Blasting and Ranking Your Products - Tribe Hangout - 6/14/15

Good morning, tribe. Today we are joined by a special guest. Wow. Her name is Esther Vivian. Amazing. Shawn and I are very proud.

She's beautiful. Oh, thank you. I know you're lying because you can't even see her face. I can see her face, not her mouth. But.

She'S been a dream and a half. We bought her off Amazon and she came delivered with prime.

You had the two hour shipping. Actually, it was 51 hour shipping from Amazon. 51 hours of labor. Pam was a dream and a half.

We were having a home birth, water broke, two days of labor at home. Finally went to the hospital and. And induced. And it was. I've never seen Pam in so much pain. It totally ripped me out. But we got this girl out of a whole ordeal. And now Sean's uncle Sean.

Now we gotta go buy. This is, by the way, why I recommended baby products in the. In the niche report. Because we have bought like half a billion dollars worth of baby stuff. Who knew that you could spend this much on something that only. Only sleeps in poops? That's all it does is seek and poop. And yet we spent half a billion dollars on things for her.

Okay.

So, tribe, today we need your help because, hey, we're halfway through the tribe hangouts and we've gone through this a few times now. This is the fifth round of the tribe. It feels like we've answered every question at least a dozen times and we have gone through the exact same set of questions, the exact same training, the exact everything five times and the same things kind of come up. So since we're at the halfway point, I want to kind of pause. We're going to talk about a couple of things, but in addition to the Q and A stuff that we've talked about on Facebook, I want to turn it over to you for a couple minutes and ask you what your roadblocks are and what would be most helpful at this point as your coaches. What would be the things that are mental roadblocks that we can clear or what do you want to see from the future that would be helpful in your business now? So I want to take a couple of minutes and have you answer that question.

Man. Chat box.

If you don't answer, I'm just going to start calling you out.

Go ahead. Go ahead. Gavin.

You are muted, my friend.

And you muted yourself.

Where's Godson when you mute. There we go.

Gavin.

Congratulations, man.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, best feeling in the world.

Cool. Listen, one of the things I've been like, really hassling with is.

I always want to know the end, so to speak. And I often find myself not seeing the wood for the trees. I was thinking if there was an actual way to like, if you guys could give an eagle eye view, whether that's in a flow diagram or like an infographic as almost. So you can look down on it as a checkbox and know where you are on the past to launch day. Because I find myself like with a whole bunch of spider diagrams in my.

Head.

And it starts getting a bit messy. So a useful tool going forward will be some sort of flow diagram with an aerial view for people with short attention spans like me. So I can always come back, you know, where I finished today, I can sit down tomorrow and pick up exactly where I left off instead of chasing another rabbit down another hole. So that would be really cool.

Cool, yeah. That's actually really good feedback. And I know what you mean about diagrams. This is me last night making diagrams. These are just my thoughts.

And for me, as soon as I turn the page, I do another diagram. I'm forgetting there's overlap. And I don't know if there's a way to create a matrix or. I don't know.

I know exactly what you mean. But I think I can simplify it for you even further. Your first end game is four products doing at least 25 sales a day.

That's the first end, if you will. And then you go to the next level. And the next level is about getting independent of Amazon, doing retail, growing your profit margins, getting a rabid audience around that set of products. But your first end game as far as getting a million dollar business, four products, 25 sales a day.

Cool. So for me it's even more macro than that. It's getting that first product, the roadmap to the first product. Because once you've done one, you just replicate. So even the four straight away is four rabbits for me. And the permutations on those four rabbits just makes me freak out. Not freak out, but I get too distracted.

You've done this with your clients before, so how would you answer that?

Yeah, and I think you're not alone in trying to figure out what the next step is. Try not to get caught up in things like building your website if you don't even have product chosen, things like that.

So.

I guess my usual advice is just to kind of go through a few key points. Like one, do you have a product in mind?

Yeah, I mean, I'm ordering. I mean, I will order. It'll be on the water, you know, in the next seven to eight days.

But you know, you find yourself one day focusing on.

Advertising, the next day on packaging the next day. And it's probably just my character.

I've got a whole bunch of things that I've done to 80% and I'm not getting to 100% and then moving to the next stage. And I do know that there are some imperatives that need to be completed before going to the next stage. Kind of like a flow. I think that's. I've got the idea of a flow diagram to if this, then that. So I cannot move to the next stage unless X is completed.

And also I suppose product selection in the first product. Correct.

I beg your pardon?

And you mean just on the first product and selecting that first product and getting it moving? Right?

Yeah, not even to me. The easy part is, is right up to shipping. To me that hasn't been much of an issue. It's now like you keep on asking, what's the launch plan?

I suppose it's an education thing, self education around.

