friend Dom Sugar and you know I haven’t given any public updates with what I’ve been working with him on the side, and I think he’d be cool that at this point, so I’m going to do it anyway.

Dom Sugar is a good friend of mine. Someone that kind of came to me with his own mental little barrier with weight loss. And you know I had a little heart to heart with him. He’s a good friend of mine now I feel he is always part of my family in a sense, and I’d seen that he was not healthy. So I said, “You know what, let’s do something. If you’re up for it let’s do it.”

[00:39:59] Scott: So we kind of came up with a plan, a health plan in a sense, and a fitness and all that stuff, nothing crazy. And it’s been not that long. It’s been less than three months and he’s dropped about 84 pounds, I believe it is, at this point in time. 80 to 85 pounds, somewhere in that range. Crazy, right? He’s dialed in right now, his mindset is really powerful. But the one thing I told him because he would report back to me and say, “You know what? I think I can hit this goal.” And I’m like, “You know what, I think you can do five pounds more.” And he said, “That’s a lot.” And I said, “Yeah. But you know what, I wouldn’t be a good coach if I just let you settle there. I got to have you strive to be better, to do more, to ask more of yourself.” And same thing goes financially.

If you want to make $100,000 a year, why not try to make $150,000 a year? Set your target there, reverse it back. How much is that a day? Go after that target and you know what, if you fall short, it might $120,000 or $125,000. Generally, it’s going to be over what you were shooting for that’s why I always like to shoot for those higher goals. Not out of range goals, just goals that are going to make you stretch we call them stretch goals. So anyway, a little bit of a tangent today. A little bit of a rant but I love doing the ranting thing.

It’s kind of cool because I get this off my chest and it’s what I believe it’s in me. It’s kind of in my DNA, in a sense, to where… I’ve got my daughter who’s 21, going to be 22. I can see just by looking at her that she’s definitely got exactly what I have as far as like that drive and that motivation, and my son now who is 19, who is starting to show signs of it. And my nine year old. I’m just starting to see that we can also, for people that are in our lives, it’s going to help those people as well in our surroundings or if you have kids. So, to me it is contagious and just to understand that it’s a process.

[00:42:00] Scott: So, guys, that’s pretty much what I got for you today. Hopefully, that’s cool. Hopefully, I got you guys thinking and you guys can maybe do a little bit of a mental shift. Maybe even you want to come back maybe bookmark this one. Definitely go check out the show notes, the transcripts, any links that I mentioned will be there as well. theamazingseller.com/369. And again, it’s where we talk all about mindset and that nine step secret formula. Being sarcastic with the secret, by the way.

All right guys. So that’s it. That’s pretty much going to wrap it up. As always, remember I’m here for you and 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, say it proud, we’re in this together guys, “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 <<

…answer your questions here on the podcast and you guys know that are long time listeners it’s one of my favorite days of the week because I get to listen to your questions and answer them for you, and also connect with you. So if you guys have a question, and you have not submitted it yet, you could always head over to theamazingseller.com/ask, and then just leave a question there. All I ask is that you leave your first name, where you’re tuning in from, and then a brief question and I’ll do my best to air it here on an upcoming Ask Scott session.

Now, today what we’re going to be talking about, just to kind of give you an idea, we’re going to be talking about product approval, we’re going to be talking about the open brand versus the full brand, once again. We’re also going to be talking about mixing different platforms and maybe when to do that. We’re also going to be talking about product selection criteria once again. And I’m going to try to give you an idea exactly of the main things that I look for and that I suggest you look for when choosing a product. So that’s what we’re going to be covering here today. Now, before we do jump into those different questions, I did want to give you my thoughts for this week. My thoughts as far as like what kind of hit me this week that’s on my mind. Well, this one right here, and this is a quote from Vince Lombardi. And the quote goes like this, “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” Think about that. Winners never quit and quitters never win.

If you quit, you can’t win. Now, I’ve always talked about, you can’t even win if you don’t start, right? So we have to start and then we have to keep trying. And if it doesn’t work, we have to keep trying. You only fail, you only lose when you quit. Really, really powerful stuff and I do believe that that is the secret formula. A lot of people want the secrets.

[00:02:00] Scott: That’s a big secret right there. Just don’t quit, just learn through the process. I recently did an episode actually, last episode, episode 369 where I talked about mindset and the “secret formula”. I talked all about that in episode 369. If you did not listen to that, definitely, definitely listen to that. So I’m not going to rant here anymore about the mindset and the secret formula, I already did that on 361. But I want you guys to just really, really understand that this is a process and it is going to have its ups and it’s going to have its downs. And I recently was reminded of this when I went to Seller Summit and I met a ton of people, a ton of listeners.

By the way, and if you guys are listening, I want to say thank you so much for sharing your stories with me. But so many people said they might not have did good out of the gate, they just didn’t do as good as they thought. But, they didn’t give up. They didn’t quit. They kept going, they kept moving and they learned through that process. You gotta understand when you are doing anything, not just this but when you’re doing something, you’re learning. And then when you’re learning, you’re able to apply it to the next thing, the next move. So, winners never quit and quitters never win, Vince Lombardi. I love it.

You might want to write that one down and you might even want to print that one out. I’ll link that up in the show notes which I’m going to remind you guys about right now. If you guys want to download the show notes, the transcripts, all the goodies, head over to theamazingseller.com/370. So, what do you say? Let’s go ahead and kick this baby off. Let’s go ahead listen to today’s first question and I will give you my answer let’s do this.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:03:45] Benjamin: Hey Scott, Benjamin here. I love the podcast and find myself listening to them every chance I could get. My question is a little different though. For the longest time, I wanted to sell on Amazon and your book is starting to motivate me but there is a twist. Instead of private label, I’m looking to manufacture my own product. Only problem is that it’s a cosmetic item and subject to Amazon’s requirements. Specifically, providing invoices, business documentation and having a safety assessment from a lab or something.

My question is, how best should I go about this for approval? It looks like the cost of getting started just went up. So should I first try selling my product on eBay? Can you recommend any labs in the US for the safety assessment, and how much it might cost me? Or maybe even what kind of sheets Amazon is looking for. Are the invoices just a receipt that I can print? Thanks a lot for taking the time to hear my question.

[00:04:53] Scott: Hey Benjamin. Thank you so much for the question and thank you so much for being a listener. And yes, this is a little bit of a twist on this question because generally, we are allowing a manufacturer to do all of the heavy lifting. And in this case, you want to manufacture it yourself. Not quite sure why you would want to do that. I would personally look for a manufacturer that can do it for you even on a small run, and then they’re going to be able to take all of that testing and also probably get the approval through Amazon because they’re going to be approved or you’re going to be able to at least get those invoices from a manufacturer.

Now, if you still want to do this yourself, it’s going to be harder. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible by any stretch of the imagination but it is going to be harder. I would probably reach out to someone like Michelle Love, who I’ve had on the podcast. I actually met her at our Phoenix event.

She is actually a private labeler herself but she is also, in her main business when I met her, which still is she’s an insurance broker and she owns an agency, and she specializes in liability insurance. She would probably be someone that I would reach out to and discuss this, and she may be able to point you in the right direction. But, there’s a big ‘but’ here, I would probably just have someone else manufacture it so this way here, you can kind of ride on their coattails a little bit because they’re going to have done all of that for you. They’re going to have the labs lined up, they’re going to have their certificates, they’re going to have all of that stuff and I would definitely say, keep it in the States.

Like keep it in the US because that’s where we can, I can’t say 100% that we can say that there are there are legit but you’re going to see the certificates, you’re going to be able to see all of the stuff, FDA approval, all of that through that company .

[00:06:56] Scott: And they’re also going to be able to connect you to a lab maybe that you’re going to have to get tested. Maybe they won’t even test it for you. You have to have it tested and then you have to give them a certificate. But at least they’re going to give you the connection of where you have to have that done. But I think for you, I think you’re going to have to have a third party manufacture it, but you may have to do your own personal inspections. And if that’s the case, you’re going to need to know who to go to for those inspections or for those lab tests and all of that stuff and the approvals.

So, again, just to give you some of the things that first came to my head, was I would reach out to a manufacturer that’s already currently creating products similar to yours and asking them, and just sitting down, having a conversation and saying, “Listen, this is what I want to do, this is what I need to know.” And then they’re going to say, “Well, in order to sell you’re going to have to have this, this, this and this.” And then you’re going to know that that’s what you need. So I can’t give you that advice. The only thing I can give you is the advice to go out there and find someone that’s currently already doing it and then ask them where to go to get that testing and to kind of move forward in this process for you. But I would say and I would try to figure out again, a way to have that manufactured for you so you’re not manufacturing it.

I don’t think that you want to manufacture it. Well, unless take that back, maybe you already have a manufacturing facility, I don’t know that or maybe you just want to be a third party, a wholesaler, that delivers the product and you don’t even sell it on Amazon. I’m not quite sure. But, from what I gathered, it sounds like you do want to sell it on eBay or Amazon. So if that’s the case, I’m not sure I would want to be the manufacturer. So many people want to do everything and that becomes challenging because now you’re a manufacturer and you’re a seller. Two different animals there. So, again, the resources that I would look into is a manufacturer that’s already currently doing that type of product, reach out to them, have a conversation.

[00:08:56] Scott: And then number two, I would reach out to Michelle Love for liability insurance purposes but also to ask her what needs to be done to make sure that we’re doing everything proper. And then she can probably guide you and direct you to a connection that can then give you further information.

So hopefully this helps you. Good luck, keep me posted and I think that you’ll do fine. I think you have to find the right person to give you the right advice as far as getting the manufacturing done and all the testing. All right guys, let’s go ahead and listen to today’s next question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:09:33] Mike: Hey Scott, how are you? It’s Mike I am joining from far, far away. Actually, from Portugal in Europe. So I’ve been a big fan of your podcast for a long time and I look forward to see you live in the Seller Summit in Florida. And I have two quick questions. First of all, when choosing several products to sell, I look into build a brand of related product so that one brand is covering them all. I know you talked a lot about the open brand idea and from the other hand, I know lately you’ve been saying that the brand doesn’t matter at all.

So you just pick any random products where the numbers are a little good. So even if they are not related at all, Amazon customers won’t care. So which is the best way in your opinion? And the second question is, I know your podcast is mostly about Amazon but I see more and more sellers are looking to expand into Shopify and into other niches and mediums and doing drop shipping, retail arbitrage to avoid being dependent on just Amazon. So are your thoughts about this? Are you going to expand into the other platforms? So thank you again for what you do. You really help a lot and inspire a lot of people from all over the world.

[00:10:57] Scott: Hey, Mike. Thank you so much for the question from, well, another part of the world, which is pretty amazing. So, thank you so much for listening and for submitting your questions. All right. So we’re talking again, once again, about the open brand and then a full brand. And if you guys have not really heard us talk about the open brand concept or a regular full brand concept, we do dive deeper into that in episode 296. So, theamazingseller.com/296. And basically, what we’re talking about here, is being able to launch a variety of types of products under one brand.

So one brand could be XYZ wholesale or XYZ deals, and then you can in a sense, launch anything you want underneath that, that is a product in a specific market. And then from there, you might say, “Oh, here’s a different market with another product that might sell. I’m going to launch that one there.” It’s very similar to doing retail arbitrage underneath one brand. So if you’ve ever done retail arbitrage, you’ve pretty much done the open brand concept. It’s where you have your brand which is you know XYZ deals and then you find something at retail at a huge discount, you list it, it’s a basketball. And then you find a garlic press, and then you find a jump rope, and then you find a fishing rod, and then you… So you find all of these different items and you can launch it underneath that open brand.

The same thing goes in private labeling. We actually are doing that in one of the brands we’re partnered with, with Dom Sugar where what we’ve done, and this was actually Dom’s idea when we decided to kind of do this. He was like, “I have these two main brands.” I think he’s got two brands that are private labeling, very successful but they require a lot of work. And he’s done that and they’re very successful.

[00:12:53] Scott: But he’s like, “There’s some products that I see that I could do well but I’m kind of limited. My hands are kind of tied because they don’t go in my brand.” So it’d be kind of cool to have this open brand that we can just kind of launch anything we want whenever we want if we see something that we feel would sell. And that’s kind of how that idea came.

Now, Greg Mercer has done this pretty much from the beginning and where he has just launched miscellaneous products under just one brand. I think he’s got a few brands. And I think it also comes because his mindset was when he was doing this in the past was he came from wholesale, maybe even some drop shipping, I’m not sure but I know that he’s definitely done wholesale in the past. And when doing that stuff, it’s kind of like you’re just trying to throw a bunch of stuff out there and seeing what sticks. And then he just kind of carried that over to the Amazon space with private label products.

So, the open brand, if you’re just starting, I think is a great place to start because your hands are not tied. Once you go in there and you start to develop that brand, you can say, “Well, I’m going to try a garlic press and then I see something over here. I’m going to try a fishing rod. And then I want to go over here and I’m going to try a jump rope.” Like there’s different things that you can do without you feeling like it doesn’t go with your product line.

Now, if you have this huge passion around something that you know there’s a huge demand for, there’s a huge market for and I use fishing as an example. And if you are in the fishing market and you are a diehard fisherman, then that might be a great avenue for you because you know you’re going to create content around the brand, you’re going to be able to understand the brand, you are going to know what the market wants and needs, like all of that stuff. That’s a different story and that’s a full brand. Again, we’ve kind of played around in both of these and they both work.

But with a full brand, you do have a better opportunity later if you ever want to exit the brand. So that’s the differences. My advice, and it was funny because when I was at the Seller Summit, I had a bunch of people ask me about this like, “If you were to start over again, what would it be? What would you do? Would you do the open branding?” The answer is yes, that’s probably where I would start, unless, like I said, I had someone that was going to the front person, someone that I knew was going to be able to create content, and also a brand that I knew there was a ton of demand and it wasn’t going away, it wasn’t a trend.

[00:15:08] Scott: With the open brand, you can do trend products. You can do products that you think might only last a year because they’re trending. So, again, that’s the open brand versus the big full brands that we talked about. So that would be my advice. Depending on where you are, depending on what you have available around you, then I would go open brand. Now, the other thing is as far as mixing platforms. That also is going to come down to, do you have an open brand or do you have a full brand? If you have an open brand, the easiest thing to do is then just put it up on eBay or another channel like that that’s easy to just kind of put that product up. If you’re building a brand then it would make sense for like Shopify or your own ecommerce store and those types of things.

So it’s going to it’s going to make a difference depending on what you’re doing in the open brand versus a real full brand. Right? So I can’t really say that you should definitely do Shopify or you should definitely do a Click Funnels website with maybe some funnels that you built for it. You can still do that stuff in the open brand but honestly, if I was going to do it in the open brand, it would be around like one or two or three products that were related to each other and I would build a little mini funnel that I could then drive external traffic to, if I was going to go down that road.

Which we’re actually going to be dabbling in in the open brand that I’m partnering with Dom. So we’re going to be playing around with that. We have a few products that they go well together and there’s definitely times of the year that these do better than others, and we will probably be testing that out as well. So, that’s my thoughts on mixing the platforms.

If you have a full brand, yes, you definitely want to start selling that on other platforms. I would start with the easier ones and then from there, start reaching out to other ones that you haven’t tapped into yet. So, hopefully, that answered your question. Thank you again so much for those questions. Let’s go ahead and listen to one more quick question. I’ll give you my answer, we will wrap this up and you can get on with your weekend. What do you say? Let’s do this.

[00:16:59] Jack: Hi, Scott. This is Jack in Charlotte, North Carolina. I hope you’re doing well. Thanks so much for all you do. I was wondering if you have a PDF or it’s somewhere in your show notes or you have a chart somewhere, that sort of lays out exactly what you’re looking for in the product research phase as far as product number one, what do you want the BSR to be and how many reviews you’re looking for?

Product two, same to metrics three, four and five maybe. Do you have that somewhere? I’ve heard you go over this a lot. But I’m a little confused and I would love to know exactly best case scenario, what would you want product number one to have with those two metrics two, three, four and five? If you could point me in the right direction or maybe answer the question on an upcoming episode, that would be awesome. Thanks a lot man, be well.

[00:17:58] Scott: Hey, Jack. Thank you so much for the question. And, I think we’re kind of like neighbors. You’re in Charlotte and I’m just outside of Charlotte. I’m in South Carolina just on the edge. I’m about 25 minutes or 30 minutes from Charlotte. So we’re kind of like neighbors. And I also wonder if you’re going to be at the North Carolina meet up. If you guys have not heard, we’re going to doing a meet up June 23^rd. It’s official now. Well, it’s an unofficial official meet up where it’s just we’re going to hang out, we’re going to meet in greet and talk shop a little bit. Meet other TASers in the area.

If you guys want more information about that in North Carolina, head over to theamazingseller.com/nc for North Carolina. Go check that out, I’ve got an event page up there. If you listen to this after the fact well, you can still go to that page and see if we’re going to be doing another one in the area anytime soon. Because I do plan on doing other one seeing that I am here local in North Carolina or just outside of North Carolina toward Charlotte.

Anyway, let me get your question here. So I get this question a lot. Scott, what are the metrics? What is the criteria? What are the things that we look at? And I’ve got a pretty good little system that I kind of run through. I go through that exact validation process on episode 189. So, theamazingseller.com/189. And pretty much nothing has really changed from that although I probably will be doing an updated one soon. So if you did want to see the updated one, if I have done one by the time you listen to this, I’ll put it in the show notes of this episode and then you can go ahead and listen to that or actually watch me do that. I mean 189, I actually show you, in a video of me actually going through the validation process. But what I’m looking for is really five things or there’s five steps to this. Let me say there’s five steps.

Number one is your sales. So I want to see sales I’m not even going to consider if the sales, the volume, the depth is not there.

[00:19:58] Scott: I want to be proven that there’s products selling enough for me to get interested. And for me, it’s following the 10 by 10 by 1, which is I need 10 units being sold a day, at $10 profit, and that’s one product. So that’d be $100 per day per product. That’s the goal. For every product we launch, we want to do at least $100 in profit eventually, not right out of the gate. And I want people to not be misunderstood with that, a lot of people say, “Well, Scott. I launched and it’s not at $10 it’s at like $8 or something.”

And I’m like, “That’s the target. It doesn’t mean that where we’re going to… It’s not where we’re going to finish. We might have to reduce our costs or our price, in the beginning, to get velocity so that we’re there, we can start to rank and all that fun stuff.” But I want to look at sales. Is there enough depth and demand? And the one mistake I see a lot of people making is they’ll go, “Yes, Scott. The top three are selling 500 each so that’s 1,500. So that’s good, right?” And the answer is, “Not really.” Because we want more depth than that.

I take usually the 1^st listening through the 10^th listing. We add those up collectively and we’d like to see 3,000 units being sold per month. So, I’m using Jungle Scout, that’s how I do it. If you’re going to do this by BSR, then you’ve got to know what a BSR is that’s doing 10 units a day. I say, just get the tool. I’ve mentioned it a bunch of different times that that’s like the number one tool that I would be using, right out of the gate. If you guys want to receive a discount on that, I do have an affiliate link that you guys can go through, which will be some extra resources there for you a little shameless plug there. theamazingseller.com/js for Jungle Scout. Go check it out. But that’s what I use. And then from there, I can look at all of these things really, really quickly That’s part of that process.

So I like to look at sales first. Number one thing because if it doesn’t have enough sales, that means I’m probably not going to get sales. That’s what I’m after. The second part of this is the reviews. This basically allows me to see how competitive this space is or this product.

[00:22:04] Scott: If I immediately see that there’s reviews that are 800 or 1,000 or 2,000, it’s too competitive for me. That means that if, I’m saying if, if people are shopping and then looking at reviews to make their decision, it’s going to be a long road for me. But if I find that there’s 3,000 sales generated between 10 listings and all of them or under 200 reviews, that’s pretty good news. That means people are buying with low reviews. So it’s not review driven. Better than that, if you can find products that are selling that only have 100 or less reviews, again, that’s going to be better for you because now it’s easier for you to make those sales because they’re not competing on reviews. So that’s one thing that I’m going to look at. That’s the second thing.

The third thing is, we’ve got to see that it’s selling far enough. So the third little checkpoint here is your price. Is it selling for $19 or more? And I used $19 it could be $18. It could $16, if your margins are right if you can buy it for a dollar or two and you can still sell it. But then, again, you have to make sure that you’re always going to be able to get at least your $16 or $17. That’s why if you go for $19 and you buy it right, that’s usually a good rule of thumb obviously, the more you can charge the better. But I also want to make sure that I’m not seeing people and they are low balling it already out of the gate because that means that eventually, it’s going to start getting low balled.

And then the fourth thing that I’m looking at is the history. The history. You might look at these numbers and go, “Oh, wow. Look at that someone selling 500 units a month and they’ve only got four reviews. Awesome. That’s a home run.” And you’re not seeing that they just launched like three weeks ago and they did a huge launch with maybe a slick deal offer or a fat wallet offer.

[00:24:03] Scott: Maybe they did something to get an influx of sales and you didn’t see that because you didn’t do the research of going back and looking at the history. So I always, always use the history of that product by looking at either Camelcamelcamel or Keepea. If you’re in Jungle Scout, all you gotta do is click on the price, it’ll bring up Keepa and then you can see the history of the price and also tell you how long it’s been tracking for, as far as how long they have data for, so that’ll tell you how old the product is.

The other thing is you can do the BSR, you can see how it’s had spikes in the BSR over time and it will give you… Really I’m looking for making sure that they haven’t just started selling like three to three weeks ago or a month ago. I want to know that they’ve been at this thing for over three, four, five months at least. And that’s how I would do that. So that’s step four in this process.

And then five, is I would go over to Google Trends and again, there’s another feature in Jungle Scout you can do this. Just look at Google Trends and then you can see how it’s been trending. Is it trending up, is it trending down, is there different times of the year that it trends higher than others? All of that stuff. So there’s my like five point checkpoint list. Like these are the things that I go through. So number one is sales. I look at the top 10 listings. Number two is reviews. I’m going to see that they’re still selling with 200 or less reviews. Then three, I’m going to look at the price. Make sure that I’m going to be able to charge enough for it. And then four, I look at the history going back through whether it’s the BSR or whether it’s their price, see how the price is fluctuating, all those things. And then five is Google Trends. And again, I go through this entire process in episode 189.

So check that episode out or go to the show notes of this page, theamazingseller.com/370 and if I have something done by the time this airs, I’ll put it there. If not, check back, and I’ll try to include it there and I’ll probably do an entire podcast on what I just went through in a little bit more detail after I go ahead and shoot that video.

[00:26:06] Scott: But 189 is exactly what I still do to this day. So definitely go check that out. All right guys. So I think that is going to wrap up this episode. I did want to remind you guys if you have a question that you want me to ask on an upcoming Ask Scott session, head over to theamazingseller.com/ask, and you can do that. And I’ll remind you also that the show notes to this episode can be found at theamazingselleer.com/370. All right guys. And remember this last one little thing that I mentioned in the beginning from Vince Lombardi. Winners never quit and quitters never win.

All right guys, that’s going to officially wrap this up. Guys, remember I’m here for you, I believe in you, and I am rooting for you but you have, 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]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…one of our latest TAS Power Hours which I feel is full of great information. And let me just give you a little background here on the TAS Power Hour and the way that that really started. Myself and Chris Shaffer and Don Sugar, we’re good friends. We’re also partners in a brand but we tend to talk about this stuff on Skype.

Like we hook up on Skype and we’ll just have a conversation and we said, “You know what, it would be really cool if we could kind of do this and also let everyone listen in.” That’s where the Power Hour kind of came from. And after I got back from Seller Summit, it had a lot of people say love, love, love the TAS Power Hour. I love listening to Dom’s stories because Dom has been doing this for over 15 plus years in this business all the way from just regular retail brick and mortar, to going online and starting there and eBay and then Retail Arbitrage. And over the past few years, private label.

So it’s awesome for all of us to get on Chris’s got a wealth of information and I’ve dabbled in this Amazon space as you guys know. So it’s a way for us to jump on and trade notes and talk about things that are happening right now and also what we see people struggling with. So this week, just to kind of give you some of the topics that we talk about, we talk about trend products in bundles, we talk about accessory product challenges and ranking, and what that basically means is if you’re building a product suite around a main product, how that can be a challenge and also how to rank.

We also talk about the open brand, again we talk about the pros and the cons because we’re all dabbling in both of those. We talk about launch costs, we talk a little bit about gambling. Actually Dom gambling and how it relates to private labeling or this whole online space and we had a little disagreement there, not too much, but we disagreed a little bit.

[00:02:04] Scott: But this entire episode is really full, full of great information and that’s why I’m airing it here on the podcast. If you guys want to attend one of our live TAS Power Hours, then you’re definitely going to want to make sure that you are connected through Facebook, through the TAS community. If you’re not part of that community, head over to theamazingseller.com/fb, and this way here you’ll never miss one of those TAS Powers Hours. Or at least you can go back and watch the replay because we do those live on Facebook and they’ll be there in side of that community.

One last thing before I turn it over to the recording, is I wanted to remind you on the show notes you’ll probably want to download the show notes, the transcripts to this episode and if you do, you can head over to theamazingseller.com/371. All right so I’m going to stop talking now so you can enjoy this episode, this conversation that I had with my good friends Mr. Chris Shaffer and Dom Sugar. Sit back, relax and enjoy.

[POWER HOUR]

[00:03:08] Scott: What’s been happening with you Dom this past week? What’s been going on?

[00:03:11] Dom: Same old, same old. I was working with getting some new shipments in for the open brand and there are two or three ASINs for my other brands. And then to Retail Arbitrage stuff as always. Always truckloads stuff coming in. So that basically would be it. Figure out logistics and because I would obviously would love that we talked to change a few things of doing what to direct to Amazon. So, the first couple times were not very smooth so, I’m trying to make sure that the process works good.

I’ve heard it’s pretty fast if you used DHL kind of stuff like Chris used, maybe you guys have used. But you know it’s only 20, 30 cases it’s not but I’m sending 10,000/15,000 pieces so it’s a little crazier than that. They love doing it by air and the logistics freight forward, they bringing it in bond and then it is delivered to Amazon. But when it is with port fees and duties and all that stuff, it’s a lot harder. So fight through that and we heard back from a couple of products that we got Guided Imports to look into, so those are three new products that we’re getting ready to work on and that’s been a struggle this year.

Just because we’ve got so much on the go a TAS all that stuff moving on, it’s just… I haven’t been able to focus on releasing more private label stuff. We are used during two or three a month you know now we’re down to one a month or two every two months. So that’s been the challenge for me this year. I just find that my focus isn’t there right now. It is but it isn’t, you know what I am saying? Like I’ll do a couple hours here, a couple hours there instead of a whole week. So now all the people that I work with are like, “Okay, let’s get this done” Before I’d be after them say, “Okay, hurry up, hurry up I want to get my order.” Now they’re emailing me and calling me and say, “Hey, what’s going on? We haven’t got your proofs, your UPC codes or your box images.

[00:05:02] Dom: So that’s been a struggle but again, that’s also because we’re trying to do a product that’s not really available on Amazon too. Chris and Scott knows a lot of what the products are. So it’s not like we’re taking something that’s already there and just making it a little better or actually trying to launch products that maybe there’s one or not even one person with that product. So we have to take from two or three factories and amalgamate all those parts and stuff. So that’s probably one of the reasons why it’s been more difficult. But besides that, you know…

[00:05:30] Scott: I think before we move on from that because people will say, “Well, Scott, don’t you think that you should launch products that are currently selling?” “Yes we are. That’s what we’re doing.” What we’re doing though, as a side little thing here, is we’re trying to see a trend that could be happening that we can then compile a few different products together and make our own little package, if that makes sense.

So, it’s kind of like we have something that we know is selling maybe in other marketplaces or whatever, and then we’re able to then say, maybe this is something that’s going to trend, we’ll do a test order, and then we can kind of go. And that’s kind of what we did with the one product that we launched with very little promotions and just some pay-per-click and… By the way, give me an update on Dom. I haven’t checked in with them. How’s that been doing?

[00:06:14] Dom: It’s slowed down for about a week there and I thought, “Okay, this is it.” Like we said, we’ll do 30, 40 a day and it drop down to like 15, 18, 20. And then yesterday I think we did another 40, 50 units in the open… I think we did 130, 140 units to open brand yesterday and that’s with limited stock because we’re still trying to get my Christmas stock back in. So it’s pretty amazing that it’s still going. Again, we’re the only one basically in the marketplace, there’s a couple of people that got into it but not the same type of product, maybe for the same main product but their accessories is a little different than ours or whatever it was. So it’s so good.

[00:06:55] Scott: You know what Dom, I’m finding a very similar situation in the new brand that we launched, which you know what that is. We have like let’s see how many SKUs do we have now, Chris? What is it? One, two with variations. With variations, four? Yeah I think four with variations.

[00:07:16] Chris: There is four in Amazon right now, yes.

[00:07:17] Scott: Yeah, four and there’s more coming. But, with that being said, there’s not really any of those products that are being searched for. The main product is being searched for. But we have accessories that are add-ons, in a sense, and I’m finding that to be a little bit of a challenge. But, I do know that eventually we’ll start showing up as frequently bought together or ‘customers who viewed this also viewed this’. We’re getting ready to launch some products that are searched for, that are very highly searched for and then that will lead people in. I’m starting to see it’s starting to pick up a little bit with a couple of those SKUs.

But, that is one of the challenges I think that when you’re trying to add an accessory for something, you’re going after the main product, let’s say, but you’re adding accessories. People might not even know that those things are accessories at this time. They’re not searching for them. But if they see them, they might want them. So, I’m finding that to be a little bit of a struggle but not really too concerned because I know that once we get that cross promotion or frequently bought together, it will start to kind of take on life on its own. And then also the products that we’re going to be launching or highly search for, those will get us in the game.

[00:08:36] Dom: Yeah, it’s because your main keywords, just like we’re on a product and we’re talking about. Even when I first started three-four years ago, I had the same issue. Because your main product is a big product and people are searching that term, they already know is going to be on page 15 until you move the algorithm. Now, you might be that term plus another term you’ll show up. I mean it depends how much PPC you’re going to allocate to that actual term and all that types of stuff.

And we have the same thing in my second brand, the second company that I opened, we’re an accessory, strict accessory. We can never rank right away for the main keyword. Just because those companies had 100 products. Not even the same product but the same company would launch different product. So you have to sort of pass all their products until you get that. Now we’re at the top, right? Because you know all the old accessory keywords or the long tail keywords we started ranking pretty fast on it.

So I think with that probably we’re going to have it. But, again, because it’s going to be a one stop shop. It’s the same way when you launch… I mean that’s why people like to launch a brand whether it’s your brand or where else is doing it, versus what we’re doing the open brand. Again, I like both models but the brand model works because it’s the same thing like a 7-Eleven now or your gas. They got gas, they got the lottery, they got cigarettes, they’ve got fruit, they’ve got pop, they’ve got everything in there.

You just go in and buy one thing. That’s why Walmart sells now because they you know because they have so much food. And that’s why Amazon got in groceries, the same reason, one stop. You don’t have to go anywhere else. You can go buy all your Amazon except for perishables, which I think is going to start eventually. So once you have perishables…

So why would you go anywhere else? It’s the same concept. For your product, you can launch 25 things even if you’re not the most competitively priced. You can be $2 higher or $5 higher and someone’s still going to buy it because they’re just going to add it on to their cart and get to that $35 threshold. So that’s one good thing about having a brand.

[00:10:36] Dom: The bad thing about it is if it’s especially a trend brand if that trend dies, your whole brand dies with it. If you built your whole brand around an iPhone 4 you’re pretty well finished or if you did nothing but Blackberry accessories, good luck. You wouldn’t make any money now. So that’s the problem with that doing it that way.

[00:11:00] Scott: You would have to almost then plan the next move in that brand.

[00:11:04] Dom: Yeah, you’d have to pivot it. You have a generic name. It’s not like you’re calling that product accessory, you could just turn into whatever the next item is. There’s always… Especially the space you’re in it’s always turning every two to three months there’s new stuff coming out. So you could just say, “Okay, I’m done with this type of stuff and then we’re going to move into this. And that’s it. That’s the beauty part. And the best thing is you don’t lose your feedback and all your history and all that.

[00:11:32] Scott: No, I agree. And, again, there’s pros and cons and it was funny at that Seller Summit. I had a pretty packed room actually, which was pretty… I was surprised because I was going up against each of Steve Chou of his own event. And there was two trucks going in and I was talking about how to launch a product on Amazon without needing incentivized reviews. I talked a little bit about the open brand product and also the most recent launch that we did using an email list and all that stuff.

And it was funny I had a full packed room which was amazing. And anyone that’s watching, there is some people that say they watch the TAS Power Hour. I want to thank you guys for showing up, supporting my presentation. And a lot of you said they got a ton of value from that. I got a lot of people that said, “What do you mean to feel like the Open Brand? What does that mean?”

Again guys, if you guys are just tuning in and you don’t know what we’re talking about, an open brand is really having the flexibility under one main brand. Like a mean brand of XYZ wholesale or XYZ deals, and then you launch kitchen accessories and sporting, outdoors or sporting goods, or maybe it’s fishing, or maybe it’s camping or maybe it’s, I don’t know, toys or whatever. You’re able to do that under that open brand umbrella. And then from there you can, it’s kind of like a retail arb account in a sense, to where you can have miscellaneous things, it’s just you’re going to call yourself like XYZ deals or whatever and that gives you the flexibility.

And someone asked me like, “Scott if you were to start from scratch, what would you do? If I didn’t have any type of direction or brand in mind, I would do the open brand without any question. Because it gives you that freedom of testing really quickly, like rapidly. And then you can move and say, “Okay, you know what, that didn’t really take off, so I’m going to go ahead and try something else.” And then you can keep playing with that.

But, if you had something, some direction or maybe you already have a brick and mortar store and you’re into some type of accessory for camping or maybe you are a sports and outdoor store or whatever then your natural next move is to put it on Amazon.

[00:13:34] Scott: And if you do that… I mean we met a company, Chris, we met a company there. They’re doing like millions of dollars on their own site and now they’ve graduated and went over to Amazon and they’re just scratching the surface and they actually, they’d run out of inventory in the Amazon and it tells you like how much are how much money you lost because you didn’t actually get to sell that. Their screenshot, Dom, was $980,000 that they lost when they ran out of inventory.

[00:14:02] Dom: That’s a lot of money and that’s crazy.

[00:14:06] Scott: No, no. Actually, their not. They are actually selling like little tricky type stuff that’s like probably what Chris? $20 to $30.

[00:14:15] Chris: It’s anywhere 20 to 100 bucks.

[00:14:17] Scott: All right. So, $20 to $100 part. But I mean they’re doing massive, massive, massive amounts of volume on their own sites.

[00:14:23] Chris: I was going to rant. I want to say thanks to everybody. We did get a lot of Power Hour love at Seller Summit and that was always followed up with what we brought up earlier which was a little bit of love for Dom. And just a little disappointment that he wasn’t there with us as well. So Power Hour is gaining some traction.

[00:14:43] Dom: Chris, your audio is a little choppy but I think we understood you. I think you said that it’s needs some traction.

[00:14:51] Dom: He is running 37. Thirty up, seven down or whatever it is. I mean I don’t know.

[00:14:59] Scott: All right. So the other thing I wanted.

[00:15:01] Dom: And that’s what we want though.

[00:15:03] Scott: Yeah. Exactly I want to answer some questions. It seems like we’ve got a bunch of questions coming in as well. A bunch of people around right now. Guys do me a favor. Like I said, share this, like it, whatever you can do to give it a little of love, keep us coming back. We don’t want to not do the TAS Power Hour, but if you guys keep showing up, we’ll keep coming back. So I definitely want to see any questions you guys have and we can help you guys. We definitely want to do that.

I also want to talk about the email that actually it’s not even been sent out yet, it’s going to be sent out at like 3:30. I think I’m going to send it out. But I talk a little bit about in there like, people came up to me they’re like, “Scott, what is the secret formula? Like if no one’s listening, can you tell me…What do you guys talk? What do you and Dom, and Chris talk about behind the scenes that you don’t really let everyone know about? What’s the secret’s like?” And I’m like, “There is none.”

[00:15:56] Dom: KFC. It’s the spices.

[00:16:02] Scott: So here’s the deal. And it kind of annoys me that there’s some people in our community that build up hype around the tactics and strategies and hacks, and all these things and get us interested. I went on a little bit of a rant in my email, just a very little rant it’s not too much but just a little rant. But I went through like everything that it takes. And we just did our workshop last night. Now our workshop guys, if you guys did not attend that, directly check that out because we’re not going to be doing another workshop for about six to eight weeks.

We’re taking a little bit of a break because I’m going to be traveling a little bit. We’ve got some plans to go to Mexico, like you heard, with Dom and family. And we also are doing a North Carolina meet up which we are almost confirmed on the meeting location. I’ve got a funny story about that too. Remind me to share that story.

But, it comes down to really just doing exactly what we’re saying but also being willing to put in the work. So many people think that there’s this hacker, there’s this secret and then it’s all of a sudden going to happen. It’s not the case. Everyone I talked to there, they pretty much said their first product might not have been successful and then they pivoted, and then went on to something else. Actually, I met a guy there that said he launched first product, it did, okay, but it just didn’t do what he thought. He pivoted and now he’s doing $250,000.

Because he adjusted. He didn’t abandon the model. The model works clearly. Dom, I ran into some people there too, it was amazing, it blew me away. I had one lady, she came up to me and she’s like, “Scott, I just want to let you know I’m a huge fan of the podcast, I’ve listened since day one. You guys are awesome. You’ve helped me so much. And oh, by the way, I’ve done $1.4 million since listening to your podcast.” I’m like, “Okay, well, you mean the email me that stuff because that gets me really, really fired up to get back on and look into this microphone and start broadcasting.”

[00:18:00] Dom: Did you did ask her where your 10% was?

[00:18:03] Scott: Yeah, right.

[00:18:05] Chris: Have you ever noticed that statements always prefaced with, “I’ve only done around four million?”

[00:18:12] Scott: But she also went on to say that, “It wasn’t all easy, I had some growing pains, I had to figure this out. This didn’t work. My freight forward did this.” Yada, yadda, yadda. But she goes, I expected that. It’s business. Like if this were her husband are from the corporate world. So the funny thing is I met her… And then I left and went on to the next room and I started talking to other people, and then I came back on and I start talking this guy this guy. And this guy is like, “Hey, Scott, I am a big listener of the podcast.” Then he keeps going through it. Come to find out, it’s her husband. So it’s husband and wife team. They came to me, they both told me a similar story and then it was just funny we all laughed. And I said, “Wow, I got to hear the story twice.” So that was really awesome.

I had another guy come up, actually a young guy, a landscaper. He said, “Scott, I just want to let you know, I’ve been listening to you for probably about eight, nine months. I took action. I went out there, I listened to you as I was doing people’s lawns. I owned a landscaping company.” And he was like, “I think…” How old was he? Probably like 25 or less than 30. And he’s done over $500,000 since starting. And he’s like, “Scott, I want to thank you.” And then actually Dom, he’s from Hawaii. So he already said we’ve got connections in Hawaii. So when we’re ready, he said, he’ll take care of us. And then the other thing that he said if he shared what he’s doing. He shared what he’s doing with a 16 year old and that 16 year old now is crushing it on Amazon he said.

[00:19:38] Dom: I mean I’ve said that too. Even the guys though my warehouse here, our staff, I’m like, “Guys you gotta jump on this. You see we talk about it every day. You guys are in the retail arb. You help me list stuff. You guys are 20, 21, 22. I wish I had this opportunity when I was your age.” I honestly I’d be retired at 40 if I did seriously like that just the way it would work, because you could just… You know in 10 years you could build up a lot of products. So you have to take advantage of that. I mean we don’t have that advantage. We’re in our 40s almost 50s not Chris but me and you. Chris is just a little guy. But you know what I’m saying. We’re starting late. My retail arb started when I was in my mid-20s but again…

[00:20:24] Scott: But Dom, you put in the work. You put in the work. And that’s another thing that I went on a little rant. I’m like people come out and go, “Scott, men, you got so lucky that’s awesome.” And I’m like, “Go back and listen to episode 300. I’ve done a lot to get where I am.” And Charles just says, meet up in Hawaii, I like it. Charles was there as well. Charles was looking for you too Dom.

[00:20:47] Dom: That’s good.

[00:20:48] Scott: Charles, men. I just want to say, awesome meeting you again there and hanging out with you and you’re always a rock star. I want to thank you so much for being a huge supporter of TAS, you’re awesome. Charles and you’re doing some amazing things as well. But yeah, definitely Hawaii that sounds fun. But yeah, you put in the work, Dom. Let’s not ignore that.

[00:21:09] Dom: No. We’ve said that from the beginning. You know it’s like we 20 years of stumbling over myself to get to where we are now. To have a high-level retail arb and three to four big companies on Amazon separated with partners. You, my fam, all that stuff. It just didn’t happen. I didn’t create hundreds of ASINs myself. I had to work for that you know. It’s the same thing and everyone asks me the same question. “How do you do it?

You seem you know what you’re doing, you have the magic touch.” I get that all the time. I said, “It’s not really that.” I said, “If somebody says don’t release a garlic press, I don’t release it.” And if we talk about a product down here or Greg Mercer talks about a product, I’m not going to release that product. Because you know a hundred other people are going to do the same thing because he’s showing that it sells. I am just using as an example.

And then you got to trip over yourself and you got to be well… Here it is Nick Gamble is a perfect person. You got to be able to gamble. He gambled, he’s lost on his gamble and he’s doing well. You got to be able to lose $1,000 and not think about it twice. I always use the casino reference you guys know that. I’ve said it a million times. You walk at a casino, you got to know you are able to lose that $1,000. If you lose a thousand then you can’t pay your rent tomorrow, it’s not a good business right now.

[00:22:25] Scott: The one difference though Dom, is when you throw $1,000 at something and then you see how it works or not, you take education away from that. On the roulette table you don’t really gain anything other than, “Holy crap, I just  lost a  grand.”

[00:22:41] Dom: Yeah. I’ve just saying that if you fail, at least you already know yourself, okay. I mean the positive-negative. I don’t expect to make lots of money today. Oh, my God. I worked over a thousand bucks a year. You’re already downplaying your success in if you if you don’t win, okay, you’re not really mad, and if you do win, you’re really happy. So it’s the same thing with private label. And again, you just have to… We said a million times.It’s all product selection guys. It’s really what it is.

[00:23:07] Scott: It’s product selection and willing to pivot when you need to pivot. Don’t marry a product.

[00:23:12] Dom: And that’s why the open brand is good because I see sort of people that get into the brand company, they release a first, go to second. By time they get to their third product, it’s so saturated. They’re like, “What am I going to do now? I’m already two products in.” Or you know what, just do the open brand and go into another category then. Don’t give up because it’s not it all. And that’s how we kind of started the open brand, Scott. After our third brand or third account, we were like, “Okay, we’ve got you know what products up.”

I’m like, “We want to releases this other product that is going to sell for like 30 bucks.” And it was just saturated. So we kind of got to a dead end and I forget about this. I’m going to fight with these brands anymore, I’m just going to start releasing whatever I want to release, whenever I want to and take advantage of it that way. So there’s really no secret sauce. Yes, there’s a lot of hype there’s a lot of hype in this game, there’s a lot of false information or you know you get quick hype. Do this. This is going to happen.

[00:24:02] Scott: Well, I think it’s like, “Let’s make it sexy.” Like, let’s make that the new hack, the new this, the new that. You know what I mean? It takes work.

[00:24:11] Dom: Of course, and I like hearing. Listen, so maybe here somebody comes up to me and say, “Look, I did $12,000 this year or I did $8,000. Sold this far this one private label.” That’s good because what did you make last month? Nothing, zero. So $12,000 or $50,000 to go here or $3,000 times 12 months, It doesn’t have to be $1.5 million, it doesn’t have to be… Again these are these really success stories. And yes everybody wants that freedom and they want that.

For me to get those levels, I’ve had to work a lot of time to do that and we’re at those levels. And we are releasing stuff. I could stop today and not have to release one more product it would be. I can give it to all my retail arb now. I just do private label if I wanted to. But why? Because we’re successful at both, we can handle both.

[00:24:53] Scott: Well, let’s talk to your wife about that second part there.

[00:24:56] Dom: Well, yeah. She gets scared when she hears, “Ti, ti, ti, ti.” And these big semi-trucks are coming in and drop it off stuff.

[00:25:05] Scott: She is like, “What did you order now Dom?” “Well, I cleared out that other liquidation over there. I know we can sell it. You got to realize like I buy it for a dollar and sell it for 10. Come on let’s make money.

[00:25:15] Dom: Even today, I looked at 35 more skids. 35 more pallets of media stuff. I mean it’s hard. You know what a couple hundred dollars a pallet and there’s $5,000, $10,000 with the stuff on the pallet. It’s hard to say no to. I mean people would love to be my position for retail arb, right?

[00:25:31] Chris: Sure, sure.

