Going All In Selling on Amazon Platform, Launching Products and PPC w/ Kevin King

Going All In Selling on Amazon Platform, Launching Products and PPC w/ Kevin King 00:00:00 Are you ready to scale and outsource your business? Okay, let's go. Welcome to the Outsourcing and Scaling Show. I'm your host, Nathan Hirsch, a show where we talk about everything Amazon, Shopify, e-commerce, and digital marketing. Let's get started. Hey everyone, welcome back to Outsourcing and Scaling. Today I'm with the legend, Kevin King. How you doing? I'm doing good, man. How are you doing? Doing great. Let me read your bio real quick. Kevin King sells millions of dollars of product on Amazon. com via retail and other websites. He's been a recurring guest in over 30 FBA and e-commerce podcasts and is highly sought after speaker at Amazon conferences worldwide. I know because I've seen him talk at a lot of conferences worldwide. 00:00:44 He also mentors sellers collectively doing over half a billion US dollars per year on Amazon in the Freedom Ticket and Helium 10 Elite Mastermind. He organizes a billion-dollar seller summit, which I'll definitely want to hear more about. Runs a private group called AMZ Marketer Mastermind. We're over $201 million and up Amazon sellers. Share advanced tips, tricks, and strategies. And you can learn more about Kevin and listen to some of the podcasts he's been on at amzmarketer.com. Kevin, very impressive resume, and we're going to talk all about that and all Amazon. But first, I want to take a step back. So before you got into Amazon, before you got into e-commerce, even to when you were growing up, what kind of kid were you? Were you a straight-A student? 00:01:26 Were you a rebel? Put some of that in perspective, and did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? Yes, yes, and yes. Yeah, I was a straight-A student. I was like eighth in my class out of like 800 and some odd people in high school. I think I went nine years of perfect attendance, never missed a day of school. But I was also a rebel. So, I was also – if you ask my dad, he always says he hopes I have a child one day that's just like me because he said – I was definitely a rebel. I was always out there bending the rules and finding a loophole. I mean, when I was growing up, my parents had contracts because if they would tell me, 'Hey, you've got to – make your bed.' I don't know. 00:02:08 I'm just making this out. I can't remember any specifics, but you've got to make your bed every day. I'd be like, 'And then one day I didn't make my bed.' They'd say, 'Well, you didn't make your bed.' Well, you didn't say what time I had to make my bed, you know, or something like that. You know, still the day is left or whatever. So they ended up making these like little contracts. They always thought I would be a lawyer or an accountant because I was, I was always good with numbers. So since the age of three, I was an entrepreneur. I started selling. My mom would take me to the little store at the age of three, and I'd buy bubble gum. 00:02:38 Back then, I think it's like a penny for this big pink bubble gum that came in a little wrapper with a cartoon or something on it. I'd buy that and bring that back and sell it to the neighborhood kids for like three cents. I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always been involved in some sort of entrepreneurial stuff from selling stamps, mail-order in the back of catalogs, to coins. Whatever it may be. I'm 50 years old right now, and the last time I got a paycheck, I was 17. I worked at McDonald's when I was 16, 17 years old, and I delivered pizzas. Other than that, I've never worked a corporate job. I'm not the traditional person that's trying to quit their corporate job and get this freedom. I'm kind of the reverse of that. 00:03:26 So you're working at McDonald's, you're delivering pizzas. Do you just wake up one day and say, 'I want something more? I want to be an entrepreneur.' How did that transition happen? No, I was an entrepreneur during that whole time too. I was doing, I was doing side hustle. I mean, even in middle school, but when I was 15, 14, 15, back then there's a billboard music chart. I guess they're still around, but the billboard music charts and the Casey Kasem would come out with his top 40. And I would actually listen to that every week. This is before the internet or before all that stuff. And listen to that and write down the top 40, you know, listen to it on a Saturday morning from 10 to one, right down the top 40, take it to school on Monday and say, does anybody want to buy the album? 00:04:01 And so someone would, you know, someone says, yes, I want the Diana Ross or whatever the heck it may be album. It's number three this week. I would then every Friday, my mom would take me to, to the record store and I would buy the album, whoever had albums on order, I'd buy them and mark them up like a buck or two. You know, I thought I was doing really well, but the dollar or two markup and take them back, you know, on that following Monday and deliver them along with a new updated top 40 list. So I've been doing that all along. It's just when, my dad put restrictions on me. Even when I was working at McDonald's, he would say, 'You're in high school, you can't work more than 20 hours a week.' And I would always try to bend those rules and work 30. 