Kevin King’s Wicked-Smart Tips for Building an Audience of Raving Fans

Kevin King’s Wicked-Smart Tips for Building an Audience of Raving Fans 00:00:04 Welcome to the Ecom Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You've already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level. Join Josh Hadley, an eight-figure Ecom business owner and investor, as he interviews highly successful business owners. Get ready because you're going to learn specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world. Welcome to the Ecom Breakthrough podcast, I'm your host Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce today. I'm speaking with Kevin King, and we will be talking a lot about generating sales on Amazon and actually building a true brand on Amazon. 00:00:53 This episode is brought to you by Ecom Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven-figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. If you've hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take in your business to go to the next level, then go to EcomBreakthrough. com, that's Ecom with two Ms, to learn more. Today I'm excited to introduce you to Kevin King. Kevin has been selling on Amazon since 1999. He has created, developed, and guided hundreds of products from inception to market. In 2015, he started five private label brands by himself and has grossed more than eight figures with those products on Amazon. Kevin has been featured in media including the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Inside Edition, and Entertainment Tonight. 00:01:41 He hasn't received a paycheck from a boss in over three decades. He makes the most of his financial freedom by traveling, having visited all seven continents and 90 countries. Kevin has learned how to sell more and work less, and he can't wait to share those latest tips and strategies with you. So, Kevin, welcome to the podcast. Glad to be here, Josh. So, Kevin, I know you're you're probably very well known here in the e-commerce, Amazon space for sure. You do some training on Freedom Ticket with Helium 10, but i'm there's a lot more that you have going on. Why don't you share with our audience all the many ventures you've kind of got your hands in right now? Yeah, I'm involved in quite a few things in the Amazon space. 00:02:25 Uh, I'm a seller first and foremost, so I've got four different brands that I I sell. I think that's important if you're going to be out there teaching, talking about you need to be actually doing. It's there's a lot of people as you know that uh uh go out there and preach but they don't do or they or they they say they teach but they preach and they don't do and so I think that's extremely important, so I've got four different uh brands that I'm either I won't outright myself where I'm partners with other people in. And then I do the training, like you said, for Helium 10. I've got a contract with Helium 10, biggest software company in the space, where I do their course for new people called the Freedom Ticket. 00:03:01 So if you buy their software, you get about a 60-hour course that's A to Z on how to sell on Amazon, not just the sexy stuff, but down into the weeds of how to set up an LLC and how to build a brand loyalty pyramid and all that kind of stuff. It's not just the sexy stuff that most people cover. And then I do their advanced training called Helium 10 Elite, which is a monthly kind of like mastermind training where we do live roundtables where we talk about things. I bring on presenters and they make presentations of the latest things that are happening in the space and the latest things that big sellers need to know. I do the Billion Dollar Seller Summit twice a year, once virtually in February and once in person, usually around the summertime. 00:03:44 And we've got one coming up next year in February, virtual, and June in Puerto Rico. You've been to a few of those, actually won. Congratulations again there. You've actually won for, like, the best ninja tactic strategy. Thank you. So that was awesome. And then I do something with Steve Simonson called Product Savants, where we help bigger sellers actually create new brands. We have a program called Brand Genesis where we actually-You can come in and say, 'Hey, I want to create a little brand in the automotive space, and I need five products that are complementary around this brand, and we'll help you discover what those five products should be, help you do the sourcing, and then turn it over to you to do the entire marketing process of that. 00:04:27 I do something called Collective Mind Society with Norm, which is a little small experiential masterminds. We just recently did something at the F1 track where we had 12 people come out, and we had this first-class all the way, like nice cabana on the top of turn one. Catered, just VIP the whole way to the concerts and everything afterwards, and just sitting around just shooting the bird and sharing stuff with each other. Then I speak at a lot of events. I don't speak as much as I used to. I'm a little more selective now, but I remember in 2018, I spoke at 35 different Amazon events all over the world. Wow. From China to Hong Kong to all over Asia to Israel and the U. S. 00:05:12 And so I speak, I used to speak at quite a few. I don't quite do that as much. I'm a little more selective now. What else do I do? I have a business off Amazon as well. So I have one, those Amazon businesses, but I also have one that's old school. I didn't even use Shopify. I use this old school software and still does really well. And still have customers sending checks and money orders in the mail. You know, half of that, probably 40% of it is. Checks and money orders and envelopes, you know, handwritten in the mail, which a lot of people think doesn't even exist anymore. And then, yeah, I have the podcast, the AMPM podcast, which is kind of how I got my start in all this. 00:05:49 People always say, hey, Kevin, how did you start teaching this stuff or start going on podcasts? And it all started back in 2016. Manny Coates, who was the co-founder of Helium 10, had a Facebook group, had a podcast at the time. He started this podcast to document his journey as a seller. And that kind of evolved as he developed the software. But he had a Facebook group called the FBA High Rollers. It still exists. And people were posting their different strategies about launching and what you should do. And there's just so much BS. So many people that just clearly don't have experience and just were parroting what somebody else said on some other forum. And I went in there and just tried to set them straight. And Manny liked what I said. 00:06:29 And in March of 2016, he's like, hey, would you come onboard. the podcast and i know dude i'm launched like you said in my the intro i was launching five brands i was like i don't have time for that he's like no just just come on just come on it i'm like all right all right i had like a the worst microphone your little headset thing it sounded like i was in a tin can horrible audio horrible everything but we put the podcast out and it just took off people loved it because i just i was pretty frank and just said it like it is and everybody else at that time was shook coding stuff and and it just resonated so from there Tons of people asked me to come on their podcast and speak at their events, and it just kind of evolved into the teaching. 