Amazon Marketing Hacks Part 2 With Kevin King and Danny McMillan

Amazon Marketing Hacks Part 2 With Kevin King and Danny McMillan 00:00:02 Hey guys, welcome back to part two with Kevin King. Hey Kevin, how are you? I'm good, Danny. Glad to be back. Excellent. All right, so we're going to continue on from the first four hacks. We're going to move into the next four. So what is hack number five? Yeah, I hope from last week's you guys were able to maybe pick one or two of those and be able to use those hacks. So I've got four more for you. These actually come from my 99Hacks PDF that I give out for people that take my Freedom Ticket course. So I've handpicked some of these just for you guys that I've never actually shared before. So you're getting these. It's the first time outside of that PDF I've ever given them to anybody, no podcast or anything. 00:00:44 So, yeah, the next one, I get asked all the time: Which keyword tools should you use, or do I use? And there's tons of them out there. And I'm one of these guys that I don't like to listen to what people say. I like to go see things for myself. So I've wasted thousands and thousands of dollars trying every piece of software out there. And I like to actually validate the data. I trust but verify. So, you know, some of these people making some software are really talented people, and others are-for lack of a better word, they're hacks. You know, they just have cobbled something together, and it's not good. And so the two tools that I use for all – the only two tools that I use at this point for keyword research is the free tool that I use is Sonar. 00:01:31 It's sonar-tool. com, S-O-N-A-R-tool. com. That's the best free tool that I've found. It's the most accurate. It gives you little bars like how popular something is. And the Chrome extension actually will put it up on the page for you as you're doing searches and you're doing your product investigations. So I find that's a good one to get a really good eyeball and really good test. I used to use AMS data. I have an AMS, Amazon Marketing Services account, and you can go in there and you can get that. It'll tell you very low, medium, low, medium, and high. And I used to use that as a barometer as well. It's kind of similar to the bars on Sonar. But I found that that can be influenced sometimes. 00:02:11 Some of these Chinese hackers and some of these Pakistani guys and some of these people that are running bots and things can drastically influence those numbers to where they're not so real. So I've quit using that. So just to back up there, when you say that, is that they're sending bots traffic to Amazon based on those keywords, which is influencing and inflating is what you're saying? What people do is they actually will try to influence the suggested search box to actually try to get their brand name or certain keywords to come up higher in suggested search. There's black hat methods that you can use to actually influence that. That's basically the data that Amazon is using, and AMS was choosing that medium, low, and high. 00:02:57 I've noticed different ways that I can say exactly I don't do myself, but I've noticed I have access to some stuff where I've seen that it's You know a keyword can come out of nowhere and all of a sudden say it's high when there's like ten people in the world searching for that keyword, but Amazon a mess will say it's it's a high-value keyword or whatever. I buy them keywords. It's it's not it's because something's happening. So the tool that I use is relatively new is from Helium 10, it's their Cerebro tool. And I find it to be the most accurate, hands down, when comparing it to my PPC data, when comparing it to all the other data. 00:03:36 I'm using market intelligence and some of the other stuff to actually, you know, when I'm doing my research, it's pretty close to being spot on. Now, its data is going to be different than, say, market some of the other tools, you know, the keyword inspectors and the other big ones that other people know. And sometimes you may be like merchant words. Merchant words may say something is 400,000 searches and Cerebro may say, no, it's 30,000. And you're like, wait a second, this can't be right. I would trust Cerebro before I would trust anybody else because most of these people are just, they're straight up guessing and they're using Google data. But I know the guys at Cerebro have a special way that they're calculating this and none of them are exactly right. 00:04:26 It's just like none of the other tools are, you know, the Jungle Scout estimators and all those others, Unicorn Smashers, those are all just estimates as well. But this one I find to be by far the most accurate. And I've noticed that when I base my decisions on that data, I get far better results. So those are the two that I would recommend you pay the most attention to. If you're going to pay for one, use the Cerebro. If you're going to want a free one, use the Sonar or use them like I do together. I tell you what, the Sonar is a lifesaver because we had friends from Celix on the show a few months back and we covered the tool. 00:05:01 I was impressed with it, not only because it's free and it's always good because obviously Celix is a paid version in terms of being a software, you know. But for European marketplaces, for multi-language PPC research, it's invaluable, you know, because even down to like. The ability to click on related images because, obviously, you've got different contexts to the language and across multiple languages, there's dialect, there's all these different things. I mean, I only speak one language, but I know that there are complications throughout the languages. The fact that you can click on images that relate to those keywords that it starts to give some semblance there so that you can really dig in and find out whether the product that you've just launched in say the UK is that whether you can replicate this across Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. 