Kevin King - about Kevin's product, profitable keywords and secret report in a seller central

Kevin King - about Kevin's product, profitable keywords and secret report in a seller central 00:00:08 Hi everybody, and welcome to the Seller Board show! I'm your host Vladdy Gordon, and my today's guest is Kevin King. It's the second part of the interview with Kevin, and we're gonna talk about keywords-how many keywords you do need, and how to find profitable keywords. Kevin also talks about one of his products, so if you want to know what Kevin sells, then make sure to watch this video. We discussed reviews and product launch strategies with Facebook ads and influencer ads. And last but not least, Kevin gave us a hack-it's about the hidden report. So there is a hidden report in the Seller Central which you can activate through the seller support and he explains what this report is about and how to use it. 00:01:01 To optimize your listings, so make sure you give us a like if you actually like this video and subscribe to our channel and before we get started I'd like to mention our sponsor sellerboard. com is a profit analytics tool for Amazon sellers on a mission to build the world's most accurate tool, showing you all fees and expenses on every level on the product level on SKU level and on the level of a brand or a marketplace. Also shown by time, week, month, any specific day with a lot of visualization options and kind of business intelligence. So if you want to know your margins exactly, Sellerboard is the tool to give you a live view on the profit and loss with the possibility to zoom into every fee and every product. 00:01:57 Make sure you check out our free trial. There's a free trial one month. The link is in the description. And after that, it's starting only at $19 a month. Let us know what you think. And now let's start the show. So let's talk about reviews in terms of picking a product. Obviously, it's probably going to be hard if you compete with somebody who has 4,500 reviews. Yeah, if there's one guy that has that, you might be able to compete. But if several people have thousands of reviews, it's going to make it very difficult to compete. I mean, Amazon might change the system. I know some of the other guys in the industry are hoping they do. It changes too, instead of saying 4,500 reviews, they'll say 5,00 plus. 00:02:48 Or something like that. If that happens, that'll give us a better opportunity to come in and compete, which Amazon kind of needs to do because now if there's a couple old school guys that have been selling for a while and have a lot of reviews, maybe their product isn't the best. Maybe my product that I just innovated and changed is actually a better product, but I don't really have a chance. Amazon's all about the customer first, so that's not the best thing for the customer. Yeah, it makes the market a bit more aesthetic, right? Yeah. So I'm hoping that that will change and that would be a really good thing for the customer and for us as sellers, so we can come and compete. 00:03:28 But as it is right now, yeah, if you go into a market where there's two or three guys that have a ton of reviews like that, it's going to be hard. But some markets, it's still okay. Maybe you can be the number four, number five guy and still make good money. It depends on the depth of the keywords and how many different keywords are there and what the volume is on those. People are positioned; you still might be able to go in there and maybe you're not selling 50 a day, you're selling 10. But if you can make money on that, why not? You don't have to be in this game. You don't have to be in first or second place to make money. The guy down in some cases in fifth place is killing it. 00:04:02 I mean, you do want for the keywords you're going after, you need to be on page one and you need to be in the top four or five positions on page one. If you're below the top four or five positions, you're not getting much of the sales. So you need to find some keywords and maybe, for the big keywords, you're down the page, you're number 10 or 12 on the page and you're, you're picking up a few sales here or there, but you found three or four other keywords that aren't as popular, but you can position yourself to be number one, number two, number three, whatever. And that's where you're picking up most of your sales. Nice. Most, most products make their sales off of three, between three and eight keywords. 00:04:38 About 80 to 90% of the sales for most products come off between three and eight keywords. Now, in some products, they do have a lot of long tail keywords and you can make some sales off of those, but typically those long tails are 10, 15% maybe of your sales. So, you got to figure out what those three to eight are and figure out which ones of those you want to capture as many of those as you can, but which ones are those within your budget means to capture and focus on those. Like, you know, there are some tools or also some guys talking about keywords, especially long-term keywords and harvesting like tons of keywords, seriously, like thousands or maybe 700. Do you do that? No, I used to. I used to. 00:05:20 And I used to try to make my listing have as many keywords as possible. You know, I would try to make sure I would have it harvest and get 700 keywords and make sure somewhere in my listing I used every one of those words. I don't do that anymore. I will start off with a title that's a little bit long because I need to figure out which of these, say, eight keywords is going to work for me. After a month or two, once I have the data, I will change my title to make it shorter and focus on the two or three that are making me the money that I can compete on. The same thing with my bullets and listings. I don't fill those up anymore. I focus. 