Amazon Expert Kevin King Answers Amazon FBA Seller Questions | Ep. 147

Amazon Expert Kevin King Answers Amazon FBA Seller Questions | Ep. 147 00:00:02 Hey everyone, it's Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy here, and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the Amazon FBA and e-com podcast. Alright, everybody, today's episode. is a returning guest one of my good friends you probably recognize him he's all over the internet you know talking on podcasts he's also involved he is the founder of the billionaire dollar a billionaire kevin help me with this the billionaire dollar summit i think i said that right right the billionaire dollar seller summit no no billion dollar i believe billion dollar summit all right sorry see there i go again it's friday give me give me a break and i've only like attended it and been on it before so like oh god all right it's i'm just so excited because he's going to be on the you know on the podcast again anyways for those of you who don't know kevin king 00:01:13 he's not just an amazon guy he's been involved with some incredible businesses he's been on lifestyles of the rich and famous uh you gotta listen to him on my i know this guy podcast he dumps some crazy stories about the mob about michael jordan about oh tigers attacking models in his studio it's it's well it's kind of hilarious but i guess it wasn't but uh anyways kelsey before we get to kevin what do we got to say Hey, We got to smash those like buttons. I see we've got Simon, Andrew, Darwin, and Tony joining us already. Let us know where you're watching from. And if you have any questions, just throw them in the comment sections. We're going to try and get to them all, but sometimes we get a little overwhelmed with the questions, but we'll do our best. 00:02:00 And if we ever do miss any questions, just put them over into the Facebook group. We've got a great community there, and they're always looking to help us out with questions. Welcome. Welcome, everyone. I believe that's Roslyn. Hi, welcome. And also, if you're looking for an episode, Kevin's been on numerous times. I think he's on maybe six or seven, maybe eight times already. So if you're looking for any extra Kevin King content, go over to our YouTube page, Lunch with Norm. That's where all the good stuff is. Full episodes are there, daily highlights. And yeah, also our Patreon is starting up. That is a monthly subscription service. Basically, if you're looking for extra content, any value, we got discounts, deals. We got consultation. We got giveaways. A bunch of good stuff over there. 00:02:50 We have Kelsey. That's the main thing. Also, he's got to get paid. So that's why we did it. Exactly. Exactly. All right. So if you have any questions, throw them over into the comment section. We'll get to them right away. And let's get on with the founder of Billion Dollar Seller Summit. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy the show. It only took me like three times to get it right. And you still didn't get it right. Billion Dollar Seller Summit. There you go. The BDSS. That's it. Oh, my gosh. Man, it's Friday. It is Friday, Kevin. It is Friday. Oh, hold it just a sec. What was that? It is Friday. We're on lunch with Norm. Jeez, I like the mug. Yeah, it's a pretty cool mug. 00:03:46 No, I was talking about your head with the new hairstyle. Oh, the white mug. How are you? How are you? How's Texas? Texas is good. Texas is good. Everything is good. Great. Hey, for those people who don't know who you are and what you do, can you just give us a brief explanation of who you are? Sure. My name is Kevin King, and I'm the host of the Dollar Billion Summit Seller. Summit thingy. No, I've been doing e-commerce for about 20-some odd years, 25 years, something like that, selling on Amazon. uh since 2001 in various formats run several different businesses that sell on amazon and off amazon uh developed and evolved in a television production produced 30 uh television national television shows uh prior prior to uh getting seriously involved in e-commerce uh dues do the billion dollar seller summit which is a high level event for advanced amazon sellers next one's coming up in september here in austin it's once once uh 00:04:57 in person per year and once virtual per year uh then also do uh products of bots with steve simonson that's a product sourcing and a discovery and sourcing program for experienced sellers and also uh host the helium 10 elite high level training and also from the creator of the freedom ticket which is the free course that helium 10 gives out to anybody that has a membership that's Looking to learn how to sell on Amazon from A to Z. I've also seen you frequenting Clubhouse recently. Yeah, I get pretty heavy. Back in late December and January, February, I was on Clubhouse quite a bit trying that. Lately, not quite as much. Bradley and I do a one-hour Clubhouse every other Tuesday at 5 o'clock Eastern Time. 00:05:46 Called the Freedom Tickets, where we just did basically a live Q&A. So if you're on Clubhouse, be sure to check that out, and then uh, Ryan up there from Canada, from your back of the woods, he does a great event every other Friday which is not a Q&A but it's more of a round table kind of thing where he brings on a lot of the experienced sellers and just throws some topics out there and everybody discuss them discusses them. Discusses them, and those are pretty good too, so I participate in that, and occasionally I'll be on something else, but I'm not quite using it as much uh as I was originally. I kind of played with it for a while; I still think it's good, uh, but it could be a big time suck uh, and so yeah, I gotta make money somewhere. 00:06:23 I love to give back, and love to help people, um, but I gotta delegate my time, and portion that out to make sure it's utilized properly. And that's the important thing. Like if you're going into a club house, you have to really understand, you know, are you it's great to hear. It's great to like I love watching Judge Judy. But, you know, if I watch Judge Judy twice a day at six and six thirty, you know, hey, it might be nice. I might be learning something about law, but how can I make money from it? And that's the same thing with club house. You could go on. At the beginning, you could go on to Clubhouse for eight hours a session and it would still be going on, but uh I still like Clubhouse. 00:07:08 I think there's i think there's going to be different ways of even for Amazon. I mean we could even start with that building a brand on Clubhouse. Have you ever thought about that building an actual like a brand like a coaching brand or an actual brand of products an actual product? So let's say that you're in the pet so bully sticks, we we both played around with bully sticks right. So we might want to start a a group a pet lovers group, a dog group it could even be depending on your your the size of your bully stick, a small dog dog Clubhouse group and then you could start bringing people in like a Facebook community and then I'm not sure if we're at that spot yet, but get somebody to sponsor your group, you know, somewhere to monetize. 00:07:57 You're allowed to tip now. Did you know that? Yeah, I saw that that was in beta, I don't know if they've rolled that out completely to everybody, yeah they've a lot of people have it but it has it's not available to everybody, I guess you have to put a few hours in speaking before they'll put out the tip jar. But there are little ways that you can monetize the room while building a brand and I, I don't i see a little a lot of digital guys out there, I see a lot of people in ecom and and coaching there but I don't see brands building yet and that might be an interesting platform for them it could be that um yeah people discussing the the different the yeah I don't know that'd be interesting it'd be interesting test to see because You don't have the ability to link out or put pictures or uh interactive content really, it's just all audio. 00:08:46 So like if you're a dog brand I would wonder how I can see people coming on there and just talking about their dogs and talking about different tips and tricks or something for their dogs but yeah um how would you uh to leverage that? I don't think the tools are quite there on Clubhouse to really integrate seamlessly, you'd have to be begging people to go somewhere a lot um which I don't know is going to be quite as effective. But you could use your profile so when you're resetting the room so in Clubhouse you're allowed To or you should there's a certain uh etiquette and one of the things that you would do is reset a room and you just tell people what the room's about, what to do. 00:09:25 Possible introduction of some of the panelists and it could be either um, you know, the sponsorship of the room, or it could just be talking about for more added value tips or advice on dogs. Check out my Instagram account or Facebook, and maybe drive them over there, get them into the group. And then, of course, you know, you can promote to them and drive back to drive back to your Facebook page. I think one of the lessons would be that you'd have to study what works in radio advertising because Clubhouse is very similar to radio advertising, but with a much more targeted market. So, you know, if you've got a if you're advertising on your local radio talk show that has a reach of, you know, I don't want to say. 00:10:11 I don't know, 3,000 people at any given time are listening to your talk show on your local radio, you know, in a big city. Out of those 3,000, you know, half of them probably have a dog. And out of those, some of them really don't care. So it's a very small audience. But if you've got 200 people in a clubhouse that are all dog lovers, that's probably as good as a 3,000 or 5,000 reach audience on a radio station, because you've pinpointed down that niche. Then it's a matter of how do you market what's effective on, on radio and direct response, uh, to actually get people and take that kind of approach, uh, and something like that, um, actually might work, or even advertising on other people's clubhouses if Clubhouse somehow could figure out a way to to allow you to have five-second or 15-second little ads. 00:10:59 I think a lot of people are on Clubhouse; there's a lot of people that are highly engaged, but probably the vast majority of those people are not that it's background noise, uh, you know they're working, they got it there while uh, even see that with people that are on stage sometimes someone the host will say something 'Hey, Norma, what do you think about that?' and takes you like 10 seconds because you're like 'crickets', shovel your papers, like pulls out a browser window or whatever and like, 'Oh, sorry uh, sorry guys, uh, just having trouble with the mute button or you make some excuse or whatever. So I think uh, figuring that out and if you look at some of the software like DirectCon or yeah, yeah, 00:11:35 you can see there's a lot of people that come in and out so you might have 100-150 people in that room but during the course of an hour or two you might Have about 400, 500 people, you did that yesterday, Kevin, so uh, I don't know if you know this but uh, I'm involved with the largest club or it might be second, but it's It was the largest club last week on Clubhouse with 500,000 members, entrepreneurs. Oh, wow. And I've got every Thursday at 1 o'clock, we have our room, our e-com, learn to sell online room, which you gotta come on. And we only have like one guest. It carries on from the podcast over and the guest talks. It's not like you have 25 people up talking on a panel. 