Unlocking Amazon Success in 2024 with Kevin King

Unlocking Amazon Success in 2024 with Kevin King Danny: Hey guys, welcome back to Seller Sessions. The King is back once again, first time of 2024. We're going to do Kevin's pop picks for 2024. We're going to allow the machine gun to unload, blazing us with knowledge as he usually would. Kevin, welcome to the show. How are you? Speaker 2: I'm good, Danny. How are you doing, man? Danny: I'm very good. Thank you very much. And you've been on the road this week, or you've been to Brandon's event. Were you there? Speaker 2: Yeah, I was in Iceland first scouting for a billion-dollar seller summit next year, lining up all the hotel deals and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, we never go anywhere until we've slept in the bed and eaten the food and checked everything out. So, finalizing, even though that's over a year away, we got to get ahead of it. So, I was there and then I went from there to ASGTG and spoke in New York. Ate some good food at that event and then came back for a couple days and headed over to Brandon's event in Orlando and I'm heading out tomorrow for the Seller's Cruise with Carlos. Danny: Cool. Okay. And how long is that? That's for about five days, isn't it? Yeah, I'm curious. Speaker 2: That's a full week. It's a Saturday to the following Sunday, basically. Danny: Wow. Okay. Cool. Let's get into this. Speaker 2: There's lots of cigars on that ship, though. Lots of cigars, because Norma and Abe and quite a few people. So it's going to be a cigar fest. Danny: Yeah. I think Isabella as well. Does Steve smoke cigars? Speaker 2: No, he doesn't. Danny: There's a little crew in it. Tim is part of the cigar crew as well. The magic circle. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's quite the Isabella Ritz, Isabella Hamilton, Isabella Ritz, both of them, both Isabellas. And then Abe always is game. Norm is a shoe-in. Dannon Coleman from Tracefuse usually is joining. And then I think this time we got a few more people Popping into so it should be a actually on a Saturday before we head on the ship. We're actually all going to We're capping this cruise with a visit to a Miami cigar bar The day before and a Miami cigar bar the day we arrive before we fly back. So it's it's gonna be a cigar fest. Danny: Excellent, cool. Speaker 2: Those are always great because I'm not a big smoker. At home, I don't drink. I mean, I have a full bar. I don't smoke, but it's a social thing for me. So it's always cool. You get a good cigar that lasts an hour, hour and a half, and you're just sitting there shooting the bird and talking life, talking business, talking whatever, and it's really good times. Danny: Good. Yeah, no, it's good. Let's get into some of the things that I want to discuss with you today. So we understand, you know, a lot of people in the industry struggling for a margin on where to squeeze, but there's also your time and attention is going to be very important. Where do you think sellers should be spending most of their time investment this year on Amazon? Speaker 2: Well, if you're, yeah, as a seller, it should be on product selection and sourcing. Those are the two, that's where the money's made in the sourcing, not in the selling. And so that's where I think a lot of people need to be paying the most attention as a seller. I mean, a lot of the other things you can job out, you know, your PPC and a lot of those things, those are all important. But as the owner of the company or as the founder of the company, in my opinion, where your effort, especially if you're small and you haven't, you're not at, you know, with 100 employees or something yet, But if you're small and growing, the owner needs to be the person that's doing the product selection and heavily involved in the sourcing process. And looking outside of China I think is something that people need to start doing. I know you've talked to Steve and I think There's so many issues right now with China, internally within China, with the geopolitical situation with Taiwan. If something, who knows what's going to happen, maybe nothing, just maybe a bunch of drum beating, but at some point in the next year, two years, five years, if something happens between the U.S. and Taiwan, your entire supply chain is going to get cut off. It's time to start looking outside and start preparing and maybe moving a little things into Vietnam or Indonesia or Mexico or Turkey or India or wherever it may be. So I think that's an important thing and then just trying to find ways to actually get your cost down because as Amazon keeps adding more cost, as more and more competitors are coming in and putting price pressure, manufacturers or factories are going direct, the money is made in the sourcing, you got to have that margin. And so that working on that and sometimes that margin might include where you're sourcing to save on the taxes, not necessarily just the factory costs. It might include financing issues, you know, because if you're having to take out loans from Amazon Lending to do your, that's part of the sourcing process, you know, that's adding to the cost of you actually buying the goods. There's a number of things there. It's not just what is the price from the factory. That's something that I think people should be paying a lot of attention to right now and really trying to get that dialed in. Danny: Yeah. What about with AI? Look, I know everyone's bullish on AI, but there's a time and a place for it. And sometimes you can over-optimize to make things complex. Where are you implementing AI in your business and your day to day? Speaker 2: I use AI for analysis primarily and for brainstorming. That's where I use it. I don't let it write anything. So I will if I've got a bunch of reviews, you know, I will take it and I'll use one of the tools or I'll create my own prompts to analyze these reviews and save time. But then I will or if I'm like in my newsletter, I use AI, it's maybe 5% of the newsletter. So maybe I have a I'm trying to brainstorm and I say, what's 10 good ways Rodney Dangerfield would say, today we've got a bunch of really cool nuggets for you or something like that and it'll come back and give me 10 different ideas and then I'll look at those 10 different ideas, maybe one of them works or maybe I'll combine three of them together like, oh yeah, that's a good way to say this or a good way to say that. Another way I've used AI is like in my newsletter I'll write sometimes, on some of them I write personal stories and one of them I did that was a little controversial was called Naked Girl on the Balcony. That was the subject line of this email about three months ago. And when I wrote the story, this was a true story of me coming out of my apartment on my balcony and looking down two floors down. I'm in a high rise in downtown Austin and there's just this naked girl standing on the balcony at 10 a.m. in the morning talking to a guy that's fully dressed. And so I wrote about that and I basically said that this woman was just standing there naked talking to a guy fully dressed. But I took my entire story, I wrote it first And then I put