00:05:53 It makes your listing more relevant. I don’t have proof of this, but I think there’s something in Amazon where it says that if you have 100 words on your listing, every word gets one point. If you have 50 words on your listing, every word gets two points as far as relevance. I mean, that's simplified. That's not exactly how it works. And so I think less is more, and it makes it more relevant and better. Your title is super important on Amazon as far as ranking. That’s the most important place. The subject matter field in the back end, not the search term field, the subject matter field is super important. And then your images are really important. And so people eat with their eyes first. 00:06:41 So I'm a firm believer most people don't read Amazon listings. They might skim them. I mean, ask yourself, last several times you bought on Amazon, how many times have you actually read the listing? Just the images and the title, that's it. Images and the title. You might skim the bullet points or something real quick. Or if there's something technical you need to know, you might read the listing. But most people don't read that. You've got to focus on your images. And too many people just take pictures of their phone or they don't really focus on their images in the way that they should. And so, so, so back, you asked originally about getting reviews. So, people say, well, how do I get reviews? How do I compete? 00:07:23 Well, you can do the illicit ways where people have friends or family that aren't connected to them do it, or they go on Facebook groups, or they offer people, if you buy it, I'll PayPal your money back. I don't recommend any of that stuff. It's against the terms of service. I recommend, what I always tell people is, look, reviews take time. It's not going to be an overnight thing. But put out a damn good product and make sure it's a good product that satisfies the need. People will be happy to write about it. I have a dog bowl that I do. It's a slow feed dog bowl. And this bowl, I created it from scratch. I designed it from scratch and had the molds made and everything. 00:08:01 This dog bowl; people love it because their dog used to eat in. 20 seconds and now it takes them three minutes, and the dog doesn't get sick from eating too fast or throw up or have gas; they love it, so they they go and they write reviews like 'oh my god, my dog is so much better now he's not pooping in the house or or whatever they write reviews it solves a problem, they're proud of it, and it's a quality product, so people will will leave reviews. I mean, you can use if you're brand registered; I would recommend you use EBC, um, you know, to get the other reviewer program, and EBC pay $60 to get those first five. You can do that in the U. 00:08:36 S I don't know what other markets you could do that in, but for sure in the U. S., if you can get it, if you're, yeah, the money, you can try to get someone to Vine. Is it like the Vine? The Vine is different. That's about $2,500 bucks. Um, and that's mostly for vendors, but sometimes you can actually, if you know somebody, they can get you in there too. Uh, that can be a great way to get reviews. Um, You can use influencers to try to get some reviews and just put out a good product or create a system. I don't use email follow-ups anymore; I turned off all my email. I don't use those. Some people still use them. I don't think people begging for reviews in there is just, I don't know. 00:09:17 It's just not what I want to represent myself as. And the open rates are so abysmal and the response rates are so abysmal. You're better off creating a really cool insert that maybe has a QR code or has a scan this code and it takes them into a many chat sequence, for example. And then you can take them through a whole process and try to get a reviews through that. I know some people are doing success, having a great success with that. But the fundamental thing is you just have to put out a good product and reviews; they take time. They're not going to be, that's why I said this is not a sprint, people get impatient in this business. 00:09:51 They launch their product and in two weeks they want to see like be on page one competing with the big boys. It takes time. That's why I said earlier, I give my product six months, you know, on that $2,000. To get to your level where you, to get, yeah. It's a $2,000 profit a month because it takes time. Usually my first order on Amazon, I'm not one of these guys that test the market. I don't buy 10 things or 50 things and test it. I do my homework and I go all in. I do them; I need to buy 500 or a thousand, whatever it is. I'm all in. I don't believe in the little test. Let's, let's test this. That's, that's, that's just playing. 00:10:27 You're just, you're not, that's not a business. You're just, you're just playing around. So I, I, that's what I do. And so I'll go all in on a product, and usually that first order, I'm not making any money on. It might be a break-even because I've got to do PPC. I might have to do giveaways. That's another area people now can really do well is targeting. PPC on Amazon has improved greatly. Now you can do product targeting, or you can actually target your competition. So, you can actually pick the products you want to appear on the page for, which is super powerful. At least in the U. S you can do that. Um, and they just, uh, announced dynamic bidding. 