00:04:44 And so I always remember one day I was working the drive-thru, and I wasn't supposed to be working. My dad told me no more than 20 hours, and this would put me at like 28. So I told him I'm going out to work. To meet some buddies or something, and I ended up parking my car in a neighborhood, like three streets away. I thought I was hiding my car in case he drove by or something. Turns out he had a suspicion, so he drove into the drive-thru, and I was working the drive-thru, and I'm on the little machine saying, 'Welcome to McDonald's, may I take your order?' And then I hear my dad's voice on the other side, yeah, I'd like a hamburger and some fries or something. 00:05:20 I'm like, oh, I just got busted. So I got grounded for that. So I've always been a hard worker. Yeah. So you had these side hustles, but how did you transition to full time? Was it just, hey, you were making enough where you didn't have to do the other jobs anymore? Or how did that transition happen? Well, the transition, I mean, in college, I went to Texas A &M University and I have a degree in business from Texas A &M. And during college, I was doing stuff on the side. I mean, the thing that where I made a lot of money, I mean, my parents had paid for my, and back then it wasn't so expensive to go to a public college, but my parents paid for my college. 00:05:54 But when I was young, uh, you know, from all these jobs, mowing yards, painting street numbers on curbs, you know, picking up cans on the side of the road, whatever it was, my parents said, you're making too much money as a 10 year old or 12 year old or whatever, you know, $200 a week is way too much money for someone that's 10 years old. So they would make me save half of that. And that money turned out to be my beer and spending money in college. So they gave it back to me as an allowance when I was in college, like every week they would say, 'Here's a couple hundred bucks or whatever. whatever the number was, for my beer and pizza money. And so that's how it came back to me. 00:06:27 But in college, my first taste of actually probably better success would be a class called BANA 217. At Texas A&M back in the 80s, the late 1980s, there was a class that every business major had to take their sophomore year of college. And that class was BANA 217. You had to learn the basic computing language. So now you know it. Basics hardly ever used anymore, but basically it was actually a computing language and they had to learn, you know, the logic behind it. I had been doing some of that when I was in high school and teaching myself, you know, one summer I stayed up all night, every night, pretty much making my own little video game, programming it and stuff. And so I knew what to do. 00:07:05 So I started tutoring people and, and it was like, Hey, my buddy wants you to do something too. So I started putting little flyers all over the campus and the library, pull off this number if you need help, eight, five bucks an hour, whatever it was. And pretty soon I would have like 10 or 15 people at a time. I was like, I can't bring these to my apartment or meet them in a coffee shop or whatever. So I ended up renting a room in the library, a free room in the library, and have 10 or 15 people in there at one time, and I'd teach them. And then that evolved over the course of a year until I was renting out the Hilton; a conference room that could hold 500 people because this class had about 1,000 people taking it. 00:07:41 And so it evolved to where at the beginning of each semester, I would go to the registrar's office and say, under the Texas Sunshine Act, I would show down this law and say, 'I'm entitled to list the students who are taking this class.' And they would give me the list on labels, peel-and-stick labels with their addresses. And so I would go down to the copy shop. coffee, coffee shop and make a, uh, like a flyer. It says, Hey, on these dates, uh, you know, right before their exams, three times a semester, come to the college station, Hilton, pay me 15 bucks ahead. And I will teach you everything, you know, need to know to pass the test. You know, cause they're teachers. I'll teach you in a different way than what your teachers are teaching. 00:08:21 And I would get 500 people paying me $1 ,500 ahead three times a semester. Uh, and I was able to do that for like, four years until the professors kept trying to change it on me. It was making them look bad. Why are they having to go and pay me for a three-hour crash course, Cliff Notes on how to do this versus they're not learning in the class. So that was my first taste. And then that evolved into when college, my first taste into the internet direct marketing world that told me I wanted to do that was I, because I had all this money. I was the guy that was doing all, supplying all the beer and everything for parties. You know, a group of four guys in an apartment. 