the entire story into AI and I said rewrite this and I forget specifically what I said but in a humorous tone that's a little edgy and I gave it a few other things so it rewrote the entire story. And then I went line by line through the story, compared what it wrote to what I wrote and sometimes it would come up with something a little bit better and so like in this instance where I just described a naked girl out on a balcony talking to a guy fully dressed, it changed it to There's something to the effect of there's a woman on the balcony feeling the breeze and being free and a guy who didn't get the memo that clothing was optional, for example. So I think that's a better way to say it than I just said it matter-of-factly. That's a little more creative way. It makes the story a little better. So I changed it. So that's an example. of how I might use AI. Well, I might use it if I have a story in my newsletter. My newsletter is completely, I write it all. But I might have like seven different sources of something. Or like the A89 story, for example. You guys at Seller Sessions did a very good in-depth story, very long, 10,000 words or whatever it was, something crazy like that. And then I had all these other documents and Anthony Lee had done something and Kelium 10 gave me some stuff. There's a whole bunch of sources and it's like, all right, I'm going to take all these, put it in and have the AI help me outline or summarize something. So I'll do that. But then I still have the human element that goes in and like changes or writes almost all of it. Or if AI writes something, I'm going in and modifying it pretty heavily. So, I'm not just taking it as is. So, that's how I use it. I don't let it write any of my titles or any of my listings. I'm not using any of that stuff. I think that's, if you speak English and you're writing, you should not be doing that. I think you're just, it's garbage. It's garbage. Danny: Is it garbage if you just let it run or if you get ideas and you rewrite line by line? Speaker 2: If you get ideas, like I just said, the brainstorming, no, perfectly fine. But too many people just let it run and take it as is and they don't even spot check it and it's going to be junk. But using it for ideation or brainstorming, there's nothing wrong with that. But you got to go in and, in my opinion, change between 40% and 80% of it and clean it up. But it's a powerful tool and people should be using it. I use it for image generation. You know, if I need something in the newsletter, if I want a little cartoonish picture or something, there's some cool tools for video, for like social media, where you can animate individual images and there's some cool applications to it. Or if you need to create a spreadsheet, you need to, you know, take all your PPC data and tell it to make a bunch of complicated pie graphs and stuff analyzing it. There's great stuff like that. Yeah that's really good but leaning on it too heavily at this point I think is a mistake or letting it do everything is a mistake. Danny: Yeah and I think if you know like say you got regular people doing regular content, I mean, I use it for summarizing transcripts for the podcast, right? Speaker 2: That's perfect for that. I mean, that's a perfect use of it. But you probably spot text those transcripts. Danny: I have to go through line by line. Yeah, I have to go line by line. Speaker 2: Make sure it didn't, because it will miss things or it will add something. I mean, it's getting a little bit better, but still hallucinate sometimes and will add something that we didn't talk about that. But for the most part, It's pretty good, but yeah, transcription, summaries are great, that's a great tool. Danny: I think with sometimes, like with the show notes, the core thing for me is the video content or the audio content, not the Description, do you see what I mean? The description's there to say, oh yeah, that's in that podcast, boom. It's important, but it's not like a listing or anything. It's SEO. Yeah, I'd spend a little bit less time on that because of what it is, but what I have noticed is that it's almost with AI, I know people say, well, you can prompt in this tone and stuff like that, but if you noticed is that you kind of feel, I know I can't put anything, I'm being woo-woo here, But you repost online, you go, that sounds like it's just knocked out. You know, in AI, it doesn't seem like it's written, if that makes sense. Speaker 2: It's like a pattern. Danny: Yeah, it doesn't give you the context of the personality in there. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It is patterned. A lot of times they'll use the same words. Danny: Yeah. I'll use the same things like that. Speaker 2: Yeah. Danny: Yeah. Speaker 2: You ask it to do titles and you tell it a certain you give it a prompt and three or the 10 titles that come back all or like you just said using the word transformative or something like that. Yeah. Danny: Yeah. And where do you think rankings going in 2024? Speaker 2: I think it's going to radically change in the next 18 months. I think tools like Data Dive and Helium 10 and Jungle Scout are going to have to adapt. I've spoken with Helium 10 and Brandon at Datadive and they disagree with me. They don't think they're going to have to adapt too much. But I strongly disagree with them and I think they're in for a rude awakening if they don't pay attention. And maybe they are paying attention and they're just saying that. But if Amazon changes to this more of an AI-based search, which I think they absolutely will do, All this gamifying of the system for ranking of using a tool like Data Dive to find out what your competitors are not ranked on, which keywords you need to put into your listing is going to completely go away, completely go away. And Vanessa Hong just did a great interview with Amy Weiss last week. I think it's up on Facebook where there's new flat files now that have been, that are in beta that have come out. And she took a look at these new flat files. Not all accounts have them, but she's like, these are radically different. They like eliminated a lot of columns, added some columns. And her opinion on that is like, this is the first step towards the change to AI on listings. And in her opinion, and I agree with her, you're gonna quit optimizing for customers and you're gonna start optimizing for AI as an Amazon seller. And the way, sorry, yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. Danny: No, I was going to say, I was just going to interject there. I totally agree. And there is, I believe there's something in it, you know, like, because you've mentioned it in the newsletter. And because what happened with fees listing back in just before Black Friday, right? And she mentioned it, you picked up on that. And then I covered it last week. It was in your newsletter months ago. But when I look at that, when you think about what they're doing, so they've stripped everything back, right? A lot of their own listings are quite stripped back if you look at Amazon Basics and stuff. What that says to me is that what they're giving back to us looks like junk because we're on version one, i.e. lexical matching, single words that index, right? But they work off semantic and but. So when you're looking at that, they're picking up the semantics and the conversational part in terms of the concept of what's in the listing and scans the whole listing. It doesn't require to be indexed for A9 to work to understand that. And the reason I say that is because once it's gone through its transitions over a period of time, if you think about it, we're still working on the version of As many keywords in there as possible that you want to index, but when Amazon wants to present the search results, if they're being manipulated, the results are not going to come back in terms of what the customer needs. It's what the seller stroke brand wants. So I think we're missing a couple of steps that we don't have the full picture for, right? But semantic and... Yeah, go on. Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't have the full picture and Amazon is not going to make these changes until they make damn sure it doesn't affect their PPC revenue. I mean that's where they make their money. They're going to make sure that whatever they do is not going to affect that. But we always think that the way we act as sellers and the way we're taught and we talk on all the podcasts and all the trainings, It's how to be guerrilla marketers and how to find the loopholes and how to step. Amazon doesn't look at listing creation the way we do. They look at it in a totally different way. You ask 9 out of 100 people on Amazon, they're not even going to know why are you using data dive to find some weird keyword. They don't understand that approach and that's not how they look at it. So you look at what's happening right now with Google. What's SGE? Search Generative Engine or whatever they call it. And they're testing it right now where it's an AI-based results rather than here's a list of stuff. You're typing in a sentence and it's giving you What what they're what the AI thinks you want to work right this conceptual terms of what is concerning yes it's completely serving up different stuff and there's a lot of people there saying what the seo industry. Is a ninety one billion dollar a year industry or something something like that i may have that number a little bit off but something something like that. And they're saying they could complete, there's articles out there saying they could go to zero because SEO in the current methodology way is not going to work with this AI and old school backlinks are now becoming important again. They've kind of gotten away from that but the weight of a backlink now from certain sites is carrying more weight in the algorithm, in the AI, on SGE. So it's going to be some massive, massive changes. And I think you're going to see some stuff get turned upside down and some software companies get left in the dust when they switch. I don't think it's going to be overnight. It's not going to be like someone hits a switch and boom, it's totally different the next day. But we're going to start seeing it and I think within the next 18 months, it's going to be radically different in the way the search results are and ranking. And it's going to be almost, the only way you're going to have a chance to control your appearance is advertising. Or figuring out, you know, someone's going to figure out exactly how do you do that right for the AI to make it relevant or what do you got to put in there. But still, the tool is looking at reviews, it's looking at people's past history. You have no control over what they've been scrolling, what they've been doing, what other pages they look at. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens, but I think it's going to be a huge shift. Danny: We've got click logs recording all the behavior, pre, post search, history of search, etc. Where do they spend a lot of their time in terms of the previous search terms and in the categories that they're searched in? What do you think about sentiments? In terms of Amazon Comprehend, do you blend in with that? Speaker 2: I know Matt Altman talked about Amazon Comprehend and using it for analyzing reviews and stuff. I think there's something to that. It's not always dead on accurate, but it They'll figure, it'll get better. I think it still needs some work, but I think the more data sets you have, the more you can do that. I mean, why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? It's for the data. It's for controlling the media and for the data. That's why, look at what Timu is doing right now. Timu is selling a huge loss to get market share and to collect data. Amazon's got data, Google has data, Apple has data, Microsoft, they have the data, the ones that have the data, and this is massive amounts of data in consumer behavior are the ones that are going to win and are in control. Danny: Well, if you look at Elon's data, the data sets that he's got, right, so he's now got Twitter, so that's his online module of his data. Then you look at what goes into the cars, the information that gets tracked there, plus the power stations, which he pretty much is the standard now. Plus if you look at space, satellites, internet, information flow, I don't know enough about the technology. But you understand there's all these areas of data that he's collecting. So Twitter was a big move for him because it was one of the only spaces he didn't have a social pool of data and with the news and information that pours through. Speaker 2: But you think when he's using it to train his LLM, I mean, he's got the X, whatever the XL, whatever it's called. Danny: Isn't he got a neuro plug or something that eventually will be plugged into? Speaker 2: Yeah, you got the neuro plug to that. Yeah. Yeah. And all the robotics. So it's. No, it's a smart play and we're going to be losing some of that control. Being able to gamify the system is going to become much harder in my opinion and you're going to have to be a true brand and a true product and it's going to be more of a long-term play. I'm going to launch and get ranked within a month and start generating some sales might be much harder to do or it's going to be you're driving that outside traffic. You got to be good at the social media game and that's where user generated content and mastering tiktok and instagram and that kind of stuff is going to become much more important that you put that into your arsenal of actually figuring that out so that you can have some sort of influence that's not driven by AI. Danny: Do you think also that people eventually, There's two things because it depends on what's more important. Let me give an example. So in terms of search, in terms of sponsored products, it's keyword driven. But if you look at the results and the technology they've got, there's the semantic element as well. So if they are shifting their organic results, it's pushed below the fold. Speaker 2: But it's not just keyword driven, it was keyword driven. Danny: No I know. Speaker 2: Even on broad matches they'll show a word that's not even in your, that you're not even going after. Danny: Well yeah because it's semantically