[00:25:32] Dom: And like they want to get my stuff. They want to get this type of stuff. So I kind of like of like, and it’s a competitive thing too, you don’t want anybody else to take it because I know if I don’t take it the next guy, they’re going to put on the eBay and Amazon and compete against me. So yeah I know you’re right. I mean the love would be transitioned strictly to private label. But I think I’ll always have that. I like to buy stuff and you can’t buy. When I buy private label is just 10,000 pieces of one thing. When I buy at retail arb, it’s 10,000 mixed. It could be 300 this, 200 that. I don’t think there’s any secret thing. Everybody on this panel you, me, Chris. We are all successful because we put time in it.

We started at the bottom but we also learned our work ethic when we were kids. Like I said, my variety started at 13 years old. Working two or three jobs when I was in high school to pay for my insurance even though my parents were well off and stuff. They still say, “Look here, you have to pay your insurance, you have to pay your gas.” So I worked at a grocery store and I worked in a sign place to make signs. The generation now it’s like, “Okay, give me an iPad and a phone I’m going to sit my room for four hours.”

I deal with it with my daughter. It’s like, give, give, give take. It’s always take, take, take. So, again, this only business model that I’ve known and I’ve been in lots whether it’s wholesale or a drop shipping or brokering or door to door or telemarketing, the only business if you put a lot of work into it and you do your research right, you can have a successful business within a year.

There’s no way. Most businesses lose money for two to three or four years. Any brick and mortar store, ask anybody unless you open up something that’s hype. If you open up the UFC store when UFC was hotter, a scrap hawking store when scrap hawking was really hot. But then where are those stores now? They’re on my emails, closing bankrupt because they went a brick and mortar trend they thought they could you know for great two, three years they made lots of money because they didn’t pivot. They didn’t say, okay. Well, Anyways….

[00:27:21] Scott: Okay, what I want to do here really quickly, Chris. I know we’ve got questions probably come in and… If you have questions, put them the chat here I am pointing with a pen now. What am I doing? So put in your questions. I did want to say something here. Again, I got a lot of stuff I want to share about this week because it was just awesome. I did a roundtable session with people that had attended or that wanted to attend that were at my presentation.

The one thing that people said to me, they said, “Scott, when you first start, when you launch a product, when do you start to…” Not even that. “I don’t want to lose money. I want to be able to just sell the product and make money. I don’t want to put my order in or my inventory in and then sell something and not make money.” And I go, “Well, number one, that’s the wrong mindset. And I like to go back and give this, and it’s funny, here’s a story for you.

I’m sitting there and after I, basically this is what I shared, I said, “Listen, people have been doing this for years. If you have a brand new store, brick and mortar, no one knows that you’re here, you’re going to run a grand opening something, right? Newspaper ads, maybe billboards, you’re going to let people know, radio. And then you’re going to have like a tent with hot dogs and hamburgers and you’re going to have the clown, and you’re going to have the bouncy bounces, and all this stuff. And then you’re hoping that people are going to go, ‘Oh cool. I’m here I might as well create a new bank account I’m a bank because am at the bank. Right?’ Or “Oh, these guys are really family orientated. I want to do business with them.””

That’s what you’re hoping for. And people are all like, “Oh okay. I get it.” So private labeling it’s the same thing. When we’re first getting our order in there and when we’re starting to do our little launch, we’re basically not thinking we’re going to make money right out of the gate. We’ll just saying this is part of our promotion. This is part of the way that we can get seen because Amazon is going to give us love after we get the sales. That’s what they do and then we start to rank then we start to get eyeballs, all of that stuff.

[00:29:25] Scott: As soon as I got them talking about, everybody got it, they agreed. “Okay, I get it now, I get it.” I left that table and I had a gentleman walk off and he goes, “Hey, I just wanted to tell you I’ve been doing brick and mortar stuff for years. We used to budget $10,000 for a grand opening.” $10,000 for a grand opening on a brick and mortar! So, you want to have maybe let’s say you order 1,000 units you want to allocate 500 units as like you’re launching material, that’s basically part of the process. Now you might not have to do that as aggressively. Maybe it’s not doing a 50% off discount like we just did.

Maybe it’s running pay-per-click heavily and not making money on the pay-per-click it’s getting that exposure. But understanding that the money that you’re putting into right now is really to build the foundation so you can be rooted. So this way here right now in our new brand we’re getting set and ready so when the traffic starts coming in especially when it gets hot maybe even in the fourth quarter, we’re going to be rooted very deeply within this product line and within these keywords.

So I just wanted to say that because I thought that was interesting that people were getting that and then a gentleman came up to me and says, “You were spot on with the grand opening example, it makes total, total sense.” Chris, did you want to say something?

[00:30:39] Chris: Yeah. The other thing, let me know if I just start going Mr. Roboto on you. He said they didn’t expect… He launched a series of stores and they projected them to be non-profitable for the first three years. So it’s $10,000 to launch and then they didn’t expect to break even for three years. And Dom you hit it right on the head earlier. This is one of the very few business models where you can be profitable very, very quickly if not even on that first order. And Scott, I know like we’re going to be right around break-even on that first order of that first product, if not he got a little bit of profit even with doing that promotional stuff, and that PPC.

I know you and I were going through the second checker we got back from that brand last night said, “Man, look at that. Look at how much we would have gotten back if we weren’t running PPC,” And then you kind of walk away from that and you go, but we want to be rooted. We want to have that foundation and we want to be in so that as we’re doing this stuff, we can let the organic stuff take back over and then we don’t have to worry about it as much.

[00:31:43] Scott: Yeah and basically what Chris is talking about is, there was like a two week, you know you get paid every two weeks. Well, we kind of looked at our pay-per-click cost because our pay-per-click cost comes out of our pay. We have it going out of our pay versus going out of credit card. So it was basically in two weeks we spent $611 on pay-per-click. And that was really to drive those sales. So we didn’t make any money on that run but we were able to get sales, we were able to get data too by the way. This is important. We got a got a ton of great data. And I actually talked to our other business partner in this brand and I mentioned the search term that’s been being seen or being searched for through our broad that now is like, “Maybe we should launch one of them.”

So we’ve got another product idea that we’re already looking into because we know that it’s getting a lot of impressions and it’s getting clicks. And people have actually bought our product by searching for this other search term they still went and bought our product. So just by 600 bucks that we spent, we got sales, we got on the map and we got a ton of great data so far. So, again, we’re okay with that. I’m happy with that. But it’s funny when you look at it you’re like I got $600 that I could have had in my pocket but I would have gotten no sales, I would have gotten that data. What’s that worth to you?

[00:33:00] Dom: To me that even sounds pretty light for two weeks. I spend that in a day.

[00:33:06] Chris: It helps that one of the products wasn’t active for one of those two weeks.

[00:33:14] Dom: What we forget though, Chris and Scott, is that listen you are going to be paying all that money upfront in what? You don’t know what’s going to happen when you get to fourth quarter. And Amazon’s going to thank you for giving them that money on PPC and then when it’s time and we start getting our algorithm moving up and you start doing sales, they’re going to rank you a lot better because they’ve seen you put money into those keywords, it’s just the way it works.

You’re going to lose some money, they know you’re losing money, and then they always start moving you around to bump you up on the keywords, get the all that type of stuff. So it’s for every launch we do same thing. It’s frustrating right at the beginning, you are spending lots of money you’re not getting any rank and then two, three, four months later you’re right at the top you know you’re ranking for keywords that you would never have ranked for before. And, again, I always put it to the fact that Amazon is kind of just saying, “Okay, thanks for spending at $300 a day with us. We’re going to help you out now because you spent that much for four months.

[00:34:10] Scott: We feel bad so we’re going you rank.

[00:34:12] Dom: Yeah, that’s basically what’s happening, right? And that will help you. It’s also the easiest way, I like to just spend two… When you enter this market or this business model, it’s also just like entering into a union or seniority role if you’re working for whatever, FedEx or United States Postal Service any of those unions. Like you that you start at the bottom. You’re not going to get that job that every forty you get paid for forty but you are only worth 25 because your route is so slower. You know what I’m saying? Those type of thing. You’ve got to work there for 20 years until you move up.

These people have to work 25, 30 years before they can get to the best paid, to the best job, because of the seniority. And it’s the same thing with PPC, you just can’t come in when there’s 50 other people selling the same that you’re doing and expect, “Hey, I got to pay I’m going to pay $10 a click and I’m going to be number one.” You could do that, that’s how we did it. But then you will be paying for $500 a day on PPC on those keywords, and then eventually it does pay off six months, eight months later. Again I won’t go back and change it but that’s the reality, that’s how it works. So if you want to do it that way, you can. You just better have money for PPC. If you want to take is nice and slow, two, three, four, five hundred every two weeks like you did $600, you’ll gradually get up there and it will just be a patient thing.

[00:35:23] Scott: It’s being consistent. And we are all going to dial that up. Actually right now we are fine tuning it. And like Chris said we had one of our ASINs that actually we had Amazon lose and then they reinstated it, and then it went down again as we made a change, three times, spent about four hours in the phone with Amazon, So it was a pain but we got through it.

[00:35:41] Chris: This thing is going to be the death of me.

[00:35:42] Dom: And as you bring more products and you get your fifth product, you’re averaging eight things a day. Your second product now you’re doing 12, now, you’re doing 16, you’re going to do 24. And then next year you’ll be doing 112. The next year after, you’ll be doing 250 a day. It needs time. 100 of us that are watching this there right now are going to hit a homerun, and that’s the biggest thing. I know what you guys like to use my analogy all the time, I never get credit for it but that’s fine, that’s true.

[00:36:10] Scott: Dom coined it by the way.

[00:36:12] Chris: Dom invented baseball.

[00:36:14] Dom: I invented baseball as related to private label, right? Single or double. One out of a hundred will hit a homerun or a grand slam basically the first time they launch their product. One of our best friends, that’s on here, he hit a homerun his first product. Sold 120, 140 a day just like a couple of other guys from the TAS meet up that we had the whole guy. That truck driver guy, I can’t remember his name but he hit a homerun right away. But you got to follow up with that, do you understand? The home runs turn into singles, turns out to turn into outs, turn into that type of thing.

[00:36:46] Scott: But the home run might only last for a short period of time.

[00:36:50] Dom: That’s what I’m saying. You’re only going to go to streak you will be a streaky hitter, you are going to hit one here, you’re not going to be on 0 for 25. So you got to keep it up. What I’m trying to say is that you can’t just look at the guy that hit the home run that’s 120 or 60 even 50 day, 60 a day and he just did a launch. Because I hear, “Oh, I’m selling right away. I’m already doing 50 a day.” That’s good, I’m really happy for those guys but in reality, if you could do eight to ten a day like you taught everybody, thought that’s realistic. Go to the next product then you’ve got another eight at sixteen and that’s how you grow your business.

But if you get stuck on the first product, you’re not even launched in the first product, you can’t even get to 10 products. And once you start getting 10, 12, 15 ASINs, that’s when the money starts really come in. You look at your days it used to be 150 a day and now there are 1,400 a day, then 2,000 a day then…. And that’s what happens but it takes time. It takes time, effort, you can’t just do it one day a week and throw it down. It’s just got to be part of your lifestyle. You’ve got to look at it. I look at this way, anything you want. If you want to buy a brand new car, you say before you save up for it, you pull that goal.

You want to put your kids through a nicer school you’re going to put that goal. It’s just like private label. If you want to be successful, you work your 40 hours a week and you come in and you work two, three hours a day times five days a week and then hopefully a new year from now, it pays off. That’s what we do with retail arb, I always did the private label at night. I still kind of do it like that.

[00:38:06] Scott: Okay, it’s a great point and I want to move on from that but you are 100% right. You can’t bank on just the one product. Really quickly, Chris, I want to talk a little bit about lightning deals. We got someone calling in.

[00:38:24] Dom: I’m on live right not. I’ll call you back okay? Bye, Bill. He is mad because I mentioned him. He hit a grand slam.

[00:38:35] Scott: Don’t get me laughing because I’m going to start laughing like crazy over here.

[00:38:40] Dom: Can somebody at the back answer that phone. I am live here we got 2,000 people watching us.

[00:38:45] Scott: Okay, so really quickly. Danielle actually wants to know looking for your thoughts on lightning deals. Well, here’s the thing we got very quickly like we did on the first launch, where we had accepted for a couple lightning deals. And we were all pumped up about it, and we had actually had a decent time too. I think one of them was at five o’clock at night in one of them was like ten o’clock in the morning. And honestly, neither of them did good Dom neither of them. Now, the first one did really…

[00:39:19] Dom: I was surprised you got. Was that a new brand?

[00:39:22] Scott: Yeah.

[00:39:22] Chris: Oh, the new brand. You see how good the brand is selling? He already got lightning deals. Usually it takes months before and that’s good.

[00:39:31] Scott: Again that’s again back to the whole like we launched. Out of the gate, we were able to get some sales coming through the order immediately we opened some lightning deals. But with that being said…

[00:39:40] Dom: Hold on a second. Maybe it has to do because we’re not doing the review thing anymore. We’re given away all the stuff at 80% off and 90% off and they’re saying, “Hey, you’re not giving your stuff away,” that’s stuff really is counted as a sale, we’re not going to count it as a sale. We want you to have 50% or less and then we’ll count it as a sale. Then we’ll offer you the lighting deal. I wonder if it has anything to do with that. Does that make any sense?

[00:40:00] Scott: Yeah, yeah. It totally does and that may be the case. Because honestly, I don’t think they gave us the exposure that we should have had. If they gave us the exposure I think we would have blew out of our inventory. But we did very, very are poorly I felt. I think the first one we might have did 20.

[00:40:16] Dom: Wow, that’s awful.

[00:40:18] Scott: And I think we allocated 100. And then I think the second one we did a little bit more. I think we might we did like 30. And we spent 150 bucks. We spent 150 bucks on lightning deals. So, again, there’s another 300 bucks that’s out of my pocket, part of the bill.

[00:40:38] Dom: What I’m thinking guys is that you don’t have enough history behind your accounts so people haven’t bookmarked you are saved you or know your product yet. Do you know what I’m saying?

[00:40:46] Scott: Yap. Maybe.

[00:40:47] Dom: Maybe that could be it. I’m actually really surprised that you go lighting deal that fast I’m pretty impressed after a couple of weeks.

[00:40:53] Scott: Well, there you go, we just impressed Dom Sugar. We just impressed Dom.

[00:40:57] Dom: As far as the units sold, it could be lots of things right. It could be maybe your next one I’ll do really good and people… How was your add-ons? Did you find it? Did you sold more of the like three products? What was your average sale?

[00:41:11] Scott: No, it was pretty much the same that we’ve been selling. I mean honestly on one of our… I guess on two of the products we’ve been selling probably close to 8-10 per day already.

[00:41:21] Dom: That’s good. So maybe people are just tired of lighting deals. You know when you keep doing the same thing over and over, people are you’re like, “It’s not special anymore.” It used to be… If they prime day once a week, nobody would care everyone would just buy on the Tuesday. Now, we get excited because it’s twice a year that’s why it works.

[00:41:38] Scott: You know what, I actually said the same thing to myself. I said, “You know what, I think now it’s overdone.” So it’s okay. I mean I’m not saying that won’t work I just think that it’s got to be the right timing, it’s got to be the right offer too. Maybe we didn’t discount enough, I don’t know, the right price.

[00:41:56] Chris: The right price that’s huge.

[00:41:59] Dom: I don’t what your discount is. But also you know what, for a young up and coming company, I think it’s good though because you’re still doing 30, 40 feet. You did 50 sales within two… Do you understand? Like you’re moving the algorithm, you’re getting your history. You couldn’t have give away much self for 150 bucks before. I actually spent $200, $300 to get 30 sales off the review clubs and stuff. So you got to look at it as a positive. I know what you are saying, you didn’t get a lot of sales. So, it could be a lot about you or maybe it’s a price for it. If you only did 30 or 40, okay, but who knows, it could be a lot of things, right?

[00:42:31] Scott: And, again, I’m not saying I won’t do them again, I’m just saying. And actually, we got another… We already do have another one slated for Wednesday, Chris, about two weeks or something?

[00:42:40] Chris: It’s a prime week.

[00:42:41] Scott: Prime week. We got the one for prime week. Which prime week is actually 500 bucks.

[00:42:46] Dom: We do basically one every week on each brand and the open brand, I haven’t had too many of it because I really don’t want to sell a lot of some of the stuff because I don’t order as much because we’re testing a lot of stuff. But we do have a lot of prime offers. About three or four out of all our ASINs which is now locked part of the ASINs but three, four it sounds pretty good and I actually truly forgot about that. So thanks for bringing it up because I might… I should probably do one in the open brand.

[00:43:11] Scott: I think we should. I think we should test it. I think it be interesting to test it. I know Nick Gamble, he’s got a newer product that’s got a lighting deal come up with very little reviews. So we’ll see on that. So if you guys have any stats or any data, definitely email us support@theamazingseller.com. It will come over to us, we can actually see it and maybe we can come back and talk about it on an upcoming TAS Power Hour. Again, guys, I want to show you guys like not just all the good. It’s like everyone comes out and says everything’s perfect all the time.

We’re gritty right now, we’re getting in there, were grinding, we’re actually figuring this thing out everything is not going to work the same every single time. So I just want to again, let you guys know that you know we’re going to try to kind of pull back the curtain as much as we can and give you guys as much details and data as we can. I know Dom, I think that would be a great experiment if we run one of the open brand, test that, see what happens we can report back and see what happens.

[00:44:10] Dom: I mean one of them they’re offering is one of our hot products. So I can’t even keep it in stock. So I’m getting it for a retail for its own. We’re not going to do that. But, it makes no sense for their… No matter what level you are, you’re, going to have some hardships you are going to have frustrations. Like I said still, you still haven’t changed the PPC. Your advertising budget versus what your campaign budget. It drives me crazy.

Now, I’m off 60, 70, the budget says I made $98 and my campaign says of made $13 am like, “Guys, how are they not synced together? Do you guys not work for each other? I don’t get it.” “No, they are working with the…” And then try to use the app on an iPad or on our phone, forget it. You can’t scroll, you can’t put your cursor inside the iPad to move up and down.

[00:44:56] Scott: You know Dom, you’re a little addicted. Here we are walking into the Raptors game, we’re walking into the Raptors game Dom’s got his iPad as we’re walking in adjusting his pay-per-click. I’m like, “Dude, put it away.” And then he thought he deleted everything. You thought you deleted everything.

[00:45:11] Dom: And then what happened because you stressed me out there you told me to put it away because we paid 400 bucks for tickets, I ended up actually putting on every campaign I ever put on. I spent $500 in about two hours that today I’m like, “What the heck? What if campaigned at two hours after the game.” I locked every scheme of the campaign I had had like 150. I guess instead of pausing them, I turned them on and I’m like, “Oh, my God…”

[00:45:38] Scott: Dom is officially addicted to pay-per-click and his iPad. So I had to look over at him and his wife and I’m like, “Dude, put that away. We are here to watch the game.” You’re like, “All right. All right. And then he’s like “I gotta go to the bathroom.” Then he’s going to go there are check it in the stall.

[00:45:55] Dom: If you want over PPC, that’s right, she had to take it from me. Even when even we were take pictures. I am trying to take pictures with my iPad. I like PPC. I mean I don’t like it I guess I’m paying the money for it, but I like the way I’m trying to figure out how it works. And it’s been an ongoing battle for four years.

[00:46:11] Scott: So all right. We’re like running late here. Let’s just keep running. I don’t know if we care if we few minutes over if we’ve got time.

Okay. So there you have it. There was our conversation all about well, everything we just covered we’ve covered a ton of different topics and things. Really I think again, it kind of comes back to products. We talked a lot about products and bundling and accessories and also launching and the open brand concept like all of those things I think are things that we’re dealing with on a daily basis.

I know a lot of you hear us talk a lot about the open brand or a regular brand, and we have two of those running right now. We have an open brand and we also have a brand that we’re building from scratch. So I believe in both models but I want you guys to understand that when you’re first starting, the open brand may be a good way to start because you don’t have to think about this is going to be it. This is going to be this big brand, when all you’re doing here is trying to find a market that you can kind of dive into and dabble in before you go all in. Hopefully, that makes sense.

But anyway, I love hanging out with those guys and hanging out with everyone on the Facebook group because you know that’s really where this all started. It’s for us to do these on Facebook lives and then answer some live Q&A. We did answer some live questions. I didn’t put them on here because I wanted to keep this under an hour. But, if you wanted to listen to the entire episode, you can head over to the show notes of this page you’ll see the video there as well with our mugs on there. So you can go check that out if you want to.

I also cut some of the beginning out because again it was just kind of stuff getting ready to do the Facebook live. But if you want to listen to the whole thing or watch the whole thing, listen to those other questions. I think we went on for at least another 15 or 20 minutes answering the audience’s questions.

[00:48:12] Scott: You can head over to theamazingseller.com/371. I have everything there, I have that video embedded. I have the show notes, the transcripts all that will be there for you guys. And again, guys if you’re not connected in the Facebook community, what are you waiting for? There’s over 40,000 people in there right now talking about this business. So what better way to go over there and even if you don’t want to get involved, which I think you should, there’s a search feature there you can search past posts and learn through these conversations that are already happening. So definitely head over there and not to mention you’ll get notified when we do a Facebook Live which is to me something that will help you, and you’ll be surrounded with like-minded people which I’ve talked about before. All right guys.

All right. That’s it. That’s going to wrap up this episode. Remember episode 371 the Facebook group theamazingseller.com/fb, go over there, get connected with like-minded people so you can grow your own Amazon or ecommerce business. All right guys. So that’s it. That’s going to wrap it up let’s end this thing strong today guys. Remember that 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, 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 <<

…a landscaper went from $0 to $500,000 in 12 months. This is an inspiring story guys and this here lit me up, this got me so fired up and I’m a going to tell you a little story as far as how I met him. Now, I met him at the Sellers Summit. This is a conference that I just spoke at, Steve Chou’s event and I met a lot of great people there, you guys might have already heard me talk about that on past episodes.

Well, I’m sitting there having a few drinks with some people, talking, just business and meeting some TASers and all that stuff. And I overheard someone talking about what they have done and what they’re doing and even actually… Actually, the one thing that they said was, “Yeah. You know this YouTuber got ahold of my product, they started using it and my sales went up.”

So I started listening and then he goes, “Hey, Scott? I’ve been meaning to come up to you. I know you’ve been busy, a lot of people around you, I didn’t want to intrude. But, I just want to let you know man I’m a huge fan of the show and because of your podcast I’ve been able to go out there and kind of build this business. And I just want to thank you for that.” I was blown away and I’m like, “So how are things going? What are you doing?” He goes, “Well, being honest with you, I was a landscaper.

And he told me his whole story.” You’re going to hear his whole story. But, just to kind of fast forward a little bit, he mentioned $500,000 and I’m like, “Holy cow. You got to email me this stuff man.” If you guys are listening to this and you guys are doing even $5,000 a month, I don’t care. You got to tell me you’re getting some results. I need to hear that stuff. That stuff fuels me and keeps me going to keep recording these podcasts.

I went ahead and I said, “Hey, listen. I go I want to be able to dig into your story, I would love to have you on.” Because his story was just very, very motivational for me. But also to show you that you can have this ripple effect as well.

[00:02:00] Scott: And what I mean by that is after he went through this process… And let me just say, it wasn’t all easy and you’re going to hear all the ups and downs and how many products he tried before he actually kind of figured out what he needed to do. And then how he shared this with someone at his local church and it was a 16-year-old kid and how that kid is just doing awesome as well.

So it’s kind of like that ripple effect of helping people and watching people actually use the material, but then also change their lives for the better. So again, I can’t wait for you to listen to this conversation that I had with Brandon. Again, a really great guy and you’re going to hear all the ins and the outs. If you guys want to download the show notes or the transcripts to this episode, head over to theamazingseller.com/372, and you can grab all of those over there.

Let me just say, when you listen to exactly how he did this, you are going to be able to take away not just what he did action wise but also mentally, because a lot of people don’t think of the mental aspect of this and it’s huge, and you can hear how Brandon was battling through this process and then eventually said, “You know what, I just got to go all in.” And that’s actually his exact words. “I just got to go all in and see what happens here.” And that’s exactly what he’s done. And now he has went on to do some really awesome things and he’s got huge plans, and I think he’s going to meet all of them or at least he’s going to come close.

I mean, he’s going to go out there and he’s just going to battle. But the one thing also, I want to let you guys know before we do listen here is, we also… It kind of turns into… I love doing this because it almost turns into a little bit of a coaching call. I learn and then they learn and it’s kind of like we go back and forth a little bit. There’s one thing that he’s doing right now that’s getting tons and tons of traffic to his listings or his listing, I should say the one. He’s got a bunch of other ones that are going too but this one here is really what opened his eyes to this.

And then from there, he was driving traffic directly to the listing, which is fine but we kind of discovered that maybe there’s a better way of doing this, and he agreed, and he’s going to be doing this.

[00:04:03] Scott: So, you’re going to hear exactly how he’s driving this external traffic to his listings, and then also how he can capitalize on that traffic even if Amazon decides to go away. So, you’re going to learn all about that. So I am going to stop talking now. You guys can see I’m totally fired up here because it’s huge, and it’s everything that I believe in. So, guys sit back, relax, enjoy this interview that I had with my good friend, my new good friend, Brandon.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:04:32] Scott: Well, hey Brandon? What’s up, man? Thank you so much for hanging out with us here today on the podcast. How are you doing man?

[00:04:38] Brandon: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on Scott. I appreciate it.

[00:04:41] Scott: Yeah. No, I am super excited to have you here. I met you at Seller Summit and I was kind of busy the night that I met you. I think was at the networking party up on the rooftop, kind of windy maybe and then I’d seen you were talking with a bunch of people and then you came over and you go. “Hey, I just wanted to kind of shake your hand, let you know that I’m a listener and, oh, by the way.” And then you kind of told me, what you told me, and you blew me away. Right?

[00:05:07] Brandon: Yeah. Exactly.

[00:05:08] Scott: So maybe you can kind of just give everyone just a little bit of a background as far as who Brandon is, and kind of how you even got into this world of selling on Amazon or ecommerce.

[00:05:21] Brandon: Yeah, sure. So, basically my quick story recap is that I got my GED at 16, I started to go to college right at 16. I spent three years in that and it just wasn’t for me. I just kept trying but I just didn’t like it. But what I actually ended up doing was I started landscaping just to pay the rent. And a buddy of mine gave me his amazing seller machine, login. This was like in early 2014 and I did okay with that. I got a bunch of products got pulled down after I started making sales and it bonded me out so I was going to be done with that and I kept on doing the landscaping thing. Later, in like 2015 that’s when I start following your podcast. So I was doing a full eight hour day and the whole time I was blasting your podcast. I just getting super fired up and motivated and the information was super good. So I launched my Amazon business officially then. I’ve been doing it since. I quit my job and I’ve been doing it since then.

[00:06:32] Scott: Wow, okay. Are you willing to share a little bit as far as like what kind of numbers you’ve done up to this point?

[00:06:39] Brandon: Yeah, for sure. So that first year was just a little bit over $28,000 in sales. So I had to keep working for a while and I kept saving. And just reinvesting all the money in. Year two, I did $250,000 in sales.

[00:06:56] Scott: Nice.

[00:06:57] Brandon: That’s when I quit and the end of 2015 I quit my job and went to this full time. And this year I’m on track for a little over $500,000 of revenue.

[00:07:09] Scott: That’s amazing. That was the number you threw at me with the party I’m like, “Holy crap. Like Brandon why aren’t you contacted me? You said that you’re a podcast listener, you’re a fan and you listen to me in your buds while you’re cutting lawns and stuff, and doing some whatever. Weed whacking.” And all that fun stuff. Like “Dude man, you got to email me that stuff.” You’re like, “Well, you know I didn’t want to bother you, whatever.”

[00:07:31] Brandon: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:07:32] Scott: Yeah, man. That’s awesome stuff. So, what I really want to dig into and unpack is that you started this, you didn’t have the success you wanted, you abandoned that for a while and then you got back into it. You stumbled upon the podcast, got you fired up to get back in the game. What was the difference, would you say? And then we can maybe unpack the process. But, I really want to know what was the difference? What was the light bulb? What was the turning point for you that made you a believer or that it could actually… Maybe you did something different that you didn’t do the first time?

[00:08:08] Brandon: I wish that there was like one big turning point but the thing is that I’ve launched over 20 products up until this point. And I had some small successes with them, with each one. But the majority of them were just complete bombs. Like I’m doing two to three sales a day, five sales as a day on the higher end. But really for me, it was just like this… After I had a little bit of a taste of my first successful product where I hit the 10 by 10 that you talk about in sales a day and I saw the potential, that’s what got me fired up to launching more products, keep learning, keep listening and keep trying.

[00:09:00] Scott: So pretty much the momentum is really what gave you your own motivation?

[00:09:05] Brandon: Yeah.

[00:09:07] Scott: You started to see that. I really want to highlight that though, man. You launched a bunch of products that didn’t do that great.

[00:09:14] Brandon: Yeah. A ton.

[00:09:15] Scott: But you kept going and you didn’t let that stop you, you didn’t let that deter you from continuing because you knew it was possible. You just didn’t find those products yet. Did you start to custom like did you start to do your product selection differently at this point? Did you pick different criteria? Different market styles? Was there something else that you said, “You know what, that other stuff didn’t work. I think I’m going to… Or maybe trends are…” I’m just trying to unpack like a little bit of what was going on in your mind at that time if anything. Maybe it was just like, “I just want to try something else, go.”

[00:09:54] Brandon: So, actually I said there wasn’t a big turning point but that was wrong.

[00:09:59] Scott: Okay. You see how this is kind of a counseling session? It is like therapy, right?

[00:10:05] Brandon: I think I’m laying down on the carpet, my feet up and you know it’s…

[00:10:10] Scott: We’re going to dig through this. We’re going to bring out some revelations today.

[00:10:13] Brandon: I’m going to learn a ton about what happened to me. So the big thing really what happened was there was one big product opportunity. There was a big barrier to entry but there was big you had to go to the CE. My first order had to be like 3,000 units or something, which is a lot for me, for a former college kid. So I ended up taking out a $20,000 loan at the time. And I was just like, “If this is how much money I’m going to spend, I’m willing to burn as much as I need to, to get ranked. I’m going to and spend, spend, spend, spend, on the PPC. I’m going to spend on my promotions. I’m going to actually build a real email list.

Like not just launch an Amazon product. I’m going to try to do some real internet marketing stuff on this and try to build a community build, build a launch list. And when I committed fully to this one product and I actually went all in on it, that’s when I was able to get ranked. And now I’m like the number one ranked product in that space. I have the most reviews by like 300 or something. And the money just started to roll in. That was the big turning point for me. Was when I just went all in on this one thing and stopped playing around with 200 units, 300 units there.

[00:11:33] Scott: I got you. I’m definitely hearing that more and more, and I always tell people too. It’s like when you’re first starting everyone thinks that immediately you’re going to make that profit when you’re really not. You’re actually trying to get sales to get Amazon to recognize that you have sales, and then they’re going to start to rank you from those. But, the one important thing though, you had to know that there was a good amount of depth and demand there by looking at the numbers.

[00:12:01] Brandon: It was interesting though. There wasn’t a huge amount when I first came in. I was thinking maybe I’ll get up to like 20 sales a day on this product. And the market wasn’t huge at the time, but the margins were really big. At the time I was making like almost $20 profit per sale.

[00:12:21] Scott: What was the cost for as far as the retail for the product? What was a retail for you?

[00:12:27] Brandon: It started at $29.99 when there was only two other people in that space.

[00:12:32] Scott: And then now since then it went down a little bit?

[00:12:35] Brandon: Yes. It’s at $19.99 now. But I’m doing you know 60, 70 sales a day now.

[00:12:42] Scott: Wow! And did you contribute that though because you went all in and you just put 100% of your force behind it, and you knew that you weren’t going to make any money in the beginning you were just going to keep fueling the sales, fueling the sales?

[00:12:56] Brandon: Yes, absolutely.

[00:12:57] Scott: And you think that… How important was the email list that you built? Was that a huge part of it or was it more of the pay-per-click or was it a mixture of both?

[00:13:06] Brandon: The pay-per-click was like… I have the most, almost like barbaric pay-per-click approach which was just to spend as much as I can, and I have been trying to refine that this year especially after the Sellers Summit. My dad told me one time like, “What got you here, isn’t always going to get you there.” Does that make sense? And sometimes you need to change up your approach. So the pay-per-click was just like, “I’m going to spend, spend, spend, spend and spend.”

And it was pretty successful for getting on the first page. But the email list I didn’t fully understand the power of that because you’ve been saying for a long time, “Build up the email list. It’s really important, it’s really important.” I didn’t really get it until I… I have about 4,000 people on my email list now and I haven’t really grown as much as I should have. But the list is so engaged. I’m getting like 40% open rate on my emails.

[00:14:06] Scott: Wow, that’s amazing.

[00:14:08] Brandon: Just before the Amazon TOS changed where you can’t really ask for reviews came up, I sent out an email and I got 75 reviews in a weekend. Like there is no discount, I just said, “Can you guys just buy this and review it for me?” And it was crazy the responses. So the email list was definitely where sales were going good and that I can start blasting out sales, I can start busting out promotions and get tons and tons of reviews and things just rapidly shot up after that.

[00:14:40] Scott: Okay, so and it’s funny you have a barbaric way of doing pay-per-click, you remind me of my good buddy, Dom Sugar because that’s his approach and I like a mixture of that. And I’m starting to get a little bit better at that is far as… If you have the demand there or the amount of searches you could have if you just scale that up. You’re basically doing the same thing as you would if you were to do a giveaway like we used to do.

[00:15:04] Brandon: Yeah.

[00:15:05] Scott: You can’t really look at the ACOS so finely in the beginning because we’re just looking at, “Can we get sales? Can we get exposure? Can we get the impressions?” All of that stuff. And it’s funny I was on a call with him yesterday and we were dialing in some pay-per-click that I’m running on our new brand. And he was all about, “You know what man, you just got to just spend five bucks right now just to see where it’s at, just to see where the clicks are at. Just do that and in 20 minutes you’ll see.” And literally in 20 minutes, we’d seen five bucks got us position two on page one. So I was like, “Okay.” And I think the clicks were like 280, is what they were. So we immediately figured that out in 20 minutes. Like we immediately seen what that was.

So I can totally relate where you’re coming from and it sounds like you have that similar approach. And it sounds like you just went all in. You’re just like, “You know what, I’m going to give this thing 100%. I’m going to fuel it, I’m going to keep getting the sales, the reviews are going to come but I’m also going to follow up and do all that stuff that we all know what to do.” But that e-mail list seems like really powerful. And people would say, 4,000 people doesn’t sound like that many. If they’re engaged, if you’re getting 40% open, that’s huge men. Put 4,000 people in a room. So that’s just incredible. How did you build the list?

[00:16:18] Brandon: So my list building approach was to get like a super expensive, like a high perceived value product. So the product on Amazon sells for 50 bucks. I’m in like the sports outdoors fitness space. So that’s like pretty expensive for me anyway. And I had huge margins. It cost about $6 for landing and everybody was selling it 50 bucks. So I said, “Well, what if I offer like a 75% discount? I would just like barely break even.” Because I have like a couple bucks left over to spend on the acquisition cost. And from there, it was just a really, really tempting bribe for people to opt in. You get 75% discount on these… They were actually new sleeves like the new sleeves. Yeah, that was it.

[00:17:18] Scott: And then where did you get your traffic?

[00:17:21] Brandon: Traffic was all Instagram for me. I paid Instagram posts.

[00:17:26] Scott: So you did paid Instagram posts? You didn’t even go to a page owner and asked them to post?

[00:17:33] Brandon: Yeah, that’s what… I actually started to do that this year and it’s been really, really effective also. I highly recommend it.

[00:17:40] Scott: Yeah, yeah. That’s how we’ve been kind of building all of ours right now if we’re using Instagram. But I’m finding that not everyone’s on Instagram in certain markets, right? Your market has to be there were. We’re finding Facebook ads are doing really well for us right now in the new brand that we’re working on. But, yeah, I just think you got to find your audience. So you found your audience, you found that, you went and you went to Instagram, did you just drive into a landing page, 75% off, get your coupon code, boom. And then…

[00:18:07] Brandon: Super, super simple.

[00:18:08] Scott: Super simple. Now, are you communicating with them on a regular basis?

[00:18:13] Brandon: Yes.

[00:18:14] Scott: Okay. Sending more content stuff like that?

[00:18:16] Brandon: I mean a lot of it is just content stuff like, I had a long email series when I went to Thailand to train Muay Thai And it’s kind of the same vein of fitness and people were really interested in what was going on. I sent pictures out, little stories of what I did that day. I think Russell Branson calls it like, “The Seinfeld emails.”

[00:18:39] Scott: Yes, yes.

[00:18:41] Brandon: Emails about nothing basically?

[00:18:42] Scott: Yeah, yeah. I know that’s…

[00:18:45] Brandon: That’s pretty much it.

[00:18:46] Scott: That’s cool. So you were engaging, you were getting good open rates. So were you the face of the brand or just the voice?

[00:18:55] Brandon: More of the voice because I’m not like super jacked and muscular. So it’s a little self-conscious being like the face of a fitness brand.

[00:19:03] Scott: Right, right, right.

[00:19:04] Brandon: Definitely the voice.

[00:19:06] Scott: Okay, cool. And I think that’s important though even just being the voice. And in having the languaging and stuff right and I think that you do because you know a lot about it. So it’s a way for you to convey. How often are you sprinkling in offers in those emails? Are you do it in a PS or how are you sprinkling in your offers to get people to continually come through and buy on your email list?

[00:19:29] Brandon: I think that I actually handled that poorly. I was still afraid to sell too much.

[00:19:38] Scott: Yes, yes. A lot of people. A lot of people are afraid to sell.

[00:19:41] Brandon: So I always felt like I hyper paranoid about giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving and then maybe asking for a small thing. Which is why I think that the engagement rates have been so good and why when I do ask for stuff, it has such a big impact. But if I had to say, I’d say maybe like one out of eight or nine maybe ten emails which was actually selling something.

[00:20:07] Scott: I would probably dial that up a little bit. And I would do in a PS just like a very… Have you ever followed Ryan Lee’s stuff?

[00:20:16] Brandon: No. Describe that.

[00:20:18] Scott: Check him out. I had him on the podcast, good guy. Really high energy, all that. He’s got a real lot of energy but he doesn’t email a day man. But he talks all about his story throughout. Like he’ll talk about he took his kids to the movies and then this happened and he’ll turn it into a marketing message. And then at the end, he talks of in a PS everyone knows in the PS he’s going to talk about his membership. And everybody is cool with that. I read him because I like him but I also before I met him and before I knew him as a friend, I read him because it was just engaging but it also allowed me to see how to write email good. You know what I mean? Like how to weave your story into and keep people engaged and not just over pitch, but then also be allowed to pitch and people are okay with that. Yes, he’s definitely a good one to follow.

And like I said, I had him on the podcast. I’ll link it up in the show notes for anyone that’s interested in checking that out. But, a great guy and he does it right. He’s not one of this internet marketing kind of you know sleazy sales pitch every single day. He does it in a way that is okay. And his whole thing is that you know if you don’t like it, then just leave my list. Like you don’t have to stay on my list. Everyone’s afraid that you’re going to unsubscribed. When I see unsubscribes I actually thank them because they are actually saving me money because I’m not paying for that email on my list.

And I don’t want to make anybody mad. But this is what it is. It’s kind of like if you had someone come over to your house and you invited them to a barbecue, and then they’re just sitting there waiting for all the goods but you can’t mention anything there that might not interest them. Like, “Wait a minute here, you’re at my house.” Like you’re my type of person supposedly but if you’re not, then maybe you want to go down the road a little bit.

So I just think that a lot of people are afraid to sell and you’re not alone. I mean there’s a ton of people like that. I was like that. I still like am like that and even with my TAS staff. I don’t want to pitch but there’s ways that you have to do it. Honestly, I mean the podcast has grown into something now that it costs money to run, you know what I mean?

[00:22:21] Scott: So people understand that and I’ll get people a lot of times are like, “Scott, I didn’t find your affiliate link anywhere, can you give it to me? I want to buy through your link.”

So you know you’re doing something right if you’re getting things like that. The same thing can happen in your brand. You know what I mean? And I think you having 4,000 emails is great. I think that that should definitely be… The amount of success you’ve had with it I think should also motivate you to want to grow that to 8,000/10,000 because then the power is even going to increase and you’re going to go from 500,000 to 750,000 to a million without even really trying, just kind of doing the same thing that you’re doing now.

All right, so let’s kind of unpack a little bit about. So your first product that kind of took off that you went all in on, was that again just like your standard procedure that you went through before, or was there anything different or was it stuff that you were interested in? Where did that idea come from or was it just doing some product research?

[00:23:18] Brandon: Like all of my good products have pretty much just been random looking through Amazon on Jungle Scout. But the big thing that caught my eye was that the difficulty like the barrier to entry to get into it. Because there’s only at the time when one manufacturer in Alibaba was selling it. They had a super high MOQ, was really big, you have to bring it over on a boat and that was exciting for me. Because I don’t want to just throw a $20,000 out and say, “I hope this works.”

[00:23:52] Scott: How much was that per unit when you first did that run?

[00:23:56] Brandon: I think it was… It was actually pretty expensive at the time. It ended up being about $7 per unit.

[00:24:11] Scott: That’s not too, too bad. But that’s up there a little bit for most people. And how many units did you have to buy at that point?

[00:24:18] Brandon: I brought in 2,000.

[00:24:21] Scott: Okay. So for a first initial you know investment that’s pretty large. And then what was in those units, was there a certain amount that you allocated that you were like, “You know what, this is going to be my promotion batch.” Or was it just the whole thing? Like, “I’m just going to get sales. I don’t even care.”

[00:24:39] Brandon: It was kind of the whole thing. I was planning on at worst breaking even or if not, I’d find some other way to raise more money and order the next batch. But I was like I’m going to get as many as reviews as I can, I’m going to get ranked as well as I can and then let the money flow six months from now or a year from now.

[00:24:59] Scott: Okay. So you just went all in on that? How many products now are related to that brand that are in that?

[00:25:08] Brandon: Active there’s seven. A couple who have some variation, but seven main listings.

[00:25:15] Scott: And they all pretty much the same price point?

[00:25:18] Brandon: Yeah. It starts like $19.99 to $39.99 range.

[00:25:24] Scott: That’s a nice range actually, that’s good. And what about your pay-per-click? Are you still as aggressive as you were when you started or have you dialed that back some? Or you just like… Do you have a daily budget you stay within or do you just say, “I just want to get as much as I possibly can?”

[00:25:38] Brandon: I’m trying to get as much as I can. I’m trying to like actively monitor my conversion rates on each keyword. So that I’m not spending 50 bucks on a keyword that’s converting at like 5% and dropping my overall conversion rate down. But as long as everything is staying with them like my organic conversion rate range, I’m just spending as much as I can.

[00:26:04] Scott: And how often are you looking at those numbers?

[00:26:07] Brandon: I’m checking that once a week.

[00:26:09] Scott: And what would you say is like right now where you are in this process, where do you spend most of your time?

[00:26:20] Brandon: Right now is… Actually right now, as of yesterday and today, it’s finding more fitness influencers to work with. It was actually during the Sellers Summit I had someone come up to me and say, “Hey I saw your product on YouTube.” And I said, “I didn’t pay for anything. I don’t know what that is.” And it’s like this gigantic 500,000 subscriber fitness influencer who made a video that took my traffic… Daily average traffic is like 400 unit views. And the day the video launched it spiked up to 2,500 views. A huge increase and so like the next week after because that was almost 200,000 views on this video now in the last a little over a week.

[00:27:11] Scott: Wow, that’s amazing.

[00:27:13] Brandon: It’s gigantic amounts of traffic. So I’m trying to find… I feel like I’m capt out on Amazon sales for this main product. So I’m trying to increase the outside traffic through this… I’m trying to replicate what happened with that video.

[00:27:27] Scott: What’s the traffic like now after the video’s been out for a little while?

[00:27:32] Brandon: So after the next day it dropped down to 1,800 views which is still a humongous…

[00:27:41] Scott: Yeah, that stinks. Man, that’s amazing. So it’s still driving traffic.

[00:27:51] Brandon: It’s still driving a lot of traffic actually. So there’s still about 250 to 300 page views over my average as of yesterday. There’s still a good amount and the sales have gone up significantly. I think did the math and it was about 35% increase after the big spike happened.

[00:28:15] Scott: Wow. That’s phenomenal.

[00:28:16] Brandon: Huge. It’s gigantic.

[00:28:18] Scott: So, again now that that’s getting you to say, maybe I should find other influencers, in this space that could do this and maybe even offer them something or a partnership or whatever. You could do something, some affiliate thing whatever, because that person did it and they’re not even really gaining anything from it.

[00:28:34] Brandon: No. But they have an Amazon affiliate link.

[00:28:38] Scott: Oh, they do? They’re getting something then. I was going to say, if they didn’t, that would be one thing that they should do. If not, holy cow. So we’ve definitely established that we need to reach out to other influencers and get that going. So that’s definitely. So what’s your strategy there? Just kind of doing some outreach of some channels that you see that are a good fit?

[00:29:02] Brandon: Basically. So I spend a day just compiling a little Excel spreadsheet, the biggest influences that I could find, their follow account, their email addresses and then I just email… I’m emailing like 20 a day now and I have five that I’m working with I just send them some free product. And if they like it, they’re all going to make videos. So hopefully, that scales out and I can get a hundred reviews videos out they are all driving traffic.

