BIG ANNOUNCEMENT and Tribe Q&A: 7/11/15

Hey, groovy group. This is a handsome gang we got today. Hey, tribe, it's good to see you. Unfortunately, it's just me today, so you guys are stuck with me. But you are stuck with me on a day that I have a big announcement. I wanted to talk to the tribe about it first. I've been kind of teasing it at you for a little bit and I have something that I wanted to reveal to all of you first. It kind of goes public on all other channels later this next week. But I wanted to tell you guys first. As a lot of you know the story.

My life changed very drastically a few years ago, about five, six years ago, when I attended a marketing conference and I paid a whole bunch of money to join a group of people that would just stretch my thinking. And just so you know, this isn't a pitch for any high, high priced masterminds or anything. This is just the story to frame up to it. But I paid a whole bunch of money to get around people who are multi millionaires just so I could learn how they, how they think. So I.

Was very uncomfortable for about two years around these people as I just kind of downloaded everything I could. And in the long term, it made me a much better entrepreneur. Just getting around people who completely blew the limits of my thinking. Because at that point I was still in the mode of how do I make 250 grand a year so that I can do whatever I want. And then being around these people helped me build a real company and serve real customers. And I really got to download everything that was in their brain for years. And a lot of them are still my good friends. I met my best friend in that group. I met all the client, a lot of the clients I've had over the years in that group and I've since then been looking for the next thing that would just stretch my thinking, the next kind of breakthrough, shatter all of the paradigms, kind of opportunity to be around people who just scared me, challenged me and changed my paradigms. And I just haven't found it. I just haven't found that. I have a buddy who talks about how you should spend. You guys might follow Tai Lopez, he's a buddy of mine. He recommends having your time split into thirds. A third of your time being around people that are below you, a third of your time around people who are at your level, your peers, and a third of your time around people who just completely blow your mind that you don't even know how to communicate with them because you're they're at such a different level than you. So I went out and I started to assemble a third of mentors of mine that have helped me get to this point, a third of peers that are in our community, but I think are doing really special things and a third of people that are just absolutely way beyond where I am. And we have almost a finalized speaker lineup for the first annual Freedom Fast Lane Live which will be in Austin, Texas December 11th and 12th. And the again, it's a hand picked lineup for me of people who have either completely changed my paradigm about life and business or people in our industry who are really doing special things or people that I don't know that I hand selected, went out and had.

Booking agencies go track down for me.

Because I wanted to bring them in because there's something about them that just completely breaks the mold of what I think is possible. December 11th, 12th and 13th, Freedom Fast Lane Live will be dripping and leaking the speaker announcements over the next couple weeks and the website is freedomfastlanelive.com There is an early bird notification list. You tribe members are going to get a significant discount over the general public price and it will be shockingly affordable. So I tell you all this kind of sheepishly as kind of, you know, my peer group, if you will, because this has been one of the things I've been scared to do for a really long time. I've wanted to do this platform for quite some time and I've always been afraid to do it. And we all have when we go to do different things.

Voices in our head that say for me it's are people going to come to Austin to hear me? And so people that I selected talk and worse, what if people actually show up and it sucks. So I just decided at the beginning of this year that I would say thank you very much voices in my head and we'd make it happen. So I am, you can tell I'm a little bit sheepish. I'm a little bit nervous about the whole thing. But the amount of detail and the amount of hand selection that went into this group is pretty special. So I think all of you are going to.

I think I would be surprised if any of you did not have the same type of experience that I did a few years ago where your paradigms were just shifted and changed and you see a much bigger, much bigger opportunity for what all is possible for.

You and for all those around you. That is the big announcement. Freedom Fastlane Live, or as we like to call it, F2L2 is 12-11-12th and 13th in Austin and details as far and speaker announcements are at freedomfastlanelive.com Some of the speakers have blurred out photos on the website and if you look hard enough, you may be able to identify at least a couple of them. That's my attempt at building buzz around speakers. Again, that's@freedomfastlanelive.com so that is the big announcement. I'm happy to answer questions about that throughout the call, but let's move into a couple other things on this call. I want to do one thing different at the end of this call. So I'm going to ask you a question now and I want you to file this away because I want your help. Both of those of you on the broadcast and and those of you who are live on the chat, I would like for you to think about how we as a community can serve you from where you are right now, beyond these calls. So we have what, four weeks of these weekly calls left to get you to the point of your business is started. And this group doesn't go away, of course, but after the 12 weeks is complete, I'd like to know how both myself and my peers can serve you best moving forward. So rather than continually and just answering the same questions over and over again and talking about the getting started, most of you know I don't really care to focus my time on the getting started beyond kind of these 12 weeks. So be thinking about how as a community and as an individual, we can serve you moving forward in a way that directly impacts your business and creates the kind of change in progress that you want to see outside of these calls, beyond these calls. So be thinking about that in the next 45 minutes or so and then I'd like your answers at the end of the chat.

There was one major question in the Q and A box. Thank you. For those of you who answered that, there was one that kept coming up and it was about Facebook marketing. So I want to take a couple of minutes to talk about Facebook marketing. And.

Last time I did this, I did it as.

A bubble presentation like a screen share. But I'm just going to try and explain it to you how we use it and also some of the potential that exists. Somebody made a comment about Facebook groups versus Facebook Page.

