Why AI Is Crushing Unprepared Amazon Sellers | Kevin King

Why AI Is Crushing Unprepared Amazon Sellers | Kevin King Speaker 2: Every Amazon seller is talking about using AI for Amazon. But almost no one is doing it well. It's not just about faster listing optimizations or generating cool images. In this episode, we're going to reveal how top Amazon sellers are using AI tools to launch smarter, to test faster, and oh yeah, this is an important one, outthink their competitors. And check out what we found out about AI generated copy. You'll absolutely want to rethink the way that you're creating your listings. All right, we got a special guest today, my buddy who always provides me with gummies and I'm talking about the regular gummies when I go to his house and even dog ice cream. So I really appreciate that. So our guest has been a leader in the direct marketing and eCommerce space since 1989. He's an old guy like me. He's the creator of the Billion Dollar Seller Newsletter and Freedom Ticket, the number one Amazon course that served over 106, I think it's over 200 students now. He founded the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. He hosts the AM PM podcast and has sold over eight figures and products. He's also my co-host with the Marketing Misfits. Kevin has spoken at over a hundred plus events and has been featured in the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. So if you don't know who I'm talking about, I'm talking about the man, the myth, Kevin King. So we'll be getting to him just after a word from our sponsor. Sellerboard, Sophie, Titan, and Connect Cash. Thank you so much for being sponsors. Without you, this podcast wouldn't exist. And sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. It's been a long time since he's been on my podcast. Welcome, Kevin King. Speaker 3: What's up, Mr. Farrar? Speaker 2: Lots going on. I think we just go and talk about anything, any rabbit hole, but AI is probably the biggest thing we could talk about and what's happening tomorrow. Speaker 3: Yeah, tomorrow we got a really cool webinar happening, but AI is, you asked about the number of registrations. We were, about two hours ago, we're at 1,245. So that's gonna probably go up to, I don't know if Kelsey's sending another email out to the Lunch With Norm crowd today or not, but that'll go up to 1,400, 1,500, maybe more. Not everybody shows up, of course, but it'll be a really good audience. And we got, like you said, we got eight really awesome speakers that are gonna be showing about five minutes each. They're gonna be showing some tactical and actionable stuff. And then that it's kind of a preview of what they're gonna be doing on the 20th on the workshop where they're gonna spend an hour going deep into details one after another all day long on a Sunday. And it's gonna be really, really cool. But even if you can't do the workshop, showing up tomorrow is definitely worth it. And if you're watching this after, there's a replay available. So if you register, you'll get the replay. If you missed this totally, you're watching this on YouTube and it's like three weeks after, you can go to billiondollarsellers.media, billiondollarsellers.media, and you can catch it there. Or you can go, it'll probably be on the Misfits YouTube channel as well right so you could find it there if you're if you're catching this episode later But yeah, AI is hot right now, and I don't know if that's where you want to go down, but I've got I'll be doing a little state of the AI tomorrow on the newsletter, just to kick it off, but glad to talk whatever you want to talk. Speaker 2: I think the first thing that we should talk about, a lot of Amazon sellers are worried right now. They don't know if they're going to exist because of AI. Speaker 3: They're not. Speaker 2: Tell me about it. What do they have to be worried about and what can they do to stay in the game? Speaker 3: To stay in the game, you need to be on top of AI. You don't even need to be an AI expert. And when I'm saying stay on top of AI, I don't mean know how to write an email using ChatGPT. I mean, knowing what's going on. You don't have to be proficient at every little tool and there's so much out there, but you need to know the general gist and so that you can guide people that are good at these different things into those tasks and gel it all together. And that's critical. And so if you're oblivious to what's happening in agentic AI or you're oblivious to what's happening with the marketplaces and where we're going and what's going to be happening, you're going to be caught with your pants down. And I firmly believe that only about one in three of the current Amazon sellers are going to survive the next couple of years because of this. And you and I, with the Marketing Misfits Podcast, we're about 15 episodes or so ahead right now, and we've got At least four or five of those are people from different walks of life, you know, from Neil Patel to you name it, talking about how AI is changing everything. And there's some really cool stuff coming out there. And we stay on the cutting edge of this and I've seen what's happening and it's small right now. So this agentic thing and the agentic shopping, it's not major, but you're seeing what's happening with conversion rates nine times higher than anything else that's out there. And it's growing, it's growing, it's growing. It's going to take a couple of years for it to really start being dominant, but that's what we said about It's going to take a long time for AI to catch up to where it is now. And we're way ahead of where it is. So who knows how long this is going to be, but you need to start playing now and preparing now and changing what you're doing now. You just take a look at the advertising side of Amazon, for example, with PPC right now, you know, you're, you're determining what you do on your PPC or your agency's determining what you do on your PPC, on your manual campaigns, on, on your, your DSP. I believe that sometime within the next maybe year, maybe less, you're not going to be able to do that anymore. Amazon is going to completely control it. You're going to say, this is my product. Here's what I'm willing to spend. Advertise it. Speaker 2: We're already seeing that, Kev, with like titles. So you go in, you have this short title, you have a keyword in it. And depending on where you are and who you are, the title changes automatically to hopefully convert you. Speaker 3: Yeah, no, they're doing that. They're doing that with images now. I saw Destiny with Sean just posted something that They're testing, changing out the images and creating AI images based on what they know about