00:12:21 But we looked at our stats yesterday. And we I think it started off at 169 people. It dropped down. But when I looked at how many people were actually listening, it was 750. Yeah, I would never have gotten that because you only see the stat of, you know, oh, it's going up, it's going down. But that's a problem, though. If you had 750 and their number was constantly around 150, that means 600 of those people were bored. Or dropped out because you do migrate to different rooms. Yeah, they migrate to different rooms. That means they're bored. So that means that they're not engaging. And that's part of the problem is sometimes on Clubhouse you get one person, especially if it's a Q&A type of thing, that will hog it for 20 minutes and they're just boring as hell. 00:13:06 And people are going to leave. So you've got to have the moderation, I think, is critical. I mean, there's a talk show here in Austin that a guy does. The host, so there's like three people that hope that are that guests that are co-hosted but one guy drives it and when people call in, you know he's very quick to like if they don't get to their point, he's like 'all right thank you very much, next yeah, you know, you're so bang on and keep keeping the thing moving because otherwise you'll be like 'ah this guy's voice is annoyingly or this is going to take forever, I'm going to see what else is going on and people bounce, so I think that's that-700 people come through there and only 150 pretty much when you're checking it, is actually a problem. 00:13:47 That means you've got to figure out a way to keep the mortgage. You're always going to lose some people. People hit it by accident or they're just curious or whatever. And some people have other stuff to do. But I think that's critical. And that's where there's a lot of people missing the ball right now on the opportunities on Clubhouse. Yeah, I usually see about a three to one ratio to where people will come in and you'll see how many minutes that they'll actually stay. We keep it tight. And, you know, we're talking about Clubhouse today, but I think it's important for people on Amazon to take a look at Clubhouse and take a look at what you can do for your brand on Clubhouse. 00:14:30 So I want to, I'm just sticking with this subject for a bit longer than we're going to move on. But. With Clubhouse, like you said, you can go to that Direcon or whatever. Just a sec. There we go. That's our sponsorship. There we go. But there are ways to monetize. Here's another way. On Clubhouse, where I found it to be very useful, and again, if you're putting up your brand there, is with those 700 people that came in, If I take a look at my Instagram account right after, right after the Clubhouse session, I'll get an extra hundred followers. And so that's helping me build my community as well. So if it's a brand out there and a lot of people, probably 99. 9% of Amazon sellers aren't doing it at all. 00:15:26 And I don't know what kind of success rate you'd have, but you're starting to see a few more groups being built out. over clubhouse! Now, have you seen any other type of social media that's working for Amazon sellers? Um, Pinterest and depending on what you're selling, Pinterest can work pretty good, and Instagram can work really good for uh, for beauty brands especially. And I'm starting to see more and more on TikTok uh, yeah there seems to be more and more people doing some product kind of placements stuff and some people doing a little quick uh product review type of stuff on TikTok. I have not played with that, so I don't know how effective it is, but I'm seeing some more of that, especially on TikTok. Yeah, I just saw something about Yeti here. 00:16:17 I guess we'll get to that in a second. You know what? I don't know about you. I can't read a bloody thing, I've got to crunch this down to get into my screen! I got Kelsey having to read all I see is a word that might catch my eye like 'Yeti', but I'm an old guy so excuse me; that snuck up, sorry guys. All right, so let's talk a bit more about Amazon. Um, one of the problems that we talked about the last time-still a really unruly problem that I'm seeing is: are these new ACE and/ or storage restrictions? Got any strategies? No, I mean, that's a it's a tough one! I mean, if you're new, it's actually a benefit for you. If you're brand new, it's, you're launching your first product. 00:17:08 Now you're not restricted to 200; you probably can do 500 or 1,000 depending on your account. So that's a good thing for a brand-new person. But for someone like me, like me right now, I've got I have a PPE brand. And I'm restricted on shipping. I'm overstocked a little bit on one item and the other one's about to run out, but I can't ship any. It's telling me, you know, the recommended quantity to ship in is whatever the number is, 813 shipped today. But if I go try to create a shipping plan, it says, no, sorry, you're restricted. So even their systems aren't talking to each other. So I have to wait or I have to pull some stuff out. 00:17:49 I had to sell some stuff to a lightning deal or something that, but most lightning deals don't work for me; very probably one out of 20 lightning deals actually work for me, so I don't even do waste my money or time really on lightning deals anymore, yeah it's a total waste of money in most cases. Um, so um, I i okay, I had to pull some stuff out; I ended up donating some stuff just to try to free up some space, so it's a balancing act and I actually had to create a little spreadsheet, special spreadsheet, like putting in the cubic storage and the weights and the projected sales. I'm like, okay, how do I got to balance this? 00:18:24 And it's going to take me about three months to balance this inventory to where I can actually get a system down to where I can like, all right, I know every Monday I need to ship in X number of units. But instead of sending in 500 at a time on one, I'm going to have to be shipping more regularly. So it's going to be instead of shipping a pallet or a couple of pallets or something in, it's going to be shipping some stuff UPS. Yeah, so that that can increase your uh cost as well, but it's not as efficient uh for for me to much more efficiently ship a pallet mess with it once pay those charges once rather than having to pay little chunks and pieces, so that that's part of the of the change that I'm having to deal with um, and yeah, it's it's it's a it's a problem uh, and I know it's gonna be interesting. 00:19:08 I have a brand new company launching um, uh, this company's supposed to start last March but we kind of put it on hold with the pandemic with launching it, it's in the pet space um, two products in the pet space that are made of recycled ocean waste, and um, the first two products are coming out and it should be live in July, so it's going to be interesting to see uh how with a brand new account how that's gonna affect me, and then with by the calendar business that I do um, it's going to be interesting this year to see how that affects that too, that one is going to be I've really never come across the seasonal side but you're seasonal with these calendars yeah, how do those restrictions work? 00:19:53 like they're they're yeah i'm sure it's going to be um it's got an account limit and in the beginning you know those those will come in stock probably late july early august which nobody's really buying on them right i can start at least the sales history i mean you're selling a couple a day at that point But come October, November, December especially, it's going to be an issue. I mean, like last year, I had to revert to, I think I told this story before, but I had to revert to FBM because Amazon actually de-indexed some of our calendars. And you couldn't even type the ASIN and find them. So they shifted them over into an adult category, basically. And so they just disappeared. No BSR, no nothing. And overnight, sales plummeted. 00:20:39 So I actually had to put up a second listing, uh, a completely separate listing with a like a different ASIN, different skew um, and just ship them FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant) I didn't relabel anything but same UPC and everything because it doesn't matter; it's not going in anywhere; it's just coming out of my warehouse. But I had to do that to salvage it, and there was a point where I was actually me personally um, because I didn't I was shipping four or five one day, I just shipped like four or five hundred orders um you know, just calendars in a sleeve and out. And but if I hadn't done that we could have lost tens of thousands of dollars, so that may be I may have to do more of that. 00:21:19 Luckily, that product has the margin um, but some people don't have those margins that that can absorb that because Amazon could fulfill that for a good fulfillment fee it's like 348 or something around those you know, I can't send those the postage alone costs five dollars and something on that even at both the discount rates plus the labor plus the uh cost of the big envelope that they gotta go in all that you know, it adds up. So yeah, it's a it's a problem so I think that the bigger sellers have multiple Skews, you gotta come with some sort of just-in-time inventory system and it's gonna take a little bit of time to adjust and hopefully Amazon will take note and actually adjust this properly like they should. 