The Current Strategies of 8 & 9 Figure Amazon Sellers w/ Kevin King

The Current Strategies of 8 & 9 Figure Amazon Sellers w/ Kevin King We are in for a very special episode this week in the Brand Builder Show because I am joined by the one, the only, the very, very legendary Kevin King. That's right, Kevin King, one of the best-known names in the Amazon FBA space is coming on today and sharing some absolute gold. I love this conversation. It was like I got some time to really ask questions of an absolute legend in the space; we talked about whether Amazon is even worth it for beginners in 2022 anymore, we talked about where the industry is going, Amazon aggregators, what six-figure sellers should be doing to scale to seven figures, what seven-figure sellers should be doing to exit their business, and kind of everything in between. 00:00:42 We talked about how Kevin's launching products right now; we talked about licensing deals with Disney, like we talked about so much. This episode is an action-packed one, and I know you're going to get a lot out of it. So, without further ado, let's get right into this episode with Kevin King. Awesome. Well, it is great to have Kevin King on the Brand Builder Show today. Kevin, welcome to the show. Thanks. Glad to be here, Ben. I'm glad you're here too. It feels like a bit of an honor for me; this is like my celebrity moment. You are like one of the OGs of the Amazon space, and I was thinking about before we got on, when was the first time I kind of heard about you? 00:01:20 And it was back in the day where you used to do the podcast with Manny on, I forget what it was even called back then. Was it AMPM back then? Yeah, I think it was AMPM podcast, yeah. Yeah, it would have been like late 2017, I think. So it's going back a while and you just kind of blew my mind on those podcasts and you quickly became this kind of massive name in the Amazon space. So yeah, it's an honor to have you on today. I appreciate it. Glad to be here, man. Um, I've got lots of questions for you today and I'm going to kind of treat this like a little bit of 00:01:50 a private consultation session and just ask you questions I want to know and hopefully the audience is going to get some some value out of that but I think one of the big questions everyone is asking is where is Manny Coates, I mean he's just built Helium 10 sold it and sailed off into the sunset hasn't he, he's done the entrepreneurial thing. Yeah, he and Guillermo started that in 2016. He actually started selling in late 2015. He started the podcast, AMPM podcast. I think I went on that around March of 2016, I think was the first time I went on that podcast. And that was just by accident. He was doing the podcast, and I had stumbled upon him and was listening to him and joined his Facebook group. 00:02:29 And there were some people posting in the Facebook group, and I think they were posting some wrong information. There's a lot of misinformation in Facebook. And so I kind of jumped on some people and said, 'Hey, quit the BS. You know, this is not how it works. This is how it works. Quit misleading people.' And Manny liked what I said, invited me on the podcast, and I was like, 'No, no, I'm just a seller. I don't have any interest in going on a podcast or anything.' He's like, 'No, just come on.' And so I went on, and I think March of 2016 was the first one, and it was a really poor audio connection. 00:02:59 It sounded like I was in a tin can, but evidently it resonated pretty well with people listening to it because I just, I just kind of said it like it is. And a lot of people weren't doing that. But Manny, he and Guillermo built that up. And in September of 2019, they actually sold to a company called Assembly. And they retained a small little ownership part and stayed on for six months or so just to kind of help in the transition. And around the time that COVID started, he was pretty much done. And so he lives here in Austin, same place that I live. They moved from California to Texas for tax reasons right before they sold. 00:03:36 And so he's got building a nice little house and playing around in crypto, and making a lot of money in crypto, and some NFTs, and just enjoying life, buying race cars and whatever. He did very well for himself. And I think he's going to get a. Both those guys are going to get another payday as assembly is; they've acquired some other companies besides just Helium 10, Pack View, and a couple PPC companies, and valuation I think it's about a billion dollars now for the holding company that owns Helium 10, and they just exploded. But it's a whole different world now. I mean, I knew them when it was just they were working from their apartments, you know. 00:04:17 Manny started Scribbles and Frankenstein, and used to just have a baby, and I would get on some calls with them, and we were testing some different stuff. I wasn't, I wasn't part of the company, but I was just, I became friends. And so they would call me, 'Hey, can you test this? Can you, what do you think about this?' And, um, it's gone from those two guys to now 200 and something employees over there. Uh, it's, you know, they're doing a huge event in Vegas in September, um, with some, they're going to announce that soon. Some pretty big speakers. It's a couple million-dollar event that they're putting on, uh, in Vegas. Uh, so, uh, you know, it's just, it's a whole different world now. Yeah. It's an incredible success story. 00:04:56 And, you know, what he did was incredible. And he deserves every bit of the life he now lives because it's, you know, an amazing tool, amazing company. And like you say, it's grown massively. I tweeted the other day about how, because they put out an article about how they've had 700,000 users of the Chrome extension. I was trying to do some of the math on it and, you know, backward calculate how many members they may have because of that. And I thought, you know, surely it's got to be a billion-dollar company. So, you know, with all the roll-ups going on, it's a pretty incredible space. Yeah, I mean, Helium 10 itself is not doing a billion dollars. The Assembly, which is the name of the company that bought them, but Helium 10 does well. 00:05:34 I mean, I do the Freedom Ticket course for them, which is free to anybody that has a Helium 10 membership, and I see how many people come through that, and it's crazy, and you have to have a paid membership to actually get into that. So yeah, their reach is, you know, it's not 700,000 paying members. It's significantly lower than that, but it's a healthy number and it's a very good. Very good business, yeah, absolutely, absolutely! But, uh, digress, we're here to talk about Amazon selling on Amazon and and you and your input into that so, but you know a fascinating story and I think it does play into you know what we'll talk about because the industry in itself is just growing massively there's crazy stuff going on and so yeah we're definitely going to get your insight into some of that. 00:06:18 But I'd love to kind of take you on a little bit of a journey like I said, you know, some of the advanced stuff I'd love to hear more about but you know, that beginner, you know, starting and then scaling and then exiting, you know, a few questions really at each stage of that journey because you've gone that whole process, you've seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and I'd love for you to be able to share