Amazon PPC and Scaling Sales - 7/25/15

We're doing that thing again where your, your head shows and I'm all bored because I'm excited about what we're doing and you're like, I'll just fan the chat over here.

So I'm good at, hey, good at reading.

Well, then eventually I bend the camera down and then I lean back with you. This is what happens set up for you every time. All right. Hey tribers. What's up?

Ryan, Daniel Moran here with most popular kid in school Sean Cohen.

And you saw the Q and A or you're on the Q and a lot of questions about PPC this time. So I thought it might be worthwhile for us to go back from the beginning on PPC and talk about some.

What we found to work and not work in the last long time because it has adjusted or changed some in the last year or so. But before we go into any sort of strategy, the most important thing before you go into Amazon pay per click is your on page conversion rate. I have had, I did a podcast, I think it was with Scott and we were talking about pay per click and I was talking about one of my business partners, Paul, and Paul likes to rant and go on these tangents about how Amazon Paperclick is a scam. They take your money, they don't even send sales. It's just a place to order how much money you want to give to Amazon. He's just convinced that there is no benefit to Amazon PayPal. Well then we made a whole bunch of changes to our Amazon listing and bumped the conversion rate up. And all of a sudden Amazon pay per click took off like a rocket ship. And he was like, alright, Amazon pay per click works, but only if you do a really, really good job.

And it has gotten harder. Just like all pay per click engines get harder because there's more competition now. There are more people bidding up prices and there's more people competing for.

The optimization and what they're willing to pay. So your on page optimization has to be on point. You have to be converting well and that comes down to reviews. Which is why I don't recommend turning on Amazon pay per click until you've got at least I'd say 50 reviews now and your headline, bullets and images are all done and good and converting. If you don't have those in place, Amazon pay per click is going to be you choosing how much money to give to Amazon. That's all going to be what it is. But let's back up and talk about strategy here. You've got kind of a formula that's better than anything I know about, throwing a whole lot of keywords out there and then refining and using outside services, finding those keywords. So could you walk us through that? Yeah, sure.

So plenty of times when people say, like, there is gold in this speech or gold in this video, there will be no gold in what I'm about to say.

If you.

It's really just find as many.

For yoga, obviously we wouldn't be using something like, I don't know, cheese boards. Yeah, we definitely would not be using cheese boards. So I use the autocomplete on Amazon. So when you start to type in yoga, see what pops up in that list. Do the same on Google. Look at what your competitors are kind of emphasizing.

You can use the Google AdWords tool. I don't know what it's called now, but it's the Google Adwords tool to me.

Well, isn't there the keyword tool that we discovered a few weeks ago? I was building up to that.

Door up there.

There's a really cool tool called Keyword Inspector where you can just run it on your competition and it'll give you all the keywords that they ran for. So it just gives you a CSV file set, just like Excel file and shows you the keywords they rank for and the Google search volume. There's some other numbers in there that I don't know what they mean, but they're interesting. But you can then look at like keywords and Google search volume and kind of infer as to how that might apply to Amazon. You have to be careful, obviously, something like what is yoga? You might be ranking for that on Google, but that's probably not going to get your sales on Amazon.

What's the tool that tracks your interest?

What's the rank tracker called?

The Rank Tracker.

AMZ Trackers.

Yeah. Doesn't that give you a whole bunch of keyword recommendations too?

Yeah, but it doesn't let you know why. The Keyword inspector shows you your competition's keywords and their rank on Google, like the keyword volume on Google. But AMZ Tracker will let you know how you rank and it'll give you some keywords that it thinks you should track.

It's a lot more, a lot more effort than you might rank. Your competition might rank number one for the world's best yoga mat, made in South Dakota. But you don't need to do anything with that.

Matt Davis, if you're on this call or anyone else who knows, there's also a tool out there that Shows you Amazon search volume map.

We know it exists.

I keep waiting for Clement to say something brilliant. Merchant words. I don't know if it is merchant words. Is it merchant words? That's what I was thinking of. I kind of have a vendetta against merchant words. I don't remember why, though. Yeah, that looks right. Yeah, maybe it is merchant words. Well, I know Matt uses this as a way to get more keyword ideas as well.

I don't know what you just. Terapeak. Terapeak has been trying to get into the business which focused previously on ebay. That's interesting. I know nothing about Terapeak.

So once you've got your list of keywords, what do you do next? Sean?

So then you take all those keywords and put them into a manual Amazon pay per click campaign. I usually set the bids. I guess you would depend on your product for like yoga mats, like $2 per click as the max. Amazon doesn't seem to be gouging you. If the bid is $0.70, they're not going to charge you $2. But their estimate for page one is really bad. So they'll say, oh, $0.25, you could be on page one.

No, they are lying.

It'll be like closer to $2, at least for the few weeks that you're.

Done looking at it. But here's where it gets tricky, because the sweet spot usually falls somewhere in between there. Because your max bid could be, they might suggest six bucks, and that's ludicrous. And then at the same time, you could bid 10 cents and not show up at all. So what we've done, one of my other companies, is we'll increase our daily budget but decrease our cost per click bid. And Amazon wants to use that budget, so they want to get it out somewhere. So you will show up, but you might not show up number one, because you're not bidding five bucks a click. You don't want to bid five bucks a click. You don't necessarily want to show up. Number one, the sweet spot. My experience is like number three. That's about the sweet spot where you want to be.

Yeah, definitely. And you can use the. You can see what your. The ACOS average cost of sales to kind of tune that. So what we did for Yoga Match is picked a flat number and then let it run a week. All right, this one is three times what we're making. So for every dollar we spend, we get 30 cents in sales. That's not very efficient. And then you can make exactly what adjustment and adjust that Keyword down to a point where you're getting reasonable profit.

Without having to cannibalize your other keyword by shifting the whole spread. So once you have that giant list of keywords, it's really weeks of testing. I say weeks because Amazon's metrics are just terrible. If you make a change today and look tomorrow, you're not going to see anything useful. It takes a. I found like a full week is a good kind of baseline to how the change took effect.