matched. Right, this is the bit I'm trying to get to. Like there's more and more that we see it. The point I was going to land is do you think we're going to get to a point where There's almost sellers and software companies will just literally have to see that when they got keywords indexed and they're not ranking, they accept then the shifts coming rather than accepting there's a shift on the way. Do you understand what I mean? Because everyone's bought into, and it's true, you know, you want to get as many keywords indexed as possible, right? That's true. But with these shifts, we're not seeing all the movements underneath. But one day, when the switch goes on, and everything tanks, how long is it going to take for people to catch up and go, maybe should have listened to Kevin two years ago, when he was talking about Semantic and Burt. Do you understand what I mean? How far away do you think, and do you think people are finally going to get the message, this is coming? Speaker 2: I don't think it's going to hit most of them until it slaps them in the face. There will be a denial or they don't want to do the work. Or they may be, yeah, yeah, that sounds good, Kevin, but it's going to be a way. It's going to be a while or I don't need to do anything now. I'm worried about paying my bills and covering my payroll right now. This is how it works right now, so that's what I'm going to focus on. But that's a mistake. And another thing on this too is the imagery. I think with the AI, it's not just the sentience and everything we were talking about with how they analyze your listing. Part of that selling to the AI is going to be in your images. Vanessa gave a good example of this in that talk that she did is you take a water bottle and if you have a water bottle and you show a lifestyle picture of someone taking that water bottle to the beach because they're taking their tea or their water or whatever or cold drink to the beer or whatever to the beach, the AI is going to analyze that and it's going to go, okay, this is a water bottle for the beach. We're going to include that in any kind of beach-related Searches or whatever. But if you don't have a picture in there of a water bottle hanging off someone's waist while they're jogging, you might not become relevant for that because there's not an image of them jogging. So what you choose in your lifestyle stack and how you do that is gonna, I think, influence the sentience and how you relate and how you show up too. So that's gonna be a problem for some people because most people suck at creating images and lifestyle images. They don't know how to do this right. And I think that's gonna. Danny: Yeah, go on, I'll let you finish, because I want to stay on this, because there's more problems down the road people are going to face. Speaker 2: Yeah, so on imagery, and then sometimes the AI misinterprets the image. There's tools out there now, it's not Amazon's tool, but there's tools that are similar, where you can drop an image into it, you just drop the JPEG or PNG in and say, describe this to me. And they'll come back, the AI will look at it and say, okay, this is a mobile phone sitting on a desk or whatever. The phone is black and has a big screen. But I've done testing with it where I have on the back of my phone I don't have it on this phone but I have a little thing that sticks on the back, it's little glasses, you know I'm old so I got little reading glasses to read the menu in the restaurant and you just pull them out and so I took this and I took a picture of it and I put it into this AI and said describe this to me and it thought the little case that was on the back of the phone were keys, not little reading glasses. So that was a completely misinterpretation of what it was and what I would need to do to fix that is change the angle Change the composition of the photo in the lifestyle photo to make it clear. And that's an example of how you're going to be able to create for the AI and not just create for humans. Otherwise, you could completely get miscategorized or not show up for what you want to show up for. Danny: Yeah. And you've also got image attributes that no one's really aware of, like what you just said there. So, for instance, you've got recognition, which is in AWS. So you can right-click and take your image URL, drop that in there. There's a number of things, you can check things like colors, the words that are on the images, because this is like Amazon are using a recognition tool, right? So they're cross-checking attributes and I've done a A long post on this based on some papers but then I physically texted this one with recognition which is in AWS. So you might have something, say you got some pens like in the case and that's the product if it's pens in the case but actually says first aid kit or first underscore aid as in a first aid kit. Now one of the problems you're going to face with that as well because they've got, you can have Tailored Attributes or you can have the list of attributes and see what meets them. So let's say you've got a garlic press, for instance, you can use the garlic attribute, right? Because what the idea is, is that when it's cross-referencing, so it's looking through all your attributes on the listing, including your titles, your bullet points, you know, sizes and everything else. Cross-reference to the image and then in the image, if it's got say a bar of soap and it's lava, it'll pick up and goes, okay, lava, brand name in the title, lava. Now there is an override to that as well, because let's say you're using it in your description of your image and you might put green and it's teal or it's teal but it's green and it's not using their standards. These are all things you've got to look at. But the biggest one I think people are going to come up against, when people show all of their accessories in the image, right, to the product, it confuses it because you can upload the image and as you scanned over, say that you've got a Swiss Army knife, you've got a box and everything else, it misrepresents what's on there. So you scan over and it's not that or it comes up as unknown. Because it can't get a good enough scan. So it can't then look at the title. It can't look at the other attributes to go, yes, this is a match. And I think attributes are going to play a massive role. Again, what are attributes? We look at what Vanessa's talking about. You've got to nail the basics as well. You've got to look at your browse nodes and everything else and make sure they're all tailored and tied in correctly. Because this is all about the structured data that you present as well. Because there's two types of data. You've got structured data and unstructured data. We put in unstructured data into Amazon, then there are structured data which they have, which is a guideline that you will follow based on their structured data. So our data is really, really important now, more so than ever. Because attributes play a big role. So if you have problems with ranking, it could be something related to your image because it depends on what it's scanned. It looks up at the attribute to whether it matches what's