Now, I don't know if that was a misspeak, if it's actually. If individuals are just actually using groups or if it's just pages. I don't have a whole lot of experience using groups, but I would like to, in fact, if I Could do a lot over again. I probably would have done more with groups, especially as I was getting started. But groups and pages have very distinct purposes on Facebook, whereas pages where you get likes are really there for mass distribution. The interaction in a Facebook page is not nearly as high as the interaction in a group, but the reach on a page is much higher than it is on a group. So, for example, I was interviewed on a podcast about selling on Amazon this week and actually on two podcasts this week. And both of them had groups with thousands of members. And as a result, that group just completely sucked up that content. There were hundreds of comments, there were questions coming in, there was all kinds of interaction, but it was just to that group. Whereas if you post on a page, you have potentially worldwide reach. Things can go viral, things can get shared, things can get commented on, you can boost that post and it'll get seen by a whole lot of people. So in the early stages, it may behoove you to have a group of people if there's a specific reason to have that group. People that I would recommend that to would be if you've got a website that you're leveraging to launch your physical product. For example, in the last round of the tribe, there was an individual who, he was already in that market. He had just never used Amazon as a channel and he had never launched a physical product before. So he was launching a business, a new physical product to his existing business. If you've got a community around a business already, bringing people into a group and then launching your products to them would be very much worth your time. If you are an affiliate in a market, if you have a large audience in a market that you're launching a physical product in, building a group around that would be worth your time. If you want to do a VIP club for your best reviewers or for your existing customers, putting them into a Facebook group would be a great use for that. If you were either not using email list or if you wanted to combine the two so that you had an impacted result, so you could have your VIP club be in a Facebook group and you would get a lot of interaction that way. The only thing is, you would have to have continual interaction with that group. It's not like you could just step away from it and never talk to them again and just leak VIP codes. You would have to be regular about communicating with those people, at least on a once every other week basis and then drop the VIP codes in there and review instructions and all that. That would be a great use of A group. Beyond that, we just use pages. In fact, I shouldn't say beyond that. We only use pages. But those are some of the ways that you could use a group to get high interaction to help you and your business. We only use pages because we're going after an audience. We're not going after a tight group of people. We're going after a large audience. So we do things like podcasting and blogging and we do all this to build up an audience. So we're more interested in the page than we are in the group. I'll tell you how we are using some of our pages in order to boost sales and exposure and it's we will write a content.

Disguised sales pitch for our products as a blog post. So it might be if, if it was our fish oil, the fish oil product I sell, it might be the five benefits of omega 3 oils or.

The five ailments that omega 3 oils solve, or whatever it is. Then we might talk about joint pain, we talk about triglycerides and cholesterol, and we talk about about middle of the night pain. And we talk about mobility, flexibility or whatever it is and have the five points and make it look like content. But we all know that's kind of a disguised pitch for why you should take official and then we'd have call to actions, a big old call to action at the bottom of every post, every article, every blog post has a big old call to action that again is disguised as curiosity based content. So there's you frame whatever your product is as the solution and we also link to the product a couple times throughout the article. Now with that content, we then post that over on Facebook to our page and we boost that post. If you get a large amount of engagements, you're getting lots of likes, lots of comments, we might boost it again.

In order to get fresh blood and.

New visibility to that post.

So that's how we're using Facebook marketing to drive attention to our audience and to our salesy pages. So you can test this for ten twenty dollars along with a piece of content. And what usually happens is you'll have. If you write five pieces of content salesy combo, four of the five will be duds and one of them will be a winner. So you just use that one a lot. It's a nice cheap way to test what type of sales messages work well to your audience as far as content goes.

So this is the way that we're using Facebook in order to drive sales and attention to our products.

And that's kind of Stage two. Ish. As far as where it falls in the sequence.

Again, the three stages that I talk about in business, the grind, the growth and the gold. Stage one for us is exactly how I outlined it for you, where we just get reviews, do blasts, turn on Amazon pay per click and get our review systems in place. Stage two, we might start to play with this as we're rolling out more products. We might start to play with some content marketing to get fresh blood into the mix. So that is how we're using Facebook for any marketing. It's not like this is not a heavy piece of our marketing approach. So we do this. We test a lot of things, we test a lot of sales messages, we test a lot of processes on Facebook, but this is not.

This is not an aggressive piece of our marketing, if you will.

Now, one individual.

In the Facebook comments.

On the Q and A said that they actually made a Facebook video and they shared that on their page. And that had.

A few sales, a few bytes coming come in, which I thought was interesting. I've actually never tried that. I'd be interested if Merlin is watching, if they could share how they did this and if they've got any feedback of what they would do differently next time. Because I've actually never done that.

Now, there were a couple questions about reviews and blasts. Just real briefly in the Q and A. Someone was asking, really, how many reviews do you need for before you do a launch and how often should you do a Launch? Real simple, 25 reviews before you do a launch. Although some people have done less, have done less reviews and they've been just fine. Some people have used launches as the way that they get reviews and that's fine. My rule is 25. We actually just did this this week. We decided to hold off on a launch to our list because we had no reviews. So we're going back and we're getting the reviews first and then we're going to do a launch to our audience. And how often do you do a blast? As often as you want to boost your rankings in keywords. So it's not just about doing it. In stage one, we do blasts all the time in order to increase the ranking that we have for certain keywords.

Hey Ryan, quick question on the whole review thing. Blast issue. So I've been watching my competitors and I know one of my competitors used the zonblast service and I'm trying to figure out. I never bought their product to see what their, their funnel was like, but I could tell after their Zon Blast.

Blast.

They got about over a hundred reviews on their product. And I was trying to get. I was trying to get an understanding. Again, I didn't buy their product, but I was trying to get an understanding of how effective. I know, I know we say that we don't use On Blast for review, but apparently it worked because I've been tracking them since, and they've actually outranked me now, and I'm losing sales. So I'm trying to get an idea of, like, what's probably some of the best practices if you were to use donblast to get reviews from your customers.

Okay, so let me ask you a question. How sure are you that the.

That your competitor was actually using Zonblast versus a different Blast service? Are you sure that it was Zonblast?

Yes. I'm actually signed up on the Zonblast list. So I see which items are going out, and I saw my competitor and we, for the most part, ever since I started launching a product, we were neck and neck on review. So we get a few reviews a day, but it's just like coincidence. Right after they use On Blast. First it was like 20 reviews and another 30, then another 50, like back to back to back.

Okay, and how far out were these reviews coming in?

They seem to come in again maybe maybe 20 the first day, another 30 the next day, and then a huge number maybe by day three and four. And now they're kind of trickling down.