How to market, what are the best platforms to market through Zonblast or Facebook or all of these things.

Yeah, I think actually I'm answering my own question to a large degree here, but just for an eagle eyed view.

Of.

Step one and most people in asm we're following modules but with all due respect, an awesome course, but there's a lot of filler in there. You can get, get to the meat and veggies a lot quicker than.

Each module. So. Okay, cool. I don't want to take up too much time.

This is a fantastic segue. First of all, have you seen my presentation? 12 months to 1 million. Yeah. Okay, cool. So let's simplify. This is actually fairly serendipitous based on something I talked about, planning to talk about in today's call. But.

You'Re clear up until the shipping part, right? Product selection, all that, that's. You're like, okay, now it's time to create a plan for building a real business out of this. Yeah, right. Okay. So if I could only do one thing, if I had a whole bunch of brain noise going on, pretty much. And I didn't, I didn't have a limited budget, meaning I could just turn on the faucet. Pretty much the only thing I would do is go to zonblast and do one until I ranked my keywords. The 8020 on this business is what you rank for on keywords.

That is the first level, if you will. That's your first million ranking. For the keywords that are going to bring in enough volume for you to have the customer base that you'll need to grow a real business. How do you get there? You do that through sales and conversion rates.

How do you stimulate the sales? You blast them to high heaven. And you do that with things like Zonblast. If I could only do one thing and I wanted to clear up my noise, I would forget about Facebook advertising, Pinterest advertising. I would forget about everything and just go to Zonblast, say, here you go. Here's like, I want to do two blasts a month until I'm number one. Go. I'd write to customer support and say, here's my market. How many units would you suggest that they give away on each blast? Great. Here's my credit card information. Please do this every two weeks for the next three months until I am number one for my keyboard. And I would just bully my way there. The reason this is serendipitous is because I texted Joe over at Zomblast before I did before this call. And I asked him, hey, Joe, would you do me a favor and set up a.

50% off coupon code for tribe members today? We're halfway through, and I want to encourage people to do some blasts because I had a feeling this was going to come up. And so I have a 50% off coupon code for those of you who are ready to secure zomblast. This is 50% off if you become a VIP, which I recommend you do. It's first month 50, all one word. First month 50. That's what that says, right?

Is that the number 5, 0, or the weight?

Yeah.

And lowercase. All lowercase.

He put it all upper caps. I don't know if it matters. Okay, cool. It looks like he's yelling at me. First month. First month 50.

I'll put it in the chat or the box as well.

Can I ask one question and then I'll get off?

Yeah.

Cool. So moving on from that, the person that is selling kind of dominating.

My market or my product.

They are literally changing their price. I would say, man, every 12 hours. And it's sometimes it's like a dollar. It's $2. What are they doing? What the freak is going on there?

That's a good question. They're either price testing or they are responding to someone else in their market and trying to stay ahead of undercutting them so that they maintain their number one spot. So they. So they see somebody else on the first page changing. So they change Theirs as like a preventative so that they stay number one.

In their space, but there's nobody near them.

Then they're price testing. Okay, here's my recommendation, though, Gavin. My recommendation is to establish yourself as a price setter, not a price taker. The person who is changing their price all the time is trying to maximize the quantity of sales which has a place. It has a place. If you have a trip wire in your product selection, which we talked about at the next level, but inside your core group of products, you want to come in and say, this is my price, and not change it. Unless it's strategic, meaning none of this random price testing. I would not recommend that unless there's a very strategic reason for doing it or your product is a tripwire and you don't care about profits on that product. But that's something you think about.

Yeah, it actually says sold by Amazon, so it's quite a big manufacturer.

All right, so what's going. Well, that's different. What's going on there is Amazon has just taken over the marketing of that, and they're doing their own price testing right now. So they're sending a boatload of traffic to it, and they're price testing it to try and find out the best profit margin. They do that when something is just switched over.

And I would think it's automated, too. They're probably not manually changing and just play a robot on the back end.

Yeah, that's true.

Which would explain why it changes so often.

Cool, thanks. I've taken enough of your time. Thank you.

Before we jump off, Gavin, because other people are echoing the same kind of confusion about the flowchart, but I think what you all are looking for, it's called the critical path diagram. That lets you know.

Really good example, is if you're making breakfast, in order to have breakfast, you need toast, eggs, and water to boil. Well, what if you. Or coffee. So coffee is actually a good example. So you can't blend the coffee until you brew the coffee. So the critical path is brewing coffee, blending coffee, but you can also do the eggs on the side. So a diagram like that, I think is what you're looking for. So I put that on my list. Probably won't be super fast, but, I.

Mean, certainly for some, that would be awesome.

But if not, I'll try and get through that because I think that would be very valuable.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Cheers, guys.

Let me.

