Kevin King’s Amazon Hacks & Never-Before-Heard Selling Story | SSP #491

#491 - Kevin King’s Amazon Hacks & Never-Before-Heard Selling Story Bradley Sutton: Kevin King is back on the podcast and in addition to some cool seller hacks that he always has for us, he's going to talk about a whole variety of topics like how he used to be a collectible card manufacturer and how he's lost 70 pounds in the last couple of years without even dieting. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you a 6, 7 or 8 figure seller and want to network in a private mastermind group with other experienced sellers? Or maybe you want to take advantage of monthly advanced training sessions with Kevin King, an expert guest. Do you want to come to our quarterly, in-person, all-day trainings at Helium 10 headquarters? Or do you want the widest access to the Helium 10 set of tools? For all of these things, the Elite program might be for you. For more information on Helium 10 Elite, go to h10.me forward slash elite. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we've got the most serious sellers of them all, Kevin King, back on the show. Kevin, how's it going? Kevin King: It's going I don't know if I'm serious though. I'm more. I don't know if I'm the serious guy I'm a seller, but I mean some people might say you know as like they read my newsletter say what is serious friends be like how serious is this guy? Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Yeah. The newsletter, we're going to talk about that. You know, there's definitely been some, some things that people are saying that this isn't, this can't be serious, but we'll get into that a little bit. Depends on, that's all the points. Kevin King: Once you see what's coming. Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Oh my goodness. I can't wait. I want to talk right off the bat though, before I forget, you know, I don't think we've talked about this on the podcast before, or maybe you've alluded to it. I've heard you talk about it, but I've never actually dug deep. Like right now, hold on. Let me just pull something from my back wall here. I just hit it behind. I was sorting some baseball cards. I'm about to go to Japan. I'm actually flying to Japan on my own time, personal time off, and I'm setting up at a card show over there because my dad's had a business there. I've heard you mentioned before that you've dabbled in the old days in the like sports cards or comics or what was it exactly in that industry were you in? Kevin King: Yeah, so as a child back in the 80s, 70s and 80s, I collected the basketball cards back when the, I think it was tops, they were big. They were like four by six size or something. Bradley Sutton: I remember those. Kevin King: Huge and I collect, I don't know when I started, second, third grade, something like that. And I collected those, collected baseball cards, collected football cards. And I was big into it. And then I just kind of grew out of it, I guess, maybe, I don't know, sophomore year of high school or something, just that was little kid stuff. Threw everything in a box, or actually put everything in a... I think I was going to throw it away. My mom's like, no, no, no, no, don't throw all this stuff away. So she threw it into a box. My mom's a hoarder anyway, but she threw it into a box. And then my senior year of high school, like seven years late, sorry, of college, like seven years later, I was like, damn, I need some money, man. I need a little extra cash. I was like, how can I make some cash? I was like, wait a second. My mom, I think, baseball cards now, people are actually starting to pay real money for these things. I might actually have some crazy rookie card for Roger Clemens or something. I don't know. So I called her up. You still got that box of stuff I was going to throw away? She's like, yeah. I was like, I'm coming up to see you for Mother's Day or something. I'm going to grab it from you. So I grabbed it and I went on and I sold, sold a bunch of those. I had some rare stuff in there, made thousands of dollars just taking them into a hobby shop, you know, a comic book store or whatever and trading them in and it got some extra beer money in cash that I needed when I was, you know, not doing so well when I was 21, 22. And so that evolved though into time and the, when was this, like 92, 93, so about three years after college, I was doing stuff, you know Mark from Billion Dollar Seller Summit, we were doing, I'd started a magazine that dealt with strip clubs actually and it wasn't, there's no nudity or anything, this is the business side of it. It was the business side of it and in doing that these For some reason, baseball cards have become hot to put strippers on. So it was everything from the Cabaret Royale in Dallas to the Dollhouse in Orlando to Playboy Magazine was doing it, Penthouse, all the Hawaiian tropic bikini girls were doing it. It became a thing to put I put Pretty Girls on baseball cards and these were being sold through traditional comic stores. This wasn't like in the adult shops and on the other side of the internet. Diamond Comics was a big distributor back then and Capital City Comics, two huge distributors that distributed to all the comic book stores. They had big booths at Comic Con in San Diego. They would put these things out and you would put them in packs. It became a huge freaking business. We're selling cases of these. And that's one of my first taste. Bradley Sutton: So you were the one who made them or you were buying? Kevin King: I was both. I was making them originally. We had deals because I knew some of these club owners. So they're like, yeah, go ahead and do ours. You know, that's a good promotion for us and we'll do it. So I was doing them. I go to them. We would either shoot it or they give us stuff that we would actually, I would design. Bradley Sutton: What do the back of the cards have? You know, in baseball cards. Kevin King: It has Suzy Smith. Stage name candy candy drop or whatever five six thirty four twenty four thirty four good originally from san diego lights and with the. A short hair or whatever it would be something like that and i need a better way to actually sell these. So a lot of people it goes back to what we do today put insert insert cards you know register your warranty or get on our join our VIP club or something. Has one of the like the eleventh card in a pack of ten. And they were sending it into the companies through physical mail. There was no internet back then. And these companies were not doing anything. They're like the business cards in a fishbowl at the gym. They're just accumulating. So I called up all these companies and said, what are you doing with your inserts? And they're sitting there. I said, send them to me. I'll get them all typed in. I hired some company in Jamaica that would type these in for four cents a piece or some