[00:29:31] Scott: Yeah, now that’s a great strategy. You are definitely going to keep you posted on that one. That’s a great strategy because again, what you’ve done is exactly what I’ve told people. Like, “Listen, sit down. Put in the time, find influencers in your space, reach out to them, and once you have kind of like a template, you can kind of like blast it out to those same people customize a little bit if you want. But ever…” Are you finding that they are responsive? Like they’re emailing you back or is there a certain percent that do and don’t?

[00:30:00] Brandon: Yeah. So I’m at about 50% response rate right now and all the responses are, “Yeah, I’ll try it out.” I tell them like, “I don’t want you guys to promote something you don’t like. So I’m sending you the free one, try it out if you like it, we’ll work together. If not, then that’s okay.” But yeah, 50%.

[00:30:17] Scott: That’s awesome. That’s really good. Keep that going. That’s amazing. And I guess too also then I would think further down the line if you’re doing this you can kind of almost hire it out. You can have a VA kind of do what you’re doing because you’ve already done the steps, do the outreach, do all that stuff. So that’s awesome. Yes, so I think that you’re starting trying to see the potential in the outside traffic.

[00:30:41] Brandon: Yeah.

[00:30:41] Scott: And then from there you’re now going to build that out. And that’s kind of where we talk about. Now you’re driving everything to Amazon. Is there any plans of driving anything to your own stuff? Your own store?

[00:30:52] Brandon: Yeah. So my plan for that, because my biggest stressor is Amazon itself, like no matter how much money I make every month on Amazon, my stress just goes out with it. It doesn’t go down if I make more money because it is still just as likely to go away for me. So my game plan is to actually drive traffic to a landing page so I get the emails. Like a presale page before Amazon. I will still take the first sale on Amazon. And all of the subsequent sales after that because I have the email, are going to be through my store, my Shopify store. That’s my approach.

[00:31:34] Scott: That’s good. One little thing I came up with here while you were mentioning that because I’m thinking to myself you’ve got all these… Let’s say you get 100 YouTubers to push links to your listing and then like you said let’s see Amazon disappears for you and then all those links are dead, is there a way that you could give them a pretty link on your page and that way there if anything ever happened you can switch that out with pointing it to your own website?

[00:32:04] Brandon: I am writing a note to do that right now. Thank you.

[00:32:06] Scott: I would definitely do that because again all of those things are kind of set in a direction and then you could direct them later.

[00:32:15] Brandon: Yeah that’s super smart. I’m definitely going to do that.

[00:32:17] Scott: I would definitely because you’re not that deep into it right now you’ve got a few that are going to do it. But when they do, you can just give them the information say, “Here’s your link that I would use. You can even put their affiliate link in it for now. Right? But then if it ever disappears you can always swap that out with a link pointing to your own website or even a landing page. So I think that’s something I would definitely do.

All right. The other thing I would like to maybe address was, did you have any… When you were first getting your products here, did you have any struggles with getting them here? Because you said you went through that… what was like the one obstacle or two obstacles that might have got in your way that for most people probably would have deterred them? You know what I mean? Was there any sticking points.

[00:33:04] Brandon: The whole sea shipping thing is just scary. The customs brokerage and all that. So free plug I only use FBA Forward and I’m going to say that I will always use them. It’s been really smooth. But outside of that, the shipping hasn’t been an issue for me. It is just been the time that it takes to ship. So if there is a problem with the manufacturer which has happened a couple times like an extra 30 day delay on something that already takes like almost 90 days and that was heartbreaking. So actually managing the inventory lead times was rough. And I think that that would scare some people off.

[00:33:50] Scott: Yeah, the other thing is like because of that, because you’re waiting so long on the inventory, did you run out of stock?

[00:33:59] Brandon: Yeah. All the time.

[00:34:00] Scott: Tell me about that. You go out of stock… Did you have any strategy or anything as you were running out of stock? Did you try to slow sales or did you keep sales consistent to keep that conversion up high?

[00:34:13] Brandon: I’ve done both the run out of stock, unfortunately a couple times. So I’ve done both approaches where like I try to slow things down, raise the price, don’t advertise as much. And then other times I’ve tried to just leave it as it is and let it run out. So, I don’t know what the right answer is or which one is best but for me, I just let it run and know that I’m going to make it up with another promotion when I get back in stock.

[00:34:47] Scott: Okay. Because I was going to say… The next question was be like, “Okay, now you get your stock back in what’s your for an approach?”

[00:34:53] Brandon: My first approach is to spend as much as I can. It’s the same launch thing that served me pretty well is just spend, get sales back.

[00:35:03] Scott: So would you say turning on pay-per-click, being aggressive there, letting your email list know you got a special promotion, whatever?

[00:35:10] Brandon: Yep. Exactly. And then the Instagram ads run again.

[00:35:14] Scott: Talking about the Instagram ads, I have been running the Instagram ads myself. What’s that process like?

[00:35:23] Brandon: It’s really smooth. I mean it’s the same platform as Facebook. So you just change the placement on your Facebook ads manager or power editor. But for me, like you said, “Knowing where your target audience is, where the demographic hangs out.” For fitness, a lot of it is Instagram. So that was future we’ve had better results on Instagram than on Facebook just for me in this space. But it’s basically the same thing as putting on a Facebook ad.

[00:35:52] Scott: So everything’s pretty much the same and I knew that they kind of cross you know you use the platform and stuff like that but I’ve never done it. So I’ve never run an Instagram ad inside it. I’ve done sponsored posts inside of there where I’ll contact the influencer and I’ll say, “Hey, can I put a post up? And they like, “Yeah, 125 bucks or whatever.” And then they’ll send it out to their followers which is pretty cool. So for people that are just getting started though, I wanted to talk to those people really quickly, because I think you started, then you stopped, and then you started again and then you didn’t look back.

What is the thing that you would say… And again. I want to talk a little bit about the person that you helped. Maybe this would be a good a good time to segway into the young the young kid that you helped but you’re a young guy too. I mean you’re not an old a man like me. I’m in my 40s, man. So you’re a young guy but you kind of helped someone else that you knew. Talk about that really quickly like and then maybe we could talk about like the beginning stages of this one of this process.

[00:37:02] Brandon: Yeah. So this friend of mine who goes my church. His name is Ethan. He is 16 now maybe, I think he just turned 17 actually. But he’s always been a hustler, always been making some kind of money doing something. And he came up to me and said, “Hey, I heard you’ve been doing really well this Amazon stuff. Can you teach me how to do it?” And I said, “Not really. I don’t really know too much about the stuff. What you should do so listen to the first like 15 episodes of Scott Volker’s podcast.”

[00:37:35] Scott: That’s funny.

[00:37:36] Brandon:  It’s like how I kind of block people because a lot of people will just waste your time. I’ve tried to help a ton of people do this and they just want you to do everything for them or they just end up not really following through. So he texts me the next day and says, “Hey, I listened to all those podcasts. What do I do now?” What? I was tripping that he was that focused. So we sat down, I showed him how to do the Jungle Scout thing in your system. And I said, “Okay. Now go find some products and come back to you me.” The next day he says, “Hey, I have these 10 products with all the numbers and all the metrics. Can you look at them and tell me what you think?” And I was just shocked, I was blown away. He was aggressive and focused.

And within another day, we found the product that he went to launch, he went out and got samples and I was so impressed with this last thing. So he says, “You know the shipping is just too much from Alibaba, I don’t know how to get past this.” And I said, “You can either ship it through sea or you can try to find a manufacturer in the US which is really hard to do.” So we haven’t been able to get that done.” And he says, “Okay.” So he comes back again the next day and says, “I found a US manufacturer, they’re sending me samples tomorrow. They’re going to package everything for me and ship it to Amazon.” I was shocked.

[00:39:10] Scott: That is crazy. Yeah, right? This kid is just a go-getter.

[00:39:15] Brandon: He just gets stuff done.

[00:39:17] Scott: So he does that, gets the sample, then what?

[00:39:22] Brandon: This is where we’re at now. So he got his sample, he likes it, he’s ready to go, he got funding and he went out and just asked all his family members, “Hey, can you give me 100 bucks? I’ll pay you back after I do this product launch thing and at some point?” And he went out and raised enough money to his first order. And now we’re waiting.

[00:39:44] Scott: Wow. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I mean, again and from what you’ve learned and now you’re kind of… It’s that ripple effect. It’s kind of like you’ve got the knowledge that you’ve kind of learned through this process and again, you listened to the podcast but you had to do the work. I said that to you when we were in person at that conference. I’m like, “The podcast gave you the information or it kind of helped motivate you, inspire you, kind of give you the right stuff to get moving but you got to actually do it. And when you do it, you’re going to learn so much.” I mean he learned so much from you sharing what you did but he actually went out there and contacted US suppliers. I mean, oh my gosh! I mean I bet he learned a ton about negotiating and all that stuff.

So that’s just amazing and that’s really what fires me up because again it’s that ripple effect that… I can be the voice to get out there in get you going. But then it’s up to you to do it but then you to share it and then it’s that compound effect and I love, love, love hearing that stuff. I want you to definitely keep me up to date on his story and his progress. I think that’s amazing and I think it’s awesome that you ended up sitting down with them and giving him a little bit of your time and you know giving him a little bit of that advice and that kick start and I think he’ll be forever grateful. And who knows where he’ll be you know who knows? He could be very, very successful outside of just Amazon because he seems like he’s a go getter for sure.

[00:41:09] Brandon: Yeah, definitely will be.

[00:41:10] Scott: So, let’s wrap up by maybe like if you could give someone a little bit of advice even maybe yourself, a little bit of advice when you first started. What would you say to make sure that you do if you want to be successful? Like what was that person that’s sitting down to you maybe a year and a half two years ago to you, is there anything that you would have did differently or is there anything that you would say, “Listen, it’s going to be okay because of this.” And I know I’m kind of putting you on the spot.

[00:41:45] Brandon: No, no. I got you, I got you on this. So what I would have said or would say is, “I think to actually have some legitimate long-term success, you need to have more of a growth mentality than anything else because you’re going to have problems.” The story of Amazon game is, “I had this problem and then I overcame it by doing this.” Whereas most people have this problem and get stuck.

But you’re going to get products pulled down, products aren’t going to do as well as you thought. But as long as you’re thinking that this is a long-term play I’m learning, I’m growing and the next product is going to be better, I think you’re just going to eventually, success kind of becomes inevitable if you just keep growing and keep learning. And don’t expect your first product necessarily to be the thing that pulls you out of the hood.

[00:42:44] Scott: Yeah, yeah. I get that man. That’s some good advice right there too because the one common theme that I heard from people like you at the at the event or just people that email me is that most of the time their first product maybe second, third, product didn’t do that well but they just moved on from it and went on to the next and they just kept going. And that to me is like you’re not going to fail if you don’t quit. You know I mean? You just keep learning and you keep evolving. It’s a big deal. So where do you see yourself then in the next year? What’s your focus? I know it’s to build this up. Is there any exit plan for you or are you just looking to build this brand as big as you possibly can right now?

[00:43:35] Brandon: That’s a big struggle. I had an offer to buy the business January.

[00:43:42] Scott: Were you advertising it or did that just kind of come to you?

[00:43:46] Brandon: So I had a friend who knows some of the guys that are Empire Flippers.

[00:43:50] Scott: Okay, cool. I had those guys on the podcast.

[00:43:53] Brandon: So I kind of went through the process there with them and I didn’t really understand the evaluation process too well at the time and I think it was within two within two days I got an offer and it was the toughest thing I’ve ever had to turn down in my life.

[00:44:12]Scott: Yeah, I bet it was.

[00:44:14] Brandon: I’m still not making that much money. The business is doing well, I’m paying myself and fixed small salary just enough to live on. I ended up saying no, obviously and now we’re closing in on almost two and a half times the valuation by the end of this month, as in January. The sales just kept going up. So I’m not sure where to take it. I’m going to have to reevaluate again at the end of the year. But I’m definitely trying to build more of the brand. I’m trying to build the social media more, keep the engagement going, the email list.

[00:44:55] Scott: Yeah I think the one thing that they stressed was, “The more that you do that, the more you’ll get for it as well. It’s more of an asset, right? It’s not just relying on Amazon if you have that external stuff. And if you can say, “Yeah, I’ve got 100 influencers with 100 links being driven to these pretty links.” That’s valuable, that’s a huge asset. And then your evaluation is going to go up, it’s going to increase so all that stuff. But, again, that’s something that you might be like, “Well you know what I think I want to do that and I’m just going to start over again in another brand.” I mean you know what you are doing, you know how to do it and you can just replicate it and do it again.

I think there’s a business out there for people to start businesses that are doing 10K a month and then just flipping them and selling them. Like all day long. I think that’s a business model for someone that’s good at it, that understands. I mean even maybe for your 17-year-old little friend there. For him, he might not have enough capital to grow and scale it but he lifts that thing up to $5,000 or $10.000 and then flips his money and then he goes over and does it again.

[00:45:55] Brandon: Exactly.

[00:45:56] Scott: That’s a good business model for someone that’s kind of maybe short on cash but can get it up to $5,000 or $10,000, because just for people listening I mean generally you’re going to get between I’d say on the low end 15X to about 25X to 30X on your net monthly. So, again do the math on that if you’re doing 10K you can 20X that. That’s a pretty good little flip if you can do that in a year. But for some people, they wanted to just keep riding up and growing. I think you’re in a better situation because you’ve already built that out. It’s in a big, big market and there’s definitely room for you to even grow it bigger. You can have a big, big payday. For sure.

[00:46:43] Brandon: Hopefully.

[00:46:45] Scott: So, I think that that’s going to pretty much wrap it up. That’s what I wanted to kind of dig in. Is there anything else that you would want to mention or anything? Anybody that’s out there listening that might be they’re starting or even just struggling with scaling? Is there any other last little bits of advice you’d like to give them.

[00:47:02] Brandon: I don’t have any good advice for scaling beyond, “Don’t be afraid to spend.” It’s an investment in future sales. But I can kind of just steal your advice for those people starting out which is just take action and do it. You’re going to learn a lot, you’re going to get better at it and you’re going to make mistakes but it’s going to be worthwhile.

[00:47:24] Scott: Yeah I thank you for that. That’s kind of what we say here on the show, right? Just take action. But you know it’s not about taking careless action, it’s about planning it out, doing your research, doing all that stuff. But then in order to have a chance you have to actually do something. You’re not going to get any results unless you do something. It’s funny I met, my roundtable discussion at Sellers Summit, and I met a guy there. We were talking all that someone said, “Yeah, I just launched. I had 500 units and I don’t want to lose money on 100 units.” I’m like, “Wait a minute the wrong mindset here. Like we got to talk about this.”

So we talked about and we kind of referred it back to like a brick and mortar business. And I’m like, “If you did a grand opening sale, you would spend a lot of money to get attention to your store. Right? You’d hire the bouncy bounce, the hot dogs, a radio station to come in, whatever. You’d spend a lot of money.” And she’s like, “Okay, I get it now.” And then there was a guy there that actually had brick and mortar businesses for years and he said, “We used to allocate $10,000 for every grand opening that we would do.”

So he goes, it’s the same difference. I see exactly what you’re saying and I said that’s kind of how I look at it. Your grand opening is your launch. You got to let Amazon know that you’re on the map and if you let them know you are on the map they’re going to start to show you up in certain areas and certain keywords and all that stuff. And that’s where you start to get that momentum.

Anyway man, I want to thank you again, Brandon for number one coming up and introducing yourself at Sellers Summit. It was awesome, it was amazing. Hopefully, we’ll get to meet again soon I know that you said possibly in Hawaii. So I would love that. I told you man. I told you I said, we were actually thinking about that. My good friend Dom he’s always on me, he is like, “My daughter keeps asking me when are we got to go to Hawaii.” I said well, “When Uncle Scott…” She calls me uncle Scott. “When Uncle Scott says that we can have a meet up for TAS.” And I go, “Wait a minute here, you’re going to put that all on me?

[00:49:17] Brandon: I put you on the spot!

[00:49:18] Scott: Yes. So we’re going to have to make that happen I think at one of these…

[00:49:24] Brandon: I’ll hook you guys up. I got you guys.

[00:49:26] Scott: Cool man. I’m going to take you up on that probably. We’re going to definitely look into doing that soon. So all right, Brandon. I want to thank you so much man, I appreciate you. I want you to keep me posted and of course, if you need anything you know where to find me and I just want to say, thank you man. I really do appreciate it.

[00:49:41] Brandon: No, thank you. I appreciate everything you are doing man. It’s fantastic. Thank you so much.

[00:49:47] Scott: Okay. So I wasn’t kidding, right? I mean what an awesome story, what an awesome guy. And I’m still blown away. I’m blown away every time that I get to interview someone that’s been a listener or a student of ours and they are you know reporting back as to what they’ve done. I also love it that when people share not just the wins but the “failures”, and I don’t believe it was a failure until you’ve quit.

And you can see that Brandon might taken a break, but he never quit. He didn’t give up, he didn’t say that the system doesn’t work, he just said, “Well, maybe that product didn’t work or maybe I just didn’t do you know XYZ right or maybe I need to do it a little bit differently, or maybe I was a little conservative on my launch or even my mindset of what I need to do during a launch.”

The one thing that I’m seeing that people that have succeeded or that have gotten at least started to where they’re getting some sales generated, most of the time their mindset shifts to where they’re not worried about making the money in month one, they’re in it for the long term. And you heard Brandon say, “When I kind of set my mind on I’m not going to make money up front, I’m just going to go ahead and fuel this thing to get sales, then I’m going have a better chance of succeeding.”

And that’s what he did. He committed to that and he did that. Now, I’m not saying go out there and do what Brandon did and go borrow $20,000. That’s kind of risky. But there’s ways that you can do that still and be aggressive without having to go to a $20,000 loan. Now, if you have more money to play with in the beginning obviously, that’s going to help you. It’s going to speed up that process but I still think you can be aggressive in other ways especially for him to go out and just do this outreach for people that are in his space that now they can start to push traffic for him and then that will start to spike those sales.

[00:51:54] Scott: And I’ve said that before and that’s why it’s so important to build your list if you have not started building your list yet, right now you need to start doing that. And a very easy way of doing that is to reach out to influencers and then have them review your product, as Brandon said that that’s what he’s doing. He is manually going out there reaching out to these people and then just offering to give the product to them for them to review it, for them to look at it and test it play with it. And then to share it on their channel.

Whether that’s Instagram, whether that’s Facebook, whether that’s YouTube whatever channel your market is. And to me that’s not going to cost a lot of money. It’s going to take some work on your part. You’ve got to go out and do that outreach. You gotta reach out to people, you got to communicate with people. But then from there, that traffic can come. And once that traffic starts to come, you’re not really turning it off. And like he said if he takes… He said 100. If he gets 100 influencers to do that, imagine how much traffic going to coming there.

But the one thing that we kind of discovered here was he’s just driving people directly to the listing. We talked about adding a pretty link there. And a pretty link, for anyone that doesn’t know is basically just a little short URL. A short link off of your website. I use it for The Amazing Seller all the time theamazingseller.com/372 that’s this episode. If you want to download the show notes you can go there. And then I just forward to the long link that no one would be able to remember. So I can change that link any time I want. If I want to change that link to theamazingseller.com/372 keep that the same, I can tell that link in the back end of my website where I want to be pointed to.

So for him, he should have that to be whatever his website is xyz.com/ whatever it is. Garlic press. And then every time someone uses that link, through one of those influencers, maybe YouTube or whatever it’s going to direct him to wherever he wants to push them. Right now, maybe it’s pushing to your Amazon listing to spike those sales. But we can always direct them to landing page, we can always direct them to our own website. This way here if Amazon ever decides to shut our listing down, even temporarily, we can then redirect that link somewhere else.

[00:54:00] Scott: That was a huge takeaway for him and a huge takeaway for anyone else out there that’s considering doing outside traffic. You want to be able to control the link as far as where it’s going to. So big, big takeaway there. But anyway, I wanted to just again thank Brandon for coming on. I mean again, just an awesome, awesome story and I know I’m going to be following up with him. I’ll probably want to have him back on the show again just to give us an update. He’s going to doing some amazing things.

I know that he’s probably, eventually, maybe, maybe not, probably exiting out of that one brand and maybe even starting another brand because I think he knows what to do now, and he could probably exit at a pretty a pretty large sum eventually. But again, who knows but you have those options once you start to build a brand? And that’s what he’s doing. He’s building a brand. This is not an open brand, this is a brand. So there’s differences. And again, when you first start you may want to start the open brand which allows you to do a little bit more testing in certain markets. All right?

So I’m not going to go down that whole discussion we’ve already done that plenty of times. If you have not listened to any of those episodes. I’ll link them up in the show notes or you can just always go to theamazingseller.com, go to little search field and type in open brand, and you’ll hear all the discussions we’ve had about that. So, again, just to remind you guys, the show notes, the transcripts, the links that we talked about can be found at theamazingseller.com/372. And go grab them, they’re all there for you guys to enjoy and to use and definitely make sure if you guys are getting any results at all, head over to theamazingseller.com/action and just record a little voice mail there. Let me know, all right? That would be awesome, that would be amazing.

All right guys, so that’s going to wrap it up officially right now go out there and do something with this information. Be inspired, be motivated but more importantly go out there and use it. So this way here you can start to get results. So guys 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, 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 <<

…answer your questions here on the podcast and I do it every single Friday and if you guys are brand new listeners I want to welcome to your first Ask Scott session maybe. There is 115 of them after today that I’ve done and that’s 115 weeks which is pretty crazy that I’ve been doing it that long. You guys that are long time listeners you guys know this is one of the highlights of my week.

I love listening to your questions and doing my best to give you some feedback, some advice as if we were in that coffee shop together and just talking business. I want to remind you guys if you have any questions that you want me to feature here on an Ask Scott session just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that. You can ask a question there, all I ask of you is to include your first name, where you are tuning in from maybe and just a brief question and I’ll do my best to air it on an upcoming Ask Scott session.

Now as you guys know I always love to give you guys my thoughts of the week or kind of what’s on my mind, what’s happening in Scott’s mind this week. This week is all about customer service and I’ve said this in the past and I’m going to say it again, customer service is huge, very, very huge. It’s big, massive, I don’t think businesses realize how important customer service is and I realize this just from going through my local Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks or maybe a restaurant and having a waiter or waitress come up and greet us or maybe the greeter at the front. I said to my wife the other night, I was like, “If I was to go back in time and if I could have done something for a year it would have been to go into restaurants under cover and really grade them on how well their customer service is and if they have the right people at the right spot in the business.”

[00:02:09] Scott: Because there are some people just they aren’t greeters. They are not the ones that should be greeting your customers. It’s something that seems so simple but people don’t realize the power in that. We had a waitress the other night who came up to us, didn’t smile, barely acknowledged… And we were very polite, we were like, “Thank you. Could we have that please? Hey ma’am.” We tried to be extra friendly because that’s the type of people we are and from there you usually get that kind of feedback and this was stone-faced like nothing, no emotion, no nothing. It kind of grinded my gears because I’m sitting there and I’m listening to what she is doing and I’m thinking to myself, “She’s really working for a tip.”

We all know waitresses and waiters they don’t get paid like the regular wage they get tips and I’m a pretty good tipper. I’m always 20% or more, that’s just the way I roll. I like to reward the people that treat me well and I know that they are working hard and it just comes back to that. Anyway, I’m not going to go on a huge rant here but I could but I won’t here today because I want to make sure that we can get into these questions. But understand that the smallest little things sometimes can make a huge difference even when it comes to your Amazon customers or your ecommerce business and those customers.

By the way that you communicate with them, follow up with them and actually care makes a huge difference and I think the subtle things like you putting in your email that you are a small local business maybe or a family-owned business, if you are of course, don’t make things up, but those little subtle things make a huge difference. I’ve had so many people that email me back and go, “Scott,” or Lisa or whoever is emailing through our company, it’s like, “Wow I can’t believe that you actually responded to my email and it’s not just an automated thing.”

[00:04:00] Scott: It goes so far when you do that and then people want to help you. So this week, customer service, just think about customer service and also I want you to do me a favor. I want you to go to a restaurant if you go to a restaurant or maybe you go to get coffee or whatever and grade those people in your own mind. How well did they do? Would you give them an A plus, would you give them an F? I would have gave this lady, gosh I would have gave her below an F. It was terrible, I was really, really upset to be honest with you just because it’s so simple and so many people don’t get it. Even the manager should have known this.

Anyway let’s go ahead and jump in here. I want to remind you guys the show notes can be found at theamazingseller.com/373; show notes, transcripts, all the links will be there for you guys. Alright so let’s go ahead, let’s get rocking and rolling here. What do you say? Let’s go ahead and listen to today’s first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:05:01] Jay: Hello Scott, my name is Jay. I hope you are doing well. I really appreciate all of your content, really helpful and useful. I have a quick question here about selling a private label product from YouTube. I have a friend of mine with a YouTube Channel, he has a lot of subscribers, 500,000 subscribers and a lot of views. He has 50 million views on one of his videos and a lot of views on the others. The channel is growing really well. Basically what he does is putting best boosted songs on his videos just a song like a mix of songs with the bass boosted and he puts a picture on it. That’s all he does. It has a big fan base now, it has been working really well for him so we came with this idea of selling a private label product and we have ideas of some products he want to sell.

I’ve listened to some of your podcasts, I have an idea of how to create this product but basically what we want to know is how do we go from now? Should we just place the product with a link to Amazon at the YouTube page or maybe create a Facebook page and an Instagram page? We have an idea, we want to do all of this but basically what we want is just some tips on how to go from here. How do we make this working really well? We are really motivated and we think we have a chance of potential here with this YouTube page. We want to get some money growing in this page. He has been really interested in this idea and I told him about Amazon FBA and the potential he has with all of this fan base he got. That’s it, thank you Scott I hope you get back to me soon with this, have a great day and take care. Bye, bye.

[00:06:52] Scott: Hey Jay thank you so much for the question and I love what’s happening here for you and I love the way that you guys are thinking. Now what we are talking about here is you having an influencer already created, someone that has this reach and they are not really utilizing that. This goes for anybody out there right now, you may be a listener, you may have been in this business for a long time. Maybe you are a blogger, maybe you are a podcaster, maybe you are just someone that’s a content creator and you have some type of audience. If you are not leveraging that audience or that reach, shame on you, you should be doing that. Now in this case you’ve aligned yourself with someone, they are not really aware of what you can do, you are and that’s a great partnership.

And we’ve talked about partnerships before and when they work and when they don’t work. In this case it sounds like this could work for both of you because you have the knowledge and all of the skills to actually do the Amazon FBA thing and even your own ecommerce stuff and probably build out your own sales funnel and all that stuff, that’s you. His thing or her thing is, whatever I didn’t catch if it is he or she it doesn’t matter, the person that’s the influencer all their job is is to really just keep being the influencer, keep building up the audience and the goodwill and the relationship and all of that stuff and then it’s pretty much going to be easy for you to go out there and either ask what they want or just put certain offers out there in front of them and see what they respond better to.

And a great way that you guys could do this and really test products before you actually create your own product is just sign up for Amazon’s Associate Program, become an affiliate in a sense, you’ll make 4% to 6%. I don’t even know if they do 8% anymore. 4% to 6% let’s say and let’s say that you just review a product of some kind that you are thinking about that you think you might be able to private label down the line and then you see what the response is.

[00:08:58] Scott: You see what people say, what they like, what they don’t like or you just see the sales numbers and you are like, “Oh cool, we sold a hundred of these just by doing a little YouTube Live or Facebook Live,” whatever you are doing and we’ve seen the response and we are like, “Holy cow we only made 4% or 6% okay that’s fine but what if that was our own product? Man, we could 30%, 40%, 50%,” or even more depending on your margins. That’s a way to test products very quickly. You guys hear that I just snapped my fingers like really quickly, you can literally do that like today depending on what market you are going to go into.

I don’t know what kind of influencer they are and what kind of market you are in but whatever that is that’s what you want to start building products around so this way here you can start to test. You might also even want to do a video or have them do a video asking questions and getting feedback on like, “Hey I know you guys like cooking like I do. What’s the one thing in your kitchen you wish you had that was better than what you have right now?” Or, “How many of you are frustrated with your blender because it doesn’t blend that well?” Or, “You don’t have the right tools to…” I don’t know I’m making stuff up here. You get what I’m saying right?

You put the stuff out there and then you say, “How would you make this better? Would you prefer it to be this, this or this,” and then get feedback from that. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that you can do. The first thing that I thought of though, the very first thing that I’ve thought of and again if we are sitting down having this cup of coffee which ironically right now I am having that cup of coffee so cheers, but what I would say is the first thing I would do is also probably figure out what I can offer them in exchange for their email address. I would start building a list, an email list in that particular market.

[00:10:55] Scott: So again we go down to the fishing example and it’s funny I had a listener, actually one of our students and a friend now he said he goes, “Hey Scott, I know you use this fishing analogy a lot of times with the bass fishing and stuff and I just want to let you know, I don’t know if you are faking that you don’t really know or you do know but I just want to let you know that we don’t use lures or leaders in bass fishing.” Honestly guys I wasn’t making that up, I have no idea. I fish a little bit but I’m not at all a hardcore fisherman so that’s my bad but I never said I was a pro fisherman actually but anyway the cat’s out of the bag. I am not so that was legit. I had no idea what you use for bass fishing other than I would put a spin around or something I don’t know.

Let’s go back to what we were initially talking about so let’s say that you had an audience and your YouTube channel was all around fishing and then you haven’t done anything with this. Well then you can do like ‘five tips to catch more fish this weekend’ or ‘five tips to catch more bass this weekend’ or whatever it is and then you can give that away as a PDF very easy to create or maybe even if it’s a video series because now that you are doing video on YouTube maybe you create five videos that you don’t post on YouTube or you keep them private and then you give people links to those as people opt in and join your email list.

I would be doing both of those, I would be doing the email capture right away and I would be doing offers with affiliate offers through Amazon to start to test products before I would even launch the product. That’d be a way for you to really test things and start building a list in that market so hopefully that helped you. Also, anyone else that’s listening if you are not understanding the power of finding someone or yourself… This could be yourself.

[00:12:54] Scott: I always tell people look at what you are good at and maybe you can be that influencer. Maybe you are okay with being on camera, maybe you are already teaching something but you are not teaching it online. I’ve got a friend of mine who teaches at a local college for electricians. If he wanted to, which I’ve told him this but he’s not motivated enough to want to do it I guess or just doesn’t care I say, “You could be teaching that online and then having people from all over the world do that not just thirty people that sign up for the fall semester.” But anyway, if you have that kind of ability or you think you know someone that does that could be a great partnership and I think that is the direction we all should be moving, moving forward.

I just had someone on actually episode 372 the episode before this The Landscaper that started out with nothing really, tested a bunch of products, failed a bunch of times and then said, “I’m going to go all in,” and then he found a few products that are doing really well. One of these things that he really seen work was going out finding a YouTuber and then having that YouTuber use the product and then from there the sales just started coming in, the traffic started coming in and now he’s going to go out and reach twenty five more influencers or people in his space. But that influencer could be you or someone you know if you have that connection so really, really powerful stuff here, definitely stuff we are going to be focusing on.

I’m going to be doing more around that myself personally we already got some things that we are working on behind the scenes a little bit in this new brand because we are really going to be able to test all of this influencer, face to a brand type stuff in this new brand. So I’m really excited about that. Anyway, let’s wrap this up. You are definitely sitting on a great opportunity, I want you to report back to me, email me scott@theamazingseller.com, I want to hear what you do, how it works and I just want you to keep me posted on that and anyone else for that matter.

If you have anything like this that you are doing currently share it with me. I’d love to hear more about it and I’d also possibly like to let other people, the podcast listeners, you guys to know more about it as well because I think this is powerful, powerful stuff. Alright so let’s go ahead and move on now, let’s go ahead and listen to today’s second question and I’ll give you my answer. Let’s do this.

[00:15:09] Brian: Hey Scott I am new to the FBA world here. I’m just going through the research phase of it all. First off I would like to say great podcast. I came across your page here and it’s exactly what I needed to push me over the edge to continue with an FBA business. Just a quick question, you’ve probably answered it in one of your many podcasts but would you recommend a freight forwarder, ordering right from Alibaba to a freight forwarder and then they send it to Amazon. As far as I know that’s how it works. Would you recommend that and if so do you have any opinions or any thoughts about a freight forwarder? That will be it yeah thanks.

[00:16:06] Scott: Hey Brian thank you so much for the question and I got your name from the email but please guys leave your first name. I’ve said this before time and time again please just do that for me; your name and maybe where you are tuning in from. That would be awesome. Alright so this is going to be a quick one, you guys have heard me talk about this before but anyone that is new or maybe even just thinking about this right now like do I really need a freight forwarder or do I want to handle all that logistical stuff myself? Get a freight forwarder. I know just from a lot of people that I’ve worked with and also people in a partnership that I have right now freight forwarding is definitely going to be money well spent.

They are going to handle everything from the time it gets picked up from the factory to the time it lands in Amazon they are going to handle all that stuff. You don’t have to worry about it. Now you would probably be asking, “Well who do you recommend?” It’s a great question and recently I had the owner from FlexPort on and went through the entire, how that whole brand got started but also all of the ins and outs of freight forwarding and they were just a great, great company. Actually Michael reached out to me from the company and that’s how I initially got in contact with FlexPort and great guy too. I met him out in seller so they are a good company.

That’s the other thing I really want to highlight here, they are a good, good company. For a little while there they weren’t even accepting new customers because they had such an influx of new customers that they wanted to get thing built out before they oversold their services. I really respected them for that. But now they are currently accepting new customers. I would recommend FlexPort that’s where I would go for freight forwarding. It’s pretty much a done for you service where they also let you see exactly where it is in transit inside of their portal.

[00:18:09] Scott: I would definitely say FlexPort. We do have special setup with those guys and you can head over to theamazingseller.com/flex and you can go ahead and take advantage of that and learn about their services there. Yes I am affiliated with them, I do get a small commission from them if you do go through them, no cost to you of course that will buy me a cup of coffee as you guys have heard me say before. But again whether you use my link or not, great service I highly recommend them, they are good people. I would say definitely, definitely use a freight forwarder and FlexPort would be the one that I would choose. That’s my recommendation for that and really not much more to say than if you are going to be using sea definitely use a freight forwarder.

If you are going to use air I would say you could just reach out to DHL, UPS and they can handle all of that for you. That’s what I’ve done, it’s worked really well for me DHL, I mean knock on wood here, I’m going to knock on wood, they’ve been really, really good and it’s been pretty much seamless. DHL air is what I’ve always used, I would recommend doing that. The one thing I would definitely make sure though is make sure that the company that you are contacting your manufacturer, make sure that they are cool with you having DHL do it for them or for you and also maybe ask if you can use their DHL account because a lot of times you get better rates if you go through their DHL account. A little side tip there for you.

I know that FlexPort will do air as well but I would say air you can probably do on your own, it’s pretty easy but anything by sea definitely, definitely freight forwarder. That’s what I got to say on that. So definitely go check out that resource if you are interested. It’s all linked up on the resources page too if you guys want to check out any of the tools or any of the services that I have either been in contact with or used myself they are all on the resources page so theamazingseller.com/resources.

Let’s go ahead and listen to one more question for today, I’ll give you my answer, we’ll wrap this up and you guys can get rocking and rolling into your weekend or into your week depending on when you are listening to this and we can get out there and start taking action. What do you say? Let’s do this.

[00:20:34] Josh: Hi Scott my name is Josh. I had a question in regards to click funnels. I do have multiple brands and websites. So if I use click funnels would I be able to use one click funnels account for all my brands and all my websites or do I need to get multiple Click Funnels accounts, one for each websites? Is there a limit to how many you can have on each account? Was just trying to figure that from a cost perspective for myself because looking at that for a website I would love to hear from you. As mentioned it’s Josh from New Jersey. Thanks Scott.

[00:21:08] Scott: Hey Josh thank you so much for the question and anyone that’s listening is like, “What the heck is Click Funnels?” Click funnels is basically a tool that allows you to build sales funnels which is basically pages like a website in a sense but it allows you to connect these pages together. For example if you were going to set up a little sales funnel that could maybe capture someone’s email and then after that it sends them to a thank you page and then maybe give them a 25% off discount or something like that. That would be like a little mini baby funnel.

You can have some that are more elaborate once you start doing ecommerce you’ll probably want to do so that would be like opt in to get a discount then they opt in to get a discount. On the thank you page you have another offer and then if they don’t accept that offer you can do what we call down sell or you can actually do if they actually take the first offer you can do an up sale. There is a lot of things that you can do by all of these pages that you can create with inside of Click Funnels so I just wanted to give a little recap on that.

We’ve actually created some resources using Click Funnels because we actually use them ourselves so we have some resources, actually some pre-built funnels for you guys if you decide to use Click Funnels and you can find that by heading over to theamazingseller.com/funnels. That will take you there I believe there is a trial period you can check that out and then just email us support@theamazingseller.com and we’ll go ahead and make sure you get hooked up with those.

But anyway, to answer the question about multiple brands with one account is it possible? Yes. Do I advise it? Not really and the reason is because it will just get a little bit messy so I would like to separate those. For a basic account we are talking 97 bucks a month as of right now so for a business that’s all you need so it’s $97. If you are going to use their email auto-responder system they have a thing called actionetics like all of this other stuff which you don’t necessarily need when you are starting.

[00:23:10] Scott: You can connect them with Aweber or MailChimp or convert kit or any of those other ones but the basic is 97 bucks and that will get you a lot for that and really if you have multiple brands I would advise like doing multiple accounts for those. That is just how I like it. I like to keep things separate. Again it’s like same thing with the business expense it’s like 97 bucks for this brand and 97 bucks for this brand. It keeps thing clean but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.

You can totally do it, you can create your own domain name in GoDaddy and you can have that redirected to your pages. It’s just then your pages will have to be either masked or… I don’t even know how to do this. Chris Schaffer is the brains behind this but then you can actually it redirect over to the one domain so it looks as though everything is on that domain you are not seeing the whole long ugly click that click funnels will give you.

That’s all possible but I don’t like doing that. I don’t currently do that, I do multiple Click Funnels accounts and that’s what we have. I think right now we have four so I recommend breaking that up. That’s was just my personal take but again you can do multiple brands into one Click Funnels account. To me it just gets a little bit messier. So I would keep them separate.

Hopefully that answered your question and again if you guys are totally lost on this whole funnel thing and how to build your email list we’ve done a full workshop, totally free that you can check out by heading over to theamazingseller.com/buildlist. At this time I don’t even believe there is an email opting to get access to that I think it’s just a replay that is up there, at least at the time that I’m recording this it is and it will probably will be. So you can just go there, watch it, totally free. Go check it out and you’ll see exactly how we’ve build a launch list using kind of what you can do in Click Funnels too but you can also use give away boost which is a plugin that we created.

[00:25:13] Scott: But the concept is and really the perks is really you need a landing page for the front end of it, you need a thank you page and then you need to connect that to an auto-responder. I know guys that if that’s sounds all like foreign you need to go watch that workshop because it’ll clear it all up, you’ll start to understand the language, you’ll also understand the components. Whether you purchase Click Funnels or give away boost or any of these other tools you don’t have to to understand how it works. To understand how it works is really what I want you to get here because once you understand that you build this and then you can keep driving traffic through it and then you can start to test and tweak the sales funnel itself.

And I just love this stuff, I just love talking about the whole process and how we can build something and then just start to find traffic that’s related and that’s targeted and then start driving them into a funnel that educates them but also gives them offers and all of that fun stuff. Anyway go check that out theamazingseller.com/buildlist and like I said all the resources that I talk about are going to be on the show notes page. They are also on the resources page which is theamazingseller.com/resources and everything will be there.

And then just the last thing a little reminder here is we have the show notes at theamazingseller.com/373 and everything will be linked up there for you and one last little reminder, depending on when you are listening to this, if you are listening to this the day that it is aired or even a week after that, we are doing a North Carolina meet up, unofficial meet up meaning there is nothing really planned other than we are going to get together for I don’t know, four hours, hang out, have some coffee, meet each other, talk a little shop and just hang out. We are going to do that in North Carolina. If you want more information about that it’s actually June 23rd and that’s going to be at four o’clock pm eastern because we are in North Carolina and it’s going to be in a local coffee shop here.

[00:27:10] Scott: If you want to attend that, totally free to attend by the way, and then you are in the area just head over to theamazingseller.com/NC and that will direct you to the events page that we posted up on Facebook and we’ve already let the coffee shop know that we are going to be having some people coming in and we are just going to be hanging out, having some coffee and meeting up other fellow TASers and having a blast so would love to have you there. Guys that’s it, that’s going to wrap up this episode of Ask Scott.

As always 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, say it proud, say it with some energy today do it for me, “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 put a spotlight on actually one of our Tasers inside of our Facebook community which I feel is the best community out there for Amazon sellers. I’m just saying it’s pretty darn awesome. Now, what I’m going to share with you is how Josh turned his side hustle into $5,000 and probably by the time this airs it will be more.

But he’s got a potential big brand on his hands here and he’s going to explain exactly how he got into this, kind of how we got led into this and then now he’s so excited because he’s already learned the process and he’s already thinking about patenting the product or at least applying for that patent. And we talk all about that, we talk about how he got started really quickly to kind of validate and verify that this thing was going to work, how he figured out how to make certain changes, which he’s going to do on his next run, and we also talked a little bit about things he can do to really grow and scale this brand into something pretty big if he wants to.

And I love doing these because you just never know where it’s going to end up and whenever I hop on with someone like Josh we just start to kind of go back and forth and start to dig into that person’s business, and then I generally can give my thoughts and maybe some extra little advice that could hopefully help them. And you’re going to hear a couple of things that I’ve talked to Josh about that he’s definitely going to be implementing too by the way. Then from there, he’s going to be able to grow this thing beyond way beyond the 5K that he’s already generated.

But, the other thing that he mentioned, I think is really important to highlight as well, is that when I invited him on he’s like, “You know my numbers aren’t like these major numbers like these big, big $100,000 months and stuff.”

[00:02:02] Scott: And I said that’s okay because I think people like to hear what it’s like in the beginning stages, and what’s it like to hit your first 1,000 your first 5,000 your first 10,000 like what is that like in that journey? Because a lot of you may be starting right now and maybe you want to know what it’s like to get through that first cycle of your product. And Josh had said to me, “Honestly, I like those stories myself because it’s more relatable to me and where I am. Yes, I love to hear about how people made $100,000 or $1 million. It’s great and eventually I want to get there. But right now, this is where I am.”

So if this is you, this is definitely going to be something you are going to want to tune into because like I said number one, it’s inspiring, it’s motivational but it’s actionable. You’re going to hear exactly how Josh did it, how we turn this little side hustle into something that can grow, into something really, really big. And I think he’s going to do that because he’s a pretty determined guy, by the way. And he’s just a great guy and awesome to chat with. So I want to remind you guys if you guys are not connected inside of our Facebook community, please get over there right now request to join.

It’s totally free, you just have to be approved and from there you’ll have access to our amazing TAS Facebook group. So you can head over to theamazingseller.com/fb. And this is exactly where I found Josh because he posted this inside the group, people were giving him high fives and I jumped in and said, “Hey, what do you think? Would you mind coming on the show and sharing how you got to your first 5K?” And he said, “Absolutely.” So that’s why he’s here and I’m really excited to share this interview with you.

Now, before we do let me also remind you the show notes to this episode can be found at theamazingseller.com/374. All the show notes, transcripts, links that we talk about will be there as well. All right guys, so sit back, relax, enjoy this awesome interview that I did with Josh who turned his side hustle into $5,000 enjoy.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:04:09] Scott: Well, hey, Josh. Thank you so much for being on the podcast man, how you doing?

[00:04:13] Josh: I’m doing well Scott. I certainly appreciate having you to actually come out and chat with me for a bit.

[00:04:18] Scott: Yeah, this is awesome and I actually was brought to the attention or you brought the attention to me by posting in the group, in the TAS group that is and you kind of gave a little bit of a play by play as far as like what you’ve done up to this point. I thought it was interesting because you and I talked a little bit before we got on here and it was kind of like, a lot of people throw around the big numbers. It’s like you know $50,000 a month $100,000 a month.

And a lot of times, for people just starting out, that can be a little intimidating. It can also be like, “Wow, men. That’s just so far down the line.” Like I just want to see someone that’s started and made like $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. I can see what that’s like. And I think your story really kind of… And you were so open and kind of like helpful in that post. So what I really wanted to do is highlight that here and really dig a little bit more into how everything kind of came to happen. So number one, I want to thank you for coming on man.

[00:05:14] Josh: Well, no. Absolutely I appreciate it. Definitely excited. It’s sound funny because the longest time I’ve been listening to you for months now and I’ve always been thinking like, “Man, I want to ask him some different questions.” And then I feel like there’s so many people that probably want to ask you questions. I’m like, “What’s the likelihood it’s going to get answered.” So apparently, the easier thing to do is just skip right ahead and get a chance to be on your show.

[00:05:36] Scott:  Yeah, there we go. There you go.

[00:05:37] Josh: Just to having to question. That works.

