#427 – Breaking Down TikTok’s Fate and What Sellers Can Do Now with Rafay MH

#427 - Breaking Down TikTok’s Fate and What Sellers Can Do Now with Rafay MH Kevin King: Welcome to episode 427 of the AM-PM Podcast. You know, everybody's talking about TikTok shop and TikTok right now. What's going to happen? That's what we're going to talk about today. And oh, by the way, if you're catching this on the day of release, Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy holidays. My guest is Rafay. Today and we talk about TikTok, what we think is going to happen, three different scenarios really that could happen, how to actually deal with those and how to actually work with TikTok, whether it stays as it is or gets delayed or gets postponed by appeals or is a shell of itself. What should you be thinking about and how can you actually make TikTok work to your advantage as an Amazon seller, as a TikTok seller, as an e-commerce seller in general? Enjoy this episode with Rafay. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Kevin King: And we've got a hot topic today, you know, everybody's talking about TikTok. TikTok's the hot, shiny object out there. People are wondering what the heck is going to happen with TikTok. Is it going to stay? Is it going to go? Is it going to be a show of itself? And today we've got an awesome expert who's a master at TikTok, at training people, at helping people sell on TikTok. Rafay, how you doing, man? Rafay MH: I'm good, man. Blessed to be on here. Thanks for having me. Kevin King: I appreciate it. Now, you were in Australia, but you don't have an Australian accent. Rafay MH: No, so yeah, I get this all the time. So I was born in Saudi and they had American English schools. And so I learned American English up until I was six. And then I moved to Australia. I just couldn't kick it, man. Like, you know, I say grass and that sounds normal to me. But in Australia, they say grass, but it just came out really like palmy or British and just didn't work. So yeah, and I'm stuck with it. Kevin King: Now you just you just told me before we started, you just moved to Dubai. Rafay MH: Yes, sir. Big move, man. Honestly, it was a split between moving to Austin, Texas, because I've got a bunch of friends there, or Dubai, and I just couldn't convince my wife to move to the States, so here I am. Kevin King: Is your wife Saudi as well? No, no. Rafay MH: She's from Australia. She's Afghan. Kevin King: But she didn't want to move to the States. I mean, I'm in Austin, but I was just telling you, like, if I had to move one other place in the world right now, I'd probably choose Dubai. And then you're like, oh yeah, I'm just in Dubai, and it was between Dubai and Austin. I'm like, all right, at least Like minds think together, you know. So what was it about Dubai that drew you? For those listening that hear, they think of, you know, 90% of the people listening to this podcast don't even, probably can't even find Dubai on a map and they don't even know what it is. So, but I've been there several times and I love it. What is it about Dubai that actually drew you? Rafay MH: You know, I think every city you visit whispers to you, whispers something. And so, like LA whispers, you know, clamorous enough. Brisbane, Whistford, which is where I was living before, was like, hey, chill out, go to the beach, take it slow. And when I came to Dubai at Whistford, built, built. And so that was part of the reason for me. And I think, you know, wealth is a byproduct of opportunity density. And so if you're in a place where lots of people are doing things, you know, there's a lot of room for serendipity. And that's very difficult to have in a place like Brisbane where everyone is, you know, Comparatively, kicking their legs up and taking it a little bit slow. Kevin King: But Austin is, if I had to say there's one city in the world, not just in the US, but in the world, that's a capital of digital marketing, it would be Austin. You know, you have Silicon Valley as a capital, you know, that's high tech and all the, a lot of stuff spins out of San Francisco and all the incubators and YC and all that kind of stuff that's there. But when you look at Austin, Austin's become this high tech digital marketing place. You have digital marketer, the company is based here. You have amazing.com in our space is based here. Rafay MH: Timer End. Kevin King: Ryan Moran, the list goes on and on. Perry Belcher is based here. The list goes on and on. The guy that did the Ask Method, Adam, what's his name, Lebesque. You have Joe Rogan and you have the whole, I mean, this has become a mecca. I've been in Austin 30-something years and it didn't used to be that way. There's two things that have changed dramatically, two industries that have changed. It's always been a high-tech city because of the university and because of Dell Computer and Oracle's based here. Now, Musk has moved a lot of his companies here. So it's always been high-tech. In the last 30 something years, it's become a very big digital marketing city and it's also become a very big comedy city. I had no idea until just recently, but Joe Rogan really created the mothership comedy and then Kill Tony and all these big comedy things and now there's comedy clubs coming up and Austin's become this place where it's second only probably to LA right now for new comedians to break through and get their big break and it's probably going to replace LA. Fairly soon at the rate it's going. And it's a cool city. I mean, we have really good restaurants, really good everything, and everybody that comes here is like, other than the traffic and sometimes the summer heat, they don't want to leave. But the heat in Dubai, I've been in Dubai in August, it was 120 in the shade. It is brutal. But it's a cool city. For those of you listening, if you've never been to Austin, if you've never been to Dubai, put that on your list of places to go because they're both, they're different, They're both really, really cool cities. Rafay MH: Oh, dude, 100%. It was number one on my list and I have a few close friends that were pretty upset that I ended up moving into Austin, but I'll be visiting. I spent three or two weeks in Austin earlier this year, so it's great. The tagline is, we're weird or something like that. Kevin King: Keep Austin weird. Rafay MH: Keep Austin weird. I love that. Kevin King: Live music capital of the world and keep Austin weird are the two. Big taglines you hear quite often. But speaking of keeping things weird, there's a lot of weird stuff going on right now in your space. I mean, you're in the TikTok space. How did you get into this space? Were you doing social media before and just kind of evolved into a TikTok master? Or how did this whole process evolve into you getting involved with TikTok? Rafay MH: Yeah, good question, dude. So I started in the Amazon space like a lot of e-commerce sellers because I had no idea how to create demand. I used to be a primary school teacher and then my wife and I decided, OK, we're stuck in this spot and I want location independence. So I was like, OK, cool. So let me try. And I tried my hand at dropshipping and I was terrible at getting attention. And so I was like, OK, I need to sell where, you know, I'm fulfilling existing demand because I knew how to make Experiences and things in order of magnitude better. And that's kind of what wins on Amazon. And so we launched on Amazon. We built our brands there and then we exited. And then after the exit, you know, it was like probably around 2019, maybe 2020 when COVID hit. And then my wife was a chronic Instagram user. And then all of a sudden she started Playing on this app called TikTok, and she got me to do this challenge. It was like this weird chair challenge that girls can do, guys can't do, just like limbs and stuff. I was like, what