It can take a while and it.

Doesn'T mean the change isn't taking effect. It means the reporting from Amazon isn't visible, if that makes sense. Some of them process after you have that giant keyword list. You can also use Amazon's auto campaign to get keywords as well. But once you have that list, then just like fine tuning down to the profitable keywords that drive the correct customers. And we had kind of a.

Thing with hot yogurt.

Yeah, right. This is.

This, I don't want to say problem, but it was just.

This is a good story. I've told it a couple times so I want to hear you tell it.

So we did exactly. See you're grinning at me in the camera. We did exactly this. The process that we're talking about and we found like hot yoga mat was doing pretty good.

Profitable. It was getting.

But our reviews weren't very great. We got a lot of complaints. It wasn't very good for hot yoga. Turns out our yoga mat's not very good for hot yoga.

It is a non slip mat, but not when you sweat all over it.

We had been targeting that in pay per click SEO and then that was not a good idea.

Then we went back and pulled all the optimization for hot yoga and turned off our keywords for hot yoga just because one, we don't want to mislead our customers. No one's going to be happy if they're buying our mat expecting it to do something it won't. It's not going to be sustainable long term. Focus that money on keywords and driving customers that really do want what our.

Yoga mat can offer. Yeah, but we had the same experience with the supplement where people bought it through a keyword that was converting really well but they expected do something that wasn't meant to do and that caused some problems. We're getting lots of sales for it. So what we did is we cut out that keyword, rolled out a product specifically for that keyword that worked really well. Any questions about this process? This is boring to Sean and me. Because we've talked about it a thousand times, but this was the question that came up the most on the Q and A. So we wanted to recap. There's really no art to this. It's really exactly how we've laid it out. So do you guys have any questions before we move on about this?

Would you have the automated and the.

Ones that you make on your own both run at the same time or would you do automated first and then tweak it from what Amazon suggested?

That's a good question.

So we in the beginning and I've been beginning like months of beginning, we ran both and then whatever one ended up being the most profitable. If they're really close, then I would just let it keep going. But for example, if you're spending $100 a day on manual campaign and 100 on auto campaign and auto is only getting, I don't know, 90% average cost of sales and your manual is getting 10%, so the lower will be better. Just shift the capital from the auto to the manual and turn off the auto campaign. If it's flip flop, then figure out what's going on in the auto campaign and try and replicate it. And if you can't, then just keep pumping the money into auto campaign. Really it's just shifting your resources to whatever has the highest return on investment.

Okay, yeah, because I'm doing about double of what they're suggesting bid is and I'm still not even sales. Like I'm hardly even getting any clicks at all and I'm bidding double. So I don't know if that needs to be increased as well.

So I would look at kind of like your keyword. What I found is if Amazon doesn't think the keyword applies, then they won't start driving traffic to you. So if we did cheese grater on our listing and set it at $500 a day, we're still not going to get any click.

So maybe that's not the problem. But I would definitely check and make sure that those keywords are showing up in your listing.

As the format of the pay per click keyword.

Okay.

I was just thinking about that time that Google Translate Erica came in. Just put in the chat box.

I miss those days. Those were the good old days. I missed.

I miss.

What's his name?

Godson. Godson. Yeah.

Where's Godson?

Is anybody old enough to remember Godson in the tribe? Old enough. Does anybody hold him? Yeah, I remember.

I miss him.

Sweatshirt man.

That was Doug Daly. Doug's coming to the next level this month.

Did you tell him he has to wear that sweatshirt?

I told him he had to wear his black hoodie, but I could not hear him unless he was wearing a black hoodie. So this is a great question that came up in the chat box.

Hi.

I wish I was in China and I wish I was in Thailand.

I wish I was in China.

I'm from China. Have you been to China? I don't have a passport. Oh, boy.

It's on the list of to dos.

That's a problem. All right, any other questions about pay per click before we move on to other topics?

You said you mentioned something a second ago. I know this is probably pretty basic, but you talked about making sure that your listing is relevant. Having the relevant. I mean, having the relevant keywords that you want to show up for in pay per click.

Is that something that, I guess, here's a question.

Is it going to be more so.

On the listing itself or, you know, how in the back office you can say you can associate keywords with your listing that don't necessarily show up in your listing?

So I think what you're asking is how do you ensure that your listing is relevant for the keywords that are going to be most helpful both on. On your listing and then the back office of your listing? Is that it? Yes, it's both. It's what's in the back keywords, it's what's showing. I mean, really, we shouldn't have a hot yoga mat anywhere in our listing. We don't want to show up for that. We don't want to bid for that. We don't want any customers who are looking for a hot yoga mat finding us because that's not what we have. And we get unhappy customers when they buy from us. So it wasn't just stripping that out of pay per click, it was stripping that out of the headline. The bullets. The back office getting any hot. Any hot keywords out of our listing. So it was about relevancy, but it was also about just not showing up at all for that keyword. Does that answer your question, James?

Yeah, I was just trying to understand whether or not the back office had, I guess, figuring out if the back office keywords are going to be placed in. How big of a relevancy jump would that be from a pay per click standpoint?

I've never tested this, but I have people who tell me that it matters a lot, which is kind of weird. But Amazon's about 10 years behind in their technology as far as marketing goes, and 10 years ago, meta keywords were important in SEO, so people tell me that it matters substantially. I've never run a split test on it though.

What type of. What's that.

Question in the chat box? Where's Brian Krieger?

What type of on page conversion for your product should you target before turning Amazon pay per click as well as base number of reviews? Gee, I wish someone would just tell me how many reviews to get before I turned on Amazon. Paperclip. I wish some. I wish 20 minutes ago. I wish I could go back in time and hear how many keywords it would take. I don't. How many would you say? Like 40 million? I think is probably 40 million keywords. 40 million would definitely be a good start. Or maybe like 50. 50 is less than 40 million. Yeah, I changed my mind. Okay, so 50 reviews. Sean says 50 reviews before you turn. Or 40 million. 40 million is good. 40 million. Can you imagine the curve to merchandise that had 400%?

