Is Amazon Still Worth It for Sellers in 2024? The Inside Scoop With Kevin King

Is Amazon Still Worth It for Sellers in 2024? The Inside Scoop With Kevin King So if you take that $10 billion of Walmart. com, who's the next biggest player out there in terms of traffic, and compare that to the $400 billion on Amazon, there's no comparison. Amazon is the king. Amazon will do this last Prime Day that just happened in July. Amazon did basically in two days what TikTok will do in an entire year with that perspective. It did more than what Walmart. com will do in an entire year. So you've got to be on Amazon. Welcome to the Ecom Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You've already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level. Join Josh Hadley, an eight-figure Ecom business owner and investor, as he interviews highly successful business owners. Get ready because you're going to learn specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world. Welcome to the Ecom Breakthrough Podcast, I'm your host Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth, Matt Clark from ASM, and Norm Farrar, the Beard Guy. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Kevin King. He's an Amazon seller, the founder of the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and the newsletter. And we've had him back on the podcast previously. He's coming back. We have only had a select number of people that have come back onto this podcast. Obviously, we've got to have Kevin King back on here. So we're happy to have the king of Amazon e-commerce back. In our last episode, we discussed all the wicked smart direct marketing strategies of inserts and how to follow up with people afterwards. So today we're going to be diving into something brand new, getting into where the puck is moving with e-commerce on Amazon. What should you be focused on? This episode is brought to you by Ecom Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven-figure e-commerce companies to eight figures and beyond. If you're an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a partner who can help take your business to the next level, then my team and I bring hands-on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for an investment partner, reach out to me directly at josh. ecombreakthrough. com and let's turn your dreams into a reality. Today I'm excited to introduce you all to Kevin King. Since 1989, Kevin has been at the forefront of direct marketing, Amazon selling, and internet marketing. His cutting-edge strategies and extensive experience have empowered thousands. He believes in leading by example, educating, and entrusting competent individuals with the freedom to excel. He's the creator of the Helium 10 Freedom Ticket, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, billion-dollar seller newsletter and an active Amazon seller and host of the AM/ PM podcast. So, with that introduction, welcome to the show, Kevin. What did I send, the $20? It was more than $20. More than $20? It was more than that. Well, first, I have to give you the exchange back because I think it was a $5 million deposit to get my name on the Dream 100 list, right? That's right. It was $5 million. That's exactly right. I appreciate that deposit. We'll hold it in accrual for a while, so it's safe. As long as you don't mess up, it's safe. You'll get that back. I think it's in 10 years. 10 years. Perfect. Or if you sell your business. If you sell your business, if you sell Hadley Designs or Ecom Breakthrough, then you get, I think it's a 50% penalty. I love it. Well, Kevin, this episode is coming out. We're recording this the day that I just saw your newsletter. I was inducted into the Dream 100 and we had a funny conversation where since that post, I shared it on social media and people reached out to me. How do I get into the Dream 100? And then people were reaching out to you as well. Hey, how do I get my name onto the Dream 100? So Kevin, dispel all the myths right now. How do people get their names on the Dream 100? And what the heck is the Dream 100 to begin with? Well, you gave me the $5 million deposit. So, I mean, that's, you know, it's a bidding war. I mean, I think the next highest bid was $3. 5. And you're like, 'I got to be there.' So, no, I'm just kidding. And all jokes aside. No, so the Dream 100 is something I started last year. I started my newsletter in August of, so it's basically a year old now. I started it August of 2023. And one of the things I was like, how can I? Acknowledge the people that do good things in the space you know there's a lot of riffraff out there, a lot of people that are speaking or they're posting on social media or they're doing YouTube videos, they're just full of 'um' and they just are, and I just want to recognize people that do a good job, that are making a difference in people's lives, either with the the teaching they're doing, or the help they're doing, or the education they're giving, or the free the posts that they're giving. And so I I made a list of... I said, 'I want to do you know? In funnel hacking live, they always talk Russell Brunson was talking about make your own dream 100 of who you want to meet or who you want to work with. And I was like, 'OK, if I could make a list of the people that I would want to work with and that if I had an issue, who would I call to help me solve this problem? Why don't I do that and then share that list? And so I made a list of 90 people and I left 10 spots open. And those 10 spots are people I haven't met yet, because there's a lot of people out there that run in different circles than us or I haven't met them yet. So I left those open. And those 90, some of them, if they mess up, if I see them do something that they shouldn't do, they may get scratched and someone else put in there. And then every about three to four weeks, I pull one, literally it's like out of a hat, pull a name out of a hat, and I announce them in the newsletter and do a little story about them, a little bio or a little bit what they've done or how they've affected things. And there's a website for that at BillionDollarSellers. com. Summit. com billion dollar seller summit. Come and there's a little thing that says 'Dream 100' and then out of that I'm doing a whole bunch of uh, uh marketing promotions. There's benefits to being in the Dream 100; you get some special perks for some of my events. Um, and we're doing, uh, um next month in September, we're doing an event in Austin where a lot of the Dream 100 are going to be there, and we're helping people with their businesses. So if someone's, you know, you go to conferences and you go to these kinds of things and a lot of times, you There can find great stuff like you speak, give good tactics and good strategies, but those strategies might not apply to everybody. There's someone in the room going, 'Yep, I need to do that.' And then, you know, three, four rooms like that sounds cool. That looks great, Josh, but it doesn't apply to me right now. But if you can go to an event where for two and a half hours you sit and get grilled on and advise specifically on your specific pain points, whether that be SOPs, expansion, cash flow, sourcing, whatever it may be. And from some of the top minds in the space, and then get to have dinner with them and have fun with them and go play pickleball with them and just spend a weekend at a mansion together, I think that's invaluable. And that's part of what the Dream 100 is going to be. And then it's also, honestly, it's marketing. Take a look at what you were just, coincidentally, it just happened. I mean, this is pure serendipity that your name came up when we were doing this. It wasn't on purpose. It's marketing because I didn't ask you to post anything anywhere. I didn't ask you to do anything. You didn't even know you were going to be