crazy low number. Ended up building a mailing list of like 13,000 people off of this that had filled up for like 100 different companies that were doing this. And then as part of the deal, I said, well, I'll send you the list. I knew these guys wouldn't do anything with it, most of them. And I want to be able to have the right to mail it. And I'm going to buy your cards from you wholesale. And I'm going to create a catalog, a glossy color catalog that was sent in the mail and send these out and sell mine and yours. That became a huge freaking business that blew up. We were able to ride that wave for quite some time and we were doing all kinds of really cool, sometimes I have to show you. If I would have known you were going to talk about this, I could have showed you some here. We did 24 karat gold signatures in ink with raised 24 karat gold. We did and put them in those crystal cases with screws on all sides. This was serious, serious stuff. Bradley Sutton: I was ahead of the time because that's what the industry has moved to is these You know, like one of ones and like, hey, this is a, you know, there's only 10 that have this signature. And now there's these companies that have them where they actually come out like every single one, like National Treasures and stuff where every single, you know, card in the set, it comes in like this case and it's all encapsulated in these plastic or these hard holders. And you're like doing this stuff. Yeah, 15 years before. We were doing stuff with puzzles. Kevin King: So the back of the card, we might do a set, a subset of nine. So maybe the set's 100. But nine of them on the back is a puzzle piece. So you had to collect all nine, flip the cards over and put them in the right order to get another picture as a, you know, as a puzzle piece, like, like a tic-tac-toe board, but you put them on the right order, it makes another picture. We, we're doing all kinds, but because of the nature of the products, we were basically, I was limited in my marketing. It's where I cut my teeth because I had to get super creative and super innovative on marketing because you weren't allowed to. There wasn't Facebook back then, but there was. They would not allow you to advertise it. It caused us to be very creative in the way we did marketing. We did a huge event. You're talking about going to Japan at the Bellagio, not Bellagio, that's Vegas, but the Bellagio Hotel in West Hollywood on the Sunset Strip over there by the Viper Room. It may be some different name now, but it's a fancy hotel. In 1997, we brought in a bunch of the models, put out a thing and said, you know, it's 500 bucks to come. And we had all these guys come, like 300 guys, 400 guys come to stand in line and get autographs from the girls on their cards, on 8x10s. And we did a party afterwards. It was a different world. Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Well, hey guys, you heard it first. Kevin King: That's the first time I've ever talked about that. Bradley Sutton: I just heard like, you know, briefly you're into collectible cards, you know, and I was like, you know what, that's kind of up my alley. Let me ask him about that. So you heard it first here. Kevin King: Now guys, we had binders, you know, with the sleeves and special binders you would collect. And yeah, it was like, it was full on, full on. Bradley Sutton: Interesting, interesting stuff. So guys, we're doing this podcast a little bit differently. I'm doing everything backwards. You know, Kevin is known for his strategies and, and Amazon, you know, seller hacks and stuff like that. We'll definitely get to that. But instead of doing at the beginning, we're going to do that towards the end. If you guys have been listening to this podcast for a while, I've actually, you know, usually at the end of podcasts, start asking people about their health, uh, regimen and diets and exercise and things like that. Because, uh, 2023 is my year of health where I'm asking, talking to guests, but we're going to, we're going to flip the script a little bit. Stay to the end for the Amazon strategy. Now, Kevin, you yourself, wait, wait, can you look to your left really quick? Look to the side. Kevin, where'd you go? Kevin? Where are you? Oh, you disappeared. You're so skinny. Now you just disappeared. When you, when, when you could turn to the side there, how much weight have you lost, uh, this year? Kevin King: I don't know what the number is this year, but in the last couple of years, about 70 some odd pounds. I still got a ways to go, but probably about another 50 or 60 and I'll be happy, but that'll probably take me a few more years. Bradley Sutton: I've noticed once you hit 40, it's hard to lose weight. So you hit a number like that, that's pretty impressive. So let's talk about that a little bit. What are you doing? You're not starving yourself. You told me that before. It's not about starving yourself or necessarily counting calories or working out seven hours a day or anything like that. But how have you been able to steadily get to where you're at now? Kevin King: I've had an issue with my weight all my life. I've been up and down all my life and sometimes it's gotten a lot worse than what it is now. Right now, I'm about 260. I've been as high as like 360 in the past. In high school, I was right around 200. Most of my weight gain started when I left the house to go to college. I started drinking beer, eating pizza, and just kind of put it on and didn't really care too much. But then as you age, I've been lucky, knock on wood, that I haven't had a lot of issues other than type 2 diabetes, but no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol, none of that kind of stuff that you would expect. I'm in pretty good shape even though I've been a bigger guy comparatively, but it got to a point where it was actually my ex-wife. She always used to say, if you can't take care of yourself, how can you take care of me? Which was a good little slogan and it's true and so that kind of motivated me a little bit. So I tried every diet in the book. Everything from carnivore diet to Atkins diet to Weight Watchers. Bradley Sutton: Did Manny get you on that carnivore? Kevin King: At one point, yeah. They're all stupid. Bradley Sutton: I know he's big on that. Kevin King: Every one of those diets is stupid. I'm sorry if someone out there is listening and thinks they're great. They're stupid. Do they work? Yes, they work short term. But how many times have you done the carnivore and you're right back to where you started? I kind of learned this from my dad in a way because he lost a lot of weight and kept it off for like 50 years. He's skinny. I mean, he's like 100 and 30 pounds or something. It's mindset. It's psychology. Eating is psychology. You look at all the people that go and they work out. They go and they work out and work their ass off. What do they do after