the hell is this thing? Anyways, it put me onto it because I'm like, okay, my wife doesn't change her behavior for anything, right? I was like, okay, she's changed her behavior for this and she's spending her time completely from Instagram to TikTok. So I was like, okay. And so after the exit, I had free time on my hand and a bunch of capital. So I was like, okay, I understand the Amazon space, but I really, really want to understand TikTok because everyone is on there and the attention is there. And so I bought myself a bunch of dummy inventory. I put on Amazon because I understood that, but I gave myself a rule that I only set basic broad match PPC on Amazon and the rest of my traffic needs to come from TikTok. And so at the time, there was not even a TikTok ads platform. It was just like content. And the hashtag TikTok had a billion views. And now it's got something like 120 billion views. But, you know, the connection between TikTok and buying on Amazon existed. So I was like, OK, cool. So at that time, I just started, you know, texting, not texting, DMing creators and be like, hey, do you want to I make a video of my product, no idea what I was doing. And I kind of just went through that process and started getting traction with creators, creating content, driving to this like, you know, me too product, Amazon listing. And then the ads platform came on board and then I learned how to do ads. And then of course, hired internal creators and learned the whole organic content machine and kind of went from there. Kevin King: Do you still sell this product on Amazon or is that just for testing purposes? Rafay MH: No, that was just for testing. I only had like 500 units, so I sold out of that. And then just a bunch of other things as well, like a supplement brand did the same thing, but that was to a Shopify store and now launching another two brands of my own again. Kevin King: So now you have an agency, right, with Graham? Rafay MH: Yeah, it's a done-with-you model. So it's not a done-for-you or do-it-yourself, which is a course, it's a mentorship program. Kevin King: So what does that mean? People sign up and you kind of, you're on the calls or on the chats with them as they're setting everything up and kind of holding their hand? Is that what that means? Rafay MH: Yeah, but a little bit more involved. The space on TikTok is, and we're going to get into how weird that space is 100%, but just a bit of context for those listening, that the space on TikTok, people are really excited about it because there's a lot of attention, but it's actually riding a much larger wave, which is social commerce. And part of the reason we created this Done With You model, apart from the fact that we're building our own brands, I don't have the capacity to do a complete Done For You agency. But on top of that, I think that skill set of being able to harness Top of funnel awareness machine attention into your brand is so essential that you need to understand it. So what we do is we help implement those systems of borrow traffic, which has worked with influencers, pay traffic, how to run to talk as effectively and then own traffic, how to hire internal creators within your business in an eight week sprint. Kevin King: I think the thing is, why do you think TikTok has become so big? It's nothing new. I mean, people are selling stuff on Instagram and they still do Pinterest and Facebook. What is it about TikTok that made it go from this app called Musical.ly back ten years ago, eight years ago, where it got changed to TikTok? I think I got introduced to TikTok the first time in, I think it was 2018 or maybe 2019. And I was at, coincidentally, Brandon Young was hosting a Grant Cardone 10X event in Miami. And Brandon Young hosted one of his little golf party meetups at a golf place like he always does at Topgolf. And there's somebody there who's like, hey, have you checked out this new app thing called TikTok? I was like, what the hell are you talking about? He's like, oh, no, dude, you gotta check it out. It's addictive. It's really, really cool. And so I've been on that app five, six years now, I guess, whatever that is. I'm not personally selling on it right now. It's something that I've looked at many, many times. But I just, I haven't, it's a bandwidth thing for me, but I follow it very closely. And I know a lot of people, I mean, you know, Michelle, and you know, a lot of people, Paul, maybe, and I follow all that. But why is TikTok broken out? What do you think it is about? Is it the algorithm? Is it? What do they do right that nobody else has done that's made this happen? Rafay MH: It's three things. The first thing is probably the level of effort in consuming content. With YouTube, you still kind of had to select it. And then with Instagram, you were following people and sure you had the explore page, but that was all built on a social graph where the more followership you had, the more distribution you had. But when TikTok came around, it kind of turned the whole thing on its head because its algorithm was so great. It was built on a content graph, which meant Regardless of how many followers you had, whether you had, you know, a thousand or a million, you have the equal opportunity of getting a distribution because it's a content meritocracy. So being able to be a new creator on that platform, the barrier of entry is like ground floor for every single person and every content piece is evaluated the exact same way as it, you know, gets launched onto the platform. And I think that was part of it, of the adoption. The next piece was it wasn't as polished, man. Like at the time TikTok started really getting traction, Instagram was really reaching its zenith of like cheering ...of the best parts of life and then TikTok came around and people are showing their double chin and they're like, hey, this is what I do, you know, getting ready for work in this like really raw way. I think that was the second piece. And the third piece was the vertical format, man. It was unique. There was a novelty to that aspect where no other platform had embraced it in such a full way. Like you couldn't, like DMing was a thing, sure, but followers weren't really that big. You got on the app and immediately it was serving you content, right? So I think those three pieces contributed a lot to it. Kevin King: That algorithm is magic. I don't know how they actually do it, but I know I always, I've said this before, but I always say that if you want to know someone's personality, Or who someone is, just say, can I borrow your phone for a couple of minutes and pull up their TikTok. Instantly, you're going to know what they're into. If they're into cooking, if they're into comedy, if they're into girls with big boobs bouncing around on trampolines, or if they're into dogs or whatever it may be, you're going to know by just looking at their feet. And it's really, really good at actually honing in on that. And that's what makes it, I think, from an e-commerce point of view, special because Amazon has tried to do this with Aspire and other platforms have tried to do this. But TikTok knows what you're into and it's a discovery platform. It's not a platform where you go necessarily to buy. I mean, some people may be now going to TikTok shop and actually they are going and typing in search keywords and stuff, looking for things. But that's not where most of the sales come from. Most of the sales come from I'm watching a bunch of dog stuff in my feed and all of a sudden up pops some sort of kitchen organizer because they know Based on the people that watch these dog videos and other actions that I've taken, I'm probably going to buy this or be interested in this kitchen organizer for my sodas in my refrigerator. And I've bought probably 15, 20 things off of TikTok actually. I didn't have to