in it. I don't know if someone messaged you this morning, you saw on social media. It was, yeah. Or if you saw the newsletter first. WhatsApp. She's like, hey, congrats, you're in the Dream 100. And I was like, wait, what? So then I immediately, I was like, 'Hold on, where's my email?' Yes. So then what happens is not everybody does this, but most of them; I don't ask you to post. I don't ask you to do anything. but a lot of people will then turn around and they'll post and so and that that creates brand awareness for bdss it creates a prestige it might give me a few new newsletter subscribers because the newsletter is top of funnel for me for a lot of things that i do in the education space um and so that that it's it's this flywheel you know it's just like amazon's got a flywheel you want to create these flywheels and it's it's part of the flywheel and it helps add to that and it's become As you know, I mean, you've spoken at BSS events. It's hard to get on my stage. And I'm very picky of the people that I put on stage. And, you know, this year in Hawaii, we had a speaker that has done very well in the past and just bombed this year, just totally bombed. They'll never be on the stage again. I don't know what happened. Well, actually, I know what happened. But I get a lot of people asking, how can I speak at your event? And I'm like, sorry, it's full. I'm very picky. And so it's become to win BDSS has become almost like a feather in your cap for a lot of people because it's the best of the best. And if you can win that, whether it's the hack contest or it's the presentation side, you're voted by your peers and other sellers, that's pretty high honor. So now the Dream 100 is like the next level up almost, I guess you could say. Where I'm saying that, hey, this is someone that everybody needs to pay attention to. And what makes me the one to choose that? I think I know a thing or two. Yes, you do. I posted, you know, me knowing you came back in 2016 when you were running the Illuminati with Manny Coates. I joined that and that's where I started learning all the Amazon tips and tricks. From you guys way back then and so you you've been around this space for quite a long time, and you have that history of sharing those tips and tricks which I think prefaces what we're going to be talking about today. Kevin, because you've been around in the internet marketing sphere for a long time, you've seen the rise of Amazon and Amazon is still the king of e-commerce in the U. S. so with that being said, Kevin, in 2024, where do you see the puck going? What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for people selling on Amazon right now? A lot of people are saying, 'Well, has Amazon jumped the shark?' Should we be doing Shopify? Should we be looking at TikTok? To hell with Amazon. I think they're making a mistake. Amazon is still the place you absolutely must be. If you're selling any physical product, at all, whether it's just in stores right now or it's on your own website. If you're not on Amazon, you're leaving thousands, tens of thousands, maybe potentially millions of dollars on the table because it's the shopping cart of choice for anybody in e-commerce. Now, there's some people that have gotten upset at Amazon. They're like, 'The heck with Amazon.' They don't take PayPal, so I'm going to go buy on eBay because they take PayPal. Actually, eBay doesn't take PayPal anymore. I'm going to go buy on Shopify because the seller takes PayPal. I don't trust Amazon or something, so you have a few people like that. But you look at the numbers, I mean Amazon last year did something like close to 600 billion dollars in sales, now some of that's AWS and advertising, it's not all product sales, I think the product sales side of it was somewhere in the 350-400 range, somewhere, I have to look at the charts, and that's just Amazon's what they took in, that's not total GMV. Because third-party sellers are about 61-62 percent, and Amazon only counts in their sales figures what they charge in fees. They don't count the total GMV. So the total GMV, if 61%, let's just call it $400 billion, if 61% of that is coming from outside, that's basically a trillion dollars in sales, in top-line GMV sales. And that's incredible. You look at TikTok shop. Everybody's hot about TikTok shop now. And a lot of people should be. There's some opportunity there. But I think TikTok just put out at the beginning of 2024 that our goal this year is $20 billion in sales. And you look at Shimu and Timu, there's a lot of buzz around them. I think Sheen this year is projecting like $40, maybe $40 billion, almost all fashion. And then Timu is like hoping to get to $20, $25. billion in total so that's a lot of money i mean don't get me wrong but you look at walmart . com everybody's always walmart . com walmart . com is going to do about 100 billion in sales this year but 90 billion of that is their own wholesale stuff that's their issuing purchase of the stuff they sell in the stores that they're issuing purchase orders to big companies only 10 billion of that is from third-party sellers so if you take that 10 billion of walmart . com who's the next biggest player out there's terms of traffic um and compare that to the 400 billion On Amazon, there's no comparison. Amazon is the king. Amazon will do, you know, this last Prime Day that just happened in July, Amazon did basically in two days what TikTok will do in an entire year with that perspective, or it did more than what Walmart. com will do in an entire year. So you've got to be on Amazon. So the people that say that you shouldn't be on Amazon or I'm going to go somewhere else are making a grave mistake. Now, is Amazon more competitive? Absolutely. I mean, you started. 2016 2015 2016 i started selling on amazon 2001 but the fba model which is what most of us are doing i started 2015 and it was way easier then it's way more competitive now you could get by it was kind of skirting and not knowing everything back then now you got to wear a lot of hats or you got to have a big team that knows a lot about a lot of things about cash flow about product sourcing about marketing about sourcing about logistics about tons of things and there's there's holes in all those areas and that overwhelms a lot of people and they can't handle that and and so they fail you know ninety percent of all sellers who try to come on Amazon fail and I think was it eight hundred thousand new sellers I think in the US last year something something like that there's about two million active seller central accounts in the US and a lot of those probably haven't sold anything a marketplace pulse probably has those numbers but Only 60 ,000 of those, I think it was, is the stats. I think it's 2022 or 2023. Somewhere around 60 ,000 did a million dollars in sales. It's somewhere around that number. It's probably gone up a little bit since then. That's a decent number. That's a small city of millionaires or million-dollar sellers. They may not be millionaires, but they're selling over a million. And some of those, probably half of those are big companies. Half of those are crocs. dude wipes and whatever that are, you know, big companies. They're not the little guys sitting in their underwear at their house selling stuff. So that's, the opportunity is still big, but you've got to know what you're doing now. It's become a real business. It hasn't become a side hustle. I mean, you can make it a side hustle, but in the Western world to make real money, it's got to be a real business. And unless you're just, if you're just looking to make some little side cash to take a vacation or pay off a bill, or if you live in, you know Pakistan and where a thousand dollars a month is serious cash, you're rich, um, you know it, it's hard, um, to, to make a living off and a lot of people don't understand the