00:09:00 I was the guy that had the money. Nobody else had money. So I had money. And so I was basically the, you know, I was the guy that's supplying everything. And I got this is stupid. Why am I buying beer for everybody and alcohol? And I'd taken a beer, a class in college, like my sophomore year. I was just curious, like right around 2021. How to be a bartender. I want to know how to mix different drinks. And so you go and you take this class, and in the class, you don't use real alcohol. It's just like colored water. Uh, but the real bottles sound like, 'I want to know what this stuff tastes like.' So I went out and bought like an entire bar's worth of liquor, like 50 different types of liquor and bars. 00:09:33 So, uh, for the bar, and we had in our apartment when the people started coming, obviously, uh, cause I had free alcohol. I was like, 'I'm not paying for this.' Everybody's going to have to, uh, pay their own way. So I had a little Apple Two, two computer. My mom had given me the laptop, old school laptop, and I programmed a little program on there to basically uh be a bartending program, so I'd have recipes and also would run a tab for everybody, so if you come and I would actually uh, you know, you want a hurricane, you want a margarita, okay, it's a 50 cents or whatever it was. And we'd have specials on Tuesdays. 00:10:07 And so I had this little program, and I was like, 'I should do something with this.' So I started advertising in the back of computer magazines, uh, as a, uh, you know, as this little, it was on floppy disks and I was using the university's computers to make the manuals and all kinds of stuff. Uh, so that was my first foray into direct marketing. And then I ended up starting a company my senior year called a college lifestyle company, which is a full-blown 16, uh, back then I think it was, It was a small, 32-page, four-color catalog with all kinds of stuff that you would want if you're in college, little Nerf balls to shoot and blankets and all kinds of just stuff that college kids would want, dorm refrigerators and whatever. 00:10:46 And I did that by direct mail. And one thing led to another off of that. So my background before all this Amazon stuff was in direct mail. So I did a lot of direct mail. I did a lot of sourcing in Asia. I never really went over to the source. It wasn't as sophisticated as it is now, but sourcing in Asia and Korea and developing products. I ended up into collectibles like baseball cards. Actually, with pretty girls on them instead of baseball players. That became a hot trend around the time of Beanie Babies, like girls in swimsuits and stuff. That did really, really well. It lasted. So this whole direct marketing thing, I've been doing for a long time in product developments. So when Amazon – I've been selling on Amazon since 2001 as a third party. 00:11:33 I have a calendar company separate from – It's a seasonal calendar company. It's a separate business from my Amazon business, but we sell on Amazon. So they were buying wholesale from us. And then I started the FBA stuff in 2015. I think I saw, I think Amazing. com was doing like ASM three or four, I think it was. And they're doing a little four-part video series to promote it. And I watched those. I was like, I don't need to pay five grand to take this. I know all this stuff. This is like right up my alley. Everything I'm talking about, I know. So I just started listening. Limited number of podcasts that were at the time and digging into Facebook groups, just to try to get a grasp on everything a little bit more of the particulars, and just took off from there. 00:12:12 And so I launched a bunch of brands, and that's how we have us today. So you've obviously had a lot of success on Amazon, off Amazon. Are there any failures that stand out? Maybe an Amazon failure in the early days when you were figuring it out? I've had plenty of failures. I always say success without failure is luck. There's always a story behind it. I've had a bankruptcy. I declared bankruptcy in the 1990s off of one of my other companies. I had to rebuild from that. I've had a lot of failures. As far as Amazon, yeah, my first two products didn't do well. Two of them were in the beauty space. I'm a guy. What do I know about beauty stuff? Those both didn't really work. 00:12:58 There's been plenty of failures and missteps and doing things wrong that I've had to recover from. It's not always everything I don't touch doesn't turn to gold. There's plenty of issues along the way. I actually may write a book. I've dealt with one of my other companies. I've dealt with the mafia where I actually had to sleep with baseball bats on my side. I had my life threatened. I had to check underneath the car with all those remote starters before he started up. I've been on photo sets for one of my other companies where a tiger mauled a model and drug her by her foot across the studio, all on videotape. The news coming out, I've dealt with, I've had a lot of uh, a lot of, I can tell a lot of stories. 00:13:46 So what motivates you? I mean, you said that you were being an entrepreneur at a very young age. I also know that you're very passionate about teaching people. You said that you were doing that back in college. I know you're doing it now. I always see you giving back to different communities. What motivates you past all those failures and to just keep doing more and more? And then even just figuring out new stuff. I mean, I think it'd be pretty easy for you to sit back and say, hey, I've had a lot of success. Like, I don't need to go run this summit or I don't need to speak at this event. What keeps you going? I enjoy helping people. 