This is really good because since we're at that midway point, is a perfect time to kind of recap and say, what are the essentials at this point? We've talked about the Brian Regan sketch where he talks about when he lost his bag at the airport and he's given an Essentials to. Oh, an Essentials Kit. It must be filled with food, shelter and love. So let's go over what your Essentials Kit is up to this point. There's a great question posted in the Q and A about what are the essential pieces of software that you need up to this point. So why don't we go through the absolute essentials. You need a product and a supplier and a freight forwarder or some way to get it to Amazon. From there you need to have your listing and that's it as far as like what you need absolutely in place to take sales, a product and copy. You're done. All of you know that, all of you are there. So from there, what is the Essentials Kit? I would say from a marketing perspective of making sales, of getting that first critical point of 100 sales per day, I would say your Essentials Kit is a ranking tracker. Somebody brought up AMZ Tracker in the Facebook group.

I think that's the one we use. And I think it's free. Is that right? It's free or like 20 bucks a month?

20 bucks a month? I don't think it's free. But it's not. It's not.

They have some free services, right?

I think you get a free trial. They all blurred together.

But are they not Seller Labs? Are they not the same company?

No, no, different.

Different.

Seller Labs is some three steps. Yeah, well, we use AMZ Tracker to track our keywords. Zonblast is a must or another way to launch your products. We've gone over several ways to launch your products, but if I was a simple man, I would just say, go use an outside service and we'll build up your launch. We'll build up your own list from there.

Asterisks. If you have your own assets, meaning you've got a list, you have a website, you have a blog, you have a list of affiliates from another business, this would change a little bit. Then we would create a plan all around that business that you've already got. And this would be in addition to on top of that business. That's fine, you can keep it.

But if you didn't have any of that, it would just go straight to Zomblast and let them do it, Let them handle it. Let them blast it.

That code again, by the way, for.

Your first month of Zomblast, Half off is first month. 50 that expires, by the way, and that's just because we're at the midway point. And I would like to encourage you all to do that, to do this. That expires in, like, a few days. So you have to secure that it expires the 18th. So four days from today, there's a four day.

So Zomblast AMZ tracker. The only other thing. Everybody look at me in the eye. The only other thing you need to have at this point, a plan to get reviews.

That's it.

Now put this in the chat box. Don't unmute yourselves because we're on a roll here, but put it in the chat box. What's the reason why we need reviews?

James? You're right.

I'm looking for a word that starts with C. There we go. Ralph Got it. Trusty old Ralph Monavie got it, too. Yeah. Good work.

Gavin. Yes, I believe you can sign up for Zomblast and then use it later if you're not ready yet. But conversion is the reason why we need reviews, because we can't convert traffic if we don't have the social proof that's needed to make conversions.

And the more the better. So how are you getting that first 50 to 100 reviews? And how are you turning the sales that get turned on into the traffic that gets turned on into sales? So that's it? It is. Where do you rank go? Rank get reviews? That's your plan?

I don't want to complicate it, but this really doesn't complicate it. Like the next piece from there, the other essential, Amazon Pay per click. You turn on Amazon Pay per click to fuel that. So if we were making this into a diagram.

Actually, let's do this. Let's experiment here. This could go horribly.

Stick with me for a second or I'll make this worth your time.

Stick with me. I didn't plan for this. This is improv.

Come on.

Okay, here we go. We are going to switch my screen over here, Screen share. Is that how we do it?

All right. Yeah. You all can see my screen right now. Okay, so if this is.

Your product listing, so I'm assuming here you've got copy and product.

Your essentials here.

Are Launch Blast, and I'll put the coupon code here.

This is your code for your first month of Zomblast at half off, which is like a lot of money saved and like a lot of money in your pocket, because some people just do one Zomblast and all of A sudden they're ranking and they make money.

So launch.

Reviews.

Amazon paper book.

So this is your promotion essentials kit.

Now here is where we all get confused.

Where we get confused is the nuances on each of these.

So there's a thousand ways to get reviews, right? So what's the best way to get reviews? So let's break this down. We're going to get our first 50 friends and family or.

Five members or what's another.

Whoa. What just happened?

This is, this is your low hanging fruit, your first 50. You're also gonna get some over here.

But we don't factor these in. We don't factor our reviews from Zomblast into this calculation. We consider those bonus because yes, we're gonna get them, but that's not what it's. Therefore.

The next reviews are going to come from a follow up sequence.

This can come from two places.

Phone calls.

Emails.

Most of you aren't going to do this right now, phone calls because it's going to confuse you. So we're going to delete that.

Instead we're just going to focus on emails because most of you aren't going to just put in the legwork for that and that's fine. So Sean, what's your favorite tool for emails? Yeah, Feedback genius.