think twice about that. Yep. That's me. I want that. And they just know. So how, how, um, And that's become the commerce side. So I think that's the fourth thing is TikTok has done a good job at merging commerce with entertainment versus a lot of other haven't. Would you agree with that? Rafay MH: Yeah, but that's because it started as an entertainment platform and then became an edutainment platform. But that was what it was made for, right? It was made for passionate audiences to talk about things they're interested in, right? And that's the reason why it works so well. And that's why TikTok Shop took off the way that it did, because people were already spending so much time on there. They were already so interested. And then launching Shop, obviously, what they've done in China, the same thing that they bought across into the States, which is insane. Kevin King: I mean TikTok was like the top most downloaded app I think in the Apple App Store. For a couple years in a row, Timu just unseated them in 2024. Timu actually became number one over TikTok as far as the most downloaded free app in the app store. But this goes to show that's also shopping. So shopping is becoming a huge thing. I mean, we're nowhere near what it is in China. But I think what a lot of people don't realize is that the United States is not even TikTok's biggest market or second biggest market. It's Indonesia. Rafay MH: Yeah, I know. Kevin King: I mean, it's China, Dooyan, Dooyan, Dooyan? Yes, Dooyan. Dooyan in China is the name of TikTok there. That's their biggest market. But second is Indonesia and people which is a island country of 2,000 islands or however many, I think it's more than that, 18,000, whatever the number is, thousands of islands. That's where Bali is, Jakarta. For those of you that go, where's Indonesia? It's in the South Pacific over there, just north of Australia. But that is 270 million people and that's number two. So there's a lot of talk about what's going to happen with TikTok. I mean, there's a lot of people in the U.S. and Europe has now gotten on board, Canada's gotten on board, where they're like, hey, this is owned by the Chinese government, but they're spying on us. And they have influence over our culture and influence over what we see and what we think. So as most of you have probably heard, in early 2024, the Biden administration banned TikTok. And they gave them until January 19th to actually either sell the company or close down. And January 20th is the inauguration of Trump. Now, back when they did this, they didn't know who's going to win, but they covered their ass just in case their party, the Democrats didn't win. They put all these clauses in there that make it very difficult for the next president to override it. I mean, there's things that they may be able to do, but it's not as simple as just making an executive order, I don't believe. And just in mid-December, The congressman sent out letters to the Google App Store, the Apple App Store, saying, hey, just heads up. Remember, you have to take these apps out on the 19th of January. And now TikTok appealed and TikTok got denied the appeal. The judges upheld the ruling, but now they're taking a determinant on when you're listening to this. This might have already happened, but as of right now, It hasn't. They're appealing it to the Supreme Court. I don't know if the Supreme Court is going to accept it. And if they do, that'll delay this process and it'll get tied up in the courts for a while. Or the Supreme Court may say, no, we're not going to hear this. If that's the case, TikTok is going to change. It's going to go away because they'll exhaust their appeals. So what do you think is going to happen here? Do you think the Supreme Court is going to listen to this and it's going to get delayed and we got another six months or a year to figure out what's going to happen? Or do you think It's going to sell or do you think it's just going to go away? Rafay MH: I think the least likely outcome is that it's just going to go away. I think most likely it will be sold, but it will be sold without TikTok's amazing algorithm. So either way, TikTok is going to change. Obviously, the viewership is there, the users are there, but I doubt that it's going to be delayed. Like if it's tied up in the courts, maybe a year or two for sure. But yeah, I don't see it completely leaving because you have to think about it as a business as well. How valuable it is. There's going to be so many people bidding to buy it, right? I mean, Amazon would be a great person to end up, a great company to end up buying it. Or I know YouTube is pushing really hard in social commerce with what they've done with their massive deal that they did with Shopify. And I know Zuck is looking around at this thing thinking like, oh wow, this is going to be great for Instagram. So yeah, I think somebody's going to purchase it. That's probably most likely. Kevin King: Well, all those guys just went right before Christmas and visited Trump. All the tech guys, you had Zuck go and visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago. You had the TikTok executives go. You had even SoftBank, who's the biggest investor in TikTok, the Japanese investment company. They actually went to I went and met with Trump to make their case and you had the guys from Google. So all the tech people are going and having dinner or lunch or whatever it is with Trump trying to get on and donating to his inauguration, trying to get on his good side because like you said, Zuck would love to see it go away. TikTok doesn't want to go away. Amazon might be a good player for it or even Microsoft or Oracle or someone like that. And this has happened in a couple of other places where, was it, maybe it was Indonesia, maybe it was somewhere else where actually they had to switch it to local servers. Rafay MH: Was that India? No, it wasn't. They banned it out, right? Kevin King: It was somewhere. I can't remember this. A similar thing happened. And then people argue like, well, okay, yeah, TikTok knows a lot about you and can influence what you see and influence politics and influence public opinion because so many people get their news and their information from social media now. But so can Facebook, so can, All these other guys, but I think that the big rub is, well, yeah, that's the US. At least we could go in and do something, but not really. I mean, I've talked to people in AI. I've talked to people at Facebook. They're like, we know everything. We got it all. We want to do it, and we do things that you don't even know we do. It's already happening, so I don't think it's that big a deal. Anything that's free, You give up rights. There is no such thing as privacy in the United States. Really in the world. Rafay MH: In the world, yeah. Kevin King: GDPR and stuff in Europe is trying to crack down on some of that. That restricts some stuff. But in the United States, there is no such thing as privacy. It does not exist. Unless you stay in your house and never leave and never get online and never pick up the phone and don't use any electronic device. And even now, if you email a newspaper subscription, people know there's no privacy. It doesn't exist. Rafay MH: Man, the genie's been out of the bottle for years now. I mean, like, yeah, privacy doesn't exist, hasn't. It's like the problem with the commons, right? It's like if privacy wasn't protected initially when privacy could be encroached upon, it now is just run over, right? And that's really what we're seeing happen worldwide. And obviously the US might be, like, doesn't have the GDPR thing, but like, The rest of the world, man, I feel like they're in the exact same bucket. It just doesn't exist. Everyone has a smartphone, which is just a really high tech tracking device, if we're being honest. Kevin King: Yeah, no, it is. I mean, it is. And anything that's free is. That's where people forget is like, I remember a few years ago, Zuck went before Congress and one of these old like 85 year old senators asked him, so how do you guys actually make money if you're giving this away for free? And he's like, we sell ads. So anything that's, any social media platform that you're using for free, the product is not Facebook or Messenger or TikTok, you are the product. And that's where a lot of people forget is you are, every action you take, It makes you the product and from a marketing point of view, I love it because I can target people. And I can go in and I can find, cause my background is direct marketing. So before there's an internet, I was trying to try to figure out who do I mail my postcards and my catalog to that's most likely to buy. Now with the, with digital marketing, it's, it's pretty damn easy to figure that, figure that out. So on TikTok though, let's, let's talk about, so if TikTok gets sold, I agree with you that if Amazon or whoever, Oracle, whoever it may be buys them, I don't believe, The whole algorithm will come with it. I think some of it may. I may be able to duplicate 70, 80% of it, but it's going to be different. So people like you are going to have to quickly adjust on the fly. But like you said, 170 million users in the United States, that's a major, that's a major audience that you don't want to lose. And even if it changes, some people are going to be disillusioned and go, screw it, I'm going back to reels or something. Even that 170 cuts in half, it's still worth a lot of money. And depending on what the, and you know, this stuff's already in the works. So what, So how are you adjusting right now as a someone who's doing this done with you service? Are you just doing status quo like just assuming that this is going to get delayed in a year from now? You got another year of appeals and let's just keep doing what we're doing. That's kind of how TikTok is operating. I was like, oh, we're introducing this new feature and this and this is acting like nothing's going to happen. But how are you approaching it with your clients? Rafay MH: The thing that undergirds the entire approach on TikTok is understanding how consumer behavior has changed, right? People are preferring to consume content in vertical video format. They're preferring to get content that isn't just conversion content. Most people, when they're trying to get on TikTok, they just want to add and it feels like you're getting sold to. And that's the same issue that I'm seeing with people that are running, trying to get attention or an audience on Instagram or on YouTube short. If you're creating conversion content, that's going to hurt you. So from a content creation perspective, I think it's going to be the same because the customers put their hand up and said, this is how I like consuming content. I always like saying I'm platform agnostic. I'm going where the attention is and where the highest amount of leverage is. If TikTok ends up leaving, which it could very well happen, the strategy that undergirds the approach is going to be the same. The only difference is going to be one, obviously the algorithm, and then a mechanism like TikTok Shop that gives you a click-to-click and a sale-to-sale level data. The level of transparency you have as a seller on that platform is literally, I've never come across anything ever that's this level of clarity. And so From a tactic perspective, that might change based on platform, but from a strategy perspective, it's going to be the same. Kevin King: So what about the halo effect? Right now, TikTok has a massive halo effect. I think it's kind of hard to exactly quantify and prove, but a lot of people that are doing well on TikTok, and it may not be that they're making a lot of money in a TikTok shop, some people are, but they're seeing this halo effect. Go over to Amazon. Have you experienced that and can you describe what you're seeing there? Rafay MH: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the truth is people prefer to buy what they prefer to buy. So if you've seen that product on TikTok a number of times and you have a Prime membership and you know and trust Amazon because you've been a member for the last decade, you're just going to go over there and search the same thing. So what you end up finding is your branded searches end up getting absolutely through the roof that you've made it viral on TikTok. But the interesting thing is Unlike normal consumer behavior on Amazon, where they're solution aware, so they type in, you know, reusable water bottle and they look at all your competitors and you, they know your brand name and your reusable water bottle with all the videos they've seen on TikTok. And when they search your brand name, even though your competitors come up in the search, they're only going to go for you because they don't know if that third or fourth product has all those separate features that were mentioned in the video on Amazon. So they're just going to go ahead and buy yours. And that connection is there. But one thing that I'd like to say for people that are listening and are worried about TikTok is, if I were you right now, prepare for both cases. Start getting contact details of all these creators that are in these niches because there's Thousands, hundreds of thousands of creators that have built a skill set of creating, converting, converting content that are going to be without a home. So you're going to be able to pick up all those creators, pennies on the dollar, give them a home, put them on retainer and get them to create content for you on different platforms. Like what social snowball is doing from a tracking perspective of driving from, from Instagram or YouTube to Shopify. I mean, it's getting really, really good. You'll be able to track a lot of those things as well. And so people aren't seeing the opportunity in the chaos. I would be like, this is a great, like, if it's bad, it's great for a brand owner, because it's like all these creators, you'll be able to work with and then all that top funnel awareness that you may have gone while you're on TikTok right now, you can then move them over somewhere else. Kevin King: I saw a stat in China, there's 25 million I'm a registered influencer slash creators. It's an official job title. Like, you know, here we say, what do you do? I'm a president of a company. I'm an officer. I'm a janitor. I'm a bus driver. One of the options is creator slash influencer. There's 25 million registered. I don't know what the number is in the U.S., but I've heard that most of these guys don't make much money. Every 12-year-old wants to be a creator when they grow up, and they don't have to wait to grow up to do it. They can start when they're 12. Very few creators make over $100,000 a year. You hear all these success stories of viral videos and people crushing it, and that exists just like on Amazon. There's people crushing it, but the vast majority of these creators are in that $5,000 to $30,000, $40,000 a year range, which is still not bad, especially if it's a side hustle. But a lot of them, you used to be going to put them in the tank in case something happens. I agree that's a good strategy, but what I'm hearing is that most of these creators I've thrown up their hands like we can't deal with 300 emails a day coming in from all these people wanting us to push their product. They just go through agencies now and there's some several agencies that have emerged that are like the major source for all the top creators that can actually move the needle. Is that what you're seeing too? Rafay MH: Yes and no. So yes, there are some agencies, but there's also multi-creator networks. I think what brands, the mistake that brands have made when they're working