that? They go get a Starbucks. They just undo the entire workout they just did by getting a Starbucks with all the cream and all the whatever in it. I'm not a coffee drinker, so I don't know all the terminology. And they just completely undo it. But they feel good about themselves. I worked out and I had supposedly a good coffee. You've got to be conscious of what's in your mouth. My ex-wife had found this woman. She's from Venezuela originally. She was listening to this podcast in Spanish and she was a guest. She was talking about something called intuitive eating. You can Google it, intuitive eating. She was talking about how this works. My wife at the time was like, I want to do this. And so she called her up and started doing like launch. This woman lives in Miami, doing long distance consultations. And then she said, Kevin, I think you'll really like her. She's really, really good. You should try it. So and during COVID-20, it was at end of 2020, around Christmas time 2020, I had my first call with her and started really in January 2021. And what she does is she doesn't believe in diets. And she's like the head of the gastric fat people of Miami. I don't know what the damn thing is called. But she's like the top person of it. Unknown Speaker: G-F-M-M. Kevin King: But she's skinny. She's an attractive, you know, Vince Whalen girl. But she's head of this whole thing. And her whole thing is intuitive eating. And it's the psychology of eating. It's not about, you know, weight loss is about 80% what you put in your mouth and 20% everything else. And being conscious of what you eat. And so, she's like, Kevin, promise me you'll never go on another diet in your life. Done. Checkmark. She's like, if you get bad, if you go off rails on something, you go out and you You eat a gallon of ice cream one night because you're depressed or something. Don't think, well, shoot, I just ruined everything I'm working at. I might as well eat another one the next day and I'll start a diet on Monday. Everybody always starts a diet on Monday or the first of the month. Okay, on August 1st, I'm going to start. She said, that's absolutely the wrong way to do it. She's like, eat what you want. If you want a freaking pizza, Eat the pizza, but it needs to be you want the pizza. It needs not be a five or six out of habit, but like a nine or a 10 and go get the pizza, but be conscious of what you're eating. Maybe get a small instead of a large or whatever. And I had a habit. I had a bad habit. Like every night to relax, I would watch TV just to, you know, unwind my brain and everything and spend an hour just watching mindless TV. America's Got Talent or some stupid reality show or just whatever, just to kind of just wind down. And I would eat a box of Milk Duds. I love milk duds because you could put three or four of them in your mouth, suck on them. You put three or four in your mouth, they kind of meld together because they're caramel. And so you're just sucking on it like you would a butterscotch or something. And then as it gets lower, you put a couple more in your mouth and they meld together. So you can make a box last like an hour and a half. But that's 600 calories and a lot of sugar. I was in this habit of doing it. Every single night. She broke me of that. Now I have that maybe once a month. But it's she got me to thinking about things and she finds substitutes. Oh, why do you like those milk duds? Is it the texture? Is it the caramel? Is it the way it tastes on your tongue? There's something about it. Why do you drink soda, so much soda? It's because you like that carbonation, but it's a specific carbonation. How about switching to this drink? Not a Perrier, not a this, but this specific one, and it works. And so you're tricking your mind psychologically because you have those cravings and those desires or those habits, and as you're breaking those, you swap it. So she told me like, you know, most dietitians would say, if you're drinking, you know, Coke Zero, you need to cut that out. You need to go to water, you know, 128 gallons a day or ounces a day. I mean, a gallon says too much. That's a whale. Bradley Sutton: That's pretty much what some of these people say. Kevin King: But 128 ounces a day and And, and quick cut those out immediately. She's like, no, if you're drinking six a day, just swap one of them out for a water and this, you know, and then have five and let's see where that goes. And, but over time you start consciously eating things differently. You start looking at stuff. Am I eating because I'm hungry or am I eating because it's a habit? And now I'm at the point now where I have a private chef that comes once a week and cooks for me. And he used to make my lunches and my dinners. Now I'm just telling him to make one meal a day because that's all I want. And I'm not eating half of it anyway. I eat a little bit of breakfast, a protein shake, maybe a little cereal, a piece of bread or something. But if I want a candy, I buy it. If I want an ice cream, I get it. But I used to eat a lot of ice cream. Bluebell is my favorite. It's a Texas company and you can get it across the south. It's not everywhere, but it's my favorite. So I would have those little pints. I buy those little half gallon things or whatever they are. It lasts a couple of days. I've had one right now in my fridge for two months and I haven't even opened it. It's a change in And in psychology or what I've done is like, okay, if I want that taste, I want that ice cream taste. I love that taste. It gets the hormones in me. It gets the things, you know, that satisfaction, those triggers that are in your body. I buy little small-sized cups. They're like for birthday parties for kids. They're 160 calories. I'll eat one of those. She's like, do you go back for a second, go back for a third? I'm like, no. I just eat one. Some of it's discipline. Some of it's mind over matter and just being conscious of everything that you eat. That's the biggest thing. The second Sleep is so important in health and a lot of people, especially, I mean, you're a perfect example. You're working your ass off and sleeping wherever you could grab a nap here or there or just a couple hours a night at one point. I know you're better about it now. Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Kevin King: But most people dismiss how important sleep is for your overall health. And what woke me up to it is a few years ago, I was going to get life insurance and I didn't have life insurance before, but I got married. I better get some life insurance. And talking to the agent, they're like, okay, there's a what's your sleep apnea score? And I'm like, I just did a test and it was like, 19. I had 19. Mild things or whatever it was in a period of whatever the measuring period is. Okay, that's mild. What this insurance company told me is that you're at 19 times, maybe it's 19 times per hour. It's subconscious. You don't realize it, but it messes with your body. And they said, if you get to 20, you're uninsurable on life insurance. I'm like, what? And so I went immediately. My wife used to say I would snore. I would snore like a sound like a Mack truck. Well, coming down the street. So I went I had a there's a guy here in Austin that does a balloon sonoplasty. So they go into your I had a 70% blockage. I didn't know it. I just you get used to it as you're living. You don't even realize it. But I had trouble in my nose, so Manny just did it. I did it. Mark has done it. A bunch of people have done it. He was like one of these Doogie Howser guys that became an MD when he was 14 or something. He invented this technique so it doesn't require the major surgery. You still get knocked out for like 15 minutes, but he goes in and uses his balloon and blows it up and opens all that up. That made a huge difference on my snoring and my sleep. Plus, I started using a sleep mask. Sometimes in your bed, if it's hot or cold, the temperature is not right, you're tossing and turning. You're not getting as much sleep or you wake up and there's a little bit of sweat or whatever. But there's something called the Eight Sleep Mattress. It's the number eight sleep That's freaking amazing. It's a mattress topper and it's about two grand. It's not cheap, but you put it on top of your bed and then you set settings. Are you a cold sleeper or a warm sleeper? And you can do splits. So if your wife and you are on one side, your partner and you. Can we opt different? And then it measures you throughout the night. I mean, it ring and fitness fit bits and stuff do this, but we'll give you like your pulse rate and use some measurements during the night. But this like measures your whole body and like how often did you wake up? How what kind of quality of sleep did you get? What was your heart rate, your HRV through the night, all this stuff and it. After a week of testing, it figures out what temperature is optimal for you. You can manually override it, but it adjusts up and down, either cold or hot, the temperature of the mattress. This thing is so thin. It's super thin. It goes on top of the bed. It has a little pump that you hide behind your bed with a little bit of water in it. It's brilliant. I have a $7,000 sleep number bed that has something similar built in. That sucks compared to this eight sleep. It's awesome. So things like that, plus you got to watch as a man, you got to watch your testosterone. So as men, the number one thing is sleep, sleep apnea or sleep, testosterone level and your diabetes level. Those three things play more in your health than anything else. If you get on top of those, your chances of Having a long fruitful life and being there for your kids and your wife and to enjoy your retirement are much, much higher. Bradley Sutton: Intriguing stuff. All right. So let's. Let's give somebody a quick tease. We're going to talk about your newsletter you just started, why you started it and some of the stuff. What's one that's come out already or something that's coming, one of the strategies that you can share with our listeners who maybe haven't gotten a chance to read the newsletter? What's something you brought out in one of your newsletters that can right off the bat help sellers listening? Kevin King: I just started August 14th. It's twice a week. It's Mondays and Thursdays. When I say newsletter, a lot of people roll their eyes. They're like, yeah, I get a newsletter from Helium 10. I get a newsletter from this software. Every time I get my email, I get the company newsletter. Those are not newsletters. Those are promotional emails for the most part. Go read our blog. Go read this. A newsletter to me is more like a magazine. In the newsletter format, it's action-packed. Yes, there's a couple of ads and stuff in there from people that are paying for those, but it's action-packed, actionable stuff. It's totally free. We just did a big one that's really resonating. The one that came out on August 28th talked about the A9 algorithm. Danny McMillan over at Seller Sessions did a big document on it. We analyzed that and while that's good, there's more to it than that. We took a look at Amazon Science, a big paper that came out, and a couple of other things. We analyzed that and we talked about that. I've gotten so many people saying this is the most amazing. It was written in a way that we can understand it. Sometimes this stuff gets too technical, plus some of the tips and tools that we put in there. We had a really cool resource for like getting, sometimes when you're trying to create your A-plus content, your brand story, your brand pages, you're like, what should I do? What should I tell my designer or graphics person to do? And maybe you saw a couple here or there ideas or you give them some basic idea, but there's There's a guy, George, that's a similar library of 25,000 A-plus pages and you can filter by it. I'm in the pet space. I'm in the this space. It's got it all keyworded so you can search and get like, wow, that's a cool one. That's a cool one. I want my designer to do something like that or combine these two together. So we share resources like that. I have something called the Dream 100. As you know, there's a lot of BS. Bradley Sutton is BS in this industry with fake gurus and stuff. Every Thursday, I put someone in the Dream 100. I announced this is a legit person. You should follow them. Trust what they say. So that'll get up to a hundred people. It's only three right now, but that'll get up to a hundred people over time. We do, I add a little bit of humor to it. So there's like, I'll either call somebody out, you know, that's basically a fake guru or we'll put some crazy listing like, Hey, can you believe that this product is selling a hundred grand a month? On X-Ray, on Amazon, you look at it like, holy cow, that's the craziest thing I ever saw. We do some of that. It's a mix. I tell a personal story and each one is called a six-second story. When someone opens the newsletter, you got to hook them right away and you got to get them reading and engaged. I personalize it and then I tie it to whatever we're talking about that day. Bradley Sutton: Reason one kind of caused a stir about some naked people on some balconies. Kevin King: I always say if you're not pissing someone off, you're not doing a good job. If you try to please everybody, you please nobody. And so I'm cleaning my audience and so if that bothers you or it's going to bother some people that might be religious or depending, that's okay. You can go find your information somewhere else. I'm fine with that. The overwhelming response to that has been like, holy cow, this is the best thing ever. Don't stop. Can you do this every day? I can't believe it. One guy sent me a message today. He's like, this is so good. I can't even take