That's it. There's a bunch out there. This is our favorite. Each of their strengths and weaknesses. This is our favorite.

Do you have any essential tools or anything for Amazon Paperclip?

I didn't but Jenny and Kelly just found a really cool one. Remember who Jenny and Kelly are?

Yeah, of course. They gave me the wrap that Esther's sleeping in there. They give really good gifts. They do give really good gifts. They are good people.

They are good people. They found this tool. They actually had it up because I wanted to bring it up today. It's called keyword inspector and I'll put the link in the chat box but you can scrape your competitors keywords and see what they're ranking for. And you can scrape your own keywords. Yeah. And it's super cheap. It's like 20 bucks.

Let's see. Where have you been all my life? Okay, so tribe, I can't even see your faces right now because I'm in this thing.

Might have one of their files because did I delete it all?

Let's see. All right, so what is that? Whoop, that's not what I wanted. What is that called? Keyword inspector.

It's simple.keyword inspector.com.

I should really have an affiliate link for this shit, I mean, seriously. Keyword inspector. I lose so much money not caring. Keyword inspector.com. all right, so asterisks here. I don't know anything about this and.

I just found out about it yesterday.

So none of this is pretty cool. This is the competition Sean is showing. Sean is showing me the data that's been pulled up that was shared by one of our tribe members, Kelly and Jenny.

Next level graduates, Kelly and Jenny. All right, so I don't know anything about this.

But we're investigating it right now. How about that?

And what it'll be used for with pay per click is give you a good baseline of some keywords to run so you can just use. And you don't have to use this tool, but it's certainly the easiest thing I found. You can just scrape your competitors keywords that they're ranking for, throw those into your pay per click, let it run for a couple weeks and see what works, turn off what doesn't.

So this is your essentials kit for getting started. I literally would add nothing to this.

So there's other ways that we could satisfy this box. For example.

That'S not what I wanted.

So we could complicate this and say Facebook launch. But here's what it looks like. Then we gotta have ads, then we gotta have.

What'S our budget and then we gotta look over our targeting and all of a sudden this is stop doing that. This is starting to get complicated. And then we're going to do split tests and then we're going to have.

Different landing pages and for that we're going to need leadpages. So we're starting to complicate it now. I do all of this. I do all of this. But is it essential? No, it's not. Food, shelter and love. So we're. Dang it. So we're just gonna get rid of all these. And the reason we're getting rid of all these is not because it doesn't work, is not because it's not effective, but because it's not the most immediately impactful.

So this right here is all I would do. And if we were gonna put these in order, it would actually look like this.

Have your product send them, get the reviews. Here's what it would look like.

Run is on blast. Let's get rid of this guy.

And just say repeat is we're going to repeat this until we're at the top. And by at the top, I really just mean getting consistent full price sales.

And then.

Amazon pay per click. And this is the One tool we use for this. So as far as tools go, here's what we've got. We've got feedback. Genius.

Zomblast, Keyword inspector. So this is your. What did you call it? The flow.

The critical path.

Okay, the critical path.

Now if we're going to add eggs to this, is there a term Stop.

What's the, what was the word for eggs? Like the mashup thing.

Let me look it up.

So what's the non critical thing here? The non critical thing, like the nice to haves. I'm going to put these here.

Anz tracker.

This tracks your keywords. We did this manually for a long time. Would you add anything else to this?

Oh, actually, yes. Here's another, another.

Nice thing. Packaging. Packaging's a nice thing to have. Is it necessary? No. What else is nice to have? So James mentioned on here on the essentials, he said he would put inserts which I say are nice.

But not essential for getting your business started.

They're a pain and a half. Are they effective? Hell yeah. We spend a lot of time talking about inserts at the next level and turning those sales into leads. But are they absolutely essential? No. You look like you want to say something.

I don't know if there's a name for it, but the name for that, the lag between the critical path and the non critical items is float. So if you're making eggs and you can make the eggs two minutes before the coffee, you have two minutes afloat because you have two minutes to delay on your eggs to have them ready at the same time.

So if your product is going to be on a boat somewhere for two months, you've got two months afloat to.

Get your launch ready.

Okay.

Yeah.

Cool. All right, so here are all your extra things. Packaging, AMZ tracker.

What else is nice to have but not essential?

What do we do to a website?

I hate that pop up.

Having a website. I'm going to put a Facebook page on here. Now this is already starting to get all confusing because we're adding non essential things here.

Calling people will be non essential.

Yeah.

So that's a whole other rabbit trail.

So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to delete the non essentials. The reason I put these up here because.

I want you to see that they're extra.

So let's go ahead and just delete these because they're extra. You don't need them on your diagram.

Here is your essential flow.

This will get you to stage one of having.

Profitable sales Coming in and allow you to move to stage two. Or we repeat the process.