[00:05:39] Scott: That works. And we can definitely answer some questions today. It could be a live call here. So, yeah that will be awesome. And it’s funny because you’re right. I do get a lot of emails and anyone that is going to send questions I like Ask Scott, I like when you send those questions. But also if you want them quicker, a lot of times and this is little tip for anyone even if it’s just not me. It’s like if you’re going to ask questions, ask those questions in a shorter form in an email. When I get an email and it’s like it’s just a big block of text, oh my gosh. I can’t really do it. I’ll have to skim through and it it’s hard for me to skim.

Sometimes, I’ll send it over to my buddy Chris Shaffer and I’ll say, “Can you just tell me what I should answer here,” because it’s hard. I get hundreds of emails. But yeah, I definitely want to dig into your story a little bit and kind of unpack exactly what you did to get to where you are. So the post that I read when you posted that in the group, and we can give an update from that but you had a screenshot of like 181 units in that 30 day span. $107 in that sales that one day six units sold. So again, not like mind blowing, right?

But you wrote a nice little post. Today officially marks our one month on Amazon, currently how many units, and you kind of go through the whole process and kind of how you even got introduced to this. And then a bunch of people just jumped in and you started answering questions. So maybe you could take us back a little bit in let us know exactly how you even got the idea to get started.

[00:07:08] Josh: Yes, absolutely. So, like I said, I am 34 Midwest-based guy out of Kansas City area. So you know go Royals for anybody that’s baseball fans.

[00:07:22] Scott: Go Yankees? Sorry.

[00:07:24] Josh: That’s fair enough, fine. Actually, currently I’ve always kind of done the entrepreneur thing at least for now. But the last five years in college I had a small side business. It was funny it was actually my first company or business I ever owned was speed dating company called, speedmingle.com. It was just like a college thing where we’d host parties at different restaurants or venues and then people would come out and sit across from each other and chat for four minutes and then they would decide if they would want to date after.

[00:07:54] Scott: And that’s cool. I like that.

[00:07:55] Josh: Yeah, and it was a lot of fun, from a social standpoint. But it was right about that time when Yahoo Singles and match.com and things like that were coming out, and so it’s a lot easier for people to sit at home in their boxers and Starbucks and look online for potential options than it was maybe to put themselves out there from a confidence standpoint.

I did that in college and then was always kind of working in positions where I had some level of control over my income based on effort. So call it sales, call it however, selling in the mortgage industry and things like that. And then I ended up landing in logistics for a freight brokerage for a large third party freight company in the United States and I worked for them as basically an account manager and built a book of business, and still kind of wanted to do something on my own. From there I left and kind of sidestepped to a marketing company that I did Google Ad Words management for where I was a non-compete and ultimately floated back to the freight side but through starting my own under licensing another company software.

So essentially, what we did is basically say, “Hey, I like that industry, I like the model of it but I don’t work for anybody else.” So there was an opportunity to license somebody’s basically freight rates. And essentially go on there and build my own book of business. And I’ve done that since end of 2012, beginning of 2013. So I’m going on four years now and we do about right at seven figures a year in gross revenue. And it’s just me and I have a VA overseas who kind of helps with just dispatching shipments and things like that.

And so I’ve done that and pretty much we’ve always primarily done mostly LTL and truckload throughout the US. But we did some international as well and that’s kind of how the Amazon opportunity circle around and came backwards. I’m on the board of directors for a nonprofit organization in Kansa City, that kind of raises money for different children’s charities called, the Baucus Foundation.

[00:09:55] Josh: One of the board members, his significant other she went through an online training program offers, kind of a popular one out there in the Amazon space and so she got to experience that and started selling online and she was moving pallets like two or three pallets at a time via Air Freight to the US. And she had a conversation with me about it and I go, “Whoa!” I was like, “Hold on a second. You’re doing what? How much is this? You are talking, $6,000, $7,000 and 2,000 lbs worth of product via air. I’m like, “We can get that done by two grand if we just do it over sea shipping.” And so we obviously…

So that kind of opened the gates. And so I went through and kind of helped her navigate those waters and we got her stuff into the Amazon fulfillment center by sea freight. Then she did kind of randomly in a conversation I was actually on a trip with my girlfriend heading to Chicago to visit her family, and on the way to the airport she’s like, “Why aren’t you doing this?” And I was like, “Well, I’ve got my plate pretty full right now.” And she’s like, “The program totally goes through and gives you a play by play and there’s so much information on there. But it seems one thing everybody struggles with is shipping and that’s just like second nature of business as usual for you.”

So I was like, “Okay.” So we got together and just started going over some of the different parameters and I just started doing some personal research online and just started going through the process of researching products and got connected to some different Chrome extensions of course, like the Jungle Scout and things like that to do some product research and kind of went into the process of niching down to a subcategory and looking for a particular product that I found interesting but then still met the parameters.

That’s kind of how I got into it. I mean most people that listen I hope, sort of know the process from there, of course which is just found the product I liked and made sure I met those parameters, started reaching out to some manufacturers to get some samples in, and then started with a 500 unit test order and this was… So we’re in end of May 2017 right now and so that was basically February. End of February is when we ordered the samples, got them in March. And so our first day live on Amazon was April 25th of 2017. So we’re just over a month now.

[00:12:31] Scott: Maybe you can get us caught up for people that don’t know. Where you are at like right now with that 500 unit test order. How many have you moved? Take us through maybe that process.

[00:12:44] Josh: Yes. So the 500 unit test order as of to date, we are right at just under $5,000 in total sales. So grown about a five week period and we’ve moved approximately 260 units.

[00:13:01] Scott: So over half?

[00:13:02] Josh: So over half gone the first month and I will say that we’ve probably lost about 20% of that opportunity, only because our product it’s one product with two SKUs. So call it you know a size large, and a size medium. That’s not necessarily the variant but the problem was that we had significantly less number of say medium than large knowing that largest would sell more. Well, unfortunately, Amazon fulfillment center had a little bit of a screw up and mixed in the units together. So we basically had to shut down that other variant or that other listing option.

So we haven’t even been able to sell that one all the entire time. To the point that they still haven’t solved this so finally it was just easier that I just recently, last week went ahead and did a removal order of those that were listed incorrectly. So those basically those are coming back to me right now and I’ll be able to sort it out. But I would say probably, because they’ll even tell you, “You’re missing” On seller central, “You’re missing an opportunity in the sales because of this particular variant” And I’m like, “Well, yeah. I don’t want this, someone got the product.” So I think that will definitely hopefully help. But I mean so far today, a little over 250 units and then right about 5,000 in sales. I will say that I’m a big proponent of your philosophy on the one by 10 by 10, I think is how you refer you refer to it. The one product, ten units a day, $10 of profit.

So I would say, for about the last 10 days ironically enough, we’ve been averaging at least 10 units a day. So that’s kind of on the uptrend. And honestly, as far as from a launch perspective, didn’t really do anything major as far as totally discounting the price. I went online and I researched where the top seller was and where kind of the bottom sellers were and just kind of found a happy medium and put it there.

[00:15:00] Josh: I reached out to Facebook friends and just kind of said, “Hey, this is the product we’re offering and if anybody is interested let us know, we’ll do some coupon codes and stuff like that.” And so necessarily close friends but even from then, I would say maybe 10 to 12 units might have gotten sold initially from that push. So we did start pay-per-click very quickly and did that as well.

[00:15:29] Scott: How aggressive were you with pay-per-click right off the bat?

[00:15:31] Josh: Right off the bat, I was… I don’t know. I mean as for me I don’t think is terribly aggressive but I would say I definitely started between $20 and $40 a day pretty quickly.

[00:15:41] Scott: And was that targeting like a manual campaign or auto campaign?

[00:15:45] Josh: I did the manual campaigns. So I followed your process that you promoted as far as doing the manual campaign. So there’s two very obvious search terms for our particular product and we’ve gone through and obviously did like the manual/broad terms to get an idea of what would come out from that. We did use some of the tools that are out there to kind of generate some other possible keywords and went from there. And then from that, once we got that run for a week or so, went back in and started looking at the customer search terms and the reports tab and seller central, and then started to take those and put those an exact match pay-per-click campaigns and kept those about $25 a day towards the exact match and then kept about $10 to $15 a day on the broad match.

[00:16:47] Scott: Okay. So you’re still kind of mining for those keywords but you took the ones that were doing well and you moved them over to their own… And you went right to exact you didn’t even the phrase. You went right to exact.

[00:16:57] Josh: Yeah, I did go right to exact and the only reason why is because I did invest and it’s not like a lot of money, but I did pay for a couple of tools that would let me pull other persons, other ASINs search terms like competitors, as far as the doing the scrapes on their listings and even the PPC scrapes. So that kind of gave me an idea of what other customers were their search terms for that were coming up, as far as Amazon goes. So that gave me a real quick indicator of, “Okay, are these relevant?” So I pretty much… For most part was just the broad and exact.

[00:17:36] Scott: And how has that exact been working for you now that you’ve moved? How long has that been? Just a short time?

[00:17:41] Josh: Yeah, it’s been probably about two weeks now. We definitely pulled in on some positive or some lower, definitely under 30% ACOS for a handful of them. But we do have some of course, that are higher which is a little bit of a struggle because it’s just, particularly the ones that are higher are like the prime ones of course, stuff like the ones that are like those are pretty much right in if somebody was going to generically think of garlic press, so to speak. And they were to type that in, and of course that’s the ACOS, it seems to be higher for us.

And I imagine it’s probably just because of the competition level that everyone’s using. So might have to try and focus more in long tail keywords and look for those opportunities because obviously, I feel like if we are able to find some profitable long tail keywords with a decent traffic amount of traffic, our cost per click will probably be quite a bit lower than some of the more popular ones as well as a higher conversion rate.

[00:18:39] Scott: Yeah. I agree. I think you’re still really young in the process. So you’ve got a lot of stuff I think that’s going to still be coming in from the search terms because number one, there’s a little bit of a delay, we know that, and because you know it’s only a month and a half old. So there’s going to be definitely if you give that more time on the front end of the broad and allow them to keep pulling in those search terms. I know we just recently did that with our new brand, and there’s actually some search terms that are coming in that is giving us ideas for the next product. Yes. It’s really helpful. That hasn’t always happened that way but in this case, it did. But I just think that a little bit more time with those broad is going to help you.

The other thing is, I actually interviewed a guy yesterday. I actually met him at Seller Summit. Real nice guy, actually a young guy. He’s like 23 or 24 and he’s crushing it. But his whole philosophy after… I mean he’s done it where he failed like his first handful of products. And then he’s like, “You know what? I’m going to get serious about this. I’m just going to go ahead and really just spend as much as I can to basically get sales.” And he’s done that and he’s on track to do $500,000 this year.

[00:19:55] Josh: And you know I definitely agree 100% with that. The first order you know my thought process in the beginning, I think like most people is, “Hey, I am going to run this, I’m going to stay competitive and optimize my listing.” I spent money on a photographer to make sure the pictures were better than what I thought my competitors were. You could tell in our space a lot of the photos were clearly download, pasted from the manufacturer’s website. So  I wanted to separate ourselves with that and figured, “Okay, we will get in the middle there and if I can catch 10% of the gross sales for all of the competitors across the board, then I’ll be doing okay.”

But, of course, part of that is that cost per click and thinking, “Okay, we’ll I put this much money in so I’ll reach you my money plus I’ll double it or add that much more to it as far as profit goes.” Then now after being in for a month, it’s really more stressing because you’ve kind of download a little bit of a design change now that we’re really geared towards. Let’s just recoup our money or not really losing if we can but focus on just allowing that first 500 units to be the foundation of sales history and review some mining tools to a certain extent. And then the next one we can kind of look more at optimizing for profitability over trying to do that right off the gate.

[00:21:22] Scott: Yeah and I love that. Actually, I’m kind of skimming through your post here again. I did want to talk about that because you have here you say, “We looked at some competitors reviews and read some feedback and decided to improve our product and recently secured a provisional patent regarding a change to a function of the product, which we feel will give us a leg up on the competition in regards to efficiency and functionality.” Can you talk about that a little bit?

[00:21:43] Josh: Yeah. Because I know there are some back and forth on that, and I did a little bit more research on it and actually I got the paperwork in the mail. I got the approval like I said a week or so ago. But I actually got the physical paperwork in the mail yesterday. Essentially from my understanding with talking to the company that processed the paperwork for us, there’s not actually such thing as that thing called, a provisional patent like you don’t have them, but you have a provisional patent application. Which is essentially the precursor to obtaining a true patent, which the easiest way to say it is a provisional patent application, to a certain extent allows you to fish off the dock without fear of getting you know basically hijacked.

Now, that being said my concern isn’t so much somebody going out mimicking the design change and selling it on their Shopify side or their eBay side. I certainly don’t trust the manufacturer when they tell me that, “Oh, no. we’re not going to make this design change for any other customers.” That they’re not going to do that. I mean they have no reason not to. My biggest thing is, is will this buying me enough time on Amazon that once it goes live I can have six months or a year to really put my foothold in that particular design model that I think, in my opinion, based off of people that are experts in the space, that I’ve worked with, will say that, “Yeah, this hands down is a better solution to that particular issue?”

The biggest example would be like let’s say a garlic press, a stainless steel handle but it was frustrating because you get condensation from your hand or it will kind slide off the handle. So it’s just like, “Oh, how much easier would it be if we had rubber grips on the handle?” It’s something that simple towards just like does that mean no one’s ever going to get rubber grips on the handle again?

[00:23:44] Josh: No, but for the next six months to a year I have the ability to flex a provisional patent and if somebody does throw one up on Amazon and I can send that over and Amazon will have them take down their listing, then that’s good with me. I don’t care if somebody goes out and sells it on their Shopify side or something like that. Obviously, I’m still a big proponent of building a brand but I think it’s easier to build the brand with a sales channel like Amazon as basically being a precursor to generate that profit and that revenue and that kind of helps you with that brand launch when you can really start to get some sales traction and all over sudden you might have a little bit of capital and invest in other channels and building out that brand. So if I can keep my competition, in that regard, eliminated on Amazon then that’s good for me.

[00:24:32] Scott: I think that’s huge. And actually we’ve done something very similar in the new brand. We have a patent pending type thing. Everything is submitted and all that stuff. And as long as you have that, from my understanding I’m not a legal advisor and I know you’re not. But from what I gathered is, once you have an application submitted, technically it’s your patent pending.

[00:24:53] Josh: Yap, you’re good.

[00:24:54] Scott: You’re good. I mean now that can or that will expire in 12 months but I’ve also heard you can give an extension.

[00:25:00] Josh: I can even get another year extension. The nice thing too is like I said, to my understanding correct me if I’m wrong and I’m sure you’ve had it researched as well, but that whole patent pending application really it’s the first to file. It’s kind of the winner of the race. It’s not as though somebody else can jump in and do it. I certainly wouldn’t suggest going out and saying, “Oh, that’s a great idea on a product that somebody else is making. Let’s see if there’s a patent I can grab a patent real quick and go knock him out.” I’m a big fan of karma, so you’d be asking for some personal troll by trying to do something unethical but, no.

That was ours. To our particular design change. There is a similar like item but it’s made from a completely different material. So that was where we specified in our patent because our competitors are not really that same material that these other competitors are using. So we really went in and said, “If you have this particular item made this material we have this particular change on the design and that’s why we are filing the patent pending or whatever so we’d like to have the exclusivity of that.” I think you’re right. If something does come up on the Amazon with yours or anybody else’s, I would imagine if you just simply scan an email over that paperwork to Amazon, they’re not you know…

[00:26:20] Scott: They don’t mess around. I think that’s going to give you a leg up, again, if you have filed. Now, you mentioned here also something that I found interesting, have you applied for brand registry or have you been approved in brand registry?

[00:26:36] Josh: I’m approved and our content’s up. So I got really lucky only because I literally… I think I was like four or five days approved before they shut down the brand registry. Then they basically changed the terms to where you got get the Trade Marked and all that. I’m a big believer and if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. So take advantage of all the tools. So from the very beginning, it was okay build a website. I built the website for our freight company as well. So it wasn’t an afterthought of well do I need this? It was just like well yeah, it doesn’t take that long to do.

[00:27:21] Scott: It’s a home based kind of thing.

[00:27:22] Josh: Take four hours on a Saturday and build thee website. There’s plenty of drop and drag templates at 99 cents for a domain. So build that… So we have that and then you know Fiverr for a logo if you need one. And so we did that and then submitted it. And right from the get-go you know provided all the correct parameters they asked and didn’t have any pushback. I sent in all the information, they came back, “Hey, you’re going to go. Registered.” so there’s about a couple of days later that we’re able to go in and update the content and then went back in, and filled that out and followed all the parameters that they required as far as what you’re allowed to put in the content and then now it’s up and going so I like it. It’s funny because I know that some people will question I guess maybe the content in your brand registry is it indexed or you losing an opportunity for ranking under those keywords, I don’t know, I don’t know. So I really have any way of comparing it.

[00:28:23] Scott: Yeah, I’ve heard the same thing and I don’t think we are 100% sure and again that’s something the Amazon could also change. They could start indexing the enhanced content but then we don’t know but I mean I think there’s enough areas that will be indexed. I mean how many keywords are you really going after? We pretty much know there’s a solid handful and especially when you look into your pay-per-click and stuff you can kind of see like what’s the main stuff that people are going to be finding from you.

If you have that stuff somewhere I mean you’ve got plenty of space on the front end in your bullets, your title, your back and search terms so I think you have plenty of that’s just my opinion. I think Amazon will eventually also start indexing that. And I think that you might even get some extra boost in your ranking just regardless because you are brand registered.

[00:29:12] Josh: Well I don’t think that they would offer that added service.

[00:29:15] Scott:  As a negative, right?

[00:29:16] Josh: No. Yeah. They weren’t going to hold at higher value especially if there is talks about at some point when they decide to charge somebody for brand registry. And if that’s the case, I don’t think they’re going to charge somebody to say, “Oh. We’re going to make you pay $30 extra a month for brand registry but we’re going to make you rank lower.” Because I mean where is the value? But one thing that I did and I don’t know if anybody else has done this but I kind of thought it.

I know in your listing photos, not necessarily your front photos since obviously want to stay within the terms of conditions of just being your product or somebody using the product or something. But on other photos people put content in there like, “Works great while swimming,” or something like that on the water. Well, on a couple of my photos just because I know that with the likelihood that some people scroll of the description session, I just like they put in the words in there you know, “See into the description section for more photos and details.

Two, just from a conversion standpoint the user standpoint, if I was in somebody’s listings shopping for something and I saw a photo that said, “Go to this section and scroll down.” Then I would go, “Okay, I’ll scroll real quick and just see.” So I’m thinking that that might help as well, we’ll see.

[00:30:25] Scott: Yeah. It gets people to actually scroll when a lot of times they won’t. So I agree with that. Let me ask you, for you making these changes, was that just from you looking at reviews and feedback from your competitors in the beginning? And then also, after you kind of answer that question and kind of tell me about that, what was the process with your manufacturer to have those changes made?

[00:30:52] Josh: Okay. So right from the beginning. I’m surprised, that when somebody were to see the design change compared to what’s currently available in that space, how simple of a change it is that it hasn’t been done yet and how obvious the complaints were because all the reviews are generally good but there’s two very blatant and obvious negative review points that are brought up multiple times across different listings and different products in the same space. And so looking at those I just thought, “well, what’s a possible solution?”

Then I was researching other competitors in the market just through a Google research looking at, “Okay, who also sells this type of product?” And then I did find one that has a similar design to our new one but as I mentioned before, they don’t sell the same material product we do. So it’s not really their space and in addition, that particular item that they sell is more of like it’s a one-off for them. It’s not their core business. Their core business is something entirely different and let’s say if I’m in the sports and outdoors or would I say camping. So they sell tents as their primary form of business but they just also happen that have like you know a pop-up tent to change your clothes in. So it’s not something that they generally sell bulk of, it’s not really their space but I liked the design or the idea that I’m like yeah, that makes a lot more sense.

So then I went to some people that are experts in that space so call it like a survival expert or a camping expert or something or cooking expert if you’re doing the garlic press situation. I went to them and said, “Here is my thought process, and correct me if I’m wrong,” I’m walking through the current one works and some of the limitations to it. And I said, “So what if we do this instead? Is this make more sense?” They’re like, “Yeah, absolutely.” And I go, okay. And so once I got confirmation looking at the negative reviews and I go, “Okay. So if we do it this way, negative review number one, did we eliminate the problem?

[00:33:04] Josh: Yes, we did.” And then negative review number two, by doing that same change it actually eliminated two problems that people complained about. At that point, I was like, “Okay, this is really what we want to do.” And so I literally took the sample of one of the current products that they sent us of our product and I basically just made it myself. I cut off pieces the needed to be cut off and sewed pieces on that needed to be sewed on and said, “Okay. This is what we want it to look like in a rough sketch. Took pictures of it, emailed the manufacturer and said, ‘Hey, listen, we’re going to do a new run of 500 or 1,000, whatever real soon and we’re looking at going ahead and making a change to the way this part of the item is made. Can you guys go ahead and do that?’” And they went ahead and looked at the pictures and they go, okay, and they just said, “Can you verify exact measurements and stuff like that but it shouldn’t be a problem.” So we really weren’t asking them. Thankfully we didn’t have to necessarily ask him to add new parts to the product itself, it was just rearranging how the parts were put together.

[00:34:14] Scott: Got you. Okay, so just different positioning maybe or…?

[00:34:17] Josh: Exactly, exactly. So basically be something. If a baseball mitt has the catcher’s pocket sewn on the outside of the mitt it would be like, “It would have made more sense if we sewed it on the inside because the ball is not going to get stuck on the backside of between the fingers or something. I know that’s kind of a random….

[00:34:40] Scott: No, no, no. That makes sense.

[00:34:43] Josh: So basically we’d say, “Can you just switch this for us and make it a little bit like this?” And they said, “Yes.” And so then they go, “We’ll go ahead make a sample of that and send it to you and they sent it to me and tried it out and tested it, and I was like, “Okay, this is great.”

[00:34:55] Scott: Awesome. That’s awesome. That’s how it happens like you said I mean a lot of people think they have to like create a new mold from scratch, whatever or if you’re using material, you have to have like a whole new like design but those are components that are already there and you’re just kind of like saying, doesn’t it make more sense if you just put this here? And for them, all this is like relocating it and doing it differently. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen for every product but in this case it did.

[00:35:20] Josh: And honestly it probably made it cheaper because there was actually a metal piece on the item that we just got rid of. We didn’t know why this is here. If you change the product to the way we want it, this eliminates this metal called a clip or something. So we don’t need that anymore because we’re doing it a different way. And so honestly they’re using less material to make a new one. Which once we get the new one and having everything mailed to my house or my office depending on when truck delivers, and then we’ll go and mail out from a portion of the boxes to the fulfillment center.

But I’ll have an opportunity kind of like make sure everything looks good. They sent the sample to us and my opinion there’s looking at the product space there is two very clear front runners one’s been online basically look at Camel Camel Camel. One’s been on there for a little over a year and they do, of course, $72,000 to $90,000 a month in gross revenue. Which really put me on to the other one was that when I first started researching there was another who’s now, essentially the second product runner and they’re doing upwards of $25,000 to $40,000 a month in revenue but they’ve only been live since January of this year.

So they literally got about a 45 day start on me. Maybe a 60 day start but they’re about half the price of the other guy. And let’s say the number one guy’s got 1,400 reviews and the number two guy has got 100 just passed a hundred. The number one is selling for about $39 dollars, the number two selling for $19 or $18. We’ve kind of kept that same $18 price point and we landed at $5.60 a unit in Amazon after shipping. Then you figure you throwing $6 or $7 for Amazon fees, puts you at $12 or $13, throw another a couple dollars on for a assume pay-per-click cost per unit based off of how many you sell per day and then that at least get those breaking even on that lower price point. But this next round we’ll absolutely be raising the price.

[00:37:41] Scott: Got you.

[00:37:44] Josh: And honestly, from a buyer perspective, if it was me… I think like we won’t necessarily go up to $39 but I think that we’ll definitely hit between $28 and $32 which I think will give us the $14 net profit after pay-per-click in fees. Because if it was me buying something online and I see the number one seller is selling for almost $40 and everybody else or the lower sellers are selling you know under $20 it’s kind of like because we can’t physically touch it. I’m looking and go “God, I don’t want to spend $40 but why is this $18 or why is this $15?” So if you come in and you’re the $27 seller, it’s like, “Okay, I’ll pay $27.” Because I’m like, “Well, is this really worth $40? But there are only selling it for 18, maybe it’s just crap.” If I can get in the middle there then I’m like, “Well, I’m willing to pay $25,” or, “I am willing to pay $28.” So I look at it from that perspective as a…

[00:38:41] Scott: I think that makes total sense and a lot of people they think that it is that you got to go on price. I do that all the time, I’m like, “This is 40 bucks and this one here is $20 like why is this one that much more? It’s got to be better. Right? It’s got to have a better material, better stitching whatever.” So it’s one of those things that you… I think at that point too if you see those you’re going to start looking at the reviews at the $20 one more and seeing if people are saying it’s a piece of junk. Or you’re going to look at the $40 one and see if people are saying that that’s awesome. So by you having that such thing in the in the middle maybe at 30 bucks and you have good reviews, I think people would definitely probably go for that. Now, is the product, the new version…? So your first version didn’t have all these changes or did it?

[00:39:32] Josh: No it didn’t. So the first version basically we found the manufacturer… I’m a little disappointed in myself on this side because we there are several manufacturers and we vetted a handful and though we also didn’t necessarily get all the samples. And so got a couple in and then basically placed the order and they were in the process of manufacturing and everything looked really good and then I went to have the photos done. And in the photos I wanted, because it’s a unisex product, so I wanted the female and the male both using the item at the same time, so people could see just like the versatility of if that hey, both people can use it regardless of like their size or so on and so forth.

So I didn’t have another one I just had my sample. So actually had to go out and get a generic one from the same manufacturer of somebody else was selling it online that was maybe not branding it, just so I’d have a second product to compare it to. Then when I got that product, then I go, “Whoa, it looks a little different than mine.” I was like, “huh?” Then the couple samples that I got…

Ultimately I felt that the product I got was good quality and was a good product but I found the new manufacturer has done the new sample for us is just a better quality product. So a better quality material, so if it’s a cotton, it’s just a better cotton or a more higher end cotton maybe like a soft cotton. So if you’re buying like a fitted… You are the teacher it’s like I’m a big fan of cool T-shirts and stuff but I hate somebody has a cool design and it’s just like a heavy cotton shirt that’s going just going to go shrink and it’s going to up and it’s going to stay wide. It’s awful. I’d rather spend the extra five bucks or ten bucks on getting the shirt and I’m like, “I’m going to wear this all the time for the next 10 years.” So when I saw that, we went to the new manufacturer and so I think it’s just a better quality product but the design changes as well will be.

[00:41:34] Josh: And I’ll be able to very clearly show the benefits of the new design versus the current in the market through a story and pictures as well as some text. Which I think will be a good thing because… We’re doing a little marking thing as far as making it like a special edition. So I’m going to market it is like, “Oh, this has the such and such addition.” At the initial launch and kind of making the logo, we changed the logo slightly a little bit and so…

If it was a garlic press and we’ll say you’re looking at the logo on the garlic press and it says, Silverstein Garlic Press. That’s great. Nothing special, whatever. But if you had one that was Emeralds. Emeralds Garlic Press and it’s got a little bit more weight behind it because of the person in that category, not that we’re using a famous person or anything like that but we’re using something that is very in line with the in the industry that people will connect with. So when they see that I’m like, “Wouldn’t I rather have this?.” That there are two products that this logo is cooler than this logo, I’m going to choose that logo.

[00:42:52] Scott: Of course, it’s almost like the packaging. The packaging is going to sell you a little bit and we like to have a good brand that represents the product especially if it’s a product that warrants that. So I’m a big fan in packaging the logo, all that stuff. So it sounds like you’re building a brand.

[00:43:11] Josh: Definitely that’s the goal. I have the Shopify site, I run some Facebook ads to build an audience. I have not yet but I’m in the process of doing the giveaway idea or whatever and start to get a list that way. I’ve done some other stuff to just like do some cool videos that highlight the product, and then just pitching that to our market to kind of the top end of the funnel to just create a lookalike audience before I start to retarget them. I have listed it on some other sites as well. So obviously eBay, Etsy, things like that just because I mean why not? I’ve had a couple sales from eBay, I’ve have had quite a few from Etsy honestly, which is a little surprising because honestly I feel like the target market for the product seems to be 80% guys.

I review my Facebook ads and I see like who’s looking at the ad and things like that, I see some 80% male demographic. But every single order on Etsy has been females and it’s listed higher cost on Etsy too. So I’m definitely a big fan of putting in as many channels as you can because it doesn’t hurt you. First round we sent directly into Amazon. This one I’m bringing the to me first and I’m going to hold back a box or two of them and then go through the process of seeing if I can get approved for like a walmart.com or sears.com as well, and then go that route and see what happens.

[00:44:51] Scott: Sure, why not? Why not do that? Exactly. The one thing I would say for sure and again, I’m kind of piggybacking off of what I actually talked to a guy yesterday like I said I interviewed him and he’s blown it up. He said I mean a huge thing for him was and this happened by accident at first but now it’s kind of brought attention to him, I think you could definitely do the same thing. He had an influencer on YouTube start using his product and he didn’t even know it.

All of a sudden he started seeing the sales go up and then someone brought it to his attention. Then he looked at his numbers and his sessions went from like 400 sessions a day to like to 2,000/2,500 and it was all just from that particular person doing that. So that’s something that you may even want to do in the future. You know I mean? Like reach out to an influencer in your space and be able to reach out to them and say, “Hey, would you mind using that?”

[00:46:00] Josh: I’m 100% onboard with you in that regard and actually, totally I have plans to do that because what I would like to do is because our product has other products within that in that niche and we’ll go back to baseball mitts. So there’s catchers mitts, there is the outfielders, pitchers and so on and so forth. So there’s a ton of different mitts in that niche. Ours is a particular style. Basically because it fits multiple uses in that sense. But because of our competitors with this new style, I’ve definitely been kind of keeping my eyes out for people that are big influencers especially on YouTube in that space, and I want to see reach out to them and basically say, “Hey, if I were to send you my product and then my top three competitors, would you do a comparison video?”

And I think that blatantly if they said, I will pay them whatever it costs whatever. But to go in and say, “Hey, we’re going to compare this style baseball mitt compared to other makers of the same style and which one do we think the best and why.” Obviously I don’t know whose they are comparing. From the talking to professionals in the space and stuff like that, I think it would be a really great opportunity for people to see that and obviously too to kind of help highlight the benefit of that design change and see where it goes from there. So I’m definitely on board with you in that sense. I mean that’s really…

[00:47:35] Scott: His plans now are like just to reach out to 25 or 50 different influencers and try to get them to do it because it’s driving all that external traffic. My only tip to him was because he was sending them directly to his to his Amazon store through their affiliate link, because obviously, they’re going to affiliate, I would send them through a pretty link. So now for example… Anyone that doesn’t know what a pretty link is, it’s basically on your website you can add a little a little plug in your WordPress or whatever where you create this little short link. So for us like you know it’ll be theamazingseller.com/ppc. That directs to our resources for pay-per-click. But what you would do is create that little pretty link and then if for some reason Amazon decides to shut you down or whatever, you can then redirect that link to your own website.

[00:48:21] Josh: And then the pretty link you would say that that would get directed initially from your website, it would get directed onto the Amazon listing?

[00:48:27] Scott: Exactly. You just keep pushing it to the Amazon listing for now. But if for some reason Amazon took your listing and suspended it or whatever, you just don’t know. Then from there, you can intercept it in a sense and then push that link over to your own page.

[00:48:44] Josh: Directly to your sales page on Shopify.

[00:48:47] Scott: Exactly.

[00:48:48] Josh: I agree 100%. So we’re definitely looking at that and then… I really feel like with the new one I mean when we built the website we had some other products in the space that once this hits, we’re going to look at adding a couple more that are similar to this one but obviously same category but just different product within that category, and then trying to additional some additional ones. So I think the goal for myself is to have at least three to four products live and selling before the end of the year.

So it’d be nice to kind of roll into the holiday season and do three or four products for that season. On this particular one so we’ve been averaging 10 to 12 a day. I think the last three days we did 11 or 12 each day which was good. So I think my hope is that when the new one lands, I’d like to see us at 30 units a day within the first 90 days is kind of the goal. And looking at what the others are doing in that space are based off of the estimates on the different Chrome extensions that you can get they’re dealing easily 50 to 70 a day or 100 a day.

So it might take a little bit of time for people to grasp the concept of why the product looks slightly different in regards to that particular piece of it but I think once they’re in it it will be pretty obvious as to why and like I said, finding some of those influencers and things like that, if there are shoppers that look on Amazon, then decide to jump off and research the product name of the brand or something like that to be able to highlight those as well.

[00:50:36] Scott: Now, is your competitors using pay-per-click pretty much?

[00:50:40] Josh: Yeah so one of them who’s been… The number one seller who’s been on for quite some time, I don’t really see much pay-per-click when I go there and do different search terms, and I’ll open up separate browsers so just try to get a little bit of variation of what might show up based of like Chrome or Internet Explorer or Firefox or whatever. But then the number two is just doing a ton I mean they’re everywhere on PPC. Which makes me wonder when I look at them and I’m like, okay, well they’re doing $30,000 for $40,000 a month in gross revenue. But are they making you know are they spending $27,000 between product fees and pay-per-click?

So it’s hard to know what if they’re just saying, “Hey, we’re just going to sink ourselves into this until you know we lose enough money.” And I definitely I’m a tactician when it comes to Googling. So I will Google the heck out of it and figure out, okay who is this person? Where are they selling? Are they anywhere else online? Is that a Chinese manufacturer or is an actual individual or?  And kind of see where my where my competition is in that regard.

[00:51:54] Scott: And the reason I was asking so I was wondering like when you get ready to wrap things up, is it going to be very competitive for pay-per-click? Because you can start getting your sales increasing just by increasing the amount that you’re willing to spend if you have the impressions.

[00:52:12] Josh: Yeah and we do. Like right now like if I look at my last search term report, I want to say that as far as the ACOS, we’ve got as far as customer search terms there’s currently 60 that show that they have gone through and resulted in a sale, and then it ramps from anywhere from 1% ACOS up to 108. So I’m trying to look for anything under 50 or under 40 as far as focusing in and looking at do I have a thousand or more impressions or a couple thousands, or more impressions on that listing that I can then put those maybe in a separate campaign.

I’m always wondering, because the PPC thing, is so crazy. So I look at it, I’m like, well I’m doing the exact search terms so should I just do a campaign for one customer search term by itself or just multiple exact search terms in a single campaign? And so I’ve had different opinions on the matter. I guess I’m just…

[00:53:10] Scott: I think it’s more about managing it is really what it comes down to. It’s how you’re going to manage that because if you put all of your keywords like all your exacts into one campaign, that’s fine but at the top level you’re seeing you’re ACOS across all of those. But if you only went and put that into one campaign then you’re able to see that. I tend to like to put them into one and then I can manage it easier and then I can dig in and see which ones are the losers which ones are the winners.

[00:53:39] Josh: So in that, to clarify that for myself and hopefully anybody else that’s going to be. If we saw a customer a search term that was running right now at a 27% ACOS and it said green garlic press. What you’re saying is start an exact match campaign for the search term green garlic press by itself and put a $5 a day budget on just the one exact search term or $10 or whatever and then just see what results in that essentially?

[00:54:14] Scott: Yeah, I mean that’s one way to do it. The way that we’ve kind of recently started doing it is kind of where you have buckets. So you have like your main campaign which is let’s just say it’s stainless steel garlic or just garlic press. And then underneath that, we’d have three buckets. One would be broad, one would be phrase, want to be exact, and then I would just move out of the broad into an exact underneath that same campaign. And then I would just stack all of my exact keywords into that campaign. The difference though is when you’re looking at that exact campaign bucket that has 10 different exact matches in there your overall ACOS is going to be all 10 of those collectively.

You see what I’m saying? So then what you’ve got to do is, if let’s say that you’re at a 60% ACOS, you might open that up and see the exact and then say, “Holy cow.” You know what I mean? There’s two of them in there that are at 10% ACOS and the rest of them are you know higher than that. So then that’s where you would say, I got to start lowering the bid on those exact matches to bring down my ACOS.

[00:55:17] Josh: Got you. So you can have your exact… So you can have your campaign and then have a broad, a phrase and an exact and then under the exact, you might have multiple exact search terms?

[00:55:30] Scott: Yep. Exactly. In that way there you’re able to manage all those exacts underneath that one umbrella kind of thing.

[00:55:37] Josh: Got you. And that’s what I wasn’t sure if it was that or it was going to create campaign, click that yellow button and say green garlic press.

[00:55:45] Scott: I mean you can. You’re just going to have a lot of campaigns. You are going to have 10, 12, 20 different separate campaigns for one keyword.

[00:55:53] Josh: But instead just create almost an ad set or group.

[00:55:56] Scott: Exactly. I mean you’re from that world. So, yeah. It’s like having an ad set of some kind.

[00:56:01] Josh: You know that’s awesome. That’s good advice. Because I think that is going to be… I would say the pay-per-click in my opinion and obviously only having dug into the space a little bit, I would say the pay-per-click is going to be top three indicators of what’s going to make somebody successful on Amazon, aside from the product research and so on and so forth.

That other key component is definitely the understanding and making a profitable campaign. because as Amazon changes their terms of service and their conditions and we know the whole review thing and all that, they’re going to… If you can figure out a way… What’s going to separate the winners and the losers of the people that figure out a way to have a profitable pay-per-click campaign. Because otherwise, you are going to bleed.

[00:56:55] Scott: I think that but I think the other thing is external traffic. Because if I can push external traffic, then my competitors aren’t even going to know how the heck it’s happening. You know what I mean?

[00:57:03] Josh: Yep. I agree completely.

[00:57:04] Scott: So I think you’re right. Pay-per-click and it’s funny I’ve got a good friend of mine Dom Sugar who I’ve had on the show plenty of times. He’s a big fan of, “I’m going to just bid really high I lose a ton of money in the beginning and then my competitors are going to get frustrated and stop bidding because I’m basically going to basically push them out. And then once…

[00:57:25] Josh: He is a mafia of PPC.

[00:57:28] Scott: What’s that?

[00:57:30] Josh: He like the mafia of PPC.

[00:57:31] Scott: He really is.

[00:57:32] Josh: You are going come in and go like, “Listen if you want to stay around, you are going to pay for protection of your ad words.”

[00:57:38] Scott: It’s pretty much his philosophy. He’s like, “Listen I’m going to keep aggressively going. I’m willing to lose money, I don’t care.” And then once you decide that you can’t afford to stay in the game any longer, then I’ll just come in and I’ll lower in my bid, and I’ll take over. It works for him. But you gotta have that mentality. It’s kind of like you’re gambling in a sense. But you know in a way that you kind of know that eventually you’re going to win as long as you can keep going.

[00:58:07] Josh: Right. And I agree with you the outside traffic. And you’ve mentioned that before because I made a mistake until I heard you mention it on a podcast was, I was literally running some cold traffic stuff just to test it to see what kind of audience would have and say, okay, if you run this quick little video showcasing the product and then say, “Oh, click here now on amazon.com running a 60% off sale because we list we our manufacturers price on Amazon and you have your sales price or whatever.” You know I was driving traffic straight to there but when I heard where you had mentioned that probably not the best idea because if you’re just getting a bunch of people to click and look and walk away like window shoppers, you could see a really low conversion which can hurt your Amazon ranking.

So we kind of went through and basically created a landing page to essentially say, “Hey, send your email address.” Once you send your email address, we will display a coupon code and then the sell action out of that is this, “Oh by the way, if you go ahead and use the coupon code today we will also pay the shipping.” And just trying to get them maybe jump on board a little bit faster. But at least I’m catching that audience and those who are and if they do get retargeted, if they do get redirected after they opt in to Amazon, they are one more step closer to be more of a serious…

[00:59:32] Scot: They are a warmer target now. All right men. We got to wrap this up. We could go on for another hour I think. We got a lot of things we could dig into. But I want to thank you again, Josh, for coming on and sharing your story. I just love coming on and being able to dig in and unpack where you started, where you’re going and then also some of those things that is part of the process that sometimes things are good and some things aren’t as good. And as you thought but you’re learning through that process and I think as we walked through this you can see just by us having this conversation that you definitely have room that you want to grow, and you want to improve and you want to build this thing out and I think that that’s awesome. So I want to thank you. Is there any way that people can get in touch with you if they have any questions or anything like that?

[01:00:19] Josh: Yeah. If anybody wants to touch base on Facebook, is probably the easiest way, and there’s always ways to get a hold of me through Facebook to other platforms that am on but to not bombarding anybody just Facebook.com\joshbellis82. And so that’s probably the easiest way to get hold of me for any questions. The only I’ll say, Scott, your stuff that you put out, fantastic, amazing, definitely valuable in that sense. My only recommendation for somebody that’s new and getting in the game is, you have one of two choices and that’s either going to be time or money.

Because I used to be like, “Oh, do you want to pay for a program, you want to pay for somebody to teach you.” And I have a girlfriend that would attest to the amount of time that I’ve spent till three or four o’clock in the morning trying to figure everything out. And so if somebody wants to do it that way, they’re more than welcome to. And there’s definitely ways to figure on your own. But there is a lot of legitimacy to people that are willing to say, “Okay, maybe if I go to this program or if I take this course,” or whatever to where your time might be more spent other places if you’re willing to just take a training course.

And you didn’t say anything to me about promoting your… Anything like that. But I understand like in I think about it and I used almost to be like, “Man, why are these guys, are just trying to get you to spend a bunch of money when you can just get it on for yourself.” And the more I think about I’m like, “I’ve learned so much but it’s been at the cost of hours, and hours, and hours,” where I look back in like, “Man, would I have been able to pay somebody a few hundred dollars. Can you just give me the rundown real quick?”

So, I would was that would be my biggest advice to people and then just to know that it’s 2017, and you’re seeing other outliers, the other is outliers but there’s plenty of room at the top for people that are willing to have the diligence to go in and do the work and don’t expect it overnight, but it truly will grow if you put in time and I’d seen it happen now. And so probably I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t had the advice of this guy that I listen to saying, “Take action.”

[01:02:25] Scott: Well, a little bit. So, I mean it’s true. Everything you said I agree on 100% with and you know I’ve put out a podcast, we’re over 360 plus episodes probably depending on this era 370-ish. But it there’s all the information that I’ve put out there. But the problem with all that information is a lot of times people just are like, “Give me the roadmap.” That’s why we do free workshops and we have a class. But you know the class isn’t for everyone and I always tell people. If you want to go through and just go through all of the information we put out there kind of piece your way through, you can. You totally can.

But if you want to program, we do have a class but again, I’m not here pitching my class I’ve barely mention my class. But I agree. And the reason why people had reached out to me, in the beginning, was kind of like, “Scott, can you show me step by step.” Like what’s the steps. And I think though as you’re learning, no matter if I give you steps or not, you’re going to learn through your own journey. So I can’t stress that enough.

But again Josh, I want to thank you so much for coming on spending some time out of your day. Keep me posted on what’s happening within your brand. I think you’re going to do great and it sounds like you got a great plan and you’ve got all the pieces. I mean you’ve got all the pieces that you just got to go out there and you keep executing, man.

[01:03:38] Josh: You threw a lot of those pieces out there, so I appreciate it.

[01:03:41] Scott: Yeah, no problem man.

[01:03:42] Josh: I’ll pick them up.

[01:03:43] Scott: Yeah, right. Pick them up and use them.

[01:03:45] Josh: Absolutely.

[01:03:46] Scott: All right man. Hey, thank you so much and have an awesome day and we’ll talk to you soon.

[01:03:51] Josh: All right, fantastic. Take care.

[01:03:53] Scott: Okay, so there you have it. Another great conversation with one of our TASers. Josh, I just want to thank him once again because man, oh man, it’s just really awesome to be able to dig into someone’s story and really unpack how they got to where they are. You heard him explain how he got started in this whole thing in kind of like how it led him to where he is now, and he’s so excited about this opportunity, and he’s so like driven to make this thing work and he’s excited about it. I think that’s the key. You got to be excited about what you’re working on and he’s out to build a brand.

And I’ve talked to you guys about the open brand and I talked about building a regular brand like a brand with a product line, and all that stuff. That’s what he’s doing. But I also want to say, he’s building it off of something that he’s had experience with in the past. So with that being said, think about the brand that you want to build whether it’s an open brand so you can dabble a little bit or if it’s a brand that you’re going to have a face to. Whether that’s you or whether that’s partnering with someone, that’s a couple of things you need to think about. And if you can if you can really understand that, then that can give you a little bit more direction moving forward.

So again guys want to remind you the Facebook group theamazingseller.com/fb. Head over there, see what we’ve got to offer over there, totally free by the way, and an awesome community of TASers. And then the show notes can be found at theamazingseller.com/374. And the last little announcement that I want to make here, depending on when you’re listening to this, we are having an unofficial meet up in North Carolina and that’s going to be June 23rd, 2017. It’s going to be at four o’clock PM, Eastern in the afternoon. This is going to be an in person meet up we are just going to which is going to be there, having some coffee having some great conversation. Meeting other TASers and you are invited if you are local or if you want to travel a couple hours depending on where you’re located. But I just wanted to let you guys know they’re going to doing that and you can head over to theamazingseller.com/nc for North Carolina. And that will. Much take you to the event page of all the information about that little local meet up that we’re having in North Carolina.

