Kevin King's 2019 Amazon FBA Hacks - Secret Reports, Stealing Sales, 90% of Sales from 3-8 Sources

Kevin King's 2019 Amazon FBA Hacks - Secret Reports, Stealing Sales, 90% of Sales from 3-8 Sources 00:00:04 Well, what's up guys? Danny Carlson here with the Actualized Freedom Podcast. And today's guest, you guys have probably heard of this guy. If you haven't, then you've been hiding under a rock. We got Mr. Kevin King, been in the e-commerce game for 23 years, which is almost as long as I've been alive. He is multi-billion on Amazon and he coaches students doing collectively over half a billion in sales in e-commerce. So it's my pleasure to welcome to the podcast, Mr. Kevin King. How's it going, man? I'm doing good, man. How are you doing? How's everybody doing out there? Good, good. Well, I'm out here in the Philippines, so we're a little bit warm. Well, I guess you're in Austin, Texas, so it's also warm out there. 00:00:43 But my hometown, everyone in Vancouver, is freezing their asses off right now. It's cold-ass Canada in the middle of the winter, so we'll try not to rub it in too much for them. A little better in the Philippines, I'm sure. Oh, definitely. So the first thing I wanted to talk about here, Kevin, you have a ton of experience when it comes to advertising and there's been some recent changes to Amazon ads. So I was wondering if there's any old strategies that people used to be using and used to teach that aren't really working anymore. I don't know if there's anything that's not really working anymore. There's a lot of different schools of thought on how to advertise and how to use the PPC on Amazon. 00:01:20 The beauty is they've migrated some of the stuff over that used to be only available on the vendor side. You either had to have a vendor account or you had to have a vendor express account. And there was a hack that came out a couple years ago, Mike McCleary put that out for Amazing. com on how to basically give us-give a throwaway product to get into what was called AMS or Amazon Marketing Services in order to get access to some of these cool tools. But now those tools are available to pretty much everybody under sponsored ads. That includes the headline ads where you can run headline ads. And just recently in the past month or so, they launched where you can actually do product targeting where you can actually target to your competitors' ASINs. 00:02:02 A lot of people and a lot of my students in the Freedom Ticket course, they'll say something like, hey, I was checking out my search term report and I see all this gibberish in there. Instead of keywords, there's a bunch of gibberish and all this stuff that starts with like a B or whatever. And I'm like, that's not gibberish, man. That's golden nuggets. What that means is that your product was purchased off of someone else's page. And what a lot of people don't realize is everybody's always concentrating on keywords. I want to get ranked on page one for a certain keyword or whatever's relevant to your product. And that's definitely important, but that's only about 50% of the sales or so on Amazon come from people sitting down and typing in a keyword, choosing something from the list and buying it. 00:02:43 The other half of the sales, come off of ads and off of items on other product display pages. So if you can get your product on someone else's page, that page might have been the gateway from a Google ad or from a Facebook ad, or maybe someone searched on Amazon and came to that page. But down at the bottom, there's a couple spots where you'll see. Customers who bought this also bought that, or customers who looked at this also looked at that, or frequently bought together, or the column where it says sponsored products related to this item. If you can get to any of those spots, it can actually be a goldmine for you, and especially if you have really good product imagery and your main image is really, really good. 00:03:24 And so that now is open to everybody, and that's something you definitely need to test. I'm doing some Christmas candy stuff right now, and I'm crushing it with that. To be clear, that's the old product display ads that used to be in AMS, and that's exactly what's been transferred over? That's correct. Yeah, it's under the – if you're not familiar with that, you go up and you set up a manual campaign, and there's an option down there that will say something like beta as of this moment, and it's called product targeting. And you can choose by category, which I don't recommend you do. I recommend you choose by product. So you can go in there and choose the top-selling ASINs, not top dollar amount, but top unit. 00:04:00 That's your competition, and bid high or in some cases low and actually get on their product pages and steal sales away from them, it's a really powerful thing uh and then you know as far as the the i mean advertising is getting more expensive on amazon you know versus what it was a few years ago it's continued to get more expensive but the so and amazon i think is moving more towards a pay-to-play model so i think you're going to see In the coming years, it's going to get even more expensive and more big brands come in there. And there's a lot of idiots that are just – that aren’t really – they don’t know how to advertise properly and they’re willing to spend stupid money. 