So we haven't seen people's faces in like 10 minutes. So why don't we pause? Why don't we.

How do I present to everyone? I don't know.

Could they not see?

Now you guys could see all of that, right? Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

That'd have been bad.

And our face. Hello.

Okay, so questions on that? Was that helpful? Was that confusing? What can we clear up from that? Ralph is bored? Because Ralph.

Is way more advanced than this. So he's like. He's like you amateurs.

So, for example, Ralph, give me a thumbs up. You're past all that. So your essentials kit would look a little bit different, Right? But I'm guessing your path to success looks something like that, correct? Yes. Okay.

I could use the AMZ tool because I was tracking them every day for the last 30 days.

And wouldn't you agree that once all that's in place, it's pretty easy and simple to add the non essentials to it and grow that business?

Yeah, because then you get bored. If you don't add anything else, you'll probably get bored getting sales every day and not having much to do. So then you start optimizing and adding tools to simplify your life or. Very nice.

After Ralph gets bored making lots of money.

Yeah, Ralph life.

So after you start making the sales that you had set as your goals, it's like, huh, what's next? You know?

So that's the essential path. The critical path. The essential path. Is that what it's called? That's the. That's your essentials.

We can make up our own words.

It's our essentials kit. That's your food, shelter, and love. My name might essentials to it. There we go. So that's your food, shelter, and love for growing this business. I want to hear from Gavin. Gavin, how is that as far as clearing up your mental. Your mental space?

Yeah, that is. That is cracker. That is absolute gold. Thank you.

When you say cracker, is that a drug reference, a white voice reference or something that I've never heard of before?

It's me just trying to sound street.

Very street.

Can we pull up the chat box?

Okay. That was actually. People really liked that. Good. Well, special thanks to Gavin for bringing that up then. So that's like cutting out all the noise. We could complicate this a hundred different ways. We could add in a bunch of different tools. We could add in a bunch of different paths. But when it comes down to it that's what it looks like sometimes. So some people will apply for the next level when they're at like 40 ish thousand dollars, which is, I like to see people at least at 50. I prefer them to be at 100, but 50 is the minimum to get there to qualify. Otherwise it's just going to be over your head. This stuff is too advanced. And.

Usually what I tell them when we're on our consulting call, which we do before somebody qualifies for the next level, is I'm like, alright, your assignment for the next month is to do exactly what we just assigned and then come back and reapply. And that's what happens is they go back and they do that essentials, they get over that $50,000 a month level and then we work with them one on one to get them through that hurdle and into the next level. Sometimes I'm just telling people, all right, you need to hang up this phone and go call Zon Blast and not me. Because all you need to do is blast this through your keywords to get that moving. So what I find interesting is sometimes people find our content out of order, but if you watch it in order, you see the evolution of it all. For example, if we just take my three talks from stage about Amazon, about doing a launch, getting to a million, selling your business. There's a very logical flow here. And in the first one where we talked about doing a launch, it was, here's how we manually did a launch. In stage two, it was here's how we manually launch things slide several times. So we had a million dollar business. And three, it was, hey, there's this tool now called zonblast which does it all. And by utilizing it, you can rank for keywords. And based on those keywords, we were to evaluate a company and then sell it. If you watch those out of order, it can be a little bit confusing. If you watch the launch video last, a lot of people come back and say, how do you set up a launch now? Truth is, we don't anymore. We have other tools that we use. So does the Facebook Launch still work 100%? Absolutely, yes. It's different now because we have different goals to do that. But for the goal of just getting a business kicked off and started, we would just go over to Zomblast and go through there. It's more of a direct cut out the noise, do it. I still do Facebook launches, but now it's extra. And there's different.

Goals for doing that, which I could talk about, but it would complicate the process. So we're talking about essentials. We won't get into that. If I was just going for the goal that I had when I talked about here's how to launch a business, I would just go pay somebody to email out to their list. That's the brunt. The blunt force shotgun approach. Take no prisoners, kick down some doors.

Anything you need to add to that or anything in the chat box.

I have a quick question.

Go ahead, Ralph.

Well, not a quick question. I have three questions.

You're a liar.

That's how it gets in.

Quick question.

Just kidding.

That's just like a.

That's how you get in the door.

Go ahead, Ralph.

So first one.

How many for keywords? When you're searching for that work for the newbies. Also when you're searching for a first keyword, what is the minimum on merchant words that you would go with for your main keyword?

So I have never one time used merchant words. Never, Never in my life. The only thing I think about is what's the most obvious keyword for this?

That's what I start with. I think when we started, you just pulled it up. How did you know that I was going to ask you that question?

