Amazon Marketing Hacks Part 1 with Kevin King and Danny McMillan

Amazon Marketing Hacks Part 1 with Kevin King and Danny McMillan 00:00:00 Hey guys, welcome back to Seller Sessions. This week we bring in Kevin King. How are you doing, Kevin? I'm good. How are you doing, Danny? Yeah, good. What have you been up to this year? Do you want to give a little bit of background on what's been going on for you? It's been a busy year, man, both business and personal. My Amazon business is going strong, doing the training with the Illuminati Mastermind, and I want to thank you for coming on. You were a guest and had a really good, hit presentation that people really love. Launched a course called Freedom Ticket for new people. Personally, I got married to a big wedding down in Columbia, so getting used to the married life now with having someone else in the house all the time. 00:00:43 Unfortunately, she's always saying, 'Go work, go work, go make money, go make money.' So that's a good thing. But yeah, it's been busy, man. It's been busy. Excellent. Now, it's good when you can tie in both where you get your personal and your business life. They all kind of come together. And of course, we're now in Q4 as well, aren't we? That's right. It's Q4 time. So this is the money-making season. I have another business that's besides, I mean, selling Amazon, but also selling Walmart and eBay and a few other places, my own site. But this time of year, I've been doing this for almost 20 years. I have a calendar business. It's a seasonal. 00:01:18 calendar business and I specialize in a specific subject and we have the world's largest selection of that type of wall calendar you know we bring them in from Europe we bring them in from Asia from from Australia and so I have a that keeps me busy as well we do A good business off of that this time of year. Yeah. Now, I have a seasonal business offline as well. But the good thing is it's this time it quietens down. So December and January is very quiet. So it's nice to flip things over. So it's much easier to manage with everything going on, especially with Q4. Okay. So let's get into it. So today we're going to be speaking about a few hacks that have worked for you over the last year or so. 00:01:58 So there's a few here. So let's start with number one. What is hack number one? Yeah, what I want to share with everybody today, Danny, is some practical stuff that hopefully they can take away and actually put into use, one or two of these. These come from a PDF I have called 99 Hacks, and these are all things that I personally have used in my business that have made a difference. But the first one that I just wanted to share with that a lot of people may not realize is that when you're filling out your product listing on Amazon and you go into Seller Central into your back end, a lot of people always say fill in the keyword field. 00:02:33 And as we know now, it's 250 bytes or 250 characters that you can put in there, which is kind of limiting in some cases. But what a lot of people don't realize is there's a lot of other fields that you can fill out. For instance, the fabric field. In a lot of categories, you can actually get a sixth bullet point if you put something in that field. And it gets indexed. But another one that doesn't show up on the main page, it gets heavily indexed is the subject matter field. There's something called subject matter. There's another one called platinum keywords. You just want to leave that one blank. That's a special one for just a handful of people. But the subject matter field, there's five different ones there. 00:03:09 And what I like to do is actually take my best keyword phrases. Even if I've used those words in the title or in the bullet points or whatever, I'll repeat them and I'll put them in that subject matter field. And I think it's 50 characters per field and there's five fields. So I'll typically put If I'm selling a makeup brush, I'll put makeup brush set, makeup brushes, or whatever. What are the top keywords? 10 or so keywords, 15 I'm targeting, and fill that out in there. I found that that helps me on the PPC matching. It tells Amazon that these phrases in this phrase order are important. That way, I can use those 250 bytes for all the other random misspellings and Spanish keywords and all the other random stuff. 00:03:54 You can get a little extra bang for the buck by doing that excellently so; if someone wants to test that, how would they know that they're going about the right way? So question number one on that subject and number two uh is this available for all categories or it's only certain categories you worked on or do you know if the this whole subject matter works across multiple I mean, I sell in five different categories and it's available on all five of those; now I know there's twenty-some odd categories on Amazon so i I can't tell you absolutely it works in every single one, but it works in all five that I sell in. So, I believe it works in the vast majority, if not all. 00:04:30 The one that doesn't is the fabric type; that one is certain ones that won't show up in. You don't even have that option. It's just the subject matter. I mean, you can test it. There's the way to test whether you're indexed or not for something. So, you can put something in the subject matter field to know if you did it right. Put some random thing in