cash, you know. If you're doing a million dollars in sales, profit margins used to be they used to say 20, 25, which bottom line, which you should shoot for. Some people might be doing more than that, some less. If you're doing FBA now, wholesale is more like five to ten percent, but if you're doing the FBA private label model, um, it should have been the But now people are like 15% is considered good by the aggregators because the margins are getting squeezed, the costs are getting higher, there's more competition. But even if you're at 15% and you're doing a million dollars, if you're one of those 60,000 people doing a million dollars a year and 15% is $150,000, that's decent money, but it's not life-changing money for most people in the West. But what most people don't think about is that $150,000 is not going into your pocket. You might be taking $20,000 or $30,000 of that. uh and living on on noodles uh because you're having to reinvest it if your company's growing you're having to buy new inventory and get some additional stuff you're going to stay ahead of the game it becomes this cash flow struggle that a lot of people just they got cash coming in and going out but they can't keep they can't get ahead of it and the only way really to get ahead of it is to um either sell uh and have a windfall you get 150 000 sde You might be able to sell that for $300 ,000 to $400 ,000 right now with the multiples, and you get a hit of cash. So you've got to play the long game, or you've got to figure out a way to get your margins better so that $150 ,000 can go to $200 ,000 or $250 ,000, or you've got to sell a lot more. That's a struggle that a lot of people have. It's a lot to do and know. Yeah. No, I completely agree, and I think your point is well taken in the aspect of The Amazon game has changed not to the aspect of it's no longer a viable business opportunity, but it is more competitive in the aspect of like you can make fewer mistakes with your supply chain. You can make fewer mistakes with your cash flow. You can make fewer mistakes with your ad spend dollars because. The cost per click is a lot higher now for the ads and so you could easily blow your ad budget really quick, so I think it's becoming more of like, 'You have to create a real business around it.' Like you said, do you have experts that are going to be able to help you execute a wicked smart PPC strategy? Do you have an expert in supply chain that can help you reduce as much of that waste that goes into optimizing your supply chain so that you're not sitting on too much inventory, but also not too little. That's the problem with supply chain; you can never forecast perfectly. You're either too much or too little, right? But that, getting that number closer to the perfect amount becomes more and more important. So Kevin, I guess that would be my question to you then. If that's what's required, then-how do these small mom-and-pop, I guess, marketers that kind of like started things, they were a one-man shop? I mean, I feel like we heard that a lot; like there were a lot of people that stumbled upon million-dollar businesses. They had three, four, five million-dollar businesses, and it was just them, maybe a couple of VAs. Do you see that changing, and how do they need to pivot? They just need to come to MarketMasters and hook up with a Dream 100, you know, the best in the business. The answer to that is sometimes people try to grow too fast because they just quit. Those mom and pops that have a couple of BAs, they just quit their job. Or someone sold them a bill of goods on YouTube or a podcast or somewhere. Oh, yeah, you can make a lot of money doing this. And so they're tired of working a corporate job or something, and they quit way too soon before they can actually have the cash flow to support themselves. And so they get desperate, and they start trying to grow too fast. Um, so fast growth is a big killer; uh, a lot of those and a lot of them; they should not be. You need to know the basics; you should do a course; you should do watch some YouTube videos; listen to podcasts; know the basics of PPC; know the basics of shipping; and you know what's the difference between a small shipment and a full truck or whatever, um, shipment. Um, you should know some of those basics but you should not be trying to be an expert in all those things. You need to be hiring good people and then getting out of their way. And how do you know who those good people are? It's hard. That's one of the reasons for the Dream 100 is pointing people in the right direction. You can go on LinkedIn. There's other places, get referrals from other people that have been working with people. But hire people that know this stuff, that maybe where you're breaking it out into agencies. And at some point, maybe you can bring that in-house or hire it. But that's part of the problem the aggregators had. There's all these billions of dollars raised in the agri space, and they figured we could just buy all these, group them all together. We could probably hire some of the operators who were doing this to come in and help us out. Most of them didn’t want to do that because they wanted the freedom. They don’t want to work and go back to corporate life. And then they thought, well, we just hire some Harvard MBAs and Ivy League people that know what they’re doing, and they don’t know what they’re doing. They’ve never done e-commerce. They’ve never done guerrilla marketing. It’s not their money on the line. Rents due next month, or payrolls due, and you’re like, Amazon hasn’t paid me yet. What the heck am I going to do? They’re holding my money. They never dealt with any of that stuff. And so it didn’t work. So those people that are small need to focus on the branding side, trying to create, not just go into it and looking for product opportunities, but looking for branding opportunities. Look for opportunities where you can find an avatar and sell to that avatar. Not sell products, but sell people. And so if I'm a person, what's my avatar? Maybe I'm a dog owner. So does that just mean I sell dog treats? Probably not. Maybe it's too competitive. But what else does a dog owner do? They take walks with their dog. Maybe you come up with or find some sort of unique either development yourself or come up with some unique shoes for walking on rough trails around a lake when you're walking your dog. When you're walking your dog for an hour, maybe you need a sun visor for you and the dog, or maybe you need something to hold your phone in your pocket or on your arm or whatever. Think of the avatar and think of not specializing in a category, but specializing in a lifestyle person and sell to that person because then you can sell them over and over and over. It's a long-term play. It's not a short-term win, but then it becomes something that's more sustainable. And that's what I think a lot of people are missing. They're just looking for they're using tools out there and just saying, 'oh, that's a great opportunity.' Let me launch a blender that makes cool smoothies. And then, oh, here's another cool opportunity. It's a dog bowl that slows the dogs down from eating fast. Let me launch that. And there's no congruent, no togetherness there. It's not creating a brand. It's just looking for opportunity. Those things are usually short-lived. And you can make a little bit, maybe some quick cash that way if you need to do a couple of those. OK, but you need to move off of that. Uh, and and start creating true branding. Uh, so you is the trick is you need to use these platforms, whether it's TikTok or Amazon or Walmart or wherever Shopify your own Shopify to get you need to own the customer. There's nothing more valuable than owning the customer because if you own... look at my calendar business as a perfect example. I've been selling calendars since 