So, unfortunately, there's not a lot you can actively do on a Zonblast in order to encourage reviews simply because you don't get access to the customer data. But there are a couple things that make a difference. One is the type of product that it is. If it's a more easily reviewable product, you'll get more reviews. For example, we could do a Zonblast for one of our supplements and get almost no reviews for it, whereas we could launch a yoga towel and get 150 reviews. So the difference in how quick it can be reviewed, like, oh, this is a physical product. I know this feels how it's supposed to feel. It feels good. I like it. Versus is the MCT oil in this coffee really doing that much of a difference? I don't really feel that much, so I don't know what to say in a review. That's the first piece. I know you got a similar product, so that doesn't really help you much. The only other speculation, and I am completely speculating at this point, is that they have one of Zahn's other products like one of their review programs where they send a follow up email to get more reviews for that product which they may might have upgraded to. Again, I'm speculating, I have no idea. We've just seen a difference in how reviewable a product is based on it being physical or consumable or if there was some other differentiating factor. I do know that they do certain tests to see what types of things give their customers the best results. So they might be testing something internally too. But unfortunately that's about the best feedback I could give you on that.

Okay.

When was the last time you ran a Zomblast for your stuff?

Honestly, I have not and that, that's probably one of my issues. I've been, I've been doing kind of a creating my own Zon Blast list using a service called Lead Serve or Opt Intelligence and basically creating my own list and promoting to those. And I've had limited success on that. But I haven't used the Zonblast service other than. Well, I haven't used it yet though.

Okay, so. So let me ask, let me ask you something, James. What is the difference in number of reviews in your product and some of your other competitors, including this one who's now outranking you?

Okay, so the main grouping is probably about within maybe 50 to 75 review. And then there's two people.

Whereas I may have about 500 reviews. They've actually shot up to over a thousand relatively quickly. And I'm again, I don't want to say they're buying reviews, but it's like when we all started out at the same time and then they shot up. I mean, I know there's ways to do it because I've been to your boot camp. So maybe they're using those type of techniques, but it's just, it's starting to hurt my bottom line.

I completely understand. So a couple things to keep in mind. I have Mastermind buddies who use Zonblast for reviews. I know that's not what they're supposed to be for, but they will use them. They'll give out hundreds and hundreds of units not because they need a ranking as month, but because they know they are going to get a decent amount of reviews from that and that's a primary strategy for them. There are also, yes, they could be buying reviews, but there are people who use those Blast services to get reviews and they use several of the services in order to get those reviews. And remember, you've got access to my Favorite over the weekend strategy of getting a whole bunch of reviews, which I would probably encourage you to deploy as soon as possible. Right.

Okay.

That's my question.

Cool. Anything else we can help you with, James?

I think that's it for now. Yeah, that's it for now.

Okay, cool.

All right, let's, let's open it up. How else can we help you in your business.

Ladies and gents?

I'll start calling on you if you don't.

All right?

Oh, go ahead.

Oh no, go ahead. James Clement just waved at me, but he didn't unmute himself. So. Go ahead, James.

This is just a selfish question. How do you, I mean, how do you find yourself, and this is probably anybody. How do you. So how do you find yourself just staying motivated, especially when you're having ups and downs and ups and downs in the Amazon business, Like, you know, working by myself and you know, just trying to stay motivated and you know, when things go down and up and so.

On and so forth, having a partner really helps because I have to stay motivated because my partner expects that of me and vice versa. So if either of us are dropping the ball, we catch the other person, we kick the other person, and then the other thing is staying motivated just in business in general is I just set really challenging goals that I don't think are possible. Like events like doing Freedom fast lane live where I don't know if people are going to show up or if people are going to think I'm an idiot for spending over $100,000 on top level speakers to come in.

I don't know what's going to happen, but that challenge drives me. But in the Amazon space or in a physical product space, it's two things that really challenge me. It's adding another hundred thousand dollars to our that number of sales that shows up every time you log into to Amazon. And I journal at night where I'll ask myself a crazy question and we kind of did this together when you were in Austin. Was I'll ask myself how if I had to turn this into a billion dollar company, how would I do it? And then I sit there for like five minutes without any answers and I just start churning out some ideas. And it's not like I'm going to go out and try and build this into a billion dollar company. It's just I'm trying to get new weird ideas to flow through or how would I add a thousand reviews to my product so that I was number one? And then I just sit there and I start to brainstorm and whatever is immediately actionable I'll do or how would I add $100,000 to the bottom line of this in the next 90 days? And then I sit there for a while and I start to brainstorm and the ideas that are immediately actionable I extract. That is by the way, how we came up with the 200 reviews over a weekend strategy. And that's how we started. We just got approved into retail this week. So that was another way that another thing that came out of just sitting there brainstorming of how we would turn this into going to a level that we didn't know was possible. I don't know if that speaks to how your brain thinks, but that's how I personally do it.

I think as well like having had my own business for a while, another thing that really helps is making sure that you get out of the house because whether that be working at a cafe, joining, doing physical activity. Like I personally like CrossFit and I find the CrossFit community appeals because you're all like people who do CrossFit tend.

To have a little bit of money.

Anyway and so they tend to be type A professionals who.

Who don't really like necessarily judge you based on where you are in your physical activity. But it's fun and it gets you.

Out of the house.

I 100% agree about getting out of the house and being around people that stretch you 100%. I don't know about you guys, but I have a really hard time working from the house so I try not to. I've had to the last five weeks because there's a baby here. But apart from that I try to make it a rule that I don't work from home because I'll go crazy. So I have a physical office I go to or will work from a coffee shop and that helps a tremendous amount.

And I think actually a lot of cities have co working spaces.

Which also can be kind of inspiring because a lot of these co working spaces have startups which are doing kind of weird and crazy things and that can kind of get some other people too in that regard. A lot of them have social events.

And things like that. James, do you have any feedback on any of that?

Actually I agree, I think especially with the leaving the house. I started doing that all week and I've noticed my productivity definitely shifts, definitely has gone up. The other thing is actually what I was planning on doing is creating like a meetup community around.