00:22:03 It's more successful sellers but from Amazon's point of view I understand it uh even though they've added what 50 or 60 percent more capacity, they're still growing and they don't want to be a warehouse and they've over and over tried to do things to say hey look we're not a warehouse, we're fulfillment center quit using us to store all your crap. And then since there's so many people getting into the into the game a lot. Of people will just send stuff in to Amazon just let it sit there and um It doesn't sell. The new sellers are over 500 or something, or 1,000-something cents straight in, and they're selling a couple a day. That stuff is just sitting out there taking up massive space, and Amazon's having to deal with it. 00:22:40 Yeah, they're charging you storage fees and stuff, but at the same time, that's not where the profit's at. They need to be moving that stuff. Right. I used one of your examples with our mentoring group this week. We were talking about this exact issue and uh having a lot of sales, excuse me, having a lot of sales come in and then getting hot, excuse me, oh my gosh, too many cigars, Kevin, um, so after this we'll have to go for a cigar, uh. Anyway, if you have a lot of sales and all of a sudden your sales either plateau or go down, You could be stuck with either a removal order, as you were saying the last time, like you blew me away when you said you could have got hit with a, I think it was a $60,000 fine because you were moving all that product. 00:23:34 And then all of a sudden there was a dip because they suspended you for, you know. Whatever Amazon does, you know for and it was it you've already proven that this PPA product um uh you know there was no issue with it but you got a random suspension again which made your sales go down uh and then what it was 60 some a thousand dollars if you didn't react correct yeah yeah it was very expensive yes and people have to realize that and the reason why I'm saying this this is a segue it uh we're this uh Prime Day. Prime Day is coming up. And if we're pumping a ton of product into Prime Day and we're expecting that there's going to be a lot of sales, are people going to fall into the trap where they have tons of inventory? 00:24:23 They use up all their storage to put their inventory in. And then after Prime Day, your sales slide back because we're not in fourth quarter. Yeah. I mean, Prime Day people, I see that a lot. You see a lot of people now, their blog posts, different things coming out. People ask me, what are you doing to prepare for Prime Day? What are you doing to get ready? And my answer is nothing. Nothing. What's the point? It's a single day. It's actually two days or whatever they make it, three days, whatever they make it now, of decent sales. And as long as I have some, what do I do? I make sure I've got some inventory. I mean, make sure I'm not down to my last 20 units or something. 00:25:03 That's all I do. I do nothing else. I don't put any Prime banners, any special logos. I don't email my list. If you've got a lightning deal, a Prime Day deal of the day or Lightning Deal, then yeah, you need to really make sure you get your inventory in there. But other than that, it's just a nice couple of days of sales. And for me, there's nothing else to do. Hey, how are you doing? Nice to see you. This is Norm's fault. We're interrupting you. Now coffee, please. How rude. For me, it's not like the fourth quarter. A Prime Day is like there's 45 Prime Days between mid-November and early January. That's my philosophy on it. I don't see it as a great marketing tool for Amazon. 00:25:58 It's a great reason for people to come in, but usually it levels off because all you're doing is forwarding some sales. Because usually after Prime Day, the next week after Prime Day, it usually sucks. Sales usually go down. Because all you're doing is compressing some sales. It's just great marketing for Amazon and selling Prime memberships and whatever. But unless you've got deals of the day or something else going on, just make sure you have some inventory. And now with the new rules, like you just said. That scares me. You've got to be a little even extra careful. Yeah. So, I mean, with that extra inventory. Like you said, the sales slow down. How is that going to affect the removal orders and playing around with it? 00:26:42 So it'll be interesting to talk to you in July after all this kind of settles down and see how it fares out. But one of the things that we never do, and I think you'd agree with this, there's so many new sellers that'll go out there and you'll receive an email from Amazon saying, oh, to have better chances of winning the prime day battle increase your bids and you know one of the things that we'll never do ever do is increase our ppc now i do do something a little bit different i like i i won't bid anything at the beginning very low and i'll start to gain speed throughout the day and add a little bit while people's inventory is going out i don't do a ton of prime day 00:27:32 changes one of the things that do you ever do a pre-launch kev a pre-launch yeah a pre-prime day launch so uh for us yeah i've done in the past with my own list yeah i like that and what we'll either do is we'll um send out um just a notification to our list is that good coffee or tea uh it's actually i got soda in there all night uh actually no uh and w uh right now trying something changes kevin too many changes but the prime day the pre-launch for prime day uh works extremely well if you want to let your list know that they first of all that they can go Over to Amazon for Prime Day and take advantage or take advantage now and get an additional five percent off. 00:28:28 And that works extremely well. We'll get a lot of pre-Prime Day. I'm not really worried. Like last year, Prime Day absolutely sucked for us. The year before, it was a different story. But I'm not expecting a huge boost in sales. But anytime you can leverage, like what you just said, anytime you can leverage off of a holiday or an event, it can be good. Whether it's Prime Day or, you know, I used to do this a lot in one of my not Amazon stuff, I haven't done as much, but driving to my own store, I would do Labor Day specials, Memorial Day specials, Valentine's, President's Day, whatever, some sort of excuse to here's 10% off or 20% off or get a free item. 00:29:11 Those kind of sales that are tied around an event can work very well and gives you an excuse to send out an extra message that's technically maybe not as spammy in some people's eyes. What a lot of people don't realize in the catalog business, think about this, especially in the States. I don't know if it's so much in Canada, but in the States with drag mail, snail mail, the one the postman brings and sticks it in a little box. If you start paying attention, you'll notice after any holiday. So, here in the U. S., Monday is a holiday. It's Memorial Day. So, watch your mail Tuesday through Thursday of next week if you live in the U.S. 00:29:48 And if you're a mail order buyer, if you're someone that's bought from catalogs or mail order in the past, uh, you're one of those types of buyers. You should see an uptick in catalogs arriving on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of next week because the days, the three days after a holiday, those are the days that companies time it by purpose. You know, you'll get the Crate and Barrel catalog or you'll get the Sharper Image catalog or you'll get whatever it is. A lot of those will show up extra ones, you know, an extra stack of them will show up a couple days within those couple days after a holiday because it's proven in the direct marketing industry it's one of the best times to actually hit people is actually after a holiday. 00:30:27 And so I've never actually tested that fully online but I actually maybe should, that logic actually may apply there too, so a post-Prime Day sale like you were saying, a pre-Prime Day sale, maybe uh, it would be good something. You know, maybe when you're driving onto your Amazon page or even to your own website, doing a, if you have your own list, a post-sale. So if Prime Day is on a Tuesday, you know, that following Wednesday and Thursday, that's when you actually do your best discounts. And I've done stuff in the past, like on Christmas, around Christmas time, I've done stuff where it's 10 days of Christmas and each day is a different item. I've done it around Thanksgiving in the U. S. Or I'll send out an email on a Wednesday. 00:31:14 All right, here's today's deal on Wednesday. Coming tomorrow is another deal. And the deals progressively get better all the way until Monday, until Cyber Monday. Those have worked as well, too. I would think that, actually, now I'm thinking I'm just brainstorming here out loud. A post-holiday sale might actually be even more effective than a pre-holiday one. Yeah, yeah. And if you wanted to even add another layer, if you drive those people back to your website for products that aren't available on Amazon so let's say it's soap, you know, so maybe your lavender soap and and some tropical scents are on Amazon but you have dead, Dead Sea, you know mud soap, and you know a few others that you just can't get on Amazon. 