with the audience, you know, how you feel the market of selling on Amazon is right now. You know, for beginners right now, do you think selling on Amazon is still a good business model for a new entrepreneur, first business? How do you feel about it? Yeah, I do think it hasn't jumped the shark yet. 00:06:53 It's still a very good business. Is it easy like it was a few years ago? No, not at all. It's a whole different game now, and it's becoming more difficult, and you're going to need bigger skill sets, and you're going to need more money. That's not to say that if you're someone in Pakistan with $500, you can't change your life. It just depends on what you're trying to do. Someone in Pakistan just go and start an Amazon business with $500,000 and sell. A thousand dollars worth of stuff a month with a two or three hundred dollar profit, or and grow that to maybe a five thousand dollars a month business, uh, with a thousand or two thousand dollars a month profit that can change their life for them. 00:07:32 You know the average wage is five six hundred bucks, whatever that's that can definitely help them. But for someone like me and you, uh, you in the UK and I mean us, a thousand dollars a month is is not even gonna pay our rent probably, uh, so it's all the perspective of what you have to look at. So for people like ourselves, you have to play at a little bit different level. And the opportunity is still there. Amazon is still growing, but it is becoming more of a pay-to-play marketplace. The old way of just finding something on Alibaba and putting your logo on it and sticking it up on there is going to be quite difficult unless it's super niche down. It is leading more towards branding now and more towards establishing a true brand. 00:08:15 Amazon is closing a lot of loopholes that you could use to rank. It's more of a long-term play. In the past, people would launch a product and expect to be on page one by using search, find, buy, or by using blast services or giveaways within a matter of weeks. And now that's difficult to do unless you have your own list or own customer base. For a new person, it's more of a long-term play. It's not something you're going to be able to quit your job and start doing this full-time probably for a year or two, unless you come into this with a lot of money and have a cushion. The opportunities are still there. I see them every day. I do it with product savants, one of the companies I'm involved with. 00:08:54 We find products for some of the aggregators and stuff. It's there, but it's definitely more of a business rather than a business. Yes, a get-rich-quick type of thing that some people may have perceived it to be in the past. And there's still a lot of people peddling on Facebook and stuff that, hey, this is easy. It's easy to pick products; we can pick them for you, come for you services. There's so much. There's a lot of scams. There's a lot of misinformation out there that leads people astray. And most as a result, a lot of people aren't successful. But, yeah, the opportunity is still good. Yeah. And in an attempt to kind of shut out some of that noise, what would you say are the two, three key things that a new seller should focus on in this new market to succeed? 00:09:45 Well, you've got to know your numbers. A lot of people don't know their numbers. I don't know how many new sellers get in. Do they find a product using Helium 10 or one of the other tools? And they're going to sell it for $19. 95. And they're sourcing, they find a factory that It's $6 or something like that to get it. And they're like, look, I've got a $12, $13 profit margin here. But they forget to factor in all the fees, all the storage fees, all the fulfillment fees, all the shipping fees, all the delays, all the PPC costs. PPC costs are rising. All those things, at the end of the day, they have no margin. 00:10:22 And then a lot of other sellers come in, including some factories in some cases, that they have an extra margin to play with. How margin are they selling it to you with? They can absorb that and and it becomes a race to the bottom and. And they get priced out or they're generating cash flow, but they're not generating profits. And so that happens a lot. So knowing your numbers is would be key product selection is number is is huge. I mean, that's where the 1 thing I would never job out. As an Amazon seller, I mean that's the thing that you need to master and you need to be very, very good at and 00:10:56 you know people always say oh i'm hiring a VA to help me with product selection i'm like maybe hire a VA to help you give you some ideas you know they can go weed through some stuff and say hey what about this but you need to make that final decision based on knowledge and criteria because there's nothing more important than product selection and knowing how to do that is critical, knowing how you know how good are your competitors? Can you compete with them? Do you have the budget? There's a lot of good opportunities that you may find in doing research, but you can't compete. There's no way. You don't have the budget to compete with them. So you have to find things that fit your budget. 00:11:31 And a lot of people, if they start with $5,000, they go out and they spend $4,000 on their first product from the factory and get it shipped over and they have $1,000 left. And they fail because even if they succeed, in selling that they picked a good product and start selling 20 30 units a day because they don't have they don't have any money to actually place an order for the second one the second order because they haven't been paid for the first one yet so it becomes this vicious cycle where you run out of stock and you're constantly trying to relaunch and it people just don't do the math and they don't they don't understand to how to do that and that's that's a major mistake so product selection the financial side and then knowing how to actually truly differentiate 00:12:16 uh it is in differentiation it's not just throw a pdf with it or uh give a warranty but truly knowing how to differentiate and i think you guys start having to do more and more of that excuse me i'm gonna start having to do more and more of that On Amazon, to really have a chance of succeeding and you don't always have to be the lowest price, uh and um, there is a place everybody has this this notion that Amazon is all about price, and price is extremely important for some categories and some products, but there are people that will pay a premium on Amazon if you can justify it. And you have to justify that with the differentiation of the product, the marketing of the product, the imagery, the video, the copy. 00:13:02 You can have a place where you can succeed by selling less, but make more money. A product that I used to sell, just as an example of that, is bully sticks. Bully sticks are treats for dogs. And these bully sticks are actually, they're the penis of a cow. That's what they are. Seriously. And they, you know, when they butcher a cow, they want to make sure they use every piece of the cow. Well, dogs love these things and chew on them, like bones or whatever. And so there's six-inch ones and there's 12-inch ones. Well, a few years ago on Amazon, these things were selling, they still sell like crazy, but they were, this is like 2016, 2017, they're selling like crazy. 