I'm running two businesses and I think you already know that, Brian, but Just another meet up community around those couple of businesses. So.

Just to meet people in this, in this arena so that I can, you know, bounce ideas on and just hold for accountability.

James, how was your creativity when you were in Hawaii?

I found that. I don't know. Let me see. How can I explain that? My mind was more free, but it was more of a. I didn't think about business and I was just more relaxed. I don't say necessarily I can judge my creativity at the time because I wasn't really thinking about anything other than the waves and the excursions. But now that I'm back, I realize how much.

I realize how much ideas that I have that I want to implement. It's just prioritizing those ideas and moving forward with them.

Yeah, prioritizing and delegating those ideas. So I knew an entrepreneur who knew that he worked better and was more creative when he not only got out of the house, but was on vacation. So about every other week he'd say to his wife, hey, do we have anything going on this week? And if the answer was no, he would say, well, then let's get our shit and leave. And they'd pack up and they'd go book a cruise or they'd book a flight somewhere for the reason of he knew he was more creative and he was more productive when he was on vacation. In fact, again, I haven't done this since baby, or since we found out about the baby. But I used to schedule my vacations just because I knew that I, I needed them as far as creativity and.

Productivity. So I get my best work done on planes. I get my best journaling done on planes. I get my best work done when I'm away from society. So getting out and getting away is huge for momentum, for motivation, for creativity. And you got a bit of a taste of that when you were in Hawaii this week.

So James isn't responding to me. So I'll turn it back over to Clement. Since Clement, you waved at me.

Sorry, I'm folding. Close.

So I guess I had two questions and more out of curiosity.

Do you do anything to respond to other.

Other competitors who are currently blasting either on Zon Blast or other lead generation services in order to diminish their effectiveness?

I try not to be reactive to other people's aggressiveness. I just try to maintain my own aggressiveness. So this is a lesson that I learned from the Cleveland Indians, who have won four in a row, by the way, and are starting to climb themselves back out of a hole and back into the Playoff hunt. But the Cleveland Indians, they've publicly said over and over again, we're not a reactionary club. Which means if the Detroit Tigers go and get Miguel Cabrera, the Indians won't go out and just acquire some overpaid slugger in order to try and match that team's aggressiveness. And if you've watched the Detroit Tigers of the last three to four years, the. Every year they go out and they are the most aggressive acquirers every off season, and a lot of times the other teams will reactionarily overpay for players and acquire people to try and match the aggressiveness of that team. But the Tigers implode every year. They acquire all these people, and then they absolutely just implode. Happens every year, and they have one of the highest payrolls. Whereas the Cleveland. Cleveland Indians build their team more like a puzzle, and they acquire the very strategic people. And it never looks like they're being aggressive, but they're always very strategically bringing in pieces that complement everything else they have. So we try to do the same thing. This is a lesson I learned from baseball, which is I maintain a regular idea of aggressiveness, but not in a reactionary way. I try to be very strategic in the aggressiveness in which we operate. So we will do Zaun blasts in order to boost our ranking, but I won't do a blast in response to someone else's blast. I also make myself wait a week before making any major changes in response to a competitor. I said this in a podcast this week, where a lot of times something like what James experienced this week, a competitor will come in, they'll blast themselves to high heaven, and for about three days, you're like, what do I do? The business is going to go under, somebody's going to beat me, I'm going to have to move back with my mom in her basement. I'm going to be poor forever. And there's just like this constant. And you want to be reactionary to that. But what I've experienced in some cases is someone will blast a high heaven or they'll do a major price cut, and they get all kinds of new customers. They pass me, and then a week later, negative reviews start to come in.

Their listing starts to decline, and they were aggressive on a product that they shouldn't have been aggressive on because it was a crappy product. And all of a sudden they're starting to dwindle and I'm starting to grow. So I know I kind of sidestepped your question, but we try to be more strategic and build a puzzle rather than be responsive in our aggression.

Okay.

And then I guess the second question is Prime Day is coming up. Is there anything that you are doing or would suggest that we do for events like this? And the next event, obvious event is Black Friday.

Yeah.

And I'm not in supplements. But the obvious question since so many people are in supplements, is what is the impact of Black Friday on supplements?

Yeah. Cool. So Black Friday and Christmas are good for everybody, supplements included. So actually in the health space, Black Friday is like January 15th. Now that's not an official day, but January is the supplement community's Christmas because of New Year's resolutions. So supplements, everybody gets a bump around Christmas. Everybody does. So supplements get it. But not as high as in yoga. For example, in yoga, we'll double our sales every day during Black Friday on whereas supplements, the sales are double. January, that's where that window is. Just, you can file that one away. But as far as Prime Day goes.

We do sales all the time around specific products. We find a reason. James knows because he's been to the next level. And Ralph, you'll find this one out. We find out that we find reasons to do promotions. We will find promotion, whatever excuse we can to do a promotion. It might be it was a full moon this week, so it's time to do the full moon promotion. I mean, we will find whatever reason we can to do some sort of a promotion, even if it is just to do some sort of a combo. It could be.

It was a full moon this week, which means you need a yoga towel. I mean, whatever reason we can, we'll find a reason to draw attention to one of our products. Prime Day will be exactly the same. So we'll probably do a company wide discount, 10 to 20% off. You know, company wide. And we'll hit our email list, our Facebook pages really hard with those.

James just posted my cat ran away and I'm sad promo. Yes, that would be perfectly fine. So any reason we can to do that. And Prime Day is just another example of that. We'll probably do it differently than our other ones just by doing more of a. We usually do very product centric promotions. We'll probably do more of a here's why you need to order this week promo of any of our products. And we'll hit our email list hard with that. We'll hit our Facebook page hard with that. We probably will not adjust our listings. I get very nervous. I'm very hesitant to make changes to my listing to say like Prime Day discount In our headline. That just seems really tacky to me. So I try to avoid that. Some people will put their sales in their headlines, but that's not something I do. So we hit it in our email list, in our Facebook page.