00:32:02 You drive the traffic using your list over to your Shopify store; they get this, you know, 15% discount and they buy two or three, they go over to your shopping cart. And because it's a Prime Day sale, when they go to exit, now they have your coupon for your Prime Day to go back to Amazon and buy your regular soap. Yeah, something like that could work too. Yeah. Or even tell them up front: You buy two soaps from our website, you get a something, a heavy discount or a free soap off of Amazon or whatever. Yeah. Or a rebate. We'll give you: Buy two soaps from our site and one from Amazon. Send us your Amazon receipt and we'll refund your Amazon money for your Amazon buy. Be sure to use this link. 00:32:51 Right. Our search for this stuff is something effectively effective. Yeah. What are you excited about? Anything new? It doesn’t have to be Amazon, but like e-com wise, anything that’s making you perk up and listen? What am I excited about? Yeah, I don’t know if I’m excited. I’m excited about live events coming back in the Ecom space, you know, going to Prosper. It’s going to be kind of weird because, you know, since March of last year, I haven’t been on a plane since March of last year. And I haven’t really, all I’ve been doing is working. And I was talking to somebody the other day about this and it's like, I might feel a little bit guilty, you know, going to a Prospere show for five days and not actually, I'm like, I feel like, hey, I'm not getting work done. 00:33:38 I've gotten so much work done in the last year because I'm not traveling. I'm not having to take that time. So I'm wondering how that's going to feel. I think it's going to feel pretty good because I need a break. And I'm actually making around Prospere about a three-week break because I'm going to drive out to Las Vegas, actually, and on the way stop at a few places. That I gotta go to California for about a week, uh, that spend uh with Helium 10 to shoot the next uh Freedom Ticket uh, so uh, that's been about a week out there, so just gonna be about three weeks of July where I'm uh not sitting at my desk and it's gonna feel a little little odd, I think. 00:34:20 Man, I am trying if my bloody country will allow me to travel. Please, Prime Minister Trudeau, just lift the bloody travel restrictions in July so I can go to Prosper. Or at least by September so you can have a billion-dollar seller summit. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I'd love to go. I mean, I got to say this, you know, your event, you know how to do things right. What's got me going. Was the Illuminati event that you did in Cancun and it was just holy crap yeah when we walked into that room it was all done and i i said who's like who's the person that actually was the event planner and i heard it was you that's Mark huh it's Mark well yeah but Mark but you were the guy that yeah I guess the both of you and That was a hell of an event. 00:35:14 And then, you know, just what you put on in Austin at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. I got it. See, BDSS. It's incredible. It is jam-packed with education, fun, and hospitality. So I just got to say that. I mean, we're not a sponsor or you're not a sponsor. I just have to say that it's got to be one of the best events I've ever been to. I appreciate that. Yeah. So let's get back to being excited. Alright. So events, you're excited. I hope that we can meet at Prosper. Anything else? Is Amazon doing anything that you're seeing that, you know, something different right now that you can just jump on? I mean, they've always got the little videos up and coming. We've talked about the Amazon posts in the past. 00:36:09 Those are kind of hit and miss to me. I still think there's going to be a good opportunity coming in video. I think it's still got a ways to go. I'm not 100% sold on Amazon Live yet. I know some people are doing okay there, but I don't know that it's for the masses just yet. But I think it's going to get there. i see amazon still growing i see the opportunity is still huge you know i'm every week i'm i'm still looking for products because i do that for products advance um you know i have my a system that i do you know using brand analytics and stuff and um but that there's still plenty of opportunity i mean people are saying you know you hear this all the time of uh it's it's too late or too many Chinese sellers and, or there's too much of this. 00:36:57 And yeah, that's true for, for some things, but there's still plenty of opportunity out there to make money. And on, on this platform and it's amazing what you can do. And, you know, we're looking, when I'm looking for this, I don't, I don't, we don't consider anything that doesn't do at least $10 ,000 a month in sales. That's the bare minimum. Right. So, you know, other people, some people will happily launch things that will make them two or $3,000 a month in sales and a thousand dollars profit. String together 10 or 15 of those that can be a nice little business, but we're not looking for that because it's just not worth our time for the way we do this; it um, because the amount of effort that we put into the sourcing and the vetting and everything, it's not cost-effective. 00:37:37 So we'll leave that to other people. But the range of ten thousand dollars in sales per month and up, uh, with 25 to 40 profit margins, uh, or net contribution margins, there's still a lot of opportunity, tons, and so anybody that tells you otherwise is doesn't know what they're doing, uh, or doesn't know what they're talking about, or they're approaching it wrong. So that I, I see that as a good thing. Um, and then, yeah, i mean, i'm excited to be launching a a new company; um, you know that we funded this company and everything about a year ago? We set this thing up uh was actually Scott Deets from Northbound uh helped us set this up in uh 2019 uh we had the investment. It's a significant investment that was put into the company. 00:38:23 It evolved a little bit because during the formation, right after we formed the company, one of the biggest outdoor brands came to us and said, 'Hey, we want you to take the license for our pets, pet products, especially in e-commerce because we've tried some other people. They don't know what they're doing, so why don't you guys do it?' So we have a big brand that's involved. That's got a lot of the big athletes, uh, and since these products are all made out of recycled ocean waste, um, they've got to, they're an ocean-based brand, uh, beach ocean-based brand, so it's a perfect fit. So we're kind of excited to see what happens with their influencers that have two million followers on Instagram as soon as they post pictures with our products with their dogs and talk about it, to see see really what kind of impact that influencer marketing actually has on an Amazon business. 00:39:19 People always talk about going out and convincing an influencer to do something or paying them to do something. This is going to be basically free, and they're really good products. So we'll see. And it's going to be interesting to see. I think one of the big opportunities on Amazon is exactly what we're doing is branding and not creating your own brand, but partnering with existing brands under license so that's what we have we have to pay about eight percent of our top line sales um to to you know as a fee uh to these guys uh but we're gonna see is it worth actually paying that eight percent the extra value that we're getting because of their brand name people are researching for it already knowing it already trusting it is it gonna be worth it you know they're already ignored streams and uh dick's sporting goods and all the pets places and they could just make a phone call and say hey add this product to the line and so we'll see 00:40:12 We're going to see. It's a good test, but I think this could be part of the future for a lot of people. I went with Paul Miller to the licensing show a couple of years ago. He's done well with licensing on some of his products. I saw some good opportunity there. I think a lot of Amazon sellers don't understand that or they don't get that. If you're putting out a a flashlight and there's tons of flashlights already for sale on Amazon, but there's room for you to come in there and you're like, yeah, if I was the 10th best selling flashlight on Amazon, I could still do $30,000 a month in sales. Um, maybe, but what if you were the US Army, um, uh, tough and rugged flashlight, you know, you had the US Army logo on the side of that flashlight. 00:41:00 Could you bump that up to being a third or fourth bestseller just by having that license and actually, uh, paying a royalty maybe. Uh, so maybe you should go after that license uh, I think I think there's big opportunity in the future for Amazon sellers doing that um, and I'm about to find out if it's um, if there's really any value in that or not right? And you know uh, one of our listeners, I i think she's probably listening today uh, Marcia Reese, she's had a billion dollars in sales with Power Ranger licenses, yeah, you know just licensing is another way, another look or another way to provide even higher perceived value so you can go on there'll be a flashlight there for 10 bucks but because you have 'US Army' on there it could be 25 bucks so you might be paying that 8% back but you could go at a higher perceived value because it's a higher, it's perceived as a higher quality. 00:41:59 I mean we're doing exactly doing that, I mean the product one of our products that we're selling, One of the best-selling brands on Amazon is in the $60 range for this product. It's for dogs. And it's about a $60 item for dogs. And ours is going to come out at $75. And there's two reasons. One, we have a higher cost because of the licensing fees. But it also has the brand name behind it. So people should actually pay more for it. And then we actually made a lot of significant improvements. Uh, to the product, uh, too, that's it's a really kick-ass product um so I think uh it's not only going 00:42:39 to be the most expensive, it's probably going to be the best on the market, uh, problem so it's just how fast can we gain traction and take away and you know the top sellers got 10, 000 reviews or something like that, you know, that doesn't scare me, I think we can beat them um and it's going to be but at the same time, When you're dealing with a license, these guys are fanatics. We did a package insert or a little tag, actually, and said that everything's got to go through them for approval. You just can't do whatever you want. We had to change the fonts. It's no big deal, but these are the only five fonts you can use and anything that has our logo on it. 00:43:20 We had to change one of the fonts that we were using. Then they were nitpicking the whole thing. Move this image two pixels to the left, please, on the printed form. I'm like, okay. And so they were nitpicking it pretty good. So it's going to be interesting to see once we put up our Amazon listing, how much they're going to try to influence us there. And that's where it could be a problem where I'm like, look, you came to us for a reason. We know Amazon. We'll go by your rules and use the fonts when we can and all that stuff. But let us create the listing. We know what we're doing with keywords 00:43:56 and the way it's written and whatever so it's going to be interesting to see how much micromanaging they try to do there right