00:04:38 And Amazon will gladly take that stupid money. But too many people worry about A-cost. They want to – they’re proud. I see screenshots on Facebook. Look at my A-cost. It’s 5%. That’s great. It’s nice to have a low A-cost and you should definitely strive for that. But sometimes a break-even A-cost or even a higher – a less than break-even A cost can meet to your benefit. It’s more about your overall product mix. You should be getting about 20% to 25% of your sales coming from PPC. If it's higher than that, then you're not doing a good job on the organic side. Those PPC sales can help prop up your organic or even can help you get launched. 00:05:15 Sometimes it's worth it to spend more there and actually maybe even lose a little bit of money in the beginning on your PPC in order to gain position on the organic. Once you've gained position on the organic, then it can be fine to break even on your PPC as long as that's helping prop up your organic. Tell me a little bit more about that. How do you go about calculating how much over your ACOS, would you be willing to spend to prop up that organic? Is there a specific calculation you go through? It's one thing to say you can gain that organic ranking, but how do you quantify if you even are gaining that organic ranking from, let's say, having a worse and break-even ACOS? 00:05:55 Well, what I look at break-even is actually once you factor in all your costs. So you can't determine that by looking at Amazon's reports. They only give you an ACOS, a percentage of ad spend, but you've got to know what your costs are. And so you've got to take that into a spreadsheet or into one of these software tools. They'll allow you to plug in your actual cost, your manufacturing cost, your shipping cost, all your other costs, and you can see where you can break even. And so, the way you can tell your organic versus your – paid is, you download these search term reports if it says you sold uh you know in a period this in the month of uh November, you sold uh 30 units, and you look at the total sales were 50 units well, 20 of those came organically, and 30 of those came from ppc. 00:06:36 I mean, that's how you determine the ratio there; determine whether it's helping you or not. Um, that's a little bit that's a little bit harder but that's by monitoring your position, And it's all sales rise, all ships. And the more places you can appear, the better off you are. A lot of people say, well, if I get my product to page one, should I quit advertising? Because I'm already on page one. I say no. It's just another place for someone to see you. And they're like, well, I'm just wasting money. I'm like, but are you making money or at least breaking even on that? Then you're not wasting money. So that's. So in the beginning, you're probably going to lose money. 00:07:13 So you can look at it like, well, if I'm going to do a giveaway, if I'm going to use one of these blast services and give stuff away at 90% off, and I've got to, say, give away 200 of these things at 90% off, and after Amazon's fees and my cost of the item, if I'm losing $10 on every single one of those that goes out, that's a $900 loss, right? Not yet. Almost a $2,000 loss right there. So if you took that same $2,000, plus those are all discounted sales. Amazon doesn't account for discounted sales like they do full-price sales. They don't count as much in the algorithm. But if I go and I spend that same $2,000 and get some full-price sales, just because I spent the advertising, if I can achieve that at a $10 cost per per sale on PPC, I've accomplished the same thing, but now I've got full-price sales. 00:08:09 All those reviews that are left are going to be verified, and I've done a better job in the algorithm. It plays more into Amazon's system. It's showing this is what people really want, and this is what they're willing to pay for, not that they just want a heavy discount, which Amazon is starting to penalize now that there's a lot of heavy discount buyers. Yeah, I've seen a really great article put out by Anthony Lee from Six Leaf. He just really dove into the data that they have. They're one of these launch services that have a lot of data on the effectiveness of launches. And their data is showing that the really deep discounts are really not as effective as even going up to like 70, 60%. 00:08:45 They're showing seems to have a little bit more effectiveness these days. Another thing I wanted to ask you on that topic there for the product display ads, is there any specific? Should people be targeting the number one seller in their niche? Should they be targeting products that aren't their exact product but are maybe a little bit related? What are you seeing the best results for from those ads? I'm doing three. I take the ASINs that show up in my search term report from an automatic campaign. Whatever shows up in there when I launch something or appear, I add those. Then I also test. You don't know until you test. So, I will go in and I will take my straight-up competition. I'll use an X-ray from Helium 10 and see who the top 50 competitors are on my exact product. 