Quick question.

One of my goals for this month, aside from pushing my next product, is to increase my conversion rate. But I don't really have a great number to strive for right now. I made the calculations a 2% increase in my conversions for my weekly sales would be an extra 5,000 in sales. So what is the difference that you saw for your girlfriend's product when Amazon made the change in the images? What was the. Do you know the number and conversion?

First of all, your only goal this week should be to survive the car ride that you're in right now.

Oh, no, I'm parked.

Okay.

But I think the change we saw was 3%. So just a quick recap. Pamela and I had kind of a weird experience where Amazon removed some of her images, which was weird, but we got like a 3 or 4% jump in conversion rate as a result of that, because apparently they just removed images that suck. So as a result. Thank you, Amazon. We saw a bump in sales for that, so it was about 3% from the images. And just so you know, your baseline 13% is what we consider good. Anything above that is really good. And there are. I mean.

The biggest things that impact conversion rate are reviews and price. Those are the two biggest things that impact conversion rate. Everything else is extra. Images are next. Headline is next yet, and then the rest kind of falls underneath that. So there are other things that make a slight difference, like if you are comfortable putting. If you're comfortable slipping the images there into your description area, as some people are okay doing, that's more grayish hat. But that has a slight bump in conversion. Again, biggest price, reviews, then pictures, then headlines. So if you're gonna go for a 2% jump, focus on those things.

So, because one of the things I was looking at was, I do have some images that I could remove. Now, I was trying to, for some reason, I've heard that, you know, fill up all the pictures you can. It will be better for you. But I realized that she only has three pictures on her listing. Now. If I remove all the bad ones, it doesn't matter how many I have. If they're high quality, it should help.

That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. So I've realized that that's a myth of having more images is not necessarily better. It's best images are necessarily better. And that was. I used to believe what you just said of more images was better. And I have learned that that is not necessarily the case.

In fact, I was doing the experiment on myself last night. I as I'm shopping for my new laptop, I was looking for accessories and I realized that they had a listing that had many images, but the only one that I actually paid attention to was the one that was HD and I could see and imagine that on my computer. So I was trying to find the psychological thing that makes people buy from you.

The only other thing I'd add to that is.

If you're gonna fill up your images but you don't have really good images to use, use social proof. Use other forms of proof that you can borrow a I'm looking for something to hold person saying this mic is great or a proof of authenticity from a manufacturer, or a test from a lab or a screenshot of your best review. Those types of things are great to use as proof that allow you to get another image spot, but they don't detract from the quality of the overall images. So if you're going to fill up your spaces, use that type of proof element to fill it up rather than finding an inferior image to just throw into a spot.

And last question, I know you said that doesn't make a big difference, but I realize you're a yoga company. You guys have HTML listings which look beautiful. Who and where do you find somebody to do that for you?

Where do you find someone to do that for you?

Who did you guys.

Who did it for you guys?

Who did the images?

No, the description. You guys have a whole HTML listing. So it's all nice images and illustrations.

So we actually don't use it so much in the yoga company, but we use some workarounds in my other company that are completely legit. It's called a content. So a content is a service in.

Service in Amazon that you can either apply into or be invited into that allows you to have, you can actually purchase to have images in your listings. So when you see combo really beautiful HTML photos plus text, that's a content which you get as a benefit for Amazon selling your products. So it's a legit workaround, if you will, where you can purchase these modules.

In each of your listings. And I think it ends up costing us like 900 bucks or something to have that in there and for it to be legitimate. I suppose rather than stuffing it in there in the HTML, there are ways to stuff it into the HTML, but people Debate on whether or not that's.

Gray or white or what have you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ralph. Good stuff, Ralph.

I want to hear from Dan.

Hey, guys.

What's up, Dan?

Yeah, good, thanks.

I guess I'm not really struggling with too much at the moment. It's more the fact that I'm a bit frustrated with my manufacturer, and it's taking longer to actually receive the products than I actually had initially anticipated. So I've got the whole extra delay factor that I'm trying to work out and also trying to build my audience, which is also frustrating in that it's a lot slower than I was hoping it would be. So, yeah, I seem to be on top of it. I just would like to have more people that I could promote my things to. But I think until I can actually get some products to promote for, I think I haven't really got too much that I can actually do at the moment.

So you're looking for another group of people that you could promote to in order to do discounts, get reviews, giveaways, stuff like that, Right? Yeah. Facebook pages, blogs. I like blogs and people who have mailing lists. I also really like people who do a lot of content but don't have anything for sale. So anybody who's building an audience, I try to build a relationship with. Do you remember the assignment from a few weeks ago of being around, writing a list, raking a list. Writing a list of five to 10 people that you'd like to be around that have audiences? Yep. So do you have a list of people that you'd like to be around?

Not that many, but, yeah, it's something that I'm looking at.

Yeah. So I would encourage you to look at YouTube pages, podcasts, email lists, blogs, mailing lists, anybody who has a following, even Twitter pages. And then your second assignment is to try to get the smallest yes possible. The smallest yes possible could be, are you open to the conversation of me giving you money? Or it might be, are you open to. When I used to buy websites, the question was, hey, I found your website and I'm interested in buying it. Are you open to the conversation of me buying your business outright? If so, please reply and we'll talk numbers. Who the heck wouldn't say yes? Throw a number at me. The idea is to get the smallest yes possible so you can get the conversation started. So one of the worst things you can do is, hey, we've never met before, but you should promote my product. Delete. But if it's. Are you open to the conversation of blank. That makes a big difference. So get the smallest. Yes possible. It could be as simple as, can I retweet your stuff? Can I send your stuff out to my audience? What can I do to help you get that? Yes. And then use that as the catalyst to start other conversations.

Yeah, I totally understand all of that. The thing I'm struggling with is that I don't have any products to actually give to anyone. I don't have any products at the moment. So the thing that I'm struggling with is actually doing the audience building. But without any products. I can understand what to do when I actually have the products in Amazon ready to sell. But until that point, that's the bit where I'm treading water that I'm like, what things should I actually be writing about? I can write about the product that will be available, but until I actually have a timeline that I can actually start things. It's a bit like picking darts.