you. You got to remember Amazon and Google and Facebook and all these, they know every freaking thing about you. ChatGPT does too. So they can customize to what they think is going to convert better than what you can. And you're going to lose some control. So you've got to have to put out a good product and make sure that your listing is feeding the database And feeding the AI the right information for who your profile, your avatar is, so that they can then turn this and actually show that. But you look at what Facebook, Zuckerberg, back to the advertising, just to finish that. He said that by next year on Facebook, you're not going to control anything on advertising, on meta. You're just going to say, this is what I want to advertise. Here's my money, go. Look at what TikTok just did. TikTok just said GMV Max is it. You can't do any of this other targeting or any of this other stuff anymore. We got you. Don't worry about it. I think Amazon is going to be next. And Google is doing that now with Pro, what's it called? Pro Max or whatever it's called. But they still have some control, but it's all moving in that direction. And so more and more that's going to happen. So that's going to be on you now to make sure you're listing and you're optimized for the AI. And when it comes to The search, I believe that a few years from now, if not sooner, definitely within the next three or four years, if not sooner, most people are not going to go to Amazon.com to buy something. Amazon's going to still be there because they got the logistics and the infrastructure. There'll be some people that go to Amazon.com, but it's going to be almost like that little toggle at the top. You want to go to the old site or the new site? Most people are going to be going to Perplexi or ChatGPT or Google, probably Google in most cases, or ChatGPT. Those are the two. And they're going to be searching there. I need a new dog bowl. And they're going to start there. And then that's going to lead you to Amazon versus starting on Amazon. And if you're not optimized on the ChatGPT side, To actually show up on those listings. It's called AEO. Some people call it GEO. There's AIO. Speaker 2: There's like EIEIO I heard. Speaker 3: EIEIO, but I prefer to call it AEO. At some point, a name will settle that everybody agrees on, but it's answer engine optimization versus search engine optimization. And a lot of people, I don't care, I sell on Amazon. You need to care because these are going to be driving a lot of traffic to Amazon and a significant portion. And the conversion rates are higher. And if you're not showing up there and they don't show the whole list, they don't show here's 50 products you might be interested in. If you go look at what they're doing now, they're showing three or four or five that may expand out. But if you're not one of those, then you're missing the ball. But here's the kicker. You remember the early days you were back in 2015 where you could just put up a product on Amazon. And get a couple reviews and then go to the beach and just hear your phone ching, ching, ching all day because you're there first. You built that moat around you with reviews. The guys that were there in 2015 selling by CSERM built 50,000 reviews. And 2020, 2021, the aggregators bottom up for a lot of money. The same thing's happening right now in AEO. Yes, it's not going to be a major portion of your sales right this second. But if you act now and get there, a few years from now, you're going to be sitting prime duck at the very top of the ladder because you've already taught ChatGPT that you're the product that people click on. You're already optimized for that and you're going to ride that wave while everybody else is crying going, why is my Amazon traffic down 80%? You're going to be like the newspaper people now. Look at what Google did with AI overviews. You have all the newspaper people that used to get all these traffic to their website and they're selling ads based on that traffic because people type into Google, you know, looking for the news or whatever, and they go to the New York Times or Washington Post or whatever it is. They're down 80% and they're crying because Google now is doing AI overviews and people don't have to click off. They get it right there. That's going to happen for your Amazon listing. And you're going to see, that's why I say two out of three are not going to make it because they weren't prepared for this and they're going to be crying. And you're going to see $5 million sellers are doing $5 million a year now, I think go down to half a million and bail, which is good. That's going to open up You know, less competition in some cases for the ones that are prepared. So that's just the touch of it. Speaker 2: Yeah. So, Kevin, one of the things that I learned about, I think it was last month, and I believe it was your newsletter. You know, it's okay sometimes. Speaker 3: You read it. You read it. Speaker 2: I do read it. I do read it. And you can see my clicks. So, you know, when I, you know, so. But in your newsletter around three to four weeks ago, you had something that caught my eye and that was something called an LLMS.txt. And from that point, we started, like I reached out to our web technician, like Wenver, our developer, and I said, you got to understand this, learn everything you need to know about this and get this into all of our websites now. And so he's implemented it. I don't know if he's put into everything because he wanted to research more about it, but that's something that if you're not doing for your sites, the LLMs are not going to pick you up or they're not going to pick you up and rank you as quick as you could be ranked, right? Want more unfiltered tips from top eCommerce experts? Well, hit subscribe and you'll never miss a Lunch With Norm episode. Speaker 3: The LLMs, they're spiders. They lack structured data. And so an LLMS.txt is a file. It's kind of like an invisible file that sits inside your web route. You know, if your website is lunchwithnorm.com, underneath that is index.html, which is your homepage and then your subdirectories and everything. There's an LLMS.txt file that sits there. For those of you that are coders, there's also a robots.txt file and that tells spiders don't go to this directory or don't do this. There's also a sitemap.xml. There's a lot of little files in there. They're kind of like a table of contents. So the LLMS is like a table of contents for the spiders, for like Claude and Gemini and OpenAI and Perplexity and all those guys. If you don't have that, they can still crawl you, but it's not going to be as structured and they may miss some stuff. So this is like you're