00:07:08 I'd done some of that when I was younger as well in college. I did tutoring at Texas A &M, so I was used to speaking and stuff. So it just kind of evolved from there, and now I enjoy both aspects, the creative side of selling and those challenges, as well as the helping other people. Everybody needs a little helping hand sometimes in creating that. I like to create experiences. So, like the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You go to a lot of these conferences and it's just go listen to some people talk and maybe go have dinner or go out to a club or something afterwards. But I'm like, I want to be more. But like the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, we did that amazing race slash scavenger hunt type of thing, which is a networking experience. 00:07:49 Which was amazing. A lot of people were like, what the heck is this thing? I'm a grown person. Why am I doing some? And then at the end of it, people were like, this was freaking awesome. But we try to do that kind of thing. In addition to the learning and make sure there's networking built in. So I'm all about experiences. Life is all about the experiences you have and the people you meet. That's what matters most. That's a quick 10-minute intro to what I do there. Well, I think to say the least, you've got your hands in many different aspects of the Amazon e-commerce industry here. You have a lot of experience, not only as a seller. 00:08:29 Which, as you mentioned, is extremely important so you know what is actually working, what is actually going on in your businesses rather than just being a guru, so to speak, and just talking about it, right? Yeah, so I think that's fantastic. So Kevin, you've got a lot of history; it goes all the way back to 1999. Why don't you tell people like how did you even get started in the world of Amazon to begin with? Well, it actually goes back before then. I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. I'm in my 50s, my mid-50s, and last time I got a paycheck, like you said, I was 17. I worked at McDonald's in Louisville at the corner of I-35 and 1171. There used to be a McDonald's there. 00:09:10 I think there might be one now on the opposite side of the street. There used to be one on the same side as the hospital since you were from that area. I worked there, and then I worked at Delivered Pizzas for, I don't know if it's, what's it, Jimmy? Not Jimmy John's. Jimmy, sorry. Jimmy something pizza. You got two pieces. You order one, you get one free. It's kind of like the Little Caesars kind of thing with delivery. And I did that in Louisville and Flower Mound for a while, and that's it. That's the only jobs I've ever had. I've been an entrepreneur the rest of my life, the entire rest of my life. So I was doing e-commerce and direct mail. 00:09:47 I was actually named one of the top 40 marketers under 40 when I was younger by Direct Marketing Magazine. And I was doing direct marketing catalogs, printed catalogs. When I was in college, I developed something kind of like the Sharper Image. If you remember the old Sharper Image catalog of gadgets and stuff for college kids? And put that out with all kinds of dorm room accessories and different things. In college, I had one apartment I lived in, and I rented the one below us. We were in a two-story building. I rented the apartment directly below us, and I turned that into a fulfillment center, basically, when I was like 21 years old. I love that. Stacked with boxes of, like, little neon lamps and, you know, Simpsons T-shirts and whatever it was back then that we had. 00:10:35 And I had three phone lines in there, and I had girls coming and answering the phone; 1-800 numbers coming directly into the apartment. And they would answer it and take orders, running ads in the back. Back then, when you would register for classes, this is kind of pre-Internet, the schools would send out, like, a booklet, like a – a booklet uh like a almost like a catalog of here's the classes you know that you can take each one has a code and you get to call an 800 number and uh to register and punch in the code of which classes you want to do and I would advertise in those for colleges all over 00:11:08 all over the place um doing all kinds of stuff like that so that I was doing a lot of direct marketing and a lot of uh that and then I got when the Internet came along started uh shifted a lot of focus to the internet was doing a lot of stuff online with membership-based websites with I had a daily news site so we were sitting out uh at one point like 250, 000 emails a day uh people would come on and we would aggregate almost like a Drudge Report but we were in a for a specific niche and we would actually take content; I had two guys that would like feed in all these News stories into this database behind the scenes, and every night by four midnight I had to go in and pick the five headlines myself personally, no matter where I was in the world. 00:11:51 And I remember I'd been Costa Rican on some ancient dial-up connection in a hotel, but you know this is back before there's internet everywhere. I'm trying to get in to like pick these five stories and an email would go out the next day at different times people could select the hour of the day they want the email it wasn't just okay it sends out in the morning so we would have 10, 15, 000 emails going out hourly depending on how people selected and then there were games and puzzles and stuff and we built that up and then leveraged that audience into buying physical products and digital products And then did a bunch of that for a while, published a magazine, got into the calendar business, which I know you have a hand experience in, and still do that to this day. 00:12:33 We do different, I think a little bit different things, but still in that calendar. Just a little bit. Just in that calendar business. And so that started doing that, and then that evolved. And then around, we're doing a lot of video and stuff online as well. And YouTube kind of killed. We were able to charge for this video content and this teaching content and the video stuff that we were doing. And YouTube kind of killed that market when they came around in 2007. So we were able to coast for a while. And then in about 2014, I was like, you know what? I was traveling, like you said. I was doing a lot of travel. Pretty much every month I was off somewhere. 00:13:17 I had an office here with 16 employees, and I would take a week to 10 days every month and go somewhere. And sometimes by myself, sometimes with friends or family. I was going to do that for a year, but it turned into like seven years. So that's where I got a lot of the travel. And I wasn’t backpacking up, but I wasn’t like staying for four seasons. But I was doing it decently. Yeah. And then money started to run out a little bit. And I was like, what am I going to do now? So at that time I was like, Maybe I should do real estate. You know, Austin's going to be booming. This is before the big boom. It’s like 2014. I was like, it’s coming. 00:13:51 Maybe I should do real estate because that gives me still some freedom. You know, I don’t have to like go to an office or do something like that. So I got a real estate license. And then, also at the same time, there's a camera called the Matterport, which is like a 3D camera that you could take in and it makes the. these 3D renderings of buildings and stuff. I don't know if you've ever used one where there's a little circle in the floor, and you put that circle, and it moves you to that circle, and then you can spin around 3D. I played with that. I tried to start a business with that. And then, around the same time, Amazing. com, I saw something online for one of their little four-part series. 