And Dan, is that because you've got products sitting on a boat somewhere?

Well, it's products that I'm. Yeah, well, it's going to come by air, but it's the fact that it was a slight delay and I had to change some of the manufacturing processes and so that delayed it longer than I thought. So it was initially a 25 day lead time but it's now turning into nearly twice that. So it's actually trying to use my time wisely without actually having a deadline. That's the thing that I'm like, I don't really know.

I should provide a disclaimer that that time when you're waiting for inventory to ship is pretty much the most frustrating. It's the hardest thing in this business. It's. It's like, keep everyone away from me because I might cut them.

You're so anxious, but there ain't nothing you can do during that time except for answer the question. What are you going to do day one when you can take a sale? How are you going to get as many sales as possible? That's the only other thing that you can do. The rest of the time it is just pure torture.

I know exactly what I'm going to do the moment I get it in Amazon. But I want to be doing something before that happens. I want to be building an audience. I've got a Facebook group, I've got a website set up. It's just trying to think of different ways. I think I'm going to go with what you just said about trying to find out some more people. Influencers that I could potentially target when it actually is live.

Yeah. Cool. So you're doing the right thing. I unfortunately cannot relieve the pain of not having inventory.

If I could fly to the Pacific Ocean and push the boat or the plane or whatever it is and make it go faster, I would. But there's unfortunately nothing else I can do.

Yeah, I think the next thing I may have a problem with is customs, but it should be all right.

If we can figure it out. So can you.

Well, I'll ask you if I don't.

And I'll defer to Sean.

All right, who would like to go next? Let's do one more. So if you've got a burning question, speak now.

I'll ask a question, because I'm kind of on that topic, and I saw that a lot of other people in the tribe on Facebook were coming across the same issue. So my niche, I was saying, hangs out a lot on Facebook, and I reached out to. I can't even tell you how many people. I only had one person respond. So it wasn't even getting a small yes, because my messages weren't even getting to them, which I believe is probably because of their privacy settings. They weren't even seeing their messages. So I don't know if I'm going about this the wrong way. So that's question number one. Has anybody else experienced this, and how do you go around it? So what I decided to do was just continue to build my own list on my Facebook page. So I managed to get my ads down to 17 cents, which, yeah, I was really excited about, because at first when Facebook was helping me, it was like $2.30 or $3. And I said I took control and got it down to 17 cents, which is exciting because I'm building a huge audience. However, there's so much engagement going on on these previous pages with these huge audiences of more like half a million people. A million people. But I'm having real difficulty of getting through to whoever's managing these pages.

So.

Are you messaging individuals, or are you messaging pages?

I'm messaging. Yeah. Just like with my page, if somebody sends me a message, I get alerted. And I have been messaged before.

So what I'm asking is, are you messaging individuals or are you messaging pages.

Right on the page? Okay.

Facebook does not tell you when a page reads their message. They only tell you when an individual reads their message.

Okay.

So if you're not seeing a red.

Sticker, it's not even showing, and even. It won't even show delivered or anything. It's just like showing up nothing.

Correct.

So it won't even tell you that if it went even anywhere.

Correct.

Okay, so it's very well that they could have received it.

It's very well that they could have received it. Yes. Okay, so let's address. Let's pretend that they're getting your messages but that they're not responding.

Now, as a Facebook Page manager, I know checking your messages for page is kind of a pain in the rear. It's a little bit.

It's on your to do list. It's not something you look forward to. It doesn't go to your primary box. It doesn't even go to your email. It just goes to some random ass list that you got to manually log in and check and it's annoying. So we've kind of got to stand out. So can you walk us through the message that you're sending them?

Oh, I'd have to go back and look now. I gave up and stopped writing them, but I don't even think I would talk about my product at all. You know, just thank you so much for what you're doing. And you know, I try to look through at things that did stand out to me. You know, you've really made an impact on this.

What's the small yes you were going for?

I'm trying to remember now if it.

Wasn'T clear, we've identified your problem.

Yeah, yeah. Because I tried to stay away from my specific product. That's what I tried to do until they just acknowledged me and then I was going to bring it up. Right. I wasn't even getting acknowledgement. So I must have been doing something wrong.

If there wasn't a clear yes, I personally wouldn't respond either. So if you are going after a page with 25,000 people on it. Actually, I think you said there were a lot more.

Some of them were like. Yeah, half a million. A million.

Okay. So they get messages probably all the time.

Right.

So there needs to be a clear yes, which could be as simple as, I really like your page. I've got a list of people here. Even if that list is still compiling, I've got a list of people who would benefit from this page. How would be the best way for me to alert them or bring you some attention from that group? Or can I share some of your content on our page or to our audience or can I introduce or what products and services do you have that I can promote to that group? So there needs to be a clear.

There is a benefit for you to Respond to this message even if it is just by saying yes.

Right.

So what's that small yes that you can get? If that's not clear, then we've identified your problem.

Okay, so chances are they are getting these messages.

There's no guarantee they're logging in, checking them, because it's a pain in the rear. But are they getting delivered? Yes.

Monavie. Yes. I see a hand. I think it's your hand. There we go.

Yeah. Okay, I have a question. So a couple days ago, you all at zenactives had a promotion for getting a coupon code, signing up, getting a coupon code for a mat, and almost immediately the email came with the coupon code in there. It was a very nice email. But what are you all using in order to be able to get these emails out there? I mean, it pretty much seemed automatic by how fast it came. And we've been kind of flummoxed by what to use.

Did you just use the word flummoxed?

I did.

Can you spell that for me?

I think F, L, U, M, M.

O, X, E, D. And does that mean befuddled?

Yes, it does.

Okay, so you've been befuddled and flummoxed by the delivery of a single use coupon?

Yes. Yeah. Single use coupons.