00:05:53 So for me, it's invaluable. The one tip. You're talking about the visual tool there that they have. Yeah. They've got a visual. Yeah. It's really good. Yeah. It's really good. Yeah. The one thing I would say about it. For four people, it is that for for some reason it depends on your version of Excel and everything when you download the data you get all different weird characters and stuff in there but when I spoke to friends if you import it um nine times out of ten it will work out exactly what it was what it is is when you download the file bring it into Google Docs because that will recognize the file instantly without and changing the UTC code or whatever it is Or I think he uses a colon so when you bring the data in You can set it up to look like it's via colon and then it brings down the data. 00:06:45 So that's the only problem I found with the tool but it's a phenomenal tool and I use it all the time Yeah that's good to know And the Cerebro tool I mean you can download I guess with it as well and they give you the exact search volume and the broad search volume So you can actually do a lot of extra data mining and kind of really play with to see you know what you can do with those two are very similar or if there's a big disparity between them it gives you different thoughts and processes and different opportunities that you can go after yeah you're setting up your listing or you're doing your product research so while we've got you on this subject and you're like me you you you get dirty with the data you go deep with stuff maybe to to the extreme i've got to a stage now personally and and i and i've had people like 00:07:34 I've had on the show, like Dan Little has convinced me of this is going for the 80, 20 rule with stuff. It's like, I could spend days compiling spreadsheets for all of this data. And ultimately at the end of the day, there's probably two or three real, real, real main keywords that are going to be your sellers. Cause it's like rising tides. Yeah. Well, not always though, Danny, not to interrupt you on that, but That can be the case, but what I like to do, and this could be a whole long discussion, but what I like to do when I'm doing my keyword research is I like to find out what's driving the sales. If you go and you type in 'makeup brush' on Jungle Scout or Market Intelligence or Unicorn Smasher, and up comes the top 10, 20 sellers or whatever, and it tells you that this guy is selling 1,000 a month, well, you don't know. 00:08:23 That's how he's ranking on makeup brush, but 1,000 sales aren't coming off the word 'makeup brush', most likely. There may be one sale coming off the board maker, but actually there may be a hundred. So I like to take that a lot deeper and find out using a combination of tools that market intelligence, one of them in Cerebro and some others, and see where that's actually coming from and try to pick five or ten. What I've found a lot of times, and I have a product right now, I have an ab roller as one of my products. People don't like to say their products, but I have an AB roller that I've been selling for two and a half years. That does very, very well for me. 00:09:00 And for the word 'AB roller', which is the top keyword in that space, for describing that product, I'm not on page one or page two. But I sell 25 to 30 units a day at a high price point. You know, it's not a runaway hit, but my price is double everybody else in the space, double everybody else. I sell 25 to 30 a day. And it's not coming off those main keywords. There's a lot of times you can find these middle range keywords that people ignore. And you put enough of those together. If you can find five or ten of those using these keyword tools and target those, it's much easier to rank for them. It's much easier to compete. 00:09:37 And rather than going after these top two or three that everybody else is all going after because they have the big numbers. Yeah. No, that's a fair point. I mean, when I was saying that, my point of it was that, you do have the main two or three keywords. And if you know how to rank and you know how to drive external traffic and do giveaways, but like you said, you can't make things stick. There's two elements there as well. You could go after two or three keywords, use a rotating URL storefront, and then you could rank within a few days. Now, a couple of things that can fall by the wayside. Either your product is not resonating with the audience. That could be the product itself, the image, or the price, which means you'll slip down the rankings. 00:10:19 Or your product doesn't have any activation with that keyword. Do you see what I mean? So some products sell on that keyword. But I was just talking about overall, like I could spend days on this. And what I found across my products is that if you're in this, let's call it three stages. You've got the low end where there's not much search volume, so you don't get a lot of keywords to work with. So, you have to go for the top one, but they're not very competitive. Then, you've got the middle ground-uh, where there are competitive keywords but there's enough room for micro conversions and the conversions on the top of the keywords. And then, you've got top of the pile which it becomes very expensive to try and rank on those keywords if unless you're sending external traffic and know certain things what to do right. 00:11:04 But what you're saying is, is that that discovery process now I agree with you on the discovery process for me is that it's that time that you spend doing that whole discovery process. It can take a lot of your time. And in some cases, there isn't a guarantee, is there? Because it could be that there simply isn't enough conversions in that frame rate, in that area, to warrant doing it. Do you see what I mean? Because sometimes you can't. I overcome that by using my PPC data. So when I launch a new product, I don't immediately go do a viral launch or a honey rank. on Blast or any of these guys. I don't do that right away like a lot of people do. I don't pick, this is the keyword I'm going after. 