00:13:42 And so I stumbled across this in my research tools and everybody's selling these things in a plastic bag, like a poly bag, putting 30 sticks to the bag and putting a label on the outside of the bag and selling them for $30, $30, $35. And I started looking through the reviews and I see that people are complaining, saying, 'hey, these things stink.' When my dog chews it, the house smells like pee. You know, of course, it's the penis of a cow. And so some companies are like, 'They're not cleaning it properly or treating it properly.' And other people are saying, 'it's staining my couch.' You know, the dog jumps up on the couch and chews on this and it stains it. 00:14:17 And so I was like, 'I've got to find a solution to this.' So I started calling around. And people were also saying, 'Where is this meat from? Is it from China?' Is it, you know, people don't trust, in the U. S., at least, they didn't trust meat from certain countries. So they didn't want to know what their dog was chewing. So I went and found a guy in the U. S., in New England, in the U . S., that was a classically trained French chef. He had this 15-step process that he, natural organic process that he did to create his bully sticks. They were bigger than the competition. They were like big and thick, and they didn't stink, and they didn't make a stain, but they were expensive. 00:14:52 And so I was like, 'How much are these?' He said, 'Well, you know, I forget exactly what the cost was, but the whole sale for three sticks was like 12 bucks or something like that.' I'm like, well these other guys are selling 30 sticks for 30 dollars and there's no way i can compete on this but i started looking at it like yes there is so i actually what i did is i took his three sticks uh 12 inch sticks i put them in a cigar i created a cigar box like a really nice cigar box with a cool little label on the outside that has some texture on it and felt very fancy you know the louis vuitton kind of feel or whatever and put these three sticks in that box with the label on it 00:15:29 did some really good marketing on my imagery and showing the difference between like hey these other sticks they're sold on amazon these are made by machine they stink it's like going to mcdonald's and getting a fast food burger but you know your pet is special to you treat them like royalty give them these other ones like take them to a steakhouse take them to the nicest steakhouse in town so i would show cartoons where there's a bunch of dogs in a car driving through a fast food restaurant drive-thru getting some like mcdonald's type of uh bully sticks that's the competition and then mine were like driving uh they were in a steakhouse sitting around a nice table with a little waiter with a bow tie with the the the sticks on a tray and that painted a picture in the customer's mind that these are they didn't know who the hell i was but it gave them that image instant instant credibility and then i showed 00:16:17 these come off a machine ours are a hand cut there's a knife you see a hand and it's cutting the knife and and i sold my three sticks for 54 . 95 remember everybody else is selling 30 sticks for 30 bucks wow and i sold them for 54 . 95 and I did well; we sold a lot. Now, could I rank for the keyword 'bully sticks'? No, because the keyword 'bully sticks' was a like 40-50 at the time (40,000 to 50, 000 searches a month). I'm sure it's a lot more now, I haven't looked. With 40-50, 000 searches a month, And to try to rank on page one for that, I was, there's no way. Everybody going to 'bully sticks', all the listings were $30, thirty sticks. 00:16:55 And here's my $54 one for three sticks. People think I'm out of my mind. They think I'm ripping them off. And so, you know, I would get sometimes comments when I would get on page one briefly, you know, I'd get a bad comment or something. What the hell kind of rip-off is this? But then other people would buy them because I would get ranked for like 'bully sticks', no odor. 'Bully sticks' made in the USA. Bully sticks, thick hand cut or whatever. There's all these other longer tail keywords that I could rank on, and I sold a lot. And so I didn't sell as many as the guys that were selling 36 for $30. They're selling 100, 200 units a day on page one. 00:17:33 Here's me selling 20 or 30, but I'm making more money than them. They're making $1 or something or $2 on every one they sell. Some margins are so competitive, they're so low, and I'm making $5, $10 on every one I sell. And I did well enough that the biggest company in the U. S., Best Bully Sticks, reached out to me and said, 'Hey, what the hell are you doing, man?' How in the world are you selling three sticks for $50-something dollars? We've got to talk to you. So I ended up making a partnership with them and actually took some of their other treats. They had duck treats and they had antlers and some other stuff. And so we ended up with a partnership doing some other stuff. 00:18:07 So the point of that whole story is, you can differentiate. You've got to think about it, give the customer what they want. And I had a guy; bought from me, I don't know, 30, 40 times. Every couple weeks he'd buy another box for his dog. So there's people that treat their dogs like kids. So if you understand that, and that's what you're asking about the new sellers, you've got to understand that. It's not just find something and stick a label on it. Understand the psychology. Why do people buy what they buy? What is the intent on what they're looking for? And then where is the opportunity? And it's not always on those big, fancy, glamorous keywords. Sometimes it's down in the weeds. Yep. 00:18:44 where do you find the line though with at the moment obviously the old thing used to be high demand low competition find something with the first page doesn't have you know the average review count is under 100 or something like that you know those are getting harder and harder to find because reviews are growing on the platform where do you find the line do you not even look at competition anymore and just focus on differentiation or is competition still part of the the fact that competition is still part of it i mean when i'm looking at a keyword like the bully stick example if everybody on page one for bully sticks is selling for 00:19:18 30 bucks 30 30 35 and my product i'm going to need to sell for 70 there's probably a next to zero percent chance that i can compete on page one for that and you know if you're not on page one you basically don't exist so i have to look and see are there other keywords are there bully sticks made in the USA where the price range is different. The best thing I like is when I see prices all over the place on page one, on a keyword that tells me I can go; I can compete on the low end, I can compete on the high end, I can compete in the middle-that's number one! I do look at reviews, so if, you know, the hundred thing throw that out the window, it's actually impossible unless it's a brand new thing that or something that just doesn't sell much. 00:19:57 Uh, but You know, I don't like to see a lot over a thousand. I don't like to see more than like four or five on page one over a thousand. You know, you have to keep in mind reviews now, it's a little bit different. It's easier to get reviews now because it's reviews and ratings. In the old days, you actually had to write some sentences to actually show up as a review, raise that counter on the reviews. Now you could just click a box and give it a score. And so the numbers are a little bit different than what they would have been in the past. You know, a thousand reviews in the past was a lot. 00:20:28 And that might be the equivalent to um, you know, two or three thousand now because of the way the system works, but it still matters and so, I do look at that, so if it's I look at the age, I also look at how good they are at Amazon. There's a tool from Brandon Young called Data Dive which is a really good tool that overlays Helium 10, and it takes a look at how How good are the other sellers on Amazon? And that's critical because if they suck and they're missing a lot of the opportunity, you can come in and steal some of that. So it's knowing how to, like I said, go deep into the weeds and find those opportunities. So that's critical right now for what I'm evaluating products. 