with creators is like, hey, you know, hawk my stuff. Here you go. You know, I'm going to give you this commission. Kevin King: Spray and pray, right? Rafay MH: Spray and pray, but they're not, if a brand owner approaches the relationship like this, If they go to the creator and say, I want to solve your problem. You've been on the content hamster wheel for the last three years and your reliability and income is probably not great. I'd like to bring you on board for a retainer and an insane commission, but I'm also going to be training you to create content that will actually convert not only for my brand, but with the skill sets that you develop working with me, you can then work with other brands as well. And then those are the types of creators that absolutely crush it. I'm seeing because of TikTok shop a lot more creators that aren't bound to an agency. They might be part of a multi creator network, which is like a discord group where they're learning and that's cool, but they don't necessarily have representation like that. Maybe the very top like live sellers are the ones that are absolutely crushing on TikTok shop. But yeah, I think there's a lot more freelancers that we realize. Kevin King: Well, a lot of these creators, they don't know the call to actions. They don't know the psychological art of selling. I mean, there's some that do. They don't understand all this stuff. They're just like, oh, this is a great makeup kit. Look how pretty it makes my lips or my face or whatever. And sometimes that resonates with the audience, but a lot of times it doesn't. There's lots of little things they could do. Like you said, they. They, they need to learn. So when I'm looking for creators, sometimes people are just looking like who's got viral videos or who's got the most followers. And a lot of times that's not where you actually want to be. You want to be like, who's selling? Like I know on TikTok, you can see GMB, like gross merchandise value, uh, what they've sold. And so, so when you're looking for creators for your, your clients and your brands, what are you, What are some of the things that people should look for and what are some of the things that people should stay away from putting too much weight on? Rafay MH: Great question. Followership is irrelevant. Like the word influencer is dying because TikTok democratized the entire relationship between brands and creators. And so it's really like you You work with creators who eat what they kill, so to speak, with the commission that they get. And so if I'm looking to source some creators, step one, I'm going to be looking directly at my competitors and see who their top 200 affiliates are. And that's my first list to start with. The next piece I'm going to be looking for is... Kevin King: How do you do that? Rafay MH: Oh, okay. You can just use tools like Kalo Data, FastMass or ShopPlus. It's all there. And you literally just type in the shop name and you can see all the affiliates that have sold for them on a seven-day period, like one-day period, 30 days, 90 days, 180 days. And you can export those lists, not just at their handles, but their emails if they're available as well. And so it's a co-current approach where you DM them, you send them messages through the Affiliate Center, but also send them emails. Also send them messages where they don't get messages, like how many friends are actually going over to LinkedIn and sending a message to this creator? So it's also just standing out in the crowd of all the people that are trying to reach out to them. So that's one, getting adjacent affiliates. But the next piece, and I think this is probably more important, is finding creators who are talking about the problem space that your product lives in. So if I'm selling a reusable water bottle, I'm obviously in the eco-friendly space, right? And so I'm going to be looking at keywords of labels that people ascribe to themselves If they value eco-friendliness. So I'll be typing in eco-friendly. I'd be like, you know, complete cycle or recycle or Or yeah, what's another word for that? Or like reuse. These are all keywords that I'll be typing in. I look at all the videos that are ranking on that, like naturally on TikTok search bar. And then that's how I'm going to start creating my list and then reaching out to those creators because most people are just looking at creators right now that are crushing it on TikTok. But you're also finding all the other competitors that are looking at that as well. So that second way that you find a lot of diamonds in the rough there. Kevin King: There's a lot of people that think that if someone creates you a good What about IP, is I guess what I'm saying. Someone creates a great video on TikTok and then me as the brand, I just take that and I run that on my Facebook and YouTube, but that's a mistake that a lot of people make. You need to actually get permission and actually pay that creator for that, even though it's your product and you actually may have hired them the first time. If that's not clear up front, you can get into some troubles and issues, right? Rafay MH: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you don't own the content. The asset is the creators. And if in the future you want to get access to that piece of content to redistribute elsewhere, you can definitely do that. The way around that, though, is just to get the creator on a retainer and then in your agreement say that you have like ownership of that piece of content. Now, you might have to pay them a higher retainer. Sure. But I mean, if the amount of traffic and eyeballs that these creators can move with their very niche skill set of creating, converting short form content, like where else are you going to be investing your capital? Because if you get attention distribution, your competition on any marketplace or platform you're selling in becomes irrelevant. And so really the goal is how can I create an army that distributes attention for my brand so that I have this amazing moat? And that's really the way or the frame that I recommend brands look at. Kevin King: Now, there's been a bunch of these services pop up like Stack Influence and Levante and WayWord and all. ...archer affiliates that are trying to connect creators with brands and help manage some of the reporting and all that. And there's some good stuff in there, but what do you... And a lot of it, it's a fancier way of doing affiliate marketing. And that's basically what a lot of TikTok creators are doing. It's affiliate marketing. So what do I need to give away? What percentage do I need to give away? We all know, if you're listening to this in your Amazon seller, you know that outside traffic, Amazon has a brand referral. But on TikTok, you can't link straight to Amazon. They penalize that unless you meet a certain requirements and pay for it, right? Rafay MH: No, you can link now. So as of, I think maybe 12 days ago, it's rolled out to every creator that you, if you're an Amazon affiliate, you can link that link directly in your comment section. And it's like this blue link and it opens up Amazon directly inside of TikTok. You can complete your purchase in TikTok and then continue scrolling. Like it's insane. I haven't played around with it yet because it's so new. But yeah, that's definitely a thread I'll be pulling. Kevin King: That's a game changer right there. If it opens up within Oh wow, okay. That's actually really good. So what kind of a commission do I need to give to these affiliates? I mean, there's some standard ones and some minimum settings and all this, but... Some people are really stingy on that and like, I don't want to give this away. And other people are like, no, this is a great way to rank and great way to get the residual effect of ranking on Amazon stuff. So what do you recommend that people