00:09:29 I'll sort them by sales, not by dollar amount, but by units sold. That's more likely they have more people going to their pages if they're selling more versus dollars. And so I will actually then target all those and see which ones work, which ones don't. And then I will do complementary products. So if you're selling a You know a jump rope, I might target resistance bands or something like that and and and you can also use tools like Yazeef, why a SIV comm it's a free tool. That's kind of like a five degrees of Kevin Bacon. And it'll show you a lot of related stuff and you can test some of the aces that are in there. It shows relationships and puts things in clusters, and that's a pretty cool tool to use as well. 00:10:08 Excellent. And then let's just touch briefly on the Facebook advertising. If you could create one Facebook ads funnel, can you just break that down for us? Yeah, it'd be a messenger bot. If I was, if I was going to create any kind of, do any kind of, if I could only do one, it would be, it's, it's the hot topic of 2018. It's going to be continuing into 2019, a hot topic. And it's cool. Groovy, but to be honest, you know a lot of people have taught it there's been special courses on it we talk about an Illuminati mastermind for the high-level sellers that I do with Manny Coats, but it's a a lot of people don't implement it because it it's a it does take a little bit of a logical thinking kind of like flow charting like programmer's mind and so some people get confused or it gets a little too complicated for them, but it's really not that complicated. 00:10:55 But the chatbots right now are I know a lot of people are using those for launches with great success. And so if you haven't played with chatbots on Facebook and engaging people and building into an audience, and the reason they work So well is because right now it's not oversaturated Everybody's on the Instagram on their on their phones all the time. So the response rates are like around 90% or so. The open rates are around 90% versus a 10% to 20% if you're lucky on email, on a warm list that knows you. So the open rates are far greater, so the chances of someone clicking or doing something, and you can guide people through a process. So people are using it for like a search find buy to launch a product. 00:11:34 They're saying, hey, would you like to get a discount on a – you know, 20% discount or something on, on my new barbecue gloves. It's so tight below and they have to type something below. And then once they've typed twice, you have them on a messenger list. And so that's like, like almost like an email list, and then you can remarket to them and do promotions to them. But then you can guide them through these funnels and these paths that then takes them down the path and says, okay, great. I'll tell you what, if you buy it right now, instead of a 20% discount, I'll give you a 40% discount. But you have to buy it in the next hour. Are you ready? 00:12:10 Because that way, what you've just done is by offering the 20% discount first, you've got somebody in there. Who isn't just looking for a great deal. They actually probably want the product. So you screened out some of the riffraff potential customers that Amazon might penalize. And then you reward them a little bit more by giving them a surprise and saying, if you act right now, you'll get a 40% discount or whatever the discount is. You know, you could do less or more depending on your situation. And then once they respond to that, you walk them through the steps. Please go to Amazon. com and open up a new browser. Don't make it a link. Open up a new browser, type Amazon. com, and search for this keyword, whatever the keyword is that you're trying to rank for. 00:12:48 Okay, have you done that? Type yes below. Okay, now look for a picture that looks like this, and you show them your main image. It should be around page 13 right now, or whatever the page number you might be on because you just launched it. And then you walk them through the whole process, and it can be very, very effective. And then you also get them into a Messenger list, which you can remarket to and follow up with on a review sequence and all kinds of stuff. It can be very, very powerful. So if you're not familiar with that, you or someone on your team should – there's a course at Manichat. I think it's at Courses with an S. Maybe it's course. It's either course or courses with an S. 00:13:25 Manichat, M-A-N-I-C-H-A-T. com. It's totally free. It was done by Molly Pittman. She's one of these high – she's working at Digital Marketer, really respected marketing person. It's like a 10-hour course that normally someone would charge like two grand for, but you can do it totally free. And about four of the modules or so in there are very Amazon-specific. So it's worth going through that and just kind of getting your head around it and learning it. And you can do that totally for free. And then, if you decide to do Managed Chat, I think their base thing is like $10 a month. So it's not going to break your bank. Yeah, incredibly, incredibly cost effective. And my many chat list is way, way smaller than my email list. 00:14:01 But it does, I think a little bit more than double the amount of business out of that many chat list. So super, super powerful. One thing you mentioned in there is you're sending people straight to Amazon and then getting them to manually search for and find your product. Are you finding that? Are you finding that to actually work and get a lot of people to actually go through that entire process versus just dropping them a link in there. And you're seeing extra ranking juice for doing that. I assume you get, you do get, um, you do have some drop off. You know, some people are like, ah, screw this. You know, it's too much bullshit. I just rather click a link, but you have to, you have to test it yourself. 