People that haven't even visited are buying your product.

4 million. How's your coffee? Good? It's really different, isn't it?

Tastes like normal coffee.

You just get black coffee. I got coffee, butter and mpt. We got somebody else made our coffee today. It's making me feel very sarcastic, but it tastes good.

Blame that on the coffee. What are back office keywords? So back office keywords are inside of your setup of your listing. There's actually a place where you put in keywords, not in your headline or your bullets, but actually putting the back office keywords in.

I just use the term to define the term.

In the back office keywords.

There's a tab for keywords and you can put keywords in there. And spoiler alert, Sean just typed up a to do list. Make a video for how to make back office keywords for coaching jungle. Is that right? Sean's coaching program, coachingjungle.com.

The tribe is sharing in my sarcasm thing. 50 reviews. Wonder where I heard that before. That's a great question from Carmen in the chat box. Any other pay per clip questions before we move on to other topics?

How high of an average cost of sale do you have before you say we need to go back and figure something out? That's a great question. I have a rule for this. I don't know if you have a rule for this.

I don't know if I have a set number. Usually at the point where I start fiddling with things and it gets worse is when I stop. So I'll fiddle and fiddle and fiddle as long as things Keep getting better, I'll keep fiddling and then once I screw it up, I go back to whatever was working last run with that. But you have an actual number in that.

I say 100% because if you're spending, you're obviously not profiting that wholesale. So if you're spending the total cost of sale on getting the customer, I think that is just on the high end of acceptable. That's just past acceptable. Anything less than 100% in my mind is acceptable or good and can be scaled scale over 100% becomes difficult. Now, Joe Gianpola has a completely different answer. He's like, I don't give a hoot. I'll spend whatever it costs to get a customer because it's going to help me rank. I'm going to spend money on a Zomblast. Why won't I spend money on pay per click? I know I lose money when I send somebody to a Zomblast, but I do it for the ranking. Why wouldn't I do that on pay per clip too? And that's the more aggressive way to look at it. And he's totally cool with that. If I'm going to do it for a long time without a specific purpose on keywords that aren't going to make me money, then I don't really care to rank for those keywords. Those are the two different thought processes there. Both are completely relevant.

So mine's 100% and up is too high. Joe is whatever it costs, I'll pay.

Did that answer your question, Stephen? Yeah, I think so.

Cool. Any other paperclip questions before we move on?

Somebody in the Facebook group.

Well, actually, I can tell you what's happening.

Chris had a specific question saying, asking, saying that he had asins in his PPC Amazon report, which was kind of weird in his auto report, which I guess implies as he was saying that people are searching for his competitors Asin and then they're clicking on his ad.

That's really weird.

And he's wondering if that's normal or not normal.

No. Can you do negative keywords in Google, meaning negative keyword? Yeah, like you strip out a keyword. No, I don't think so. Like in Google you could have, you could do a negative. Who is that handsome dude just highlighted in Amazon? You can do like minus free. So anytime somebody types in free yoga mat, you won't show up.

I think Amazon's an exact match. So if they type in free yoga mat and you are getting free yoga mat, I don't think this is just my theory. I don't think you get that. What they might be getting for this ASIN is if your competitor has a super URL with the ASIN in it and then they see the ad. If they come through that link, that would still make Amazon think it was a search.

I don't know why.

Keep going.

I don't know why they would do that to rank for their asin, but maybe they are. And then they click on the ad.

Then that might show up. I've seen that too.

I don't follow. So you're saying if somebody comes to a super URL and in the URL there is an ASIN that would make Amazon think that they searched for the Asin.

If in the URL the keyword is the asin. If the competition is purposefully directing sales through the asin, either they screw something up, they think they know something that we don't. Because then.

Yeah, see, so we just came in.

Through.

The super URL.

Yeah.

Let's just imagine that there's a keyword yield map because I don't think I.

Have it set up that right. Making my brain hurt. Is anybody else following this?

I could be going totally crazy.

Who might. I don't know that it's that important of an issue.

No, probably not. It probably doesn't matter.

Scroll up. That's a really interesting looking mat. Is that a yoga mat?

No, that's like.

Alright, so I don't know if we answered the ASIN question. If the question was is that normal? I don't think so. If you're getting a lot of searches for that, that's weird. If you're getting a few, that's just somebody searching for a competitor and clicking on your ad.

Any other PPC questions before I move on? You can tell I want to move on because I have something to share, but I'm holding back.

Going once. PPC questions.

Okay, if you'll allow me, it's not a PPC question, but because I have to go, I'd like to ask one question.

Go number one or number two? Huh? You have to go number one or number two?

No, I have to get off the call.

So yeah, it's a productivity question actually. So how do you. I do prioritize and write down my to do list and do my weekly planning and all that stuff. But how do you plan for different businesses? So for example, you had three businesses in the morning. Do you put a little bit of each or do you have a day specifically for each business that you're managing?

I specifically have a day for each business, and it would drive me crazy if I didn't do this. I've gotten the most amount of work done if I have blocks of time that are dedicated. For ZenActive, for example, Fridays from 2 to 4, or for Zen active, anytime there's an idea that comes in, I put it, the Zenactive file, on my phone. Friday at 2:00', clock, I get to it. That's when I've got the most amount of work done. Sean, you're looking at me goofy, like you really want to share? You're like, ryan doesn't get things done. Why is he answering?

No, that's not what I was thinking at all.

No, I just think it's interesting that we do things very differently because I would go crazy if I blocked off time for one.

Really.

So what I do is every morning, I like triage, whatever's on the list. And the most important thing of the day.

I don't even know what that word means.