in the title. Is this a bottle of suntan lotion? Well, the image doesn't say that. This says it's a bottle of toothpaste or it's an oil or something, and it doesn't meet up with each other. Now, I don't know where that's going to go and whether or how much damage it's going to be done, but the image recognition isn't matching. It could cause problems down the road. And I think once, you know, and I'm not talking about you shouldn't have accessories in your image, but when you've seen, you know, the ones I'm talking about when they've got 400 pieces in there and they're just squeezing everything in thinking it's value for money. Well, their tools may not be able to pick up on those correctly and it could have impact, but we don't know how much impact. Speaker 2: You know, people that are just, that have, like you asked earlier, when people are going to pay attention, the people that have all that, they're going to have to, one day they're going to not rank and they're going to be like, what do I got to do? They got to redo their entire library of imagery and that's going to be a major chore and expense and then maybe they'll let AI do some of that. I think Amazon's gonna probably at some point go to the point where, you know, they got AI image generation now that they're testing, but I think at some point they're gonna go to, you got certain images have to be actually real pictures. You know, it's just like with some of the Kickstarter or something. You know, now it used to be when Kickstarter you could put up a 3D render of your product and actually raise money on Kickstarter. Now they require an actual photo. of the product, you know, it's actually a photo taken with a camera, not something, I think Amazon might get to that point where they'll let you have a couple AI images in your listing and you're gonna have to have X number of images that are real pictures or something to that effect, just for some of the reasons that you just said, but also just to prove that this product exists. Danny: Yes, it's definitely going to be interested, but at the end of the day, none of that's relevant unless you've got a good product that is desirable for people to purchase. Speaker 2: Exactly, you gotta, exactly. And I mean, that's also, this plays into more of the branding, you know, Amazon is still an awesome place to sell and everybody should be selling on Amazon but it's not the only place. I think TikTok shop is another one. In 2024, people need to be paying attention to. There's another fellow that has another newsletter out there that says that you're wasting your time. If you do anything on TikTok, it's going to go away. I think that's absolutely wrong. I think TikTok is going to be number two behind Amazon within the next few years. It's already making big inroads. I think it'll be bigger than Walmart.com in the United States especially if they are able to buy or acquire a good fulfillment and bring that in-house. They're way behind Amazon. Walmart included is way behind Amazon. Nobody's going to catch Amazon. Anytime in the near future when it comes to D2C fulfillment, nobody. They just have a 20-year running start and $100 billion running start. And so that's not going to happen but social media especially TikTok shop I think is going to be huge and people that aren't paying attention to that I think are going to be leaving some money on the table not only for driving sales to Amazon Because people will just go to Amazon because their credit cards are already there and they'll find it on Amazon. TikTok is a discovery platform. You look at the 16 to 24 year olds, 40% of them, TikTok is where they go to search. They don't go to Google to search for something. They want to know how to tie their shoes. They go tie my shoes in TikTok. They don't go to Google or YouTube to find a video. So that's gonna be a big shift too and so people, right now is a golden time. You hear people making, killing on TikTok. It's gonna get more competitive but That's an algorithm also that you don't control. Another thing I think a lot of sellers need to be doing is because you don't control Amazon, you don't control TikTok, you should use those platforms absolutely. But you need to do everything in your power to get your customers' names, email addresses, and phone numbers into a database that's on your local machine, not stored in a cloud that could get shut off, maybe it's stored there, but it's backed up regularly to a local machine sitting in your house or in your office because that's your golden asset. If you have the customer list, then you can pivot easily onto other platforms. You can import it, you can email, you can physically mail, you can do whatever and that's where a lot of people And this business have a weakness, including the biggest aggregators. They got sales and they got distribution, but they don't own the most valuable asset of any business, which is a customer list. And that's something I think more and more people need to focus on. That's why I'm doing newsletter stuff right now. That's why I'm doing it for my Billion Dollar Seller Summit for the education, but I'm also doing it for physical products because it's a great way to capture that stuff. Cool should we go another thing I think people people need to focus on and most people just glossing over. Danny: Should we go into the newsletter to how to use it for products I mean I can completely understand why you're doing it. In terms of sharing industry information and we discussed earlier on off call that the curation is important. The person who's curating it and resources or sources where it comes from, it's going to make the biggest part of the newsletter. But that's sourcing information in that sense. How would people use it for their own products and get a similar impact to what you get? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm doing it right now for my own products. I started it originally because I already had an audience, you know, with billion-dollar sellers and online. I'm like, this is easy. Let me figure out the software. Let me figure out the tools. I don't got to reinvent the wheel. And so I started the billion-dollar sellers newsletter in my audience, but the way to do it for products is at Sculptor Avatar. So like for example, I have a dog product and our dog product is, our market is people who own a dog and are also into sustainability. So it's not just a broad market of dog owners. It's niched down to people also in sustainability. So we've created a newsletter that's about dogs. It's not about our company. It's not, you know, if my company is Wag House, it's not about, it's not the Wag House newsletter or Wag House bites. It's a dog. It's a dog-based newsletter. I won't give the name out. We haven't launched it just yet, but I will once we've launched it. It's a dog-based newsletter. In this newsletter are articles about dogs. So there's dog training tips. There's tips from a vet. Why does a dog lick its paws? Here's seven reasons. Here's three ways to train your new puppy to behave. Here's a story about some firehouse dog that rescued some old lady out of a fire. Here's three ways to