[01:06:07] Scott: So if you’re in the area would love to meet you, and if you’re listening to this later well, maybe, next time. All right guys. So that is it. That’s going to wrap up this episode. Remember as always, 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, say it proud, “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 <<

…a coaching call recap that myself and Chris Shaffer just got done with and the question was asked at Seller Summit. We were sitting at lunch with one of our TAS listeners and also one of our students and he said, “I think I might have picked and launched the wrong product. Now what?”

He really had a great mindset because he said to himself, “At least I’ve launched and at least I’ve gotten some momentum here but the sales just aren’t what I thought they would be maybe I’m doing something wrong.” We said, “Let’s jump on a call when you get and I get back, and we all get back and get situated let’s jump on a call and dig through what you have going and see whether it’s something we can improve or if it’s something we can say maybe we need to pivot and move on.”

That’s exactly what we did here on this call so I just wanted to let you guys know before we jump into this call actually Chris and I had a little bit of some glitches in our Skype connection so you might hear a couple of pops here and there but I think you guys will be cool with it. I just want to let you guys know that I am aware of it and I think you guys will still get a ton of value from this. I’m going to turn it over to the conversation that I had with myself and Chris Shaffer and oh by the way the show notes to the episode can be found at theamazingseller.com/375.

Alright guy so enjoy this recap call that I did with my good friend Mr. Chris Shaffer.

[COACHING CALL]

[00:01:33] Scott: Chris, are you ready to rock and roll?

[00:01:34] Chris: I am ready to rock and roll, let’s do this thing man.

[00:01:39] Scott: You ready to do this thing? Right now the time that I am recording this which is early in the morning, you are just a little bit earlier than I am

[00:01:47] Chris: Just a little.

[00:01:49] Scott: Just about an hour but normally right now I am not recording this early so again I’m recovering from this chest cough, I’ve got some coffee I’ve already had some nice tea and everything. I’m hoping I’m going to get through this without coughing Chris I think that’s my biggest fear right now.

[00:02:04] Chris: I think we’ll be okay, you’ve got a mute button.

[00:02:06] Scott: Oh that’s true I do, I do. We are not doing this technically live, are we? Yes we are, we are actually live we are just not live if that makes sense. But Chris what I wanted to do is maybe just give people the backstory really quickly on how we met Reese and get people caught up. You and I were at Seller Summit which was an amazing event, Steve Chou’s event and we met a lot of great people, a lot of great people and we sat down had lunch with Reese and Reese said, “Hey guys I just want to let you know I’m a fan of the podcast and I’m also inside of the PLC classroom.” And we were like, “Awesome, how are things going?” He goes, “It’s actually going really well. I mean we are selling consistently but I don’t really think this is the product or at least I’m not sure if it is because I may have jumped the gun but I’m okay with that. I did that on purpose because I just wanted to get started. I didn’t want to sit there and think about it too much I just wanted to jump in and learn the process.”

I don’t know about you Chris but that to me showed that he was just ready to get in there and learn and he had a great mindset. What did you take away from that little conversation we had with him at lunch?

[00:03:11] Chris: That little lunch pow wow in the sunshine in Florida.

[00:03:15] Scott: Oh my gosh it was amazing.

[00:03:16] Chris: Oh man I’m standing here staring at a very cloudy sky here in Southern Texas and just thinking about how nice it was being in Florida and only half listening to what you are saying because I’m distracted by how nice it was.

[00:03:32] Scott: It was.

[00:03:34] Chris: No I’m just kidding. Reese is a good dude and I think that’s absolutely the mindset that you should have. It’s the fail quickly mindset. If you are going to do it and you are not sure if you picked the right products you still go all in and see what happens and that’s the mindset that he and his wife have had which is, “We think we can make this work but we are not sure if it doesn’t oh well it’s going to be a learning experience.”

Quite honestly it sounds like from our conversation with him that even if it isn’t a product that they are not going to continue with long term at least it’s not a costly misstep. They are going to come out around, breakeven from the sound of it. That’s always good to start with. I think they have absolutely the right mindset for this kind of venture and I’m curious to see what your thoughts are in sum total from that call as well.

[00:04:19] Scott: Yeah well again I want to get people caught up as far as we sat down, we had lunch with him and he’s telling us all about what he’s doing and everything. You and I are like, “If you want I mean we can jump on a Skype call. We don’t do this with everyone but we are sitting here at a table, we met you in person and stuff let’s go ahead and jump on a call and we can walk through exactly where you are at.” He was at this turning point really, he was like, “Do I continue to go with this product that’s not really selling awesomely” Is that a word awesomely?

[00:04:49] Chris: Awesomely? It is now.

[00:04:52] Scott: It is now. He just was stuck. The other thing he did is right away he is like, “I think I made a mistake because I had too many variations.” That was another big one that he’s like, “I think I made a mistake on that but I’m okay with it because I learned a ton through this process.” I said, “Let’s just jump on Skype once we get back get situated let’s find a time that we can get together and go through your business.” Of course he’s going to reveal his product to us and all that stuff and he did and it was really good to go through everything that he’s done so far. I think he’s done amazing just getting started, getting through that process but again us being able to look at it from a different perspective and then give him some insights and that’s what I’m going to do here.

I want to just recap that call for everyone and guide people through what we seen and then what the advice was and for him to actually have a lot of these I think aha moments where he is like, “Oh okay I see, don’t do that do this.” I want to bring people through that process and give them some of that advice that we have given them. Maybe we can just dig in to the whole he had like five or six different variations off of this one product. That was the first thing that I seen that I was like, “Oh boy.” To start off to have five six different SKUs, even if they are under one parent, that’s a lot of different products. Technically some might not sell, some might sell. What’s your thoughts on that Chris?

[00:06:19] Chris: That’s a mistake that I see a lot of people make and it’s a conversation that you and I have a few times a week with people. Any time that we jump on a workshop people ask us that question, you get that question I know via email a few times a week and it goes something like this, “My top selling competitors have eight colors. Do I need to sell all eight?” The answer is no, please for the love of all that is holy do not sell all eight in the beginning. Take a look and see which one sell the most and start with those one or two. We even did this recently in a brand that we are in Scott where we said, “There is a hundred different color variations that we could launch. Which are the two that are going to work the best?” And we asked our audience which two they wanted to see and we let them choose.

The same thing works here, you can use Jungle Scout say okay, whether it’s a size variation or color variation or quantity variation which one of these sells the best and then you can decide to launch the best seller or the two best sellers. I would not generally suggest anyone launches a product with five variations especially for their first swing at the plate because you are managing a much more complex system. We had a statistic and I don’t remember if it was at Seller Summit or if it was somewhere else recently but it was like every time you add a SKU… Oh it was at the Click Funnels event. Every time you add a SKU to your business it gets more complex by 12%. Does that make sense?

[00:07:51] Scott: Yeah it does.

[00:07:52] Chris: So if he has five variations and I’m going to give every math teacher in the world a heart attack right now, that’s what 60% more complex?

[00:08:00] Scott: Wow you are doing some great math right now.

[00:08:02] Chris: Right, so I guess technically it will be like 48%.

[00:08:06] Scott: I don’t know, you lost me already.

[00:08:07] Chris: You can’t count the first one but it’s 50% more complex than it would be if you just had that one SKU so there is a whole bunch of other variables. You have to track five listings, you have to worry about running paid ads to five different listings and figuring out which one works. You have to look at the sessions for five different listings and that can be overwhelming. That can also be distracting in the beginning and it turns out that just like everything else in business it seems like his sales are following the Pareto Principle, the 80-20 rule if you will. 20% of your stuff is going to net you 80% of your results so turns out two of his variations were like 85% percent of his sales.

[00:08:47] Scott: Yeah and I think we can say what we are talking about here small, medium, large, extra-large, extra extra large. That’s what we are talking about or it could be five different colors. That’s what we are talking about so when you have those different ones, not everyone is going to need the small, not everyone is going to need the red but once you find out that there’s one or two that people are more or less buying then that’s going to be a better way to go into that space without having to have five different SKUs.

Remember if you have five different SKUs that means if your supplier says you need to have a 300 or 500 minimum per SKU that means you’ve just 5X’ed that and that can be overwhelming and expensive. I think that was a big one and he already knew that when we sat down on the table before we even got on a call. He was like, “I think I might have messed up there. I’m okay with it.” So now that he’s going though and I want to lead people through the first thing that we did.

We looked at that and we said, “Okay yes, that’s probably something…We can fix that. That’s not hard we can just liquidate the other ones and keep the main ones for now and keep fulfilling those but the real question is, is there really any chance for you to succeed with this product? Is there something different about your product? Is there depth and demand for your product and is it too competitive for your product and is it worth continuing?

That’s really the big questions that we had to answer here so our first step in that was looking at the product and immediately when I looked at the product I go, “Yeah too competitive, too easy to copy, it’s probably not going to be worth continuing.” That was my first reaction but he is running paid ads to those pay-per-click and his ACOS is like 55% right now which isn’t that bad and 500,000 impressions which isn’t that bad especially when you are just starting out and being that competitive so really he’s generating all of his sales through pay-per-click.

[00:10:56] Scott: Now the next question is this, can you rank on page one to start to get sales on page one because if he gets to page one he can probably sell that product? But he is not even in the top twenty pages. It’s that competitive and the product only sells between it was like $11 and $20 depending on the color or the size. The first thing we had to look at was the competition and right away I said to myself, “Competition, very, very high and I’m not sure it’s worth even trying to get to page one.”

Does that mean that we give up on that product 100%? Our advice was, “No, you have some momentum, you can keep selling this if you want to if you can do minimums and still fulfill that without having to do thousands of units and then you can slowly start to rank for other long tail keywords and stuff like that and maybe still run that pay-per-click at least if it’s a breakeven and then see if you can still build that out.”

It also could lead people to other products in your brand, that’s if we want to continue out this brand which we’ll talk about because that was another part of this conversation. Chris I just went on a little bit of a rant there about as far as how to figure out that next part but what did you take away when we’d first seen the product and when we first seen what we were up against with what he’s selling?

[00:12:18] Chris: I think my gut takeaways were very similar to yours and the thing I geeked out over is he had a metric boatload of sponsored ads data. He had 500,000 questions and all that stuff and we got to talking and it sounded like we are around breakeven on the product, is it worth continuing to pursue? And to me the answer to that question is not super simple. You have to decide if it’s worth renewing that order or not just on those say the two largest selling colors, the red and the blue and if you can do that then does that make sense rather than getting red, blue, pink, green, fuchsia and black if we just reordered those top SKUs and we can use that to bankroll other products? Is it worth our time?

At breakeven the answer is probably no because we are not creating a bankroll there, we are not pulling out any profit but what it turned out to be was that even without much refinement, his sponsored products were at around the breakeven point. So with some refinement we might be able to make that profitable which is interesting to me. One of the things that I suggested is that he take a look at that and see if there is a way to make it profitable because even though he is not getting a ton of organic traffic to that, if he can cut that ACOS in half then it might be worth doing because you are going to make… I think he said he was making $10 a unit so at a 50% ACOS that means he’s breakeven. If he can drop that to 25% percent he’s making $5 a unit.

So that’s not the ideal $10 that you and I talk about in the ten by ten by one method but its till $5 and this plays back into the question that I got a few times at Seller Summit and we get all the time and it was from our friends Josh and Jess. They said, “Look, we have a product that’s not necessarily on brand with where we want to be long term but it’s selling. Should we keep going with it or should we not renew it?”

[00:14:23] Chris: And that’s the same exact answer that I gave them. I said, “Well if you can use that to create profit and fund your other products then why wouldn’t you reorder it?” If he can find a way to make that profitable then it might be worth reordering in my opinion. That was my initial gut call from what we were talking about because it sounded like he was at breakeven if we can improve that a little bit and use that to bankroll the other stuff it might be worth doing another order on.

[00:14:52] Scott: Yeah okay so we talked about that and then he was really like, “I just don’t know if this is the market, I don’t know if this is going to be a brand.” And I’m like, “Listen, if it’s not telling you that it’s a brand, if you don’t have someone that is going to be pushing a brand I’m talking like a real brand that you have a suite of products then maybe it’s time to go to an open brand, maybe it’s time that this is just your open brand account.” And he’s like, “Well I’ve already branded my account with my name.” Then we basically told him, “That doesn’t matter, you can change your seller’s account your brand name within five minutes. That’s not a problem and then this name that you’ve given this product that could be your sub-brand in the open brand.” Does that make sense Chris?

Being able to take that brand that’s kitchen garlic presses you’ve named it that because you are going to be this kitchen garlic press seller and that’s what you are going to sell. You are going to sell these specialized garlic presses instead now you take that sub-brand or you create that as a sub-brand your main brand is XYZ deals.

[00:16:05] Chris: Yeah, what you are talking about there Scott is the soul buy name.

[00:16:07] Scott: Yeah the soul buy.

[00:16:08] Chris: So you can change that at any point. It’s in your account settings inside of your seller central account and you can change that to be XYZ wholesale and then the brand of the product doesn’t have to change.

[00:16:18] Scott: Exactly so that can stay the same so you have one leg in your brand let’s call it one channel in your brand or in your main brand, your umbrella, your open brand that could be in kitchen stuff and then you can start a brand new one in cabinet accessories for kitchens? So you can totally just start to pick random products and I think that’s what he really wants to do because then he can dabble and not feel as restricted like I have to find something in this space. That’s what we told him like that might be better to do so you have to go back to the drawing board and then start from scratch. It’s funny I asked him I said, “Reese do you have a list of products that you already have a list of that you might want to look into next?” And he really didn’t.

And he actually told us too when he was at Sellers Summit. He said, “I’ve just let this go on its own. I haven’t really pushed it, I haven’t done much maybe got busy,” whatever and then still been doing what it’s been doing so that’s still pretty good but I would have thought that he would have had a list of… I know I have a list of products. I know Dom does, I know you do and there’s just not enough bandwidth to launch all those products. And it doesn’t mean that all those products are going to be ones that you launch because you might go back to them and go, “Oh no now that I look further at it it’s not good.”

We opened his eyes a little bit on how to do that product research going back to basics and he said, “So what do I do, do I go just back to the Jungle Scout web app and start going there?” I’m like, “Listen you’ve got to start over by going back to your touch list. Go back to your touch list or think about things you are passionate about right now. Is there something you would want to build a brand around eventually? Maybe you start there even though you might not call it a brand yet or a big brand you can at least dabble in that brand to see if something sticks and then start to build off of that.”

[00:18:18] Scott: He got thinking he’s like, “Yeah okay.” Then I’m like, “If you are going to use Jungle Scout web app and we actually did a whole thing with him on this we took him through that process using some examples and I said, “Listen, what you have to do though is use the web app to get ideas.” Maybe, do those refinements and stuff and all those filters to bring up products that could fall in that arena of the different criteria but then from there, and this is what people don’t do and he didn’t even do this and a lot of people don’t so it’s not like he is the only one that doesn’t do this.

But you find a product and then that might not be the product you are going to launch because it’s being shown in a web app so you are like, “Everybody sees this thing,” but then you drill into that person’s brand and then you see a suite of products that they are selling or their open brand and then you start to pick through those and start to see if anything can meet that criteria. Does that make sense Chris though all what I just said?

[00:19:13] Chris: It does and going that second layer deep and it’s something I said on the call with Reese was no one does it and the other thing that no one does and everybody poo poo’s the touch list but every time we talk to somebody who’s selling extremely successfully it turns out that they are using their touch list and Scott you and I find most of our products by using our touch list.

[00:19:34] Scott: 100% yeah.

[00:19:38] Chris: It’s something that we do all the time. Now I don’t keep a running list of everything I touch at this point because it’s a habit for me. When I touch something I go, “Oh I wonder if this would sell on Amazon. This is a weird thing I wonder.” Then you jump on and you look at Jungle Scout when you get home. That’s how I handle that but starting off with that list is extremely powerful. But the other thing that is and that’s what you were touching on is diving that second layer deep.

It’s clicking on that soul buy name and seeing what else those sellers are selling and it’s something that not a lot of people do because one, they either just don’t know that it exists or two they are digging through their own list of stuff and they just want to look at the top level things. That second layer gives you a lot of insight into one, whether or not you can build a brand off that product. That was something that you and I found, the item that you and I have talked about that I found when I was putting together my guest bedroom.

We did that second layer and found out that there were a lot of complimentary products that would also meet the ten by ten by one criteria and we could build a brand around a completely non sexy, for a lack of a better term ridiculous item and build a brand of five, ten, fifteen even products around that one item. And so diving that second layer deep gives you other ideas but it also validates demand for the market as a whole, for the niche as a whole rather than just for that particular item. Does that make sense?

[00:21:04] Scott: Yeah it makes total sense and the one that I said to him is well, “Listen, sometimes it’s the non-sexy products.” The product that he’s selling is a sexy product and what I mean by that is it’s something that you’d be proud to tell your friends that you sell. It’s like, “Cool look at this, I sell this amazing…”

[00:21:22] Chris: People would get it.

[00:21:23] Scott: Yeah they’d get it and they’d go, “Oh I see,” but if you told people that you sold repair parts for a blender that’s not that sexy. And it’s funny because I showed Reese an example actually I pulled one of the items off of my list of products then I said, “Reese I don’t care I’m going to show you this.” So I showed it to him and I started drilling down into these different products, these different pieces and he was blown away and he’s like, “Wow I would have never known,” and I go, “Yeah I never would have known this number one, if I didn’t have to have one of these in my house one day and then if I didn’t start looking at parts around this item I never would have found that.”

That’s how I found that product. I did not find that product and the things that could be sold around it by using a tool. I did use the tools to go in and refine and dig and I used the shovel once I figured out where to dig but I did not go out there and just let the web app tell me what I should sell. That’s what people are relying on. They are relying on the web app to tell them exactly what to sell. That’s not how I’m using it and I’m not saying that you can’t find a product that way but I’m saying I use it as a way for me to bring an idea to me in a certain market or a category and then I can start to drill down and dig in that area that it made aware of.

Like I said the product that I was going through with him and it was funny I showed him like this whole different methodology on how you would do it that he wasn’t aware of and it’s funny because I’ve said this time and time again and I’ve showed people how I’ve done it but it’s basically again just finding that product, looking at the brand… Don’t even worry about that product right now it might be selling really good but it’s competitive and then I would click on the brand that’s selling that and I would look at all their products and sometimes you see that all their products are related to that one products and sometimes you’ll see just a barrage of things that’s their open brand. And then I start drilling into all of those different products inside the open brand.

[00:23:24] Scott: The other thing that I do is once I go into their brand that’s when I run the Jungle Scout extension and I get details on all their products that they selling in that one brand. And that was one thing that he wasn’t doing as well and he was like, “Oh wow I didn’t realize that running that on that page is going to give me just their results,” and that’s exactly what it does.

He took a ton away, I know he is going to get back to the drawing board, I know he’s going to figure this thing out but I just want to go back to anyone else that is at this point just understand that if you are not married to the product, and you shouldn’t marry the product at first because you just don’t know and the thing is if you don’t marry the product it gives the freedom to be able to say, “You know what, I’m going to pivot and I’m going to go ahead and figure out another product or if I’m going to turn this into an open brand versus a main brand.” Does that make sense Chris?

[00:24:17] Chris: It does indeed and that is the key here is don’t get married to your product even if it’s something that you’ve been selling for two years. You have understand that the market is going to change but in most cases if you get out of the woods on that first order it’s something that you can continue to sell. That’s a question that you and I get all the time is that, “When you guys say don’t marry your product but does that mean you are just churning products out left and right?”

No, you are still selling some of the stuff that you first launched and you are selling almost as many of them as you did when you first launched it at this point. It’s just one of those things and if you don’t get married to those it’s going to open your eyes and it’s going to make you a lot more objective in terms of whether or not you want to continue with that or if you want to pursue something like the open brand strategy.

[00:25:03] Scott: Yeah exactly and going back to even like my first product and first so called brand because I thought that that’s what I was going to do is build that thing as a brand, I’ve since backed off of that just because the market. Now I’ve learned more and I’ve seen that its saturated in certain areas and stuff and I also don’t want to expose myself to people finding me and stuff so for other reasons but like you said I was able to look and see what’s happening, adjust and then decide do I want to let that brand be an open brand or do I want to let that brand do what it’s doing and start a new brand? That’s your option.

For Reese my recommendation to him was probably go to an open brand right now and it’s very easy for him to do that because he’s only got the one product and now he can just make that product and he can still launch products in that market just underneath that brand but the main brand, the soul buy brand is going to be XYZ deals or XYZ wholesale and then from there he has the freedom to be able to do that. I think the big thing I want people to understand here is number one, you are going to learn a ton through this process and I think Reese really understood that. I think a lot of people don’t see the value in you take the action, you get results, you react. You learn, you react, you get all of the things that happen when you actually get to see what happens.

It’s like split testing. If you don’t do a test you don’t know how it will perform. A perfect example, the product that I first launched the very first product and I would think that it’s not going do well it’s just going to fizzle out. It’s still selling pretty well and I’ve raised the price because I tested it and I found out that I probably should have raised the price a year ago because I’m getting two to three dollars more per unit right now and it’s selling the same. But if I didn’t test that, if I didn’t take action to see what would happen I never would know.

[00:27:02] Scott: I can’t stress that enough guys, you guys hear me say it all the time it’s like you have to actually implement something in order to see a result period. It just doesn’t happen. You can’t lose weight unless you start to exercise and diet. You can’t, you can think about it but you’ve got to actually do something. So Chris, let’s wrap this up but I did want to get your thoughts on the overall call that we had with him and then anyone else out there that might be in this situation or in this spot.

[00:27:30] Chris: First of all and I said this earlier I think he’s got absolutely the right mindset to be successful in this business. I don’t think the product he picked was an ideal product by any stretch of the imagination. I think if he does want to continue with it, if he digs through that data that he can make that a profitable product for him to bankroll those other things it’s just a matter of whether or not he wants to do that work versus investing that time and effort and quite frankly money into a new product or launching a few products with the open brand concept. But I think he definitely approached this from the right way. He is using the data to inform his decisions which is exactly what you were getting at there.

We say don’t get married to a product, don’t be emotionally invested and that’s something that’s really hard for a lot of us and I struggle with it too, but I know that the data is going to tell me whether or not something is working. If you are at breakeven after your first order that’s not necessarily a bad thing and you have to do exactly what we did with Reese yesterday and look at whether or not it’s going to be profitable in the future. If I make this change, this change and this change is it going to be profitable and then if yes do I want to invest my time, effort and money into making this product profitable? Does that make sense?

[0:28:47] Scott: That makes total sense and I think this goes right down to what I see in a common thread of people that we met at Sellers Summit and people that I just talk to in general but most of the people that are successful have failed before they were successful. Meaning the product failed or their idea failed but they kept going. There’s many people that we met over that weekend and said, “You know what, I started my first two products were no good, the third one I started to building some momentum and then I launched three more products around that and now I’m doing $500,000 or now I’m doing $1.4 million.” Like that couple that came up to us and said, “I failed so much going up in the beginning but I learned a ton, I learned what not to do, what to do more of and all that stuff.” That’s the people that succeed.

You can’t win if you quit, period. You have to keep going, you have to keep trying if you really want this and again that goes back to your why and all that stuff that’s why mindset is a huge play here in anything. We are talking business her e but if you wanted it’s there for you, you just have to keep pivoting or keep figuring things out as you move through this but you will be smarter I promise you. You will be smarter as you keep going through these different tests. Think of them as experiments when you’re doing a product in a sense. Think of it as an experiment, think of it as a test and then from there you can decide what to do next.

You won’t be able to do what we just did with Reese unless you’ve actually done something to get a result so we can actually look at and make that decision. Chris I think that’s it I think that’s going to wrap up this episode. I wanted to keep this short and to the point and give everybody like a quick little recap of like being in a coaching call with us. I think it was really, really good for him to hear our outside perspective and he even said that it’s good to see someone looking at it with a different set of eyes through maybe different glasses in a sense where you are actually able to see a little bit differently and you are not just looking inside so tightly because they are so vested in that product or they are so committed to that product.

[00:30:54] Scott: That’s it, that’s all I got. Guys the show notes can be found at theamazingseller.com/375; transcripts, show notes, any links we mentioned will be there as well and yeah that’s going to wrap it up. So guys we are going to do this with Chris on this time, we are going to do it together, hopefully Chris has got enough energy to do the ending with me so, you ready Chris? Are you ready to do this?

[00:31:17] Chris: Oh I’m ready.

[00:31:18] Scott: Okay let’s do it. alright guys, 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, say it proud, come on Chris, one, two, three, “Take Action!” Have an awesome amazing day guys and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]

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Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…answer your questions here on the podcast and I do it every single Friday and I am pumped to be here with you once again. I’ve got a few questions I’m going to answer today and those are really about… I’ll just give you guys a little heads up promotional placement. We are going to talk about that, we are going to talk about managing your Amazon business and we are also going to talk again about UPCs, FNSQs, all those numbers that could be confusing and who’s supposed to do what and what ones are we supposed to be buying and all of that stuff.

So we are going to talk about all of those today and before I did jump in though, I wanted to do a couple of things. Number one I want to thank you for being a listener. You guys are awesome and the more that I get to meet you guys in person and I’ve done this many times now when we’ve had these unofficial meetups and all of that stuff and I just really, really love spending time with you. But I also want to let you guys know that it means a ton to me that you guys are listeners and that you guys send me emails or post on Facebook or whether I meet you in person, you tell me your story.

I want to hear your stories so I’m going to give you guys a way that you can do that. You can head over to theamazingseller.com/action. Just go that link, there’ll be a little voice recorder there and just record me a short little message maybe your first name, where you are tuning in from and then just a little bit about your journey so far and maybe how the podcast has played a little bit of a role on that. I would love to hear your story. The other thing that you can do is if you want to ask a question and have me maybe answer it here on an upcoming show all you have to do is head over to the amazingseller.com/ask and yeah you can ask a question there as well.

A lot of you have already been doing that and I want to just say also be patient because I do get a lot of questions but I will try to answer each and every one on an upcoming episode.

[00:02:00] Scott: Now this episode is 376 so the link to grab the show notes, the transcripts, all that good stuff is over at theamazingseller.com/376. Now you guys know on Fridays I like to give you guys what’s been on my mind or what’s going through my head and one very simple thing that I want to say here that hopefully will sink in and also allow you to not get overwhelmed or when you are starting to feel overwhelmed think about this right here, and what this is it’s really simple and I’m sure you’ve heard it before but I think you might need to write this one down. “One bite at a time.”

You can’t go out there and expect to understand everything. You hear me talking about launching a product. I talk about building a list, I talk about funnels, I talk about marketing, I talk about maybe sourcing. It seems like there’s a lot of stuff and it might feel like I’m spraying you in the face with a garden hose or a fire hose and I understand that. I’m trying to help everyone at different parts of their business but that does not mean you have to do everything right now. We did a Facebook Live the other day and Dom Sugar had a little meet up in Canada and some people came out and they go, “Dom there is so much information I’m just not sure what to do during this launch I know Scott talks about building an email list and then we talk about pay-per-click and we talk about all this stuff.”

We went over that on Friday on our Facebook Live, it was on a Friday, and we basically just said, “Listen it doesn’t mean you have to do it all. It means that you need to mix it up or you need to do one thing at a time. Try one thing, if you are in the product selection phase that’s where you need to be, that’s where you spend your time. Don’t start thinking about launching right now, just think about the product, the criteria, all the things that go into that phase.” You guys know I always break it down into phases so that’s what you want to do one bite at a time. No one expects you to do everything at once and you are not going to know everything at once, you are not supposed to.

[00:04:02] Scott: So one bite at a time. Slow down, take a breath and see where you are at and take that one bite at a time towards the thing that you are working on right now. Now one last thing before we do jump into today’s questions I want to give a shout out, I want to give a little Facebook love to our amazing TASers out there. You guys are awesome, community is growing, the community is just even better than ever I mean so many people are being so helpful and I want to give a little shout out, I want to give a little high five to Greg Hatts. So Greg, I want to say thank you so much for posting this and this was a little win that he was able to celebrate and I always tell you guys it’s not about the big, big gigantic wins it’s about those little wins because they build over time and they compound on each other.

But Greg posts here little screenshot $160 in sales today and then ten units sold so far today and he’s got the last seven days $463. Little screenshot there and he writes, “Been at it for about a month now with my first product, finally hitting ten units per day. This stuff really works, thanks Scott.” And of course I jumped in there and said, “Awesome, high fives,” because that’s what we need. We need to understand that it’s not going to all happen overnight and the thing is Greg is getting results because he did something. I say this over and over again, we can learn this stuff, we can consume it, we can sit there and think about it and what if this happens and what if that, but you won’t know until you actually do something. You will never get a result.

I’m not saying go out there and be hasty go out there and rush things but I’m saying until you actually do something you can’t judge on what you are doing or you can’t base any decisions until after you’ve done something. You’ve got to work yourself through it. You can start small still but you’ve gotta start somewhere and I just want again to say awesome job Greg and everyone else out there that has some small wins right now celebrate them.

[00:06:01] Scott: High five each other, post that in the group, I think that that support around you is so important, the mindset is so important and this stuff right here can fuel you and motivate you to keep going. Alright so alright guys let’s go ahead and let’s get rocking and rolling here. I am so fired up today I can’t wait to jump into today’s questions so let’s go ahead and do that. Let’s go ahead and listen to today’s first question and I’ll give you my answer. Let’s do this.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:06:27] Brian: Hi Scott my name is Brian and I had a question in regards to promotion. If your product was say 60% off are you allowed to put a bullet just stating that your product is 60% off for a limited time? Not in the title, would be in the bullets I just didn’t know if that was against the terms of service. I would love to hear from you.

[00:06:47] Scott: Hey Brian thank you so much for the question and this is a great question. Now I’ve seen some people put in the first bullet they’ll put ‘50% off, mother’s day special’. Not supposed to do that, that is against terms and services. There’s no promotional material is supposed to go inside of those bullets the bullets are meant for benefits and features. And some could say, “Well it’s a benefit if they are going to save some money,” to you maybe but not to Amazon. Amazon wants those to just be information about the product, benefits, features use it for those spots.

Now the one cool thing that Amazon does now is when you put something in your promotional area there is actually a little spot there that goes up top now just below the price so that’s new so that’s really a great spot to put something like ‘buy one get one 50% off’ or maybe it is 20% off or whatever it is. You can have your little promotional thing there and it’s blue, it’s in a nice blue color and it’s very noticeable so I wouldn’t worry about putting it in my bullet I would rather put it there anywhere in the promotional area so use the promotional tab, use the promotional area, run those things because I’m telling you that can increase the amount of sales that you get from that one customer.

We can increase the size of the cart if it’s a good deal. You can even cross-promote in there because it could be like ‘buy one of this get twenty 25% off of other products’ and then they would click to see the details and then it would show the details. So that’s one way. There is another way that you can do it. Now again this is riding the line a little bit, it’s probably, I’m not going to say that’s it’s grey but it’s not a 100% white. Let’s call it that white hat, grey hat, black hat so you can put something in your images that could then let them know about something. Technically you are not supposed to put promotional stuff in there as well but I don’t see a big issue in that. I don’t think it should be like obnoxious but you could technically direct people to where they should be looking.

[00:08:49] Scott: Maybe it could be an image with your product being used and then a little footer banner could say something like, “Check out our promotional area for monthly deals,” or something like that. I don’t personally have a problem with that but again use your own judgment. If you looked at the Terms of Service there is probably going to be in there something that states “100% product-based” or whatever. But me personally I don’t think that that’s a big deal. I’m giving them more information about the product and I’m also then just throwing that in there.

Now this is not on the main image, okay? Nothing like this would go on the main image. That is completely against terms of service so that is no, no we do not want to do that. Anything additional as far as those additional images you can put other things in there. You can put badges, you can put people, you can put lifestyle shots, you can do all that stuff so that stuff is definitely okay at least as of right now that I’m recording this episode. So be careful, I would be careful of putting stuff in the bullets, I would be careful of putting it in the description and I would just put it in the areas that they allow us to put them in which is definitely in the promotional area. That’s what they want that area for so that’s what I would do and yeah I think that you’ll do well with that.

I think that the other thing to note here is if you are going to do something do something really valuable so people want to actually do it not like 5% off your next purchase. It’s not big of a deal. You know what I mean like 10% minimum I think. I think even more but 10% minimum is what I would probably do. Alright so hopefully this answered your question let’s go ahead and listen to today’s next question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:10:28] Greg: Hey Scott, Greg here from Grand Junction Colorado. I have a quick question for you. We are about to launch our first product and I’ve been hearing a lot lately that Amazon is taking more and more time for people to basically manage their product, manage their inventory and what I’m afraid of is we’d like to eventually get two maybe two, even three products out there but what I don’t want to see happen is this one product end up taking 30, 40 hours a week of our time. Would you have any recommendations for leveraging other programs or systems or maybe hiring an ISA or even family member to manage inventory, orders, follow up, that sort of thing? I’d appreciate your feedback on that and your advice. Thanks Scott.

[00:11:19] Scott: Hey Greg thank you so much for the question and I talked a little bit about the time it takes to run an Amazon business or an ecommerce business in general. It’s going to be different for everyone but let’s focus on Amazon as a channel right now. I mean if it was eBay it’d be an eBay channel, it could be Etsy or maybe all those channels but right now I’m not really sure I’m understanding what you are saying because you are making it sound like people are saying that it’s really hard to manage your inventory and it’s hard to maybe manage your pay-per-click. I don’t know where that time that they are saying and Amazon is not good about the management of it and stuff or maybe the reporting is behind maybe that’s what you are saying?

Let me just say this and maybe this will clear it up for you, I don’t think it’s that complicated to run your Amazon business especially if you want to utilize a tool or two. Now for the longest time I was using a Spreadsheet. The inventory levels are going to be pretty much accurate with inside of Amazon. Now has there been times that they’ve been off a little bit? Yes you have to understand that they have… You’ll see the breakdown it will some are in reserve. In reserve means that they are either being transported to another warehouse or they are sold and they are reserving them so that way they don’t get sold.

But that stuff is almost real time in a sense. I mean it’s no more than eight ten hours behind let’s say that so you are still going to be there so I’m not really sure I understand that. Now when it comes to bookkeeping or accounting or any of that stuff that can be a little bit of time consuming if you don’t have a tool that allows you to see how many units are sold, your cost of goods because you’ve got to take that off and that was one thing that Josh Bauerle the guy that I’ve had come on the CPA, he’s come on the show. He’s actually going to come back on the show here soon again give us some updates on what’s been happening with tax stuff and all that stuff but the one big mistake that people don’t do is they don’t allow for the cost of goods, or I shouldn’t say that they don’t allow.

[00:13:25] Scott: They want to take the money that they’ve spent on inventory and immediately deduct that off and you can’t do that. You can only deduct the cost of goods after its been sold so you definitely want to make sure that you are clear on that but if you have a tool it will allow you to see this. And I’ve got to be honest I just started using Fetcher about four months ago and what’s really cool with Fetcher is I’m able to load in all of my different brands that I’m working with and with a click of a button I can go in and switch to a different brand so I can house more than one brand under this one account.

But what’s really cool about it is I was always taking after each month and I would break down how many units sold and then I would have a spreadsheet that said how much those cost me and then I would pencil that in and then we would pencil in cost for pay-per-click and then we would do Amazon fees and then you would do all that stuff and then at the end you’d come up with your profit, your net. With Fetcher, and I just did it actually this morning. I actually had to do it for quarterly taxes, and I went in and with literary with the click of a button to set the timeframe parameters I had all the data right there. I had all my inventory levels, I had how much that cost me, I had right down to the last line item and it all did it for me.

All I had to do was set it up and begin by just saying how much my cost of goods were and it did all the other work for me. I was even able to put in monthly expenses for tools that I’m using for those businesses and it automatically just triggers those every single month. I would say on an accounting side of things that’s where it can become time consuming but if you use a tool like Fetcher… I’ve mentioned Fetcher before, you guys know that I’m an affiliate for them if you guys want to go through my link buy me a cup of coffee and also get a nice 30 day free trial go ahead and head over to theamazingseller.com/fetcher. It’s very affordable too by the way.

[00:15:25] Scott: It’s really affordable I mean if you are even thinking about Quick Books or any of that’s stuff so much more affordable. Definitely go check that out and I would definitely say that’s going to make things a lot easier on that part of it. As far as inventory levels it will show you that, it’s not an inventory tracking tool which will give you projections but it will help you by seeing what your average per sale or your average sales per day are, how many units you still have in stock and all that stuff. But that stuff isn’t going to take you that long especially if you only have a handful of products. If you only have one or two products nothing, if you have more than ten that’s when it can get a little bit more time consuming.

If you are talking about pay-per-click again that can be time-consuming but now there’s tools out there and again I don’t want to just keep pushing tools on you guys but if you are at that point where you want to have someone else take care of this for you, you can have a tool that monitors that for you and does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. We use Ignite and again guys I’m not pushing links on you guys here. There’s free training on pay-per-click and how to manage it and all that stuff and how to set up these campaigns in the beginning a free resource theamazingseller.com/ppc go check that out before you even do sign up for anything like Ignite or anything because you can do this by hand. That’s going to be more time consuming too.

You can spend an hour or two in your pay-per-click or more if you want to just keep refining, and keep digging through all of your reports. But again I’m not really sure I’m seeing what the, I mean if it’s product research that’s going to take time, that’s going to be your time you can train someone, you can hire a VA to do that and then bring you back all the top results. There’s always ways to lessen the load but in the beginning it’s really just going to be you getting your hands in there and starting to do the different pieces to it. But once you get things up and running there is not really a lot of day to day stuff that you have to do.

[00:17:19] Scott: It’s funny I talked to John Lee Dumas from EOFire and we were talking about he’s got two books, they are journals that sell on Amazon right now and he spends maybe only like two to three hours a month on monitoring that and he’s doing over $30,000 a month, so you don’t have to. Now I also talked to him I’m like, “You probably should be doing a little bit more than that,” and he laughed because he could be getting more sales, more results and stuff if he focused a little bit more on that so we may be playing around with that in the future with him but just saying it doesn’t have to be a ton of time.

I’m not really sure if I understand where you are coming from or maybe you are just hearing that and I’m not sure where you are hearing that because most people once they get things up and running not that much to manage. Hopefully this helped you or anyone else out there thinking to themselves this is going to be a beast to manage it really doesn’t have to be. Alright guys let’s go ahead and listen to one more question for today, we’ll go ahead and answer that, we’ll wrap this baby up and let you guys kick off the weekend. What do you say? Let’s do this.

[00:18:17] Chaz: My name is Chaz and I’m from Salt Lake City Utah. First of I love the podcast Scott. I’ve tried listening to other Amazon podcasts and it’s just not the same, there is no comparison. I’m a full time college student and after listening to your podcast and your webinars and tips and other things but most of all taking action I’m itching to graduate so that I can spend even more time with my little Amazon project. I also listened to your podcast at my J-O-B and I’ve got to tell you I can’t wait to quit that thing. So I have two questions. I set up a brand new UPC code for a product that I’m selling and just so you are aware I made a G-T-I-N UPC code. I don’t know if you needed that but my first question is when I’m setting up the barcode there is two options, UPC-A and GS1 database stacked omnidirectional. Which one does Amazon prefer if any?

And my second question is how does labeling work? If I have my own UPC code do I need an FNSKU, do I just send over PDF to my supplier of the UPC and barcode and do they print it directly on the box or do they print it on the pallet or how does that work exactly? And also is there normally any extra charge to do that? Anyway thanks for any help you can give even if it’s just pointing me in the right direction to do my own research. I’ve had no issue taking action despite being a full time student with a full time job. It’s just too darn exciting. Thanks again Scott.

[00:20:08] Scott: Hey Chaz thank you so much for the question college kid too man love it out there hustling, getting things done, fired up about being an entrepreneur, I love it, absolutely love it. Thank you for being a listener by the way, thank you so much for getting out there and doing something especially while you are going through school I mean that’s crazy. People say, “I don’t have the time.” You don’t really have a lot of time either if you are in college doing all the homework and probably working a job too so there’s a lot of stuff that’s going on in your world I know that so yeah hats off to you man and high five.

Okay to answer the question we are back on the UPC, FNSQ, GS1, all of these different terms and language that we throw around here. Here is the deal, let’s talk about UPC codes first. Bottom line we need a UPC code as of right now to create a listing, that’s one thing and you probably already know that but anyone else listening that’s brand new, doesn’t know that you need a UPC code whether you print it on your box or not or you use a sticker it doesn’t matter you need that when you set up your listing. So to create a listing you have to have a unique UPC code. Now, what do I mean by unique?

Well, recently Amazon announced that we only want GS1 UPC codes for products. Now what they mean by that or what they meant by that is they need to be purchased through GS1 or registered in GS1’s database. Now if someone was a third party reseller as long as they purchase them through GS1 and as long as they are in GS1’s database then you are good, then you are fine but if you purchase one from a third party and they are not purchased through GS1 you could have an issue. Now I only have one other resource besides GS1 that I go to and that is Snap UPC.

[00:22:09] Scott: And I have them on my resources page you guys can check out the resources page theamazingseller.com/resources. Now if you are at all thinking to yourself that you do not want to take a risk and I don’t think it’s a risk because if you try to put that UPC code in as you are registering your product it’s going to come back and it’s not going to work. So you are going to know and then you would have to go back to the company that you bought it from and then you would say, “Listen it’s not working I got to issue me a new one.” But if you don’t want to go through that, if you just want to go directly to GS1 then go to their website, purchase… They have a standard I think right now it’s $250 and that’s gives you up to ten UPC codes. Not that expensive so just maybe if you want to cut through it go right there and that way there you know that you are getting the right code.

Now let’s answer the second part of this; UPC code, FNSKU number. FNSQ or FNSKU however everyone says it differently. It’s the FNSQ number the one that Amazon puts on their packaging it’s really their unique code. Now if you are brand registered or you’ve been selling for a long time and you are brand registered and you are grandfathered in depending on the level of seller that you are, you may just be able to use a UPC code and bypass the FNSQ number but for most people that are just starting out you are going to have to have the FNSQ number that they provide you on your box. Now, if you don’t want to print that FNSQ number on your box or on your packaging you could have Amazon do it, Amazon’s going to charge you twenty cents to do it.

I’ve done it that way in the beginning, it works, it costs you twenty cents extra per unit so in the beginning if it’s easier have them do it. If you can have your manufacturer printed on there you are going to say twenty cents on each unit that you sell.

[00:24:08] Scott: Again not really that complicated but understand that you will most likely need the FNSQ number. So Scott, where do you get the FNSQ number it might be what you are asking yourself? You get that right in your listing as far as when you start to get ready to sell it when you are going to say that I have inventory there. There is going to be a little drop down menu that says FNSQ number and then from there you can go ahead and grab that number. It will be right next to it. If you go on your back, it’s hard to explain in audio but if you just go onto your backend into that listing and then you go as if you are going to send an inventory it’s going to bring you through that process.

You’ll see the FNSQ right there and then from there you’ll have it. Now you may not have the barcode so then you can go to a website and you can type in that number when then they’ll generate the code for you or what I’ve done is I will act as though I’m going to complete a full order and then I will say that I’m going to print the labels myself and then I will just spit out a PDF and then I’ll just take a screengrab of the FNSQ number and I’ll use that as my image and then I’ll send that off to my manufacturer. There is a whole bunch of different ways that you can do it but just understand you need more than just the number. You need the actual bar code on the box because they are going to scan that.

They are going to actually take that and they are going to put it over any UPC number or any other number that’s on that box. So if you are creating your own packaging it would only have your FNSQ number on there or again like I said if you want to make it even simpler just pay them twenty cents as you are going through the process of sending an inventory. They are going to ask you, “Are you going to label it or are we going to label it?” And then you’ll say, “I’m going to label it,” meaning yourself and then they’ll say, “Okay,” and then as long as you send it there with an FNSQ number you are good. If you say, “No I want you to do it” then they are going to basically charge you twenty cents and then when it comes in they are going to slap an FNSQ number on the package, easy peasy, not that big of a deal.

I know a lot of people get hang up with a lot of these numbers and what number do I need? We are hearing BSR, we are hearing FNSQ, we are hearing UPC, we are hearing GS1, all of these numbers.

[00:26:12] Scott: Don’t over complicate this process, it’s not that difficult. Alright guys I think that is going to wrap up this episode. Again I want to thank all of our TASers out there, all of our loyal listeners, our followers and everyone that’s out there helping inside of our Facebook community as well. If you guys are not part of that community I urge you to go over there request to join its totally free. You’ll be surrounded with a whole bunch of other TASers. You can head over to theamazingseller.com/fb and request to join and you’ll get approved really quickly actually probably within a couple of hours and then from there you can go in and you can dig around and see what people are talking about. You can ask questions, you can look through the search area there is a whole bunch of resources there and some really awesome people.

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

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…listen to myself and Chris Shaffer talk about what’s working, what’s not working or how to make it better, and that’s what we’re going to do here again today. I got my good friend back on the show once again. It seems like you were just here Chris, what’s up man?

[00:00:28] Chris: It’s weird, right?