00:14:28 They used to do a four-part warm-up series before they do the big pitch for their $5,000 course. And I watched their four-part Warm-up series which is like every couple days they release a new little teaser video just to warm you up and I watched watch that and then uh at the end, you know, the last after the last one, they did the big webinar and hey it's a five thousand dollar course. I'm like, 'I don't need to pay five thousand dollars to do this.' I know I've been doing all this stuff for my other businesses importing from Asia, China or Asia or wherever, and selling stuff online and we sold to comic book stores, we sold all kinds of stuff, and and I don't I don't need this. 00:15:04 And I've been selling on Amazon since 2001 as a third-party vendor. So I already understood the basics of Amazon. I just had never done FBA. And I was like, 'this makes sense.' You know, I could actually do very well with this. And so, that's where in 2015, I actually jumped into FBA and launched five brands all at once in five different categories. And the reason I did that is just to spread the risk, you know, and I had experience. I don't recommend that for most people because they need to get their feet wet, but I already kind of, it was second nature to me. It's like my mom said back then, she said, 'it's like you were training your entire life to do this' because all the things that you've been doing in the past came together. 00:15:44 And it was just a perfect thing from the direct marketing to the wholesale, to the product creation, to that whole thing. And so still doing it to this day, and enjoying it. I love it. Well, and you've got such a breadth of knowledge because you've done so many different ventures and you've been an entrepreneur at heart. You know from day one I, you know myself, I'm I was very similar growing up always had that entrepreneur inside me. I was the kid with the candy stand on the corner of the street, always figuring out, you know, figuring out ways to make money so I love that and I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of share that similar passion it's just something inside of us that's always calling us to go create something and and bring products to market uh in the world so I love that. 00:16:32 Now, Kevin, before we jumped on this podcast, we were talking about what things are on your mind as it relates to Amazon. What has you excited? What opportunities do you see? You talked a lot about how important brand building is on Amazon now. As our audience primarily is established Amazon businesses, they've already found success, but they're looking to go to eight figures and beyond. What do you see going on in the Amazon space right now and some of the advice and strategies that you would recommend to establish sellers right now? Yeah, it's a tough one because some of them are going to need to pivot, and it's going to be a little bit of a hard pivot because in the past on Amazon, there's a lot of people that have built successful businesses and even exited successful businesses just basically finding opportunities, sticking a name on it, a label on it, and then selling that to an aggregator. 00:17:27 Those days are pretty much over. I'm not going to say it doesn't happen. It could still happen here and there. And then there's a lot of people, as you know, that may have started with a small amount of money. And that's way more difficult now. Not that you can't do it, but I always hear stories that people say, 'Yeah, I started with $500 and now I've got an eight-figure business.' And I always say BS. You might have started with $500. That may be true. But two weeks later, your uncle gave you $10,000. Uh, or somebody you got a credit card or you did some there's just no way it 00:18:00 did that just flat out does not happen um from 500 to there was something else along the way it might not be the money out of your pocket but there's something else along the way and those days are much more difficult now and that as Amazon as you know Amazon's everything is more towards rewarding brands, you know the brand registry the brand analytics the all the different you know the advertising thing everything is they're trying to reward those brands It's because they're trying to clean it up as well. They don't want just this hodgepodge flea market on there. They want people that are coming for brands. And a lot of people think they're a brand, and they're really not. 00:18:34 I say that if you don't have at least 3,000 searches a month on your brand name on Amazon, because Amazon is so big, you're not a brand. If people are not looking for you by that brand name and typing that in, and you can see it in brand analytics, and it's got like 3,000 searches. A month or more then you're actually not a brand you're just a product and so that's where a lot of people get confused and a brand is not a logo, a brand is not a name that's part of it, but a brand is what the most is, is a feeling, it's an evocation of something that people feel identity towards this or a passion towards this or it represents something that they believe in or that they feel and that's where a lot of big sellers are making mistakes, uh you know, you see all these these uh Chinese brands on Amazon, there's strange brand names like ZXTY or whatever. 00:19:26 You can't even pronounce the damn thing. That's not a brand. I mean, they're doing that because it's easy to get a trademark on that. Those things can fly through the trademark process really easy so they can get the brand registry and all that. Those aren't really brand names. So I think you need to switch more toward brand, and you need to switch more towards they need to own their customer lists. On Amazon, you don't get that data anymore. You used to be able to download that data. And so if you're selling FBA on Amazon, you don't get that data. If you're doing FBM, you can still get it. And there used to be a loophole like with TaxYar that I think just recently got shut down. A lot of privacy issues there. 00:20:04 But you need to figure out ways to actually get that data. And whether that's switching over, you know, if you're selling on Shopify or WooCommerce, start using Amazon Prime, the new ship with Prime. Or whatever it's called, Shop with Prime, Ship with Prime, whatever it's called. Shop with Prime, yeah. Yeah, where Amazon will fulfill it for you off your Shopify store. So you get that extra customer service level, plus you get the customer data, plus anything you're selling on Amazon. It's just a huge market. You've got to figure out ways to try to get them into your ecosystem with creative inserts and creative marketing stuff. I mean, like one of the things that we do with one of my brands, for example, I have a pet brand of dog treats. 00:20:42 And whenever someone buys these dog treats, off of amazon you know they spend 30 bucks to buy these dog treats we will have a really cool it's not just like a business card but like something that really gets their attention uh into the in the package and it says hey uh get a sample of all of our treats uh and we'll do a zero plus uh free plus shipping offer so it's like if we have for example if we're selling bully sticks and we also have duck duck feet and we have uh antlers and we have you know it'll be like a little sampler and we just take all the the broken pieces and the leftovers and stuff like that, and we put them in a little bag, a little sample bag, and we say it's free, zero, for free, just pay $7 . 