keep your dog from eating fast and getting gas. Here's a cool new bed that just came out that's an affiliate link. Things like that and then we can start seeing what people are clicking and you can, with the right tools like Beehive, you can actually put people into buckets. So if I see that Danny is always clicking the story about dash hounds or dachshunds, you say dash hounds I think in the UK but dachshunds over here. He's probably interested in docs and stuff. Maybe I can sell him docs and stuff. I got 10,000 people on my list and 420 of them are always clicking stuff about docs or have clicked stuff about docs. I know I can probably, that may be a product I want to make or whatever the math is. You got to look at the math. I could start tailoring it towards him. We're also doing customization where you can upload a picture of your dog. And we're using Web3 and NFTs, not NFT, JPEGs to go sell them on Ethereum and Arsalana and make tons of money, but using the technology more as a collectible. And so you upload a picture of your dog, we turn it into an NFT that goes into an easy-to-access wallet. You don't have to, you know, grandma can access it. You don't have to have all these passwords and jump through all these hoops, you know, like you do in crypto. And with that NFT, we use that in every newsletter and we use AI to actually create an image and animate the dog. So we can change the dog's face. We can put its ears with AI so that they're up and cocked to the side like it's listening. And then every day, we put a different background. We put the dog in a different scene with AI. So if it's a holiday, if it's Christmas, here's the dog in front of a Christmas tree or whatever. If it's the dog's birthday, there's a dog with a little birthday cake and candles and happy birthday Fido. That picture shows up in their newsletter customized to them, not to everybody's newsletter, but it's your dog. If you don't have a, if you haven't uploaded a picture, we might show you some of the other people's dogs as an example. And then there's a little button there that says share on social, because if it's a cute picture, you're like, oh, this is so cute, I want to share this with my friends. You hit it, it shares it on Facebook. People are seeing it on social, they're like, Where'd you get that? Or it's, you know, it's branded. And they're like, Oh, I want that too. So they go sign up for the newsletter. So you get them in your ecosystem. There's another button on this picture in the newsletter that says, it's a print on demand. Click here, it'll take you to Merch by Amazon or one of the other programs. And you can get it on a coffee mug, get it on a mouse pad, get it on a t-shirt, whatever you want if you think it's cute. So you make a little bit of money there. You're making money by selling advertising by building an audience. I make good money off of advertising by building an audience and you're selling a Korean dog chow. There's a lot of people that want to advertise in newsletters. They'll pay you a thousand bucks if you got a decent audience. Write a little ad in there. Then you're doing affiliate links. So you're making money off affiliate links. You can test things. If I'm thinking, well, I'm going to, I'm thinking about doing a slow feed dog bowl. Let me go take my seven top competitors on Amazon and link to them and see what people click on and get their feedback. You can create products. If I do that, I see that this one particular type of slow feed dog bowl is good. I'll use the AI tools like we talked about earlier and other things and go analyze what are the problems, what can I fix. I'll ask the customers, what would you like to be better about this? We'll create prototypes, let them be involved in the process, almost like a little kind of mini pick-fu, and then when the product is available and live on Amazon, we'll say, hey, the product that you newsletter subscribers picked is now available on Amazon, go buy it. And if you go buy it on Amazon, Which will then rank it and in theory under the current methods it will help rank it. Then we actually drop via NFT, we drop you a little bonus to your NFT. So now your NFT of your dog, she gets a gold collar or she gets a special leash or she gets a little hat or she gets some sort of accessory and it becomes a collectible. Not everybody that gets the newsletter cares about that, but a certain percentage of them will play that game. Those are your diehard customers. Those are your loyal fans that will buy anything you want to buy. And then you just create this flywheel that then I own the customer. I own their email address, so I don't have to worry if Facebook closes down my account. There went 10 years of work of building a list of 100,000 people. I don't have to know like on a podcast, all I'm doing is looking at downloads. Okay, 2700 people downloaded this episode. I have no clue who they are. I have no idea who those people are, how to reach them. I just got to hope they listen to the next time and then you can take this and you can take that newsletter and then if you want, you can use the newsletter to create the, use the social media and Amazon to source the audience, use the newsletter to own the audience and then use a podcast to become their best friend because podcasts are the most personal. It's one-to-one, it's that old talk radio and so you can take it and have a dog newsletter podcast that people listen to. As you know, you're a podcast host, It's the best one-to-one relationship that you can create. You create friends and you create personalities that way people get to know you. You go to a show and If someone comes up to you and they feel like you're their buddy and you've been hanging out for three years and you don't know the first clue about them and you're like looking at them like, who's this strange guy that knows what I ate seven years ago? It's nice though. Danny: He's powerful because people speak to you. Speaker 2: He's powerful. So that's how you do it with products and is that easy? Absolutely not. Is that some guru on YouTube going to show you how to do this and make a million bucks in a month? No, it's not going to happen. It's a long-term play and it does take a skill set on some of that. You can hire some of that or you can learn it. But like you said, the curation, like back on a newsletter, curation, I mean, it's important on a podcast too. Who you have as guests on your podcast can make or break you. But on a newsletter, the curation is important. It's not just gathering links and that's where most people in our industry fail. Most people There's a lot of people listening to this right now that are service providers. I'm like, oh yeah, we got a newsletter. Like, no, you freaking don't. You have a promotional email. That's garbage. Most of it, 95% of them are pure crap. My newsletter, if you have people, you have people that want to get it. They get mad every Monday and Thursday. If it's not in their inbox, they're like, where is it? If it went to their spam, they're hunting it down. I can tell you that this has surprised me actually. I've had 160,000 as of last year, this is probably