there, like zebras run fast or whatever. And just see if it indexed and then wait 15 to 30 minutes and go type in your ASIN and zebras run fast and see if that shows up as some random thing. And see if that shows up and then you know, okay, it's indexing for me. Then you can go back, take out zebras run fast and put in the real data. 00:05:11 That's a way you can double check to see if it's working for you or not. Perfect. I mean, I don't want to come off subject too much but we there's always that whole debate around the back end search terms and all the changes and stuff one of the things this is very antidotal by the way i've done it with reverse look up on about 15 20 aces and what i did notice of the people that knew what they were doing in terms of ranking in different marketplaces that appear in the in like positions one, two, and three. I did notice that most of those were using the backend in a waterfall aspect in terms of putting their keyword phrase, one phrase per line. 00:05:48 They seem to be big sellers, very much antidotal, very much against everything that's, you know, what people talk about. What is your take on that? Do you just use your 250 characters now for misspellings and Spanish in the US or? Yeah, I've gone all over the place. And as you said, you know, there's different gurus out there and different Facebook groups and different things that say different things. And it constantly changes. And I, you know, there's these services that came out a few months ago where you could get the backend keywords for your competitors' listings. And I really didn't care what my competitors list. I think I do pretty good research. So I didn't really give a rat's ass what my backend, the keywords are on my backend or my competitors really care less. 00:06:28 What I cared about was like exactly what you said. What are the top sellers doing? The commas matter, dude. Spaces matter to what are they doing? And so I picked like 50 different, you know, I want to see Amazon listings, the ones that are sold by Amazon, ones that are Amazon basics, ones that are sold by big sellers across the whole gamut. And I sent those to one of these guys and said, give me the data back. And I saw the similar thing that this-the spamming the back end keywords is not necessarily the best way to go. Most of the big sellers were actually just putting a few things back there. And some of them had commas, some of them had semicolons, some of them had spaces. 00:07:06 But there seemed to be something in common with a lot of the big sellers. They weren’t really filling that, for the most part, they were not filling that stuff in completely. And it’s more like exactly what you said, like a cascade. And so maybe there’s some credence to the fact that if you only put a few things back there, maybe Amazon thinks they’re more important. I don’t know that. There could be something to that, well, the fact is you just brought up the subject matters it just frees up that uh aspect so if you wanted to put those phrases in the subject matter now and then you can use misspellings and and say um spanish uh spellings for your keywords on the back end then that actually gives you a bit more of an adjustment because I think one thing I sorry that's exactly what I do yeah Yeah, no, that makes total sense because my thing is as well is the 80-20 rule. 00:07:56 We're on Amazon and the amount of times that the back-end search terms have changed. I mean, when I started on Amazon, I think it was 1,000 originally and then it went up to 5,000. Then it went back down. 500 kilobytes in Japan, it's 250 in most cases rest of the world, and I'm thinking we go up down up down up that indexing non-indexing it's like sometimes you want to just get on and do other stuff that you so I like the idea of if you are cohesive you use the under the limit then that way if any changes happen you haven't got to do it on the tunnel listings exactly exactly okay, so hack number two. Sure. Another good hack to use is let's talk about the one on price. 00:08:43 A lot of people are always like, how do I price my product? Do I put it at $27. 99 or do I put it at $27. 88 or do I put it at $29. 20 or do I put it 1% below the lowest price guy or what do I do? We could sit here and do a whole hour presentation on the psychology of pricing. Exactly. But the one I just want to share quickly here is that the cents here in the U. S. market that you end your pricing in can make a difference. Some people have done several studies on this and tested all kinds of pricing. And what they found in conversion, the cents, the ones that seem to be the best and in the best order, is 45 cents seems to be the best. 00:09:32 0 . 45 psychologically for whatever reason it has a higher conversion rate than 50 cents and then 89 and then 90 then 95 and then 99 so if you so it's 45 cents typically has the best conversion, 50 cents then 89 to 90 to 95 to 99 there's something in the mind that triggers when something is 27 45 people say okay it's 27 when it's $27. 99 they're like okay it's 28 dollars But so psychologically, you might test that. You know, if you're using one of these programs, I don't know, you talk about some of your other sessions, test it and see if it works for you. But it may actually work. Now, if you want to make your product look more expensive, you put $. 00. 