1995, printed, printed wall calendars. I remember I was on a webinar about a month ago talking given similar example to this and in the comments people are like, 'Who the heck buys a wall count of printed a wall calendar? Use your phone, uh, it's all digital now. Who needs that? That's stupid.' I don't believe that you're selling you know into the millions of dollars of these calendars. This doesn't sound right. I'm like Dude, you're missing the boat; you have no clue what you're talking about and that's there's a perception out there a lot of people that They don't understand markets. They don't understand their customer. They don't understand because that's not what they would do. They think everybody's that way. That's a mistake a lot of new sellers make. And then, because I'm selling calendars, it's something they've got to buy every year. So it's like selling eggs; they go bad, you need a new one. And I can go on Amazon and put my new calendars on every year, and I do, and we sell a lot. We sell a ton of them. But I do everything I can to try to get that information off Amazon. Amazon doesn't want to give you that customer data. But I try to get it through different package inserts in different ways, not to get reviews, not to manipulate the system, but I just want them in my database. So I've got 17,000 active people right now that have bought calendars from me. And what do I do with those? Well, every year when the new calendars come out, I send them an email. and i send a direct mail piece a physical printed direct mail piece in the mail with a stamp it doesn't have a stamp on its bulk rate but and it has our calendars we do four different ones that we print in south korea and then we sell in the united states and we have several others that we do print on demand just to testing concepts and testing ideas that we do print on demand if one of those works then we roll it out into mass production the next year and then we also i pick up other people's calendars so there's there's in austin where i live there's a company called calendars . com you may have seen them in the malls they have all the little kiosks you know a lot of times the holidays times in the malls and they have calendars . Com, the biggest seller of calendars in the world, and I worked out a deal with them where I can go in and get just-in-time inventory. They're buying all these calendars from all over the place, and I don't want to deal with 50 different mom-and-pop calendar makers, so I go into them and I pay about a 10% premium. But I just tell them, 'Hey, I need 46 of this unit; I need 119 of this unit next month.' And I get just-in-time inventory. I don't get stuck with anything that has a date on it, and I resell them for about a 40% margin on top of ours that have like a 90% margin. Uh, and so it adds extra money, and I'm able to do that because I have a customer list, then I see what people are buying, directly from me, and I can tailor the next year's what I'm doing to that. And then when the new calendars come out on Amazon I send these flyers and these emails and I say, 'Hey, Josh, the new calendars are out for 2025. Go grab yours. You can buy them from me. It's $19. 95 plus $9. 95 shipping and handling. Or if you're an Amazon Prime member, just go buy it on Amazon. Here's the link if it's in the email. And it's not a special link that has keywords hidden in it or anything. It's just a straight link to the product. But what does that do? A lot of them have Prime memberships, so they go and they buy. These are collectors, a lot of them are, so they buy all four calendars. Or they might go buy my calendars and then go buy some Corvette calendar or some other dog calendar or whatever. But because my calendars were also in their cart, I get in the frequently bought together or customers who viewed this also viewed. I get my four calendars linked together in the 'bought together', 'buy these three together' section or bundle section or whatever they call it. And it snowballs, and it flywheels. And so I launch them in September when nobody's buying. You're selling three units a day. But by Cyber Monday, we're selling hundreds and hundreds of units a day, every single one of them. And they're all linked together. I do zero PPC. And then there's some guys that still send me that check and money order in the mail in an envelope with a stamp on it. It's handwritten. And it's fun to go to the mailbox that time of year. I have a little P.O. box. Just south of me in a different city, and I go down there about twice a week. And you know the boxes, I had to get a bigger box; the boxes you open, you have the key, you can't see inside. You open it up, there's stacked envelopes like this high. You're like, just pull them out, they're falling on the floor. You know, you pick them up and turn them all the same way, and stack them. Like, you start flipping through them, and you're like, oh, there's there's Sam! Yeah, he's been buying for 20 years. You start recognizing names, and then you get one of your flyers back. It has a sticker on it from the post office. It says, 'undeliverable,' deceased. And you're like, oh, man, there went $1,000. That guy was – no, I'm just kidding. That guy buys every year. So that's the type of mentality you've got to be thinking is, use these marketplaces as lead magnets and then get these people off onto your own list so that you can monetize them in other ways. That's exactly – What I do with the billion-dollar sellers newsletter, I mean that's when I say top of funnel, top of funnel means What's the easiest way to get somebody on your list? And you're not really necessarily trying so the newsletter is free; I get you on the newsletter. You may not know me and see and maybe you don't like it and you cancel that's okay! If you don't like what I'm doing, you cancel you're probably never gonna be my customer anyway. But if you stay on there, and I just did this on my newsletter, and I did it in July, last month in July. I took a look at that point, I had about 10,000 active subscribers. These are opt-ins. This is not me just blasting my whole list of whoever I got their email; you had to opt in. And I kick you out if you don't open and click at least once a month, so I've kicked out about 3,000 people because they're too busy. Maybe they want it, but they're just too busy; they're never going to buy. So it also helps with the deliverability, and there's much of other issues around that. But out of those 10,000, I went in there and I said, 'All right, who has opened at least 80% of the last eight newsletters? And who has clicked at least 20% of the time, and what have they clicked on? I put some other criteria and made an audience of raving fans. These are the raving fans. These are the people that are like, 'I can't wait for the newsletter to show up and it makes my day.' I've got to make time to read it every day or at least skim through it. And there's about 1,000 people out of those 10,000. Those are my die-hard customers. Those are people that are most likely going to buy something. And if I can get more people into that, and it builds this brand new because the newsletter is coming every Monday and Thursday. I'm staying top of mind. And then what I do, there's a membership side coming to the newsletter soon. And then there's my events, the online event, the in-person event that are high-ticket. There's some other stuff that's going to be coming. I sell affiliates. I make five figures a month off the newsletter right now in gross revenue. And just from affiliate commissions, Walmart bought. Spent into the five heavy five figures to buy a whole series of ad placements so it monetizes itself that way and it builds credibility and people can do you can do this for products too physical products but you got to have the name you got to know who they are and then