00:14:15 I mean, I'm one of those guys that, you know, back when American Idol, the TV show American Idol started, you know, I would watch that show. Not because I have – I'm a big fan of music or not because I want to be on the show or be famous. I'm always the guy – I've always been the guy that's been behind the scenes. So this is kind of a change in the last couple years where I've been the guy speaking on stage. I always liked to be the little puppet master, the guy behind the scenes that was – pulling the strings and more of a producer type of role. But I enjoy, I watch like the shows like American Idol and stuff because I enjoy seeing someone who is like a little diamond in the rough. 00:14:50 Let's like, let's like got what it takes. They're just in the wrong situation, wrong time, or they just need that one little break or that one little push or that one little nugget of information. And so I enjoy seeing someone like a. like a Carrie Underwood on that show become a little girl from Oklahoma. Now she's a huge superstar. I like that process. And so it's the same thing with teaching people on, on Amazon is. I get frustrated because there's so many people out there that are scamming. There's so many people, all the Lamborghini guys, and there's so many people that are teaching or that maybe they tried to sell on Amazon. It didn't work for them, so let me start a course to try to make some money. 00:15:26 And they don't know what the hell they're doing. They just don't know what they're doing. There are some good courses. There are some good people. I'm not knocking everybody, but there's a lot of crap, and there's a lot of misinformation on Facebook where someone will say, hey, what about our – You know, reviews. Can you put your URL on a package insert and stick it in? Oh, no, it's against TOS. And like seven other people will say, no, it's against TOS. You can't do that. I'm like, bull effing crap. It's totally fine. You know, so there's so much misinformation. That's why I started to do the teaching. I mean, it evolved. It started with Manny. I'm friends with the guys at Helium 10. I don't have anything to do with Helium 10. 00:16:04 It's not my company. I'm not partners in it. I'm just partners in the training side of it. So the Helium 10 Elite, which used to be called Illuminati, first couple years, they approached me a couple years ago about this idea that they wanted to do this advanced training because there's all this stuff for new people. And I said, I don't know. I don't really have time. I'm working on my business. And they kept coming back to me and said, hey, we want you to do this or be involved. And so I said, okay, I'll give it a shot. And so thankfully I did because that's a very successful business now. It's very lucrative. At the same time, I enjoy helping people. 00:16:40 And when people say they saw me on stage or they saw something in the Helium 10 Elite or whatever, like, hey, two years later, they message me and they say, I saw you on stage at Amazing . com two years ago. And something you said, I took it to heart and I made some changes in my business. And now my sales are up three times what I was. That's where I get the passion is trying to help people see things a little bit different way. It's not the cookie-cutter way. It's not the; I have a different approach and a different, way that I look at things. And that's what I try to help people just open their minds a little bit. There's not always just one way to do something. 00:17:16 One of the things I noticed about you is you're always just coming up with new content. I'll see you at two conferences, 30 days apart, and it's new material and Illuminati. I mean, when I was there, you were always up to date on stuff. How do you do that? I mean, you have a ton of stuff going on. How do you get information and then have enough time to just stay up to date with everything that's changing in marketing and e-commerce and Amazon? Well, it's difficult. I mean, I can't stay up on everything. There's always something, but I'm pretty well connected. I mean, so that's one of the reasons I do all the conferences. I meet a lot of people. So I'm connected in a lot of different groups. 00:17:47 I'm connected in a lot of different forums. And I know a lot of people somewhere at these conferences, you know, we're out to dinner or something. Someone's like, hey, have you heard about this or you heard about that? So, I mean, sometimes people will say, hey, look. You know how to do this, but look, Kevin, this cannot be discussed anywhere. And I'll, there's a lot of stuff I can't talk about. You know, I'll totally honor that. There's, there's things that people are, are doing are little tricks that they just don't want public. And so I won't, you know, if someone says, don't say that, I won't say that. But there's, there's so that's some of it. I'm just doing some of it. It's just natural to me. 00:18:22 But like you said, you know, I, I've done enough presentation, you know, As you know, preparing a good quality presentation, either for stage or for a webinar or something, is a lot of work. It's not something you can just knock out usually pretty quickly. So I've done enough of them now where I have like 10 hours worth of stuff. And every month if something new comes out, I can add it. So like you said, you saw me 30 days apart and it was different. I try to make sure that no two presentations are the same, so that if someone's sitting in that audience that has seen me talk like 10 times, they're like, oh, yeah, I heard him talk about that before. Oh, yeah, I heard him talk about that before. 