00:10:17 So if you're actually comparing yourself to somebody, let's say you're comparing your price, you know, maybe in an email mark that you're sending out or in your Facebook ads or whatever, and you want to make the other guy look more expensive, say his price is $, you say you're the exact same price. Say you're both selling for a product for, I don't know, $49. If you show his price is $49. 00 and you show your price is just $49, leave out the period and the $00, you look cheaper. Even though you're the exact same price, psychologically on the mind, it'll trick you. So that's why you see in high-end restaurants or high-end things where they want you to look expensive, a lot of times they will put the . 00:10:57 00 to make it look more expensive. If they don't want you to feel as expensive, they might leave the . 00 off. So there's a lot to that, but you might try those tactics and you might find some success with that. Yeah, definitely. Also, there's an aspect sometimes of the cultural thing. When we launched into Japan, we got it wrong. We're following the market in terms of pricing. With the product we had, we priced it at $20. 88. And then I spoke to a Japanese person, and they said, no, no, no, what you're doing is you're following what the Chinese are doing. And apparently, eight are lucky for the Chinese, but it doesn't bode well for the Japanese. But I'm thinking, hold on, you've got the three market leaders that we're following. 00:11:39 And I've had to change that by recommendation because apparently it's lucky for the Chinese, but it's unnerving, it's jarring for the Japanese for some reason. So that's an interesting one. Number three, what we got hack-wise. Sure. Another one I think a lot of people don't know about is anything that's brought into the United States is actually public information. When you import or export from the U. S., it's public information. I had this happen to me years ago when I imported some furniture from Fiji. And, you know, one day I was just typing my name in to see, you know, what came up on me. And up comes this import record, this furniture that I imported in the early 90s or something like that. I'm like, what the hell? 00:12:26 Why is this on Google? But a lot of people don't realize you can use this to your advantage in your Amazon business if you're selling in the U. S. There's paid services out there like PortExaminer. com and Pangea. com that will, for a fee, will give you all kinds of data on what's being imported into the U. S. and what's being exported. And there's another one that actually lets you do some free searching. They have a paid aspect to it, but you can actually go and do a free bit of searching. It's called USAimportdata. com. USAimportdata. com. And it's a great way to source products. Not only, you know, instead of using Alibaba or global sources, which are good sites and good places, but if you say your competitor's been killing it and you're like, what's his factory? 00:13:12 Where's he getting his stuff? You can go to USAimportdata. com and you can do some searches. And you can actually find out exactly his factory, who his trading company is, how many he's bringing in, how often, what port. And you can reverse engineer that, and you can use that. And maybe you want to go to that factory and say, hey, I want to do the same thing, but I want to change it a little bit. And you know that we are making it. And rather than ordering samples from the factory and having to pay $50 or $100 for a sample. You can go ahead and order a sample from the U. S. You're going to get a random sample. 00:13:48 It's not the stellar, pristine sample that they picked out of the box of 1,000 and dusted everything off and carefully claimed it to send to you. It's going to be the best sample. You're going to get a random sample of their product from Amazon in the U. S. on your Prime account in two days or a day or whatever. And you can see the quality of what the factory's doing. And then you can go straight to that factory and use them. And you can do it on other competitors. You can do it to see how much they're really bringing in. And you can get a lot of really cool data by using the site. And it's a great way to source as well versus just using Alibaba or some of the other places. 00:14:24 Yeah, no, that makes total sense. I mean, some of the services that you can look up, the shipment IDs and stuff, I mean, they're like $100 a month or so, aren't they? So it's good to know this. Some of them are a little more. Some of them are, yeah, $100, $300, $1,000. But, yeah. Try USA import data and just play around over there. I think they have stuff from India and China. You can actually designate the country where it's coming from. I use it quite a bit to do some spying on the competition. Excellent. Number four. What have we got number four? Sure. Another good hack is a lot of people always are wondering how to get video on their listing. 00:15:02 And now Amazon is going to be, by the time this comes out, they may have already done this. They're saying they're going to do it any day now. Brand registered people are going to be able to actually have a video show up in the images. You know those seven images that show up on most listings? The bottom one's going to be a video, right now. You have to have a vendor account to actually get that or know someone that has a vendor account that can kind of slide you in through their account; but There's there's another way to get it, that becomes reality for brand registered or if you're not brand registered. You can still get a video on your listing. 