feeding the candy to the baby and you're like, here you go. And there's also something called structured schema that you actually need to have as well. And a lot of people do schema and they do it with JSON or JavaScript. And that's the common way to do it. Developers do it and some tools automatically do it, but it does it with JavaScript or JSON. Spiders, the LLM spiders ignore that. So it has to be hard coded, which means it has to be in the actual code. It can't be just dynamically generated. And that that schema has to be there. And I know like Neil Patel now just said that even he's putting schema in his blog post that he just mentioned this yesterday on something that he did. He said, look, at the top of every blog post, we're doing a Sometimes people do that TRDL too long or TLDR, whatever, to not read. But he's like, at the top, we put the summary, like the three or four key points, bullet points or takeaways are at the very top. And they're in a certain bullet point format because the LLMs like that. So they're formatting some stuff that way. But those are important. Fundamentals and that's not necessarily saying, okay, you do that and you're gonna all of a sudden rank number one. But those are fundamentals that need to be there for you to have a chance to do it. So you need to make sure on anything you're doing, your blogs or your own personal website, your Shopify site, or whatever you're doing that needs to have that there. You can't do that on Amazon. But all this other stuff, you definitely need to make sure that's there. And the other thing that's Super important now or SEO is not dead, but it's rapidly changing and it used to be backlinks were super important and they're becoming less and less important in the AEO world. What's important are reviews, Your reviews, not just your Amazon reviews, but across the web are critically important now. They've always been important for ranking and selling and conversions, but they're even more important because the AI search engines trust those. They don't trust what you say on your website because you could say whatever. They trust that. They trust authority. You need to be an authority in whatever you're selling. So your sites or you as a person or your representative needs to be seen as an authority That's super, super important as well. And another one is social comments and social interactivity, whether that's Quora questions, whether that's Wikipedia, whether that's Facebook or Instagram, Reddit is huge. Reddit is massive for the AI. You need to have a lot of social proof and a lot of comments and where people are saying stuff about you and your brand. Those have become even more important today than anything. You look at like Gemini, YouTube is super important for Gemini. They're doing transcripts of every video and they're looking at the comments and the interactions. The game is changing dramatically where even as an Amazon seller, if that's the only place you sell, you got to start thinking outside of this, not just going to Walmart.com or going to Shopify. But if you don't start thinking holistically around this whole big picture of eCommerce, you're going to get left behind. Speaker 2: You know what's going to happen? A couple of people will take action and do this, but the majority won't. Speaker 3: No, because it's not right now. It's not right now. They're going to think, yeah, that's some time I got to do. And it's going to be like five. It's like U.S. guys selling in Canada. I'm going to focus on the U.S. Canada is going to add 5% to my bottom line. I'm not going to mess with selling in Canada. You need to mess with selling in Canada in this example, because Canada is not going to be 5% a couple of years from now. It's going to be 75%. And if you don't, if you don't get in early. You're going to get left behind. Speaker 2: Right. One of the other things like old school, old school marketing, five years ago, Steve Wiedemann came on and he said, you have to have the bullets or the information up top at the very beginning to get picked up and to start the ranking process. Then he put out a full, just a format of what you need to do and how you need to follow it. And it's very similar to what's happening right now. And like you said, backlinks are. They're not dead. Backlinks are still very, very important, especially if you have a higher authority site. Speaker 3: It's authority, yeah. Press releases. I mean, your company, your press release company that most people have been ignoring. They're like, I don't need a press release. I sell on Amazon. Now, you need a press release now. Even if it doesn't generate a single Amazon sale directly, you need to be issuing press releases. You need to be getting into Forbes and some of these places that just automatically pick up these press releases because it's seen as an authority driver. You need to Google my business. You need a Google knowledge profile. You need all that stuff for your brand and for yourself. We talked to Kasim on the Marketing Misfits podcast. We recorded it last week. I don't know when it's coming out. But that's all we talked about is AEO. And he was talking about, you know, we're like how you do this as a person versus how do you do this as a brand. And there was a lot of really good stuff. I'll leave most of that to the podcast. So people have to listen to that. But there's some some major stuff that I think a lot of people just aren't aware. Another point I want to make is I see this in some of the WhatsApp group. A lot of people are playing with with AI video and stuff now and with Veo 3. And there's some cool stuff you can do. But what's happening is these tools have become so easy to use. In some cases, there's just a lot of crap, a lot of crud out there. That's just junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk, junk. And everybody thinks that I know someone you and I know very well in the space that just did some AI video and they're very proud of it. And, you know, as they create an avatar and stuff and it looks bad, it's cool that it could do that. You know, the technology is like, wow, this is pretty cool, but it just, it's bad. The top stuff is going to rise, the cream is going to rise to the top. And so just playing with these tools doesn't make you an AI person. What you just said a minute ago, back to the fundamentals. I'm doing something with my newsletter where I'm actually taking pieces of the newsletter, like a cool story. And I know you've talked about notebook, LLM, and I'm taking it where there's two characters. One's me, one's a woman. We're interacting and we're talking about whatever that topic is of the newsletter, but I'm not just