00:18:57 I'm going to go outside and then grab some water or something, wait for the next speaker. Then I say something, and they're like, oh, wait, he hasn't said that before. That's something brand new. So I try to mix them up to make them always feel different and fresh. I don't take the same presentation and just repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. Yeah, that's awesome. Let's talk about Amazon. We're in 2019. I got in 2008. You said you got in around 2015. Where is Amazon at now? What's working? What's not working? And where do you see it going in the future? I got in 2001. Actually, I have one of those old school accounts where I get daily withdrawals. I don't know if you have that. 00:19:35 I don't know if you have that too, since you met 2008. But 2015 was the FBA. FBA, you're right. You said that. The FBA model. So where's Amazon going? I think it's only going up. A lot of people always say, is the gold rush over? I don't think so. I think it's better than ever. But I always say, look, it's not easy like it was three or four years ago. Or you could just stick a label with a logo on something on a plastic bag and sell it. It's a true business now. You've got to approach it like a true business. There's a lot of bad players. There's a lot of bad apples. There's a lot of gaming the system going on. There's a lot of crazy stuff going on, especially in the stuff with sub-1,000 BSRs. 00:20:17 But there's still tremendous opportunity. And I don't think there's any other business model out there. You know, you hear all these people who are doing click funnels or they're doing some of the drop shipping or Shopify sites and all this other stuff. And you hear some of these success stories, and there are some over there, but there's a lot more success stories selling on Amazon. There's 20. I mean, you look at, take a look at Amazon, you know, click funnels has their two comma club, which basically means you've sold a million dollars, two commas and a million dollars. You sold a million dollars worth of product on through a, through a funnel, through click funnels. And. That doesn't mean you made a million dollars in your pocket. 00:20:52 That just means you might have made negative money in your pocket. It just means you made that much in sales. I always remember that. But I was just at the ClickFunnels event in February in Nashville, and I think there's 400-some-odd people that have done that, 443. When you take a look at the same thing on the Amazon side, how many people sold over a million dollars worth of product on Amazon last year? It's 23,172 or something like that. And now some of those are big businesses, but so are some of the ClickFunnels people that are doing it. So the opportunity is just way bigger, and it's more sustainable, I think. So I think it's a great time to get on Amazon. I think if you're selling on Amazon, it's a great time to do it. 00:21:32 Are there mistakes you can make? Yeah, there's things that people do wrong and they lose their butt. Probably 90% of the people that try to sell on Amazon fail, 90 to 95%, because they're not doing their math right. They're not doing the numbers right. Selling on Amazon is not easy. I mean, a lot of these courses and a lot of these gurus and these YouTube videos make it look like quit your job and retire next month and sit on the beach. I think the case, it requires a vast skill set. And I'm fortunate that I have most of those skills because of my past. Most people don't have that. So they have to use services like FreeUp or they got to hire people to fill in those gaps and to fill in those areas where they just aren't good. 00:22:16 And I'm lucky I have a supportive wife so I can work quite a bit. And I work smart. I don't worry about some of the little things that some people are like, totally anal when they hire a person. People always say, Kevin, why don't you job out your customer service? Why don't you hire a VA for your customer service? People always say that's one of the first things you should do. I say, why do I need to do that when I get three emails a week? Why would I hire someone to do customer service when I have three emails to answer a week? Two of those emails are from people wanting to sell me some sort of service. I just have to click the little button that says no response required. 00:22:50 I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's It's no big deal. I put out a good quality product. I put out good instructions. If there needs to be a follow-up on it to explain something, I do it well. You cut down on those problems. I'm not trying to cut corners like so many people are, just throwing something out there quickly. I don't have those issues. That's what I mean by working smart. Or I don't need that. Now, also, if I had hundreds of products, that would be a different story. You know, some of these people that are managing hundreds or thousands of SKUs, I couldn't do that. But I deliberately I deliberately keep my SKU count under 20. I have like 17 active right now, I think. 