do when it comes to how much do they pay? Rafay MH: What I'm about to say is going to be very unpopular, but I would recommend be as aggressive as possible because the game is about planting your flag and getting market share and creating the flywheel of demand. And if you're going to slow burn it, you're going to just be part of the noise. And so I would rather spend the amount I'd be spending in six months and collapse it within six to eight weeks so that I can actually get traction and start spinning that flywheel as opposed to being like, Oh, I'm only going to get 10% or 15% here. It doesn't make sense. Now, obviously you need to know your economics, but the way I look at TikTok is it's a top of funnel awareness machine. And People prefer to buy where they prefer to buy, like we spoke about. So if they have an Amazon account, of course they're going to buy there. If you have Shopify and you're running meta ads, you can retarget them there when they're going to be in the middle of the funnel. They're at least problem aware, maybe even solution aware at that point. And so if you can get as much top funnel awareness as quick as possible, yes, you're going to be making sales on TikTok. Cool. They can be profitable. Eventually, obviously, but really, it's like, how can I increase demand on the other places that I'm already selling, reduce my CPA, other places that I'm running ads? That's how you want to think about it. You want to think about it as an omni-channel approach. And this is the machine that gets the biggest funnel of eyeballs into your brand, right? And so from a commission perspective, if you're a supplement brand and you're offering less than 50% to start with, like maybe 40% sure, but I think you're just Not to say you won't get traction, but if it was me, if I was running a supplement brand, it's just like, go as hard as you can because the cost of that commission is negligible when it comes to the LTV to CAC ratio for your brand, for that customer. They're worth so much more to you. And the brand that understands those numbers and can do that math and be aggressive in acquiring the customer upfront, man, they're just going to win long-term. Kevin King: Yeah, I think that's where a lot of people have trouble is they want that immediate gratification. And so they run Top of Funnel, TikTok, which basically for those of you, what's this Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel, Bottom of Funnel, what's that mean? So Top of Funnel is just awareness. Like, I didn't know this existed. This exists, basically. Middle of Funnel is like, yeah, that looks interesting. I'd like to know more information, but I'm not ready to pull the trigger just yet. Bottom of Funnel means buy. That means they're ready. They know enough or you've convinced them enough or they've done enough research or seen enough that they're ready to buy. But sometimes Top of Funnel might come through TikTok And but middle of funnel might actually be because they went to your Shopify site and saw some more. But bottom of funnel is when you hit, we hit them with an ad on Facebook. I mean, sorry, on Amazon, a sponsored products ad. And so you attribute the sale to sponsored products. Completely. So it goes into your tacos and goes into everything on your Amazon. When in fact, it was actually this whole chain of events that created it. And there's some fancy tools out there that can do a little bit that can track some of that. But they're not usually not very cheap. And most sellers are not aware or can't afford them. So that's a thing that you got to keep in mind, too, is you got to look at that holistically, like you said, over the long term. And then one of the things that I don't know why people don't do this, but if I'm launching a product on TikTok, I'm going to line up 20, 30, 50, 200, like you said, in some cases, influencers, and I'm not going to go six to eight weeks. Like you said, I'm going to go one week. I'm going to use this as a launch. I'm going to say, I'm launching my new slow feed dog bowl, and we're holding a contest over the next seven days. Whoever sends the most sales is going to get a free Caribbean cruise. Whoever sends the second most is going to get a free iPad and I'm giving you a 100% commission on it and I'm putting bonuses. If you hit 50 sales or 100 sales, I'm adding another 100 bucks or whatever. I'm going to treat that as a marketing budget and blow the fuck up on this thing. That should start the flywheel on Shopify, on Amazon, on Walmart or wherever it is. I'm going and you should be able to crush it. I don't know why people aren't doing that. Yeah, you're raising your hands and people would resist that. Uh, it's, they used to do search, find, buy. They pay someone 15 or $20 plus the cost of goods for some soccer mom to go buy your product and, and, uh, get rank going. What you've given up a hundred percent of the product and you're giving him, yeah, you, you have a little bit of profit. So it's not technically a hundred percent. Um, but, and you're paying 15 or $20 or some search, find, buy service. I don't get it. A refund service or rebate service or whatever you want to call it. I don't get it that these sellers are so adverse to like, well, I got to do 10 or 20% or whatever. You're getting 10% back and the brand referral thing on Amazon, so that helps. But dude, just freaking go all in. If you're listening to this, quit farting around. Use this stuff. Rafay MH: Yeah, use it. And look, the best, I say this often, the best kind of races to run are the ones where more than half your competitors are sitting on the sideline. Like, people are going to hear this and they're not going to do it. And it is what it is. Kevin King: Most people that just heard me just say that are not going to do it. They're like, Kevin, I can't do that. I can't afford that. Rafay MH: Exactly. They're going to hear the fact that TikTok, you said that TikTok is top funnel awareness and think, oh, no one's going to buy this email content. But that's not the point. The thing with TikTok is that it takes you from top funnel awareness to solution aware, ready to buy in a 45 second video. Kevin King: It compresses it all in a short video. It compresses it with authority and believability from someone like you in a short amount of time that advertisers used to have to spend hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars to do. And that's the beauty of it is is the compression algorithm there. I mean, I told you earlier, I bought 20 things on TikTok and I didn't know those things existed. I wasn't in the market looking for them. And I don't even know who the brands were that were shipping them to me. And I didn't care. It looked cool. Yeah, right. Rafay MH: I got it. Kevin King: Other people, like you said earlier, it's democratic. So the smallest guy who just starts can compete with the biggest Kim Kardashian in some cases. So how do you get something To start the ball rolling on Amazon, I saw someone, it might have been Paul Harvey actually, mentioned something in one of his TikTok newsletters where he said, hey, this is what we do. We go out and we get, I don't know, 10 influencers to actually, we pay them, you know, flat fee and a commission, get them to start pushing our product. Then we get their permission to go into TikTok advertising and use their videos and ads and run ads to them, which helps them and their channel. But then we pick a small audience of like five or 10,000 people on TikTok and target all 10 of these videos and our ads to those 10,000 people. So those 10,000 people start seeing 10 different creators potentially all popping up in and out of their feed, pushing the same product. So people start going, hmm, what is this? Everybody's talking about this low-feed dog bowl and really only 10,000 people are but they think