you can leverage that in all kinds of directions and um that's that's something I think that's the last asset I would ever give to anybody is a list, you know. You sometimes go on these webinars or people that have bought stuff um and they give the list like people always ask me for the BDSS list uh you know from the attendees of BDSS can I get the sponsors do and I only give it to two people each time it's the two people that I charge a heavy premium, they pay like more than double the price to sponsor and then they get the list of attendees but everybody else doesn't. You can go out there and get them yourself because I know how valuable that list is and too many people don't understand that they just they they're already they're just trying to get the next sale from the next customer, not trying to sell more to. It's a lot easier to sell more to someone who already knows you and already appreciates you and likes you than it is to sell someone new. And I'll give you another perfect example of this. And when we were doing these calendars, the calendars that we do feature pretty models, pretty girls. That's what we do. He shot a whole bunch of, you know Mark. Mark and I, Mark's a photographer by trade. Shot a lot of high-end fashion for Neiman Marcus. These aren't porn calendars. When I say pretty girls, the first thing that comes to mind, some people are like, oh, porno calendars. I don't know. He used to shoot for Neiman Marcus and Levi's, and he shot a lot of famous celebrities and high-end fashion-type of stuff. So these calendars feature, we shot heavily until about 2009. We were doing. TV stuff for some of the big TV networks and TV stuff we were doing books and magazines and calendars and all kinds of collectibles like little baseball cards and all kinds of stuff, and then around 2009 or so, YouTube came out, and some other free stuff came out. People are like, 'Why do I need to pay for this stuff? I can just go watch it online for free or whatever.' So, sales started going down, and we're like, 'We need to pivot to another business model But because I had a customer list of, at that time, probably 7,000, 8,000 people that had been buying baseball cards or calendars or whatever from me, I was able for seven years to live off of those customers without doing anything else. I was able to travel the world. I've been to 94 countries. At that time frame, I probably went to about 60 of them, 65 of them or so over seven years just traveling a lot. How did I make a living during that time? We had an office with 16 people. We closed it down over 2011. It was closed down. And so the next several years, I lived off of selling those people. And what did I sell them? I had two things. I had assets. I had content. You know about this with Hadley Design. I had actual content, which is these libraries of videos and photos. And I had a customer list. So what I did is I knew my customer. Like I said earlier, I knew my avatar. My customers were collectors. These guys not only want to have stuff of calendars of pretty girls, but they collect them. They become a fan of a model, and they want everything that model's ever been on. And some of these guys, to this day, they buy two calendars. They buy one to open, one to keep in the wrap. And I've seen stuff going on eBay, calendars of ours from 10 years ago for $500 because it featured somebody, some model that was unknown at the time and now is famous for some reason. And so people do that. So I went to them, and we took all the pictures, and we put them on a USB hard drive. I went on Amazon. Back then you could buy a one-terabyte hard drive for $39. And so I was buying. I would have limits. Some people were putting selling limits. You can only buy five or ten or whatever on their account. So I had a couple different ones I was using. I would buy 50 or 100 hard drives, literally, one-terabyte hard drives for $39. 95 a piece, they come to my house. I had three computers, uh Macintosh computers, and I'd format all those as uh Microsoft... uh, wasn't it DOS? Or I can't remember what it's Microsoft formats that way they work on on both PC and Mac. And we would copy off libraries of photos so this was like the complete collection of photos of Susie Q, and the complete collection of photos of this and oh, you might have missed this video from this one. And we would sell those. We start off selling for 599 uh, and now to this day we still sell them. And every single one of my calendar flyers that goes out, it's still on the website and we sell 30 or 40 a year uh to new people who didn't know about us but back then we were selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of these. And then it got so good I was like holy cow. What else do we have that we can sell them? I need to take another trip. And so we're digging around in office drawers, like finding old CDs and old hard drives that had like the unpublished secret director's cut or whatever. Came out with another one and came out with another one. Then we went to other people. There were photographers that had massive libraries that said, hey, we'll do this for you. Give us your list. We'll mix it with our list. So we got free customers that we could cross-sell and we could sell to their list and ours to theirs. And we blew that up. That's all because we had the data and we knew our customer. And I was able to live and travel the world pretty comfortably for seven years doing that without any other business. It kind of dried up over time, and that's when I switched to FBA. I was like, all right. I was almost semi-retired, and my dad was like, what are you going to do? I was like, start this FBA thing, I think. I saw some four-part video series of amazing . com showing you how to make money on Amazon. They wanted $5,000 for a course. I'm like, to heck with that. I've already been sourcing all over the world. I already know how to do this stuff. I already do e-commerce. I don't need them. I'll just do it myself. And so, that's when I launched five brands in 2015 on Amazon. I love that. The rest is history. The rest is history. Sorry, I just talked so long. No, Kevin, I think it's so important, though. I hope people go back and hit the rewind button on that because what you shared is a lot of golden nuggets that people in direct response marketing have been doing for decades. Kevin and I, we actually attended one of Dan Kennedy's recent events, the Super Conference, and we were both there. And what's interesting is that there was, I think we ran into one other Amazon seller, at least that we know of that we were on shoulders with while we were there, but everybody else, they were, in extremely different industries, right? You had people that were landscapers. You had people that were selling courses that were teaching other people like SEO optimization and just random things like this. But here's the common thing that they all, here's the one thing that they all had in common. They were all focused on building a raving fan base and an audience, and then catering something to their needs. Right. And so that is, I think, the example. I think a lot of the Amazon sellers that stumbled upon a million-dollar Amazon brand, and I'm guilty of this as myself, we kind of stumble into it thinking like it's all about the product that you stumble upon. Right. I found this golden nugget that's untapped potential on Amazon. That's great, but it is short-lived. And so if you can't then create a brand and say, OK, if a customer buys this, what else will they need afterwards? That's really where the true business forms. And so a lot of Amazon sellers are focused just on that front-end sell, but time and time again, any, any businesses that have gone into the hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, they all have a very good backend process. And so Alex Hormozy's podcast, I