Okay. So on my other business where I manage it, it takes about 10 minutes for that to get delivered. I know the people who are actually doing technical stuff at Zen, I know they use mailchimp to manage the email, but I honestly don't know if that plays a factor in deliverability. Other than that, I'm not sure because it usually takes a few minutes for us. But they're using mailchimp, which I honestly have no experience with.

Okay, so they're doing it manually. It's coming in and they're actually manually sending out the codes?

No, I mean, they're using the autoresponder service of mailchimp. But as far as if there's any technology that's being used to accelerate the delivery of the email, that would be news to me if that existed.

What's getting the code into that email? Because it's a single use code.

Oh, so what is grabbing that from a database and delivering it rather than. Okay, so there's a member of the tribe who does this and his name is today, and he has a service that actually programs single use coupons into a database so that it can get pulled. So now as far as the details of this details, I don't know, but Today is the one who manages it for us. And he is in the tribe and his name is spelled T A, D, E, J. And he is in the tribe and he does this as a service.

Okay, great. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Basically what it does is a bunch of single use coupons get put into a database. Your autoresponder sequence calls one of those coupon codes, delivers it to the individual. How that works in technical world, I don't know. James probably knows better than me. But I know that once it was set up, it worked just fine.

Okay, perfect. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Okay, guys, I would like to revisit a question. I. Oh, actually, let me do rapid fire in the chat box. There were some chatbots questions.

Actually, the main one I want to hit was when tracking competitors, are there any other factors you look at other than rankings and reviews? And the answer is we look at bsr. So we look at how much a competitor is selling when we're kind of analyzing what a competitor is doing.

All right, so I would like to revisit the question I asked you at the beginning of the call, which is, moving forward, how could we best serve you? How could we best make a group that helped you break through blockages, grow your company, be confident, give you community when you feel isolated in this business. So beyond these weekly calls, how could we as a community and both myself as a individual and my partners who sometimes pop up on these calls, how could we serve you best moving forward? And I'd like your feedback in the chat box for those of you who are watching on the spillover page as well.

While you guys are thinking.

Merlin, who I mentioned earlier, is doing a video post on Facebook. Just post in the chat box. Unfortunately, he says, I must apologize. I can't really shed light on our Facebook strategy. I'm working with somebody much smarter than me who is familiar with Facebook and she set it up. So, Merlin, if you can share with us next week.

Any insight on that, we'd appreciate it.

Okay, so if you guys have info of how we could best serve you forward, I'd love to hear it.

I think for me it's more. It's going back to my original pain point is the community of actually holding. Helping a community that helps hold you accountable to whatever you say you're gonna do. And that could be in the form of. I mean, we already kind of had that on Facebook to a limited degree. But I mean, I really like these coaching calls. So it could be be as simple as coaching calls where you're not necessarily have to be Present, but the line is actually available for people within the tribe to show up on a Saturday or whenever we decide to set it up and then people just talk about their problems. Of course it'll be limited to only about 10 people to be on the video chat, but at least the brainstorming techniques or the brainstorming venue will be there for people for that face to face interaction.

So if you had a group that met regularly combined with an in person event or two, that would be useful for you?

Yeah, pretty much. Or even virtually just like what we're doing right now.

Cool. That's good feedback. Thanks, James.

I agree.

I think it's the accountability that I think a lot of people would need. Especially if you work in isolation. A lot of people work from home or as you say, from some co working place. If you don't have that team around you that you can bounce ideas off or you don't have that support network, I think that's where people will fall down. And I think if you can have some sort of structure that then people can feel secure by, I think that would help out a lot of people.

So if you had a small group of people that knew your business well enough to be able to hold you accountable to the things you said you were going to do and make sure you're hitting the deadlines and doing the things you're supposed to do, that would be helpful for you?

I think so. I don't even think you need to know someone's business on a micro level. I think it's more about understanding the processes, the stages. You've been there, you've done it. And for us, as we're going through it, we're still stumbling, we're still finding our way, but we're actually learning. It's a bit like children. We're learning as we go along. We'll fall down, but hopefully we get up. And it's that getting up. I think it's that bit of support, that bit of helping people out that I think if people aren't strong willed themselves, they're not actually going to be able to get up themselves. And I think it's having that network where you can feel safe effectively to fail.

Cool. Appreciate that. That's good feedback. Thanks, Dan.

It almost sounds like we're trying to systemize. Your tip from the beginning of coming into the tribe, of finding other people to mastermind with in the tribe is that does everybody feel like that's an accurate statement?

Could you elaborate on what he means to?

Well, when we joined the Tribe. You said that one of the most important things we could do would be to find other people within the tribe to mastermind with. It sounds like that's essentially what everybody's talking about here. But we're looking for a way to create a system to do it a little bit more automatically.

So if that was done for you and you were placed with people that would be in a subgroup for you that you could work with, would that be of value to you?

I think that would have worked a little better for me.

Okay, that's good feedback.

Anybody else?

I think.

If there were opportunities for kind of one case study a week or a specific tactic that worked really well, maybe even on Facebook or something like that, that would help. But I know that that might detract away from some of the other ventures. But.

Having. Having an idea, like even just one idea or maybe one post a week, and I guess I can foster that too. But on the Facebook group of something that's worked for somebody that week or.

Test results from something we tested that worked or didn't work or made a change or didn't make a change.

Emily, I like this setup you have. You've hacked the system to where every time the wind blows so your hair goes in the wind and there should be someone taking a camera, it enters the microphone just at the right time for your face to pop up.

You have hacked Google hangouts to make your face appear right at the model shot.

Sometimes I wonder. I'm wondering if people don't log on to watch these just to catch Emily's model shot. Go on.

Do you remember the old. There was an oscars moment, like, 10 years ago where. Where David Duchovny was standing on stage with Jennifer Lopez, and he's like, this is the first time in my life I know no one is looking at me. Every time that happens, and you've got your hair going and you're outside and looks like you're on the beach. I'm like, I know no one's looking at me.

Somebody said my name and wanted to share something.