it all in. I just got three of my team members start reading this and we're dividing up sections of what to do. There's so much out there. We do the Helium 10 Elite every month. We've been doing that since 2017 at Helium 10, which is advanced level stuff. In that, I do seven ninja hacks every month and share those with the audience. Once those have become a little bit older, sometimes I share those other places, but the Helium 10 elite people always get them first. Right now, I write everything on the current newsletter, but it's going to get to the point where I'll hire a staff. But I need to get to set the tone, figure out what works, what people like, what they don't like. And then I can feed everything I've written for, if I do this for three months, let's say, I can feed that onto an AI and then say, have the AI write in the style of Kevin of these newsletters. It'll know the exact style, the exact everything. So these are not AI newsletters. We use AI as a tool, but AI is not writing these. Bradley Sutton: So if somebody wants to go ahead and sign up, it's free right now. How can they do that? Kevin King: It's always going to be free. It's BillionDollarSellers.com. Okay. BillionDollarSellers.com with an S. It's growing pretty quickly. So I think, you know, hopefully by this time next year, there'll be maybe 50 to 100,000 people getting that twice a week and actually reading it that want it. So, you know, my email list from all the stuff I do is big. Not as big as Helium 10s or something, but so I could just blast this out to everybody, but I don't want to do that. I want people to actually want it and I have people now already saying I didn't get it. I didn't see it in my spam or you know what happened to it and they're getting upset that they didn't get it. That's what I want is it to become you know habit forming it and become something people look forward to when they see that Kevin King BDSN. They're like, oh, this is something I got to read. If I can't read it right now, I'm saving it until tonight or for the plane ride tomorrow or whatever. That's where I want to be. It's not a blast on my whole email list. You've got to double opt-in. You can't just sign up and get it. You actually sign up and you've got to click something else to say you really want to sign up and then you're in. That's on purpose. It keeps the open rates high, the engagement high. It's good for the advertisers that come into it. I support it with a little bit of advertising. It's just good for everybody. It's people that want it. Bradley Sutton: Okay. All right. So the guys make sure to sign up. It's one like I personally don't even read, you know, newsletters. This is the first one I actually just sit there and read. Like Kevin said, sometimes he starts with a funny story, but it works. It hooks you. I'm like laughing, sitting there laughing like, all right, I want to read more. I'm hooked in. From start to finish, it's long. It's like you're doing a lot of scrolling. Sometimes people say, oh, when you write an email, you don't want them to scroll. I got no problem scrolling. Kevin King: It's written short. It's written in a format so you can skim it. You'll see that it's using every trick in the book. There's no paragraphs more than two or three sentences. It's not long. Usually, when I write it, I have to go back and cut half of what I wrote out. It's straight and to the point. We use a sense of humor. It's not just that opening story, but it's like we did something in a recent one. So there's no such thing as the A10 algorithm. It's always the A9. There is no such thing. And the A9 evolves just like you did during puberty, but it's still named the A9. So we'll do stuff like that that's not necessarily business-like or corporate-like, but screw that. Put a personality to it. And people love that. And then as a reading, they have a little smile, like, I get it, or that's relatable. It doesn't sound like corporate speak or boring stuff. That's all on purpose. Yeah. Bradley Sutton: Alright, now you reference Elite and how you save the best hacks for there. Do you have any, just for a sample, you can give some of the cool, one or two of the cool hacks that you've given out on your 7 Ninja Hacks that you do monthly in the Elite group? Kevin King: Yeah, sure. What's a good reason? We do this every single month. You know, we talk about some of its tools like CASPA AI, you know, which is a really cool tool where you can shoot your product on a on your iPhone, just, you know, basic picture, upload it, and then put it into any scene you want. So you're like, Hey, I want my my water bottle to be on a holding being held by an Asian guy standing in the gym. With some barbells behind him and he's holding it facing the logo out. It'll make a cool picture instantly using AI with that which you could use in your Amazon post or you could use in your maybe in your listing you could use a lot of places. So we'll do we'll do cool tools like that or Melio payments that you know you where you can use credit cards to actually finance your purchase orders and stuff. We do things like, you know, a recent one was about how to Get that there's a newer version of this item available. We covered that. There's a newer version of this item available. People like, see that. How do I get my, if you've got a calendar or you just updated your product, how can you link that We took the old inventory so that people see there's a newer version available. We showed people how to do that. We showed people how to do the back-end stuff before anybody knew how to do the back-end and get a complete dump of your competitor's listings, like all their attributes and everything before that was really public information. Bradley Sutton: I was like a couple of years before it became mainstream. Kevin King: We did stuff like how to use a HEXA, H-E-X-A. It's a beta program that most people don't know about to create 360-degree pictures for your Amazon listing. They'll do it for you for free. I think that's really, really, really, really cool. We've done stuff like how to make money fall from the sky on your landing pages. Someone hits one of your landing pages on one of your blog sites and let's say they don't sign up, but you want to know who they are. There's tools out there that will actually I use IP and geolocation to actually figure out in about 50 to 60% of cases who these people are based on public data. In the United States, Europe, you might have a few more issues with privacy, but in the U.S., we don't care about privacy unless it's medical. We can figure out that I just went to Bradley's blog talking about the honeymoon and he doesn't know I went there. You know, as he got a hit or metrics that there's a visitor session, but he doesn't know who they are. If he puts this little bit of code, then we can figure out that, oh, this was Kevin King because he was using