to protect their brand but I understand that's their brand they want a very consistent image and very consistent message across everything but it's going to be a little interesting test you know uh you said something about ten thousand you you look for products that can sell at least ten thousand and you know that other people might not want that they might be satisfied with two or three thousand One of the things that I want to touch on is mentoring or coaching. You are the host of Helium 10 Elite, more for advanced sellers, but it's so important. I know going back to the Illuminati, we really didn't have a chance to talk back then. 00:44:45 But one of the things I was saying is that just coming to that event, I could see that if you're a new seller or somebody that's just coming out where you're having troubles with 3,000 to 5,000 in sales, by doing one thing different or a couple of things different, you can take 10 and turn it into 20. But a lot of people just need that guidance to just. Get over the hump, they don't realize if they set up their PPC this way or if they did, you know some other form of marketing. I see like Amy Weiss is here; she's got a a great coaching program. I know that you have uh Helium 10 uh Elite as well as BDSS but you know, do you want to give me uh some information or your thoughts on that? 00:45:33 Yeah, I think you gotta look at the total overall market though, so I mean there's there's some markets where you look at the product on Amazon, you pull up X-ray or something and the top 10 sellers are all doing, I'm just making this up, say in the neighborhood of $2,000 each in total sales. That's a $20,000 market basically because everything below that really doesn't count too much. So that's a $20,000 market. So can you take that by doing some additional things, ramping up your PPC or making a better product or whatever? Can you take your $2,000 And basically eliminate four or five of those guys and take their $2,000. You might be able to take some of that. 00:46:12 You might be able to get that $2,000 to $4,000 or $5,000 by having a better product, better pricing. But it depends on the market. So one of the things that I do when I'm looking for these products is I have a special spreadsheet that I've created in Excel. I think I might have mentioned this in the past. I mentioned this to Leo. I think I was on the Freedom Ticket. I talked about this a little bit just recently. And he was like, holy cow, that's a smart idea. But what I do is I download the last three months of brand analytics data. So just go on Amazon, download. It's a million records or whatever. So right now it's May. So you can do April, March, and February. 00:46:56 Those would be the three most available recent full months. And you could do it however you want. You could do it by weeks or quarters or however you want to do it. But that's how I do it. I download those and then I had someone over in India, I found someone off of Upwork that actually wrote me a special little custom uh program that uses a language called R, which is like an artificial intelligence language. She runs it through some stuff that she did there, and then it gets imported to Excel for the final product. We add all these columns, and one of the things that we look for in the spreadsheet is trends. I'm looking for one of the columns that we create, is like 'what is this trending up? 00:47:36 Is it turning down? Or is it fairly steady or is it inconsistent?' There's four different criteria so something that has an SFR of a thousand, I mean I started 100, 000 this month and the next month It's 80, the next month it's 60. That's trending up because it's constantly becoming more popular. Something that's opposite is going from 60 to 100 to 200, that's trending down. Uh, or a one that's bouncing around maybe it's 100 then it goes to 90 then it goes 110, that's fairly steady there's not huge shifts, that's going up and down. It's not huge but one that goes from 100 to 50 to 700,000, that's inconsistent um and so. And we look for those things, then we look for the conversion rates which ones have uh zero percent and especially in the second and third spots um uh second third accents which ones have zero percent. 00:48:24 Conversion rates, that's most likely manipulation; most likely so those those get eliminated and then we look for how many we take the words that are in the titles and how many of the how many and compare that to the brand analytics words and how many in the whole SFR range; do these do these does this phrase appear in different ones and we have a column that's created for that and we see how that's going; we look for ones that there wasn't an SFR in February but there all of a sudden was one in March and then then in march it went up a little bit or went down a little bit more so it's trending up that's a new keyword that's emerging maybe It came in at 900, 000 now it's at 600, 000 so that's something we've got to pay attention to. 00:49:04 So those are all criteria that you really need to make strong and we do some other stuff with this whole thing too, but I can eliminate a million SFR keywords by running this through this system down to about 15,000 that I can scroll through and I can find uh probably 200 product opportunities just like that in an hour uh after you've run all this stuff. Now there's more work that's got to be done beyond that, you know? You start with these and then go look put them through X-rays see what the competition is see what the review rates are see What that kind of stuff is, but it eliminates a lot of the work and you can really zero in on opportunities. 00:49:44 And you've got to source it and sometimes half of what we source for products of odds doesn't make the cut because either there's 80% of this factories are selling it direct on Amazon from China so we our price and what they're selling on Amazon there's no margin for us, um, so that eliminates some. Other times there's duties or tariffs or some sort of other issue, so about half of them get eliminated or it's not quite enough margin we just don't feel comfortable with it, so another half get eliminated, so at the end but still at the End of the day, you can find a lot of really good stuff, and it's amazing me how many great opportunities there are. It's just most people don't know how to to look at that data right, and to look at that, and see... 00:50:29 So back on your initial thing of something that's a thousand, two thousand; can you learn some techniques of PPC or some other straps out of traffic or doing Prime Day post Prime Date spells, or any of these things we've talked about? All those can help for sure. But the market's got to be there, the demand has to be there, and you got to be able to take it away either create new demand, which is either created or it's being Created organically by the news or by celebrities or something, or by some post that went viral on Facebook, or you got to steal it from whoever's already got it. And so if you can find an angle there to do all that, then great. 00:51:11 And we see that there's a product we just found, the product Savants, that's in the you know it's in its drinking space um for you know people that maybe have like coffee and tea and and cappuccinos and that kind of thing and the market is hugely saturated for these types of products, you go on Amazon and you see the top 10 guys have thousands or tens of thousands of reviews. But there's a particular angle that if you take this particular angle on this and we found a factory that can do this and you sell one of these things at a premium price, we think you can cut a little piece of the market there and just tear it up. It's kind of like the whole bully sticks example I've given in the past, there's tons of those types of opportunities as well but that takes marketing and positioning and branding and a lot of people that are selling e-commerce aren't very good at that correct. I have to agree and patience but that's why they need that coaching side or the mentoring side so all right I think there's a bunch of questions uh cows 00:52:19 just. Just a couple, yeah, um, all right, so uh, first off, do we have a cutoff time, Kevin? Are you good for time or I'm gonna, I've got uh 37 seconds, 37 seconds, I'm not good. You know what, when next time, Kevin comes on, I think we should do that Hammer song and instead of uh, what is it, it's, it's, it's 'Kevin Time', it's not 'Hammer Time'! Bradley always jokes that Manny used to say this when he was doing the podcast for Helium 10 and Bradley now. They say the same thing, like, Kevin, you're like the perfect podcast guest because I can sit down and ask one question and then I can leave. I can go drink a coffee, go to the bathroom, go watch an episode of Frasier and come back and you're still talking. 00:53:07 That's what I'm doing now. So it's all you. It's Kevin time. Started. It's Kevin Time from Rad. What do you think about $30 UPC code? The new UPC thing? Is that what you're referring to? I believe so. I think he's referring to the GS1 one where it's a little bit cheaper license. I don't see a problem with that. As long as it's GS1, you're getting it straight from GS1. I think that's what you're referring to. Yeah. Brad, if you want to clarify at all, just let us know. From Griffith Sleek, question for the king. What do you think of fulfillment networks? I'm not really familiar with it. I don't know. Norm, do you have any experience? Are they in your clients? I have clients that use it. 00:54:04 I'm not tied into it, so I can't really give too much information. I think it probably has some good potential from what I was saying, but I don't know enough about it to give you an opinion. Okay. And again, about Shopify, did Google partner with Shopify? Yes. Yeah. Yes. A big announcement this week. This is going to be big. So yeah, we'll be reporting a lot more about Google and Shopify and how that partnership is going to work. Okay, great. This is from Simon. With inventory limits causing higher UPS 3PL costs, combined with free freight spikes, weak currency, and higher material costs, will it shake out the weak sellers and leave 2022 for the serious guys? It's going to shake out some weak and some experienced sellers. 