was listening to it the other day, The Game. And one thing he talked about is like, if you truly want to scale an e-commerce brand to $100 million and beyond, like if you want to do big things, you have to start with the end in mind first, which he said, you have to focus first on the backend. What is the backend going to look like? Then I'll work all the way up to the front. What is going to be my tripwire? What's that cheap product that maybe gets somebody their foot in the door and into my community? So I think that's a good mindset shift. That's a good example. Like now someone will say, you know, like when I felt when you, you know, a lot of podcasts that go on, they have you fill out a form and says, what do you want to promote? You know, do you want to, at the end, we'll give you a little shout out, a little plug or whatever. What do you want to do? You want me to, sometimes they ask me, I'll promote your upcoming event in Iceland, the billion dollar solar summit in Iceland. I was like, no, please don't. We'll talk about it if you want, but please don't promote that. You know, if you want to mention the URL, okay, but no, no, no, no. Tell them to go to my newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com. It's free because 100 people that are listening might do that versus zero to one people that are listening are going to go to Billion Dollar Seller Summit. They may go there and look around, but I don't know who they are unless I'm using Retention. com or DataZap or one of these tools that will grab your identity when you don't know it. But they'd only hit about 30% to 50% of the time on those. I want you in that top of funnel because then I've got you. I know your email address. I gave you something for free. You didn't have to pay for it. And then down the road, I'm going to see how active you are. I'm going to see what you click on. I know everything, Josh, that you've clicked in the newsletter. I know every one that you've opened. I know I can segment you. And I can say, oh, this Josh guy, he's super into AI tools because every time I run an AI tool, I'm just making this up. This is not factual. But every time I run an AI tool, he clicks on it. And he always clicks on this one, always the video tools more often than the text tools. So then I can build enough audience and I can go to advertisers and say, hey, you want to reach 500 people who are really into video tools? Instead of paying me 500 bucks for an ad, these are premium. These are pre-qualified. These are like the cream of the cream. Give me five grand and I'll let you, I'll send you an email. I'm not going to give you their email address, but I'll send a direct email to them on your behalf. Just had this happen. Someone's doing a. Doing something and, with the newsletter to monetize it, they're like your audience is really good. She was doing this uh this this promotion and she said hey, can you promote it for me? I'm like, sure, I'll put in the newsletter; it'll get some hits, but if a single one-off email to the list, I'll do one a week max um, for total between all people and I don't want to burn the list or wear people out, but you've got to pay for that. And the response will be way the heck higher so she paid me 2, 500 bucks to send a one-off email; it did so well that she mentioned me back a couple days later said this has gotten so many your conversion rate off the clicks is above 50 we don't see that with anybody else that's doing any kind of promotions, forget how many clicks they get just the clicks don't convert. Your audience is so good. Can you run a second follow-up email um and we'll give you some more money? And they gave me a bunch more money; and so that I'm able to do that because I have an audience and I have the data. But you can do that with physical products. I do it with a lot of my dog stuff and the calendar stuff. I can spin things off. You know, back on that hard drive thing, we would know we had a website at one point where you could download. We had probably 200 different models. And somebody's like, you know, people are into different things, and they have different things that they like. Some people like blondes. Some people like brunettes. Some people like Asians or whatever it may be. And we could see who's downloading what. So we segmented all the models instead of. Buying a membership to the whole site, you could do that or you could just get the one you wanted and then what we want we want we do behind that is they downloaded all these pictures we came back and offered them a print on demand calendar of just that girl and we actually made it to where they could go through the 100 pictures or 200 pictures or whatever they had and select the pictures they want and then hit a button and it would send it off to print on demand and print a calendar of just those 12, and we would charge like 100 for that calendar worked really really well. So that kind of stuff is what you've got to be thinking about and doing. Use your Amazon business, or I call it Amazon business, use your physical products business as a lead magnet. These are channels to get customers. Amazon's already done the work to get people there. They trust it. Do anything in your power that's legal and not going to break the terms of service to get them onto your list. Get a physical address and an email address. Most people don't change their email address. You're probably still using an email address you used 15 years ago. You may have other email addresses on top, but there's probably still one main one, unless it's just gotten so flooded with spam, you're like, 'the heck with this.' But if you can get their physical address, that one, you can always tie it back to an email address. There's big databases out there. So if you're Josh at HadleyDesigns. com, and you've been using that for 15 years, and you suddenly decide that I'm getting too much spam here, I'm just going to shut this account down and do a J. jh at hadleydesigns. com if i have your physical address i can use big databases and i can go in and i can match that because you filled out some form somewhere else or somewhere some data and i can find your new address if i have your if you have your mailing address um and you can also follow people for in the united states for four up to four years if they move if you ever move and put in one of those change of address to forward your mail i can get all that data it's free i mean they sell it to you uh so i can follow you uh so there's All kinds of things like that that a lot of people don't understand that you can do. And to make sure you keep in touch with these people. And like I said on the calendars, I sell them calendars every year until I get one of those things back in the mail that says the guy died, you know, deceased. Or a lot of times we would get them back and it would be funny. It's like, quit sending me this garbage. This trash is, don't send me this trash again. I'm going to call the police if I ever get another. one of these pretty girl calendars in the mail or whatever. And we, this, we look at their history and they've been ordering every year for like 10 years. Like, all right, um, Billy just got married or the girlfriend found out or something. Uh, and he, they, she said, you got to write this letter. So that's when you lose them. But, um, uh, that's what most people don't understand about what they're doing is they're just looking for the quick, easy win and play the long game, play, play the long game. And you can see what, you know, Just on the calendar business, I've been making money off these people for 30 years, over and over and over with virtually no cost other than a postage stamp and a little printout. We'll spend about $17,000 to put it in perspective, between postage and printing because we do bulk rate. It's a fold-out flyer. It's like a