Oh, okay. So when Sean and I went down and we typed in our or when we were figuring out our keywords, it was yoga mat, Long yoga mat, Hot yoga mat. Those are obvious. And then we bid on those through Amazon pay per click. So I that they got traffic. So we modified it for that. We never used merchant words. We only used Amazon Paperclip to do our keyword research with what was obvious. Sean just put those. He just put yoga mat into merchant words. And those were the keywords that came up along with some others. So I don't have a minimum of what to target. It's just what's most obvious and what's getting traffic on Amazon's paperclip system.

Okay, so question number two for inventory. As you know, I always had trouble, you know, getting inventory here on time. And even when I planned to have inventory here seven days earlier before I ran out of stock, the shipping company found a way to be late. So what is the amount of days of inventory do you have left usually when your next shipment arrives?

So I'm going to give you my answer from the future because the way that we finally solved this problem was to keep a reserve of 30 days of inventory and consider that out of stock. So we did not back. Ralph, you are in great company on inventory problems.

The amount of people have inventory problems in this business are the same number of people who die in the world. It's a hundred percent. It's the biggest problem we all face. So there's a couple solutions to this. Spend a lot of money, get a warehouse to hold inventory so you can quickly replenish or just keep a reserve. Finally, in my business we keep a reserve now that we consider out of stock. So if we get a spike in sales, we might dip into that inventory, but we would normally be out of stock and we just factor that as zero. When that reserve starts kicking in, we're out of stock and we're late on inventory. Thankfully, we have the reserve to keep sales going, but we'll order to replenish the reserve and order.

An additional order.

All right, so last question for the next level. Once you're at 50k, I know you have an application process. What is it that you're looking for.

From the applicant's business in order to approve?

I'm just looking. We get on a call for about 20 minutes. Just understand your business and I just want to make sure that I can help because we have a very structured curriculum and I just want to make sure that the curriculum that we're going through is going to very quickly double or triple somebody's business. So I can tell very, very quickly that's going to be the case. I turn away about half the people, but I can tell within about 10, 15 minutes whether or not it's going to be a fit or not. There was a question that came in about that. I don't mean to be all self promoting but there was a question that came in about applying from overseas and yeah, plenty of people have flown in for the next level. Considered it well worth the trip.

Fantastic question from Traffic Salad.

Can Zonblast sustain rankings for mid high competition keywords without any other external promotions? What type of Zonblast is recommended?

Fantastic question and the answer is no. Zonblast alone will not maintain your rankings. What will maintain your rankings is conversion rates. How do you get your conversion rate? By having strong reviews. That's why that's part of the essential. That's your shelter. If Zomblast is your food, your reviews are your shelter and the pay per click is your love. Outside traffic is your love. So the shelter of conversion rate, what is going to maintain those rankings? So Zomblast will get you there. A launch will get you there. Sales will get you there. I should just say that sales will get you there. Zomblast is a resource for sales and then conversion rate is going to be the shelter that keeps you there. Then you add more to the fire with your love with outside traffic, which the essential piece is your Amazon paperclip.

As far as what's recommended at least once a month for a Zomblast, like what type of Zomblast? I prefer just the blast it to high heaven all in one day. As many sales as possible in the shortest window possible. 500 sales in an hour. Blunt force approach. Give me a number one tag. That's my preference. We have used the other ones, the Pulse and the Wave, but we use them for other reasons. We'll use them to scare competitors. We use them. I mean, there's. There's things that we'll do strategically. But as far as ranking, blast the high heaven, my opinion, I actually don't. I talked with Joe this morning and I think he was saying that's still the best for ranking. We didn't talk about it in depth, but different people have different theories and different opinions on that, so. So they can use whatever they want. They all work. I like the blunt force, crush it to high heaven approach.

What was Brian's question?

Okay, great question from Brian. Hey, Brian. Brian said we had dinner. We had dinner with Brian the one time, remember? Okay, yeah, Gary Farmer. Yeah.

I forgot about that. Yeah.

I made up Brian's life story one night at dinner. Esther, are you awake? She's fine. Is phoning for reviews considerably more effective than the three email sequence? Doesn't calling folks anger them? Is phoning people for reviews more effective than emailing them? No, it's not more effective. It's just additionally effective. It's not one or the other. It's a both thing. They will both do the same task in different ways. So that's like saying, is having a male partner more effective for making babies?

Well, no, because you need both. That's a bit of a strange example because they're not both essential. You don't need to. Phone calls and emails, guys can't even see my hands. Many phone calls and emails to make reviews, but they both do the same thing in different ways. So you can do one or the other or both without detracting from one another. Does phone calls anger some people? Yes. About 10% of people will say, don't call me anymore. But the other nine are like, I cannot believe you called me that. That's awesome. What a great company. So for every complainer, we have nine people who are really, really happy that we called.