more now, but it's about a year ago, 160,000 people had gone through the Freedom Ticket course at Helium 10. That's a lot of people. I get recognized by Uber drivers in New York that went through the Freedom Ticket. And I get people at shows that come up to me that did it four years ago and said, thank you so much. I learned the basics from you and now we're doing crazy numbers on Amazon. That's all cool. I have the podcast, the AM PM podcast that reaches thousands of people every week. I speak at events all over the world just like you have. I host events. Those are all great, but I can tell you that there's been nothing that I've ever done, and this has surprised me, that's had more impact or been more powerful at moving the needle than the newsletter. I get more people that come up to me at shows now and say I love the newsletter, keep it up. I get more feedback and more influence off of that than anything else that I've done. Take that from what I'm doing in this space and put that into a product space and imagine what you can do and you control it. You're in control of that, not depending on if you post something on Facebook to your 10,000 followers and only 216 of them actually see it because it goes through their feed. You control it. I've got 56% open rates, so I know if I send out 7,000 newsletters, almost 4,000 people actually at least scrolled it. It doesn't mean they read it. They at least opened it and probably took a scroll and gandered down but open rates aren't what matters, it's click rates. My click rate in this reality, anything above 4% is considered exceptional. I'm 14.7% so that tells you the engagement rate. So that's what you want and the curation is the hard part because so many people are like, what do I put? And so you'll see in my newsletter, I don't do the same old stories that everybody, if everybody's talking about fees just went up like they are right now on Amazon. Danny: You skip that, move on to something else. Speaker 2: I skip it, I skip it or if I have a unique angle to it. Like in the A9, there was a unique angle, like you did a story, several other people did some stories. I talked to the data scientists at Helium 10 who studied all 137 of them. And so I was like, okay, I have an angle here. I did one on aggregators. It's a different kind of little angle or compiling seven different points of view into one or something like that. I'll do it then, but otherwise I skip it. And so it's a mix of entertainment, a mix of humor, a mix of being edgy. Practical tips of news and that's the hard part. I have a background of journalism. When I was in high school, I was in school editor of the newspaper. So, I'm lucky in that way but that's part of it as well and then being edgy, not being PC or woke, you know, and I had this just happen at ASGTG. Well, I did a newsletter that when I said earlier the naked girl on the balcony story and that rubbed a few people wrong and there's been a couple other things I've had in the newsletter that I've gotten some feedback from. Someone wanted me to make a public apology of a picture I put in there. Like it didn't offend them, it just offended, I mean it offended them personally, it offended them just as a woman. But I got tons of comments of people that loved it. But this Naked Girl on the Balcony one, when I sent it out back in September, I think, August or September, I got a message back from a fellow that said, hey, I'm going to have to unsubscribe here because this is not what I signed up for. I don't want this smut coming to my mailbox. I'm here to learn and do my business. Danny: But it's not smut. Speaker 2: Hold on, let me finish the story. So I don't want this smut coming to my inbox. I'm here to learn and to improve my livelihood and put food on the table for my family. I'm like, yes, I got one of these because for every one of those I got, I got 100, this is freaking awesome, this is great, I love it. You're not being PC. You have an edge to it. It's your personality. And then at Christmas time, I come out every Monday and Thursday. Well, Christmas was on a Monday this year. So I'm like, well, do I put on a newsletter? Yes, I'm going to be religious. You got to be, you cannot miss. So every, so on Monday, Christmas Day, I was like, but I'm going to, what I'm going to do is I'm going to, I'm going to recycle some of the old stuff. I'm going to take a couple of the most popular stories that people probably miss that weren't a subscriber then. And put it in there just to, and then I put some quotes in. I said here's some of the quotes that I've gotten over the first four months of the newsletter, positive and negative. One of the negative quotes that I put in was this fellow saying this is garbage and smut and take me off the list and whatever. At ASTGG last week, a fellow comes up to me and says, hey, you used my quote. I'm like, what do you mean? He said, yeah, a couple weeks ago in the newsletter, you put the quote where I said I was gonna unsubscribe because of the nature of what you talked about. I said, how'd you know? He said, no, I'm a subscriber. I was like, oh, you're still subscribed? He said, oh yeah, this is my Bible. I'm not gonna unsubscribe. So that shows you the point that. Danny: So he took the time out of his day, he got triggered and sent that. Like, let's be clear, right, so we don't both get cancelled. I agree you don't objectify women and everything else, you know. Speaker 2: Right, correct, correct, yeah. Danny: But what I'm saying here, what was in that email, because I read it, wasn't objectification. It was an observation of a person didn't have clothes on out of their own choice, On a balcony two stories down, but it wasn't written in a smutty way. And I think what happened... Speaker 2: No, I wrote it in a way to tie it to us that sometimes that's how we feel on Amazon. You know, we feel naked against them. They have their clothes on. We don't because they're in control and we're exposed on what we're doing. So I tied it into the business side as a parable. Danny: Yeah. And that's what I'm saying. Speaker 2: Or objectification about it at all. Danny: But that's how cancellation starts because what happened is someone gets triggered right because they go you know this and then they write something back because that's their first reaction. But what they wrote back was they said it was smart when it wasn't smart. So that's where the problem starts to lie. Do you understand what I'm saying? So you have to kind of have a filter of context because we do live in a world of cancel culture now. You're not allowed to say this, you're not allowed to say that. And fair enough, there's certain things you leave alone or whatever. But in the context of that, it's more coming down to the person looked at it, felt a certain way. A guy felt a certain way. And took out a context of exactly what was said. Do you understand? And that's where you do have to have a little bit of self-regulation and think about, okay, what was it? Was it smart? No. Smart to me is what the kids used to go and buy on the magazine shelf in the shop, which is clearly objectification. But that's, there's nuances