00:54:56 I think a lot of people are underestimating, especially newer people, their 3PL and their freight costs. So, yeah, I think a lot of people – but does that shake them out? No, the problem is they still compete, and they still come in, and they're still competing against you. And then they realize that they're not going to make any money, so they just try to blow the stuff out at cheaper prices. So the consumers win, but you don't win. So I see – I don't think there's going to be a – it's going to shake people out, but as soon as you shake the tree, there's some more apples growing on the tree right away. So I don't think it's going to – it's pop a mole. Okay. All right. 00:55:43 From Faye, just a clarification. What's a Prime Day pre-launch? Oh, all that is, it's nothing official, but all that is, is prior to Prime Day. So whatever date that's going to be, I start emailing my clients or my customers just early, a week early or two weeks early, just letting them know that I either have a Prime Day special going on or take advantage of a. To purchase my product before Prime Day and I can either drive them over to my Amazon listing or over to my eCom listing so all it is is just driving traffic before Prime Day to take advantage of the sale, okay uh from Dalwin. I'm moving a listing of mine to another of my Seller Central accounts; will the algorithm of that listing stay the same? 00:56:34 It should... it's not just the same as the same skew. It should carry all the history over. You might actually get a new honeymoon period on it, depending on how you make that move. But yeah, you should be okay on that. I mean, that's what the aggregators and stuff, a lot of them are doing all the time. Okay. This is kind of a comment from Kyle. I've heard post-holiday sales, at least for Christmas, are very effective. I wonder if it has to do with people using gift cards and cash they were gifted. Yeah, the day after Christmas is usually the Christmas Day, and Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are usually pretty weak. Depending on what day of the week Christmas the 26th can be Boxing Day in some places; depending on what day of the week that is, it can be hit or miss. 00:57:23 But one of the best times for me, when I'm running my own membership sites and my own websites outside of Amazon, is that the week between Christmas and New Year's was, this very, very, very good week to actually do sales and promotions, whether you're selling a course or you're selling a membership to something or you're selling a physical product. Those are very good. A lot of people always think that on the holidays at Amazon, it's fourth quarter, but it's fourth quarter and a half, because for me, into mid-January, and even late January, sales are still really strong, especially if you're selling something that's New Year's resolution-related, weight loss or you know something like that; those really boom in January, but even just normal average everyday things have strong sales. 00:58:08 end of december and into into january and some of that is exactly what you're saying it has to do with gift cards uh that people are redeeming also has to do with returns a lot of people get stuff that they're returning instead of taking the money back they're you know just picking something else that they actually want and hopefully that's something you're selling yeah and we we've seen very similar up to january 15th is usually strong sales okay great uh from amy weiss do you think the days of amazon only brands in more saturated categories are over uh for example flashlights um amazon oh you mean amazon only brands You mean brands that Amazon's owned like the hundred and something brands that Amazon's created like Amazon Basics or do you mean people who have just create a brand and they only sell it on Amazon. 00:59:01 I'm not sure what Amazon-only brands means there. But no, there's opportunity in virtually every category if you have the right product and the right angle. And money. And money, yeah. I mean, just to go find a flashlight in China and stick your name on it and throw it into the flashlight category, you're probably not going to have very good luck. But I don't know that category specifically, but there's probably an angle in there. Uh, that like we've talked about with the US Army, uh, something like that could be a great angle. Oh Amy's talking about being a one-legged stool, so if you're only selling on Amazon, oh okay, if you're only selling on Amazon um no, I think uh, yeah there's a lot of people out there that say you need to have a creative brand, you need to diversify don't put all your eggs in one basket. 00:59:53 Um, I don't know that I don't think that's true. I think it strengthens you if you can do that. If you're experienced at this game or you come from a background of that, I think it's wise to consider doing that. But for the average person who just saw Norm and Tim's Instagram post about it, here's three key things. I keep bringing that up. Amazon. And they're like, how do I do this? I want to quit my job. I've been working as a dental assistant for the last 10 years, and now I want to go out on my own and have some freedom. Someone like that should focus solely on Amazon, in my opinion. They should not be trying, let me get Amazon going and Shopify going and get my brand here and do that. 01:00:43 They need to take one thing at a time. But someone like myself or Norm or Amy, who's got some experience in this, we started new brands like I'm starting this new pet brand. Yeah, we're doing full-on branding and we're not just doing Amazon; Amazon is a major part. But we're doing wholesale retail, we're doing Shopify, we're doing sporting goods stores we're doing a bunch of stuff. But I have the experience, and you know we've got a seven-figure budget on this uh this company – not on this one product, it's not seven figures on one product. But you know the company is well-funded, and got good people, so it's set up. And like I said, we work with Scott Deets in the beginning earlier, then finish that to set everything up to sell. 01:01:25 So this company is being built with the with the sole intention of selling it in two to three Years so we made sure our operating agreement and our forecasting and everything from day one is spot on so that we can build on that and once it comes time to sell, uh, we're not having to go back and redo things or change things or alter things. That's my thought, too many people get sidetracked and stretched too thin and don't have the resources and the money to do it right. Yeah, I can't agree more. I mean, just before this phone call, I was talking to Kelsey, and you have to at least try to become the expert. Try to understand, and Amazon's a big beast, but get to understand it before you move on. 01:02:12 If you don't, and you're just taking Shopify and Walmart and this and that and every other platform, you'll never be good at any of them. There's restrictions, I mean there's downsides, there's risks. On Amazon, Amazon you're playing in their sandbox; they make their own rules; they can sink your business overnight and they suck! One of mine, I mean one of my businesses you know, um the PBE business, you know? We just recently just uh we have one of our products, are wipes. They're really good quality wipes for the hands that are made in Vietnam; isopropyl alcohol, five-star reviews, I mean real not you know, we haven't done anything, no email, follow.-ups no nothing that's we're just or totally organic a lot of five-star a five-star average on these products um been selling them since uh december on amazon just in march we made one update to the title 01:03:04 uh on and didn't put any bad keywords or anything just need to rearrange a couple words uh uh using the maldi's technique from bradley to zero in on and the listings got suspended and uh saying that these are restricted products you see the dog page these are products that we're doing you know four figures a day overnight shut down um and you know i do the appeals uh sorry it's restricted oh the concern team is looking at It though send us some documentation they come back say sorry, denied our SMEs would special merchandise evaluators or there's some term they have I have evaluated this and these are not allowed for sale. You need to provide EPA documents and this and like no, this is not EPA. 01:03:47 We've gone through this seven times before with Amazon Legal. And we sent them the letters from Amazon Legal, the letters from the State of Texas Agricultural Commission saying these are not regulated by EPA. They're for the hands. The whole night the FDA registered, still denied again. And then I finally was able to get someone involved at Amazon that I think maybe kind of helped accelerate a little bit and I didn't give up. And they just got noticed today on May 28th. These went down on May 7th or 8th, I think. Now they're back up. So, for three weeks these were down for no freaking valid reason, zero, but they've already gone through the vetting 01:04:25 process multiple times, uh, but just the algorithm just kicked them down and then the guys in India don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and so um it is that is a the danger of selling on Amazon that's happened enough times on this product that it makes you scared to even do a launch another launch or another something that we could waste all this, we could spend bunch of money doing search find buys to get the ranking and then boom overnight back down again, that is a danger of selling on Amazon, but even regardless of that danger the opportunity is immense, and so but what happens, we're on Shopify, we're on other places, we're on several other places, but the sales during those three weeks are a joke compared to what they would have been on Amazon, no matter what I do, uh, you know, so I think in that time frame we sold five units off of our Shopify site. 01:05:19 And then there's restrictions on certain products like PPE, You can't advertise that on Facebook. Google has certain restrictions on it. So you're limited in what you can do there as well. So business is a challenge. But Amazon, despite its problems and its pain-in-the-ass stuff, it's still hands down the best place to do stuff. And any business carries risk. When you were, just to give. People, an idea when you launch that product, you're doing 40 grand a day in that product. What weren't you thinking? Yeah, yeah, we were doing without even having the product with it being like a three-week shipment. So, imagine being shut down for three weeks! And so these are the things when we talk about capitalization; we never touched on this one, uh, this show, but we've talked talked about it before being properly capitalized. 