taking the content and throwing an AI. I'm using a real storyteller to actually take that and create a story. Rather than going to AI and saying just make these characters, I'm actually hired someone out of Hollywood that has extensive background in movie production and in filming and in lighting and in angles and in cutaways and in medium shots, wide cuts and close-ups and all that stuff. Those are fundamentals. If you can apply those to the tools, you can create amazing stuff and rise above and those are the people that are going to succeed whether it be in video, whether it be in audio, whether it be in animation, whether it be in any of this AI stuff. It goes back to, you know, if you're going to use AI to write your emails or to write your marketing messages or to write your headlines or write your bullet points, ChatGPT does a better job than most people, but the ones that are going to rise are the ones that know the fundamentals from a hundred years ago of human psychology. And either they know that or they know how to have the prompts actually gear towards that. That's who's going to, that's, what's going to rise. And then you have AI feeding off of AI. And so you've got garbage going out there and the garbage is training more garbage. And so. You've got to be careful there and know what you're doing. It's cool. It's fun. It's exciting. It's different. But the cream is going to rise to the top, in my opinion. Speaker 2: Well, 100%. That's what Google is looking for. You said it. If you're just putting out crap, And AI is just picking up crap. Speaker 3: It's cool crap. Some of it is cool crap, but it's crap. Speaker 2: The average person that's doing it for the first time is going, wow, this is really good. The average marketer is looking at it going, this is crap. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Period. Right. And so it's so important that Google is looking for quality content, original, quality content. And that's why press releases. I mean, I've, I've said it for 20 plus years. I've used press releases. I've showed my success with press releases, ranking with press releases. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you remember this, you weren't sold on press releases. For ranking, and I was, like I had- Not for immediate ranking. Oh, not for immediate ranking. This was a long-term play and- It's a long-term play, yeah. You know, lots of, I talked to so many people, I presented this, and very, very, very few people ever implemented it. But I went on Helium 10 Elite one day with you, and we were talking about press releases, and I said, hey, Kev, you know what? I did a press release yesterday on bully sticks. And, uh, I want to show you the results after a day. So I pulled it up and it had 400 and some odd ratings. Now these were, it took the title, it mixed up the title. So any combination, it could have been a horrible keyword or it could have been a really good keyword. Um, but there was 400 and something just out there. There was a hundred, I don't know if you remember, this is 171. Uh, that were on page one and there was 131 number one keywords and this was a good press release. So I spent some money on it and those stuck around for quite some time. I, then I said, okay, you want to talk about authority? I typed in a password or a keyword. And all of a sudden, this is my product, Chewy was number one, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, there was the photo carousel, all 100% my pictures, it was a press release, there was influencers. And even though if you looked at it, it didn't look like my product, it was the influencers talking about it. I was the whole page. 100% was me. Then you went over to the second page and there was only two spots that weren't me. There was actually a third page. I didn't really get to it, but there was like, I took up that whole spot and most of those spots were press releases. This was back in 2019 or 20 and the press releases that we're showing went all the way back to 2016. For these keywords and all that's going to do right now is Amazon, or not Amazon, but Google in their policies, in their compliance, they're looking for original good quality content. And if you provide that, and by the way, uh, like if you, I'm not sure if it was Neil Patel, I think it was Neil Patel. Who's we haven't published yet, but he went and he, he said, look at if you want to, uh, really start ranking, not only, In the LLMs, but just in search engines in general, so either SEO or AEO, go to People Always Ask and check out the formatting. And if it's bullets, do bullets. If it's a sentence, do a sentence. If it's a paragraph, do a paragraph. These are things that are so important when it comes to ranking. Want to see how AI agents are changing the future of marketing? Watch the latest episode with Kashef Safar to learn how brands are using AI teams to write, launch, and scale campaigns. And you can check out the full episode right here. Speaker 3: Like you just said, it's a long-term thing. It's not an immediate thing. Back in the day, there used to be people say, yeah, do press releases and you'll rank on Amazon in a couple of days. It's like, no, no, you won't. No, you won't. But the press and a lot of people, they didn't have the budget, you know, A crappy press release is what, a couple hundred bucks? Speaker 2: No, they try to do a free press release. Speaker 3: A free press release or, you know, I know some of the big companies used to charge into the thousands of dollars for some of the press releases. If you want to get into the main, you know, you want to be on a ticker tocker back in the day of New York Times and whatever, you had to pay some serious money. Yeah, the free ones maybe is better than nothing, but those aren't going to move the needle as much as you need to spend a little money. Most people don't have the budget. When they're first starting out, it's not given that immediate ROI and they're not willing to play the long-term game, but you've got to now. Speaker 2: The biggest part, like there is definitely a benefit to having a press release writer write it. I've seen really good blog articles, writers that just don't understand the press release writing. But if you have a good press release writer and you use a really good syndication company, then, man, you could do some incredible results. Even off of the one press release, if you're spending, when I'm talking about this, I'm talking around A $750 up press release, you're going to stick, you're going to get tons of exposure, and you're going to be picked up by larger media content providers, not like KTV in little town, you know, Arkansas, major media hubs. So