this IP address of this computer. And there's reverse matching that knows that, oh, Kevin King I went to this gaming site or went to somewhere else in the past 10 years from that same place. It must be Kevin King. Let's match it up again to this other database. Oh, his email address is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Puts that into a database. Then you can either email those people, which I don't always recommend if you're going to do that. You should use something like zero bounce to make sure that emails are valid. Or you can put them into custom audiences if you're running Facebook ads or any kinds of things like that. And you can retarget these people. If you ever wonder how sometimes you went to a site And all of a sudden now I'm seeing this stuff all over my feed. Some of that's retargeting pixels, which is more private. But if you're wondering how do they get me onto an email list or how do they get me from this not a meta property into an X or Twitter property, those two aren't the same company, not sharing the same pixel. How do they do that? And this is some of the ways they're doing it. We also talked about, you know, Howard, you've had Howard Ty on the podcast. And he's got a little group called Elites. I forget the name of it. Elites Seller Society or something like that. And every Thursday, he has someone come on and talk about stuff. And one of the things that just recently, he had David who's spoken at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You remember David from the Ghost Story back in 2019. He came on. Bradley Sutton: You did some translating for him when you were at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. Kevin King: He came on and talked about how are things changing with the Chinese sellers. How are He's like, AI has leveled the playing field as far as creating listings and stuff now for everybody. Someone's like, how are they ranking? How are they getting reviews? What are they doing? He's like, the number one way that Chinese sellers are getting ranking right now, they're using postcards, postcards through the mail. And he's like, thanks to Kevin King. I'm like, what? He's like, oh yeah, I did talk about that in 2019 when I did, me and Brandon Young went over there and spoke to a huge group in Shenzhen. Well, they took that and now he said, that's the number one way that they're ranking products and getting reviews. And so I was like, you know what? I think I actually did that in the U.S. too. I just didn't give that to the Chinese sellers. And so I look back and I shared that to the Helium 10 elite first. Bradley Sutton: I remember that. Kevin King: Way back. I don't remember the exact time. In 2018, I did a presentation on postcards and it was cutting edge. Virtually nobody did it. Everybody, you know, they looked at it like, yeah, Kevin, that's like, I never heard of, I don't even check my mailbox. I don't, you know, I'm a millennial. Nah, who reads the mail? Like, dude, you're missing it. And so nobody in the, hardly anybody in the U.S. did it. But the Chinese like, oh, this looks good. They did it and look what it's doing for them four years later. So that's the kind of stuff we do in Helium 10 Elite. If you freaking pay attention and implement not only what I'm teaching, but what I bring on Really good guests. You know, I look for a diversity from PPC people to shipping people to you name it. You know, sometimes you get a speaker that's in. Okay, but we get some really good people as three speakers plus myself. On every single one of the Helium 10 Elite, there's a lot of groups out there that have trainings, but I think this might be the longest, the oldest one, period, it's continuous. There's others that have started and come and gone, but I think we started February 2017 when it was called Illuminati, changed the name in 2019 to Helium 10 Elite, but it's been continuous, never missed a month since February 2017, so that's six and a half years. I don't know if there's any other Group that has lasted that long at this point. Bradley Sutton: Yeah. And guys, you know, I've told people this before. This is one of the secrets, not the main secret to my success is before I ever sold on Amazon, you know, before I even became a consultant, you know, people thought I was crazy because it's only, I mean, like seven, eight, nine figure sellers go in and paying 400 bucks to get in this Illuminati mastermind. I could see the value in it. I saw a webinar or something first of you and Manny, you know, way before I worked at Helium 10. More than a year probably before, and I actually joined Illuminati just as a regular person who wasn't even selling yet. And within like three, four months, I had enough knowledge just from the Illuminati stuff and a couple other courses I was taking, but mainly from the Illuminati where I became like a pretty top level consultant and launched my Amazon consulting career, which was my career before Helium 10. Without even selling on Amazon, just because I was able to ramp up my knowledge super fast by being part of that Illuminati mastermind. Kevin King: And it's not just the monthly training. That's what we had. But more recently, Helium 10 has added a weekly call with all the people that want to participate. So I do one a month. I jump on once a month. And then the other three weeks, Bradley and Kerry and Shivali host them, and we'll have anywhere from 20 to 40, 50 people in there that are members of Helium 10 Elite. There's a lot more members than that, but some people are busy. And for a couple hours, typically an hour to two hours, everybody's on there on a Zoom call, all on the screen. There's no agenda, no presentation. It's like, what do you got a problem with? Oh, Amazon's blocking me from shipping this, and anybody else ever dealt with this? And usually there's someone else like, oh yeah, maybe me or Bradley or somebody knows the answer, we can help them. Usually, there's somebody else like, oh, have you ever tried this or this happened to me two years ago and I did this, and you have this interactive conversation that you're not going to get in a Facebook group. You're not going to get anywhere else other than maybe an in-person event, which there's four of those a year too for Helium 10 Elite. That you get to come to for free. That value right there, sometimes I learn stuff in there. I didn't know from somebody else. That right there, connecting with other high-level sellers and being able to share is as valuable as the presentations, if not even more valuable in some cases. So there's things like that that you're not going to get anywhere else. Bradley Sutton: Just last week, I don't know if it was on your call or on one of the regular weekly one that you're not on there. Either way, it was before you came on the call. There was Elizabeth, who's an elite member, and she was talking about how she's done