01:06:10 You know, you want to make sure that you have the cash flow to maintain in case something like this happens. So, yeah, we have a seller's funding loan on this company that we took a loan in November of, uh, no, October of last year, because the sales are going; sales are going so well, we need more and, uh, so we took a seller's funding loan that has to be paid back every two weeks whether they don't care if Amazon shuts you down or not. You know, so you got to make sure that you can cover that because you personally have to guarantee those things, uh, so those Are yeah, you've got to be properly capitalized and still it causes problems, you know. 01:06:48 I've had to dump more money into this company, it's lost um, it's lost over a million dollars, you know. This has not been profitable at all, we're getting out of it but we're trying to just salvage what we have and we're still fighting with Amazon on it. But even despite all that, it doesn't sour me on Amazon. I'm like, ah, screw this Amazon. I'm just going to go start doing Shopify or drop shipping or something. No, I'm super normal. Norm asked me earlier about what am I excited about? We're launching another company that's launching initially on Amazon. And yeah, we're going to go retail and other places, but the initial feedback, the initial testing ground, the initial, let's see, make sure everybody likes this product is on Amazon. All right. 01:07:29 Next question. From many, uh, love, love, love the value so far, question where do I put a keyword that I want to be indexed for? Number one place would be the title, so number one place would be the title, second place would be your first three bullet points, uh, then uh, your search terms on the back, and then anywhere else in your listing you want to put a description? Kevin, you just said title, bullet points, search terms. Has the algorithm changed? Because it used to go over to the search terms before the bullets. I don't know. Nobody really knows what the algorithm is. In my experience, subject matter used to be more than eight seconds, but now subject matter is discontinued in a lot of places. 01:08:20 but yeah i i usually put the bullets and then the search terms but you know some people might say it's the other way around and maybe it is the other way around but i don't think there's enough difference uh the title is definitely yeah i mean there's a perfect example if you want to this is what got me in trouble with the the one that just got suspended just changing the title and because i changed the title it probably went through some sort of algorithm check again like oops this is wipes these are epa it just triggered something so that's a lesson there is like Unless there's a major advantage to be gained on an existing product, don't fuck with it. But what we were doing was actually keyword-based. 01:08:58 And so I was using a version of what Bradley did on Helium 10 called the Maldives technique. And so what I did is I took the brand analytics data and I downloaded it for the keyword. Let's just say it's hand wipes. I used the word hand sanitizer. So it's a hand sanitizer. So I punch in hand sanitizer into Brand Analytics. And I don't remember the exact results, but there's 50 some odd keywords that came up that had an SFR with the word hand sanitizer in it. And then what I did is I went over to the Chrome browser, pulled up Amazon, typed in each one of those manually, typed in each one of those 50 keywords one by one, and then ran X-ray on it. 01:09:38 So I type in hand sanitizer gel, for example, and results would come up. I hit X-ray from Helium 10. And then on X-ray, there's a filter there where you can filter keywords in the title. So I would hit that little filter, and I would type in 'hand sanitizer gel', whatever the keyword is that I just searched for, and have it filter and show me all the ones on page one that have that exact phrase in their title. So like hand sanitizer gel exactly in their title. And it would come back, and that one probably, you know, 80% of them did. I'm like, okay, that's a pretty competitive keyword. I just kept doing that all the way down to SFRs. 01:10:17 I get down to an SFR or something, an SFR of, I don't know, $150,000, which is decent search volume. It's not tremendous, but it's decent enough. It's got 150,000 search volume, and it's hand sanitizer, mini hand sanitizer party favors, for example. Mini hand sanitizer party favors. So it's little small bottles that people can throw as a party favor or something for getting back together parties or in the school parties or whatever. That keyword didn't exist a year ago. But now it's an SFR. And so I do that one, a whole bunch of results come up for all these little small bottles. But then I do the x-ray trick where I type in an x-ray and do the filter by title. 01:10:56 I think it's one or two had that exact phrase in their title of all 60 of them or whatever. I'm like, that's an opportunity. I'm on page three or four for that keyword right now. Let me do a test. And when we take that phrase, change my title from now, it says mini hand sanitizer. And let's just add many hand sanitizer, add the word party favors to it and put it in my title and see what happens. And then run some PPC on that exact phrase too. I did that, made the change, ran some PPC, got a couple sales. I went from page three to page one in three days with only like three sales on 150,000 SFR keyword, which corresponds to what's that two or three, 5,000 searches a month. 01:11:40 It's not huge, but it's enough. Went to page one just by having that exact phrase. That's the importance back when that guy's question or person's question of where those keywords go. And that's an opportunity if you want to do that and look for some of the holes on Amazon, that little trick could actually take a product. We're talking about a thousand dollar, $1,000 to $2,000 product that Norm was talking about earlier and double the sales to 4,000. Doing something like that might be your ticket. Very good. Awesome. Okay. So one thing we haven't mentioned is the Wheel of Kelsey today. So running at the end of the podcast, but anyways, if you're interested in the Wheel of Kelsey, I was talking to AFA Lobby a little earlier today, and he is going to be giving away a 30-minute consult on product innovation. 01:12:37 So if you have any. Thoughts of innovating your product. Kevin is a huge product innovator. I've mentioned it a million times on this podcast about some of the things that he's done to just make changes so it's not the same flashlight that you're selling. So if you're interested in having and spending 30 minutes with Afolabi, just enter Wheel of Kelsey and he'll spend some time checking it out if you have questions, even if you don't have a product. He'll be helping you out, trying to figure out what's the best way to innovate your product. Okay, so Wheel of Kelsey, if you tag two people, you'll get entered twice. Okay, and making sure everyone knows it's not Kevin King's consultation, it's off the lobby. So just be aware. 01:13:28 Okay, from Adriana, what do you guys recommend to find a good? Coaching program, I know many offer a community Facebook groups or group sessions, but I think the one-on-one coaching is what I can't what can help sell new sellers the most, yeah it's great, perfect balance, yeah it's great if you have someone that can actually answer your questions directly, um or I can coach you. Uh, there's there's tons of them out there, you just gotta find something that you're you're familiar with. I know uh Norm, you and Tim kind of do a little bit of that with your private label legion. I know Brandon Young has a group where he does some of that with the Freedom Ticket. I don't do one-on-one. Adrian, I wouldn't get on the phone directly with you if that's what you're looking for. 01:14:15 I just don't have time. But I do a weekly Q &A call for all the Freedom Ticket students who are in the Freedom Ticket at Helium 10 if you have the Freedom Ticket Extra. There's a small monthly charge for that. But it’s about an hour to two hours every Monday, um, where it’s just something like this where everybody wants to ask questions and we stay until all the questions are answered; nobody gets skipped, no questions get skipped. Um, so that that's one way there’s other people I see posting on Facebook who offer these types of things, Amy, Amy here, I think that's on here, does it? There’s a lot of people, some of them know what they’re doing, some of them aren’t worth um, so um, I guess you can take some recommendations from some people, call them, see who you’re comfortable with. 01:15:04 Don’t commit to something long-term if you don’t have to. And see if you’re comfortable with them. See if they’re giving you value. If they’re giving you value, then that’s great. And it’s worth the value in what you’re spending. That can definitely be good. Yeah. Sharron also, Sharron Evan, she's also into the coaching side. With what we're doing, we don't have, it's hard to take on a one-to-one. And that's why, like for Tim and I, we put on the group mentoring. So it's a group environment where you can ask your questions and get it done, just like what Kevin's doing. But one-on-one is very hard to do. It's all about time. And if you have 10 clients, how do you service those clients or 20 clients? 01:15:53 So anyways, what you're saying, Kevin, is 100%. Make sure your personality fits into the group. If it's a group mentoring style program or with the coach, make sure you listen because you could be spending a lot of money if you don't know that personality of the coach, if you don't get along. So it's important to go and do some research. I mean, the prices are all over the range for it. I tried it a few years ago because I kept getting asked. And I still check my DMs right now. There's probably a bunch in there. I'm not on LinkedIn. That's one of the reasons because too many people reach out. I thought you blocked me. You have blocked me. I'm tired of you sending me pictures of yourself. 