that's really important when you're doing that. So, the other part to this that everybody skips over is when you have an article. So, let's say you do a really great article, you spend lots of time on it, yet you used AI as an assistant, but you finalized it, you put your thoughts into it, it's original, and then you go and publish it. So, what do you do? You put it up on your website. So that's what a lot of people do and that's fine. Hopefully you're using Google Business Profile or something like that to index it immediately. But what they don't do is syndicate it. Why aren't you syndicating your content like you are your press releases? It might not be the same groups. You might not be going out to news organizations, but there's definitely content people out there. Speaker 3: Put it on an RSS feed and get it out there into a lot of stuff. I do that with my newsletter. I'm sure you guys do it with Lunch With Norm. Actually, I don't know if you do. I don't see you come across my feeds. I don't know, Kelsey, do you have the RSS feed plugged into FeedSpot and some of those services? Speaker 1: I don't think we do for the newsletter. Speaker 3: You need to. There's FeedSpot. There's quite a few of them. That's one of some of the places I monitor for content as well. But you just copy that RSS feed out of Beehive and go submit it there and they'll start pulling it up. But yeah, RSS feeds, there's a lot of people that Read their get their content, but my brother gets content by RSS feed. He's got an RSS feed reader that pulls in all the his favorite tech stuff and whatever and that's how he reads it versus going to the website. But that stuff can help you get indexed a lot. And you can do that with any blog or pretty much anything, but just like exactly what you're saying is important. Speaker 2: Yeah. And there's companies also, like I used to do this with other companies that I've been involved with. I didn't know we weren't doing that, but like OnlyWire, you know, they'll blast it out there. You'll pay a premium for it. Fair enough. Speaker 3: A lot of people don't know it's in Beehive. So that's not a that you have to look for it. You don't know it's there. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. No, I just with RSS feeds, it is important that you put it out there. But like I was saying that there are apps out there like OnlyWire that can blast it out to a ton of people. And even if we have you heard, I'm kind of curious about citations. So if you're You know, bricks and mortar or if you have a brand and you have a single location. Citations were always a big, something big that we used to do. We'd go to companies like Yext and we just sign up a couple hundred bucks a year and they would blast it out to all sorts of different companies so you'd be entered into their directories. Do you know of any AI companies that are doing that right now? Speaker 3: Yeah, there are some AI tools that will you there's a handful of them that popped up that check to see how you're indexed in AI and if you're not indexed they will You they will submit you you know, like your LMS TXT file or whatever. They'll do that for you They run the range from free to a little bit of money to a lot of money. I think there's one Neil is using, it starts with a P. I'm drawing a blank on the name right now. I've had a couple of them in my newsletter. If you go to the media site, BillionDollarSellers.media, type in a couple of keywords, you'll be able to find the newsletter that those were in. There's four or five of them in there, and I just learned about three or four more just recently, so I'll probably be putting those in there too, but the name escapes me, but yes, they do exist. Speaker 2: Okay, more about AI in just a second. Kelsey, hit the sponsor. Did you know Amazon profit is more than revenue minus ads? Seller board calculates your true profitability, factoring in every fee, return, shipping cost, and even cost of goods using FIFO logic. That's first in, first out logic. Plus, they automate your PPC, forecast inventory and avoid stockouts, reclaim money with Amazon reimbursements, set FBM shipping by period and track Walmart profits with the same dashboard. And you don't even have to have an Amazon account. You can try it for free for two months. Sellerboard. Know your numbers, scale your business. I guess what we need to know is the next steps. What should people do? There's tons of information out there. There's tons of shiny objects out there, but where should I start? Speaker 3: The number one place you should start when it comes to AI is dragonfish.co because Dragonfish is going to be specializing in a lot of this stuff. So if you're confused, Dragonfish.co is the first place. Speaker 2: I wasn't expecting that answer, but that's the first place. Speaker 3: It's about to come out. So that's the first place. But no, I would start with studying up on AEO and studying up on Agentic Commerce. There's a newsletter, RetailAgentic, that's done that I would subscribe to. These guys are really good on what's happening. On the Agentic side, one of the guys started Channel Advisor back in the day and he kind of saw the writing on the wall 15 or whatever years ago when there's going to be all these marketplaces before there's marketplaces and how to have big brands tie in and he was right. And I think he's right on Agentic AI too and they're on the cutting edge of that. And then they have some things that you can do. They're telling you like, make sure you do this, make sure your listing has this, make sure your product pages have this. And they're staying on top of it. I'm in a group at aeo.co. That's all about AEO and a lot of really smart people in there. I think it's a couple hundred bucks or something to join it. If it's even open yet, it just started, but there's a lot of people masterminding in that about trying to figure this out and reverse engineer exactly how, because nobody knows. There is no such thing as an AI expert right now. Anybody that tells you they're an AI expert, run. They're not an AI expert unless they're the guy that invented AI or it's one of these guys that just got hired by I buy Meta for $300 million for four years to jump from open AI. Speaker 2: They offered me that. I refused. Speaker 3: Those guys, listen to them. But the average person online says they're an AI expert's full of it. You remember that guy that- I was just going to say that. That guy at the show that we went to- Nashville. In Nashville. Norm and I were at a show in Nashville and we were at a dinner and this little mixer before the dinner and this guy comes up to us and I'll let you tell a story Norm. It was a five grand