00:23:33 And I deliberately keep it small and lean because I'm not trying to grow a $100 million company here. That's not my goal. It's not about how much money I can make. It's about how much money can I make to live the lifestyle that I want to live. And that's all I need. So let's talk about spending your time because you said you work smart. You work with a lot of Amazon sellers. There's so many different things you can do. You can focus on your Amazon business off Amazon. You can go to conferences. There's lots of different things inside your Amazon business. Where would you encourage people to spend their time or break down their time? I would encourage people to spend the most – I mean, I'm able to go to so many conferences. 00:24:08 Like this last year, I did 26 conferences. And people say, how do you do that and you run your Amazon business? Because I worked my butt off in 2015, 16, and 17 to build it to where it's almost – I could not have gone to all these conferences in those years and built the company at the same time and built the product lines. I built up, and now it's just changing out something here or there, adding a new product periodically. Dropping a product. So it's kind of almost on autopilot. So, I'm able to ride that wave. But I'm getting ready. I'm doing a partnership with another company. We're doing some eco-friendly stuff. We're going to be launching a whole line of stuff made of ocean waste, 100% ocean waste products. 00:24:49 That's going to require some time. So the second half of this year, you're not going to see me out as much because I've got to stop and I've got to focus on building that because it's a tremendous opportunity. But I wouldn't have had that opportunity if I hadn't been out there meeting people either. So it kind of goes both ways. So I recommend people focus on Amazon and Amazon only. Don't get sidetracked with Shopify and dropshipping and all. You need a basic website. Maybe set up a basic Shopify just so you have it. But don't put hardly any energy in there. Amazon is where it's at. People say, well, I hear all these people saying you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket on Amazon. You need to diversify, diversify, diversify. 00:25:26 I say, horseshit. Stay on Amazon. If you're starting on Amazon in the U. S., focus on Amazon in the U. S. And if you want to expand, expand Amazon Canada and expand Amazon Europe and so forth because you can repeat the cycle which you've already known. You don't have to relearn a different way of marketing and relearn a different wheel. It's much, I mean, I sell on Walmart, I sell on Jazz, I sell on eBay. They pale in comparison to Amazon Canada. Amazon Canada is small. So if something happened to my Amazon account in the U. S. and it got shut down for whatever reason or suspended, I would be up a creek without a paddle either way. It doesn't matter. 00:26:02 And so I'm on the board of advisors for 101 Commerce, who's buying 101 different Amazon businesses right now over the next few years. Richard, who runs that, I mean, I'm not involved in actually buying or looking at these, but he's like, look, if you're diversified, that's great. That will add some value. But it's got to be more than 30%. So if more than 30% of your total sales are coming from off Amazon, then it does add some value. But if it's less than 30%, who cares? And to be honest, most people, unless you're doing something really bad, you're not going to get suspended on Amazon. I mean, you might have a temporary thing here or there, but unless you're really doing something that you shouldn't be doing, and not everybody always admits that, then you really shouldn't be permanently banned. 00:26:48 There's always ways to get back. But Amazon is just so huge right now. It's so good. I would go all in on that. I mean, if you want to do Shopify, that's a different business model. It's a different skill set. It's a different everything. And some people say, yeah, I want to be able to control the customer and make the customer mine and I want to build a brand. That's great. There's nothing wrong with that, but that's a different business model than selling on Amazon. It's a whole different thought process, whole different everything. Amazon is a great place to launch. I mean, you can build a brand by starting on Amazon. Maybe you don't know what the brand is going to be. You don't even have a name for it, really. 00:27:21 But you start selling on Amazon. You learn how this e-commerce works. You learn how shipping and all the whole system works. And you weed out some stuff. You go, okay, this product here, people just don't like it. I thought it was a good idea. They don't like it. I'm getting bad reviews. But this one over here is doing good. So let me add something to this and that. And it can kind of evolve into a brand that; that appeals to a certain avatar or a certain lifestyle. And that's why you shouldn't restrict yourself to a certain category because people's people buy electronics and they buy beauty and they buy dog stuff, go after an avatar or a type of person or a lifestyle and not a product category. 