00:21:08 Also, the margins I look at, you know, I want to make sure I build in a cost, the average cost to sell at least 10%. Across the board, that's that's tacos. Sorry, not a cost; yeah, a cost might be 20, $30, or $40, but the tacos, which is the total cost of advertising, I sign it to every single sale, whether it's organic or not, is at least $10. So I build that in, and then I like the margins: do I have room to play here? Can I source it at a good price? Is there any kind of uh diff any kind of moat around this product? Is it just a commodity-you know, is it something that everybody can do and there's no real barrier to entry or is it something that's really heavy and really bulky, and most people just don't want to mess with it because they watch videos like you just said; it says find something light and small, it fits in a shoe box, and blah blah blah. 00:21:55 So I look at those; I don't look at how Much does it sell? I look at how much can it make, so sometimes something there's there's items that might sell 50 a month but you can make 300 profit on every one because you're selling for 699 uh and there's hardly any competition in it so those can sometimes be big, bulky things that can be really profitable and you're not selling some a don't have as high as an MLQ. So, it it depends there, but I don't like to compete if there's a lot. Also, another thing I look at is whether there are there a lot of sellers from Asia, especially China. If there's a lot, and it's predominantly sellers from Asia, then There's tools that will show you that 60-70 percent or more from Asia. 00:22:38 I don't, I don't usually touch that because those guys oftentimes are factories. They have a competitive advantage because they speak the language. They're willing to work on smaller margins. Some of them are doing black hat type of stuff. So I stay away from those if it's dominated by them. And once I start sourcing, I find a good product and I start calling the factories. One of the first questions I ask is, do you sell on Amazon yourself? And the factory says, oh yeah, we sell on Amazon. These four products right here are ours. I look at them as some of the best sellers on Amazon. I was like, nope, I'm not going into that category. There's a lot of things. 00:23:12 I find a lot of interesting products that I end up scrapping for one of these reasons that it just doesn't make sense. But then I'll do other things where there's big opportunities on licensing right now. For example, one of my companies, I have several different Amazon companies, and one of them that we just formed two years ago, and it's just now getting going. We kind of had a delay with COVID. We have a licensing deal. We do dog products, but we have a licensing deal with Body Glove. The big surfing company, yeah, and so we went to them and we said, 'Hey, we want to do dog life jackets and a whole bunch of other products uh with your logo on it.' And so we've gone to them and they said, 'Sure.' So we just we had some delays and we're just now getting the first one launched and we haven't actually done the full launch on it yet. 00:23:59 It just came in in the stock, but we're able to differentiate with that and people that are looking for that brand or they trust that brand already will buy our product in a market that's a little bit saturated, and plus they'll help us launch it because they have athletes that have Instagram followings-some a million, two million people. Uh, once you know, it's a little bit early. Right now, it’s just the start of March, but here about another month, we’ll start doing promotions with the social media guys, and they'll they'll be on their their paddle boards or their surfboards or at the beach with their dog and our product, and doing a post saying 'go get this' on Amazon. 00:24:35 It's like, it's a free way to launch uh, and instant credibility so there's a lot of opportunity in that area too, you know. You look at flashlights, you know if you're going to sell flashlights, it’s super saturated but what if you get a license with the US Army and and you pay the US Army a six percent licensing fee and you’re able to Put the US Army logo on your flashlight and you say this is the toughest strongest US flashlight, you know it's US Army authorized, whatever. Instantly you have credibility, instantly people will trust you over somebody else versus if this is Kevin's cool flashlight. So it's all in the marketing. And so that's where there's a big opportunity right now on Amazon, you asked earlier, is in licensing. 00:25:19 I think a lot of people are really not, have really not been touching that. So if you're good at Amazon, you can crush it if you get the right licenses. And that builds a moat, it builds a wall around you, other people can't come in. yeah and you get instant credibility and in a lot of cases these licensees will help you promote the product the guys with our body glove life jackets they love them so much the samples we sent over they're like we're going to introduce you to walmart the stores we're going to introduce you to big sporting goods the big sporting goods stores and make all these introductions that might take us a year or two or beating on the walls they they make a call and say check this out they already have those relationships so you can leverage that so there's a lot you can do there You mentioned licensing fee of 6%. 00:26:02 Is that around normal? Yeah, it's usually between 5% and 8% is fairly normal. There's a huge show called the Licensing Expo. I'm sorry? I was just saying that's a pretty low amount to pay for something that could be so significant for your business. Yeah, it is. I agree. And then there's minimums. So we have to commit to minimums. So we have to guarantee a certain number of sales. And there's some upfront payments and there's some reporting. So there's a little bit of hassle factor involved in there. But it can be definitely worth it. Yeah, definitely. Now, you're not going to go out. If you're brand new, you're not going to go get a Disney license. You're not going to go get a license for Frozen if you're a brand new seller. 00:26:48 But you could get the U. S. Army. You could get the second, third-tier license, which can be great too. Have a track record of making sure you do pay your royalties on time and everything. And then when you go to someone like Disney to get a license, they'll look and say, okay, you know what you're doing. We trust you. We know you're going to pay us. And you can start going after the bigger licenses. So don't think you can go get a Disney license right out the gate. It might be a little bit difficult. But you can get NCAA college football teams. It's not so hard to get. Those are 6%, 7%. There's lots of opportunities in that area. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, that's good. 00:27:24 I mean, it sounds like you're still pretty active in the space. You mentioned earlier ranking, launching, lots of changes with TOS recently. What are you doing right now to launch products, aside from obviously licensing an off-Amazon audience? Are there any on-Amazon tactics that you're using right now? I mean, yeah, a couple of my companies, I have a list. So we have a list of customers that we've cultivated over. one of the companies over 20 years. So we're able to launch pretty quickly just by emailing that list. But if I don't have a list that identifies with it, one of the things that I'm doing is I'm lowering the price. So if my price is $19. 95, I'm lowering it down to like $3. 95. 00:28:06 Because one, I don't have any, first thing I do is I try to get buying reviews and that takes a little bit of time. And sometimes you'll get takers that'll take all, now you can do up to 60, I believe. Vine reviews: Sometimes you'll wipe it out; sometimes it depends on your product, you might only have a couple takers um that will take it, but try to get Vine reviews out of the gate to get the review process started and then then when I launch if I don't have a list, if I don't have i'll do a little bit outside traffic a little bit influencer if I can, but the main the main thrust is heavy PPC top of search placement so I'll bid extra to get top of search placement, I'll lower my price to some ridiculous low price like three dollars and 95 cents. 00:28:45 And then what will happen is someone that sees the product, I'm at the top of the search results, hopefully they see that, hey, this is $3. 95. Everybody else is selling for $20. And they look at mine and they're like, wait a second, this guy doesn't have any reviews. What if this product sucks? But they click through and look at my listing. It's good pictures. I convinced them there. I've done a good job on that aspect. addressed all their concerns and then they're like what's what's four bucks you know worst case is I throw this away you know a lot of people take a risk on four dollars if everything else looks good and so I can get people in the door and because of the low price I'm getting a lot of clicks on my ad top of placement ads and then getting conversions so that's telling Amazon that hey these ads are working and then I slowly raise that price up over the course of a month or two 00:29:32 to try to get it back to my target of $19 .95. But I'll leave it at that low price for several weeks. And so you're going in the hole. I mean, you're losing money on the ads. You're losing money on your fulfillment costs. You're going in the hole to do this. But there's not many other ways. Other ways are you take the longer approach. And some people are teaching now that go out and build an audience. Go out and build a Facebook page or Instagram page and build an audience, and then leverage that audience to launch. But that's hard. A lot of people, you know, there are some people that have success with that, but the vast majority of people can't do that. That's not easy. 00:30:07 And then you get a lot of people, even if you get a thousand people on a Facebook group that are all dog lovers, that doesn't mean they're going to buy your leash. They're not necessarily buyers. So that's difficult to do that. And most people are not able to pull that off. So you've got to get creative. And then like on one of my companies that I have the list, we have variations of the products, and I'll tell them to go buy all the variations, and they'll go buy all the variations, and then what that does is it instantly gets them on the customers who viewed this, viewed that, customers who bought this also bought that, and that starts just snowballing with other people's products in the category, and you start showing up all over the place. 00:30:49 So that's another way that we do it. And then I start with the lower volume keywords, so keywords that are high volume, you know, I gave those bully sticks and it's 50,000 searches a month. I'm not gonna touch that word, I mean, I'm gonna make sure the bully stays in my title or in my listing, I mean, you know, I want to get a little bit of credit for it. But I'm gonna go after something that has a thousand two thousand searches a month and find five or ten of those where I can compete and try to maximize those while I'm building my reviews while I'm raising the price. And then once I get to a position in a couple months where I'm back at my normal price, I have some hopefully good reviews, a decent number of good reviews; then I'll start thinking about, let's let's try to go after some of these bigger more popular keywords and see if we can get right there. 00:31:34 But if you're trying to do that too soon, it's it's going to be difficult, and you might you may make it to page one but you're not going to stay. Yeah, You are someone that has always brought these kind of strategies to the forefront. You know, like I say, I remember those early days with the podcast, lots of different strategies that you were trying and testing. Do you feel like the kind of the hack days are over, the kind of trying to wrangle your way into rankings? Is it a lot more about product quality? How do you feel? Are you still trying and testing lots of different strategies? People like hacks. They like quick solutions. People like to know if I do this, I can rank right away or I can solve this problem. 00:32:14 But the hacks are not, they're cool and they're interesting. And sometimes they can, you know, they can fix a problem. You got a hijacker on your listing or something. If you know the right hack to try to get them off, that can come in handy. But if it's hacks for ranking, those are usually short-lived. And the best majority of it, the money in this business is actually not in running your business, it's in selling it. So if you're not thinking about building something that's a true, sellable business to one of these aggregators or maybe a strategic buyer if it's not an aggregator, That's where the biggest payday is. Income, and you may have You know 20% profit on paper every year. 00:32:51 But I can tell you that if you're doing a million dollars a year in sales on Amazon, your profit margin at the end of the day, It's 20%. You're not putting $200,000 quid in your pocket. Because you're having to take some that money and reinvest it-next products or new product development. You might be putting £50-£ 100 quid in your pocket if you're lucky, and so but if you sell it, You're going to all of a sudden put, you know, in today's market, the multiples are crazy. You know, 3, 4, 5, 6x. Sometimes you hear crazier numbers than that. But if the average was even 4, you're putting 800 quid in your pocket right away instead of 50 or 100. And then you have a war chest. 