00:11:08 So now you can bid on whether you want to be on the top of search or do you want to be in, uh, where do you want to be on the page? You want to be on product display pages, top of search, and how do you want to balance it? It's really getting better and better on the targeting. I think you're going to see that that's the, uh, the future is it's going to take to sell on Amazon, you're going to have to be willing to spend more money. You're going to have to be willing to spend on PPC to get placement. You're going to have to be willing to do some of that. I think you need to build that into your budgets as PPC is going to become a more and more important aspect of it. 00:11:46 Let's summarize what we've reviewed: You talked about inserts. You talked about this early reviewer program, right? Which you get if you're brand registered with EBC, Enhanced Brand Content, right? Right. And then you talked about influencers and giveaways and PPC. So is that it or did I miss something? That's pretty much it. That's pretty much what I do. I don't do any of the tactics out there that some people do to try to get reviews. What the Chinese hackers do is they find dormant listings. So what they do is they'll find someone that-it's happened to me. They have a system where they can find people that didn't properly delete their listing. And so maybe I was selling, say, a dog bowl, and I quit selling it because it wasn't making me money or for whatever reason I quit selling it. 00:12:43 And I didn't actually delete the listing out of Amazon. I just let it go out of stock and go inactive. Maybe it has 100 reviews on there. Um, they, they have a way to find those products and using a vendor central account, they have a hack where they can go in and they can take over that product, uh, and change the pictures and change everything. And they merge, what they do is emerge. They merge it with something else. And that way they instantly have a hundred reviews. And that's why you see a lot of times in some products, you're like, 'How the heck Sally's review get to be there?' You start reading it and they're selling a different product, fitness stuff and all the reviews are about blenders. 00:13:18 It's because most people don't read the reviews. Most people look at the first page of reviews and then they look at the star rating and that's about it. And so that's a problem. I think Amazon's going to be changing that. Amazon's coming out with a unified account sometime in 2019 where Vendor Central and Seller Central become basically one account. Okay. When that happens, I think that's going to help eliminate some of these problems from the Chinese hackers. Tell me, is there anything else you would recommend for launch? We're getting reviews more or less organically. Do you go strong for PPC or some external traffic? I do it all. On launch, I think you need to have a multi-pronged approach. I do heavy PPC. I don't wait for reviews. 00:14:08 Some people say, well, you got to wait for your first five reviews. Turn on PPC. I don't believe in that. I do it from the get-go. Now, you're going to have a lower conversion rate without reviews there, but it's okay. You've got to get the data. So I run heavy PPC. I run product targeting and the keywords I've researched and automated to do some additional work, making sure that the listing is good. I run Facebook. I do some Facebook stuff. I have a list of people, so I make some offers there to my current list of customers. I'll try to line up influencers to do some stuff. I use the Amazon giveaways. You can give away up to 30 units in a giveaway, and they have to watch a YouTube video in order to maybe have a chance to win the giveaway. 00:14:54 I do all that, as much of that as possible, to launch a product and try to get it going. Okay, nice. After launch, like when you have your product, let's say at a level where you're expected it to be. So you reached page one for the most keywords. For you, is it like a lot of work to maintain it or to develop it further? Or is it rather a passive thing then? And once you get to page one, it becomes a little bit more passive. And you got to kind of monitor it and use some tools to monitor just to make sure Amazon doesn't change the system and you slip. Some competitor comes in and does something malicious against you or whatever. But once you get there, I mean, I don't turn off PPC. 00:15:47 I still run the PPC even on page one. But I might dial it back a little bit, not spend quite as much. But yeah, that's when it becomes a little bit more passive. But it's difficult to stay on page one, at the top of page one in some categories. But if you pick these categories, they're not the big sell. I mean, the products are not in these huge, low BSRs, 300, 500, 600, but they're more in the US market. The $4,000 to $8,000 range, maybe $10,000, you can stay on page one longer and have less troubles. No troubles with hijackers. It's just better. Let's talk about tools for a second. What would you recommend for the product research? I recommend for product research, I recommend Helium 10. 