there and I think this is where some problems lie is that can you have a joke, can you not have a joke and sometimes you are going to offend people but generally it comes down to their personal triggers. There's a difference between overtly insulting someone, do you know what I mean? But it, what's a trendspires is stay the subscriber. Speaker 2: He stayed a subscriber and that same time I got hundreds of people saying this is awesome, keep it up. So you're appealing to your avatar, you know your audience. So the people that always try to please, too many people in business and in life try to please everybody and you can't do that. I always say if you're not offending somebody, you're not doing your job. In marketing, That doesn't mean you need to be mean to somebody. Danny: It's the difference between offending people. Look, you're going to walk through life, you're going to walk in a room and not everyone's going to like you. And there are people that don't even like themselves. So it's having a bit of self-awareness around it and look at the context. Where does that come from? Do they not like you because of low self-esteem? Do they like you, dislike you, envy, jealousy? Could be anything. I'm not accusing anyone of anything. But you do have to understand in life, it doesn't matter who you are, you can be the nicest person in the world. There's someone out there that will find a way not to like you. So all you can do is control your behaviors, your words, And now you talk to yourself pretty much right and be authentic to yourself exactly and of course you know. There is an element, there are people sit there and go, do you know what, I'm gonna put this out and trigger the fuck out of people. That's a different story. That's like trying to get attention for the wrong reason just to get attention. Speaker 2: That's just creating shock value, that's all that is. Danny: Yeah, exactly. And we see that with clips online, do you know what I mean? People are doing that and they're being disingenuous in doing that and it triggers people. But you're right, you're always gonna find people that dislike you, right? And that's okay. As long as you've got a healthy sense of self and a bit of self-awareness. Speaker 2: It's just like people that don't like your product. I mean, people that return your product, they say it's garbage. Whatever, and you're like, no, this is great. Everybody else loves it. You can't please everybody. And that's a hard thing for a lot of people. They think some people take it personal and you can't do that. Danny: Do you know what that is? It's codependency. If you try and be a pleaser to everyone, you're just codependent, you know, and that's stuff that you need to work on yourself. Look at your childhood. Why do you have to feel that way? Because basically you're using The acceptance of everyone around you to self-regulate and that isn't healthy because that doesn't mean you won't have a healthy sense of self. There's a difference between having a massive ego and having a healthy sense of self, you know, where you're aware. Anyway, I went off on a bit of a tangent there. Where are we now with the newsletter? So if we were to sum up the podcast now, let's break down key points of using it for a product, because like you said, the curation part is going to take some time. So you must have good domain knowledge of the industry and your product's got to be worthy of newsworthy stuff to put in there, right? Or is there something I'm missing? Speaker 2: Now you can do it almost on any industry. I mean, and there's tools. This is where AI can come in. Some of the AI tools can help you in that curation. You still need a human at the end of the day to like To do the final editing and look at it, but there's plenty of tools that can help in this, in that research curation point and that's just knowing how do I want to do, how do I want to make the mix, how do I want to make this, what am I going to feed for dinner today, what am I going to put as my main, what am I going to put as my sides, what's going to be the dessert and what's going to be the appetizer or whatever. It's just like being a chef. Danny: Yeah. Speaker 2: It's powerful and it's something I think a lot of people need to be looking at more than they are. Danny: Yes, indeed. What's the best way for everyone to reach you and what you got coming up? Speaker 2: Yeah, the best way to stay in touch with who I do is BillionDollarSellers.com. Sellers with an S, BillionDollarSellers.com, that's my newsletter. If you're on that list, now I do warn you if you sign up for the newsletter, I've got about 7,000 people on there right now. I've had about 13,000 people sign up for it. About 3,000 of them never click the confirmation email after signing up so I don't send you anything. And then another close to 3,000 have been booted out by me. I've kicked them out. And this is free, but I kick you out. If you don't open the newsletter and click at least once in a month, it's both, not either or, but open and click at least once a month, you're off the list without warning. So I've removed about 3,000 people who are too busy. Because I only want a highly engaged, good audience. Danny: That's going to affect all your conversion rates, isn't it? Your open rates, click-through rates and everything else. Speaker 2: It affects open rates, it affects conversion rates, it affects deliverability. So if you've got 3,000 people on there that aren't opening it, Google's going to start looking and the people that do want it aren't going to get it because Google's like, People aren't paying attention here so let's put this in the promotions tab or the junk folder and so there's that that's one reason plus it's a funnel I mean it's a funnel for my BDSS virtual event in my BDSS and so if you're not you're not paying attention you're not interested you ain't gonna buy anything anyway so might as well make room for somebody else. Danny: Guys, thank you for joining us today. Kevin, again, thank you for giving up your time. Look forward to getting you back in the future. If you want tickets for Seller Sessions Live, go to sellersessions.com forward slash live 2024. May 11th, got a couple of workshops. Brandon Young's doing one, Steve Simonson's doing one, and I'll be doing more announcements later in the week. Kevin, what have you got coming up for your event? And it's in May, is it? Speaker 2: Well, I've got a virtual one February 20th to the 22nd, BillionDollarSellerSummit.com. Tickets will be going on sale the first week of February for that. So, I've got 18 speakers, got the hat contest, $2,500 cash prize, it's not pre-recorded, it's not a Zoom call, it's a special conferencing software, the breakout rooms. It's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool experience. So yeah, it's February 20th to the 22nd. Next level stuff, not the same stuff you hear people talk about at other events or on podcasts. It's really good. And then after that in May is the in-person event in Hawaii. Danny: Great, guys. Thanks for joining us. I'll be back here next week. Take care of yourself and your family. Much love and I'll see you then.