00:27:54 And your chances of success will be higher. So that's why people always say, should you sell in one category? Don't, don't try to go across categories. And I say, no, absolutely not. Don't limit yourself in the beginning. Just, throw some stuff up against the wall and see what sticks and then evolve from there and build a brand down the road if that's what you want to do. I like that approach. Yeah, I'm always a big fan of starting small and adjusting to the market and whatever's working, you put more money, more time into, and whatever's not, you kind of pull back. Let's talk about product launches. And I think there's lots of different gurus or people out there saying, 'Hey, you should do this or you shouldn't do that.' What's maybe something that a lot of people are preaching that you wouldn't do? 00:28:32 And what's a better way? I know you've launched a lot of products. What's your mindset behind a product launch? Well, a product launch is, I mean, in today's, I mean, there's so many different ways you can launch a product. I mean, The thing I don't do is I don't do any of the black hat stuff on launching a product. I don't use any of these services that will get you onto page one without even getting any sales. I don't use any of the services that will do rebates. I don't do any of the review group stuff. I don't even do friends and family. Right now, my approach is a slower one. I'm not going to come out of the gate and be on page one and week one. 00:29:11 It might take me a couple months to actually get there. But I'm doing it more organically, more through heavy doses of PPC. And then if it's a product, if it's a dog product that's in my dog niche, I might use some of my current customers to help juice it a little bit through some ranking URLs. To help move it along. And I might run some Facebook stuff with Manage Chat and that kind of thing to help drive it a little bit. Other times, you know, last Christmas, I was able to launch a product with no PPC, no giveaways, no outside traffic, no email on my list, just by creating the listing properly and by finding a product that's in demand. It was Christmas, so it was seasonal, so I couldn't sell this product year-round. 00:29:53 But I was able to do it. It was three SKUs. And in the month of December, I made a $51,000 profit without ever doing a single launch, single giveaway, no PPCs, just by creating a proper listing and knowing how to do the proper research that people. Could find the product and it worked really, really well. So there's, there's a lot of those type of opportunities too, but you gotta know what you're doing and you gotta know how to set up the listing and how to find those up, how to use the tools. The tools that are out there now are amazing. That didn't used to exist even a few years ago. They just keep getting better and better. 00:30:26 You know, now with the release of brand analytics data and incorporating that into some of the tools like Helium Tens or Viral Launch or some of the others. It's incredible what you can do. Whereas three years ago, it was more of a guessing game. And some people got lucky and some didn't. But now the data is just abundant. And it's just amazing what you can do if you know how to analyze and how to do it. So you can find those kinds of opportunities where you don’t need to do a huge launch. I don’t go after big saturated stuff or heavy stuff. I mean, Amazon, you know, two years ago was what, 2016, something like 100. $100 billion in sales. And last year, what’d they say? 00:31:04 That’s like $240-$ 250 somewhere. And it’s almost double, or it may be just quite double. It’s somewhere around double in just two years. So what used to be a 4,000 BSR two years ago, which is on the cusp of maybe selling 10, 15, 20 units a day now is a seven or eight thousand BSR, but it's still selling 15, 20 units a day because Amazon has just grown so much. So there's plenty of opportunity there and you stay off the rate. I've never had a hijacker. In three and a half years, four years almost now, I've never had a tax checker. The only problem I've ever had is someone that I used, I think it was Viral Launch actually, or Zonblast, or both of them. 00:31:41 Back in like 2015, 2016, some people were doing online arbitrage where they had multiple accounts on those services. So they were getting stuff for 99 cents and then turn around and sell it for 40 bucks on my listing. But they only had two or three units. I was able to wipe them out or they sold them really quick. But that's it. I've never had counterfeiters. I've never had because I choose products carefully. I differentiate the products with packaging and with the way I do the listing. So it makes it difficult. And I don't play at the high level. I don't play up there in the class five rapids where all the Chinese hackers are selling. I'd rather be down here in the class one, class two, just floating in my canoe rather than worrying about getting flipped over all the time and having to climb back in. 00:32:26 It's interesting. I love the different approach because I've interviewed a lot of Amazon people and I don't think anyone has that exact Kevin King approach that you mentioned. Let's talk about PPC and then we'll wrap this up. PPC has obviously been incredibly