Triage is like at a hospital, if there's a massive car crash and 400 people are injured, they say, you are too far gone. We can't help you, put you to the side.

This is a horrible analogy.

No, it's a perfect analogy.

People are dying. How you get things done?

I'm not causing car crashes.

Go on. How do you get things done?

So you look at what's on your list all across the board, and you say, like this, I can't even If I spent 12 hours on this today, that's not the best use of my time. It might be important, but with that 12 hours, I can accomplish 40 things and that I can do elsewhere or that needs to be ignored.

It's not going to happen. Then you look at things that are, like, not important. Like, all right, I need to, I don't know, get my hair cut. Like, I could probably do that this weekend. I've got better stuff on the list today. So I look at, across all businesses, all personal things, all everything. And in the morning, I pick, like, the six or seven things that I'm going to do, and I do those that day sometimes. That's four things for Zen, four things for work and go grocery shopping because I don't have any more bacon.

Now, keep in mind that Sean and I have very different roles in both our company and our other projects. So my job, if you will, is to sit and come up with ideas. That's often, like, I mean, often Matt will text me and be like, we need ideas on this. And that's My job for the day is to sit in the corner and come up with ideas. Sean's is to get things done.

He's the vision builder. Those are very different. So for me to block out time, I'm literally crafting mental capacity for that project. And I cannot give mental capacity for that project because it'll take away from the mental capacity that I've got. In this shawan is check boxes. This got done, and this got done. And this got done, and this got done. So we have different ways of getting things done because we have very different things that we have to do. But depending on where you fall, either one of those can be helpful. I got my strategy from the book Getting Things Done, which basically argues you can only focus on one thing at a time. And you have to get your idea out of your brain and onto a piece of paper or into a file, take care of it. When it shows up, schedule yourself to get that thing done. And that's exactly what I've done. I come up with something I need to get done. I put it in my phone as a to do list for that project. Friday at 2 o', clock, when I have that chunked out, I go through the to do list there.

Okay. I personally have been implementing what I learned from the one thing. So all of 2015 has been exactly that, where they tell you to focus on one thing. But every morning I wake up and it's like I'm trying to find one thing. But if you have, let's say, two or three different businesses, I would say they're equally important. I just have to find one thing in each business. That's why I was asking you, do.

You have a different day?

I've been in that exact situation. And the way I do that is depending on what project I'm working on that day, I will identify the one thing that will make everything easier, unnecessary for that business today. Then tomorrow, I'll figure out what my one thing is for that other place.

Okay, cool, cool.

Thanks, Ralph.

All right, see you later.

See ya.

See ya.

PPC going twice.

Ppc. Sold. Okay. As soon as I said sold, Ralph disappeared. Did you see that? I wonder if I did that again.

You gonna get rid of people?

But you're the one who said if you were a doctor, you wouldn't save people who had just gotten to a car crash.

I stand by what I say.

All right, well, the only person who agrees with you, I think, is Donald.

Trump and actual doctors.

I work with them every single day.

Oh, well played.

All right, so let's talk about. I wanted to talk about this week, about our rankings experiment and you were just checking our rankings. Did we go up or down? I don't know.

That was the purpose and I didn't even know.

I think we were down a spot three, six.

Yeah, we're down a spot or two. But yeah, we did a rankings experiment this week and it works really well and it's basically good old fashioned stuff that we all know works combined with just a certain amount of consistency and aggressiveness.

We've been training Q Brands who bought our yoga company for our methodology. I should preface this by saying they're an aggregator which means they have several different Amazon based businesses or businesses that sell on Amazon and they bought from other people. So they have a mix of different ideologies and they're refining what ideologies are working well and what aren't working well. And so they've been following our ideology on Zenactive obviously and trying to follow it to a T. So our ideology has been do blasts, do Facebook giveaways, do pay per click, do whatever it takes to give away as much as possible until you rank. And this week we had a huge breakthrough.

We did a blast and ranked higher and then we did a consistent giveaway and ranked higher and our organic sales.

Are through the roof.

So we just wanted to tell you all that because it all still works. It all still works. There's all of this mix and.

Match about Amazon changing and they are changing slowly. They've been a real pain in the rear on some of my businesses of changing images and people cheating and it's getting really annoying on some things. But the stuff that we all know has worked for years, continues to work and it continues to work well. So I wanted to let you know that things are changing but everything still works and the short term stuff that's a pain in the rear. I hope Amazon just gets their, you know what together on cheaters and messing with listings and all this crap that's going on. It's so annoying. But as far as good old fashioned marketing, it all still works. It all still works just as well as it did before.

Any questions about that? Clement just unmuted himself. He's about to say something smart.

No, but I was just gonna say like, so I guess obviously you've seen in the tribe a few people have had their listings fiddled with, suspended and what have you. Do you know if that's pretty common throughout right now, happening everywhere.

It seems like they just went through a big old.

Like a big Old mass mess of people's listings. This week I had probably four of my listings messed with. Images changed or copy changed. I don't know what's going on. I don't think Amazon knows what's going on. I have many, many times tried to get in touch with our contacts at Amazon. Said, will you let me fly to Seattle at my own expense? And just tell you what, just tell you from a seller's perspective, what the heck is going on?

Well, they haven't invited me yet, but.

It seems like this happens in waves. They come in, they make massive changes, then they all go back and they say, problem solved. And then they stop doing it. And then a year later, they go through another massive wave of changes. Guys, you have to stick and roll with the waves and the changes.

We've got a new asshat in our industry that is cheating his way to the top. And I think I told you this story. Was accusing me publicly of leaving negative reviews. Was actually commenting on his negative review. This is Ryan Moran leaving me negative. What?

I mean, it's just ridiculous. It's asshat number three and.

You just have to roll with it. It's just, it's. It's part of the process. And.

Amazon has removed almost every cheater in my industry, except for one, has eventually caught on to their game and removed them. But it was six months of.