or something? Speaker 2: Yeah, so this guy comes up to us and you know, we're talking about AI and he says, oh, you know, I can create these workflows. I do this for companies and I charge them five grand. And so Kevin and I kind of look at each other and he goes, and then per month and $5,000 a month for what? We're talking about a workflow that's automatically done and it goes through Zapier or make and there's nothing to monitor. And we looked at each and he wanted to do some business with us and we looked at each other and we just said, you know, in our minds, we don't do business with thieves. Like that's just robbing people. Speaker 3: Yeah, but there's a lot of that out there. A lot of people overpaying because they don't understand it or they're scared. A lot of people will be preying on local businesses. A lot of people are going to be preying on Amazon. So there's a lot of stuff that people say is AI and even their domain is blah, blah, blah dot AI. It's not AI at all. It's just automation. Don't get AI and automation confused. Make.com is not AI. Speaker 2: Nope. Speaker 3: It is automation. N8n is not AI. It's automation. It's cool. And you can tie AI into that and you can tie AI things into that and do cool stuff or you can have it, but it's an automation and it's an advanced, it's an, it's a early, early, early agentic automation thing, but it's not AI. Don't let people say there's, there's tools that we're doing. I remember there's one of the big guys, PPC companies was saying, we've got this AI tool that monitors all your PPC stuff. And it's not AI. It's just, it's rules-based. If it has, if then else statements in it. That's not AI. That's rules-based. AI is pattern-based. AI is pattern-based and looking for patterns and then mimicking and improving on those patterns. That's more AI. So don't let people fool you and overcharge you or convince you to do something when it's just automation. There's a lot of cool stuff. Agents are the next big thing. As well, we're early days right now and it's a little clunky in cases and you still need some humans in the loop, but agents can do some cool stuff with automation. So agents tied to automation can do cool. So you could do a make.com or an N8N automation or Zapier. Zapier is kind of losing some of its luster right now, but a make.com or N8N automation. N8N is more for programmers. Make.com is more for the average man. I'm a woman that you can do some cool stuff with the automations tied to AI. And so the automation does some steps and then an AI spits out an answer and then it comes back to the automation. The automation continues. There's some cool stuff you can do around that to automate a lot of things. One of my buddies, a good use of AI, one of my friends is actually starting an agency for OnlyFans. We're talking about OnlyFans. Norm's not telling you how well he's doing on OnlyFans with those feet pictures. He's doing feet pictures. You just think he's going out to smoke a cigar, but he's actually doing his feet. They're using AI in a lot of ways. I mean, I just showed you a video that they created yesterday, a little promo. It's a little five second one. That looks pretty damn good. And then they're doing stuff on AI on the backside where these guys buy to supposedly talk to somebody and it's somebody in the Philippines at $4 an hour. But I was like, I was asking him, so he's like, yeah, these people go through like three or four days of training. We have a complete avatar for every girl. And I said, well, what if they ask what type of car she drives and that's not in the avatar? She said, well, we have a GPT. That they can then go to and ask. It spits back an answer and then adds it to the avatar. So those are good ways of using AI as a tool, but you can automate a lot of this stuff too, but they're not letting it, they still have a human in the loop. I guess is what I'm trying to say is humans aren't completely out yet. It will get to that point. The humans can step out, but right now you still have babysitters because it's not quite, it's not there yet. I don't know if that's going to be this year or five years, but it's coming. We will be able to step out and that's what. A lot of people are scared about us going haywire. Speaker 2: Okay. We got a bunch of questions. Should we get into the questions? Speaker 3: Sure. Speaker 1: All right, so the first question, you guys were talking about press releases. Theo was asking, what do you mean to syndicate it? Speaker 2: Well, there's different distribution companies out there. Some people will try to go and do it on the cheap. I know some people that do this and they try to send it out themselves. There's other distribution companies that you pay for and these distribution companies will send it out, well, There's some that are 49 bucks and you get all these small towns USA's. You don't get really any good coverage. And then it just goes up from there. So syndication is really just the distribution companies that you're using. And that's the same with articles. So there's article distribution companies that will take your article and blast it out there, even though it's on your website, blast it out there to a hundred, 200, 300, 400, 500 different companies to give you some better exposure. And those companies might be magazines that'll pick it up, whatever it is, you know, it could be anything. So hopefully that helps answer that question. Speaker 3: A lot of times when you see a deal, When you see someone on their website says, we were featured in Forbes. Forbes didn't reach out to them in most cases and say, hey, we want to, here's a reporter. We're going to write a story. They'd use syndication or a press release to actually get into that. It creates authority. And most people looking at it go, oh, they're in Forbes. They must be real when it's, they just paid to get in there. Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's non-compliant as well. So, you know, I see a lot of people say that. But most of the top distribution or press release companies will advise not to put it up. But if they do, they do. You can say, by the way, like, you know, your press release was in XYZ, but you shouldn't be showing the Distributed by all these companies. Speaker 3: Featured in. Speaker 2: Yeah, featured in. Speaker 1: Okay, so the next question is from Simon. What tools do you use to create videos for your product images to use on Facebook? From your product images, these are images to video using AI. Speaker 3: VO3 and Cling AI are the two best right now. Everybody I talked to that's in it. So VO3 from Google and Cling.ai. There's a lot of others. One starts with an H. That's actually pretty good, too. That's been in my newsletter. Those are the three that I would recommend. Cling.ai, you can do flow. You can combine it with flow to actually string together like five second clips into different things. Amazon now has an AI builder for ads that some people are saying it's not bad. I have not played with it, but some people are saying it's not bad in the ad side. If you come to our webinar tomorrow, SI, one of the guys is going to be talking about that, what he's doing, where you can just take a picture of your product, shoot it on your dining room table, not good light. And then actually put that into this tool and I'll show you how to actually make a full video that looks pretty damn real out of that. And he's going to be showing you a little preview I think tomorrow and then going more in detail on the workshop. So he's got a pretty good system. And I'm not sure exactly which tools he's using. It may be those or maybe something else. Speaker 2: And there's another one Kevin and I will be sharing at some point. I haven't talked to him really about it. But I have a buddy who's into apps and he came up with this tattoo app, tattoo drawing app, which is really cool. If you're into tattoos, which I am, but he came up with this video. You drop your, your product in, it takes it, it cleans it up. And there's these crazy instant videos that I've never seen before that take literally a second to produce. And he's just finishing up this app. And then he told me in about two weeks, he's going to release it. So it's pretty, pretty cool. Oh, by the way, I wanted to add one thing. If people are interested, so there's so many, we talk about these shiny objects, some that stand out, you know, the ones that you should be taking a look at, like these video automation tools. Check out our buddy, Abbas. He has this platform that's called skillleap.com or it's skillleap.ai or skillleap.com. And it's very inexpensive. And he comes out with new videos all the time, weekly and multiple email or multiple videos every week. And I think it's 20 bucks, something like that. So he's always on the cutting edge. He's got new educators. And this guy is an educator. He is from the film industry and he's an educator. And you can tell by the way he creates these videos. They're perfect. I go in like on a Saturday and I'll watch whatever's new. He's now merged with another company. You can still get it at Skill Leap, but it's another learning platform that is AI based. I forget the name of it right now, but check it out. Speaker 1: Futurepedia. Speaker 2: That's it. Futurepedia. Yeah. Speaker 1: Okay. We just have a couple more questions from Steve. What budget are we looking for at PR? Speaker 2: It's how long is a piece of string really? And who's writing it? So you've got two areas. One thing I want to straighten up. When we talk about PR, a lot of the times people think I'm talking about public relations. So public relations, you just think of it as the event. And then press releases are the newsworthy information that goes out on a wire telling about that event. So just to make sure that that's clear. To write a press release, it's $100, something like that, and make sure it's a press release writer or a press release company that's doing it. It might be less than for any worthwhile press release. At the low end right now, everything seemed to have gone up around COVID. But you're looking, God, I don't even know if I would look in the 150 range anymore. It's more like 300. That's for the cheaper ones. And then for the quality ones, Kevin was right. So our lowest is 750 bucks, and that'll do most of the time. The next step would be 1,000, 1,500, and it can go right up to $3,000. But there's very few people that I work with that have ever put out the $3,000. It's just overkill. But 750 to 1000, you're right in the range. And what I tell most brands, you got to do it. It's long term. You can do a really good press release every quarter. And then the smaller press releases in the months. I tell them, do it every other week in the opposite, in the next two months. And then the big one, then for two months, do two every other week. So hopefully that makes sense. And it's worth it. I'm telling you, it works. Speaker 3: Yeah, the other thing that works that we've just, Norm and I both just learned too, is putting out video daily on YouTube. We had someone tell us this in one of my masterminds. I told it to Norm. I think he passed it over to Kelsey. He's like, hey, you got to go 180 days of daily content on YouTube before YouTube will really kick into gear. And you can kick in before that, but if you really want to juice the wheels and make it actually start paying attention, it's 180 days. I was like, man, I don't know if this is true or not. It sounds interesting, but let's give it a shot. And then yesterday, Norm and I were recording on the Marketing Misfits podcast. And a guy who was an Amazon seller, exited three or four Amazon businesses and now doing some YouTube stuff with a casino based stuff, which is pretty cool. It'll be on a future episode of Marketing Misfits. And he said that, you know, it was at the beginning, it was a little slow go, but all of a sudden, the last two weeks, they started picking up steam. And he's like, I was like, we got into his like, well, what's your strategy? What have you been doing? He's like, oh, we've been posting every single day since, was it January 5th or 9th or whatever he said, whenever they started. And he said, and when we got on the call, he said, this is today is our, was it six month anniversary? And then we put two and two together and you look at the time frame where his stuff started taking off from like 500 views or a thousand views to tens of thousands of views was right at that six month point. And I was like, have you missed a single day? Did you miss a Sunday? Cause you overslept. He's like, no, we haven't missed a single day, seven days a week, seven days a week. And it's almost like clockwork. And we're like, Holy cow. Um, that just validates independently what someone else said. I mean, maybe we're putting two and two together and it's really has nothing to do with each other, but I have a feeling it does. So that's another thing is just be posting. It doesn't have to be educational or posting stuff about your brand or re-crafting videos or whatever daily. Little shorts. Doesn't have to be long stuff or different products that you're having or whatever. That can make a huge difference. And now with YouTube being a major source for the AEO engines, especially Gemini, That can be huge. Speaker 2: Very good. Yeah. Great point. Speaker 1: Okay. The last comment we'll take is from Simon here. COVID lockdown made everyone so lazy. Before it was standard practice to do press, awards, exhibitions, TV news, QVC. Now peeps hide behind their screens and rely on Facebook posts. And you also mentioned that Dragon's Den was the best PR he's ever done before. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: And that's good PR for eCom business for sure. Dragon's Den. The version in the U.S. or the other versions around the world are really good. Speaker 2: Right. Dragon's Den. And also, going back to those authority links, I had a company, you know all about this, Kev, but we got to be on Dr. Phil and be in the directory for Dr. Phil. And the second, the second, like all of a sudden we're getting all this traffic and we're wondering what the hell happened. Turned out that we got into the directory. Second, we went into the directory. All of a sudden, just this ton. We got the authority. We got that authority link, which I think was an eight or a nine. And then all of a sudden we started to see all this traffic. So keep, you know, it's, Simon said it, it's back to old school marketing. It's back to the fundamentals. And we did a really great podcast recently. Who was it that was talking about the five levels of awareness? Speaker 3: That's Ritu. Speaker 2: Ritu, yeah. So she's on the Marketing Misfits podcast, probably coming out in around two months, I think. Speaker 3: If you're not following Marketing Misfits, you should be if you're a fan of this one. Keep listening to it here, but work it into your schedule to check out Marketing Misfits, marketingmisfits.co. It's been around a year, so there's some really great back issues, but we're starting to hit our stride a little bit now with better and better guests and better and better topics. I mean, it's always been good, but it's like leveling up. So I would encourage you, Norm and I know what's in the can. Cause we shoot these in advance and there's a lot of really good stuff coming. Speaker 2: Yeah. And I just saw Theo had another thing. What makes a press release newsworthy? New product intro. Do you agree with most companies? What's that? Do you agree that is what most companies miss? Okay. So if we want to just touch on this for a second, going back to press releases, it's all in the title. If you structure your title right, That's where Google will pick it up and you'll create the most amount of keywords. The body of the the press releases is secondary. It's got to be well written. Newsworthy is newsworthy. You can't talk about three reasons why. So I'll give you an example. I've used this in the past. You could talk about elderly dogs. Five reasons why bully sticks are good for elderly dogs or you know for health benefit. In a press release, it might be grass fed bully sticks provide health benefits to elderly dogs. If you want, this is a key is you can geo target this as well. So if you put Something like in Fort Lauderdale. All of a sudden if you're selling in that area and that's where a lot of your sales are, you're going to be picked up and you'll be number one for pretty much any keyword that you were able to put into that title. Now structuring a press release, this will be a whole other podcast, but what you can write a press release about I know that we put together a guide, 108 things to talk about. And it's not just, oh, I got a new product or I got a new launch. There's a zillion things that you can talk about that you probably haven't thought about. And Kelsey, maybe we can just attach that PDF into the show notes for this. Oh, what does Simon say? Speaker 1: Simon's saying way too many people in lockdown were watching some guy doing Freedom Ticket. Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel sorry for them. Those people, they wasted their time. Speaker 2: Was it like, Simon, I was wondering, is it kind of like Charlie Brown listening to the teacher? After about the 60th video? Speaker 3: That's why we got AI now, so you can change it to a sexy female voice or a British voice or Australian accent or whatever, you know? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 3: So you don't have to listen to... Speaker 2: I know I tune out. Absolutely. So I think that's the end. I do want to ask one thing. Kevin, I never talked to you before the podcast. We just came on. We have a workshop coming up, the AI workshop, which is going to be on the 20th. This is going to be out before the 20th. Are we able to give a workshop away? Speaker 3: It comes out of your pocket. You're going to pay for it? You're going to pay for it for one of your people here? Yeah, okay. Send me the check and we can do that, Norm. Speaker 2: All right. Very good. Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. It's fine. Speaker 2: This week, and everybody knows how we've changed around, I think, unless this is the first time listening, that we've changed around the Wheel of Kelsey. So if you're interested in joining the Wheel of Kelsey, you can put hashtag Wheel of Kelsey or tag two people into the comment section. But what we've done now is that prize will be given away next week because we also allow people that subscribe to our newsletter to enter the wheel. So if you're interested in joining us, we have the webinar that's on the 10th. But the actual workshop is going to be on July the 20th. And believe me, you'll want to see that. So, hashtag WillaKelsey, tag two people, and you'll get a shot in the comment section. And we'll also publish it in the newsletter. All right, Kevin. Well, thank you, sir, for coming on extremely last minute. Speaker 3: I know, I get this urgent call at midnight. Hey, can you come on? I got something else, but I'll go catch the last 30 minutes of that right now. Speaker 2: Thank you, Kevin. And thank you all for listening today. And I highly, highly urge you to check out the webinar or the workshop. This will probably be published afterwards, but check out that workshop, which is going to be on July the 20th. It'll be well worth it. Speaker 1: Oh, we gotta run through the Wheel of Kelsey for last week. Speaker 2: Oh, last week, yeah. Speaker 1: So we're gonna do this quick Fluencer Fruits from Liz Saunders. So we're going to give this a spin. If you're the winner, please email me kate at lunchwithnorm.com. This is for one month of Fluencer Fruits. Speaker 2: Marsha. Speaker 1: Is it? Speaker 2: Marsha. Yes. Well, congrats, Marsha. Speaker 1: All right. Congratulations. And for those entering for the workshop, Simon, Steve, I've got you. And we'll be spinning that wheel on the next episode of Lunch With Norm on Wednesday. Speaker 2: Fantastic. All right, everybody, we'll see you next week.