something like $2 million on TikTok shop. Some crazy some crazy number like that and so she was just like people were dazzled with what she was saying just randomly got on there. She was just one of the participants and was talking about that. Now we're actually going to do a training in October in the elite in-person workshop in New York where she's going to show people what kind of like reverse engineer how she was able to get to This level of success that she's had on TikTok Shop, which is definitely a hot topic. Kevin King: That's hot. That's big right now. That's big. If you're not paying attention to that, that's big. Bradley Sutton: You know, I had Perry Belcher. Kevin King: This will be coming out on the AM PM podcast in October. So be sure. But Perry Belcher, if you don't know who he is, he's one of the top marketers in the space right now. He started digital marketer. The big expo was 7000 people. I'm sorry, traffic and conversion. He was one of the founders of that. He started digital marketer. Really big in the marketing space, an old school marketing guy. One of the things he actually said on that podcast, among a bunch of other cool stuff, is that he's like, if you're going from Amazon to Shopify, it's a mistake. You should not be doing anything on Shopify. He said, we're finding far better success by setting up funnels with ClickFunnels or High Level or one of the other and doing single product drives. The conversions are way higher. The sales are way higher than driving someone to a Shopify site where there's too many confusing things that can distract you. And he's like, that's where these Amazon sellers, because I asked him for one of the mistakes people are making. He said, that's one of the mistakes a lot of these Amazon sellers are making. Right now, as they should be focused more on driving stuff to single products with upsells rather than driving to a Shopify store. Here's all my 20 things my company sells. Bradley Sutton: I can't wait for that episode. Um, but yeah, yeah, I mean, the TikTok shop, there's just whatever is cutting edge, you know, we talk about an elite. So it's actually the longest in history in that, you know, Kevin just said it started in 2017. So it's we're talking over six years, almost seven years. It's been closed for the longest time in history. I think the last time it was open was in March of this year. I'm not sure by the time you guys are listening to this episode if it's open, but sometime in September, October, we're going to open it up for a couple of weeks or so. So this is the time to sign up. Guys, write this down, h10.me forward slash elite, h10.me forward slash elite. And even if it's not open right now, there's a button on there where you can join the waiting list. So you can make sure that when it does open for the short window that it does, that you guys can get in. But the benefits are this is like the only way to really talk to Kevin. I want to ask, you know, want to hire Kevin as a consultant all the time. Kevin doesn't have the bandwidth to do that, but once a month he'll go on there and just live, you know, just in a regular Zoom call, you can ask him anything you want. You can ask other people anything you want in the Facebook group or we have two weekly Zoom calls now. In the afternoon on Friday, US time and then one that I actually hop on at midnight because it's 8 a.m. UK time every Friday and we hit all the European sellers and people in Asia can hop on a call and network with each other. We have four quarterly workshops. The next one's coming up in October, the fourth one of the year. We had one in during Amazon Accelerate September 11th and now October right during Unboxed. We're going to have one where we're going to be talking about, like I said, TikTok shop and also we're going to have a PPC expert and there's a whole bunch of other advantages of being on the elite program. So if you guys are interested to add this to your Helium 10 account again go to h10.me forward slash elite and either sign up right there if it's open take advantage or if it's closed just join the waiting list so you can hook up with Kevin that way. Kevin King: There's some software tools too that they get extra tools or extra capacity or something right? Bradley Sutton: Yeah, elite members usually get access to tools like way before like we just launched some historical cerebro. Elite members have had that for like a year and a half, you know, but now barely diamond members are getting like a year and a half later. There's some tools like our elite analytics tool that Kevin actually developed himself. He gave the kind of blueprint for it. That's still only elite members can access that. Diamond members don't have access to that. That's been around for like two years. So lots of advantages. Are including networking and training are that only has your back in the day like I said when I was in a league Illuminati member. It was only the you know there's a I think there was a Facebook group maybe at that time or something but it was mainly just one of those training calls a month and not that was enough value of for me and now it's just like all of you know tons tons of other value so guys make sure to. Another thing, I'm wearing my OG Billion Dollar Seller Summit shirt today from the very first one and the next one, time and place in 2024 for the next Billion Dollar Seller Summit. Kevin King: There's actually two coming. The next Billion Dollar Seller Summit is May 18th to the 23rd in Kauai, Hawaii, which is going to be amazing. Right after that one, from the 23rd to the 26th, I have a second event called Level Up. The first, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit is mostly for Amazon sellers and all the traditional things that you're used to, like you are, Bradley, from a Billion Dollar Seller Summit. The Level Up, we're switching resorts. I'm taking everybody that's staying, that chooses to stay. They're going to the Waimea Canyon, which is the Grand Canyon of Hawaii. It's like a little Grand Canyon in Hawaii. Then we're taking them on the Nepali Coast on a dinner cruise. The Nepali Coast is where these mountains, these beautiful mountains come right up to the edge of the water. It's just stunning. Dolphins jumping everywhere, so that's going to be cool. Then we're switching to Hanalei Bay to The One, The Chain. The One is a $300 million resort. I just had an overhaul and it's like $1,400, $1,500 a night to stay there, but we got a rate that's like way less than half of that for people coming to the event. And then we're doing, it's called Level Up. So it's six speakers. Only one's Amazon. The other five are, you know, like Perry Belcher just said, he's probably going to speak at it. Jason Flatland is someone that's maybe speak at it. There's a couple other, Molly Mahoney is probably going to speak at it. And then we're mixing that in with some mind