00:11:49 I think I'm going after it. Let me go after it for the exact reasons you just said. They'll get me to page one, but I may not stick. And so I like to run heavy PPC for two to three weeks and then look at my conversions, and look at these top five, 10, 20 phrases that I've identified and see which of those are actually converting, which are resonating. And then I'll rework my title and my listing, and then I'll go do a giveaway on one or two or three of those and include some of the top ones, you know, these big money, you know, the word app roller, which is the main keyword in that space. I'll include it in there so I get a little bit of lift for it too, but I don't target it specifically. 00:12:28 I target the others. And that way I know that I'm going to what's called stick the landing. When I get to page one, this is resonating, and I'm not wasting my time or money. Crazy giveaway that's, you know, shot in the dark like a lot of people do. Yeah, no, totally. And I think the other thing where people fall over is the miscalculation of what they're doing with PPC in order to rank. So there are a lot of people out there and go, okay, I'm going to go after this batch of keywords and I'm going to try and rank my product. But if they go after what I call a batch of keywords, that becomes very, very expensive for one. Two, quite often they miss out the calculation. 00:13:07 So they're trying to take up the top spots. And now with the right rail possibly disappearing as well, it's going to come more and more expensive. And there's that percentage of organic sales over PPC sales. So I think where a lot of people maybe don't succeed when they're launching a product or becomes very expensive with PPCs because they try to use too many keywords at the same time and do not do the correct calculations to work out what their spends are over what their returns are. Yeah. I don't typically target more than about 20 or so, 15 or 20, you know, I don't fill it up. You can do a thousand. I don't fill that up. 00:13:44 One of the most effective mining ones that I do, uh, it, I mean, I still run an automatic campaign at a low bid now for two years and one of mine, because it works at like a 4% ACOS, but I do single words. So if I do keyword research and I've got a list of, I don't know, 300 phrases, I'll dump those into a tool and have it dedupe it down to the individual words on individual phrases. But, you know, if it's makeup brush, it's the word 'makeup', with no dash or space, and then 'brush' and then whatever. And I'll just do single-word campaigns, a low bid. I'll put them on a broad campaign and do a low bid on those like, you know, maybe 15 cents or 20 cents or some really low bid at $10, $ 20 per day. 00:14:26 And you'd be surprised at what happens there. Now, it's not going to make you rich and make you the best seller, but you might be surprised at what kind of keywords you come up with that you've totally overlooked. And they don't cost you hardly anything to get. Yeah. I mean, Brian Johnson, we had on the show a few weeks ago, he kind of came up with a good solution now is that you can throw and stick to the wall; that you can take a load of keywords, dump them into a campaign, and if they don't get suggested bids by them, the chances are they're not worth going after, which may kind of. Good sense 00:15:04 as well and that will help filter down the the the bulk of the keywords you've got because the danger is as well is you could spend a lot of time pushing data around unnecessarily and I think unless like me and you we've done this before on that before Amazon, we've done this in commerce; we understand our PPC works and stuff, and I think if you're kind of new to this business then you can get overwhelmed because you're trying to go after thousands of keywords. You want to inherently go after the cheaper keywords, but the cheaper keywords won't always convert. And it's nice getting micro conversions, but you need the macro ones as well to make up the difference. But yeah, it's been great. So moving on next one. Sure. Yeah. Sure. 00:15:47 Well, let's go along on the same way about ranking and getting sales and stuff. Yeah. A lot of people always want to know, They ask about, you know, how do you get the Amazon? What's this Amazon's choice badge and how do you get it? The Amazon's choice badge is keyword dependent. So it's not product dependent. It's keyword dependent. So you might have it on one of your products for a certain keyword and not on any other keyword. It's what Amazon's Alexa recommends. So if someone says, speaks to Alexa, 'Buy me a Danny Sullivan fly swatter'. And you're the Amazon's choice for Danny Sullivan, you know, Fleisswater, it's going to pop that up and put that in your cart on Alexa. 00:16:30 But it also can make it, you know, gives it some social proof because the average customer doesn't know what the hell it means. It thinks Amazon might have said, hey, this is our recommendation. It's kind of like editor's picks in the bookstore or something like that. So the way you can actually influence that, if you really want to influence that, the way you can influence that is by sending traffic. To using Facebook or your own email list or whatever to your listing, but have them blindly put it to the cart because what Amazon is looking for that gives them the proof that this is socially, that this is viable for Alexa is that if someone doesn't actually look at your listing to buy the product, because they can't look at your listing if they're telling Alexa to buy it. 00:17:14 So they think that if you, in a group of search results, if you know how Amazon has a little, you can click the link to actually go to the product listing, or you can just add it to your cart straight from that search results page. That's what you want to get people to do is add it straight to the cart from that search results page. There's a link, you know, amazon. com. It's basically, it ends in ad.html. And you can, some additional code, you can probably Google this and find that, find this information. And it will create that link for you. So they just hit the add to cart button blindly without looking at your full listing. And you get a handful of those. 