Hell and reduced sales until that person was removed. Now, I could have quit at that point and there were many times I wanted to, but as a result of rolling through it and getting better and always growing, you come out at the other end with a really strong business. So nobody says business is going to be easy or that things aren't going to change. You just roll through them. So I'm still hopeful that Amazon's going to get their crap together. But in the meantime, when you have changes, you just kind of have to roll with those changes.

So for those who have been caught in the dragnet, as it were, would you suggest that they completely do a 180 and stick to. To everything on black and white, being everything perfectly with their style guide and everything like that, or do you think that over time it's okay to kind of shift and be a little bit gray?

When you say they're getting caught, what is it that they're getting banned or reported for doing so?

One person in the tribe was saying that their listing had been locked and then the only way to unlock it was to change everything around in terms of their text, in terms of their title, and they assumed that this meant to be in complete conformance with the style guide, which is I guess basically your.

Brand.

The name of the product and then your key feature kind of thing.

And I guess all your bullets have to be, I'm not really sure. For compliance purposes I think I assume that most of these are fine.

So from an advisor standpoint I would say follow Amazon's terms of service. How you follow Amazon terms of service is up for interpretation. So following the exact standard protocol of headline I found to be unnecessary as long as you're following Amazon's terms of service of what you're putting in that headline once you switch back and you have control of your listing. From a practical standpoint, and this is not my advice, but what actually happens is usually Amazon puts a whole lot of attention on you for a few days and then they forget that you exist and then it's wide open west you can do whatever you want. I'm not saying that you should do whatever you want. I'm just saying that in a lot of cases they put a lot of attention on you and then they forget that you exist. So.

You can be as strict as you want until the I is off of you. What I would recommend is just following terms of service, but giving yourself the freedom to do things well within those terms of service. Like you can write a good headline that follows terms of service that still converts really well. I don't follow Amazon standard protocol of brand name, number of units, whatever it is, I don't follow that. But I don't break any of their terms of service inside of the headline. And I write really good copy with the 200 characters that we have.

All right, Ryan, to kind of piggyback.

And avoid that question.

Yeah, actually to kind of pick up piggyback off that situation. Again I'm running into a similar situation but it has nothing to do with my, the listing being non compliant or anything like that. I basically got into a little spat with one of my negative 1 star reviews. Basically in a roundabout way, I'm not gonna lie, I kind of accused them.

Of.

Basically saying well they accused me that my, they accused me that my reviews are fake and I said well no, my reviews aren't fake and I find it funny that you recommended a competitors product in my listing and basically in a roundabout way I accused him of being associated with my competitor. Anyway, as soon as I said that about, about 12 hours later my listing got blocked and so I'm. And so I what I ended up talking with Amazon and they just basically said that a Customer complained that my product was inauthentic and I'm like, I'm trying to understand why, but Amazon's not giving me the details of why they're saying my product inauthentic, but they sent me this message basically saying, asking me what plans I'm going to put in place to ensure that these types of problems won't happen again. But they're not telling me what the actual problem was.

Yeah, I've had this happen before and it's. It is the most. Ugh, I feel for you, man. It's not, it's not fun. That, that probably is a competitor because anybody can claim that your product is inauthentic and get you bought. It's the most vast acords system. Amazon. Get it together, guys. Come on, Jeff. And instead of innovating all the time, fix what you've got in place, please, Cameron. Anyway, brand over. The way you prepare for this and the way you get around it, get a certificate of authenticity from your supplier. Show them receipts from your supplier, shipping details, if you have any brand registry, any trademarks, any patents, any pending trademarks or patents, any statements from attorneys, anything that basically says, this is original. This is straight from the manufacturer. We are the exclusive seller of this. Any past history that you've got with Amazon in a chat box that has you talking about something.

And any of that can support your case. So assemble all of that as quickly as possible. Even if you can only find one, zip it over to Amazon in that chat, that will get that removed faster than just debating with them back and forth.

All right.

Yeah.

I've already sent them six months worth of factory receipts, but they've still not unblocked it yet. But I'm working on a certificate authenticity from the manufacturer. I should have that by Monday.

That should do it. There's no guarantee and no guarantee it'll happen quickly, but that should do it.

Okay.

That's the process we follow.

My heart goes out to you. That's not fun.

Hey, Gail.

Hey, Ryan. I have another question, but back to ranking. If it's fine.

Can you maybe tell a little bit more about your ranking experiment and especially what exactly you did or you do after the blast in order to improve the results. After the blast, what are you doing after the blast? In order to improve or maintain the results of the blast?

Sure. So in order to improve and maintain the results of the blast, we did a high discount to our own list in order to what Joe calls stick the landing, we did a price discount and we did a Heavy private discount through a coupon code to our list in order to keep sales stimulated and also keep the conversion rate up. Because Amazon will see that as.

A sustainable launch rather than just a one hit wonder. So we'll do, and I've done this in other businesses too where we'll do a blast and then we'll do a public price drop to keep sales growing and the conversion rate climbing because Amazon will say Amazon's kind of catching on to the blast idea. But if you stick the landing, meaning that you do some tweaks to improve conversions after the blast, you're more likely to stay rather than drift down. That make sense?

Yes. Would you do that after the blasts result or just after the blast?

I do it. You mean after you see the results or just. Alright, yeah, just after the blast.

Just after the blast. That'll maximize the result that you get from the blast.

There's, I think we teased this a couple weeks ago. There's some data to suggest, and I'm not willing to like put my foot down and say this works, but there's some. Now you're taller, now you're higher than me. No.

There'S some data to suggest that.

This is a big build up for not that big of a point. There is some data to suggest.

That doing a price drop after a blast improves ranking because Amazon predicts a conversion rate bump. There is some data to suggest this. This is not science. But there's some reason to believe, and I know this because we did the opposite and it was horrible where we did a public price drop and then we mailed our list about it, sent a whole bunch of sales through a keyword and then we raised the price back to normal. And it was terrible for ranking. But when we did the opposite, a high price even through a coupon and then publicly dropping the price, there seem to be some benefits.