00:14:39 But sometimes the drop off is worth it because the value of the person that will go through that and actually do the search, find, buy. It's so much higher than clicking a link. Amazon knows. They track everything. They know that someone just clicked this link, and it came from a ManyChat ad on Facebook. They know exactly where it came from, not just that it came from Facebook, but what kind of ad it was. And so they can see that versus if you tell them, open up a new window, it looks like a completely new search, completely independent of what you just did. There's no tracking back to a link or you looking like you're gaming the system. So you'd have to test it. 00:15:11 I mean, some people have success using a – a two-step URL, brand URL, or an index URL, or one of the other various URLs you can use with the keyword embedded. But you just have to test that and see. But, yes, you will have a drop-off. There will be people that are just lazy and will not follow through. But the ones that do are much more valuable than the people that just click a link. Yeah, that's one thing I love about you, Kevin, is that you're constantly testing new things out. You're constantly just tweaking things, coming up with new ideas, finding stuff, trying new stuff. Like when I met you a year ago at Capcom and had the pleasure of hanging out over a couple meals and through the hallways there, you just seem to be dropping golden nuggets left, right, and center. 00:15:56 Like everyone else seems to be there. They don't want to talk about Amazon when they're over dinner, but you, it's like, You live and breathe it. You would be talking about it if you weren't at an Amazon conference. Just whoever you can talk about Amazon to, right? Pretty much. My wife says sometimes we have to have an Amazon-free zone. The next two hours, I don't want to hear anything about Amazon or marketing or whatever. I love doing it. I love testing things. I love helping people out. Yeah. Like, oh, how's the many chat funnel coming today, honey? That's excellent. So there's also been some algorithm changes in Amazon here when it comes to relevancy and the way that you should optimize your listing when it comes to keywords. 00:16:44 So what changes have you seen over the past six months or so when it comes to listing optimization? Well, the number one thing on listing optimization is your photos. I mean, not that Amazon has changed the algorithm to do with photos, but that's a place where a lot of people skimp. They're willing to spend the money to get quality lifestyle photos, or they're doing the cheap way out and Photoshopping and stuff. I'm a big believer in spending money on your pictures. I'll spend sometimes $1,000 or more listing just on my images. And you can do it. There's ways to get quality. People don't know your brand. When they come on Amazon, they don't know who Kevin King Inc. is or whatever my name may be on there. 00:17:24 They don't know who that is, and so they're going to judge you based on the pictures, and they're going to make a decision. It's kind of like when you're in a store. If you're looking at olive oils and you're looking up at the shelf, you're like, 'fuck', it's all olive oil to me. Which one should I buy? You look at one that's a cool package or one that sparkles and stands out. It looks like it came from Italy or whatever, and you're going to trust it more. It's the same thing with images. You're judged by your worst image, and people just, well, they'll take pictures on their phone, or they'll have their buddy that has a nice camera take it, and they just don't do them right. 00:17:51 They don't do the infographics right. They don't do their whole image seeking. So that's the number one thing on list optimization is spend some time on your image, and it's not just show the front, back, side, and top. I mean, you've got to go show comparisons. Do all kinds of stuff in your images. But as far as the keyword side of things, the title is always the most important. And I'm seeing – what I'm seeing is that shorter titles are better. You know, the old school thought was like, stuff your title with as many keywords as you can. You know, back a couple years ago, you could put like 500 characters in a title, just like the whole title read like a paragraph. But that's – Amazon cut that back to like 200 or 250 in most categories. 00:18:31 Some it's down to 50 or 80. But I believe you should put some extra – most – What people don't realize is that most sales on Amazon, your page, come from between three and eight keywords. Now, there are some long-tail ones that, you know, there's a sale here or there, but about 90% of the sales, and I know this by seeing some data directly from Amazon and analyzing that data, that about 90% of your sales are going to come from between three and eight keywords. It's not all these long tails. And so the idea of this, let's find every possible keyword under the sun for most products. I'm not saying this for every product, but for most products could be hurting you more than helping you. 00:19:12 It's better to find out what are those three to eight focus on those focus on the ones you can afford to enter on. It might not be the best keywords in the beginning, not be the highest search ones in the beginning because maybe you can't compete there. Maybe you have to start in the middle or down the. the bottom of those eight or so and work your way up depending on your budget, but focus on those. So you want to, when you're first starting out, maybe add a few of the extra keywords to your title, not too long, but after about a month in running PPC, you should actually know, okay, these are my. These are my gold keywords. And you're going to probably want to cut your title down a little bit to focus primarily on those keywords. 