[00:00:29] Scott: Yeah.

[00:00:29] Chris: It’s almost like we were already talking to each other and then we decided to record a podcast.

[00:00:34] Scott: Yeah, kind of, right?

[00:00:35] Chris: Weird.

[00:00:35] Scott: Yeah, it is. Actually, I want to let people know like when these hot seats happen it really comes from me answering an email and then kind of going back and forth and then being like, “You know what, maybe we should discuss this because I think it’s good for everyone to hear the back and forth.” And also kind of like hearing what Chris and I have done in a live environment when we do our TAS breakthrough lives. It’s very, very similar to what we’re doing here. And I get a lot of people that say they love listening to these because, again, they’re unscripted and we just kind of dig into someone’s business. So today, we’re going to be talking about, “Can I make my product successful on amazon or should I quit?” And I’m just going to let you guys know it’s going to probably come down to product selection but there’s some other things we can kind of look at too.

[00:01:19] Chris: Spoiler alert.

[00:01:21] Scott: Spoiler, spoiler. But, just to let you guys know we’re going to be digging into product selection again because guys I’m telling you once you get into this and you start to understand how things are working, you’re going to come back and say, “Man, where did I make that mistake?” It’s generally going to be in the product selection and it could just be in not just the selection of the product because it’s not doing well in Amazon or it’s too competitive, it could be because you’re not able to source it right. And that’s another spoiler alert. So, Chris, are you ready to dig into this hot seat?

[00:01:21] Chris: Let’s jump right in, man.

[00:01:56] Scott: I should let people know though the show notes. I should let them know about the show notes. I always like to kind of let everyone know in the beginning this is episode 377. So transcripts, show notes, theamazingseller.com/377. All right Chris go ahead. What were you saying?

[00:02:12] Chris: I was going to say, if you’re ready I’m just going to jump in and read the email that we have here. The inspiration for this hot seat.

[00:02:18] Scott: Yeah go ahead.

[HOT SEAT]

[00:02:18] Chris: So it says, “Hey Scott. My name is Camilla.” And guys if we’re butchering names just roll with it. “I’ve been listening to your webinars and reading your emails for the last few months, rock on. I’ve been selling on Amazon since January. However, I’m just not being very successful at it. No matter what I do, it doesn’t seem to result in much conversion. My PPC has a three digit ACOS percentage which is nuts both in the auto and manual. My category has probably the worst conversion rate and I’m running out of both kind of money and motivation. At this point, I’m throwing my hands up in the air and wondering if Amazon is too saturated in my niche, and that it’s just not going to be possible for new sellers like myself to succeed.

I have on several occasions gotten to the bottom of page one just to find a few short days afterwards that I fall back to page six or seven. I just can’t seem to get it to stick. My sales sometimes are zero for a week and then four or five a day or four or five a week. So we’re kind of swinging it back and forth on sales there. I wish I could figure it out like all of the other sellers that you talk about who are finding success. I would really appreciate if there’s any advice that you can give to help me turn this thing around.” And then they did us a favor, they sent us some screenshots and some listings and some of that kind of stuff and we’ll use that to dive in as we work our way through here today.

[00:03:38] Scott: Yeah and again, I want to highlight that there are people struggling in this space. And I say struggling it’s like the people that are struggling are the ones that are actually doing something. So number one, high fives for actually doing something. I think that’s important to know here, because there’s a lot of people that want to jump in but again, it’s one of those things like, “Men, what if it doesn’t work?” And I think the successful people know that it probably isn’t going to work 100% as planned. I mean if you’ve ever built a house, that’s definitely the case and it’s pretty scary because nothing ever turns out the way that you planned.

You think is going to smooth and it doesn’t. And it’s the same thing in business or life or anything. But I just did an interview with someone we met at Seller Summit, Brandon. And we talked about how he kind of went through the whole process very similar to this but his first product wasn’t good, his second product wasn’t good, his third product wasn’t good but he kept going. And now he’s on track to do over $500,000 this year. So, again, it’s like one of those things that I’m here to help you, Chris is here to help you, everyone here within TAS the community, everybody is here to support each other and that’s really what I want to do here.

I’m not sugarcoating things. There are going to be bumps on the road, there are going to be obstacles and you’re going to see this right here. But there are some things that if I can highlight these for you, you can avoid these mistakes or look a little bit closer before you pull the trigger. So that’s why I like doing these hot seats. So again, you’re not alone. If you’re thinking like this or feeling like this it’s totally, totally normal. But these hot seats are really here to help you and kind of highlight what people are struggling with or being frustrated with. So, Chris, with that being said, I want to dive into exactly what we’ve seen right off the bat because, he actually followed up with another email. And we’ll kind of go back to how we normally start with this.

[00:05:37] Scott: But this really immediately, made it very clear to me that there is something immediately that I would be doing, or I would have thought about doing in the beginning before I would have even jumped in. So maybe we can kind of address that first. What did you see when actually, you know what, let me just read that that’ll probably be better. Let me go ahead and read what he had wrote to me. He said, “Thank you, Scott. I need to add that… Just so you know that my cost is really high with this product. And just to let you guys know it’s selling right now for like $25.95 and some, I’ve already looked, some are selling for $29.95. I think even a few dollars more than that.”

[00:06:16] Chris: $59.95.

[00:06:17] Scott: Okay. So it’s even up higher. So that isn’t a problem, necessarily, as long as we have comparing apples to apples and all that stuff. But he goes on to say, “The cost per unit is $9.50 that’s not what shipping from China through Sea. It’s higher than expected and it’s $4.50 on top of the $9.50. So we’re talking like $14, $15 here. FBA fees $10.17 makes a total of $24.17, selling for $25.95, basically giving it away for free than anyone that buys it.” So that’s a number that’s number one like red flag I’ve seen right off the bat before I even look at the listing before I even look at anything. It’s like that means that we need to be able to charge at least $35 to $40 in order to get to our $10 in profit.

We have to be able to do that. So are we going to be able to do that? That would be the next question. Can we? And we’ve kind of looked at the category and at the products and all that stuff, and there is a chance. But, the ones that are really selling are in that $25 to $30 range, I would say. But, again I just want to let you guys know when you’re doing your homework, you need to understand the costs. Now, I’m okay if this is selling for $25.95 right now and you’re breaking even on your first run and you did a test run of 250 units. I’m okay with that as long as, as long as, you see that you can reduce your costs by $8 to $10 in the future. Right?

[00:07:54] Chris: Right.

[00:07:55] Scott: If you can reduce that down even $7. If you can reduce that, then we’re okay. Then I’m okay with that. Then we’re testing, we know we’re spending more but we know eventually we are going to be to reduce that cost. I think is shipping rate away we know we can reduce. I think that’s high for going by sea and this product weighs a pound. I don’t know. I think something went wrong there.

[00:08:17] Chris: It’s high for air.

[00:08:18] Scott: Yeah, totally is. I mean gosh, I’m doing an air shipment right now and I think we’re only paying like less than $2 a unit like a $1.75 or something, I think it’s a pound. So there’s something wrong there and maybe we don’t have all the details. If that’s the case that’s good. I mean it’s bad but it’s good, because at least we know that that’s wrong, we can probably get it shipped if we went by sea for $1, $1.50 a unit, so we’ve just cut our cost by $3. That’s good. But now the cost of the unit also at $9.50 I think is high. And again, that’s where you’ve got to do your research. You’ve got to reach out to other manufacturers, other suppliers all that stuff. So, again, we haven’t even gotten into like looking at the listing and looking at all this up.

That’s my first thing. So when you guys are doing your product research, and then you’re doing your sourcing, make sure you know the numbers. Make sure you know the numbers what they are now and what they can be in the future if you buy more if you have a better relationship with your supplier, shipping. Maybe you doing air now then you’re going to go to sea. Understand where you’re going to be able to cut cost without compromising quality. Chris, do you want to mention anything there before we jump into the actual looking at the listing, and the depth and all that stuff?

[00:09:31] Chris: Absolutely. And Scott, we don’t often get to talk about people making a product selection mistake in this stage. And I don’t know that it was necessarily a mistake because there are some things that we can do to improve that. Obviously ordering a higher quantity is going to bring down unit cost, shipping by Sea or even just getting a second quote for that air shipment is going to change a lot of those things. But the first place that products get knocked out for me is based on competition. If they’re not overly competitive, the second place that I lose the most products in the product research stage is in the sourcing.

And the reason that we talk about having substantial margins, we’re talking you know $10 profit is what we shoot for. Obviously, I’m very happy with $8 or $9 or $20 but $10 is kind of the ballpark average that we talk about is for exactly this reason. Because if I’m going to get $8 on the first order and I make a change, then I know I can get 10. If I’m going to make $1.50 on the first order, that becomes very, very difficult to get it launched and to make it work. So that’s kind of the second place that a lot of products get knocked out for me. And it’s something that we don’t get to talk about a lot because most people don’t share their product costs with us one when we do these kinds of things. So that was an extremely helpful piece.

[00:10:49] Scott: I think that’s huge and that could that could make it more obviously profitable but also it could make it where you would say, “Okay, I would definitely then pursue this and make it work.” Because now that I’m looking I’m kind of digging through as you were talking I was… And I’m doing these live guys. I’m actually going through the keyword. The main keyword is right in the front of the listing so that’s good. And I’m looking and there is definitely, definitely, definitely depth and demand here. I’m going to kind of read through some of these numbers.

I just went in Amazon, I typed in the keyword and then from there I’m just going to run Jungle Scout, the extension that is, and I’m pulling it up right now. And I’m going to let it pull in and as it’s pulling in I’ll just kind of give you my first impression. It’s got really good solid depth and demand. Not crazy numbers either by the way which I like. Like the first one for this keyword is selling 394 a month at $17.80. The price is too low for me on that but it’s still but still, there is demand there and then you have 137 reviews. Then I go the next one selling for $13.99 and it’s 1,000 sales. Then the next one is $19.99, 528 sales with 146 reviews. And then the next one is $29.99 and they’re selling 1,200. So there’s clearly… And I should highlight this too.

If there’s a certain pack sizes, this would come into play. If you were going to do like one pack, a three pack, a five pack, you have to base that on what you are looking at what people are buying. In this case, the $29.99 one, is definitely right in line with the one that he is selling. So I would say 1,207 sales for that same size, the same components, would be what I’d be looking at.

[00:12:53] Scott: That one has 472 reviews a little bit higher but it still shows people want that size. And then I go to the next one it is $24.99, 738 sales. The next one $29.99, 677 the next one is $24.99, 377 sales. So all the way down we’re… I think there’s only one that’s like 242, all the other ones are 700, 400, 400, 400, 700, 600 and the reviews are all within range. I think the average reviews is like 286 if I’m looking at the average reviews up top on Jungle Scout.

So I actually like this. This looks good to me like this is what I would say would be your picture perfect like, “Yes, this is a good depth and demand.” I probably should even take a screenshot of this and maybe even post it in the in the notes so you guys can actually see what I’m looking at. Obviously, I won’t be borrowing out like you know stuff that can give away his product. But I think this right here looks really, really strong and the numbers look okay. I think you can get between $25 and $30 with having a similar package which he does. Chris, what your thoughts by looking at this?

[00:14:05] Chris: When you and I take a look at the screenshot I said, “Demand is not the problem.” That was kind of my first gut reaction because you’re looking at you know number four, is 1,200 you go the whole way down to number 15, 753 at $50. Right? 697 and number 16 at $22. So there obviously is some room to sell in here even at the higher end price point that he was looking at originally. And so one of the things that’s kind of coming to me just on the fly here is maybe you go from $25 to $29 just so that when you do sell it, you actually do make a little bit of profit and instead of selling it at breakeven because there’s a lot of people selling it at $29. And as long as you’re a competitive product with them, which it looks just kind of from our understanding that you are, then that may be one of the first things that I try, rather than pricing under the competition. Does that make sense?

[00:14:58] Scott: It makes total sense and again I’m just going to kind of dive into something else here because it’s just what’s coming to mind. He is in a great market to do what we’ve talked about and building an email list, so he can push sales. So for me personally, the number one thing you need to do is get sales. To rank on page one is where you’re going to get sales. How do you rank on page one? We’ve talked about this. You need sales. How do you get sales?

You push product through your email list, you reach out to influencers, you reach out to bloggers, YouTubers, you do a contest like we’ve talked about. All that stuff and then you drive sales. You do pay-per-click but you have to be aggressive. This is again a perfect example of in the beginning, your first order, maybe your second order, your second run depending on how many are doing. 500 units, 1,000 units are probably not going to make you money. That’s really to set the foundation to get you ranked. But if you get ranked and you are on this page one, you can pretty much say you’re going to get 300 sales minimum because everyone else is, and you have a very similar product.

I looked at the product, the product looks great. Pictures look good. Like nothing’s wrong there. Your keywords look good but you’re not ranking. So how do you get those sales to rank? You can’t. So right off the bat, most people and you’re not alone in this but most people think, “I bought a product, I need to break even.” Like, “I have to break even.” Well, we talk to a guy a Seller Summit who’s done a ton of brick and mortar grand openings and that’s what I like to kind of refer back to. When people launch businesses a bank maybe a new deli, whatever, they’re doing grand opening sales. And they’re spending between $5,000 and $10,000 for that opening sale to get people in the door to get them noticed. That’s what we’re doing in Amazon.

So your main thing is going to be how do I get on page one? Well, to understand the metrics you need to match what people are doing or beat them, preferably to beat them. So if I look at the average for this page which is 24 listings, it’s showing me, it’s 447 sales. But that doesn’t mean you have to hit that many sales in order to rank. I’m looking at some here that only have 242 sales in their ranking, I see some that 186 that are ranking. So I would say, if you can get ten sales a day consistently for five to 10 to 14 days it’s a good chance you’re going to rank because your keyword is right there. And it looks like, from what I’m seeing in everybody else’s listing that is their main keyword too. Chris, what’s your thoughts on that little rant.

[00:17:36] Chris: You know it’s funny that same guy that you were talking about said, they didn’t expect their brick and mortars to be profitable for three years.

[00:17:44] Scott: Three years, right.

[00:17:46] Chris: What we’re shooting for on Amazon is to kind of break even on that first order and it’s the same thing in PPC. Everybody gets worried about their ACOS. We say look, “If you can get to breakeven ACOS that’s ideal.” And then from there as you start to refine, as you start to rank organically, then you’re going to start to see that profit. I think it comes from the instant gratification that we get on Amazon where we get a swipe inside that little app and go, “We made 10 sales.” And if we don’t see that immediate progress in terms of money coming back into our bank account, we can forget that this is a business. And that we have to be willing to put our head down and push to get this stuff to work. You can’t just list a product on Amazon expect to make money with it.

And that’s something that a lot of people kind of fall into that trap where they go, “Well, you know what, I put the listing up.” Okay. But what did you do to push it? Did you push it to an email list? Did you run PPC aggressively? Did you do any of those kinds of things? I honestly think that they are positioned in a great spot. Like you said Scott, they have a perfect market to run the strategy that we’ve talked about in the past, just like the giveaway strategy, to build an email list, to do any of those kinds of things. And you’re going to be able to push a tremendous number of sales to this product by doing that. The biggest downside for them is because of their tight margins unlike with the recent launches that you and I had where even at a 50% discount we were able to make a profit, you’re probably going to end up losing some money on those product to do that successfully and to drive it to the first page.

So as long as you go in knowing that, it’s fine. Just go in knowing that if you sell 100 of these, you’re going to lose $2 a unit. That’s not that big of a deal if it pushes you to the top of the first page and on the next 300, you’re able to make $5, $6, $7 a unit. Which if you move it to 29.99 you’re going to make an about four or five bucks unit. So just going in knowing that I think you’d be okay.

[00:19:46] Scott: Yeah, I agree.

[00:19:46] Chris: That’s where that margin can strangle you. And that’s one of the things that I’m probably just going to keep hammering him over the head on is that that margin is so important when you’re sourcing specifically for this reason. Now, knowing that you have a margin that you have, then you can go in knowing that you’re not going to make a profit necessarily on that first order because we’re going to be promoting it aggressively. Then if that second order is the same size or larger, you know what your margins are and you know what you have to do. Does that make sense it?

[00:20:16] Scott: It makes sense. And I think what’s hard for people to realize and understand is the goal is to get to page one here. Whatever it takes to get to page one the right now should be happening. Because once you get to page one, as long as this is a big, ‘but’ here but you have to have a good product. I think they have a good product. I think if they get on page one, they’ll probably have a good chance of staying there because the sales will stay there. The key to staying on page one is to have sales consistently at that number that you need to be to rank on page one. So how are you going to do that? You’ve got to figure out a way to get on page one, and the way to get there is sales.

Optimization is already there. It’s already optimized. I looked at the listing, listing looks fine. Sure can you tweak things? Of course, we all can. We can test things. But right now, it’s going to be about sales that might even be lowering your price right now and losing $3 a unit. It’s the same thing as back in the day, eight months ago, when we would do a product launch and you would give away a product at a dollar and lose money. Like, lose like $10 a unit. And you’d spend… Like in my first launch, I lost basically, I didn’t lost, I just basically spent as marketing $1,800 to do that first launch. I didn’t make any money I actually paid money. And I didn’t make any money on a product but it allowed me to get that momentum and start to land in those ranking spots. And then now I just do a little bit of pay-per-click and that thing kind of runs on autopilot for me because it’s there.

So it’s a matter of getting there and then getting ranked. I’m also looking here Chris, and I pulled this up and you can see my screen. I’m actually looking inside of Jungle Scout. I’m clicking on the price because I wanted to see the price for this one. And this one company that I’m looking at it’s like a private labeler and you know it is, it’s not like a major brand. And I always like to do that too because I want to see like how well they’re doing as being as being not someone that might be… Like there’s another one here that it looks like they’ve got like one, two, three, four spots, five spots out of 24 because there are a main brand.

[00:22:26] Chris: Including one listed at the wrong category.

[00:22:28] Scott: Yeah. So I’d say they are a main brand. They are a brand that you can build as well that has multiple products that’s taking up multiple spots on page one. Okay? But let’s exclude them and then let’s look at some of the other ones that have low reviews but yet they have price points where I like and they’re selling 377 a month and another one is selling 677 a month. One has 97 reviews one has 50 reviews and they’re ranked six and seven. So now what I do is I go into the price and I want to see how their price has been doing. So I’m going to click on the one right now. And it basically pulls up that they’ve been selling since it looks like maybe March of this year. So we’re talking March, April, May about three months. So fairly new. They started at $35, they’ve brought it down. They’ve been kind of floating the price around for a little bit. But now since the past looks like a few weeks, they’ve been locked in a $29.95.

But again, they’re kind of new and they’re ranked. Now, the other one I’m going to look at is another one that’ selling for $24.99, 377 sales a month at 50 reviews. Another newer seller beginning of March. So three months. So that, again, it shows me, it proves to me that I can rank too if I get enough sales. Does that make sense Chris? Am I clear on what I’m trying to kind of let people know by looking at page one?

[00:23:55] Chris: Yeah. What you’re taking a look at is not just the demand but the consistency of the demand, right?

[00:24:00] Scott: Yeah.

[00:24:00] Chris: And the other thing that you’re looking at right now is the price to see if, “Well, did they make a massive drop in their price to rank? What did they do?” And that’s kind of the stuff that we just do intuitively because we’ve done this a few times. But quite honestly, if you can drive yourself on the first page, the demand is fairly consistent. And if you can make your way there, you’re going to continue to sell.

[00:24:22] Scott: And also I’m trying to show also that there’s some new sellers that came in that are ranking in less than four months. So it means that if I came here and I’d seen everyone on this page, now I want to see some that are selling consistently all the time because I want to prove that there’s consistent depth. But I also want to see a couple of weaknesses. I want to see a couple of spots that people just kind of snuck their way in there by doing maybe a push to their email list, or maybe they have an influencer that mentioned their product, and how they got a whole bunch of sales.

That allows me to see that as long as they got the sales, as long as they were optimized, they ranked. So it just shows me that they can do it. It’s very similar to years ago when we would do like ranking a website. Like if we’ve seen that someone ranked in the top 10 and it was a forum post or something or it was something that was just it was just okay, it kind of proved that you didn’t have to be a major heavy domain, we call them or a really established authoritative brand or name like Oprah. Like you can get there just by doing some simple SEO stuff. It’s very similar.

I’m just looking at, yes, there’s people that are in here, there’s businesses that have been here for a year or two, three years. They’re just consistently selling all that. But I also see people that have gotten their way to page one without being an established brand. So I’m just showing that there’s a weakness there that you can actually get into that top spots or the top page, or the first page for ranking. That’s kind of what I’m trying to kind of illustrate here with audio of course. But, I think this is great. I mean there’s a ton of opportunity, a ton of room. What else would you like to add Chris?

[00:26:08] Chris: The other thing that I wanted to take a look at was just the search terms report that they sent over because they mentioned their ACOS was in the three digits. Which it looks like you know it actually improved a little bit, based on the search term report. We’re talking 97% ACOS but the thing to keep in mind is we’re not looking at all the many clicks or impressions, we’re looking at… So the search terms report is a 60 day rolling average. So we’re looking at 28,000 total impressions and it looks like the PPC efforts started about a month, a little less than a month before they pulled the report for us. So that’s in a month. So you’re talking a thousand impressions a day. Scott, what is your kind of ballpark goal for impressions when you’re running PPC?

[00:27:00] Scott: Well, I mean is far as like when I’m running it I want to get a few thousand I don’t want to just have like a couple hundred.

[00:27:07] Chris: You’re talking a few thousand a day.

[00:27:09] Scott: Yes, yes, yes. And if I don’t then I know that I’m not spending enough or I’m not bidding enough. Because if you don’t have that data, how can you really make a decision that you’re getting clicks and you’re getting sales? You don’t have enough impressions. You don’t have enough people seeing it. So I would say you definitely want a few thousand.

[00:27:27] Chris: And so what we’re talking about… We’re probably low on the bid here.

[00:27:32] Chris: What is the bid?

[00:27:33] Chris: I don’t see the bid, I see the spend and the cost per click. But I don’t see any cost per click on any of these keywords that’s over 80 cents which to me tells me the bid is probably a dollar, which is probably low in this space. And then a lot of people that are listening are probably thinking, “Well but if my margins are tight and you know my ACOS isn’t good then I can’t afford to spend more than a dollar per click. But the thing you have to keep in mind is you need to get the data to understand what you need to be spending, and you need to get the data to understand what search terms are actually profitable for you, and which ones aren’t. And it turns out that there are four search terms in this report that have led to sales. And the first on the ACOS, 2.97, 2.04, 2.66 and 4.2.

[00:28:31] Scott: And that’s ACOS?

[00:28:33] Chris: Yeah.

[00:28:33] Scott: Okay. So we’ve got some winners?

[00:28:35] Chris: Potentially. But again, we don’t have enough clicks or impressions to even know.

[00:28:40] Scott: I understand that but what I’m saying is like there’s probably some there that got clicks with no sales or didn’t get enough impressions. So I would be looking at the ones that got clicks to sales right off the bat, which you have enough there for that. But on the other side of things I’d say, “Did I get a whole bunch of clicks on something and it didn’t convert?” Then I’d probably be pausing that one.

[00:28:57] Chris: And that’s kind of the second step of this. Because if you look at… There’s a lot of ASINs in here which you’re going to see and I would suggest probably pulling those out if they’re not converting for you. But you have to look at ones that have a handful of clicks on them. And one of the ones that’s performing very poorly is actually a way to describe the product in terms of what it’s made from. You spent $7 on that and that doesn’t sound like a lot. But when your margins are tight, you have to be a little bit more aggressive in pausing those things.

And this is where like the art side of PPC comes in. I know I’m going to give Brandon at Ignite a heart attack when I say this but, if I get more than five or six clicks on something and it doesn’t convert in any way especially if my margins are tight like this I’m going to pause it or I’m going to add it as a negative. And so this is where I would start to go through this report, even if you only focused on the ones that are already made you sales, that that would tremendously lower your ad spend, because we’re talking almost a 100% conversion rate on those. I think one of them is at like 94% and the other four are 100%. So you’re talking one or two clicks, yielding one or two sales each which doesn’t sound like a ton but you know that those are close to breakeven for you because your margins in any other product or with regular margins,  those would be amazing.

And so what I would suggest is instead of spending money on the stuff that hasn’t converted for you yet, focus on the ones that have and kind of go from there because you know that those have converted. So that would be kind of where I’m at. The other thing is I would just straight up pause the automatic campaign at this point because it doesn’t look like that’s produced anything for you. And that’s going to that’s going to go a long way.

[00:30:44] Scott: And I was going to say. I mean that’s like really good advice. How many keywords are in there right now in the manual that they have in their campaign? Do you know? Can you see that off the top? And the reason why I’m asking this is because I’ve been finding this, and I know I talked to Dom recently about it and stuff. In the beginning, it’s not about throwing as many keywords in as you possibly can, it’s about going after the ones especially in a broad, and putting up a bunch of money on the broad terms, and letting it then take that budget and focus on those 10 keywords versus that 152/100 that might lead to something.

[00:31:26] Chris: I don’t know how many are actually in the ad set but there are two that have led to actual clicks which is what shows up in the search terms report.

[00:31:35] Scott: So let me ask you, is one of those keywords in there the main one that they have in their title?

[00:31:41] Chris: They both are. One is the exact, it’s a two-word keyword so technically, I guess the keyword phrase that they have in their title. The other one is a longer tail version of that.

[00:31:54] Scott: And that’s the broad that they’re doing and then you can see actually what the search term was from the report that you’re looking at?

[00:32:00] Chris: Yep.

[00:32:01] Scott: Okay. And in that search report, is the keyword the exact keyword that’s actually being plugged in there?

[00:32:06] Chris: No, and I could probably share a screen with you. But it’s a long tail version of that.

[00:32:16] Scott: Okay but has it in it?

[00:32:17] Chris: Yep. Actually, it makes sense. I’m going to Skype you the keyword. But it makes sense given the way that you would search for this product.

[00:32:28] Scott: So with that being said, I would still leave the main keyword, garlic press as my broad to continue to go out there and reach these keywords because it’s going to target that too but it’s going to also branch that out. But I’d rather put more money on that term because it’s getting more impressions, it’s getting more targeted clicks leading to a sale and I would get rid of all of the ones that are kind of like ones that you might have scraped right off the bat. And the only reason why I’m saying to do that now is because you’re trying to limit the amount of money you’re spending.

So I’d rather take that money that I’m willing to spend and really concentrate on the ones that I know are really, really going to help me rank for that keyword. That’s what I’m saying. But I’m not saying that if you have the budget, you shouldn’t be out there testing multiple keywords. Yes, I’m saying that. But if you have five keywords, ten keywords and you want to take that $25 spend, it’s going to focus on those… It’s not going to take that $25 and spread out among 100 keywords. It’s going to really focus on those and really reach more phrases and other search terms from those broad terms that you’ve got in there if that makes sense. Hopefully, it does.

[00:33:41] Chris: It does.

[00:33:42] Scott: So, all right, Chris. I think we did good here. I didn’t know where this was going to lead. I think if you can get your margins better by looking at your supplier or asking your supplier finding the shipping… Find a way to get your shipping down, then I think that you’re going to be fine. I just think it’s going to be number one, figuring out if you can get your cost down. Number two I think from here, you probably have to lower your price a little bit… And I think he said it was like twenty five something at least $24.99. Like you got to go below the $25. The $25 is just going to seem higher to people. So make it $24.99 or maybe $23.95 whatever. And then from there test that. That could make a huge difference even using your pay-per-click. But again, we want to get sales. And then the other thing is I’d reach out to influencers in this space there’s going to be tons, I know the space. So there’s going to be tons and reach out and say, “Hey, would you mind testing out my product and just…”

[00:34:47] Chris: “…And give them a try?”

[00:34:48] Scott: Give it a try and give me your honest opinion on it. And also if you could shoot a quick video on it or write a blog post about it that, would be awesome. And someone that’s got a good size audience is going to get you reach and is going to drive sales. It’s going to happen. The one little side note, I would say anybody that you do that with, let them know also that they should be using their affiliate link as an associate through Amazon and that will also make them say, “Oh, wow. Well, if I do this I’ll get a percentage of the sales that you get through your things. So just a little side note just to make it a little bit more interesting and exciting for them they will make some money.

I mean most bloggers and YouTubers also know that stuff. But just put it out that you want them to also benefit from this as well. But I think that’s the answer. And then building your own list. If you’re going to stay in this market, which I think this is a great market but if you do, there’s tons you can do in this market, you can build a list very easily. Again guys, if you have not watched our replay of our workshop where we show you exactly how we’ve done it over and over again, and you guys can do it too it’s literally step by step theamazingseller.com/buildlist. theamazingseller.com/buildlist and then from there you guys can see exactly what we’re talking about and build that list.

And then you’re ready to then push this product. And your product could be part of the bundle that you do in the contest. Maybe you can even include three of them and then something else that’s even more value. You get that value to be over $100. So I think I think you’re in a good place. I think that as long as you can get the cost down, I think you could definitely, definitely do this. The signs are pointing to go for me and I think that it will work. So, Chris, you have any last thoughts before we wrap this up?

[00:36:29] Chris: Yeah, I’m actually going to disagree with you. Well, not necessarily disagree with you for a minute.

[00:36:32] Scott: Oh, you want to fight fo you?

[00:36:34] Chris: I will fight you. You’re much larger than I am and poorly for me. You talked about, dropping the price point. I would say he needs to test the price point.

[00:36:45] Scott: Well, that’s kind of what I meant. But if you want to argue, we can argue.

[00:36:48] Chris: You know at $24.99, you’re not that much different from $25 you know $25.49 or whatever it is. So test that. But I would also test it at the $29.99 price point where the other people who are selling the most similar product are. Because one of the things that happens, and this is something that you and I have talked about, and this happened you recently. You raised the price and it did not affect sales but it actually just gave us the margin, is lower priced products have a lower perceived value. And so if I’m looking for something specific and in this market, I would be looking for something very specific. I personally would fall victim to the “it sells for more, so it must be better” mindset. Because I don’t want the cheapest thing in this market. I want a more expensive product because of the perceived value that’s there.

So it would be an interesting test and I’m hoping that even if you only sold the same number that you’re selling now at $29, at least you’re making some money but I would test it both ways for sure. So that was kind of a big thing. I do think that there is absolutely room and demand for this product. I think this is something that if you get to the first page that you will be successful with as long as you drive it to that first page. Just know that you’re not necessarily going to make money during that drive. But if you can get it there and you can lock it in then you have a lot of places where you can make money.

If you’re going to get on that first page and sell consistently, even if you’re only making the like 89 cents in profit that you were making now, you’d be making money. But talk to that supplier, see what the breaking points are to bring that cost per unit down. And if you have to order 1,000 instead of 200 to do that on your next order, but you know that you’re going to sell 300 a month, that would be worth the time, energy, and effort. The other thing that I would do is, I would get a few different shipping quotes and see what it is because I think when we did the math Scott, it worked out to like $10 a kilo. For our American friends that’s 2.2 pounds which broke down to right around $5 per product.

[00:38:53] Chris: Honestly, that shouldn’t really cost you much more than six or seven on the high end for air shipping. And so I would talk to that supplier and see if you can get a couple of different quotes from different people. And if they won’t, then reach directly out to your DHL or FedEx and see if they can get you a better quote even though you’re not necessarily going to get like a bulk discount or a volume discount on that first order. But it would be worth doing. And that’s going add… If we drop that from $5 to $3 let’s just say we move it from $10 to $6 per kilo that gives us an additional $1.50 to $2 in margin per product, which is insane.

I mean you’re tripling your margin there basically just by doing that even if you don’t get a pricing break from your supplier. And those little things really do add up especially if you’re in the situation where you’re in, where you’re kind of at a break even point even if you are selling. So those would be kind of the steps that I would take. I would drive it to the first page, I would talk to my supplier and I would see where it takes me from there. But if you get to that first page, you are going to sell in this market.

[00:40:01] Scott: And again, I’ve been looking through the listing as you were talking, images are spot on. I mean they did a really, really good job with the images. The packaging is spot on, everything about this is spot on. The reviews, over 70 reviews. All five star. So I mean everything is pointing to go. The issue is right now, you don’t have enough sales to rank.

And also maybe you thinking to yourself, “I can’t really push this because I’m not making a profit on each unit that I sell right now.” I think if you can get past that, and get yourself ranked, and get this thing seen, I think we’re going to sell them. I honestly do. I think this looks like a great, great product. The listing is fully optimized, the benefits are calling out in in the bullets. I don’t know Chris, now than more I’m looking even at the pictures and everything. Everything else there looks spot on. So, all signs are pointing to go for me and with the depth demand that we’ve seen, I think the product itself is great, and I think you’ve already proven that with the reviews and stuff that you’ve already received, and the feedback and all that stuff.

So I think it’s just the price point and then from there as far… I say price point how much you’re buying it for, you know the cost of the goods. And then again, like Chris said and you know definitely I would just test and I think that’s all I was saying was, do you want to test the price? I do think in the beginning I would just reduce the price and see what happens because you’ve already been higher. But again, that I would test it on the opposite end of it I would say, “Let me try $29.95 and see what happens, who knows?” And then you can play around with that. But right now, it’s about getting sales. So however you are going to do that, that’s all you should be focused on because everything else looks it’s already there, like you’re done.

So anyway, Chris I think that’s going to wrap it up. This was a good call. I wasn’t sure where it was going to lead but I’m actually excited about this. I think if they take what we just talked about and they implement that, oh my gosh, I want to hear a report back because I think this is a great product in a great space, and I think it’s got legs. I think it could definitely do really, really well.

[00:42:10] Chris: So Scott, a question for you.

[00:42:12] Scott: Yeah, sure.

[00:42:12] Chris: And I think I know the answer to this based on the last statement. If you saw this Jungle Scout screenshot, and obviously we’re not going to launch this product because someone shared it with us, but if you just stumbled across this, would you launch this product?

[00:42:28] Scott: Yeah, I actually would because I think everything there that I just went over is… I just kind of went through my own little kind of like, “If I was going to launch this, this is what I’d be doing. This is what I’m looking for.” I just did it in just real time. And then if someone handed me this product and said, “Hey, everything’s all done for you. Here it is.” Game over. To me, that’s definitely. And now that we’re building lists inside of markets, I would build this out to be a brand.

[00:42:53] Chris: And my biggest concern here would be the cost per unit, right? But we know we can bring it down not because the shipping we paid is high, not just because of that but because there’s people selling it for $13, $17, $19. So there obviously is another way to source this that I would be able to kind of take advantage of. Even if it was only $7 or $8 profit and not $10, it would still be a product that I would absolutely kind of move to the next stage.

[00:43:22] Scott: Yeah, Absolutely. Now everything to me is pointing to, yes, for me as long as I can get the cost of goods down which I believe I could. So that would be my answer. It doesn’t look like it’s overly competitive. Review numbers are low for the most part that I can compete with then you’re already there. Some of those that are already selling 400 to 500 a month that you have more reviews than some of them. So I like what I’m seeing, I would be saying, yes on this one. Does that answer your question, Chris?

[00:43:54] Chris: It does, indeed.

[00:43:55] Scott: Cool. Let’s wrap this baby up. All right guys. I want to remind you guys the show notes can be found at theamazingeeller.com/377, and you can grab all the show notes, the transcripts, links maybe even a screenshot. I’m going to probably grab the screenshot, I’ll blurt some stuff out at least you guys can see what we were looking at as far as depth and demand, and all that stuff. So that’s it, Chris.

Let’s go ahead and wrap this up for good. Guys remember as always I’m here for you, I believe in you and I am rooting for you but you have to, you have… Come on say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, Chris is going to say it with me today 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.

[END]

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…Amazon’s early review program and what this actually means. What did I just say? I just said that Amazon has its own review program now? Chris, are you there? Did you hear what I just said?

[00:00:25] Chris: I did hear what you just said.

[00:00:28] Scott: Is it true?

[00:00:29] Chris: It is and the thing that makes it even funnier or more funny for those who are grammar fans out there is that looks like they are doing a little bit of an incentive for some people to leave some reviews so it’s going to be interesting.

[00:00:44] Scott: Yeah this is going to be an interesting conversation. We’ve already had it a little bit on our TAS Power Hour. We seen it was rolling out. Our good friend Danny Brewer had posted something in the PLC classroom and brought some attention to it and yeah I thought that we should probably talk about it because some people are like, “I knew it all along. Amazon was going to create their own review program. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that they just did that. They told us that we can’t do it but now they are going to do it.” Chris I want to definitely dig into this, I want to talk about what this actually means from what we understand right now currently and who can use this because not everyone can use it.

They are not going to just let anyone do it or be able to use it so I want to talk about that. I also want to talk about what it means if you maybe don’t meet the criteria here. Are you still going to be able to get reviews? I also want to talk a little bit about some of the buzz out there of people saying they are able to follow up with their customer or your customer, theirs I guess is they classify that as but then also maybe what’s going on here maybe with following up with your customer in general. Are we going to be able to do that anymore or is that going to go away?

Let’s talk about some predictions a little bit, we’ll talk about the Amazon Early Review Program that’s rolling out and I’m not sure that everyone is seeing it yet. I want to talk about that. Before I do though let me remind you guys if you guys want to download the show notes, the transcripts, all of that stuff all the links that we talk about you can head to theamazingseller.com/378 and you can grab all the goodies over there. So Chris, where do you want to start over here on this big announcement? There wasn’t even really announcement. I think we’ve seen it under our tab in the advertisements or they advertised?

[00:02:34] Chris: It just showed up in our accounts and Amazon used to do a really good job of if you log into seller central they had that little news and headlines section. I think this is something they are quietly rolling out or maybe something that they didn’t announce there because it is only available to brand-registered sellers at this point so I don’t know if they are just not going to put it there because they don’t want everybody to see it or what. Let’s give everybody a real quick rundown on exactly how the program works and what the program is. That’s probably the best place to start.

[00:03:08] Scott: Well actually the one place I’d like to start though is and definitely you can start there too. Please start where you want to start I don’t want to not start where you want to start but it’s getting confusing.

[00:03:19] Chris: But I’m going to not start.

[00:03:21] Scott: But I’m not going to start there because if anyone wants to know where you would find this, you click on advertising and then you’ll see in there it’ll say “Early reviewer program” and then usually right below that will be lightning deals, promotions and if you are, enhanced brand content will be there up above that as well. So you’ll have campaign manager, enhanced brand content, early reviewer program, lightning deals promotions. That’s what they are currently the time that we are recording this underneath the advertising tab so go for it Chris.

[00:03:53] Chris: If you are eligible…

[00:03:55] Scott: Right if you are not eligible you won’t even see that. I think enhanced brand content is there but you have to apply. Is that correct?

[00:04:01] Chris: Honestly I do not know. It is only available to brand-registered sellers so all of the accounts that I work in are actually brand-registered at this point.

[00:04:10] Scott: Okay big help you are.

[00:04:14] Chris: Even if that dropdown is there for you, if you are not brand-registered you can’t use either of those features right now and if you can and you are not let us know. The way that it’s set up inside of Amazon is they let us know that it’s only available for brand-registered sellers and the number one thing on their FAQ for their early reviewer program is, “If I’m US based but not brand-registered can I participate?” And it basically just says, “No.” so you have to be brand-registered which we’ll talk a little bit about that because that’s the other big change that has come down in the last few weeks is that Amazon has rolled out their new brand registry so I’m sure that we’ll talk about that at some point here as well.

But the real kind of breakdown of this early reviewer program is Amazon understands that it’s hard to get those reviews in the beginning. Amazon also understands how important those reviews are and they get that they made it more difficult for us. They also understand Scott and you and I have talked about this at length that those reviews are important for conversion rate and that is something that Amazon really does care about. They want people to have a good understanding of the product before they buy it. It helps more people make an informed decision which means more people are, A, going to buy good products and B, fewer people are going to buy bad products which means Amazon pays less on returns and those kinds of things.

So Amazon does really want those reviews they just had issues with the way that we were going about getting them and legal compliance and all these kinds of things. So what they did last year in October is they got rid of the incentivized reviews which you guys have heard us talk about at length which means you can’t give a product away in exchange for a review or you can’t pay someone in exchange for a review as a seller. What they’ve done with the early reviewer program is they are basically saying, “Anybody that enrolls a SKU in this program can do it as long as you are brand-registered.” It costs $60 one time so basically you download a spreadsheet on Amazon and Scott and I got a kick out of this because it’s a one column spreadsheet.

[00:06:18] Chris: We went, “Oh man, you are going to have to upload all of these fields it’s going to be like the flat file or the inventory file.” and I downloaded it and I was sharing my screen with Scott and we both got a kick out of it because literally all that requires is that you put in the SKUs of products. So you just copy and paste the SKU in, save it and re-upload it and basically what Amazon will do is for any SKUs that you upload that have fewer than five reviews, they’ll charge you the $60 and then what they’ll do is they will actually go out and follow up with people who buy the product more aggressively than they would otherwise and for anyone who chooses to leave a review from the Amazon follow up, up to that fifth review. Does that makes sense Scott?

[00:06:53] Scott: Yeah.

[00:06:54] Chris: Review zero through five Amazon will offer them somewhere between a $1 and $3 Amazon credit in exchange for that review. So you are not giving anything in exchange for the review, you are paying Amazon and then Amazon is saying, “If you leave what we deem to be a legitimate review we’ll pay you $1 to $3.” The thing that makes this interesting is we were giving discounts and we were giving free products in exchange for a review. In this case it appears that they are going to be paying full price for the product and then Amazon is simply just going to follow up and incentivize them for taking action and leaving that review.

One of the requirements of this program is that the product is priced over $15. If you reduce the price under $15 at any point they are going to stop asking for reviews on that product so you do have to be selling it at what we would consider to be full price even if you launch it at $50 and then raise the price you can do that but you can’t drop it below that $15 while you are in the Early reviewer program. The other thing to keep in mind is you are not dealing with these customers, you are not selecting these customers in any way. Amazon is handling that for you.

The other thing that’s cool about this program is they are going to give a badge for any of these reviews that come in, review zero through five or one through five I guess and it’s going to have that little early reviewer flag. Scott you and I have talked in the past about everybody gets all concerned about whether reviews are verified or unverified and I generally say that it doesn’t matter and I think you feel the same way. Most buyers don’t know the difference but I do think that the badges for this are going to draw a customer’s eyes in the same way that the badge for the top five hundred reviewers or the top one hundred reviewer or the vine voice badges draw the eye.

I think Amazon is going to give these types of reviews a little more weight in terms of where they show up in the rank order of reviews like how they have the most helpful review, most helpful positive, most helpful negative, those kinds of things.

[00:08:54] Chris: I think the badges on these are going to have the same effect that the vine voice badge or the top one hundred, five hundred, one thousand reviewer type badges have in that and I also think that similar to the verified, unverified and forgive me if I get too much on the weeds on this, the one difference between the verified and unverified reviews is their weight in the star rank. Does that make sense?

[00:09:19] Scott: Yeah, where they show up.

[00:09:20] Chris: Amazon has that one through five star ranking system and if you get a one star verified review and a five star unverified review it doesn’t go to two and a half. It actually goes to two because Amazon weighs verified reviews more heavily. I believe they do the same thing with the bannered reviews like Fine voice and the Early reviewer and that kind of stuff so this could potentially be really, really good for you long term.

[00:09:47] Scott: Yeah it’s more like they would stick to the top easier because they are weighted differently. Now, the one thing I believe, and correct me if I’m wrong Chris but some people would think, “Well okay this is cool and if I get the approved by Amazon review or badge, they are vetted by them and all that stuff then that will help me rank better.” I don’t think this has anything to do with rank other than you could potentially get more sales because it’s going to convert higher which then in turn would help you rank. Am I wrong in thinking that Chris?

[00:10:26] Chris: I think you are spot on on that and if reviews play any role it’s very, very small. The thing that plays a role the most in ranking and we know this because time and time again we can demonstrate it is sales. Getting these initial reviews is extremely important and that’s why we talk about launching properly and I think this does have the potential to be a really nice tool to help us launch properly because now we can focus a little more on driving those sales. Yeah it’s $60 to get those first five reviews and Amazon seems like they are going to follow up pretty aggressively because obviously they want people to pay that $60 which means they are going to get those five reviews.

We can focus a little more on the sales perspective of that and I think this is going to come in more and more handy and you brought it up at the beginning as the email follow ups become less and less deliverable. If Amazon is the one that’s going out and doing this outreach and they are going to do it on our behalf, it takes one more thing off of our plate at least in the beginning. And you and I talk a lot about focusing on one thing at a time and I think in the beginning people need to focus the most on sales and the reviews will come. If you build it they will come and so if we can focus even more on that by utilizing this program I do actually think it’s a good thing long term.

[00:11:49] Scott: Yeah I agree. My only thing is we have built an email list in this new brand and this is a great way to test out this new review program. We actually have three products right now in that new brand that have over five reviews so we can’t even submit our products to get these five reviews so we are too seasoned already. We are already out there, we’ve proven that we are not new anymore because we’ve gotten over five reviews and we did it without really asking for reviews either other than just our normal follow up after we’ve done some initial launches through our email list.