Because the theory behind that is that Amazon's predicting a conversion rate.

What was that post about? Bulletproof coffee? Clement posted something smart.

The people who do bulletproof coffee just got a nine million dollar investment to do their nootropics.

Oh, to build out their own nootropics. That's interesting. I wonder why.

I should ping Dave and ask him why he did it that way. I wonder why. I wonder why it's necessary to.

Raise the money rather than just fund it. That's interesting. I thought was it for the nootropics or for their cafes? Because I know his cafes are going live.

Huh?

I'm not in this world, so I didn't Actually read it.

Okay.

Too much detail.

Okay.

Dave Asprey is a very smart, interesting person who's very controversial. Anyway.

That'S enough for their day. Madhavi, tell us what's going on.

We're good. So we launched about two and a half weeks ago. We're building our customer list. We have about 75 reviews right now. We did have some taken off. Yeah. But we're doing good.

We're hanging in there.

We're getting an average of 16 organic sales a day.

From organic searches and from PPC. We are page one on all of our secondary keywords. We are on the bottom of page two for our main keyword. We are at a BSR of in the 4000s and we have a blast scheduled for this week.

Great work, madhavi.

Thank you.

16 organic sales on 75 reviews. Pretty damn good. Thank you. Nice work.

So onward, onward we go.

Anything that we can do to make your life easier or your results faster.

I thought and thought. I can't think of anything to ask you.

How about like a way to accelerate your review?

I would love that. I know you also mentioned, also mentioned a cryptic. How do you get 200 reviews in a weekend? To James, last time we talked, I know it's next level stuff, but.

Any tips or anything to accelerate reviews would be well received and appreciated.

Okay. So I can give you the high level stuff, but I'm very, very closely guarded on who I share the 200 reviews in a weekend strategy. But we go into it pretty long depth at the next level. So reviews we.

Where do we want to start with this actually? Tell me what you're doing right now to get those reviews and then we'll take it from there.

Right now we have our review email series in place and friends and families. I've been just asking, asking, personally asking and.

We'Ll send a reminder out to our list. That's what we've done so far. Now you mean like where are the reviews coming from? Is that what you're asking me?

Say again?

Are you asking me where the reviews are coming from or are you asking me what are we doing to get the reviews?

What are you doing to get them? Ok, we can definitely crank this up a bit with. How do I put this?

We are definitely very liberal in what we will do to get a review. So if we've got to send out an additional product, if we've got to give a discount on another product, if we have to send.

A gift card good. For one of our other products, we will do whatever it takes in order to make it easy for someone to leave a review. So if that means following up with them and saying we have these other products or we'd like to send you a review version of one of our other flavors or sizes or colors or whatever it is, we'll happily do that in order to make a review easier. We have the best results. We had the best results. Having somebody call our customers who is the same demographic as the person who is buying and just make sure that their experience was good. I mean, you've heard my script for this. Just to make sure that their experience was positive and ask for nothing, just as a follow up. And usually they're like, holy smokes, I can't believe this person called and didn't ask for anything. And we were doing probably three to four reviews a day, doing that on like 30 or 40 sales. So what is that, 10, 15% of people were leaving reviews as a result of that person just being good on the phone and saying making sure their experience is great and asking for nothing. That saw a really good three and four reviews a day. We were very happy with that 10 to 15%.

The follow up emails are almost bonus, but if you're not doing something, if you're just saying, please leave a review.

Gonna be, I mean, basically they're doing you a favor if there's no reason for them to leave a review. You can be a little bit more liberal with that. Now how you do that is a bit of an art. How you can make it really easy for somebody to leave a review. It would be a good use of your brain power this week to just sit and think, how can I make it super easy for somebody to leave a review and then want to do it? Also, blast services, although I would not recommend using blast services as a source of reviews.

They are ranking services, not review services. You will get reviews out of those blasts. So we will. We will. We're liberal with our reviews. Come on, brain. We are liberal with our blasts because we know that as a secondary benefit, we will get reviews. This is your first blast coming up, right?

It is, yes.

You'll see what I mean. You will get reviews out of it.

Did all that make sense?

Yeah, makes sense.

What else you got? Guys.

I want to hear from Jason.

Hey, Ryan.

Sorry, I'm muting here. Can you hear me?

I lost you guys.

I've had a pretty good week. I'm up to about 14 organic sales a day.

My follow up sequence is not that solid. I'm doing the feedback. Genius. I have the two Email sequence. But I think what you just said, I'm basically asking very nicely for a favorite. So I'll spend some time thinking about how I can incentivize that. One thing I've had a lot of success with is just going out onto Instagram. I put my product up and just write like giveaway and do some hashtags and little coupon groups. Jump onto that and I'll let them know that it's review for product type exchange. And those have worked pretty well. I'm getting about 80% from those. So I'm going to step that up a little bit in the following weeks and just trying to hustle for those reviews, basically.

Yeah, great work. So be careful with the word incentivize.

Because Amazon hates that word. So let's say encourage, encourage and make it easy. How can you strongly encourage and make it easy for someone to leave a review?

But yeah, coupon groups are great as long as they're done well and carefully. Because if you do it, a lot of times you do a zombie last for a dollar and it leads to a coupon group that sucks. And you can have your inventory cleared out of that. But if you're going to coupon groups directly, that can be a great thing. Okay.

And then I have my third blast coming up. I had an interesting thing happening with my second blast. It hit with a pretty big thunk. I did 200 units and people grabbed like 40, which was very strange. And then I got a ton of emails from them, like, review codes aren't working. And what I think it was is I tried to do two asins because I have two different colors. And I think somewhere in there something got lost. So I don't know if anyone has any experience with that.

And that's an interesting question. That's very interesting because we started doing multiple colors and I actually don't know about this.