00:33:26 Now you know what you're doing. Now you can come back and do it again. But the problem is there's a lot of people that are selling right now to aggregators that started in 2015, 2016. And they were right place, right time. and they were able to get a product in at the right place. They were able to just organically grow it. Now they've got 10,000 reviews and they don't know what the hell they're doing. And so they sell to an aggregator, then they come back and try to do it again and they fail. You haven't seen this happen a lot. So if you know what you're doing and you know the fundamentals, then this can be extremely lucrative and just work and turn it and leverage it. 00:34:04 It's just like selling real estate or something. You know I've got one buddy that they're on their fourth business right now, selling; they saw their first one for like almost four million 3 . 8 in 2017, then they sold another one for six and another one for ten, then they're about to sell one for 25. And then you're working in tournaments, you know they're like, um, working turning that cash and then they're they're stepping stepping their way up into serious money, and you can do that in this, but you got to be thinking about that long-term strategy. It's not a get-rich-quick thing. Yeah. And I think sometimes people bemoan the idea that, oh, I wish I'd gotten started sooner. I wish I was selling back then. 00:34:43 But I try and tell people, you know, the fact that you're selling now forces you to become a better entrepreneur, a better business owner. And that actually will be better off for you in the long term. Because like you say, there's people that would have just built a big business because they were in the right place at the right time, but don't actually have the skill set to then go and do it again. And so, you know, this actually may be a better time to get in it for the reasons you talk about as well. Exit market. It's crazy, right? What's your thoughts on the next five years of that? Well, I think it's crazy. It's going to settle down. Right now, the multiples are high. 00:35:17 So if you're in a position to sell this year, I would seriously be looking at that because the multiples are definitely higher. I think they're going to settle down. I think you're going to see some consolidation. There's 100 plus aggregators out there right now. There's no way they're all going to survive. You're going to see some of them buying each other, some of them going out of business, some of them are getting into this realizing, holy shit, this actually ain't that easy. I think you're going to have five or ten major ones left standing. You're going to always have some little ones. Those guys are going to be owning a lot of the market. In the past, people were always like, 'We're competing against the Chinese sellers. 00:35:57 They're the ones selling for the cheaper price. They're the ones doing the black hat stuff.' They're the ones doing, that was the general consensus. But I think that's still going to be there, but you're also going to have, oh shit, here's the aggregators. They completely own this category of whatever, you know, of dog leashes. There's no way I can compete against them because they have deep pockets, deep resources, and they're doing, you know, they're playing by the rules for the most part. And there's no way to compete against them. So, you're going to have to find those other opportunities where they're not in, or the holes that they haven't filled, and there's a finite number. I think these guys can buy; you look at marketplace polls where they just say 60, 000 people or companies did over a million dollars, yeah, and u. 00:36:41 s dollars in sales on on amazon as a third as a third-party seller last year if that number is accurate that's great that's worldwide so it's not just the us that's worldwide but you got to figure a third of those are probably big companies they're adidas and nike and some of those seller accounts are big companies so those aren't in the aggregate space so if you're left with 15 20 000 of these they're doing over a million dollars that's a lot of companies but a lot of those are not actually making money uh they're the margins are so small they're just robbing peter to pay paul to stay alive or they're wholesale businesses which aggregators really don't want the resellers so there's a pool of five or ten thousand maybe that these guys could potentially go after and if they Gobble up a thousand or two thousand of them in the next few years. 00:37:31 That's a significant number and be covering a lot of bases, so that's where you're gonna have to go into licensing and go into really developing your own true brand not just finding an olive olive product product and sticking your name on it. You're gonna have to you get to create something of value and to have a the best chance of success and getting a good multiple in the end down the road. Yeah, so last sort of topic of conversation, because I know you're a busy guy, but on that front. You're talking about something of value, creating something that is sellable. For anybody that's listening, we'll have listeners that are in that kind of six-figure range. They're wanting to build towards an exit. What would I say are the keys right now to focus on? 00:38:14 Because I feel like everyone has a different opinion. Yes, build diversification. No, keep it concentrated. So much talk. You yourself, what do you believe are the keys for a six-figure seller to really build as much value as they can and exit in the next one to two years? Focus on one or two markets. You need to diversify. You have all your eggs in one basket. Yes, there is some danger to having all your eggs in one basket, but you can spread yourself too thin and you can take your eye off the prize. The same amount of time that you could spend trying to build up a Shopify store, if you put that same effort and energy and money and investment of people into expanding to Amazon Canada from the U. S. 00:38:56 or from the U. K. to Germany. You're going to make a lot more money, go where the money's at. It's on Amazon if you want to expand off of Amazon in the US, maybe consider Walmart. Uh, you might need a Shopify site just for legitimacy and to have that, you know, people there are people that are going to go Google your name. And to have it there. But don't I wouldn't put a lot of effort into that; it's a different type of buyer, different mentality. But having that there and a few sales come off it but don't put too much energy into it-that's key. You need to find a way to build a list so you need to you need to own your customer. 00:39:28 You don't own it on Amazon, but you can download it through, you know, Tax Jars, some of those servers you get those customer names, but they're still not truly your customer, but that's better than nothing. But you need to find a way on all your inserts to get these people onto your list and that doesn't mean here's go fill up sign up for my VIP club or fill out a warranty card. Most people aren't going to do that and that's not going to you want to get them to buy something from you. I mean, one of the things we do with our Our dog stuff Is we put an insert in and we say, 'Hey, get a sample.' We forget dog treats. Get a sample of all of our treats. 00:40:02 You get our duck treat. You get our antlers. You get this. It's free. Just pay $7. 95 shipping. So the fact that they're willing to actually pay $7. 95 shipping basically covers my cost. And I send them out a small little sample pack. That gets them that they can try it with their dog. Oh, my dog really likes these duck things. And they come back and they order my duck stuff. But I also have their name as a buyer. Not as a tire kicker, not as an Amazon person, but they actually gave me $7. 