big 11 by 17 that folds out print on heavy card stock. Got all the pictures and the order form in there and everything. I think it's about eight grand that we'll spend to send those 17. So call it, let's just call it 50 cents a piece. Call it 60 cents a piece. Just round up. 60 cents per piece. Can you run a Facebook ad for 60 cents and get a click? Probably not. Can you? And these are customers. Remember, these are already customers. And off of that, we'll do hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales off of that one mailer. That's a really good ROI. And I don't have to do anything else. That's what I used to be where if someone would write me a letter uh on this calendar business and I get a letter email hey do you have any pictures of Sally Sally Jane and we don't and I would I would write them back sorry we don't we don't have anything in Sally Jane but this is someone that found us off an internet site their buddy told them but what would I do? Is I made sure that that name on the return address on the envelope I would cut it out or tear it out and make sure that it went in our database as a potential customer. That's how anal I was about every one of those as a potential lead. And that's where a lot of people miss the boat. Use every one of your e-commerce sales as a potential lead and get them whatever you can do. Get them on your list and then resell to them. Yeah. Kevin, I think we could probably keep going on for another two hours just on this specific topic here. Uh, maybe we need to save it for Part Two because I think getting into the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of this is kind of where the magic lies but I think today, I think this has been a in my opinion hopefully a good mindset shift for a lot of sellers that are maybe too front and focused that are just like when am I going to make my next sale on Amazon? Because it's much more than how do I make my first sale on Amazon? There should be a community building. There should be backend products and services that you're able to offer to those customers because you know them and you're communicating with them. You're interacting with them. You have a newsletter. You have all the information on them, just like you have on everybody that's part of your billion-dollar seller newsletter. You know what they're clicking on, what they're interested in, and you can better create products to serve these unique customers on your list. And again, that's where this flywheel keeps going around. Building communities is one of the biggest things that people overlook as product sellers. You know this with your wife and the designs and stuff. If you're not going to do what I just said and try to get do everything in your power to get their name and email their address, their name and their email address on your list, their physical address, their name, um it's think about building a community uh around what, what are your avatars that you're selling because you look and look at look at the you're on the billion dollar sellers WhatsApp group, you have to bend you have to bend to a a billion dollar seller event to get in there so there's five six hundred people or something that are in there but look how active that is in that community um is There's no spam going on other than me posting stuff from time to time saying here's what's going on around my event. And the same thing I do for the newsletter. I don't know if you're in that one or not, but you've got to refer at least three people to get into a special WhatsApp group for the newsletter. That qualifies you. It's like you're someone that actually likes the newsletter. You're not just someone that just wants free stuff. You actually have benefited. So build those, and those communities are very active. And you can do that around products, around your avatar, not around your brand necessarily. Don't build a – I wouldn't necessarily build a Kevin King community; I would build it around whatever the avatar is, so I'm building around sellers. I'm building around people seeking education. I'm building around one my dog product brand people that love dogs and are looking for a niche, and down even further. Not just dog owners, but niching down they all have they all have dachshunds or something like that. That's the kind of thing everybody should be thinking about too because I've heard several people just recently, Harry Belcher is just one of them, uh, just saying this the other day they believe and you just said about Alex; so communities are one of the big things going forward that are going to give you a major magic bullet if you can, if you have it. Yeah, I believe it, Kevin. My last piece of wisdom here because I'm going to wrap wrap things up... I'm going to share three actionable takeaways from today's episode you let me know if we're missing anything here so. Action item number one You talked about how the game is changing on Amazon. You need to be a more sophisticated business owner in order to actually excel at Amazon. And I would agree with that. Now, that doesn't mean that if you just crossed a million dollars in sales that you can go out and hire a bunch of, well, I can go find a full-time supply chain manager. I can go find a full-time PPC manager because those are going to be six plus figure salaries if you want the cream of the crop, right? So here's one recommendation I have for you: If you're looking for expert advice and consultants, that's where I would argue you begin. And one of the best places you could go, there's different tools, but there are a lot of websites. Intro . com is one of the examples where you can hire experts in their particular field, set up calls with them and you pay, you know, sometimes a high hourly rate, sometimes at three, four, $500 an hour to speak with these individuals. But you're going to get people that are in the weeds that can give you direct valuable experience just for your brand. And they can help you rather than hiring a full-time. So that's action item number one. Action item number two, you talked about how the game is changing on Amazon in terms of the products. And I think this also leads into the AI conversation, which we didn't really dive into today. But the game on Amazon is going to change to where Amazon is going to know what your type of product, which audience that serves best. So in the calendar business, are you, you and I are both in the calendar business, but our demographics can be more different than they are because I'm selling to women primarily between the ages of 20 to 55, their moms, a lot of school teachers. That's my demographic. I know who that customer is and yours is the opposite. Yours is going to be more on men. And so knowing that customer. And who that audience, create products around them, and then create your A-plus content, create your images to feature and double down saying, 'this is my avatar I'm trying to sell to. And that's going to help the whole AI algorithm down the road. But at the same token, it's going to set you apart because if you just come off with, hey, I got, I found that blenders are crushing it on Amazon right now. So I'm going to go create my own blender. If that's your only basis, you have like a one, not even maybe a 0. 