00:21:21 95 shipping. That covers our cost, but it gets that name, a qualified name, onto our list. And we're successful with that. And it also gets some sampling out of their product, so hopefully they try it. Then we'll do stuff where, like, if it's your dog, it's like, instead of registering your warranty like other people do, we say register your dog for free gifts. That's great. They'll give us their dog's name, dog's name is Spot. His birthday is April 11, 2017. What kind of dog is it? We'll just ask some basic questions, and we'll say if you upload a picture of your dog, you get an extra entry into our monthly drawing of free treats for a year or something like that. So we get some user-generated content, or we'll ask for video or whatever. 00:22:07 Maybe they'll be eating our treats that we can use on social media. What we do is about a week before the dog's birthday is we drop a postcard into the mail. And that postcard will be addressed to the parents. And it will say to the parents of Spot, don't forget my birthday is coming up next week on Tuesday. Don't forget, I really would love some of those bully sticks that you bought me before. Here's a coupon for 25% discount. In some cases, we'll do something where if you buy our new treat, we'll give you this one, the one that they really want for free. And that gets them, you know, that surprise and delight. And it gets them, they're like, holy cow, they remember my dog's birthday. So we do things like that. 00:22:50 That's brilliant. Keep, build a list. We do it in a, I have another business, for example. We sell a lot on this business calendars, wall calendars. So it's a seasonal business for us. These are calendars with pictures. You know, there's calendars that are like desk pads and stuff that just, you know, you write your appointments. These are calendars that you hang on the wall with pictures. And what we, every year, the cover, as people know, if you guys are experienced sellers, you might use PickFu or something like that to test covers. The cover is all the difference. If we have the right cover, we'll sell three times as many calendars, even though it's the same title, the same everything, as another year. And so sometimes we mess up. 00:23:32 Calendars are like selling milk because they expire. And so, there's a window of pretty much September to February for us where the vast majority of them sell. And a lot of times after Christmas, you've got to discount them. Uh, to move them out, even though the year is still a full year ahead. It's just the psychology of people like um, because they buy them as gifts, and so that you're discounted and you're trying to get rid of this stuff because a 2021 calendar is pretty much worthless right now. Um, and so you correct sometimes we we mess up and we we print in Asia and in Korea because it's just uh, so much cheaper to do it there, including the shipping and everything. 00:24:08 And so I'll order 20, 000 of this one, and then we end up only selling 16, 000. Or something like that, I'm like, 'What am I gonna do with these four thousand? I can either take them and recycle them and take them to the recycling bin or what if I turn them into a loss leader? So what we do is in every single calendar that goes out we put a 4-by-6 card it says 'Congratulations, you want a free calendar, a free random calendar from our selection. It's going to be something that you like, a topic that you like but you don't get to pick the calendar. But we're going to send it to you for free. 00:24:40 You just paid used to be $5 shipping ahead now I'm $10 because the price has gone up and I used to be able to ship Media Mail, etc. Now I can't ship a media mail so yeah um yeah it's so people will actually either go to our website and enter a code uh because this product doesn't show up on our website without the code, knowing the code, they'll pay ten dollars or they'll send a check and money order through the mail. So every for every calendar I sell on Amazon, we get about 10-15 that actually do this. I get them on my list. And then the next year, I have their name, their email, everything. And I can market directly to them. 00:25:14 And one of the things that we do is we also carry a lot of other calendars in our subject area that are not on Amazon. We import stuff from Germany and from Australia and places. So we extend the brand. We have ours that we produce and print, which are four or five different ones. This year it's four that we print in South Korea. And we do a lot of business on Amazon, and we sell to calendars. com and some of the other places as well. And then we sell direct. I have a mailing list of 16,000 or so. It's going out right now as we speak. 16,450, I think, is what the NCO after we did the national change of address and everything on it. They're going out. 00:25:52 And these flyers go out. And it actually says on the flyer, you can buy our calendars. It says available on Amazon if they want to go there and do Prime and not pay shipping. Or they can buy them directly from us and they pay shipping. We charge $9. 95 shipping for one calendar, $12. 95 for like two, up to $24. 95 shipping on top of the calendar cost. And a lot of people will send checks and money orders into us still in envelopes, and other people will go online and order it on our website. It's not a Shopify site. It's an older school website that we've just been using forever, and it works. No need to change it. Or they'll go to Amazon and buy some of them. 00:26:28 But we have – so every time one of these people does this – congratulations, you won a free calendar because they bought it off Amazon; they get onto that list, and so I'm able to sell them directly or I'm able to remind them the next year. Hey, uh, make sure you go and get on Amazon and one of the things we do is when we launch the calendars is we – just, you know, we're recording this in uh, in October of 2022; in September of 2022, our calendars came in and I was like, I need to launch them on Amazon. I uh, we don't do any PPC, zero, search, find, buy, or anything; what I do is I send out an email to a section of my list and say, hey, these are available on Amazon. 