and body stuff like we talked about earlier because that's important for entrepreneurs. So there's going to be cryotherapy. There's going to be a sound therapy lab where you listen to the bowls and it helps reset your mind. We're going to be doing hot yoga. A bonfire on the beach. It's going to be pretty cool. We're doing a race. We did that race here in Austin. You were in that scavenger hunt we did a couple of years ago here in Austin. People love that. One of the problems when you go to an event, you don't get to see the place. You see the hotel and maybe you see a bar or something or a restaurant. We've got 25 Avis rental cars, I think, or 30 Avis rental cars all lined up. You're going to be broken into teams of four and you're going to do an amazing race across the island one day. You're going to be able to see the entire islands and experience the island. Kauai is a place where you're not going to want to be napping in the back. You're going to be looking out the window after every turn going, holy cow, this is beautiful. I've never seen something so beautiful in my life. It's a drastic park island. You're going to be able to see some cool stuff in some back places that you wouldn't know. They're not on the tourist map. We're going to take you to this one cool beach as part of the race. You're like, holy cow, I'm coming back here because nobody's here. Nobody knows about this place. It's like a secret little beach. That's going to be cool too if it's your third or more trip, you're going to get a Jurassic Park experience and a helicopter ride over the island and stuff. Bradley, if you're out there, you get that for free since you're a regular, since this is your third or more. We're going to take a helicopter around the island as a tour. It's amazing. Fly up to the inside of this 10,000-foot waterfall in a helicopter and land in this Jurassic Park kind of vehicle. It's going to pick you up and take you through this amazing plantation kind of thing and to a VIP dinner that night. It's going to be really, really cool. So yeah, that's at BillionDollarSellerSummit.com if you want information on that. Then in October, I'm doing the Billion Dollar Exit Summit. So the Billion Dollar Exit Summit, I'm doing this with Scott Dietz. So some of you may know he's got the exit ticket or whatever it's called in Helium 10. Probably the top guy in helping people exit. He helped Manny Guillermo exit Helium 10. He was involved in that. I've done over a half a billion dollars worth of exits for Amazon sellers. And you may be like, yeah, but right now I'm not thinking about exiting, but you might be in a year or two years and now is the time to actually start working on it now to maximize and add a couple extra million dollars to your exit by working now rather than waking up one day and saying, I want to exit. I want to be out of here in three months. You're going to be shooting yourself in the foot. So we're doing a, it's very small, 25 to 30 people in Austin, October 10th to the 13th called the Billion Dollar Exit Summit. And it's hands-on. So he's bringing his whole team. So it's a lot of one-on-one stuff. It's not a bunch of presentations from all these random people. You're going to walk out of there with a plan like, okay, this is what I need to do specific to your business. So that's happening in October. Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Awesome. All right. So guys, BillionDollarSellerSummit.com to get more information on it. All right. Like always, let's go ahead and close this out with your 30 or 60 second tip that you can leave for the sellers out there. Kevin King: If you haven't checked out Levanta, that would be a really good tip. L-E-V-A-N-T-A, I think, dot com, I think is the This is the URL. But especially for the fourth quarter coming up, Amazon traffic is huge for ranking. You get the 10% referral bonus if you're brand registered, and it just helps you in your rank. Even if they don't buy, if you're sending traffic from outside social media or outside media, blogs, whatever, even if they don't buy, it helps you on your rank. But these guys, it's kind of a pain in the ass to go set all that stuff up. You've got to find people on TikTok, or you've got to find blogs, or you've got to find these affiliates and coordinate everything one by one by one. These guys have got over 1,000 of the top affiliates from TikTok people to people who are in the affiliate business. That's what they do to blogs like USA Today. USA Today will do a holiday gift guide for pet products this year. If you have a pet product, you want to be in that gift guide in USA Today with 2 million people reading it online. These guys can facilitate that. It's seamless. The way it works is you just connect your Amazon account to their system. And it automatically imports all your products. Once your products are in there, you can go and cherry pick them. Like, I only want to promote these three. I'm willing to give a 20% commission for this dog bowl. And then that goes into their database. These thousand affiliates, when they're writing their stories and looking for things, they can search that database. Oh, I want to promote this dog bowl. He's giving 20% off. They just automatically pick up everything. It's all done for them. They put it into their blog or their post or whatever. And it's all automated. Or you can go in there. I think they let you do 50 a day. You can reach out to people. And they're growing really, really fast. And they just had people on Prime Day, the last, the July Prime Day, do over a million dollars just off of outside traffic off of this program on Prime Day. And just imagine what that does to your listing on Amazon and the internal Amazon stuff, how that's going to get that flywheel going. So that would probably be a tip. They're under the radar and I'm missing this here. They don't give me a kickback or anything for this, but that's a tool that I think any serious Amazon seller is a fool to not use, an absolute fool to not actually take a look at that, especially for this fourth quarter and get a strong competitive edge over your competition. Bradley Sutton: All right, cool. Well, get more like that, guys, in Helium 10 Elite, h10.me forward slash elite. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. I know you're traveling a lot more than you were in the previous year, so I'll probably hopefully see you at one of these upcoming events and then for sure at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit next year. So keep on. By the time I see you next time, I might not even recognize you. You're losing so much weight. Hopefully, you won't recognize me because I need to get on the path. Kevin King: It's slow, but if we go a long enough period of time, I've lost a bunch. I'm not trying to do it quickly. Bradley Sutton: All right. We'll see you next time. Kevin King: All right. Take care.