Yeah, I think it gets lost somewhere because Zonblast makes you put in one asin, and I'm not sure if you put in the parent asin since that's not technically a live listing, if that kind of screws it up somehow. But then again, I did get 40, so it worked for some group of people.

So that could be some people figured it out. Like some people chose the right parent child relationship. So that could be the case. But that's actually a really good question that I don't have the answer to. And I would like to know if you find a good answer for this. Okay, thanks, Jason.

And then I got the.

Oh, Sorry, one more.

I got the review rush for from Zonblast when they did their prime day offerings. So I think that'll. It sounds like you get like a template for a follow up sequence. So.

I'm scheduled for Monday on that. So I'll have an update next week on that process.

That's a great service. I think that'll have good results for you. Right on. Cool.

Catherine Chung will be joining us here in Austin in about a week and a half. Nice.

That's a cool yes to see you.

Yeah. You're gonna make the long trek over. Are you prepared?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes. I'm flying. Soti.

We'Re excited to have you. We'll make your 13 hour trip worth it for sure.

Yes. Excited to be here, Catherine.

Do they play golf in China?

Do you play golf in China?

Yes, yes. I was joining, but I wasn't playing. The factory's owner took me to the driving course.

Yes.

But I wasn't prepared with a proper dressing.

Okay, well, make sure you wear proper dressing your first day in Austin.

Okay.

Oh, Govin, we have a fun activity our first few hours there. It's good.

Oh, all right.

Okay. Yes. So, Kathryn, how's the business?

My second product was so good and running out of inventory. So it's on the air right now. So it will be probably arrived Amazon two days or one day so that I got back the inventory and promote to have another relaunch and and to recuperate the lost self.

And I'm preparing my third product.

So that's why I need to learn more about how to launch the third product which will be much more exciting than the first and second one.

Nice. We'll fix that for you here in about a week and a half. Yes.

Yes.

Good.

Thank you.

Anything we can do for you this week that would make your life easier or your results faster?

I was thinking about whether I should do any focus group for my third product. But I'm thinking whether. Is it too complicated to research on the formal basis or just ask some bunch of people?

This is a fantastic question. Let's go here. Because when you're first launching your business, it makes sense to just get a product out as fast as possible. Because every day you don't have a product, you're not making sales and you can't refine it. But once you have a business, it totally makes sense to go back and say, how are we doing? Can our next products change for our customers? What can we improve? Would you walk through the review that we did when we first started Zenactive, the survey that we first did the Reddit.

So we used SurveyMonkey. No matter what you do, just find the survey platform out there. And we reached out to the yoga group on Reddit. If you're not familiar with Reddit, there's a group for pretty much everything, things that there should not be anything grouped for. But yoga is one of the things on there. So we thought, well, we know a little bit about yoga, but not nearly enough to choose what the right yoga map would be. What I thought people would want, they really didn't care about, which is kind of interesting. So we set up the survey and we tried to gather some demographics about them, like their age, their gender, might have even gone like where they live in the country. And then we tried to kind of hone the options we had for our yoga mat. So we went by color, by material, by feature. What's most important to you? Thickness, eco friendly.

Things like that kind of high level. And then we also went to really detailed features like do you like the rounded corners or not? I thought the rounded corners were cool. No one seemed to care and they were expensive. We're like, well, doesn't matter.

So. So that process, I guess what we did is we gathered the available options and then we asked the audience what they cared about and then tuned the product to meet whatever their needs were. Turned out eco friendly, black and non slip were really the important points. So that's what we focused on.

We do this exact same process in my other businesses. When we are launching our fifth and sixth products, it's hey, you buy, we've bought from us in the past. Help us choose our next product. Products. We ask a whole bunch of questions. We're always surprised by something. So I don't necessarily recommend doing a focus group, but going to your customers and saying what do you want next? Is a fantastic idea for your subsequent products.

Yeah, you know, because I invest a lot of money for my third products, that's where I have to be very careful. It's a patent product, so it's an invention. It's a little bit very unique. Have to do development on the new product. That's why it requires more confirmation from the target groups to get the right product. So that's why I'm still. We are doing research right now, but how far we should be going. It's the questions that we.

I think you're doing the right thing by pausing and asking your market, asking your audience, because that's not a product. That's proven in Amazon's marketplace. It's something you're going to have to sell, which is great. It establishes you as something very different than any of your competition. But you do want to be more calculated with it. I would go to your audience and say, you bought this from us. Would this be of interest to you? And if they say yes, move forward. Yeah.

I also do a Google survey to do a preference test. Go out and test 500 respondents. It only costs 10 cents per respondent. It costs only $50. And I test it for my second product and my third product, I just throw it out. And to compare my product, the ideal product, with the number one competitor, it's turned out to be quite well. I just need further, you know, more details and more.

Understanding on my product, on my market, so to speak. Yes.

Yeah. Very cool. Good work, Kathryn. Good work.

Thank you.

Anything interesting in the chat box?

There's a couple quick follow ups to the survey. People are saying that they tried the Reddit thing and they didn't get many responses. I guess the only things I could think of is one, the yoga group is gigantic. So if there's 2 million people in a group, you're bound to get a handful. So if your product is kind of a smaller niche then kitchen knives group.

Yeah.

So maybe try a slightly related group. So for yoga, maybe try like, I don't know, green living or something.

Yeah.

So like a larger group.

Or if it's kitchen, it's like the cooking group.

Yeah. Or like food porn.

That would be a good group. Not that one, but the vegetarian group or whatever it is.

The other thing is. No, it might have just been the actual people in the market, people in the yoga group. They just might have been more open to giving feedback. And if other groups are getting slammed with requests like that all day long, then they're probably going to ignore you. So I guess, yeah. So fitness is a huge one. Did you get. So I'm going to speak geek for a second shadow band. So if you don't have a lot of kind of.

Like clout on Reddit, the moderators will just ban your post. But you think it's still live, so really maybe no one ever saw it.