But we do have a new product that’s going to be landing here actually as we record this, as we speak literary and we did enroll that one. So I think what would be interesting Chris is we are still going to do our traditional launch to that email list. Let them know we have a new product in and if you want to receive a discount we are going to have it up for three days like we’ve done before and then from there we are going to let them see our follow up with them with our follow up sequence that we already have in place but we are still enrolled in this program. Now we are going to discount probably 50% but what you are saying is that should not affect anything within Amazon.

It’s just that any of the sales that we drive that are through our email list that are discounted at fifty percent will not be eligible to leave a review. Is that true?

[00:13:27] Chris: Wait, what was the second half to that question? It sounded very different than the question I thought you were going to ask…

[00:13:35] Scott: Ha ha I tricked you. Okay so Amazon is looking for full price sales. Those are the ones that they’ll go after for a review, technically. Now if we create our own coupon 50% off and we send our email list to that we give 50% discount off, Amazon then will not follow up with those people in regards to soliciting a review. Am I understanding that correctly or maybe this will be a test?

[00:14:06] Chris: That’s probably going to be and that is the question I thought you were going to ask I just want to make sure. The way that it’s phrased and Amazon likes to… They phrase everything very intentionally. So I don’t know and that’s the answer so we will have to test it but the way that this phrase is, if the offer price falls below $15. As long as the offer price is over $15 which is our standard price that you guys set it should still be eligible even at the 50% off.

[00:14:36] Scott: Okay, again that’s going to be a good test because we can see that and then we can see if we get some of those Amazon badge reviewers. We can actually see that from an early reviewer program standpoint and see. I think that will be interesting because here is the deal. What if I pay that $60…?

[00:14:56] Chris: Then you happen to get five reviews before.

[00:14:58 Scott: Yeah and I happen to drive my own reviews because that’s what I’m doing on a regular basis. Then I wouldn’t probably want to do the early review program or I’d have to hold off on launching my product and then I’d have to push pay-per-click a little bit more aggressively than just launching. I want to launch, I want to get sales velocity as soon as possible so I can start ranking. And I think also it’s going to depend too what… I guess the competition level is also going to play into this because if you are launching products that need very little reviews to get sales and you are not really competing on reviews in a sense then I’m not really sure that it matters.

But if you are going to be doing it anyway and not really going after reviews and you want to just get a handful of reviews from Amazon themselves then I would say enroll in it. But again if you guys are not brand registered you are not even going to have this feature as of right now. If you are not brand registered, I’m sorry you are going to have to go out there and do it the way that we are doing it anyway which is building an email list and then launching to that list and then asking those people in their follow up sequences as far as to give us some feedback on their recent purchase.

I know there are some people that have… and even people listening are going to be like, “I knew it all along Amazon took the review groups from us and now they are doing their own review group. How dare they?” What do you think of that Chris and how do you respond to that?

[00:16:31] Chris: Good.

[00:16:36] Scott: You sound like you took a… You had to think about that you weren’t sure what to say. Now you’ve copied your thoughts…

[00:16:42] Chris: It’s one of those things where one, it’s Amazon’s playground so you have to play by Amazon’s rules. That’s just how it is. Now the opposite side of that and the side that that I think you fall on as well is look, the reason that Amazon did what they did is twofold. One, they were running into an FTC compliance issue in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission issued some guidelines and I believe it was five years ago at this point that it came out that affected a lot of people around the internet and Amazon was the behemoth in the room. They were the last place to fall and that’s where that disclaimer if you guys have been around long enough to remember the disclaimers that reviewers had to write. “I received this product in exchange for my honest review,” that kind of a disclaimer that was being used over the internet for several years because of this FTC guideline and Amazon was the last place to implement that.

What happened as a result of Amazon implementing that was that consumers stopped trusting the reviews. They were getting emails and phone calls and blog posts and people like Wall Street Journal were writing negative articles about Amazon. So Amazon has to do something to combat that so they immediately shut it down because it’s hurting their sales it’s going to hurt them long term. That makes perfect sense to me and we knew that was coming. Like we have a little bit of an idea of what Amazon is going to do in the future with some of the feedback follow up type emails because they were getting complaints about it from customers.

And so as a result of that they shut it down. Now we all ran for the hills with our heads on fire for a day or two after that happened until we realized that we could just launch products the old way which is the new way which is how we used to do it right, which is coming out and building those lists and doing those kinds of things which is actually better for our businesses long term.

[00:18:40] Chris: Now Amazon has turned around and said, “Look, we know it’s harder to get that initial set of reviews and we also understand… This is just my interpretation but it makes sense. We also understand how important those reviews are to selling the product and the conversion rate and all of the things that I said earlier selling more of good products and fewer of bad products.” That’s what Amazon wants to do. They want happy customers and they also need products in their catalog and so they are launching this as a result of that.

We haven’t tested this yet. We are literally about to, the product is arriving at the warehouse right now. It is enrolled in this program and we’ll be sure to let you guys know what happens as a result of that. But for people who don’t have a list I think this is huge upfront because Amazon is basically saying they are going to go do the work for you. They are going to reach out to some people a little more aggressively than we tend to and try to secure you that initial base of reviews. I also think that it’s cool because since it’s a “Amazon approved review” if that makes sense Scott, that they are going to stick around longer.

We’ve always had the mindset that that initial set of reviews like when we were doing giveaways we always said he initial set of reviews is there as the initial set of reviews. It’s going to go away at some point. Just bank on it going away and then we’ll get those longer term stick around type of reviews from the follow up sequence. This flips that on its head unless you say, “Okay I’m going to start with a base of five Amazon verified “reviews” and go from there.” Did that answer your question or was that just a long rant?

[00:20:10] Scott: No, no it totally did and again to me it’s going back to the Google days. It’s like if you are going to play in Google’s playground you are going to have to play by the rules. It’s like anything and I still see it as a huge advantage and opportunity for us to use the platform but does that mean that you should be banking and building your business on this platform alone? No, we’ve said that over and over and over again and we are going to continue to because that’s just the way it is but it just means that you are not going to go out there and manipulate the system.

They are doing it because marketers and people in this space have done that. They’ve found little loopholes, they found little ways to game the system and now Amazon their customers were seeing this as a negative thing and that looks bad to Amazon. So now Amazon has to fix that. So for them to come back and go, “Okay we do know how important the reviews are so we are going to allow to do this up to five we think that’s a good number.”

Who knows, maybe they’ll increase that to ten who knows? Don’t know but we all seen this coming we actually seen it with the lightning deals. Then that was the big thing, “Oh Amazon is doing their own deals now. Now you can do it through the lightning deals.” So they took away the review thing they then talked about doing this lightning deal thin then it was rolled out for free at first now they charge for it. I don’t know if they are going to charge for this service. They might do that in the future too who knows Chris?

No one really knows but my point is this, it’s always going to be changing but the bottom line is there is traffic there of people that have credit cards on file, of people that are searching for product, period, end of story. Do you want to play or do you not want to? I hear people say, “Well Amazon they just do whatever they want and they control everything so I’m just not going to do it. I’d rather go do something else.”

[00:22:12] Scott: What else? What are you going to do? Are you going to open up a brick and mortar store and then three blocks down someone opens up a barber shop that’s exactly like yours? Then what are you going to do? You are going to go to another town? Then you get someone else that can do it. There are so many things that can happen through this thing if you build a business or if you go and select the right products with the criteria that we talked about, low competition, low number of reviews, you are not competing for reviews your chances are going to increase to be successful in that business model or just build out a full brand and then you don’t have to worry about any changes or anything like this.

There’s things that are going to happen within the business and then we are going to have to adjust whether you are on Amazon or not so if you are not up for that you probably do not want to create your own business in general, period.

[00:23:04] Chris: Scott have you seen the movie Bridge of Spies?

[00:23:07] Scott: I have not.

[00:23:09] Chris: I watched that this weekend. I wanted to see it for a while. It’s a pretty good movie but the kind of the premise is Tom Hank plays this lawyer and he gets drafted by the state bar of New York to defend this Russian spy. Everything is going poorly and every time something bad happens he looks at this guy that’s this accused Russian spy and says, “Why aren’t you freaking out? You could go to the electric chair.” “Would it help?” is his response every time. There is no point in getting frustrated about it. It doesn’t help and that’s the mindset I think that we need to have in any business and especially on Amazon because things change all the time, Google changes all the time.

Amazon changes all the time and so my gut reaction any time something like this happens is everybody is freaking, “Does it help to freak out?” And the answer is, “No.” In this case whether it’s getting rid of the review groups or maybe moving down the road here a few months to say, “What happens if they get rid of seller feedback? Does freaking out about it help?” The answer is no, spend that time and effort figuring out a solution rather than focusing on the problem. And Amazon in this case has given us a decent solution to a problem that they helped to create but we also helped to create by abusing the system that existed.

The early reviewer program I think is actually a good solution for a lot of people and yeah it’s $60 and you end up paying what’s that $15, $12 a review. $12 a review. Is that worth it to me? It probably is just to see at the very least to test it and see what happens as a result of that and to see what happens three months from now. Are those still the reviews that are at the top of the page and are those good reviews and are they solid reviews? If the answer to that is yes, if those are still those highly rated reviews in the eyes of Amazon, in the eyes of consumers then to me it’s totally worthwhile bucks.

[00:25:09] Chris: So I’ll offset the one review that I’m going to get that’s two stars that says I haven’t used the product yet right to push that one down the page. Is that worth $60 to me? Absolutely because it’s two sales. If I can increase two sales over what I was going to get at any point in the length of time that I’m selling this product assuming I’m selling it at $30, you guys can do that math for yourselves. If it’s $20 its three sales. If this program helps me get three sales over the time that I’m selling the product it’s worth it to me and I think that’s what’s going to fall out of that.

[00:25:43] Scott: Yeah so again people that are not brand registered number one this is not going to affect you one way or the other because you can’t even use this new feature and some of them that are brand registered might not be seeing it depending on your account. I’ve had that happen in the past where everyone else is saying that they are seeing it and I’m not seeing it and all of a sudden one day I see it so it will depend. Maybe before we jump off here today why don’t we talk a little bit about brand registry, what we know as of right now for getting yourself brand registered because as of right now it seems like it’s all about a trademark in order to make that happen.

Again going back six months ago that was not the case so again it’s something else that Amazon changed. Maybe we can just touch on that really quickly Chris and then we can wrap this up.

[00:36:36] Chris: Yeah let’s do that before we do that one other thing I wanted to touch on the earlier reviewer program Scott is parent child listings and this is something that Amazon actually finally seems to be acknowledging that it’s a thing. If you have a listing that has variations, you guys know that one of the things that Scott and I love about variation listing is that all those reviews are bundled together. Amazon only wants the parent SKU. So if you have that parent child type of a listing and you do want to take advantage of that early reviewer program it’s across all of the variations that you have that five review limit. So, you just attach the parent SKU, Amazon will go out to anybody who has bought any of those variations and will reach out to them for enrollment in this program. But once you reach five reviews on any of those they’ll stop the program. Does that make sense?

[00:27:25] Scott: Yep.

[00:27:28] Chris: Alright so let’s dive in a little into brand-registry and you guys may or may not know that brand registry was closed for quite a while, about two months. Does that sound right to you Scott?

[00:27:38] Scott: Yeah.

[00:27:39] Chris: And again everybody was freaking out about it because its change and any time anything changes that’s our gut go to reaction because we just don’t know but they have reopened the program and if you guys are interested you can join right now and I believe it’s just brandregistry.amazon.com. Now the kind of big change that they made upfront is that they do now require a trademark. Scott, do you have any resources for where people can go to get a trademark or to process some of that paperwork?

[00:28:10] Scott: Actually the one that we’ve been playing around with is, do you remember the name of that one Chris? We were talking about that one there.

[00:28:20] Chris: I do not but we can make sure to link it up on the show notes.

[00:28:24] Scott: Yeah let’s do that before I give out a link that it might not work. Go to the show notes page I’ll have a resource there for you for trademarks. We are actually playing around with one right now. So I’ll drop that link in the show notes but yeah I mean you can always go to trademark attorney, you can do it that way it’s expensive when you do it that. I think the last time I ran a trademark or did a trademark was upwards of $800 to $1000. This new one that we are looking at though which hopefully fingers crossed the process is good I think it is under $300. Anyway let’s link that up in the show notes we’ll do that for sure but yeah go ahead.

[00:29:03] Chris: Yeah it starts at $99 plus the filing fees which is not bad so basically all totals a few hundred bucks. If you guys want to build a “real brand” and secure that stuff long term that’s when I would go this route. If you just want to launch and test some products do not file for a trademark. Don’t spend that money on it until you are sure that it’s something that you want for the long term. One because it’s like a six month process and two because it is a couple of hundred bucks. But if you are going to sell that brand long term Scott’s Awesome Kitchen Supplies whatever that is, then make sure that you do that.

The other thing Scott before we dive into this is you don’t need brand registry upfront. You can brand-register at any point so what I would do if I were you is start selling and then go through the brand registry process specifically especially because you have to wait three or six months to get that trademark so you might as well be selling in that three or six months rather than just sitting on it. In addition to that trademark requirement Amazon has rolled out a few different things. One, right in the brand registry form they have a little checkbox that says, “Would you like to enroll ten or more brands in brand registry?”

And they’ve actually set up a brand registry report team that if you want to do that they are going to walk you through that process so you don’t have to do it manually. Obviously none of us, well maybe some of us are going to do that but the hidden thing behind that is they brought in a whole bunch of people, I believe it was a couple hundred people to help with the new brand-registry and do a couple things. One is to help those people with ten or more brands register and two hits to help with the enforcement and compliance.

So if you do put in a brand registry infringement claim or any of those kinds of things, they are going to actually help you as a person. They’ve also launched some new things that will help you with searching for people in Amazon who are infringing on your trademarks like logos and images and those kinds of things.

[00:31:08] Chris: The other thing that seems to be a part of this program and I haven’t seen it on my side yet but it was in their bullet point when they rolled this out is the ability to either whitelist or disallow. I’ll just call it whitelisting and blacklisting individual sellers who want to list your product. So one of the things that… Again the results of this change came from something who was that, Birkenstock. Amazon had a massive issue with Birkenstock because Birkenstock said, “We don’t want to sell on Amazon anymore there is too many people listing counterfeit, too many people just listing on our listings.” So Amazon came out and said, “Here is a way of dealing with this, you now can be Brand Gated.”

And so they are rolling out or appear to be rolling out Brand Gating to anyone who is involved in the new brand registry which means if you are brand-registered hijacking should be a thing of the past.

[00:32:06] Scott: It sounds great, I was going to say it sounds great but whether that’s the case or not don’t know yet. Amazon is doing this to really protect their platform. It’s their platform, they are allowing us and I know sometimes it doesn’t seem so but they are allowing us to use the channel and again what better way to get yourself or your business or your products and services in front of buyers? This is a search engine for buyers. People go there to buy stuff so it’s pretty important that you understand that and understand that they are going to try to make that the best platform for their customers and then you are a seller so obviously you have to stick to these rules and abide by all these things.

Having hijackers again that’s a problem that they have recognized, don’t think they haven’t. They are recognizing it. It doesn’t seem so sometimes but now a part of that will be this Brand Gating in a sense or brand registering so you then can Gate you brand and then only allow people that you are accepting to do that because then you will get a request that says, “Hey so and so wants to sell your product. Do you want to allow them to?” And then you would say yes or no. That’s in a perfect world, that would be amazing.

I believe that’s coming, I believe the first step here is to get brand registered and I think part of that is the trademark and then from the trademark I think once that happens then you are brand registered. Now anyone that’s already been brand registered as of right now you are good. You’re good. You are brand registered and you should be fine. They are not requiring you to go back and then show us a trademark it’s like you are grandfathered in. So if you are not brand registered yet and you don’t have a trademark the first step is trademark and then the second part of that is if you do have a trademark and the next step is to apply and that’s really it and then go through that whole process which isn’t a huge process to do. We did it without having the trademark thing it was pretty simple process.

[00:34:10] Chris: Yeah literary it’s a three step form within Amazon, even in the new one. The first step is to let them know that you do have a trademark they ask you for the registration or serial number and then the country of that and then they just have you answer a simple questions. “Do your products and packaging have a brand name and logo on them yes or no? What’s the brand name that you want to register?” And then they ask you how you are identifying your brand on those products and then what some of the characteristics of the brand are so that if you ever have a counterfeit claim they can evaluate it against that.

It’s very simple. It takes like ten minutes to fill out the entire thing. If you have a trademark I would definitely go do it now. It doesn’t cost anything at least as of the last time that I looked so it’s worth doing just to see some of the features that comes as a result of that.

[00:35:08] Scott: Yeah and probably as we learn more as we go through this process ourselves or have other people that take that information or go through the process and bring it back to us we’ll go ahead and we’ll probably do an update and we’ll do a whole episode on the brand registry process and trademark and all of that fun stuff so definitely be doing that in the future. This particular episode I really wanted just to talk about the Amazon’s new early reviewer program and what does it mean for us and to recap really quickly. What it means is, if we are brand registered we have an advantage to be able to get five reviews that are incentivized by Amazon.

Amazon can go ahead and they can solicit them however they want we just have to make sure that our product us retailing for $15 or more and then from there they are going to go ahead and take care of that for us. Really that’s as simple as it is what it means is we can have a little bit of an advantage again having been brand registered we have an advantage anyway but then we also have an advantage of getting these weighted… They are just more seasoned or I guess more authoritative reviews so this way here maybe they can convert better for us and maybe they are going to rank better inside of the reviews not your listing but your reviews as what’s being seen.

Chris is there anything you want to wrap up with before we do finish this episode and let everyone get on with their day?

[00:36:34] Chris: No I think you summed that up pretty well. I think the early reviewer program is worth a test if you have access to it and I’m curious and I would say let us know in the Facebook group at theamazingseller.com/fb what your experiences of that program are and how it turned out for you. Scott I know you and I have a product that should be going live any day now that’s enrolled in that program so obviously we’ll be letting you guys know how that works out for us and then if you guys have any questions on brand registry or anything like that tag us on the Facebook group with those as well.

[00:37:06] Scott: Awesome. Alright guys that is going to wrap up this episode. The show notes can be found at theamazingseller.com/378; show notes, transcripts and the links that we mentioned will be there as well. Alright guys that’s it, that’s going to officially wrap up this episode. Remember as always 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, say it proud, Chris is going to say it with us today on the count of three are you ready Chris?

[00:37:36] Chris: I am.

[00:37:37] Scott: Alright, are you sure?

[00:37:38] Chris: I am.

[00:37:39] Scott: One, two, three, “Take Action!” Have an awesome amazing day guys and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

…questions here on the podcast and I do it every single Friday and we’re going to do it again today. I am super, super excited as usual on Friday, not just because it’s the weekend or depending on when you’re listening to this, it might be Monday morning and if it’s Monday morning let’s celebrate Monday morning. It doesn’t have to just be the weekend even though we were kind of trained as kids as we were growing up, where a lot of us that Fridays were, “Hey, let’s go, weekend.” And then Sundays were, “Oh boy, I got to go back to school or oh, I got to go back to work.”

I think every day we can celebrate being able to go out there and do what we want to do and in this case, it’s build ourself a business that can support our lifestyle. At least that’s what it is for me and I know a lot of you listening. Super excited to be here again to answer some of your questions here on this Ask Scott session. If you guys have any questions that you want me to answer on an upcoming Ask Scott session, just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that.

Just leave your first name, maybe where you’re tuning in from, that would be kind of cool and then just a brief question and that would be awesome and I would love to hear from you. I can’t promise that I’m going to be able to air this right off the bat or maybe in the next week but it probably will get answered in an upcoming session so just keep listening, that’s all. Just keep listening and I’ll do my best to answer these questions.

Now today, I’ll just give you a little teaser of what we’re going to be talking about. Number one is negative reviews and how they could be hurting your sales and kind of what to do about that, what do about competition that might be hiring people to upvote the negative reviews if you haven’t heard about that. It’s pretty bad when that happens and it can really hurt your sales.

[00:02:02] Scott: I’m going to give you my thoughts on that. Also understanding pay-per-click or sponsored product ads, the search terms and organic sales and then also we’re going to talk a little bit about patent pending on products that you might be interested in selling in the future and what we should think about that before we end up jumping into that arena. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

Now, you guys know I like to give you my thoughts of the week or kind of what’s going on in my mind right, like what’s happening. I want to actually give a little shout out here to Wassim. Now Wassim posted in the Facebook group and I think we were talking about some of your wins, some of your losses and stuff like that. He came in and he said, “You know what, I’m going to give you guys some advice. Ready, shoot, aim.”

Or, and there’s a book out there called Ready, Fire, Aim and it basically means just hurry up, get something out there and then you can kind of see what the results are and then you can kind of re-aim and then shoot again and all that rather than having everything perfect and having everything lined up and then just keep waiting and waiting and waiting.

He said, “In e-commerce terms it could look like this, research, take action, refine.” I liked that, I like that a lot. Research, take action, refine. You’re probably not going to hit a homerun. You might not even hit a base hit but I can tell you this, you will get results and those results, everyone thinks that results have to be positive results. No, it could be a negative result that lets you see what will happen and then maybe you adjust or maybe you learn something through that process that helps you with the next product, all right?

I love that, Wassim if you’re listening, thank you so much for posting that and I totally, totally get it. Research, take action, refine. All right, so I love that. If you guys want to hang out in our Facebook group, our community, our awesome community of TASers, head over to theamazingseller.com/fb and go over there and make yourself welcome and dig through some of the archives.

[00:04:10] Scott: You can go to the little search tab there or little search box, type in one of your maybe questions that you have right now if it’s on product research or sourcing or launching or any of that stuff. You’ll probably get a ton of results back that you can kind of start digging through and see some of those past conversations. Because even though those conversations might be three months old, they’re going to be new to you and that’s how you can kind of learn and kind of dig through some of those archives.

Now, before we jump in, let me remind you guys the show notes, the transcripts can be found at theamazingseller.com/379, you can grab all of the goodies over there. All right guys, let’s go ahead and let’s get this baby rocking and rolling. I am fired up to get started here, to get listening or to start listening to… I can’t even talk, I’m so excited. To start listening to your questions and I can give you my feedback and hopefully help you and move you in the right direction. Let’s go ahead and do that, what do you say? Let’s go ahead and kick this baby off.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:05:10] Naman: Hello Scott, this is the Naman from Houston, Texas. I am a listener to a few of your Podcasts for a very long time and it’s such a great resource. I listen to it every day either going to work or coming back from work. The reason for my call today is I had a great product with four plus star ratings, doing great sales, it was a number one bestseller. Recently however, I see that some of my competition has basically started up voting my reviews, the negative ones and because of that, I’ve seen big jumps in the number of up votes on bad reviews. What’s happened now is that the top reviews that show up on my listing are all the one star reviews, even though the product itself is four plus stars.

I’m just contacting to see what I can do in this situation especially when upvotes and downvotes are not allowed by Amazon. I’ve tried to contact them and they have not been of any help so I’m just trying to see what to do because it’s really ruined the sales for me. It’s cut my sales more than half. I hope you can give me some advice on that. Thank you so much. Bye, bye.

[00:06:32] Scott: Hey Naman, thank you so much for the question and let me tell you something, I feel your pain. Now, what we’re talking about here is you’re probably in a competitive market where you have a competitive product, right? Probably has a good number of sales monthly through the top 10 or top 15. So again, you’re more of a target. I’ve said this and I’m going to get to kind of like how we can kind of work on this issue, which is not going to be an easy thing to do.

I’m just going to let everyone know there’s no silver bullet here. There’s no quick fix that I can give you guys but what I can do is say listen, if you guys are just starting, this is exactly why we do not want to go after competitive markets, at least me. Because you’re going to have to deal with this stuff on a regular basis.

Very similar to hijackers right, it’s the same kind of idea. They’re just coming on, they’re trying to take advantage of your listing that might be doing good but now what we’re talking about here is someone wants to make your product listing look bad. The way that they can do that is they can hire people literally, they can go out there and pay people. There are services out there I’m sure that you can say, “Hey, upvote or downvote.”

What we mean by this is if you guys are a brand new, is if you have a review on your listing, I can go to that review and I can say if it was helpful or not and the more that I say that it’s helpful, the more that it’s going to drive it up to the top. If a competitor came over and said, “Oh, let’s go ahead and hurt this person.”

We can go over here and we can start up voting that negative review. So if you had a one star review, we can start up voting that. Now, I would never ever, ever, ever recommend doing that, I think it’s terrible. It makes me actually sick to my stomach thinking that people would go that low to doing that.

[00:08:32] Scott: There’s people out there listening and you may have done that and shame on you. I do not think that you should do that. That’s like so dirty, it’s bad. I do not recommend that and I think anyone that has done that are cheating and I think that it’s kind of like having someone in your local area and you have brick and mortar businesses and then you’re having people go out there and say bad things about you even though they’re not true.

Really what you’re doing there is you’re making it look like you’re helping yourself but you’re basically going on to a competitor and then just saying these people are bad even though they weren’t. Like going to a restaurant and then going on Yelp and saying that they’re bad just because you want your friend’s restaurant to do better. It’s just, it’s not good karma, it’s not good will, it’s just terrible.

I get it and it’s happening. I don’t like it but that’s the other reason why I don’t like going into these really, really high competitive spaces or these markets. I try to stay away from them and that’s why some people say, “Well, if I’m going to put all that work into it, I want to go and get a product that’s going to give me 50 sales a day.” That’s fine, go knock yourself out but you are going to run into these issues.

You’ll run up against people that are going to go out there and they’re going to cheat and they’re going to play dirty and supplements, perfect example, it’s going to happen. I’m just telling you right now, if you going into the supplement market, it is going to happen.

Now, if you want to go after that market, go for it. Just be prepared, that’s all I’m saying. Let’s kind of address what you can do in this case. Now, you’ve already reached out to seller support which I think that that’s your first step. I think you need to have that trail, that paper trail of you saying like listen, “I know that this is happening, I need you to be aware of this,” whatever. So this way here you have a paper trail. They will start to investigate it as well.

[00:10:32] Scott: Especially if people that are upvoting or that are downvoting or any of that stuff, if they’re doing that, they also … If they’ve ever been blacklisted or if they’ve ever had suspensions or maybe they’re even going to make it at the point and they haven’t done so yet but maybe if you have not been an Amazon member for a period of time, your vote doesn’t count, that type of stuff. But definitely get them on the radar. That would be step number one.

Step number two is going to be really about you going out there and just focusing on getting your organic sales. Even though this may be hurting you, you’re still getting, let’s say 50% of your sales and then really, really honing in on getting those people to leave reviews in an ethical way and that means just a good follow up. That means giving them good customer service, basically being a real person and then from there, my next part to this would be this is why it’s extremely important to have your own email list.

What I mean by this is if you have your own email list and you’ve built up a little bit of a raving fan base like, I’m saying like 100 to 150 people, you can have thousands on your list but you’re going to have that core group of people that will buy every time that you launch at a discount. If you tell them or mention to them that, you know, “Hey, could you do me a favor? Could you go over and let Amazon know how we’re doing? We just want to make sure that we’re doing a good job, we want them to know we’re doing a job.” They will go to bat for you.

Now, I’m not saying have those people go over and leave up votes on yours and down votes on your competition. That would not be something I’d recommend. But what I would recommend is definitely reaching out to your email list and asking them to leave you an honest review. Now, that does not mean that they’re being incentivized.

[00:12:32] Scott: That’s the thing that we do not want to do. You do not want to say, “Hey, leave me a review and I’ll give you a 25% discount.” That’s not what we’re saying. We do not want to do that. What I’m saying is after they’ve purchased full price, 25% off, whatever it is, then you can come back and say, “Could you do me a favor? Could you let Amazon know how we did?” That’s it. That would really help us as a small business.

Then if you do have that list of people that will definitely, definitely help you because now they will just go to bat for you, they’ll do it for you. That’s what I would do personally. Just to recap here. Number one, if you can stay out of those competitive markets, do that and you won’t have these kind of problems or at least you’ll have less of a chance to have these problems. Number two is reach out to seller support, let them know what’s happening.

Number three, I would say just go after sales. Go and try to just continually get sales, pay-per-click, all that stuff and then number four would be your launch list. Then from that launch list, I would again, try to get those sales and then I would reach out to those people and ask them to go over to Amazon and let them know, Amazon know how you did with feedback, with reviews or whatever.

Then that will start to really kind of compound on top of maybe those negative reviews that are starting to show at the top. That’s what I would do personally there. Hopefully this helped you or anyone else out in this situation. I know it can be frustrating but I think your best bet is to just really focus on making your customers that you have extremely happy so they will want to go over and leave you a positive five star review. All right, so hopefully this helps. Let’s go ahead and listen to today’s next question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:14:22] Nerinda: Hello Scott, it’s Nerinda from Australia. Just wanted to say thank you so much for your Podcast, absolutely love it. Your positivity, your energy, your detailed questions and ideas are just fantastic. I’m really struggling with finding the search terms that people are using to find my products. Is it true that when you start up a pay-per-click campaign, that if you start an auto campaign it actually appears in your search term report as a broad campaign?

If that’s the case, are they actually two different things, as in the broad campaign that is actually an auto. One is what Amazon decides they’re going to use the search terms and the other one is where you’ve put those in the back end. The problem I’m finding is that I’ve run auto campaigns and even though I’ve sold a number of products of this particular… I’m only a new seller and I’m only selling in January. I’ve sold about 30 of these products. I can only find on the search term reports the identification of three of these with associated search terms.

I have no idea what is the search term that all these other buyers were using, what are the search terms? I don’t know if you can help me, if there’s any way of me trying to find that out. Really appreciate your help, thanks Scott. Bye.

[00:16:13]Scott: Hey Nerinda thank you so much for the question, all the way from Australia. Love the accent too by the way and thank you so much for the question and also I just want to kind of let everyone know, Nerinda actually asked a question before this and then she came back on and the voicemail said, skip that last question, let’s go ahead and move on to the next question and it was still based around pay-per-click and it really was about like, “Okay I’m spending on pay-per-click. I see that out thirty sales I’ve gotten three sales from pay-per-click and so the other 27 sales came from where?”

Well that would be organic so that’s an organic sale which we love but now the next question that she had asked was, well, how do I know what that search term was that they used in organic? That’s going to be really hard to see. Now the one where that you can kind of maybe see this and this isn’t 100% accurate but it’s a way for you to start to see what you are converting for or as far organically is the tool scope.

It’s a chrome extension, it’s through Seller Labs and what that does is it allows you to go on your listing or anybody’s listing for that matter and they will pull up this search terms, the keywords, search terms, that are being displayed for that listing and it will give a guesstimate of the sales that are being generated through their keyword.

I’m not quite sure how it works but I do know that it’s probably better than nothing, but I would use that as a gauge as well. I don’t necessary think that you are going to know exactly, on the organic side of things. The pay-per-click side of things we know 100% what has converted and in this case you are asking now about auto.

[00:18:06] Scott: In your first question which we didn’t play that because I didn’t want to have like three questions in a row from you, but I’m just kind of throw it out there and kind of let people know what was asked. It was really like, okay, I’m running sponsored product ads, I can see that, I spend x amount of dollars and I got so many impressions and then I got three sales.

I can pretty much look in the back end in the search terms report and I can see even though I’m running a broad march, a broad type inside of my campaign, I can still see that I was advertising for garlic press and that was, and it shows you like that’s the keyword and then it will say, search term.

You have to pull this search term report to see this. In order to that, you just go into your campaign manager area there you will see little things as reports on the right hand side. At least that’s where it is now but you will find it and then from there you will go to search term report and then that will spit out that information. So it will show you your impressions, it will show you the clicks and then it will show you the sales and then you can…

Even if you don’t see, like let’s say you don’t make any sales, this is still very important to do, this is because we can kind of get of an idea of what people are actually searching for. Now we went into really, really deep discussion on this and training and all of that in our pay-per-click series that we did.

If you guys have not watched that, it’s totally free, resource for you guys, we did Facebook lives, Q&As we did campaign setup, all kinds of stuff there. And you can find that resource by heading over to theamazingseller.com/ppc for pay-per-click.

You can go there and you can check all that stuff out but bottom line is you are always kind of guessing at what the keyword is.  That’s like the seed word, we call that the seed keyword and then once someone searches for something like stainless steel garlic press, it will show that alongside the broad term that you were going after so garlic press.

[00:20:12] Scott: So, then we know that wow! We got a whole bunch of people that were searching for that particular search term so maybe that is our main keyword and then we can start to see where we are ranking and all of that fun stuff. Now talking about auto campaign and that was really the question here, was alright now if I do an auto campaign, I’m not telling it any keyword to go after, all I’m doing is saying give me the information.

So, what it will do at this point now is you will see these little asterisks and then right alongside those asterisks in that campaign, you will see the search terms that were being displayed. So you will see the search term just from it triggering half of the auto campaign.

I used to say that doing an auto campaign from the start was the way that I’ve always done it and it’s still not a bad way of doing it but this is kind of like if you have no idea of what your keywords are, to start with. Now I like to do it the other way and what I will do now, and again we talk about this in the pay-per-click series.

But what I do now is I will find a handful five or maybe 10 of those really top keywords that I know are the ones that people are probably searching for and you kind of know these. Even by just looking at your competition and seeing what they have in their titles and stuff like that and then I will put them in a manual campaign and then I will run that.

Then I will start to say, oh and I will start to see, okay, well garlic press was in there, that was one of mine but stainless-steel garlic press got a ton of impressions because it’s going to show me that. Because all I did was I used that as a seed word as my broad match and then I can start to refine that.

But then going back to like, okay, how do I know now and those other sales that aren’t coming through pay-per-click? How do I know? I won’t really worry about that, I would worry about, you got sales, that’s awesome, but it’s going to take more than 27 or 30 sales to really understand what your main keywords and search terms are going to be.

[00:22:20] Scott: So that’s a really small number. Again, with impressions, this is another way to kind of see what people are searching for without you even getting clicks or sales is by you putting it a broad term and then seeing how many impressions it’s getting.

So a good test for this would be, and I just recently did this and I’m not saying that you have to do this by all means, you are going to spend some money and probably not make any sales on this but this is a way that I can collect data really, really quickly and my good friend Dom Sugar kind of pushed me to do this because we were kind of impatient.

But I would set up a campaign and I targeted just one keyword, seed keyword and I wanted to see like, what kind of data I can collect with that like really fast. So I raised my bid cause per click to $5, yes $5 and then from there I lowered my budget my ad spend on that campaign to like 20 bucks so if I had gotten four clicks I would have been out of budget but the thing was, is I was able to see how many impressions I was able to get in that short period of time before I even got any clicks.

So, I think we got like 10,000 or 15,000 impressions in like in less than two hours. So, I knew that, that definitely that phrase or that keyword was really hot but now what I can do also is I can look on the search terms report on the back end, not right away and that takes some time before you are actually going to get that data back, but then I can start to see the actual search terms.

Again, it’s a way for you to start to really understand and see what your market is searching for. So hopefully this helped you and I know that for a lot of people it’s confusing and all that.

[00:24:02] Scott: That’s why we did that full training series. It was like a weeklong series. I definitely recommend go and check that out at theamazingseller.com/ppc totally free, just go check that out and it will probably make more sense.

But I always tell people start slow and then from there start to refine and then you can start adding more to that budget. But that’s pay-per-click. Going into the organic side of things, one way to that is, number one, if you ran Scope on your listing like today and then a week from now, you did it again, you can start to see what other keywords you are starting to be index for and start to be seen for and that will give you an idea as well.

But again this stuff takes time, it’s like you are not going to get those results overnight, so hoping this helped you, thank you so much for the question again and thank you so much again for listening in the car. I don’t know if it was this question that you sent or the one before but you said that you have like an hour or two ride in work every day and home every day and you listen to the podcast so I just want to say, thank you so much for being a listener and I’m glad that I’m able to kind of be in the car with you and making that the right to go a little bit better by you listening to this information.

So, as always keep me posted and let me know things are going. All right guys let’s go ahead and listen to one more quick question. I will give you my answer, we will wrap this baby up and we can get rocking and rolling. Let’s do this.

[00:25:30] Adrian: Hey Scott, my name is Adrian and I am from Serbia. TAS is going really global right now because I currently don’t live in Serbia but I live in China Shenzhen where I’m sourcing products and working on my Amazon business, developing my ecommerce sites. So I’m fully into that right now and first of all I want to thank you for everything that you are doing. You are really great guy, helping us a lot and I already have one product listed on Amazon, your podcast helped me a lot.

My question is, I’m currently in a research phase for my second product and I already found it. I’m pretty sure that, that product will be good for me because I already have a product that is similar to that one but the problem is that I can see my competitor, future competitor or the main guy who is selling it has in his product description patent pending. So basically, I’m scared if I will go into that product that, that product is already patented, so I will have any problems because of that.

I was already looking on USPTO website about patents but I was unable to find anything. They have like a lot of different similar products and it’s really messy to look at there. So, my question for you is, what should I do to make sure that, that product is not patented. I don’t want to sell and have some problems. I want to be completely legal. So, thank you Scott very much and I hope to hear your answer. Cheers.

[00:27:20] Scott: Well hey Adrian from Serbia, what is up man! Thank you so much for the question. You guys know I get fired up when I start hearing people calling in globally. Like we are all over the world. This is amazing, love it love it, and thank you so much for being some listener and thanks so much for taking action because now that you’ve taken action you’ve gotten some results and now you are starting to get that momentum.

You are getting a little bit of MO in your life and I pull that from the book, The Compound Effect, he always talks about, Darren Hardy talks about getting MO in your life. You guys got to understand something, once you start getting a little bit of MO or momentum, man it’s hard to stop.

It’s like that big rock at the top of the mountain that starts to tumble, the more it tumbles, the faster it goes and the more momentum it builds up. It’s like the snow ball. The snowball effect. So, let’s talk about this whole patent pending thing. Now there is a couple of things that I want to mention here. Number one, is a patent pending is really just a patent pending. It means it’s not issued, it’s not been approved, it just means that it’s pending.

That they filed, I have a patent pending right now of one of our products that we just launched not that long ago. It’s a patent pending. I can write on my packaging patent pending. Doesn’t mean that I’m going to get my patent. Now I can’t get an extension on that and it was funny I was talking to someone recently and they said, I don’t even care if I really get the patent because I can at least put patent pending on my product for at least a year, maybe even a year and a half, maybe even two years depending on how much of an extension I can get and part of that game plan is that it kind of keeps people off because when you see that patent pending because it does kind of scare you off.

[00:29:11]Scott: Now let me just say that I’m not a legal advisor. I’m not giving you any legal advice. All I’m saying is that a patent pending as far as I know, is a pending thing. It’s not there yet, it’s not like official and just about anybody can get a patent pending as long as you filed.

Now with that being said, it does make me, if I see that on a product probably want to stay away a little bit or at least I’m going to want to probably reach out to an attorney and I know that you can do a Google search and you’ve already kind of done that and you might find a patent that’s there, that’s “pending”. But again if you do have something like that, that it kind of comes up, you do have to ask yourself that question.

Do I want get involved in a patent fight? Do you want to have someone come after you once you get up and running? My thoughts on that is that no I don’t. I actually had a product not that long ago that we were thinking about launching and we found a patent pending. Actually I thought it was a patent and then I found out it was pending and it hadn’t been approved yet, but a patent attorney told me, “Listen, it’s going to come down to who has the most money, and if that person’s already like up and running and selling 50,60,$70,000 a month and you are starting from zero, they are going to have a little bit more money than you to kind of enforce this patent.”

So, you have to ask yourself that question. I probably in this case would probably step aside from that product right now. Keep an eye on it, I’d just shelf it, I wouldn’t do away with it 100%. Like probably see if there is something else that I can launch, that would be along the same lines or within that same market, if that’s what you are going after.

[00:31:00] Scott: But I personally would probably step back or I would reach out to a patent attorney and I would ask them to dig into it. Probably it’s going to cost you $300, $400 but it’s money well spent now to know if you should even do that because the last thing you want to do is invest in the resources and going back and forth with your time and maybe even doing your own custom mold and all this stuff and then have someone come at you with a patent infringement violation and then an attorney and then you got to have your attorney talk to that attorney, and then you start adding up the hourly rate of $400 an hour. It doesn’t interest me.

So, I would stay away from that but just to let you know, from what I understand, a patent pending is not an official patent as of yet. It’s pending, meaning it’s not there yet but it has been filed. Now it could get approved, it might not get approved and if it does then they are going to have a full patent and now you are going to have some issues if you ended up going through with that product.

Again, you can go and say, you know what, I’m going to take this product and make it different so I wouldn’t be violating it. They still could have something in that patent that says you can’t do it for whatever reason. It could be the strangest thing but again you have to think long and hard about this, is this product the one that you have to launch, that you have to sell or is there something else that you can do in the meantime while you let this thing kind of work itself a little bit and see if you can learn a little bit more about it before you end up jumping into the patent pending world?

So hopefully this helped you and I don’t want to scare anybody but I do definitely want you guys to know that. Like if it’s me and I’m seeing that, I’m definitely going to be stepping back and some people would say, well then that’s great, then I’m just going to file for a patent on all my products and then at least I can put patent pending for at least a year.

[00:33:06]Scott: And that maybe okay, that’s fine. It’s not something that… I’m not going to just do a pattern a file to put on my product and just to do it, but if I think that I may be patenting that I would but you can’t do that, you can put pattern pending on their if you have one that is pending.

So hopefully this helped you guys. This was a great episode by the way. I think I this was really, really good, now that kind of go back and I listen to the questions and kind of like a little bit of the feedback that I can give a lot of important things here; negative reviews, hurting sales, that’s big. And your sponsored product ads. It’s always going to be a moving target pretty much, we just have to keep learning and adapting and then patents and patent pendings and infringements and all that stuff is always going to be a hot topic in something that we want to know a little bit more about.

So guys I hope this has helped you, keep the questions coming, head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and do that. Ask a question, leave your first name, where you are tuning in from and just a quick question and I will do my best to answer you on upcoming Ask Scott session. Then the show notes guys I’ll just remind you theamazingseller.com/379. You can grab all the show notes, the links and transcripts, all that stuff will be over there for you.

All right guys so as always, remember that I am here for you, I believe in you and I am rooting for you but you have to… Come on say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day, weekend, night, whatever time of day it is, and I will see you guys right back here on the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

Click Here to Download Transcript <<
…pay-per-click launch strategy. That sounds pretty cool and then we are also going to talk about ranking for keywords and some other random stuff. The reason why is because it’s one of our TAS power hours. We just got back from Mexico. I did anyway and Dom Sugar and we actually did a Facebook Live in Mexico. If you missed that one you missed out, well you can still watch it. I’ll link it up in the show notes in today’s episode of theamazingseller.com/380. That was pretty awesome, pretty epic being there in Mexico and doing a Facebook Live and connecting with everybody out there and we also had our drink waiter come on over and give a little TAS love so it was pretty cool.

But I have to be honest, coming back man we are starting to feel the effects of not just being tired but got a little bit of a stomach bug going around here which is not pleasant and my wife and I we’ve been there plenty of times so I know it’s not the water. I think we might have had some bad chicken, or something. I don’t know but the whole family is not feeling good coming back but we are getting better now. I’m just about 100%. I’m about 93% right now just a random number I thought I throw out there. It sounds cool but I want to let you guys know, today what I’m going to share with you is a TAS Power Hour that we did once we got back. It was last Friday depending on when you are listening to this.

The reason why I’m going to let you guys listen to this on the podcast is because sometimes you don’t go over there and check out the Facebook Lives but I really believe that this was some really good meaty content and we never know the direction of these TAS Power Hours. We just jump on there and start talking about what’s going on. I actually had Chris Schaffer that is get me caught up on some of the new products we just launched while I was gone and I knew a little bit but I didn’t know all the specifics. So he went ahead and he gave me all those, you guys get to hear those, and we talked about The Aggressive pay-per-click launch strategy.

[00:02:05] Scott: We talked about some key words and all of that fun stuff so you are going to be able to listen to all of that which I think is going to be really a huge amount of value for you guys just to hear the play by play and how things are going down and what we are working on and how those things are working. You’ll also hear how Dom has a very aggressive approach and I’ve got like a medium approach but he’s starting to push me a little bit more aggressively and it all comes down to in the beginning guys. It’s really how much money are you willing to put into this thing in the beginning and not expect a return? A lot of people they get started and they think I have to make that money right back, like instantly I have to make it back.

And that is the wrong mindset whether it’s really, really aggressive or you are willing to lose thousands, I’m not saying that but it could be a few hundred or it could be a thousand or two or it could be even more. I always go back to the guy that I met at Sellers Summit where he told me after I had mentioned about our initial promo whenever we launch a product is really just not even breaking even. I mean if we can that’s great but it’s not even breaking even and I said it’s a lot like a brick and mortar store and he came up to me afterwards and he says, “Scott you are dead on.” He goes, “I’ve opened plenty of brick and mortar stores and we always had a budget of between five and ten grand as a grand opening. The bouncy bounce for the kids, the hotdogs, whatever other activities, the DJ, all that stuff and it adds up.”

It’s like a party so this way you get attention and it’s very similar to what we do here to get attention on Amazon when we are starting to launch products and especially now things are a little bit different. I mean people are taking back, “I can’t do big massive giveaways,” and that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about using Amazon’s tools, using their platform to really help us launch and I’m going to stop talking so you guys can actually listen to everything we talked about and I think you guys are going to get a ton of value. I did want to remind you though again the show notes, theamazingseller.com/380, transcripts, show notes, all that stuff will be there.