Dan is Asking about ranking for primary keywords and then secondary keywords. That's what we've always done. Some people have said now that Amazon is more competitive, they go after sub keywords first and the main keywords later. That's the opposite approach that I've always taken. Both will work just fine. But some people do say.

Go for your secondary keyword first.

Thank you. Trapped salad.

I forgot. I forgot. Brian was the lactose intolerant. Very fun. Now I want to make one additional comment about this essentials piece.

The essentials are going to be different if you have a different set of assets, meaning you've got other assets that you can leverage for the results that you want.

For example, if you've got a customer list, which I do now, we have thousands and thousands of our own customers on email list who love our products. So we're going to leverage that as an essential piece of our business now. And that's what we do. So we rely less heavily on.

Pay per click and more on our own customers for repeat buys or our own blasts. And we'll use that as an essential piece. But that's because we have a different set of assets. But the same is true if you've got a different set of knowledge assets. For example, Jason Katzenbeck, when he started this business, his essential piece was search Engine optimization. Why? Because he is one of the top SEOs, or at least was at the time. And he used a lot of Web 2.0 properties, a lot of search engine optimization to promote affiliate products. He had courses on search engine optimization. That's originally how I met him actually was through one of his search engine optimization courses. So his asset was a lot of SEO knowledge. So when the first couple ASMs were launched, his opinion was, I don't care where I rank the keywords on Amazon because I'm going to rank all over Google and send a bunch of traffic from outside. I have another friend who is one of the top black hat SEOs in the world and he's like, yeah, I don't care what I rank on Amazon, I'm going to rank on Google and I'm going to get even more traffic and I'm going to have hundreds of sales a day coming from Google. So why do I care about Amazon? Because that's where his asset is. So his essentials kit is going to look different than Sean and my own. I've got a lot of SEO background, but I'm way behind them. Like I.

Remember Alex, the Brit who doesn't know how to play American Football. He's like a master at SEO and he talks about it and blows my mind. I'm like, it's so different now. But if he were going to go, I paid him to manage the SEO of our Amazon, so that's not an essential for me. If he were to launch an Amazon business, you better believe he's going to be seoing into hi, hepatitis. So if you've got. I've got one friend who's just a brilliant genius at Google pay per click. So his essential might be, I'm going to set up a high converting.

Catherine says Ryan. It makes sense. I think that means. Shut up, Ryan. You're repeating yourself a thousand times.

So your asset is going to be different to leverage. But if you don't have any special skills, what we've outlined today would be kind of the primary essential skill.

Would you add anything to that?

I would say if you think you don't have any special skills, you're probably not thinking hard enough. You've got something. You wouldn't be here. You had no special skills. You'd be doing what everybody else is doing. So figure out either what drew you to starting your own business and kind of capitalize on that. Ryan and I talk a lot about our strengths. Marketing. Not my thing at all.

Writing copy is getting things done right.

Writing copy drives me crazy. I'd rather, I don't know, jump off a building.

And I can do it my sleep, right?

So figure out what you're good at and then outsource the rest. There's no way I would ever try and write my own copy for listing because with the amount of time it would take one, it'd probably be three months of over and over and over. And it's not going to be anywhere near as good as something that many of you could do, just because that's part of the skill that you have.

What was the question from Jack? Jack Ammo.

Listing title. Is a short title better than a long title? What are the most important spots in a title? Are first words more important first? Yes. First words in a title are more important. How many of you actually read an entire title on an Amazon listing? Your first words are what's most important? Well, I get it, girl. We talk about Amazon titles and you just come right away. So your first words are absolutely the most important. Is a long title better than a short title? No, not unless a long title converts better than short title. Some people can say much more in one sentence than they can in.

A long paragraph. I gotta tell you what I'm gonna make a good point, but let me return her to her mom first. Come on, baby girl.

While he does that, we'll talk about titles. So what I usually recommend to my clients when we're just starting off is one, your first title doesn't have to be perfect. I usually lean on the longer side, kind of keyword stuffing it, but make it human readable. I'm sure you've seen some gibberish titles out there that just make no sense at all. That can't be good for conversion rates. As a customer, that doesn't really do it for me, but I tend to lean on the longer side. Now, recently I've heard some discussion that that might not be as effective. And that's fine. You can always test, so set it up. Once you have some steady sales coming in, you can always change your title. Change one thing at a time. Don't change 40 different things in your listing, because you're never going to know what the impact was.

You were both gonna say something. Yes, I'm brilliant. You ready for this? Yeah. Does anybody remember what Barack Obama's sales message was in the last campaign? Brilliant.

What was his sales message? Meaning what was his tagline? Was the tagline of the campaign?

Close. Close. Madhavi. That was. That was in 2012. 2008. That was 2008. Change we can believe in was the tagline for 2008. What was it in 2012?