00:17:49 On some of your keywords and you don't have Amazon's choice on a lot of stuff. So that's like a little hack that's actually working right now to influence that Amazon's choice and get that badge if that's something you're looking to do. Fantastic. And the final one that you got for us. Sure. Next one is another way to get actually ranked that a lot of people don't realize is when in several categories when you, if someone's, most people on Amazon, they don't, they don't filter down into a category to actually do a search. If I'm looking for electronics, I don't go to Amazon . com, pull down a little electronics bar, get into my subcategory and type in my keywords. Most people don't do that. 00:18:30 Most people type from the general search bar is all, they all listing up there. And a lot of times in many categories, what Amazon does is on the search results for that is they, they will, if there's a lot of subcategories and, and under, under, under that your keyword can go into. Or that's relevant for you, they'll show the top two, typically the top two listings, and each of those categories will often appear on page one. If there's 25 subcategories, they're not all going to appear on page one, but usually there's six, ten subcategories or something that are relevant. They're going to take the top two, typically, maybe in some cases three or four, but typically the top two will definitely make it and show those in the results. 00:19:12 So if you can get your product. Into the top two sellers even with a Best Seller badge, or maybe it's the number two position in a subcategory. Your chances of being on page one for any specific keyword are far greater uh and you can that's how sometimes you'll see a product that doesn't sell so much and it has a BSR of you know 50, 000 and everybody else has a BSR of a thousand you're like how'd this guy get there uh it's because he picked some random obscure subcategory to put his product in. And he's in the number one or number two position in that random subcategory. So there's a tool on Amazon if you just Google it, Subcategory Picker or something. Because when you go in and set up your product, it doesn't give you all the subcategories. 00:19:56 It only gives you a few of them. But you can actually go in and there's some tools and you can Google this. A category code, haven't you? Yeah, it's like a category code. And you can really go in and see where you can compete. And there's some categories where you might only need. three sales a day to be the best seller or the number two guy or something and you can just get your product into that category or if you have a variations get one of your variations in that category and the rest of them and you know other categories um and and you can do you can do some magic so that's a little hack that just that subcategory that you're in can make a huge difference in how you appear how your ppc works what you get indexed for So pay good attention and maybe even experiment with that a little bit and see what that can do for you. 00:20:45 Excellent. And I mean, obviously, because it's category related and we've got to deal with relevance, we've got to be a bit careful with that in any way. So you can't just go from not being a pet and then going to home and kitchen, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to be careful. Yeah, no, no. There is a balancing act there with the relevance, for sure. But there's ways to. To do it uh and and to really this used to be a little easier when you could actually be in two categories, you know back in the day when you could just phone up Amazon and say hey can you can you put me over here please too? 00:21:17 And then you can't do it uh but but sometimes Amazon will automatically assign you to a second category so I've noticed that sometimes when I put it in one category and I get a bunch of sales, I'm like later you're like no you know I'm gonna try this other category and see if I can get a boost, I still might have that first category show up down there sometimes as well. But just pay attention to that and consider that as a factor when you're setting up your product and trying to position yourself. Yeah, definitely. So no putting silicon hammers in the air purifier category. That's right. Excellent. Look, it's been amazing having you on. Thank you so much for sharing what you've been sharing over the two episodes. 00:21:58 Before we go, how can people reach you? Sure. Well, I'm one of the mentors in the Illuminati Mastermind, which is a training program at illuminatimastermind. com for high-level sellers. We do a monthly training. We have a live event coming up here in Kauai at the end of January as well. And then I also have freedomticket. com. If you want more of these hacks, you can go. There's a webinar over at freedomticket. com. I think it's on replay right now. You can check that out. There's a lot of good information in there and it tells you how to get this 99Hacks PDF, a lot more of the stuff like we've been talking about. We just did three of them today. Or you can go to AMZ, AMZ, AMZ Marketer on Facebook and you can see a lot of the different podcasts and sessions like yourself that I've been on and just like it over there. And I hope I've given some good value to you guys and you can take some of this and it helps you in your business. Fantastic. Again, guys, thank you for your time. Kevin, thanks for coming on. I look forward to getting you back next year. I appreciate it, man. Thanks, Danny.