00:19:49 And that's going to get you more relevance and make you a little bit, it's going to help you in your rankings in most cases. The other place that's super important is the subject matter fields. As of right now, Amazon could change this at any moment. But as of right now, the subject matter fields are really important. The subject matters in the back end, these are not the extra keywords where you put in misspellings and Spanish words and whatever else but these are the subject matter ones and you want to make sure you feel fill those in as well. And I put complete phrases in there. So even if it's from my title, whatever the complete exact phrases, you get five fields of 50 characters each. So I will fill those up with exact phrases. 00:20:27 I'll repeat words. And that I found has helped tremendously. Your bullet points and your description are not that important in the new algorithm. They're important maybe to the user, maybe for sales, for the few people that actually do read your listing. They do help you get indexed a little bit. But that should be the secondary keywords. Your main one should be in your title and subject matter. And then there's some additional fields in the back end that most people don't fill out, all the colors and sizes and whether it has batteries or not and the category. There's a ton of other little fields, intended use. And there's a way to actually get – most people don't know what the hell to put in there. 00:21:04 And there's usually a default that comes out, and you're typing something in, and it says, you know, it's like intended use. It's for men, women, and children. Other or something it's like the defaults when you're in the back end of the GUI, but if you actually do uh do this little trick um if you actually go into uh go into Seller Central there's a report that's missing in Seller Central you look down all your reports there's one that Amazon just doesn't turn on for some reason it's called the Category Listing Report so you want to open a ticket uh with Amazon send them an email and say hey Hey, Mr. Amazon can you please activate my Category Listing Report? And usually within 24 hours or so, you'll get an email back and say that they've turned that on for you. 00:21:45 And it'll stay on for a few days to a month. It depends on the agent how long they allow that to stay on. I don't know why they hide this. Then it's going to appear in your reports list. You're going to want to download that report. And at the same time, you're going to want to download your browse tree guide for whatever category you're in. If you don't know how to find that, you can just Google it. Google 'seller central browse tree guide'. It'll take you to the page. Sometimes that's easier than searching on Amazon. And you're going to want to download the flat file for your category. So if you're in beauty, you would download the Beauty Browse Tree Guide and the Beauty Flat File Report. 00:22:17 And inside those reports, you're going to look at the help sections, the help tabs, and it's going to have information about what should be in these fields. And so when you download the category listing reports, it's going to show you; you can open that up in Excel or Google docs or whatever; whatever spreadsheet program you use, and you're going to see what's missing and what you have inaccurate. Instead of women and children or men, women, or children in the intended use, it actually may say something like for people, for bald people or for people missing you know with skin problems or whatever the heck it may I'm making this up but whatever it may be you're going to get the exact phrases 00:22:54 Then you're going to want to update either using the flat file or using the GUI update your listing with those correct things And once you've done that you'll see that your PPC in some cases will start to work better You'll see that the filters over on the left-hand side will help you filter out a lot of the competition for the people that use those You'll find that that can help you quite a bit. So that's something that a lot of people don't even realize exists, don't even do. So that's a, that's a. That tip right there, if you understand what I just said, should be worth the price of listening to this podcast alone. Absolutely. I didn't know about that one. 00:23:27 This is the kind of stuff that Kevin just drops on a daily basis, just walking around talking about Amazon Golden Nuggets. It's insane. Is that on an ASIN level? You have to do this for each individual ASIN? Yeah, it's on an ASIN level. Okay, interesting. What once per ACE and you just go into seller support and get them to unlock this for you. And then you only have to do the category. The category listing report is you only have to do once, but then you have to do the comparison and comparing your category listing report file. It's like a, it's basically Amazon's blueprint of your listing. It'll have everything they have about your listing and all the hidden things. It'll have everything. And there's some of the stuff that's in there. 