the whole world is because they can't keep constantly seeing it and then it just helps that snowball up. Do you have any thoughts on that or do you have any other tactics that you could share that works well? Rafay MH: For sure. I think the most important thing is that that platform is based on social proof. And one of the best kind of social proofs is the amount of videos that are being created by the affiliate you're working with, right? So on Amazon, you have reviews, but on TikTok, it's like, oh, I just saw 20 videos of this thing I'm ready to buy. I don't care if on TikTok shop this has like Five reviews or zero reviews. Even on Amazon, they'll switch over and find that brand on Amazon, only have like a handful of reviews and still be crushing because they've been overwhelmed with social proof. So definitely agree with that piece. I think it's also important to remember that it is really easy right now to like buy your own product on that platform. You can just have a buyer's network and just buy the first 50 to 100 to 200 of your own product and then just cycle the money back out. Obviously, you get your mates to do it. You don't have to do it yourself. So it's super easy to get that social proof very, very quickly. Once you have that content, I think a step before Like launching, you need to achieve product content market fit, because a lot of brand owners are just Amazon sellers, so they don't know how to visually demonstrate their product, visually sell their product. So before you start pushing behind any piece of content, you need to create a sandbox for those creators, understand what type of content will work for your type of product, so that you can achieve product content market fit, and then start pushing. So that's one, obviously, with the ads, what Paul said. Kevin King: But on top of that- What does that mean, product content market fit? Can you explain that a little bit more? Rafay MH: Yeah, let's double click on that. Product content market fit means you know how to effectively visually sell your product or at the very least communicate that to affiliates, how to visually sell it. So as opposed to your affiliates talking about five or ten different things and they're kind of just choosing random things, you tell them these are the three things. These are the three things It's not like good quality and tastes good like you can't taste through the screen So like what what are those hokey things those three? Uniques I like calling it that you're going to be pushing to every affiliate to say so that's what are you gonna say? And then how what are you gonna show your product may have like ten features, but what are the ones that are most visually? demonstrable I like talking about a If I'm designing a product that's going to launch on the platform, it needs to be demonstrable. It needs to have a transformation for the customer and the passionate audience needs to be there. So if you have a product that has lots of things or can do lots of things, how can you show it in the most visual way? And so that is a real easy way to get product content market fit. And the third piece to achieving that is look on TikTok. Consume the content your avatar is consuming because that's going to give you ideas on how to visually sell your product in the same problem space your product lives in. Does that make sense? Kevin King: Yeah, no, that makes sense. That's good. Thanks for that explanation. But continue on the other part on actually getting something to go. Rafay MH: Yes. Okay. The next piece is flash sales. That's such an obvious thing. It only runs for three days. Run it every three days. Do some intense flash sales. And when I said earlier, brands should be aggressive, aggressive with commission, aggressive with their sales initially, because unlike any other platform, TikTok benefits from a parallel. And so I've used this analogy quite a few times. Like back when you were in school, high school days, somebody yelled fight, right? And I was like, oh, there's a fight. And so everyone starts running and looking at the fight and more and more people start going. And that's kind of what TikTok's like, but with like affiliate opportunities. And so if your product is starting to get sales, even if it was through flash sales for these initial affiliates, more affiliates will share with their affiliate friends because birds of a feather flock together. Hey, this is an opportunity, crazy commission, and it's doing really good sales. And that link will be shared across all these Discord groups. And that's how the flywheel ends up starting to run. One, obviously we've got the ads that Paul was talking about, but having flash sales. And the next piece is running search ads on TikTok and TikTok shop. Because people have changed their buyer behavior or user behavior on TikTok, people are switching over. There's genuine search volume that's happening in TikTok shop. And so you can pick up some really cheap sales just by running those three pieces just to begin with. And once that flywheel starts running, that outbound funnel of you trying to convince these affiliates to work with you, it's going to become inbound because it's like, oh, dang, this is an opportunity. I want to work with these guys. And that becomes easier. Oh, last piece. And this is probably, I should have said this first, launch with one product, one. Because it takes 5.4 times for someone on TikTok to, a user on TikTok to decide to buy. And if you have a number of products and you're getting those affiliates to say different things, it's going to take so long for the buyer to decide, hey, is this the same product? Is this the same thing? To actually end up for you as a brand to start getting traction. Kevin King: There's a lot of people that expect immediate results on TikTok. I know a lot of brands. I overheard a discussion just recently at a party where a brand was talking to a prominent influencer that has over a million followers on TikTok. And the brand was talking to this influencer saying, I'll pay you a few thousand bucks. Just run the video. You're successful. You got all these followers. We know it'll work. And the influencer was saying, no, I don't want to take your business because you don't understand how this works. I can't guarantee you anything off of one video. And this is a process. And I just saw something Neil Patel just put this out. Recently he put the, basically it's a life cycle. How long it takes, like you just said, 5.4 times to see something to buy. It's similar to that. It's like how long was the cycle, the buying cycle typically on different types of media. And I think email was the quickest. It was like six to eight weeks, you know, an email drip sequence or something. And some of the social media was, it was in the middle of the pack somewhere, but it was into the month's timeframe on, you know, on average of, Constantly just going after it, going after it, going after it. That chart is in my newsletter, Billion Dollar Sellers. If you look back in December or before Christmas, one of the before Christmas newsletters, you can actually find that chart. I can't remember off the top of my head. But yeah, it's fascinating stuff. But so what would you say to these brands that are looking, they just want that immediate gratification. They're like, well, I picked someone that's gone viral. They should be able to go viral again. It's a numbers game, right? It's an algorithm. It's a numbers game. I think Gary Vee says that every Brian should be putting five to 10 pieces of content out a day on social media organically. What are your thoughts on all that? Rafay MH: I don't know if I'd go as far as Gary because I think you can ramp up to that short, but five to 10, I don't think that's necessary. But I think if your mentality is, I want this for a quick win and cash