By the way, I'm seeing your comments in the chat box, and I appreciate them and I'll get to them in a second. But somebody said something I wanted to share.

I thought it was Madhavi, but apparently not.

All right, well, then I'll read some comments in the chat box. Someone said, find more clements. That's what they said would be helpful.

Matt says, I like these meetings. I'd like them to continue. Perhaps they don't have to be on starting up more advanced techniques, Joaquim says our main roadblock turns out to be sourcing. I want more help with that. Would be good to have some more group meetings. Not every week, but maybe every other week. Agree on accountability. Maybe facilitate accountability partners, which are smaller teams that touch base with each other. Cool.

Someone says, I'd like a document that outlines the steps of the marketing strategy.

Okay, cool. And someone posted, bewildered, befuddled, flummoxed and perplexed.

Okay, would anybody else like to share what would be helpful to them beyond these meetings? Once you're beyond the startup phase, what would be helpful for you moving forward?

There goes Emily again with her model shot. It's fine. I'm pretty sure it helps. I'm pretty sure it helps my viewership. I'm not complaining. I'm pretty sure I'm getting more hits as a result of you having your polo dots. It's just, I know no one's looking at me and I like attention.

Hey Ryan, this is more of a question kind of harolding back to about 15, 20 minutes ago with the advent of mobile and just I've read various reports that talk about Amazon gets a lot of their sales from mobile. Has anybody tried mobile marketing and has been able to successfully track how good or how bad it actually works out?

I personally have not beyond email. There's some people who I know do text message marketing. It gives me the willies because of some FTC regulations on what you can and can't do via text messaging.

I only do email. And beyond that, no, I've never touched anything mobile exclusive. I'm not even sure how that would tie into selling physical products. So I personally can't comment on that.

Can I ask a question about your review phone calls?

Sure.

So I personally, I'm not confident enough to make that phone call myself.

You shouldn't anyway.

Okay. Especially knowing that I'm already sending out three emails.

Is that something that you should invest in at this point to hire somebody to do for you if you're in the beginning stage, if you're in the grind, because those reviews are so important right now?

I'll say this. A couple comments on this A. Do you have to do it around a review? No. My buddy Joey Coleman just calls or recommends calling customers just to say thank you and asking for nothing. So that's another way that you can do it.

Do I recommend calling customers? If you can do it in a cool and ethical way? Yes. Is it necessary for you at any stage? No. Can you do just as Much goodwill and customer follow up using other methods. Absolutely. So. So if you don't want to call your customers, you absolutely do not have to. You can get just the same effect using other methods, email being one of them.

Good.

Thanks.

Also, from now on, we're going to now make it a rule every time Emily has a model shot, we're all going to do an invisible shot. We're going to call it the model shot.

Make it a real shot.

By the end, I'll be like drunken games. I want to have my own model shot. Let me open a window.

Any final thoughts or feedback on how we can serve you best moving forward?

Okay, so we are going to have a break week next week. There will be no call next week. We will pick it up the week after. I'm actually going to be. This sounds so important. I'm meeting with a billionaire to try and convince him to come speak at our event at Freedom Fast Lane Live to fill up one of the spots. So I'm meeting with some potential speakers next weekend to fill up that lineup. So we will pick it up. It is not Richard Branson. Dan put Richard Branson in the chat box, but it is not Richard Branson.

Somebody is asking about LeadPages in the chat box. Yeah, you're on LeadPages right now. If you're in the chat box. Actual chat box is leadpages. I use leadpages all the time. It's one of my favorite, my favorite tools.

And somebody else asked, would it be beneficial to seek out networking and sharing ideas with others in the group who are in the same niche as you? I say yes, we certainly do that. We definitely do that. We know almost everybody in our space.

I have another quick question. Again, this is a going to be off next week. I think this is maybe a couple of tribe calls. Well, not within this iteration, but within another iteration. We talked about your conversion rates helping with your ranking. Has anybody done any kind of study to show that external traffic from like again, Google and Facebook and all these other places, you know how that lowers your conversion rate because it increases your sessions on your Amazon product, but has it shown to lower your rankings even if you're sending kind of unqualified traffic to your funnel, I mean to your listing.

I actually have tested this. Yes. So our mastermind did a test for this and within our test we found no change.

Okay.

So the theory for this is that Amazon is mostly testing the conversion rate of their internal traffic. So if you were to send outside traffic through a super URL and then thus Faking the system and it was junk traffic that might have a negative effect, but just sending mass traffic from somewhere and it was clear that it was from an outside link, in theory would have no effect on internal conversion rate and thus ranking.

We also found no effect on.

Outside traffic having a positive effect on ranking unless it produced sales. So some people have the theory that if you just send out any outside traffic, it'll boost your ranking. In our test, we didn't find that to be the case.

Okay, so that actually meshes with my test. And I actually created a super URL that would match what a typical person searching on Amazon would find. And I sent a lot of mobile traffic to that URL. Again, that's why I was asking a question about mobile. You know, my conversion rates dropped from like around 2018 to 20% all the way down to like 1% and less. And I did it over a few days just to test things, and I noticed no difference either. And again, that's with Amazon super URL.

Yeah. A lot. A lot of people talk about how it. So if it was just asterisks. Sorry, I just had like three thoughts. I'll combine to one. But if it was just an Amazon super URL, meaning you weren't disguising it in some way. Amazon can read that as being an outside traffic source, so that would not. Amazon, in theory, could see that it was outside traffic and thus not impact your internal to Amazon conversion rate. When I say super URL, I mean using a service to disguise it to look like it's Amazon's own traffic, which those pieces of software obviously exist and plenty of people use them. But if you were just grabbing. If it had Amazon.com in the link, Amazon can read that as outside traffic, but a lot of people think that just sending outside traffic will impact either positively or negatively, your conversion rate. I haven't. And it sounds like your test confirmed that that hasn't been the case.

Correct.

Cool. Okay, tribe, not to repeat myself, but no meeting next week. We will pick it up the meeting after or the week after. And we will see you all in two weeks. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks. We'll see you later.