00:27:06 If you've got a Prime account, just go buy them over there and get free shipping. And a certain percentage will go, and it instantly launches the product. And we're launching it. We don't need a lot of sales. We'll do $10,000 in sales in a couple days off of that little promo in September. This is not the buying season. This is way ahead of it. But because we do that, we get into the top 100 of calendars on Amazon instantly because even though we only sold 15 of a title per day or 10 of a title per day, that's enough at that point in time to get into that top list. And you just ride that wave as more and more people are going on as Prime Day, you know, the new Prime Day came along and other things come, you just ride that wave. 00:27:44 And then by December when you're just rocking and rolling and just printing money. And so that's something that big brands need to be thinking about is. You've got a valuable asset there of these people that are buying on Amazon, a super valuable asset. You've got to figure out a way to market to them and to get them to buy again. A lot of people are always worried about that first sale. That's not where the money's at. The money's at the second, third, fourth, fifth sale and reselling it to them. Maybe it's not even your product. Maybe you don't have other products to sell to them. Partner with other people that are complementary to you. Do something with them. 00:28:25 If you're selling dog leashes and dog watering bowls, partner with a company that's doing running equipment and say, 'Hey, ask them to say, go out to their audience or you go to their audience and do cross promotions. Hey, you runners, if you've got a dog, all you runners with a dog, I've got the perfect leash for you. All you runners, all you dog owners that also like to run or walk the trails. Here's the perfect shoes or the perfect thing for the hold your watch or whatever. So many people don't do that. You've got a valuable asset there. It's the most valuable asset you have is that customer list. And so many people don't use it. They don't use it. And they're afraid that I go, I don't want to bother them. 00:29:09 I don't want to spam them. I don't want to go out, but you got to, that's where the money's at. And like this calendar business that we have, it's on autopilot. We've been doing it since 1994. And I have customers since 1994. They haven't died yet. They're still buying every year. And it's on autopilot. I know every year this is what we're going to do. And I don't have to go out and recreate a new list. You know, I got the NCOA at it, which means National Change of Address. So there's companies like Melissa Data that you can send your list to, and they update it. You know, when you go to the post office and you fill out a little form that says I moved, they have all that data. 00:29:46 And so they can say, if Josh, you move from the Dallas area to Atlanta, I'm going to get your new address so that I can send it straight to you. Or I'm going to find out that you died. It actually will tell me that, hey, you know, Josh unfortunately passed away. No need to mail him a flyer. So it takes all those people off. It does all that kind of cleaning, adds a zip plus four and standardizes it and everything. And that way you get the cheap rates. There's huge business in that, whether you're driving them to your own website or you're driving them to Amazon or Walmart or Shopify or whatever it may be. And so many people just don't understand that they're just too focused on this one little Amazon piece. 00:30:24 And there's so much more you can do. No, I completely agree. You've dropped some wicked smart strategies and tactics. I think the examples you shared were fantastic because what you've done, Kevin, is you've taken the idea or the concept that everybody's preached about, right? Hey, just include an insert in your package and, you know, have people register a warranty with you so you can collect their information. But that's not a very compelling offer. What I love is that you've been creative with your ideas to say, hey, what is a creative offer that I can give to people such as like the dog, right? With your dog treats instead of. Saying, register your warranty for 00:31:07 this pet toy why don't you register your dog so that he can claim some free gifts and then you're going to be sending out you know the birthday postcard I mean brilliant strategies and and also great value adds to the customer so that when they receive your product they not only enjoy the existing product you've obviously created a good product but then on top of that you're adding extra value with Hey, here's a free sample pack of other treats. Just pay shipping. And so I love that all the way around. These are brilliant marketing tactics that I think any seven figure or any Amazon seller, regardless of what stage you're at, should be implementing in their business. Kevin, one question I have for you is what type of tools like software tools are you using to implement some of these strategies and tactics? 00:32:00 Well, I mean, I have my own database tool that we've developed, you know, to store all our customers and relationship management type of stuff. It's not like a commercial one out there. We just developed it ourselves over the years in-house to manage that. But then, like, you know, for Amazon, it's the typical tools like Helium 10. I'm in trying Turku's mastermind. He's got some pretty cool little tools. I use a lot of his brand. For brand analytics, we actually developed Steve and I, our own little tool to actually parse that data and really do that. the main tools um you know there's a handful of others but i don't have like a huge tool 00:32:34 suite of like you know 50 different tools there's so many different things out there it's so fragmented now um with stuff um but that's i mean it's just old school you know i still do stuff uh you know i'm still old school my calendar uh my wife's on me all the time i i don't use like apple calendars or google uh calendar i have like a It's like a text document where I just have date by date by date in there. I'm old school in that way. And it just that system works for me. And, yeah, I'm involved in a lot of stuff. But one of the things I like to say is I like I like to work smart, not harder. So I partner with people on certain things. 00:33:09 And so, like on on the teaching stuff with Helium 10, you know, I could go out and do that on my own and probably make make pretty good money. You know, like what Brandon Young and does with seller systems and some of the other people. Yep. But then I would have to be giving affiliate commissions to get people to promote it, probably giving away 50%. I'd have to be hiring a team to manage it and customer service and who's going to be editing it versus if I just partner with TM10, they do all that for me. They have the traffic. They have the eyeballs. They have all that processing and everything. I don't have to worry about anything. Just show up and do my thing and collect a bunch of money. 00:33:44 And so I do a lot of that type of stuff too to work smart. Another thing like we did back on the – I think I didn't mention on those calendars where I was saying that we make $20,000, but we only sold $16,000. What do we do with those other $4,000? That's the ones that we use, that excess stock. Instead of recycling them, I use them in those free random calendars. So I get rid of the product. And basically, they're paying $10 for it. It's free plus shipping. It's $10, but it only cost me $5. 20 to ship it out. The calendar that landed is $1. 60. So I actually technically make money on that too. 00:34:18 And I'm getting rid of excess inventory because it's totally random. Another thing we used to do is we used to sell baseball cards at a company. This was a hot thing back in the 90s and early 2000s. And they had baseball cards that had, like, bikini models on them, like Sports Illustrated and things like that. And these guys would buy them. And what we would do at Christmastime is we would go and we would hire an actor that looked like Santa Claus and have him. We would set up this whole scene of, like, a Christmas scene. And we would have some girl in, like, sexy lingerie or something, you know, come. And sit on his lap and tell him what he wants for Christmas, and it'd be a you know it was clean, it was like Victoria's Secret-ish, sure, sure, well this is not porn or something like that, but but it was clean. 