00:16:38 They have a whole suite of tools that I think are probably the best. There's a couple others out there that have good tools too, but I think Helium 10 has the best tools as a set. If you have the budget, I would do Helium 10. I would probably do Viral Launch. I know there's a couple and a few in the European market that are pretty good. And you can dabble in all those, but if you had to choose just one, I would choose Helium 10 because you get the most bang for the buck and they've got some really good data and their black box tool and their cerebro and magnet tools are really, really good at doing the research and they get some tracking tools and stuff. 00:17:19 And that's probably who I would go with as far as the number one tool. And then, you know, The main tools you need are you need the keyword tools, the data discovery research tools, and then you need a really good tool to keep track of your profits like seller board or there's, you know, Helium 10 has a, I mean, if you want the details, you know, seller board is going to go in much more detail. If you just need the top-level stuff, you know, it's something in Helium 10 that does that at just the cursory level. But I like to get down in the weeds, so I'll usually supplement that with a really good profit analyzer tool. Yeah. So tell me about the keywords. Like you said, three to eight keywords generate 90% of the profits. 00:18:06 And I was wondering, how do you know, basically? I've seen data from inside Amazon. I don't do any kind of hacking or any kind of illicit stuff. Because of my position in the industry and I speak at a lot of events, I've met people that have inside information and they show it to me and they look, look, look, this is what's happening. Or they analyze it, they get all these reports and they analyze it. And so, from my own experience, that's fairly true too. Good for you. If we pick a product, for example, I don't know, a jump rope. I think it's a horrible example, but let's just stick with it as an example. But like a jump rope. Now I'm thinking about my listing. 00:18:55 So I guess I'd like to understand one of the main keywords. What should I put into the title? The main keywords, the way I would do that if it's a jump rope is I would go and I would use a tool like Helium 10 Cerebro. I would go into Amazon . com and then I would type in jump rope and see what the top, what comes back as results. I would then use the X-ray tool from Helium 10 to Chrome extension. It's kind of like Jungle Scout or something. And it will pop up and it'll tell me this is what their estimated sales are. I will sort that by number of units sold, not by dollars or profits, but by how many they're selling. So sort the columns by number of units sold. 00:19:40 And then I would take the top 10 of those Aces of the top 10, I would put all those Aces into the Cerebro tool; there's a way to put them all in one page, you don't do them like one by one, there's a way to put like one ascent and then on the next line you put the next nine all together and it puts all together, and then you hit the you hit the whatever the search button or the go button, whatever it is; and then it's going to go out and it's going to look at all 10 of those Aces together rather than individually. And it's going to then spit back all the keywords that they're potentially ranking on, and sort of create this matrix. 00:20:15 And it's going to say, 'look, out of these 10 products, seven of them are ranking for, on the word, skip rope. Not jump rope, but skip rope.' And they're ranking in these positions. And this is the keyword demand, and this is the competition. And then it's going to say, 'you know, only. You're going to get the keywords that you can see. I show this.' It's hard to explain this without showing it. At thefreedomticket. com, there's a free webinar. I show you. Just go watch it. It's on replay. You don't have to buy the course or anything. If you just go to freedomticket. com, the first hour is solid training. I show this exact process, and it makes it much more understandable. It's very, very valuable. You can then zero in on. 00:21:02 Look, I'm not going to go after the word jump rope. Maybe I'm going to use the word jump rope in my title because it's an important word. It describes a product. But my focus is going to be on skip rope or on whatever it is because there's less competition. I'm going to try to rank for those less competitive keywords first. But what happens on Amazon is whatever's in your title, every word in your title gets a little bit of love from the algorithm for every sale. So if I'm focusing on skip rope, I don't even know if that's one of the words. I'm just making that up. Skip rope. I'm going to still have jump rope in there because every time I make a sale off skip rope, I might get like one point on my score. But the word jump rope, I get like one-tenth of a point or something. So over time, I'm going to rise with skip rope, and I'm also going to start to rise with jump rope. And hopefully over time, six months, maybe a year, jump rope, without having to do a lot of giveaways and go crazy, it's going to keep rising and keep rising, and more people will find me that way. And so that's how I do it. Wow. 00:22:09 Look, Kevin, I have a last question before I ask you to talk about your course and your mastermind. Give us a hack or something, maybe some secret thing that we can apply. Sure. All right. So if you're already, let me see. If you're already selling on Amazon, if you're already doing