injection, TikTok's not for you. Like short form content platforms aren't for you. Like run meta ads, run Google ads, bottom of funnel solution aware, continue running Amazon PPC. The reason you're trying to get on these platforms is you're going further up funnel. And further up funnel doesn't just mean people that are unaware. It also means that there's a ton more people that are unaware of the problem and the solution. So the pool that you're fishing in is just way bigger. And so if I told you, if you invested six months time into making this work, but it would, with an order of magnitude, change the trajectory of your business, and you might only start getting results in month four, would you do it? I know I would. I know you would. But it's the mentality of investing in your business. So it's hard now, easy later. So that competition becomes irrelevant. Your enterprise value goes through the roof. And you're the incumbent. So any new competitors that are coming in, they're going to compare you, those users and those potential customers, compare you to them. And they're going to be like, oh, you're just copying X, Y, and Z. So it is a land grab. And yeah, I just, it's never been easier to get free eyeballs. And so if you're not going full scent on getting free eyeballs, I don't know what you want. Kevin King: Don't forget my newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com. BillionDollarSellers.com every Monday and Thursday, brand new issue comes out. It's totally free. And also in February, I have Market Masters coming up, the Market Masters Think Tank and my Iceland BDSS event. There'll be people from Helium 10 at both of those events. So check out BillionDollarSellerSummit.com if you're interested in getting more information on those. What do you see the difference in product placement versus actually sales? So if I'm a makeup brand and I got some beauty creator showing me her makeup routine and all her makeup kit and all the brushes and creams and powders and everything she uses and what the case she holds them in, I could say I'm making the case that holds all this, a travel case that holds all this beauty stuff. One way is like, look, this is the travel case I use. It's really great. You can get in a TikTok shop or you can go down and look in the comments and see my new Amazon link that you said is now there. That's one way. It's a direct call to action versus the subtle approach of this is the makeup kit. It's by Kevin's Beauty. This is the one I use and just move on. You just mentioned that it's more product placement like they do in movies. You know, you see someone drinking a Coke or see someone driving a Ford. It's product placement. What do you see? Does one of those work better than the other or should you do a combination of those or what are your thoughts on the actual way to actually... Either directly or subtly try to get your product out there. Rafay MH: There's four types of content. So you described two of them. So the first type of content is awareness content where you expand the problem in the user's mind. So you're not even talking about your product yet. Snow teeth whitening does this really well where they talk about oral health and then they'll introduce the product sometimes in the same video, but sometimes not at all. So that's awareness content. You're really expanding the problem slash solution in the brain. Kevin King: You're making them aware of a problem they may not have known. Rafay MH: Exactly. And because TikTok's algorithm is so powerful, when you post another video in the same problem space, it's going to serve it to you in your for you page, right? And so that second type of content that you were describing where they're talking about the solution, hey, you know, take this product, it's showing the product in use, that's consideration content. Right, so you have awareness content, you have consideration content, and what most brands do is they jump on and they go with the conversion content, which you're most familiar with. It's like, hey, buy this thing. It's like, you know, 20% off or it does this thing, go ahead and buy that. But you're Not going to get as many people biting because you haven't built the problem big enough in their mind and shown them how the product is in use enough for them to actually decide to buy. And so that's conversion content. And then the last part is retargeting content, where most people leave that completely. And that's where you sweeten the offer. It's like, okay, I'm retargeting people that have watched all these videos, and I'm going to give them an extra 10% coupon, or I'm going to give them a bundle, or, you know, I'm going to push them over the edge by this extra gift that's included with this product. And if you are a brand owner that's wanting to Harness, capture attention consistently in a way that's scalable. You need to hit all four content levers so that you build that interest funnel. Kevin King: Like you said, so many people just go straight for the kill and that's not the way that's going to usually work. TikTok doesn't work or Facebook doesn't work or whatever doesn't work. Rafay MH: Exactly. And the truth is, there's nothing new, like nothing new under the sun. The exact same stuff that you're talking about that works in email works in social media, right? And it will work in other things. So people don't, don't take advantage of strategy arbitrage. Kevin King: Human psychology hasn't really changed in thousands of years. The human still thinks the same way and they're motivated by a lot of the same things. Food, sex and excitement and whatever, there's like eight different things that people are motivated by. It hasn't changed. Just the technology and the way to actually serve it up to them or to convince them has changed. And so if you understand the underlying psychology and underlying principles, just use the technology to apply it and to your advantage. Rafay MH: Yeah, I mean, like, I love Dan Kelly. I've read all his books. Eugene Schwartz, amazing as well. Ogilvy, same thing. If you just read those and then apply it to, like, any new vehicle, you have this, like, unshakable foundation of human psychology that you can apply to all these new tactics and new vehicles, and then you can take advantage and gain so much quicker ground because people think, oh, TikTok is different or, you know, Instagram's different or YouTube's different or email's different or, you know, funnels are different. They're not. It's just a different vehicle. Yeah. Kevin King: So if people want to try out this TikTok thing and they want someone to hold their hand along the way and they want that to be you, want to give it a shot, what's the best way for them to do that? Rafay MH: Just go to theuptik.com. That's u-p-t-i-k.com or find me on LinkedIn. It's Rafay MH and just shoot me a message. We can jump on a call and see if we can help each other. Kevin King: Awesome. Well, Rafay, I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing. This has been fun. Rafay MH: Thanks for having me, man. This is great. Kevin King: Regardless of what happens with TikTok, you need to be playing the social media game. Whether TikTok stays as they are, becomes a shell of itself, everything switches over to Instagram or Facebook or some other Twitter or some other platform, social media and if you leverage it correctly and the organic reach plus the paid reach you can get, there's never been anything like it since we've been around. So definitely be Playing in that in that sandbox as you can see with this talk with Rafe that there's some magic that can be done there We'll be back again next week with another episode of the AM PM podcast in the meantime I hope everybody is having a great Christmas holidays I hope you have a great new year, and we will see you again next week.