[00:04:04] Scott: I’ll also link up the Facebook Live the videos if you want to watch us and listen to some of those shenanigans that are going on over there. There is always something funny going to happen when you have Dom sitting at the table with you and that was proven in Mexico as well. Definitely go check that out and then I’d also like to say that if you have not caught any of our Facebook Lives head over to Facebook and join our amazing group, literally. It is the Amazing Seller Group but it is amazing and yeah, go over there and just join our free Facebook Group, be part of the TAS group over there and you’ll be notified when we do a live and hopefully you can come on a live with us or even just watch the replay but we do them every single Friday at 2pm Eastern Time.

We have a lot of people that show up live and we have a lot of people that view them after the fact. Thousands view them after the fact and we would love for you to be there live with us and interact and ask any question. So those are there to really help you and also let you look behind the scenes a little bit and look over our shoulder as we are discussing this stuff privately in a sense but then you guys get to listen in which is cool. If you want to join the Facebook group head over to theamazingseller.com/fb and you can go ahead and join that amazing group, literally. Alright so guys I’m going to stop talking now so you guys can enjoy this episode so sit back, relax and get ready to laugh a little bit too every now and then. Dom is really good at that so enjoy.

[POWER HOUr]

[00:05:31] Scott: Alright, cool let’s get rocking and rolling Chris. Maybe what we can do is dig into maybe what’s been happening ever since we launched. Maybe even like ranking for these keywords and I just looked at it this morning and we are moving up in the ranks on some of those bigger keywords so what do you want to let us know about that recent launching stuff?

[00:05:53] Chris: Let’s dive into that and Ben said, “You guys have been talking about all these products that you’ve been launching.” I think we’ve launched six in the last five, six weeks. It’s a little crazier than we intended it to be but it’s all good because they are all selling. We did product research correctly and we had an idea of what we were doing. He just wanted to know how closely related are all these products. All the ones that we’ve been talking about recently are in the same brand so they are in the same thing, they are all closely related and we are seeing some of those cross sales and up sales.

In fact one of the things that I noticed on the launch of the product that we launched, what was it Scott Wednesday of last week, actually it was Wednesday because we were talking about the first full day of the launch last week on Facebook Live, is we are getting people who bought this also bought this like day one not necessarily the frequently bought together but other products that people who bought this looked at, however that’s phrased at the bottom of Amazo.

Those kinds of things we’re starting to get almost immediately because we are driving our own traffic and so the people who bought one that we have control over, Dom just made a sale. The people who bought one all over we send back and then if they buy something else then we start to get some of those up sales, cross sales which is really the reason that we talk about building a cohesive brand and that’s something I think Dom resonates with as well. When you are talking about building a brand is one of the main reasons you want to do that is to take that average order quantity from one to 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 so they are buying more than one thing in the transaction they’ll count on average and we are starting to see that as well. You and I haven’t really talked today so we are setting up some of the things on 1K Fast Track so where are we ranking on that new stuff?

[00:07:31] Scott: Okay, yeah so just imagine garlic press. Garlic press is like that main keyword that it might take you a long time to rank for the keyword. You may never rank on page one but if you are going for that you are going to start to go after all these long tail as we call them but actually I just checked this morning and we are actually on the bottom of page two for one of the garlic press keywords.

[00:08:00] Chris: Which is for the new product?

[00:08:01] Scott: No, it’s for one of the more seasoned ones, probably about a month to a month and a half and to really let everyone know the entire process behind how we were doing this, and Dom and I had a really long conversation about this, about pay-per-click and Dom is a big, big believer in going out there and putting money on that keyword and then just continually getting impressions and getting sales. Then from there it’s going to start to naturally rank you for that keyword but also a lot of miscellaneous keywords. Now what I did do the other day Chris is I went on our listing and I ran Scope and now I’m able to see how many keywords we are being indexed for and how many we are actually being found for.

And now I’m going to go back and keep doing that from time to time and then that will let me see how many more we are starting to go for because one of the products that I’m going up against and using their data they’ve got thousands of keywords. We may only have a few hundred right now but as we keep doing this and that’s what Dom says, the more that you keep doing this we keep building out our… We go wider now with all of these keywords not just deep. We were banking on one keyword and that’s where it can really start to happen.

Also we are willing to go to in the red right now so because we are willing to go in the red, we are also showing Amazon that we are willing to pay. We can’t say this for sure but Dom’s a big believer that if we go ahead and we show them that we are spending money, we are willing to buy our way to rank, then they are going to remember that and when traffic starts to come in more they are going to also give us a little bit more of an edge if you will. Dom, why don’t you speak into that quickly, that conversation that we had privately in Mexico that late night and maybe just talk about that?

[00:09:54] Dom: Yeah we basically talked about how to overcome your main keywords and how to become the number one seller guy or girl and that’s how you have to sometimes lose your shirt over those keywords maybe ten or twelve of the main ones until you basically set precedence that you are going to be the leader for that. Now what’s going to happen, I always found that we do it this way, we lose a whole load of money at the beginning for those couple of months but then it pays back in the end because they’ve got the other people that are trying to bid high basically back off because they only have one or two ASINs or maybe their first launch. It’s a little more difficult for them to keep up. They just give up because they are spending their whole budget, they are not selling that many and they are using all their money on budget

Yeah it’s a little bit easier because we have lot of products and its cool but you can still do it if you have one or two products. And then what happens is because you are paying Amazon all that money, I feel anyway in the four years that I’ve been using the PPC, again I don’t have any written proof and I’m just going because I check PPC all the time and I have my staff do it, is that the way the algorithm works is that because you are spending money on PPC and you are bidding on those keywords organically Amazon is going to help you in the search a lot easier. You could bid $10 a click and not get one click and have like twenty five impressions and a month from now that keyword could be on the first page, even though you didn’t get any clicks on it. It’s just how it works naturally that’s what I found.

[00:11:20] Scott: I was going to ask you something about that really quickly. I forget who I heard this from but I just recently heard it. Do you think there is anything to, even though you might not convert on that keyword but yet you’ve gotten impressions and then clicks over to your listing, do you think that helps you in rank at all because it shows that it’s relevant?

[00:11:40] Dom: Again I guess in theory would work.

[00:11:45] Chris: It’s all relative.

[00:11:46] Dom: It’s all relative I mean if I get impressions I know that whatever they are typing in their keywords is getting to that keyword that I place so that we know for sure.

[00:11:54] Scott: I was just saying because I heard someone say that even if it’s just yourself, if you search your keyword and then you click on your listing once you find it in the ranking that immediately shows that someone searched and someone found you.

[00:12:10] Dom: Yeah you could do that maybe once or twice and then Amazon knows.

[00:12:14] Scott: But I’m saying that’s you but let’s say that you did pay-per-click and you are starting to get impressions then you are starting to get thirty clicks but you didn’t get a sale yet for whatever reason. Does that help you, does it hurt you? I don’t know the answer to that and I’m brainstorming here with you and Chris. Chris what do you think on that?

[00:12:30] Chris: I swear I need a shirt man, I say it depends. It’s all relative in this case and to me the intuitive way that this works is just based on what I know about computer science and algorithms and all that stuff which is probably more than I should but not enough to intelligently speak about how Amazon designs theirs, is it’s going to be relative. Amazon wants the most relevant thing to show up so in a case where you are getting hundreds of sales, that to me would be the highest relevancy in Amazon’s eyes. The second most relevant thing from a logical standpoint would be people visiting that listing. So if I get ten and you get five I’m more relevant than you if sales are equal or conversion rate is equal.

Then beyond that it would be impressions, that’s the highest level and it’s the same way that we look at solving a PPC problem we just do it the opposite way. Do we have impressions? Yes. Do we have clicks? Yes. Do we have sales? No. That’s where the problem is so if we work backwards from that it makes sense that Amazon would look at all three of those things to rank you because that’s how they are going to see it. But if I’m getting hundreds of sales from a keyword and you are just getting traffic I should at least in theory rank higher than you if that keyword is driving those sales for me. Does that make sense? Guys, let us know in the comments if that makes sense or does that just gibberish and it’s over everybody’s head because I have no idea?

[00:14:01] Scott: No I think that that does make sense because again I think it’s like you have the one factor is sales and that’s a true like I search for garlic press I found a listing, I bought it that’s gold but I never really thought about that as much as like even if I don’t convert, if I get the click over it shows that it’s relevant. And that could be a good thing for ranking depending on your competition and how they are doing.

[00:14:31] Chris: Exactly, I think everything comes back to that number and it’s a number that we hammer on a lot on the live but don’t tend to talk about a lot outside of that because it’s dependent on everything else.

[00:14:48] Scott: I want to go back to go back to though like we initially started talking about which is how we are ranking and all that stuff. I’m looking at the campaigns that we set up and I worked with Dom a little bit on this I said, “Okay I want to get aggressive, I want to see what it takes to get on page one.” We talk about that, some people say that you can’t even get on page one for results. I’m talking about pay-per-click results, like campaign results so what we did is we went ahead and we just bid $5 and we said, “Let’s see what happens.” Since I’ve done that, it’s been a couple of weeks now since I’ve done that. My impressions went through the roof, my cost-per-click has went from I think the most I paid was maybe $2.25 and that was getting me position two or three.

Now Dom I haven’t told you I’m getting position one and I’m also getting position one for not just one product but two. I’m getting it in the right hand side and I’m getting in the very top for two different products so two of my top…

[00:15:42] Dom: And you want to tell me it’s cheaper too. You’re probably getting that $1.50 that’s what happens so that means your competitors have cut they say, “That’s it we can’t afford to pay $2.25 a click we are going to give up,” and then you just keep sitting there and you just keep sitting there eventually that will be $1. It’s just the way it works.

[00:15:56] Scott: I’m looking right now as we go. It was $1.14 last week though Dom, a $1.14 I got 233,000 impressions and 549 clicks and I spent $125 and my ACOS is 79%. Now people would say, “Scott that’s terrible,” but that’s like a last week result and I got 549 clicks but guess what, for that product I’m ranking on page two about middle of the page for that big, big, massive keyword.

[00:16:35] Dom: Even at the beginning I wouldn’t even worry about conversion.

[00:16:37] Chris: What can we do Scott, for people to understand how massive that keyword is?

[00:16:43] Scott: I would say iPhone case or something.

[00:16:46] Chris: It would be iPhone so what did you say middle of page two?

[00:16:55] Scott: Yeah I’m looking at that for I think it was the second product that launched and that one there I’m looking at that main keyword and literary as I’m talking to you it’s page two, position looks like thirty sixth.

[00:17:10] Chris: So it’s at bottom of page two, bottom half of page two. So guys what we are talking about here is not the long tail term. It’s not necessarily even the terms that people would use to find the thing that have. What we are trying to do is rank next to the iPhone so that when somebody goes to buy the new iPhone on Amazon they see our iPhone case directly underneath that. If only you are number one for almost all of the longer tail…

[00:17:46] Scott: Yeah let me give you that one, I was going to say iPhone accessories we are page one and our position right now today is sixteen so we are at the bottom of the page on one.

[00:18:02] Dom: I mean when your main keyword, anybody that’s out there when your main keyword is relevant to a big brand or even to a mid-sized brand it’s difficult to rank for that word. It’s going to take you a long time. I mean we have the same thing in the open brand. We have two three products that are related to big brands and we got forty thousand impressions a day on those. That’s crazy and that’s only because I tailored them down. At Christmas time we were getting like 150,000 it’s insane. So you’ve got to play with it. If you don’t have the big brand but again to play in that field you’ve got to pay to that and if you can get to page one for a big brand you are doing pretty good.

[00:18:37] Scott: I think we are on our way Dom. I think we are on our way.

[00:18:40] Dom: Yeah because what’s happening is you just keep pushing it and taking the loss and taking the loss and I know you guys were talking about irrelevance and you are talking about conversion. I wouldn’t even worry about that. If you are at 150%, 200% for that keyword just keep pounding it away because you need that keyword. You lose money for ten years on that keyword because you are going to make it out on everything else.

[00:19:03] Chris: Yeah and Dom I’m talking about the listing as a whole. Obviously I don’t want to throw hundreds of dollars and never make a sale [inaudible] losing money I’m okay with that even if it’s just [inaudible] for this.

[00:19:10] Dom: My main brand loses money on our main keyword and you guys all know what it is. My main brand for my main keyword it’s a massive keyword and I’m talking 100,000, 200,000, I can have 400,000 a day if I want to and I don’t make any money on that keyword because my ACOS there is so much in that but I make tons of sales on other keywords but I have to be relevant for that keyword. People when they type that keyword they have to find my product and I’m always in the fold. I’m either two, three, one, four for PPC but I’m not making lots of money off that keyword just because it gets hit so much but what happens is that if I stop bidding on that keyword I’m afraid to stop. That’s basically what I’m saying.

Once you are up that high you can’t just stop but you are right you can’t keep doing that for years and not make any money you know what I’m saying but again if that keyword’s ACOS or 80% that’s good you are not trying to make any money.

[00:20:16] Scott: Honestly I just went back and looked at last month which doesn’t have as much data because obviously we started these campaigns a little while ago but last month’s data we had 249,612 impressions on the one campaign. We had 766 clicks at seventy two cents Dom. We’ve had 60 orders so our ACOS is 48.90 okay?

[00:20:46] Dom: It’s great and that’s just starting.

[00:20:48] Scott: I go to the next product which was the one right after that that we launched and that one there at 149,000 impressions, 453 clicks at eighty seven cents but mind you I was still willing to spend more. 31 orders were at 59% ACOS so to me we are doing okay because we know, and a lot of people don’t look at this, they look at ACOS they go, “Oh I lost money.” They don’t look at the organic side of things, what did you also bring in that’s not the 31 sales that came in from this? Because I know we did more than thirty one sales on this one product. I know we did sixty more on the first product so I know that so right away in my head I’m like, “People are buying it, I’m putting it there they are buying it so why not keep going with it and I’m starting to get my cost per click down.”

[00:21:37] Dom: You basically have to do whatever it takes to get to that front page at least halfway to the full. You’ve got to look at everything that we do here is exactly that what retailers and distributors and manufacturers do. When you go into Walmart and Costco they pay for that space. You think Pepsi, Coke want to be five shelves back? They are right in the front? Frito chips, Hostess chips in Canada, they always buy the bulk. Sony at Walmart they buy an end, they buy a whole showcase, they buy POP it’s called presentation. They buy that and they say, “We’ll give you $100,000 for all this month we need to be the front so people can see the Nintendo switch. Tons of presentations at the front, new launch. It’s all part of it. You have to do what you have to do to be relevant.

If you are not page two three for all your keywords you are going to get some sales because of PPC but you are not go through enough organic. Then what happens is once your organic sales kick in and you can get rid of PPC, tone it down like we do and then just rinse and repeat. Again we don’t get too much in depth in it but that’s what basically the strategy is.

[00:22:39] Scott: I like that analogy though Dom it’s like your shelf space, your shelf space…

[00:22:44] Dom: You are buying.

[00:22:45] Scott: Exactly you are buying shelf space. It’s just you are buying the Amazon sponsored ads space. Chris were you going to say something?

[00:22:54] Chris: Yeah and I wanted to say a couple of things. One I want to address Shawn’s question he says, “So you are selling a competing product and you are using other brands keywords?” No, we are selling accessories to the product and we are trying to rank on the first page for the main keyword like iPhone.

There is 13 different iPhone listings, different sizes, different whatever all those are on the first page so what we are trying to do is we are trying to rank some of our accessories for the iPhone on the first page just to see where that takes. But I think the shelf space analogy is perfect with the story that we are talking about here which is you are not going to make money on every one of those keywords.

If you walk into a convenient store and I know you guys probably don’t drink, well Dom I think you used to drink Red Bull, there is 19 SKUs of Rock Star energy drinks, 20 SKUs of Monster energy drink and 10 brands of Red Bull now.

The honest truth is they don’t actually make money on most of those flavors but the more flavors they launch the more shelf space they can take up at any given store and then if Monster launches additional flavors, Rock Star has fewer slots that they can put their stuff in so they might actually lose money on a bunch of those. Those shelf spaces, those can holders in the convenient store are our keywords. We want to dominate as many of those as we possibly can, not all of them are going to make us money but we obviously want to make money at the end of the day so we have to be profitable someway, we’re not going to make money on every single transaction.

[00:24:23] Dom: No matter what store you go in gum, Trident, chocolate bars, they all pay for that space. They all pay for those toppers that say two for $2. You go into the fridge at your 7/11 you will see Rock Star has got the whole they got four foot top to bottom with two for $4. They buy it and they pay for all of that stuff and you get there. Again the more competitive the space the harder… The space that you guys are in is very competitive, very competitive but again they don’t have lots of all-star guys like you guys working on it and that’s the key there.

You guys can launch six products at a time, we are not saying everyone needs to launch six products within a month because I would never suggest that because you’d have to fund it, have time and do PPC but again before we talk last week before you were like, “Hey Dom I’m spending $45 today on this campaign, what do you think?” And I just said, “You are just wasting, you’ve got to go to $150, $200 a day.” And you say, “Well, I don’t want to lose money” and I say, “Exactly, you know that, that’s part of it. Brick and mortar we talk about it, minimum $5,000 in advertising, radio.” Think about that $150 a day, you are going to give that away in the old days in 100 units a day anyway. That’s the way you’ve got to look at it before you start to give that stuff away and do PPC on top of it. You are actually ahead now you don’t have to really do the reviews any more that much.

[00:25:40] Scott: It was funny. I forget who I was talking to recently but we were talking… Actually I know who it was. I was doing an interview just the other day actually with Kevin who we met at Sellers Summit, the referee Chris? I had Kevin and he actually took his referee money for a whole season and then rolled that into his private label business and now he’s got five SKUs and they are launched in five different marketplaces so he’s doing really good.

[00:26:08] Dom: They are monarchs.

[00:26:16] Scott: They are monarchs. So he came on and we were talking about that and we talked about his first launch and he was talking about the reviews, “I did it the old way, I did it with the reviews,” and I go, “It’s funny because even though I know that that’s the old way we went after I’m going to do a review launch I never looked at it as I was doing it for reviews. I was doing it for the sales. That has not changed for me. The ranking factor was what I was really trying to do. To me the review was the bi-product of that but the big thing here is I wasn’t going for products that have thousands of reviews. That’s a different story. Even like you saying like we are in a competitive space we are but for accessories around the product, they are not crazy reviews. They are under 500.

[00:27:05] Dom: There is a lot of one offs in your model, a lot of one offs. Scott you are going to have 10 to 15 ASINs and SKUs at the end. That’s the difference. Everyone is like an open brand, they are just throwing that product and that product and that product and you could afford to throw the $10 stuff because you have $30, $40 stuff coming. The $10 stuff like we talked before. Again if you are going to a real competitive market this might not work the way we are doing it. You still got to throw even more money at it. We’ve suggested, we never told you that we’ve suggested not to do that, anybody that wants to do that you are in your own field there is nothing really we can tell that’s different. Like you want to start selling selling yoga mats I don’t know there must be, any nutritional type stuff, health care, hair loss, men hair stuff, send some my way I’ll review it for you but I say you are in a world of hurt. Again there is a million products that are out there still, you don’t have to get in those space. Make your life a lot easier.

[00:28:10] Scott: It’s funny because there still is a couple of products that we’ll probably launch in this line just to have them but there is people that are launching them every day now I’m noticing and that price is going to keep dropping and the reason is because they are pretty easy to source and everyone’s doing the same thing. Then all of a sudden they are offering a three pack and all of a sudden they are going to offer a six pack because everybody is trying to add to that thing. The problem with that is there is nothing different, there is nothing unique and then you are going to be going up. With us with what we are doing is we are creating stuff that we feel is different to the market. There is actually one of our products that I think we might even be the only one in that space right now.

There is different ways to do it and we’ve talked about that but going back to doing the launch and in the beginning especially, it kills me when people say, “I’m spending ten dollars a day and I’m losing money.” I’m here to tell you, you have to have a budget for promotions and advertising when you launch.

[00:29:17] Chris: Scott fair question, what should that budget be?

[00:29:19] Scott: I know someone wants to hear me say like 12.5% or something. I’m never going to give you that. What I’m going to say is this, when you are starting depending on how competitive the space is, I would say number one I want to allow a hundred units as a promotion. It depends on the competition though. If your competition is higher and you are ordering… I know some people that say, “I bought 100 units. How many do I allow?” If you are doing 100 units you are doing that just to validate that the product will sell so an easy way to validate that is don’t worry about anything other than just turning on your pay-per-click, seeing if you are going to start getting some sales.

Perfect example, my daughter she was doing RA. They are doing over $10,000 right now. They just passed that they are doing phenomenal they just got over two hundred SKUs RA. They discovered a product through that process which I told everyone that’s what you do. The 1K Fast Track will help you do that. Little shameless plug there for the 1K Fast Track. Basically from there what she did now she basically had 10 of these products that she wants to test. We are going to ship those in, we are going to turn on pay-per-click and we are going to see if we’ll can sell them. If we can guess what, we validated that it will sell, now we go ahead and we try to source the product.

So that’s another way that you can do it. There is not like a cookie cutter way to do it and I also think that a promotion doesn’t have to come in there and say, “I have to allow $1,250 for promotion.” What I would say is you need to allow 100 units to give away as at a discount, not 100% as a giveaway like 100% everything’s got to be free. It could be we’ve done 50%, we haven’t done anything more than 50%.

[00:31:04] Chris: The highest we’ve done in the brand is 50%.

[00:31:06] Scott: Yeah so that’s what I would say. You need to allow for that and then the other thing is again depending on how competitive the space is I would probably allow $1,000 for your ad campaign. That would be me. So if I’ve got $3,000, $1,000 of it has got to go for promotions, the other $2,000 is going to go for sourcing the product and part of that sourcing the product is those 100 units that I’m going to be giving away or 200 units whatever it is. Again it just depends on the budget but I guess the lower budget that you have or the least amount of money that you can probably get into this thing is let’s say that you have $2,000 you want to go in at it then you have to go after a product that’s less competitive, period.

[00:31:50] Dom: What I’ve got to say too Scott was, sorry Chris. We’ve talked about too and we are doing the two launch process. You do it the way you can or you can do like I do. I’ve got seven ASINs that are just landing now as we speak. I think a couple are replenishment to probably brand new. It’s all going to be high PPC with low entry point. It’s just giving away some…

[00:32:07] Scott: What do you mean low entry point just for people that don’t know what that means?

[00:32:13] Dom: Everyone is going to be at $19.99 I’m going to come at $13.99 so it’s going to be $6 until I gain some traction. So just like giving 25% off basically but I don’t have to go through the loop of sending it to review clubs and all that old junk or the other stuff. It seems to work for the open brand. Everything we’ve done I’ve done it that way and it seems good on top of… Again some of the stuff because I’m not building a brand I don’t need the email capture as much because I’m not following them up with something that’s going to be similar like we are doing with your brand.

The follow up sequence is not as pertinent so basically I put in if everyone is selling for $24.99 I’m going to come in at $17.99. Again I’m going to be close to my wholesale cost and I’ll do that until a couple of weeks. I’ll say, “Look I need to give 100 units away at this price,” and maybe I’ll sell two or three days and I’ve always said, if you can sell units your first couple of days you are pretty well onto an alright product. That’s basically what validates you.

[00:33:16] Chris: “Oh I just got my product and I just started to sell.” That’s how I discovered Amazon as a thing. We put a product and then we were like, “We sold one.”

[00:33:27] Dom: That’s how I do it. If you do PPC and you don’t have a sale I mean okay I could be wrong, you have to have everything optimized and I’m assuming everybody knows what optimizing…

[00:33:39] Scott: Mexican air got to you.

[00:33:44] Dom: But you guys know what I’m saying. Forget about basic optimiz… Oh jeepers.

[00:33:48] Scott: Optimize, say it with me Dom optimize or this one optimization that’s another good term.

[00:33:52] Dom: Optimization yeah, once you are doing optimization of your listing the collaboration of the focus [inaudible] of the listing itself. The corporation of PPC and amalgamation of the vortex of affiliations that you are doing could financially bring you stardom in all your brands. Is that better?

[00:34:18] Scott: That was awesome.

[00:34:20] Dom: What I’m saying is once you’ve got that done, if you can sell your stuff within a couple of days, I mean the first day, again don’t get excited for the first hour because it’s probably your competitor buying it. I really get irked a little bit, “Oh I sold one or two just now.” Most of the times it’s your competitor finding out, “Okay what’s this guy doing that we are not doing.” They want to see your insert cards, all that stuff. Again I’m not saying it happens every time but it does but if you could sell four five a day within a couple of days you already know you are on to a good product that’s what I think. Now it might be a price point thing but I think exactly that that you’ll do it.

If it takes you two weeks you haven’t sold something either your product is not very good or you did not put it in the right category or your listing isn’t optimized.

[00:35:06] Scott: Say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, optimized!

[00:35:10] Dom: Optimized, anyway that’s my little thing so again we’ve seen that lots of people are proving that, we showed it. We went from $50 $60 a day because you wanted to do it calmly to $150 to $200 a day depending on PPC and you see what has happened. Already your keywords are moving within a week. You are already ranking big for the major ones and you already got a stranglehold on all that. Before remember we were fighting we were, “Okay we are on page three here. We raised it to $2 and you’ve got to pop it up to $5 to $6.” Now you are on page one for those. Again you might not want to say number one because you don’t want to that much but if you can afford to be number one and everyone know, we’ve taught people how to do that.

You bid as high as you can $5 within about three hours you’ll know what you paid for that click. You’ll know what the highest is already because you can just play around you can just keep refreshing, put your keyword in, put your $5 wait an hour, go back. I would say 30 minutes. Take that keyword see where you are in placement. If you are third place and you bid $5 you know then the top guy is bidding at least $6, $7, $9, $10, which is crazy but that’s what happens.

[00:36:12] Scott: What’s crazy right now Dom is I put in our main keyword right now I’ve got both positions at the very top of the page not even on the right sidebar. I’m in it looks like organic it says sponsored at the top but two of them for two different products.

[00:36:27] Dom: And the reason you are getting that Scott is because you are probably in the same main category but you are in different subcategories.

[00:36:34] Chris: It’s actually two different categories, two different subcategories. One is category iPhones the other one is category iPhone accessories.

[00:36:44] Dom: Yeah if you were in the same subcategory and you only rank for one and because you are in two and we use that to our advantage. I tell you that some of our products we are allowed to be in two different categories, not main categories one in this section category and one in that one. What we do is we have listings on both of them so no matter where you type the keyword in we’ll show up in both categories. And then it helps you and again not everyone could do that because you are releasing the first product but again that’s stuff to think about later on. When you’ve got two, three of the four you are well on your way. Now you are going to be paying a lot of money on that but eventually it’s going to pay off especially in fourth quarter Amazon is going to remember that you gave them all that money to be up there and they are going to send as much traffic as they can to you.

[00:37:25] Scott: Yeah I mean I got to be honest like I said my bid has gone down dramatically.

[00:37:33] Dom: Well it always does, it always does…

[00:37:34] Scott: And I’ve got a replacement.

[00:37:37] Dom: What’s happening is because Amazon say, “Okay we knew you were willing to pay $3.50. the other guy is not that high we’ll track it down and then the second guy below you is probably saying I’m tired of paying $2.50 a click. I’ve got to be down to $1.50,” and then Amazon lowers it, now brings it to the threshold. Now what will happen is maybe a month somebody else will come and say, “Hey I want to be leader. I’m going to pay $10 a click.” You are going to lose your clicks or you are going to go out? You are going to sit there and fight that guy off, that person guy or girl so I always say guy but it could be both of them and then you are going to go through the same process again.

It’s a pain in the butt but you’ve got to do it to be relevant especially when you’ve got so much involved in it now. You’ve got four, five, six you are going to be up to ten then eventually it just comes down and you sit there. You reap the benefits, the fruit of all your labor after a while.

[00:38:25] Scott: Okay let’s move on. Chris I know we went on a little bit of a tangent there, a little bit of a rant but it was a good rant. I love it because this stuff worked. You have any question in there and everybody that’s watching on? Everyone that’s watching right now or listening we are going to answer some of those questions but if you have any other questions drop them in there also give us a little love. Share this, like it, do whatever you can to spread the love and we will keep coming back and doing more of these sharing we are doing on a weekly basis because that’s what really we are doing.

We are actually sitting around a table Chris, Dom and myself and having the same conversation that we’d have privately it’s just you guys are listening in so we want to keep doing these. Show us a little love, share it with people, share it, like it all that fun stuff.

[00:39:12] Chris: If it makes sense give us hearts, likes, rainbows, Mr. Yucks, any of those kinds of things that way as we are going through on these rants we know that it makes sense for you guys. The first question I have and Dom it comes back to your launch strategy which was PPC plus the lower prices from Christopher, he says, does coming in low create a race to the bottom that RTB as you refer to it?

[00:39:35] Dom: It will yes at some point and there is two ways that you can do it. One they are not going to fall all the way to the bottom because they’ll say, “This guy is going to burn out.” That’s what the leader is going to say, “This guy let him waste his money,” because they don’t want to kill their margins because they have other stuff. Two, if you come in with here it is, here is the nugget, if you come in with two to three ASINs you are going to lose on the cheapest one. We always order 5,000/6,000 of everything minimum, about 500 to 1,000 used to be for giveaways so now I use those thousands as my entry price point everything else stays at competitive prices.

[00:40:15] Chris: So that’s going to be a one pack when you are actually trying to sell a three pack.

[00:40:22] Dom: That’s correct, you are trying to draw people to the PPC you are going to put up one unit. So if you have a pack of two you are going to put two times this a lot of two, “Oh $8.99 and everyone else is at $15,” they are going to come in, “I’ll buy this, oh wait a minute, he’s got a five pack for $12.95.” That’s how it works, that’s how that strategy works. It works best for variation listings. If you have a one off it’s going to be a lot tougher but that’s how it works so we never really discussed that but that’s how I do it. I give away stuff I’ve brought so I never changed the business model I just don’t give them away for free now. I just lower my price which is basically the same.

[00:41:00] Scott: Now someone asked and not here today but before when doing that does that bring it into where it’s an add-on item now if you go too low?

[00:41:08] Dom: It will show up in the… I don’t know it’s really weird. So we’ve run out of stuff and that was the biggest issue remember we talked about raising your price. What happens is we didn’t raise our price and when it came in stock we raised our price before it would run out and then of course it kills your algorithm and all that stuff but if it’s going to be three months out what’s the difference? What happens is that the stuff would come back into stock and for about four, five days we would have the add on and then all of a sudden it would go away. It started selling, a couple of people would buy it and Amazon said, “Okay let’s put you back to your old algorithm, we’ll get rid of that old tag for you.”

I don’t know how it works, you are right there is a certain threshold at choosing under $10 but you can have some that’s… Like I can sell my mic for $10 but I won’t because it’s still heavier than, right?

[00:41:58] Chris: It has to be small, lightweight and cheap.

[00:42:01] Dom: Exactly. Now the way to get round that you could find out, you could send it to the other warehouse. I’ve never used it before what’s it called the light and small warehouse fulfilment or something. You could do that, it’s a bit of a pain. Again this is how you do it, don’t order 10,000 of them. Order ten and see where you end up. Buy 20 of them for $1 or $2 and test it out if you are not sure. For us, everybody is talking now our panel, what we do a minimum of 500 and for myself or the open brand I already know this stuff sells. Unless I’m getting it on liquidation, we’ll go and buy five thousand right away because we know it’s going to sell.

We are not competitive, sometimes we are the only ones, maybe there is five so really we don’t have to test. I already know that it’s going to sell and that we could improve on the listing and someone else is old school guy. So we never had that issue. If I was launching something new and I was skeptical and I was afraid about the add on thing, first of all Chris and Scott you should be releasing anything that’s $9 or under anyways. So my question should be irrelevant if it’s a single SKU but you are right. You could come into that so maybe you have something that’s $10.99 and everything else is $15 and $19.

[00:43:13] Scott: I guess the question then Dom would be this. Let’s say for example your products is $19.99, what’s your entry point price?

[00:43:22] Dom: Well for $19.99 I still have an entry point of about $11.99. I’d have $20, $16 and then $12 so like $11.99, $14.99, $19.99 maybe I’ll throw a fourth one at $16.99 but then some of the stuff have had to come in at $8, I’ve had stuff at $7.99 for when we first started years ago. Yeah I’d lose money but they were my giveaways. I’d rather give away for $7.99 instead of a $1.99 that’s makes sense right? You are not going to go through as many because you are not giving away but it’s still going to help you rank.

Again you have to test that, I don’t know everything we release now is above that now. I don’t do anything under $10 anymore that market is way too competitive. Again you are right it could happen I don’t mind just don’t go buy 1,000, just test it. That’s all I would do but you are never going to stop the race to the bottom. It happens at retail arb and it happens in private label so that’s the only way you really could… I mean you could tie the person but why would you want to tie the person. What I mean is if they are at $14.99, you put yours at $14.99 the same thing. You’ve got to be lower than that.

A lot of guys will not come down, there will be if there’s five guys in the space maybe one or two will come down and fine, let them come down. You are going to sell more than the other three guys that didn’t come down so you are going to pass them. You might not catch the other two. By the time you get to the other guys then you can put your price up and by then you’ll more ASINs, you’ll have other stuff involved so it’s a process. Maybe you’ll have another two products by the time you catch up to the first two guys so now you have more money coming in so you can spend more PPC. There’s a million factors involved.

[00:45:09] Scott: Alright, let’s move on to another question. What have you got Chris?

[00:45:11] Chris: Leo says, “After seven days of starting my PPC.” He at least it looks like waited unlike most people, “I have thirteen clicks and no sales. Is this enough data to take action? Should I remove that keyword from PPC or keep it running a little bit longer to get more info?” 13 clicks is not enough information in my opinion. Leo the thing that you are probably seeing is you are probably not getting all that many impressions. Now it’s hard to give an average number of impressions you are going to be looking for but we are talking mid hundreds to thousands a day impressions on each of those keywords so 500 is the minimum that you want to see daily.

[00:45:50] Dom: You should have minimum thirty clicks in a day. In a week, again it could be lots of things. It could be you are in the wrong category, you are not spending enough, most of the time it’s because you are at a $25 cap for the day. You are not going to get any impressions for $25.

[00:45: 03] Chris: Bid is the other thing that I see messed up a lot because Amazon has these suggested bids that they put out and I know that they are trying to be helpful but they are terrible.

[00:46:10] Dom: They are better than they used to be though Chris, they are better than they were a year ago. A year ago they were eight cents and ten cents. At least now they are up to $1.12 but they are still off.

[00:46:26] Chris: I tend to bid 50% or more above that suggested bid. Here is the thing guys, just because you are bidding $5 like we were talking about, if we are trying to go aggressive we might bid $5 or $10. You are not necessarily going to pay $5 or $10. If the number one spot is $2 you are going to pay $2 and one cent. You are not going to pay $10 so the reason that we bid higher in the beginning is to get that data as quickly as possible. Then we know that the average cost per click for the number one position the most that we’ve spent all week is $1.48 so guess what we are going to do? We are going to bid $1.50 and then we start to see those clicks come off then we can do that.

[00:47:07] Scott: But Chris let me just say here I did that exact thing. I put our bid at $5 and I haven’t touched it it’s still at $5.

[00:47:15] Chris: Yeah but you don’t have to now. If you are worried about spending that money then back off.

[00:47:24] Dom: Scott in that brand he wants to control that keyword and in order to control that keyword you never touch that $5 bid. He might have to go to $10 if the second guys decides, “I want to take it over.” If you are happy to do that… Now again we have to find out what this guy’s budget was or this girl’s budget.

[00:47:38] Chris: $20 a day.

[00:47:40] Dom: Yeah that’s why, you are not going to get enough impressions at $20 I’m sorry. That person if you want to really find out what it is, put it at $50, put your clicks at $5 and then you’ll be out of that in about three hours, you’ll spend your $5 you’ll know exactly where you are when the top guys are bidding.

[00:47:57] Scott: But the other thing is to consider there is we talked about spending $20. The other thing that you may want to do and this is something we’ve been playing around with again Dom had given this advice, turn on your campaign at 11am Eastern and turn it off, if it still has budget left, turn it off at eleven o’clock at night. The reason why I’ve been doing that is because I found that if you give Amazon two hours without budget it’s going to spend the money and that audience will not be the right… It might not be the right audience so what I found is by turning it on at eleven and turning it off at eleven at night it’s been working really well. I spend my full budget.

[00:48:42] Dom: We could do it from 11pm to 2am it will all be gone that $150, done. Amazon will spend it for you trust us. If you can’t spend your budget it’s because your stuff is a little… But you are right 11am is beautiful. Now you are going to miss some of the western, depends where your product is too like in the winter time if you are selling summer stuff you can still swim in California and Texas so you might want to keep your PPC running a little longer.

[00:49:10] Scott: But Dom also what I base it on is how much of my budget have I gone through. If I only have like $10 left I might just kill it and say, “Wow I got enough for today. I’ve got 35 sales, I’m doing fine,” but if I noticed that I’ve only spent half of my budget I may let it go then through the night.

[00:49:32] Chris: Now he said you might lose some lower price clicks when you turn it off and that’s true because Amazon is going to try to spend the rest of that budget so if you have $2 left when you turn it off you are not going to get that additional clicks but this is $5.

[00:49:48] Dom: The only drawback to that is that your competitors might see you as being weak because you turn it off or like, “This guy is running out of budget.” At first I worried about that now we don’t even care because you are right I mean sometimes I’ve forgotten to turn it off and I’ll come back in the morning and they already spent $80 and I’ve got two sales. It’s because nobody shops at three in the morning but Amazon is still bumping it so I like that…

[00:50:16] Chris: That’s the thing, the way that your budget runs with Amazon is it runs from midnight and one second to 11:59:59 and if you are running and it hits midnight you are going to reset to the next day and Amazon immediately is going to start spending that next budget not necessarily in the prime buying time. Now, my question for this would be to test it for your product exactly what you were saying Scott and Dom you were agreeing with it as well. If you sell SPAM, you might sell more to Hawaii than you do to Pennsylvania so those hours might shift. Right now and I don’t know of any tool that lets you do that automated, Jeff or Brandon from Seller Labs, if you guys are listening maybe…

[00:51:03] Dom: Another thing too guys is that, a lot of people don’t know this but I’ve talked to Scott a long time ago, that’s actually that’s one of the biggest when I first started talking to Scott about a year and a half ago is also rolling budget guys. What that means is whatever you set before your daily budget or your campaign budget Amazon takes that over a thirty days and divides it. If you‘ve got a $150 budget for a day and you decide to turn off at eleven o’clock it’s only $110, they’ll spend $200 of it tomorrow because you average $150 so don’t be, “Oh my god I spent $200 today.” It’s because you told them that… They are banking it for you and that’s the way to do it too guys.

[00:51:44] Scott: But the way to get around that would be to set your overall budget, correct?

[00:51:50] Dom: Still same way works exactly the same way.

[00:51:53] Scott: So if I say I only want to spend $150 today overall on all my campaigns?

[00:51:59] Dom: And you turn it off at $120 they’ll spend that extra $30 tomorrow you’ll at $180 for the day.

[00:52:02] Scott: So what you are saying is by you telling them you are willing to spend $150 they are going to times that by thirty and that’s going to be your monthly budget?

[00:52:12] Chris: From the campaign budget not on the account budget.

[00:52:15] Scott: I’m talking about the account budget.

[00:52:18] Dom: The account budget yeah it stops.

[00:52:19] Scott: And that’s what I was saying.

[00:52:22] Dom: So always set that and sometimes I’ve thrown that up because I get mad because it turns off I’m like, “I don’t want to stop spending money.” It’s too hard to go back and change all your campaigns so I change that to go by the single campaign not by my account. And we did that the other day because we were not… I think you did it too we set a back and forth to test that. So you are right, no matter what, if you set your overall budget for $200 for the whole day no matter if you have $20,000 it will shut off. There is no rolling budget there. It will go $1 sometimes or $3 but never like $30, $40 so you are right. That’s a safeguard guys if you do that.

[00:52:56] Scott: And that’s what I was saying but what you are saying is if you don’t… Forget about that, you are saying that if you say, I want to spend on all my campaigns it totals to $150 a day,” and you only spend $100 today it might spend $200 tomorrow because it’s going to take that $50 but if I say I only want to spend $150 a day on my campaign overall and if I had $200 leftover it will only spend $150.

[00:53:17] Dom: Right, that’s correct and then basically what happens is you’ll never catch up to that campaign. If you only spend $50 and you set your campaign at $60 its ten maybe next you spend $50 now it’s got $20 in the bank by the time you get to the end of the month it might have $500 but you always cap out because your budget’s always set.

[00:53:36] Chris: They was you may catch up Scott let’s say your daily budget is $150 on campaign A and campaign B is $30 and your daily cap is $200. You might spend $150 today but you might not spend any money on campaign B tomorrow because you hit $200 of campaign A, does that make sense? Ad words does the same thing. Michelle is a little confused and I wanted to clarify for her. We are talking about Amazon spending your budget, it’s how we phrased that and she said, “Wait, isn’t it cost per click its pay-per-click aren’t people clicking on this?”

Michelle what we are talking about is if you condense that window down Amazon tends to show you faster because they want you to spend that budget. So you are not necessarily going to spend all of that and it’s not Amazon costing you money its window shoppers are there and when those people are clicking. I hope that makes sense, if it’s not let me know in the comments. Chad wants to know what time does Amazon operating on? To me it’s always been Pacific.

[00:54:40] Dom: It is West Coast I thought midnight to midnight California time, Vancouver time. Pacific yeah always, because they are in Seattle right so midnight to actually three o’clock our time. Actually I don’t know what, Chris is probably different but me and you we are the same.

[00:54:58] Scott: Yeah his is an hour behind.

[00:55:02] Dom: So if you turn it off at 11pm eastern it’s actually at seven o’clock Pacific time but again you can play with that and maybe you stop.

[00:55:10] Scott: It’s eight o’clock. This is the same guy with optimize.

[00:55:14] Dom: Optimize so you are to going to up at one o’clock at night turning that stuff off unless Greg Mercer or like you said Jeff Cowen can come up with a ‘can you please stop my campaign feature?’

[00:55:25] Chris: That may be a feature they could come up with I mean. I don’t know why they wouldn’t be able to because all it will have to do is have a pause and enable feature, they may be able to do that so we may want to talk to them about that. Leo says, “Most of my keywords on the $20 campaign,” that we’ve been talking about aren’t getting any impressions I’m already bidding higher than suggested. The suggested might be 70 cents, you might be bidding a $1 make that higher and number two make sure that you are relevant for those keywords so make sure that those keywords are in you listing and your title and your back ends search terms, any of those places.

[00:56:00] Scott: Category two.

[00:56:02] Chris: The other one if you are selling a soccer ball and you are listed in home and kitchen you have to bid a heck of a lot higher than someone who is posted in sports and outdoors because Amazon goes, “This must be like a soccer ball you put on the wall in your house because that’s the only reason it would be in home and kitchen. You have to bid an outsized amount if you are in the wrong category or a different category from your competitors.

[00:56:25] Dom: You don’t want to cross contaminated. Same thing if you have a baseball hat you can put it under clothing hats, outdoor on men’s or you can put it on sporting goods men baseball hats so it depends. Sometimes keywords don’t catch on certain categories and we’ve talked about that before too guys. We’ve had to launch in different categories in order to make out keywords. That’s just the way it works, I don’t know why they do it they just want to make sure you are relevant, your keywords relevant they don’t want to skew that. It’s all a customer thing they are typing a keyword and show everything in automotive when really it’s a home and kitchen product.

I’m going to say that you are bidding seventy cents and your competitor is probably bidding $2, $3 that’s why you are not getting impressions and maybe you didn’t put them in the backend of the seller. Some people forgot that I’ve heard. We talked about it on the trip.

[00:57:13] Scott: We’ve done it.

[00:57:16] Dom: Yeah we’ve done it.

[00:57:18] Scott: Chris, I know we’ve got to wrap up here. I want to get to more questions so let’s just do a little speed round maybe a fire round.

[00:57:22] Chris: What if competitors keep looking at my ads? Amazon is doing a really good job of freezing that wouldn’t worry too much about it.

[00:57:32] Dom: I think you are allowed about two to three. What you’ve got to worry about is I’m going to go with that. I don’t know I mentioned but there are companies, there are people that you could pay to go against credit and it’s such a d-bag move and I hope they get rid of it because it’s just a pain anyways.

[00:57:46] Scott: Okay let’s move on. Dom are you still drinking the Mexican water?

[00:57:53] Dom: No I…

[00:58:00] Chris: Sandeep wants to know how we are launching products so the first way would be the low price entry plus PPC. The other way I would go to theamazingseller.com/buildlist and that’s how we’ve been launching the products for this brand as well as some other things that we are trying once we have that audience like just jumping on a Facebook Live with the audience and letting them know that the product is live. And that’s all we did for the last one and Scott do you remember how many units we sold over the three day launch window?

[00:58:25] Scott: The very first one with the email blast?

[00:58:30] Chris: No the most recent one that we did.

[00:58:35] Scott: Oh the most recent one I think was over 150 or 160.

[00:58:37] Chris: Okay, I knew it was over 100.