01:16:46 but anyway uh yeah i was charging a thousand dollars an hour and people were paying it but it's still i i had to look at my time because usually i felt bad just doing an hour because i want to help the people so it's an hour and a half two hours three hours and and and then it you know they always have follow-up questions or have additional things and there's a responsibility there so it's like do i want to make that my business or do i want to do other things what they're more scalable so for some people that makes it makes perfect sense let's make coaching my business and that's what i'm 01:17:18 going to do and that's how i'm going to pay my bills and i'll sell a little bit of stuff on the side but for me but problem with the coaching is you can't sell that you you're working you're you're working for your money you're you're trading hours uh you're trading hours for dollars um versus if i go and i build a business you know like this pet business that we're talking about and amazon is running it 24 7 for me and shipping and doing everything and all i gotta do is spend that same three hours that I would have been talking to someone for a week on the phone and doing something on Amazon, can I make more than $3 ,000 for those same three hours? 01:17:53 And the answer is unemphatically yes. So I'm better off taking that time and doing three hours of something on Amazon that's going to make me, for those three hours of whatever, you know, the keyword thing that I just gave an example, you know, that's going to make me over time, maybe this year make me an extra $20,000 this year in sales. But when I go to sell a company on top of three years from now, it's going to be another $50,000 in sales price. That's 70,000, $80,000 instead of $3,000. That's where it's better. So that's how I look at it. And, you know, I have eight different businesses that I'm involved in. So that's I have to delegate my time and I work smartly. 01:18:34 And so that's that's that's how I approach it. And so someone else, you know. Has that time and that's what they they want to do; I love doing it, don't get me wrong, that's why I'm doing this with Norm. I love answering the stuff, but uh, I have to; I'd rather just give it away for free, uh, for a little while, uh, and then have that other commitment right okay next question okay uh let's see from Nathan uh would Kevin ever offer an influencer uh Joe Rogan deal which uh deal where the influencer gets a percentage of profits and even owns part of your company potentially yeah if it's the right influencer yeah absolutely; Joe Martin was on, he's the guy from BoxyCharm. He teamed up with a bunch of celebrity influencers. 01:19:24 Also, we had Ruby Mendez on. They've teamed up with Snow, with Conor McGregor, and a bunch of them. Joe Martin just sold his company for $500 million to Etsy. Teaming up with influencers can be major. Yeah, you see that sometimes on Shark Tank. I don't know if any of you people watch Shark Tank. You'll see these people come in there, and they're like, 'You give me $100,000 for 5% of my company', and then the shark's like, 'Well, no, I'll give you the $100,000, but I want 50% of your company or 25% of your company.' And they're like, 'No, no, I just can't give away that much. This is my baby. I've got too much work in this.' A lot of times that's stupid. 01:20:12 So the right influencer. Giving them a bigger piece or getting them involved can make everybody a lot more money. Okay. Let's see. There's one about your email platforms you use from Andrew. We got five or six still, but we can end it. Do you have a number in mind? 130. Okay. All right. From Andrew Smith. Kevin, what is your email automation platform of choice? Actually, I use right now I use something called FormGit. It's an Indian-based company. It's like 50 bucks a month. I know MailChimp is another one, but I use actually FormGit for all my email automation. I've never heard of it. Most people haven't. From Git, they have a section that's called MailGit. A get um that's what I use um; it's not the most sophisticated, you know, with all the bells and whistles that some of the others have, but it it does what I need to do what makes it 50 a month, like Mailchimp is free or they have a 29 version or you know higher; um, I don't... 01:21:32 You get all these things. You get form builders. You get mail. It's a whole pack. It's a whole suite. It's kind of eight and ten. It's not just mail. And I don't use a lot of the other stuff. I use the mail get. But one of the things that I like is I can use – there's some advantages to it on some of the SMTP and SES stuff that I can do that some other tools don't have. And I'm not as limited to. All right. Okay. Maybe one more question. Let's see. Okay, from Adriana. Our product suffered the Amazon glitch from a couple of weeks ago, and we haven't got our ranking back on all keywords and lost index on money. What would you recommend? Yeah, I know some people took advantage of that. 01:22:21 I think Leo and Destiny from Better AMS are talking about They took advantage of this glitch and actually raised their PPC during that time, and actually he would get a lot of ranking when it came back. But, yeah, so I don't have an exact answer for you. If you lost your ranking, it could have been someone else took advantage of that time frame, like Leo and Destiny, where they pumped up their volume and kind of overbeat you. But I don't know. What would you say they should do, Norm? That's a tough one. I mean, you might want to play around with your title. It is tough because there's different ways that you can do it. Some people take advantage of putting out rebates or search find buy, throwing them against the keyword. 01:23:18 You might want to just go back, play around with the PPC, see if you can do something there. But one of the things you might want to check is to see if your bloody word is indexed, so we found that some of the rankings didn't come back; they weren't indexed, so we had to play around with it again in the listing to get them to to index properly. Didn't happen very often, but we did see it on a rare occasion. But yeah, I don't know that that's all I have to say about that one. Okay. So yeah, we can start into the Wheel of Kelsey if you want. Here we go. Yeah. Okay. Alright. So get ready. Alright. So thank you everyone who entered the contest. 01:24:20 Of course, if we missed any questions, always add it into our Facebook group-Norm Amazon FBA and E-commerce collective, and we highly recommend the old client, basically our plans. Um, let's go three, two, one is that a leg, no next stuff, oh all right, Nick! Good job, Nick. All right. So, that's the 30-minute consultation with Afolabi from Pony Worldwide. And by the way, Afolabi is doing his lives on, what are they? Wednesday mornings! It's Wednesday mornings at 10 a. m., and they're biweekly, so every two weeks. He's doing a good job at that. Yeah, he does great. Have you ever seen Afolabi talk or speak? Um, yeah, yeah, he did a like he's just starting to do the Amazon lives; he's doing a good job, cool! So, okay, so Nick... 01:25:24 uh, I think you've won before, so just reach out to Kelsey at k@lunchwithnorm. Come, oh we are having a little bit of problem I don't know what it is with our email server we might have to send it to what address, Kels? Receiving emails haven't been an issue so far. It's more just guests. Yeah. Like sending stuff to Kevin. Yeah, exactly. All right. I think I've bombarded Kevin with some emails this week. All right. So, Mr. King. Thank you for being on. I look so forward to shooting the shit with you. Yeah. I really look forward every month to get on and just talk with you. Hopefully July, we actually get to go and look at beard oil. Okay. Ah, yeah. Cognac and Cuban cigars. You just got to have that smell, don't you? 01:26:28 I'll do that for your head polish. Yeah, yeah. So I'll do this and then I'll get some head polish wax or whatever that's exact same. We got to match. That's right. All right, sir. Come out when we're having a Coke Zero and a cigar. That would be awesome. All right. We will see you later, Kevin. Thank you again for coming on. No problem. Take care. All right everybody, I hope you had a good time, I mean Kevin always comes on and drops tons of information, but uh anyways, we'll re-listen if you're there, some of the things he was talking about, the uh analytics that you might want to you know re-listen and just figure out you know what he's doing, he knows his stuff. 01:27:11 But one of the things I just want to say before we close off, he tries, he doesn't get like it's not a give up pro, he keeps going, he keeps going if he gets kicked between the legs, he gets back up and he he always takes action and I think that's so important is that you take action if you hear something on this podcast, take action. So with that being said, thank you for coming on listening spending your time with us today, Kelsey do you have anything to close out uh yeah actually this, I guess May 31st will be the episode, but we started this podcast, We started doing our first Facebook Live on May 30th, I remember. So it's almost been a full year. 01:27:58 So just looking over the Facebook group that has happened, I just want to say thank you to everyone that has joined us on this journey. It's been a little crazy. We didn't know what to expect when we were starting this. And yeah, if you guys want to go back to the first episode and see what we did, please check it out. Highly recommend it. But yeah, just want to say thank you to everyone that's joined us in the Spirit Nation. Also, we're doing this Patreon, which is a monthly subscription service. It's starting June 1st. This is something where we give you bonus content, kind of small group lessons. Consultation giveaways, exclusive deals, free services, bonus Wheel of Kelsey. There's a whole bunch of good stuff. We're doing AMAs. 01:28:45 I'm even doing some social media AMAs and hot seats, stuff like that. So definitely go check that out. Just patreon. com/slash/ lunch with Norm. And yeah, have a fantastic Memorial Day weekend to our American friends in the South. And yeah, have a fantastic weekend. All right. And if you want to check out more about Kevin King and his life, which is absolutely amazing, go to I Know This Guy, the I Know This Guy podcast, and you will be amazed. He's had such an incredible life. All right. So please join us every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you, everybody. We appreciate you being part of this community. We couldn't be doing this without you. And enjoy the rest of your day. Enjoy your weekend and happy Memorial Day.