this is for private label. If you already got a private label product on Amazon, something you want to do is, you know, in the business reports, you go into Seller Central and the Business Reports section of Seller Central. There's all these different reports, advertising reports, click through all these different reports. Well, there's one that's missing there. There's one that for whatever reason, Amazon doesn't turn it on. I don't know why they don't turn it on, but they don't, they don't turn it on. 00:22:56 So what you want to do is you want to open up a ticket with Amazon. I know this works in the U. S., so I'm not 100% sure about Europe. I think it works in Europe, but I know for a fact it's the U.S. So you open up a ticket email, send an email into Seller Central, and say, 'Hey, can you please turn on my category listing report? It's called the category listing report. And they'll turn it on, usually for like a week, maybe a month. It's temporary. And so they'll get an email back, and they'll say, 'We've turned this on.' You're going to want to go on and download that report. It's like an Excel spreadsheet. And then you're going to go and you're going to download the flat file template for your category. 00:23:37 So if you're selling beauty, you're going to go and download the beauty, the flat file. For adding new products. For adding new products, as if you're going to do it by a flat file. And then you're going to also download the browser tree for that. For your category, then you're going to open that category listing report, and that's basically the blueprint of your ASIN. It's going to have all kinds of fields in there, fields that aren't even in the back end of Seller Central, stuff that you don't see. Most of them are in the flat file, but a lot of people miss them. It's going to tell you what should be in those fields, and you're going to compare some of that, and you're going to compare some of the columns. 00:24:21 Say, subject matter you're like if you go in the back of our intended use that's a good one, intended use, and the back end of Seller Central, there's a field called 'You know near your search terms' it's called intended use and you're like what am I supposed to put there? This is a this is a barbecue glove, well the intended use is cooking meat, that's what you think you know, but that's not what you're supposed to put and it doesn't tell you, or and there's another column that says 'who's this for' and the defaults are like men, women, children, or something, and you're like okay, but that's not what you should put. I don't know why Amazon is; it doesn't have the right data there, but this category listing report and you compare it with the browse tree. 00:24:56 Guide for those columns and the flat file guide because there's there's a there's a screen and those guys I mean those flat files where it's like the instructions it says these are the valid values, these 10 values, so if you find out of those 10 values, the ones that are most important for your product or relevant for your product and fill them in, fill them in, uh, into the category listing report or into your flat file on your backend, whatever, get them into your listing. And you're going to see that your relevance score goes up. Your, your break will probably go up if you do it right. And all the filters on the left-hand side, you know, when people come in and they get a lot of results and there's a bunch of filters on the left side side, say it's a beauty product that they want to filter by for dry skin or whatever. 00:25:39 That way it makes sure that you filter properly whenever someone puts all that stuff over there and you eliminate your competition. So take a look at – sorry. Go ahead. So basically this category listing report, it gives me like all possible values or best practice values basically for all those fields. The category listing report, no. The category listing report shows you what you're missing. It shows you what's wrong. And then you take the browse tree guide and the flat file and you compare it because it will match up. Sometimes the flat file will call something like, I don't know, I can't remember a specific example, but like subject matter. It might not be called subject matter. It might be called some other word. They don't match. 00:26:27 The words don't match, but you can see which, oh, this is supposed to be that. Okay. Alias for it. You know, oh, I need to put these values in here. It is huge like do you get the do you see the values in the category listing report uh no the category listing report just places like a blueprint of your so it'll show you what's all you're missing it'll show you what you need to add because what's the field names basically it's the field names and the data that's there already that you already have inputted already and then you can pair that with the flat file and the browse tree guy because those have some different values some different column they don't have the same and then you take the ones that you can you fill them in And then the category listing reports, you fill in as much of the field. 