1% chance of actually succeeding. Whereas if you say I'm creating a blender for hippies that love very unique designs and they want something that's super obscure, like then maybe you're onto something there, especially if you've got a community. Last but not least, my third action item is this: build a community and focus on the back end of your entire Amazon-based business. So if you have a physical products-based business where 90% of your sales are coming from Amazon, you've got to focus on how do I start to build an audience and a tribe that i can market to and identify let's say if i have teachers maybe there's a some type of teacher course or bundle or maybe supplements that i could maybe even start selling that's dedicated just to teachers right that's the type of things you need to be thinking about and so my final thing on that note would be step outside of the Amazon space. Because guess what, Kevin? You and I have both learned these strategies, not by going to Amazon events, but I was a part of War Room. So I was with Perry Belcher, Ryan Dice, Roland Frazier. I was with those guys and they come from a very different background and experience. And I stole a lot of their ideas that are working in their industries and applied them into mine. Same thing with Dan Kennedy. And it's the same principles there. Kevin, am I missing anything else here? No, I think that's pretty good. That's pretty good. You said it was intro . com? Intro . com. Yeah, that doesn't come up. Intro . co. That's CO. All right. Just want to make sure everybody had that. Oh, that was listening. Okay. Intro . co. All right. Cool. All right, Kevin. Here's my final thing that I'd love to ask each guest the following three questions. I didn't prep you for these, but I know you'll be able to answer them. What's been the most influential book that you've read and why? Probably Guerrilla Marketing, Jay Levinson. I read that when I was in my early 20s. I think there was a series of them. That was really good, and Wizards of Ads is another good one. It's little short stories about all these successful people. Those two are probably the two. I've got a huge bookshelf. You can't see it here. Of probably 100 books that people have recommended from different things. Oh, you've got to read Find Your Wine. You've got to read Persuasion. You've got to read it. I haven't gotten to most of them. They look good on the bookshelf, and I want to get to them. So some of those could take their place, but those would be the two that I would say. Those are great, great recommendations. All right, next question. What is a new AI tool that you've been impressed with that you think is maybe an undiscovered hidden gem? We talked about it a little bit before we got started, Benson . ai for people in our business that are doing copywriting and VSLs and stuff like that. It can be pretty game-changing. It's B-N-S-N . ai. From an Amazon seller's point of view, man, there's a lot of good tools, but they're focused. I think what I end up doing, I use four or five different tools together. Some of it's the general stuff like Perplexity. I use Perplexly, Cloud, and ChatGPT, all three of them. I use some of the Amazon-specific tools. So if there's one, I think the ones that are going to make the biggest impact that could change a lot in our business and change a lot in the entertainment business are like Sora and Runway, these video tools where you can just type in a text prompt and say what you want. Hollywood movie level video and being able to do that for your products, I think that's going to be a major thing. And your influencer marketing is going to be major, major, major. It's not quite there yet, it's almost there, but within the next six months to two years, you're going to be able to do things without needing actors or actresses or anything anymore. You want to put your your blender for hippies in a scene where there's a bunch of people at Coachella sitting around a campfire with your blender, uh, telling stories. You just type that in all and it'll make an amazing video, and you put that run that on social media or send that to your audience if that's your audience, and they're going to identify immediately with it and you're going to be able to do this instantly. And if that one didn't work, you're like, 'oh shoot, uh, we forgot to' -it's not supposed to be oak on the fire because the hippies don't like oak; it needs to be red redwood or whatever, switch the logs to redwood and put it back out, and look, the conversion rate is now 20% higher. You'll be able to do all kinds of cool stuff like that so those. Types of tools I think are going to revolutionize some of the ways that we can market and we can build these audiences to where they relate to what we're doing rather than just telling them or showing them in a still photo, we can bring them into our world uh and I think and I'm not talking about metaverses or anything like that I'm talking about bringing them into our world I think that's going to be game changing yeah I love that. Those are some great recommendations. All right, Kevin, last question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why? Oh, geez! I respect them most. I mean, I think there's people like Alex Ramos. He's really good at what he does. Listen to what he says. A lot of his advice is good. These are not Amazon people. These are more general marketing people where you can apply their principles across multiple disciplines. I think people like Ryan Dice from the War Room and Perry Belcher. Perry Belcher is kind of a little renegade. He's not for everybody. He's a little raw on the sides, but super smart people, always got good ideas. Those people are some that are really good in the e-commerce space that I think are at the top of the game. There's others out there. We've had them on, like Norman, I've had them on the Marketing Misfits podcast. You know, like Katie Wells, I think she's a super smart girl. Hopefully she'll be in Iceland next year with us at uh at Elevate 360 um there's a yeah those some that just come to mind right away. There's there's plenty of them but those would be some that come to mind. I think Dan Kennedy is still really good, you know we went to his Super Conference back in May. I think he's just getting a little bit aged a little bit uh a little bit you know old around the collar um but the principles that That don't change. The psychology and the principles don't change. Why humans buy is the same reason now as it was in 1850, 170 years ago. It's the same. It's just the technology and the methods, the delivery systems have changed, but the psychology of human behavior has not changed. And so a lot of these, go back and study a lot of these old writers from the 50s and 40s and 30s that were breaking ground in marketing, and a lot of those principles still apply to the modern world. Yeah. Love that. I totally agree. Kevin, if people want to follow you, I think I already know what the answer is going to be. But if people want to follow you, where should they follow you? BillionDollarSellers. com. BillionDollarSellers. com. That's the newsletter. Sign up for that. You'll keep on top of everything I do. Yep. I highly recommend it. I've been to his Billion Dollar Seller Summit. 20/22 was my first one and haven't looked back since. And so I think the biggest benefit that you have, and again, attending one of Kevin's events, is because it's a high ticket event, here's the best part. The people that have gotten into that door, you're dealing with high-level sellers. So compared to a lot of other conferences that I've been to where there's people like, oh, I just started yesterday. It's like, okay. I want to go talk to the people that are doing more than me. And that's what I find at Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And that's what I love. So Kevin, thank you so much. You never want to be the smartest person in the room. You never want to be the smartest person in the room. If they're the smartest in the room, you're in the wrong room. That's exactly right. So till I get to that billion dollar valuation. It's coming. It's coming. Becca told me it's coming. It's coming. Kevin, thanks so much for your time. And we'll chat with you again soon. All right. Glad to be here. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening. Visit ecombreakthrough. com for more information. 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