So if your account is new or if they just didn't like that, they might have banned it and you wouldn't know.

To get around that. Fitness might just be. There's a lot of traffic on fitness and that just might not be the right spot. So maybe try the opposite of. With my previous advice, try a subreddit that less frequently gets spam.

Try the opposite of my advice.

I guess the summary is try again somewhere else. Regardless, too high, too low. Keep trying.

Or pay somebody with an authoritative account to post on your behalf.

Yeah, and that's actually a huge. I didn't realize this people, that's your full time job, they build up accounts with millions and millions of.

I don't.

Even know what the points are called karma. And then they lease themselves out mainly to like big companies like people like Pepsi and Sony.

Yeah, pay somebody to make the post for you. There was a question about. Oh, reviews overseas. If you're not US based, use Facebook, Target people. Do a giveaway via Facebook to people that are in the country that you need the reviews and then follow up with them via email. I go over that. I don't go over it internationally per se, but just follow the process. In my most famous YouTube video, the 12 Months to 1 Million. Why are you giggling at that?

I just sent that one to somebody yesterday. They asked the same question.

I'm like, ryan, I already told you, just do that.

Can I jump in and ask a question about that?

Only if you take your hat off.

In regards to.

Sorry, I can't hear you.

In regards to. Can you hear me now?

Yeah, I can hear you way better.

Right.

In regards to doing a launch on Facebook and doing it at such a huge discounted rate and I've already been hijacked. I don't want to go through this again. How do you, when you send them an email with their claim code, how do you avoid sending out just the one single code that anyone can use? Because I know we can make our group codes. I understand that, but how? If you have it on an automated response through let's say mailchimp or whatever you're using, how do you make it so that everybody gets a different code?

Yeah, there are services for this. There are services that automate this. The only one I know of that we personally use is, I don't even know the name of it, but it's run by someone in the tribe. His name is today Tadej and he actually has a service that automates this so it plugs into your autoresponder so that when somebody opts in they're getting a single use code rather than getting one that's just massive that goes into a group. So I honestly don't know what it costs or anything. But we go to him and he set it up for us and now he'll do it for tribe members for a fee and it works beautifully and it avoids his problem.

So that's what we should do.

Well, that's what we do. You can. You can use that as a recommendation if you'd like. But that's what we personally do.

Right.

Was that James?

Can you post this service link in the tribe?

Yeah.

So I try to not make recommendations in the tribe because I try to keep it unbiased. But there is. But Matt did a huge long endorsement of him at one point.

If you just. I try to avoid making recommendations in the tribe. So if you just search for his name today, T A D E, J, you'll find a bunch of posts about his service.

That's a good question. Thanks for bringing that up, Emily.

Thanks.

Is that what it is? Yeah. No. What you just pulled up.

Oh, no, this is something different.

Okay. So there are other services for this, by the way. I just don't know. I don't have any experience with any other service because today set it up for us. But there are plenty of other services out there.

What's the one you're looking at right now? This is Azon vip.

Azon vip.

It looks like you have to install something on your server. So if that's something you're cool with, maybe go that way.

If you could hire somebody for 10 bucks to put it on your server. Oh, yeah.

There's a couple different options out there.

Yeah. So there are services that will do this. The one we use is a guy in the tribe. There's other ones out there too, that do pretty much the same thing. They just plug into your autoresponder. It's basically a database. It loads a whole bunch of single use coupons and then it hooks your autoresponder to that database. So every time somebody opts in, it pulls. Pulls one from the database, removes from the database and it moves on. Basically how that works.

Those birds sound lovely. Those birds chirping just sound lovely. Oh.

So Clemens just bumped the post, so it should be at the top.

Any final thoughts? Sean Coyne?

I don't think there's something smart essays. But I cannot.

I'm going to do a self. Can I do a selfish plug? I guess it is my hangout.

Do whatever you want.

I'm totally biased, but I think the most recent Freedom Fast Lane podcast is the best podcast ever. So if you haven't listened to it, I would highly recommend going to listen to the latest episode of Freedom Fast Lane.

As far as content goes, I think it's the most impactful. I think it's the most impactful I've ever done.

By the way, you're past.

You have a lot of downloads on your episode. Do you want to do another episode?

Yes.

All right, cool. We should record one today. All right, cool.

I disagree about the most recent one being the best one ever.

Really?

I haven't listened to it. It wasn't the one that I was on.

So we got to have a better one with Sean Quine.

Yes, I'm sure it's awesome.

So Kathryn says that today's service is a lot better than azon VIP. Cool. I mean, I have no experience with azon VIP.

Monavie says it's 250 to set up. That's totally reasonable.

Apparently you guys are talking a lot about today in the chat box. Apparently today was an awesome job for you. Great. You did a great job for us too. Gives 30 seconds.

Oh, okay. All right. So Azon VIP has like a timer to it.

Did you see this question? We should answer this before we. This one? Yeah.

So someone asked me how flight school was going. Did I scare myself yet? Yes, yes. Many, many times. I got to land twice in my last lesson.

It was terrifying.

Concrete, when you're going like 120 miles an hour is a very scary thing. But I didn't die, so I guess.

I did it right. Not scary when you're going 120 miles an hour on a Tesla.

No, it is much more fun.

The airplane doesn't beep at you when you do something unsafe.

That's true. My Tesla beeps at me a lot.

Alright, guys, it's good to see you all again. I missed you all on the break and we will see you next week. And we have some cool announcements coming soon. We are this close to locking down our keynote speaker for Freedom Fast Lane Live. It's a good one. Sean can attest to that. It is very cool. It's a good one. So if you like the speaker lineup so far, we only release two people. I'm going to be sending out an email here shortly with another speaker announcement and then the keynote as soon as I lockdown. Assuming we get them. It's a really, really good one. So you're going to want to be there in December if you're not already planning on being there in December for sure. All right, guys, good to see you all and we will see you next week, everybody. Take care, guys.

See.