95. They actually took it. It was worth, it's a huge difference than someone that gets something for free or just signs up for a warning from someone that actually gives you money, no matter how much money it is. 00:40:36 So try to get them to do that. Come back and market to your current customers. A lot of Amazon sellers are not marketing to their current customers. I mean, the same thing we do on our dog stuff is I ask them when they go and do this, I say, what's your dog's birthday? And what's his name? and breed and that they they gladly fill that out and then we send a postcard, a physical postcard, a piece of paper, through the mail about a week before their birthday, says 'happy birthday Fido congratulations you get 20% off your next bag of treats on Amazon, be sure to give this to mommy to Ben, your daddy to daddy Ben for you and it works like a charm, so you're remarking to them, 'you got to be thinking about that kind of thing.' And that can maximize your value when you go to sell. 00:41:21 And not just to an aggregator, but sometimes aggregators aren't the best ones to sell to. Maybe you're building something that a Procter & Gamble or a big, huge company would want to come in and buy as a strategic buyer versus an aggregator. And those can be even bigger paydays. You look at something like what Helium 10 did. It's more of a strategic buy than it was an aggregator, type of thing. Um, that's something I think, and then getting your numbers, I mean every think about everything that you're paying for, you know, every piece of software, you know if you're paying a hundred dollars a month for a piece of software, you've got Helium 10 and you have Jungle Scout and you have Viral Launch. 00:42:03 Are you really using them on or can you just go with one of those? And and that 200 or 100 a month for for Jungle Scout if you don't need it, just stay with Helium 10. that that's 1200 bucks a year and a 5x multiple that's six thousand dollars out of your pocket right there yeah so those little things uh getting your money back you know using this cup using heat m10 or a company like gatita or somebody to get all the money the damages and the lost stuff back can add hundreds of thousands to some businesses that there's a lot having your sops getting you know systems in place so that when you step out this thing can keep running those are all important things to be thinking about when you're going to sell Yeah, very important. 00:42:45 If you were selling a business today, how would you go about it? Would you go to a broker? Would you go direct to aggregators? What would you do? I would probably decide it depends on the size of the business. But in most cases, I would recommend at least consulting with a broker. Some brokers are better than others; people like Quietlight or Global Wired Advisor. If I was selling to an aggregator, I'd probably go to someone like Quietlight. and say hey because even though i'm paying them a fee some people say why are you going to pay them a fee they're going to get your books in order and find a lot of holes that 00:43:17 you may not know that's going to actually increase what you can sell it for and i think they in most cases they're going to get you not every case but in most cases they're going to be able to get you more money and and it's just going to be a cleaner smoother process selling a business can be a pain in the ass there's a lot of due diligence there's a lot of stuff you got to do they'll make sure that you have your stuff in order if i'm selling to a more of a strategic buyer not an aggregator i would go with like global wire advisors those guys are really good at like investment 00:43:44 funds buying it or big aggregator type of people buying it and help you i would i would go that direction now if you're selling it you know you're doing fifty thousand dollars a month uh in sales and you got yeah it's a small sale it's a hundred Thousand two hundred thousand dollar sale, those guys are probably not gonna get you a whole lot more. Um, but yeah, if you're a seven-figure, seven-eight-nine figure seller, I would, I would be using somebody. But if you're small, you know, you could just go list it on Empire Flippers or something, you know, or FBA brokers or one of these others and probably be okay, yeah, that's wise words, definitely. Uh, I think you know the idea of using a broker can actually make you more money right when even with their fee included because that's what you're paying them to do their expertise so yes, good to continue, you say that too. 00:44:27 Um, We'll kind of look. To wrap up and appreciate you coming on so much. What's the one kind of strategy maybe that we haven't talked about that you think is a really good strategy that Amazon sellers should be deploying now? PPC, product research, anything like that that you feel that we haven't talked about but is really valuable for the audience? I think using the data. I mean, Amazon has opened up data like brand analytics. And but going out, I mean we've created our own little software tool for brand analytics and being able to analyze that data, and we're tracking stuff, and we're finding a lot of really good opportunities in there. The Product Opportunity Explorer, the Brand Analytics, there's still some holes, and then combining that with the tools like Helium 10 and Data Dive, you can really find massive opportunities still out there so I think that's the thing that a lot of people; they're not doing the full 00:45:22 analysis and a lot of this that used to take weeks to do and a lot of spreadsheets online, VAs, and handwork, now can be done in a matter of minutes with some of these software tools. And I think that is where a lot of people are making a mistake. And then also, you know, the diversity in sourcing and with what's going on in Ukraine, what's going on in the world, I would be looking at diversity of sourcing. If you're in the U. S., looking at Latin America, perhaps. If you're in Europe, looking at some of the options in Europe or Turkey, Pakistan, depending on what you're selling, and not be so dependent on China. I mean, China is definitely the easiest. It's the world's factory. 00:46:00 You're still probably going to have to do some stuff there. A lot of the raw materials still come from China. But I would be looking at diversifying a little bit on some of my supply chain as well. Yeah, that's really good and really helpful. The last question on the data, you talk about finding opportunities in that data. What do you see as those opportunities? Is it underserved keywords? What should people be looking for in that data? We track it over the course of a year, so we see all the trends and we see the SFRs, but the number one thing I do is I look for competition. because they give you the conversion percent 00:46:40 they give you click percent and conversion percent on the top three and so i look for opportunities in using that conversion percent so i'll take those three those top three the conversion percents and add them together and i'll add an extra column to this if you're doing this in excel you download brand analytics add a column add up those conversion percentages so if one of them is 13 one is 20 and one is six percent that's what 30 uh 39 percent total uh and i like to see under 40 for those top three that are that that are getting the most because that's they're telling you these are the ones that are converting on 00:47:13 that keyword if it's less than 40 that