00:24:10 You won't be able to fill out. There's a lot of columns. You're like, what the hell is this? I don't know what this is. Some of it you'll leave blank, but you're going to want to fill out as much of that as you. Possibly can and either re-upload that if you're comfortable as a flat file, which is the best way to do it, or if you're not comfortable doing that at least fill in what you can on the GUI on the back side of Seller Central on the other tab where there's all this additional information that most people don't fill all that stuff in and it can make a big difference on your relevancy and how well your listing does. Very very interesting so I mean that, that is an amazing golden nugget to end things off with here. 00:24:42 Really appreciate you coming on Kevin, if you had If you had just one tip for the some of the Amazon sellers out there who are, you know, they already got some traction, but maybe they're stuck right now. What would you give them? One tip if they're, if they've got some, okay. So someone that started, but they're having a little bit of trouble is I would say, don't give up. I mean, I would say that, you know, Amazon, people always say, 'Is Amazon saturated? Did I miss the boat? Should I have gone in three years ago?' And I say, absolutely not. It's better than ever right now. But it's better than ever if you treat it like a real business. 00:25:14 Selling on Amazon is not a get-rich-quick scheme like all the gurus and all these courses paint out to be that you can do this, quit your job next week, and retire and live on the beach. Maybe if you have a if you can live on a thousand bucks a month, okay maybe you can do that. But the best way to grow your is to treat it like a business and try not to take any money out the first or second year because the most money in this business right now is in selling it. There's almost a billion dollars out there in investment funds and private, private equity funds and family trusts and stuff that are looking to invest in these Amazon businesses. They don't want to do the dirty work. 00:25:46 So if you can come in and find some products or a product line and prove it, and grow that sales by by not taking money out of the business and by working and turning your capital, there's hardly anything. out there that can grow as fast as an amazon business i mean you can start with five or ten thousand dollars and within three or four years be selling that for potentially a million plus dollars there's hardly any other business out there you can and you can do this all in your underwear or sitting on a beach in the philippines uh like so there's there's i mean it's if treat it like a business treat it for the long term don't look at it as a get rich quick thing and uh and don't give up that the money's there sometimes your first time you strike out most 00:26:24 big sellers have failures but that doesn't mean it's bad or that doesn't mean You did it wrong, it's all in the product selection and all in the keyword analysis, and so if you're not good at math if that's not your forte get someone on your team that is. It's not about always making the product better or having the best idea, it's about how how to knowing how to use the tools that are out there to analyze the data and to make smart decisions, and you can do very very well I love it, Kevin. So, I mean, half my audience had just bought a plane ticket to the Philippines with their favorite pair of underwear. All right, great. Awesome. And where can people reach out to you or learn more about you, Kevin? 00:27:03 Well, I have a Facebook group at AMZMarketer. If you search Facebook for AMZMarketer, it's a group there. But you have to be doing a million dollars or more. It's free. It's totally free. But if you're doing a million dollars or more a year in sales, you're welcome to join that. We just share tips and tricks. Or if you're new to the business, I would recommend, or if you're not new, I would recommend you go to freedomticket. com. There's a webinar there that's on auto-replay. Just watch. It's about two hours long. The first half, it's all straight-up training, no bullshit. It's stuff that you're not going to hear on other stuff or on other YouTube videos. The second half, it's a pitch to buy my training for new people. 00:27:41 You can ignore that part if you want to, but at least watch the first hour. I think it'll help you. If you're already selling and you're already doing well and you're looking to – if you're doing at least $25,000 a month on Amazon and you're looking to 2X or 5X or maybe even 10X your business, the Illuminati Mastermind is the high-level training that I do with Manny Coats where we train people who are already selling how to get it to the next highest level. Awesome. And I really recommend you guys do check this stuff out. Kevin is one of the more legit voices in the space. I think that – He doesn't focus on the fluff, the BS that a lot of the other Amazon sellers are putting out on their YouTube channels on the daily. So definitely one of the better voices out there to follow. I'll put links to everything that Kevin just mentioned in the show notes on actualizedfreedom. com. And until next time, guys, take care. And thanks for coming on, Kevin. No problem. Glad to be here. Cheers. Cheers.