00:34:59 Then we would print those and we would if we had 4, 000 customers I think at the time on our list that were regular buyers, we would number those one of four thousand, hand-number them two or four thousand three or four thousand mount them on another card, send them in a really nice envelope like a Christmas you know, like you get a Christmas card and and send that out to them, uh totally unexpected. And they would get this and they would just freak because this is something that nobody else could get, it was totally for free, they're collectors of this of These little baseball cards, so it's like this is like the perfect thing in their collection. I've seen some of those going on eBay for like 400 recently, wow! 00:35:34 Um, from like 20 years ago, but so those kind of things where you go and you surprise them. I always remember I used to order when we were doing a lot of TV stuff, we would order uh beta tapes, this is back before everything was digital and you had to get those big tapes, you know, you know that you stick in the video camera, yeah! And we would order those from a company in Philadelphia, and they would always inside the package, they would throw two of those little uh small packages of m &ms you know like you get it the halloween size camera uh yeah and just be two of those on top with the with the printed invoice or the packing slip and i always remember if i didn't get those two i would be like, what the hell? 00:36:13 Where are my M &Ms? This is something simple. This is like a $0 . 25 thing. And I would order from them sometimes just because I knew, hey, when it shows up, I get a little M &M snack. It's the silliest thing, but it's brilliant marketing that they do. And so if you can do that in your product, surprise and delight, include something in your package that is not on their listing, that's not advertised anywhere, that has some sort of – it's a small token, but it has some sort of perceived value or reward to the customer. You surprise how many raving fans and how many loyal people you can build off of just just surprising and delighting when they're not expecting it yeah I love that Kevin and I'm also curious when you've built a brand and as you collect emails have you ever faced any challenges in terms of not getting the type of engagement you would like or quite the opposite. 00:37:06 Have you always, you know, had success like you collect their emails and then you're just printing money whenever you send out an email? Have you had the opposite, where it's like, for whatever reason, like this audience, I send stuff out and it's just crickets? It depends on what you're sending. As long as you're sending, I mean, it's all in the message. I mean, the list is the most important part. And then it's the message that you send to that list. So, yeah, there's times where, you know, we have to test different subject lines or we get on the RBLs, real-time blacklist, because we're sending so many emails. That some of them end up going into spam, or if you get a couple people that mark this as spam, you know they report that back and so you can have deliverability issues. 00:37:43 So, there is a battle sometimes there uh with that, I mean I even have it with like the billion-dollar seller summit, you know I people get the replays or the PDFs and I'll send out, you know 200 uh or something emails, or something, and two weeks later I'll have like 10 people say 'Hey, I never uh, I never got the The replays,' when are you going to send those out? I was like, those went out two weeks ago. I didn't get it. I was like, well, can you check your spam? You know, you're using Gmail or something. Check your spam. Oh, there it is. And so, yeah, you have, there are challenges on that. That's a constant battle of staying whitelisted and fighting that. That can really mess you up. 00:38:23 And it's also, you know, people don't want to bug people too much, but you've got to. Stay top of mind – I don’t know how many times you’ve probably gotten an email from somebody, like oh man these guys are emailing me like every three days and some of them you just get frustrated, you unsubscribe but other ones that seventh email you’re like okay what the heck is this, you know you’re sitting right waiting for the Uber uh and you’re like um let me actually check and see what the hell these guys keep sending and then maybe you buy uh so you gotta balance that as well, the pissing people off versus the uh uh you know trying to get them to converge into the end. 00:39:00 Do you have, do you have a recommendation with like how many times that you found based on your experience? Like is it three, four times a week that you’re reaching out to your audience or is it daily? I wouldn’t, well, I used to do the daily one. Remember we used to do the daily one. This is, but this is before spam existed. And so we would, we were sending out 250,000 a day and they weren’t going into spam or RBLs. This was amazing. Yeah. I couldn’t do that today. Even with full permission, based that we would have some sort of issues probably. Um, but yeah, daily was, would be ideal, but, um, and, and I get some daily newsletters, you know, that marketing newsletters and stuff like that, that, that I keep up with, um, daily would be ideal, but you gotta deliver value. 00:39:44 It can't be a promotion every day. You know, I get, sometimes you sign up for these, you know, you go to Macy's . com and then every day you're getting some promotion after that, that you got to deliver value. And then it's like, uh, Gary Vaynerchuk says, uh, uh what's it punch, punch, punch, right hook or whatever it is um right and you that's what you you got to deliver value and that's what we were doing when we were doing those 250, 000 a day as we were delivering value it was news, it was games and then there would be like one line in there that's like oh by the way we have uh this calendar for sale or go join this website or whatever and it works you know we that's where you gotta if you're doing daily but if you're not Twice a week, if you're doing promotional, straight up promotional stuff would be probably the most I would do. 00:40:28 Good. That's good input. And I think another takeaway from what you just talked about is that you got to be willing to test, right? Test different offers. I think now you've been able to kind of refine what your offerings are. But I imagine along the way, you probably tested multiple offers of like what free insert or what free product is going to get the best take rate, right? Or what is going to lead people to actually follow through in the best way. Is that correct? Yes, and that depends on whether it's a cold audience or a warm audience. Like with our calendars, I don't need to make a nice HTML email when I go out to my list, to my calendars and say, hey, they're available on Amazon right now. 00:41:09 I don't need to make a nice HTML with covers of the calendars and have all this fancy looking email with all this explanation. I can do a three-line email. This is because it's a brand, and I can make sure the email is coming from the brand name so they instantly recognize it. And the email is literally three lines of text. Hey, the 2023 calendars are available. If you're an Amazon Prime member, get them with free shipping on Amazon. Click here. That's it, and it works. I don't need to spend a lot of time developing fancy emails or hiring copywriters or anything because they know that's a brand. That's what I was talking about earlier. They know this brand. They know it. Let Amazon, the listing, do the selling. 