means 60 of the sales on that that particular keyword are coming from everybody else that tells me there's a what if even if i could can rank to spot number four or five on the page there's room for me to grab a significant part of sale proportion of sales on that keyword and then i use i look at Title density, and I look at the okay, this keyword to search this brand, this brand analytics keyword, how many times does it appear in the rest of the keywords in the list of a million plus brand analytics, and how many times does it appear in the title of those three that Amazon's showing you they get the most clicks and the most uh sales, and that tells me the title density is two different numbers, and in fact that is a high number that tells me there's a lot of places where if I could just rank on this little route, I could probably do really well. 00:48:02 And there's a lot of doors, there's a lot of keywords in the list, 15, 20, 30, maybe 100 different keywords that are making some sort of sales that I can go in and try to find, carve out my little niche of 10, 20, 30 of those keywords that are going to really make some money for me. And then combining that with tools like Datadive where you can see how good are people on Amazon, you can really zero in on where the golden opportunities are really fast. And so the combination of Helium 10, brand analytics, and Data Dive, I think, is a no-brainer. And there's tools from people like Trianturcu, who's like this genius guy, Romanian guy, that has like a little private mastermind. 00:48:42 And if you're in his private mastermind, you can get some special tools that he's created. And they're really good tools. But in the past, I was going to those kinds of things to get data that you couldn't get from Helium 10 or some of the other tools. But now with this combination, you can. Get almost anything if you've been doing this for a while, you remember three or four years ago people were buying reports from China there was inside information. You could actually get the whole thing-you could pay someone 50-100 bucks and you could get a you know like spreadsheet back in a couple days from some some guy that worked for Amazon, China or Amazon India, you know. 00:49:16 Actually here's my competitors, here's all their PPC here's their everything uh and you're like holy I need to target this and do this and you don't need to do that anymore the tools have gotten so sophisticated and Amazon's giving enough of the data they don't give everything but they give enough of it combined with Helium 10 and what what Brandon's doing those three right there is all you need yeah yeah absolutely, that title it's like a you know it's like driving a race car, you know me and you know how to we know how to drive our car down the road but can we go drive an F1 you know? You get become that F1 driver and you can race to the riches on Amazon. 00:49:52 yeah Yeah, well, we've got Brandon coming on next week, actually, so I'm going to be drilling him about the data dive tool. Looking forward to that. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And that title density column on Helium 10 is a game changer. It's such a powerful aspect that not many people are using. No, I mean, I'll give you an example of that one. We were selling hand sanitizer, little bottles of two-ounce, what's that, 60-milliliter for the UK, 60-milliliter hand sanitizer. uh in 2020 and we launched it and we're doing all right and then started having a little bit of fade off of it and i was i looked at brand analytics after six months or something 00:50:31 just looking through different words and there's a word that came up in there that had not come up in my original research and i was like what the heck is this word it was it was hand sanitizer party favors so people were actually actually buying these little small you know pocket-sized hand sanitizers they have to give them away you know at parties and events and stuff and I was like I look at the title density like you're just talking about and there's like two people had that in their title and I'm like alright I'm gonna change one of my one of my listings to have that in the title near the beginning And see what happens without doing a heavy PPC or a launch or anything. 00:51:07 I just changed it and instantly went from page six, I think, to page two within like 20 minutes, and then got a few sales and went to page one, and we started making it wasn't a huge number of sales but we started making 10-15 sales a day just by realizing that title density and nobody else has in the title how important that was, and just making that change. It's super important. Absolutely, yeah, so anybody listening who hasn't checked it out yet, grab a Helium 10 subscription, go into Cerebros, the main area you can find it. Look at title density and get those keywords with low title density into your title, yeah it's so much easier to rank for those, so super powerful feature. That's really helpful. 00:51:53 Kevin, I've honestly so appreciated having you on, and I feel like there's so many more questions I want to keep asking you, but we've been nearly going an hour already, so I will look to draw it to a close. But you're doing lots of things at the moment. Where's the best place for people to find out more about what you do? You mentioned the sourcing stuff. Is that a major thing for you, or is that more of a side thing? What's that? I've got eight different businesses involved in the Amazon space. I'm a seller. I either own or I'm partners in four or five seller accounts that we're selling on, and I do products advance, which is we find product opportunities for some of the aggregators. 00:52:31 And then I do the training for Helium 10, do their Freedom Ticket and their Helium 10 Elite, which is their advanced training. And I hold my own event, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, twice a year, once virtual. It was just recently in February. There's a live one in August in Austin. That's a pretty high ticket, big seller event. And then the best way to reach out to me is probably just follow me on Facebook. I'm not on LinkedIn or Instagram, really, or any of those. I don't really pay. But follow me on Facebook and you'll kind of see what's happening. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for all you've done for the Amazon selling community. There's tens, probably hundreds of thousands of people that have learned from you with Freedom Ticket. 00:53:12 And you've got a lot of legacy out there in the space. So we appreciate you a lot. No problem, Ben. I'm glad to be here. And best of luck to everybody out there. Amazing. What an episode that was. I enjoyed sitting down with Kevin so much and I hope you got something out of it. If you did, make sure you hit that like button on YouTube or if you're listening on the podcast, please do leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast because it helps us keep getting on the caliber of guests like that. Next week, we have another 'goat' of the Amazon space. How can you have more than one goat? Because there's only one greatest of all, I don't know, but multiple goats, and we've got them on the Brand Builder Show. Next week is going to be another great episode. So, make sure you subscribe to get notifications when that episode is out. They keep on coming, and it's going to be a great few weeks on The Brand Builder Show. Okay, I'll see you next week.