00:15:35 You just can't get it in the So it's seven places, but you can get it in the video shorts section, right below, which doesn't make that big a deal on a desktop, but it's huge on mobile because it shows up very prominently on your listing on mobile. And as most people have heard, especially like right now in the fourth quarter, 70% or more of the searches are starting on mobile. And so if you can get a video of your product, maybe it's an influencer talking about it, maybe it's a video you have made. Maybe it's a comparison, a box opening, showing yours versus a competition, whatever it may be. But there's several services out there that do this, but the one that I like to use is called GenVideo. 00:16:12 It's Gen, G-E-N, dot video. Not GenVideo . com, but Gen . video. And they work just like a same bit in some of these others where you can actually don't have a video made. I think they start at like 500 bucks. But you can actually have an influencer make a video for you according to your specs. They'll put it on their YouTube channel, promote your Amazon page and so forth. But you don't have to use that aspect of it. The beauty of it is if you already have a video, maybe you've reached out to influencers or you're a good video maker or your wife or your girlfriend or whatever made a great video. You can take that video that you already have, and I think they charge like a $29 fee per month, and you can upload 10 or 20 videos to your ASINs on Amazon using a video that you already have. 00:16:58 And you can get that in that video short spot, and that can make a difference in your conversions. And so a lot of people don't realize that. They think they have to spend a lot of money to get a video on there, but it's a service, and you can't go directly to Amazon. This is totally TOS. All people always ask is this within the TOS. It is. They have a special arrangement with Amazon. They're one of a few companies that do, because Amazon doesn't want to vet these videos. They don't want to have to sit there. So they hire outside companies that basically give them access and they vet them for them. But it's a great way to do it. 00:17:33 And if you're worried about the desktop, you can put even one of your images, like say the seventh image, you can put a little screenshot, a little screen grab of the video, you know, with a little play sign, say. For more information, look below in the video shorts and watch the video about this product or something to that effect just to make sure people don't miss it. I've been doing that for over a year, and I think it's paying off. It's not going to take your sales from 10 to 100, but it might give you an extra sale or two a day. An extra sale or two a day is worth the time and effort in most cases. 00:18:06 Definitely, because I think some companies out there, I think they charge $300 to get you onto the listing without naming names of the company. And you've also got the aspect that if you've got an influencer that you can work with, like you just said, $500. So, for someone to make the video for you to your spec, even if they're not a big influencer, but your goal is to get it on your Amazon listing. It's not a bad spend, is it really? In terms of, no, no, it's, it's not. I mean, cause you can get in the beauty. If you pick the, the influencer, right. You can spend a lot more than that. A big influence is going to charge you a lot more than that. Yeah. 00:18:40 But you can even go to a service like FameBit and you can get people in there for a hundred bucks that are up and coming influencers and take that video and then use it in your ad. You know, if you're, if you're, if you're pinching your pennies and have them upload it or, but yeah, I do a lot on influencer marketing and if it's done right, you gotta be careful. Some influencers are not worth a dime. They're not even worth giving your product to for free. The hassle of sending it to them for free. You gotta be careful. There's metrics you gotta look at. That's a whole nother discussion on how to evaluate an influencer and make sure their audience is real and not fake. 00:19:12 And there's a lot of stuff there, but it could be very powerful. Excellent. Well, look, let's leave it there. And then guys will come back in part two next week. Again, Kevin, thank you for your time. Just before you go, if anyone misses the part two, how can they reach out to you and what's going on with you at the moment in terms of events and stuff? Sure. The Illuminati Mastermind, which is our mastermind for high-end sellers. You need to be doing it $25,000 a month or more. We have a big event in Kauai, Hawaii in January. You can get information on that at illuminatimastermind. com/forward/slash/ live, L-I-V-E. You can reach out to me. You can learn more at thefreedomticket. com. Of course, for people there. Or my Facebook is amzmarketer.com. You can like me there, and I usually put all the podcasts and different videos and stuff I'm on there, so you can check that out. Excellent. Guys, again, thank you so much for your time. Kevin, thanks for your time, and I look forward to chatting with you next week. All right, great. We'll see you then.