00:41:50 I don't need to do it in an email versus other times if I'm doing cold listing or prospecting or I'm starting a brand new billion-dollar seller summit, for example, is a good example. When was the first one that you came to? First one I came to was the Virtual Summit in 2020. Okay, 2021. Okay so you 2021 yeah so yeah signed up in 2020 but I think that first one was like what February 2021 right yeah exactly okay so I started that in 2019 uh and the first one in Austin and I had a little bit of a name you know because I've been speaking and stuff so people knew who uh who I was but I was like how how can I get people to come to this event I want high-level people I don't want new people So I got to charge a premium amount and we're going to do some cool stuff, you know, VIP parties. 00:42:46 And we're going to, you know, it costs me several thousand dollars per person out of my pocket for the billion-dollar. So it's not people's look at it like, oh, it's $6,000 ticket. You must just be like cashing in. Yeah, I make a profit, but there's some serious expenses to doing that. You know, a Coke, a Coca-Cola in the break during a break, $7 a can for a 12-ounce can of Coke that the hotel is charging us. You know, it's $30,000. to have the ballroom. You know, it's $10,000 if you want internet in the room so people can get on there. There's some serious expenses that are involved there. But I was like, I want to do this right, and I want an audience that's high level, so I need to charge an amount that they can afford, that the average new person, it's just way too much money because I don't want the new people there. 00:43:31 I want to create this audience. And so how can I get people to come? You know, there's so many other events out there. What can I do? I decided, you know what? I'm actually not going to make a fancy website. I'm going to leverage off of my name. I'm going to literally make a signup page. It looks like a 1990s HTML page. It's like, which I remember when I saw that the first time I was like, what is this? I have not seen anything like felt like so retro. And I was like, is this going to be legit? Like I had, I had questions, Kevin. I was, I was quite concerned about your aptitude for being able to create websites, but keep going. But, no, I do that myself. 00:44:10 I mean, that one, I actually just go in there and code it. And I was like, I'm going to try to do this differently. And Danny McMillan at Seller Sessions has done like a whole podcast on how it's the branding of it. So it's like I'm going to do a deliberate website, and I'm going to say on the website, look, this is on purpose. We've spent the money on the event. We don't spend it on fancy websites that make it look like it's cool. If you don't know who I am or don't want to come, don't come. It actually weeds out. It's a weeding mechanism. Do I hurt myself a little bit on some sales? Probably. But it also does what you said is like, hey, earlier when we were talking, like everybody in that room was cool. 00:44:43 You know, that was a great audience, a great everything. It creates that. And so on that event, what I actually, the first one, you couldn't even sign up on the website. You had to download a PDF, really? Download a PDF, handwriting it if you want to type it. But most people handwrote it and take a picture of it and send it back with your credit card information. And one of the reasons I did that was because I was afraid my credit card merchant process was going to freak out because I've been running $20, $50, $100 calendar orders through this thing for years. And all of a sudden, I started doing $6,000 orders. And are they going to freak out and put a hold on the money or something or whatever? 00:45:21 So I want some sort of proof of signature and everything just to have that. That's one reason. Plus, it was a qualifier. And it's a hassle. And people are like, 'Ah, screw this.' But then once they did that, what I did is to reassure them is I sent them a gift package. So everybody on the first one got a, like a, I spent about $150 on this, each person. And they got a gift package from Texas. It was like Texas barbecue, some sausage. It was like a nice little box with like some hay and stuff around it. Like we custom made it. It wasn't like something we bought off a promotion site. We custom made this thing with stuff from Austin and sent that out to everybody. 00:45:58 And then that created a viral effect where people started getting, holy shit, okay, this actually looks pretty cool. And they were taking pictures of it and other people were seeing it. And that created a little bit, okay, Kevin's thing must be legit. You know, Isabella Hamilton's going and she's got this picture and this other person did it. And then I actually invited about seven or eight people to that event for free. So you don't have to pay, but these are like people that have a strong social presence and social. You guys can come just fly yourself there and pay for your hotel, but you don't got to pay. And then that created getting it going as well. And then just like this last one that we just did, which I think was probably the best one yet. 00:46:41 And the buzz from everybody still says is the best one yet, from the content to the fun. And we did a contest. I mean, a scavenger hunt thing, like Amazing Race Scouting, where everybody got broken up into teams of four and it was for networking and fun stuff. You got to see a part of the city that most people never saw. And part of that was posting pictures online to get extra points. There were more than 3,000 pictures that were posted online. Some people deleted them afterwards, but there were like over 3,000 pictures deleted online. I still have over 200 photos on my phone from that event that I haven't deleted because I was the one who happened to take the pictures and upload them and it's still on my to-do list, I'm like, 'I keep going back and I just laugh because I've got pictures of like Tim Jordan on there and we're just... 00:47:32 I'm wearing the dress, Tim Jordan's wearing a hat, like it is, it's just classic, like hilarious stuff, so like, I haven't deleted them even though it's like just 200 pictures of complete randomness but It created that experience. So keep going. That's marketing. And that's all part of having fun, but it also is marketing at the same time. And people like Gracie, I remember she was there. She's a big social media person. She's like, 'I see exactly what you're doing here.' I don't know if I want to post because I charge money for this kind of stuff. But she did. So that's where a lot of these brands, you were asking earlier, what can these Amazon sellers and what can they do? You've got to be thinking outside the box, thinking about creating these experiences. 