00:27:08 You can't fill in all those fields. There might be 100 fields. Some of them you can't fill in. But you fill in as many as you can, either using a flat file and uploading it or going into Seller Central and figuring out, oh, okay, this is what this one means on the other tab or the additional tab. And sometimes, depending on your category, there's tons of options there. And you'll know what to fill in and what to put and what's missing. It's really valuable. Cool. Yeah, okay, I think I get it because when you download this flat file, it's basically empty, right? So you can't have your listings in this file already, so you don't really know what's in your listing. I mean, some of the fields you see in Seller Central, but some are missing. 00:27:48 Yes. I think one that was missing was maximum water value. I think they added it now, but okay, that's obviously not relevant for ranking or so, but although, who knows? But I know at least in Germany or in Europe, it was missing in some of the categories. But you could see it in the flat file, but there was no way to see what's in there at the moment, right? Yeah. I get it. Oh, that's awesome. Cool. Thank you. You're welcome. Just one question. You mentioned subject matter value. Subject matter field. Yeah, what's that? The subject matter field is in the back end on Seller Central, you have a – You have keywords. You have your search term field. That's where a lot of people will fill in additional terms or something back there. 00:28:36 But there's another one called subject matter. And it's actually five lines of 50 characters. And that one is pretty important for Amazon for ranking. I've actually been able to rank products by putting just keywords in there in the subject matter field and having a bare bones listing. So what I do in that field is I repeat all my best phrases. I don't use the word just once and then fill it with a bunch of words a single time. I'll repeat phrases. So if it's jump rope, I'll put jump rope. Jump rope for kids. Jump rope for women. And then the next line, I'll fill up 50 characters. The next line might be skip rope. Skip rope strong. Whatever they were, I just fill them up with exact phrase order. 00:29:21 With my top keywords and it makes a huge difference in my relevance and my placements. Nice. Oh, that's awesome, Kevin. Thanks so much. So a lot of value bombs here, guys. I would sure be interested in trying this. I'd like to define a seller central account now and go ahead and try to unlock this report and see what it looks like. So tell us, you know, where can we find you? Well, you can find me at amzmarketer.com. amzmarketer. com or you know I like I said earlier I recommend I'm not trying to sell a course or anything like that I mean I have that for new people it's it's like a thousand dollar course but a lot of people like it because every every Monday I do a live Q &A for all my students so it's not a it's not a coach it's with me so I get on and whatever questions they want to answer I ask, I answer to the best of my ability pretty much every Monday. 00:30:15 But if you go there to freedomticket . com, there's a webinar. It's in English. So you need to speak English, but it's on replay. You can just choose a time and watch the first hour. It's not a hype. It's a, it's solid training. Like we talked about the keyword thing earlier. I recommend you watch that. The second part of the webinar is, is you know, it's about the course. You could, if you're not interested in that, you don't have to watch that. Uh, but watch that first hour and whether you're experienced seller or you're new, I think you'll, you'll learn something from it. If you've been selling for a while, uh, you can go to Illuminati mastermind. com. That's our training for people who are, we recommend you'd be doing at least $25,000 a month in sales. 00:30:53 Um, but that's, that's our training for people who are experienced and kind of know what they're doing, but they want to get that next level edge or that the crazy little hacks or something like that. It's closed right now. It's not open all the time, but you can enter your email, and when we open it again here soon, you can get notified and see if it's something that's of interest to you. And then, yeah, that's pretty much where you can find me. I've heard about Illuminati Mastermind. It's super exclusive, so guys, go check it out. Crazy Hex. And by the way, I was watching your presentations last year in Europe, Guys, for those of you who haven't seen Kevin on stage, just use this chance if you have one because there's always a lot of value. 00:31:42 And I think you're sharing a lot of really deep, cool stuff, which is not that easy to find. So, guys, make sure you attend some conference or event where Kevin is speaking. Yeah, I think the next one I'm speaking at is in Prague at the end of March, the European Seller Summit. I think it's March 29th and 30th. I'll be speaking there. That's close to you guys. You don't have to go all the way across the world. I'm going to be there. I'm going to go by car. Some of the listeners want to meet me and Kevin. Let's do it. Let's meet in Prague. Thanks so much for being on our show. No problem. All of the best. I hope to see you again sometime. Yeah, we'll see you again, I guess, in Prague. Sure, at latest. All right. Thanks. Take care. Take care, everybody. Good luck on everything. Bye-bye, man. 00:32:42 Thanks so much for watching. I hope you liked it. If so, then don't forget to give us a like and to subscribe to our channel. That would motivate us a lot. And check out the free trial of Sellerboard. com, the world's most accurate profit analytics tool for Amazon sellers; there's a free trial, and after that, it's only 19 a month. Let us know what you think. Thanks so much, and see you guys next time.