profitable for Amazon. It's only getting, it's only going to become more, only more features. Where do you see PPC going? What's your PPC strategy? I think PPC is going to become, I think Amazon's going to become much more of a pay-to-play platform. You know, what was it? $ 10 billion last year or something like that. It's probably going to double or triple this year. They're introducing more and more tools. They've been behind the curve on Google and Facebook for a while, but they're starting to introduce more of that. 00:33:03 Some of the big brands are now starting to pay attention to Amazon. Wall Street brands have been doing big TV ads. They're going to start diverting some of that money. They don't really care about ACOS. They don't really care about some of that. It's branding for them. They're going to be taking up more of this real estate. I think there's a good chance, in the next year or two, that organic may start on page two on Amazon. Or maybe there might be a line at the bottom, you know, like there is now-the customers who do these also like these and that might be, that's where the organic shows and everything above that is paid. Now Amazon's not just going to take your money just to take your money. 00:33:42 You got to have paid plus conversions. It's got to make sense, but it's becoming big enough and there's enough people starting to to spend money. I think the PPC component is going to be a much more important component to success on Amazon in the future. To me, PPC is not hard. A lot of people-they just can't get their head around it. My course, The Freedom Ticket, which is for new people, that seems to be a stomach block for a lot of people. They're like, I need a good PPC course. Anybody know anybody can do PPC? It's not hard. It's just math. I guess that's what makes it hard for people. And I look at PPC too. I don't even look at ACoS. I don't care about my ACoS. I really don't. 00:34:23 I want to know what my total cost is. So if I'm selling 100 units, as of right now, 80 of those are organic and 20 of those are from PPC. My PPC ACoS might be 100%. Maybe if I'm selling the item for $20. Maybe it's costing me $20 to get every single one of those sales. A lot of people would maybe cut that off and say, 'I want my cost lower.' I don't care. It's helping drive, prop me up, and give me the exposure for the other 80. So I would take that. Those costs of $20 times 20, $400, and I apply it to all 100 of them. So my ACoS really is $4 out of a $20 sale. So it's 20% ACoS across everything. 00:35:05 I look at my numbers like that. Amazon can't give you that data because they don't know your costs. You have to use third-party tools or Excel or whatever to get that. But that's how I analyze it, which is different than what most people do as well. So PPC is super important. Amazon's going to be introducing some new tools soon, some new ways. I mean, they've got the video coming up. I mean, they're doing a live video right now in kind of beta, like a QVC. They're going to be able to have video show up on keywords. They tested this a few years ago with the video shorts, but I think it's coming back where instead of you bidding on a keyword, you bid on barbecue gloves. 00:35:41 Instead of just having your picture up at the top and a sponsor, somewhere in the listings there's going to be a little video that plays. Because you bid on your video that has barbecue gloves on it. I think that offers potential for the people that do it right is huge. I think someone who does a good video and gets a video ad can convert it a much higher percentage than someone just clicking on a still picture. So I think the opportunities are getting better and it's going to cost more to play. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find out more about you and what do you have going on that you're excited about that you want people to know about? Um, yeah, if you want to know more, you can go to amzmarketer. 00:36:17 com or, uh, you know, helium10elite is our training for advanced people. If you go to helium10, uh, elite. com, uh, or if you, uh, freedomticket. com is where I teach people, uh, new people how to sell. So if you're new at this business, there's a webinar there that's worth watching. Even if you don't want to buy the course, it'll show you a lot of cool stuff on keywords and everything at FreedomTicket. com. And then I'm, I'm super excited. Uh, in May, I've got, um, a billion-dollar Seller Summit. So happening 50 that, It's 12 hand-selecting. I go to all these events, and I'm very much a tactician. I want, like, tactical stuff, not just more corporate fluff that you hear sometimes at these events. 00:36:53 So I've hand-selected 12 people that are coming in to speak, and then we've got 50 of some of the most successful sellers out there coming into Austin for four days of just amazing learning and networking and fun at the end of May, May 20th to 24th. So it's going to be – I'm looking forward to that as well. Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us. No problem, man. See you next time. Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for watching. Did you enjoy this content? If so, click like, leave us a comment and subscribe to our channel so we can continue bringing you great content all about hiring.