00:48:16 Brands in the past, a lot of times have been a passive thing. It's a name, and it's like, 'You're buying the brand.' But try to make it more active. You can own a Louis Vuitton purse, and that's a status symbol for a woman. And, yes, it's usually a better quality, but it's also a status symbol. It makes them feel like they've made it or they've belonged or they're special or whatever. But if you can take that and make it active. You know, where it's Louis Vuitton events or or anybody that has a Louis Vuitton purse is actually can come to this special social event. Only if you have a Louis Vuitton purse or whatever, make it more active. And like we were just talking about with the branding of billion dollar sauce and making it more active, not just pass. 00:48:56 And I just go and listen to some presentations and have a VIP dinner like everybody else does, but actually make it active. And that's where, if you can do that in your your current products and evolve towards that, then you can have a much more active community, much more success, much more engagement, and it just goes, it'll spread. The word will spread out there about what you're doing, and more people will want to get involved. And we're doing that now. I know we don't have time to talk about it here, but with NFTs. And a lot of people are like, oh, NFT is a bunch of JPEGs and monkeys and stupid, that sounds stupid. But no, the technology behind it, if you understand it, is amazing what you can do. 00:49:33 And you can qualify people, get them into your community. Use those communities to build things and to reward people and to do all kinds of cool stuff. I did a presentation at Sale and Scale and Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And there's one out there right now, if you want to see about that, Orange Click. Augustus Lugis has a YouTube channel, and I just recorded that for him on YouTube. But talking about how we're using NFTs in one of my businesses to actually build an entire brand and this whole experience, this active to passive and this whole rewarding and stuff all around that. And physical products to using it to launch and build community and all kinds of cool stuff and there's a lot of opportunity out there uh and a lot of things that people just need to think differently you know it's the old apple slogan, 'think differently', yeah, you can, there's lots of things you can do, yeah, Kevin, you've dropped some amazing knowledge bombs with all of our listeners here today. 00:50:29 I myself have already been taking down notes throughout this entire episode. And so I appreciate all of those insights to kind of sum things up for our audience. What I would say are some three actionable takeaways would be, number one, you've got to build a real brand on Amazon. Long gone are the days of just creating Me Too products or just white labeling products. It's not build a real brand on Amazon. It's build a real brand. And then Amazon is one of the. Platform the marketplaces of choice where they buy it, so it's not just on Amazon, but your Amazon has to become a marketplace of choice for people. But it needs to be a real brand independent of Amazon as well, yeah. Thank you for correcting me because that is an important mindset shift, right? 00:51:14 Creating a real brand that is not just 'I'm just making money on Amazon' -it's 'I'm creating a real brand and Amazon is one of my distribution channels It may be your biggest and your most, and that's okay, but it needs to be able to stand alone as well. Yep, yep, very good. Action item number two would be creating your own email list, creating your own audience, right? So testing out different insert cards, testing out different offers that you can include with your product so that you obtain customers' contact info. And then number three is actually utilizing that audience to further your brand, not just sending them promotional material to just elevate your sales, but providing them actionable and content that can serve that customer. 00:52:05 And as you do that, like Kevin has mentioned so much on this podcast, creating experiences, right? How can you create an experience with your customers as you reach out to your audience? Then as you create those experiences, they will more readily receive. those future opportunities where you're promoting a new product that you're trying to launch. So I think our audience has a lot that they can digest through this episode. But Kevin, one of the final questions I want to ask you is the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, one of the best conferences that I've ever been to in regards to Amazon content and the type of people that are attending that event. So kudos to you there. But I want to hear, who would you say are your top three kind of speakers or attendees that have ever been to your billion-dollar seller summit? 00:52:53 Who are those people that, you know, people should be paying attention to? And maybe I'm putting you on the spot, but I know you give away like best speaker awards as well. So you could also, you know, push it back onto who are some of those people as well. Well, I know I think in the Amazon space, I think someone that does a really good job is Brandon Young. I know, you know, he's a guest or maybe a guest or has been a guest on your, on your show. Uh, but I think that's someone who does a really good job with his tools that, uh, that, that, uh, people should be paying attention to. So he's been to the billion-dollar seller summit. So, um, that would be one of them. 00:53:31 Um, you know, Casey Goss has kind of disappeared a little bit, but he's a super smart guy. You know, he'd started Viral Launch and then he went to Thrasio and now he's doing, was doing some stuff or is, I'm not sure completely Carbon Six. And, uh, and then he's kind of migrating over to some AI and just dabbling around. But that's a super smart guy that if you're able to ever hear him speak. I remember when he first spoke at one of our events in Mexico in 2017. He wasn't very good. It was one of his first times on stage, and he was kind of scatterbrained. But you could just tell this guy is brilliant. There's a super smart mind inside there. 00:54:05 And he was just a little scattered, but he got better as he presented more and did more things. But that's someone that if you get a chance, he's won a couple times at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit's best speaker, and that's someone that's been there that's good. A third one, man, who would be the third one that really would stand out that you should follow? This is a guy, Josh Hadley, that won the best hat contest. If he has a podcast or something like that, I'd be making sure I listen to that because it's probably going to be some amazing value that comes out of that, and I'm sure if you need some help growing your business from seven to eight figures, this is a guy that probably has a clue and actually knows how to get you there pretty quickly and do a good job. 00:54:52 So maybe someone like this guy, Josh Hadley, if you've never heard of him. All right, Kevin, your check's in the mail. I love it. Kevin, this has been such an amazing episode. I really appreciate the insights that you shared with our audience. And if people want to contact you or continue to follow you, where's the best place for people to go? I know you've got a lot going on, but where would you like to direct people? Yeah, if you just probably follow me on Facebook or something, that'd probably be the best place. I'm not really, I have an Instagram account. I have a LinkedIn account. I think I haven't checked my LinkedIn in like a year. So I'm not really active on those, but Facebook would probably be the best place just to hit a follow there or reach out to me on Messenger or something if you want to reach out. Awesome. All right, Kevin, thanks again for joining the show. No problem. Glad to be here, man, anytime. Thank you for listening. Visit ecombreakthrough. com for more information. If you've enjoyed today's episode, the best way you can show your appreciation is by clicking the subscribe button and quickly leaving a review. See you again next time.