Forward.

One word. Forward.

He said a lot with that word.

Now, the message was he was basically saying, here's all the things we did. The other side is a retraction. We're forward. Do you want to go back to the old way, or do you want to go forward? He said a lot with that one word. I happen to disagree with his analysis of it being forward, but it was brilliant marketing. So forward.

One word. And he said a lot with that one word. Now, his tagline could have been, barack Obama is a vote for change and a vote for going forward. Because the other side is a retraction to the old way. That would be saying way too much. So is a short title or a long title better? The fewest number of words that you can use to say the same thing is the best.

The shorter number of words with the same message is your ideal. Now we have to massage that because we need to get keywords in there because we have certain things that we want to squeeze in there. But if you can say more with fewer words, that's your idea. Think forward.

Another question. Chat box.

All right. So here's what I want to do. I think I have you all muted.

Probably because we were so engaging today. So go ahead and unmute yourselves now if you want to, or as long as if you got headphones in, go ahead and unmute yourself. Otherwise we get yelled at for having echoes every week. So go ahead and unmute yourselves. Go ahead if you want to comment on any of this or ask questions from here. Q and A blew up, huh? Oh, by the way, so you all cracked me up.

So every week for six weeks. Well, no, that's wrong because we didn't do it for two weeks. Every week for the past month, I've sent out a Q and A email in Facebook that says, state where you are and what we can do to help clear you up next.

And this week, for whatever reason, you all decided to interpret that as where in the country you live. So there's like.

In all fairness, I.

Thought that's what you were asking.

Every week I'm like, tell us where you're at and tell us where you need to go, what you need to go forward. And monavie is like, denver, Colorado, and everybody else chimes in. I think the person in front of me did that. And so I just followed that format without making any other interpretation.

It cracked me up.

I'm Monavie from Denver for the next level. Great.

Almost everybody cracked me up. Hey, James.

Hey, Ryan.

Quick question.

So I've been running into issues where I'm trying to launch a couple more products, but what I'm finding is that I need a freight forwarder actually to make it work. I mean, these are the products aren't that competitive. I mean, the products I can actually go in and they will work for my niche, but the size is almost to the point where it's a little bit heavy or a little bit bigger for air freight. And I'm finding that if I can get a freight forwarder, it'll actually work. It'll work in my favor and I can actually go into that market and make lots of money.

But.

I've never used a freight forwarder up to this point. So I'm trying to get an idea. Does anybody have any suggestions about them or where I should go look and like the procedures and such?

This guy right here.

Yes, we use Behringer's D E.

Let.

Me just make sure I'm giving you the right.

I've been spelling it so long when.

I tell people Derringer is a name, but their website is a N Derringer. So website is www.a n e e r I n v e r dot com. I'll throw that in the chat box. Just email them, let them know what's going on and they'll get you set up. Yeah, plenty of other good ones out there, but that's just the one.

Would you explain quickly how that process works? Like the freight forwarder picks it up from your supplier and how exactly does that work? Yeah, sure.

So before you contact them, you want to make sure you have your product size and the carton size all set up with your supplier. They're going to need to know how many cartons, what the size is, how much they weigh, what the product is for customers and where it's going. So with Amazon, you can create the FBA shipment and that'll give you the address of the warehouse. Take all the information, contact them, let them know where it's coming from, where it's going, all about it. They'll give you a quote. I think they even have an online quote calculator on their website that you can do first. That'll probably save them the hassle of getting spammed by all 400 of you at once. And they will connect with your supplier. You'll have to give them the contact information. Of course, they'll take it onto the boat. They'll take it from the boat to a port, take it from the port through customs and customs to either their warehouse for labeling or direct to Amazon. If your supplier labeled it, they can keep it at their warehouse. And the fee was minimal. I want to say it was like 100 bucks a month for a thousand yoga mats.

And they pretty much did everything. They're certainly going to be.

You're going to pay for the convenience. So it was a little bit more expensive than the suppliers, but it was way less hassle. When we used this supplier shipper for our first order. I was up till like two in the morning talking to them, pulling my hair out when I used Freight forwarder, basically connected with them. And then I got an email saying, hey, your stuff's on Amazon. Like, oh, wow, that's pretty cool.

So I guess that's kind of the overview of the freight forwarder.

Does that make sense, James? Process? Yeah. Yeah, it does.

And there's a handful of tribe members using them. So just let them know that you're, you can give them my name if you want or just let them know that you're selling on Amazon. They should direct you to the right context that have done it before.

So would you tell me what this question in the chat box means. I'm sure this is out of context, but I want to understand this is the question. Auto reacting from people. I was did. Hell yeah, I passed without even passing anything. But I got so many congrats. Unbelievable. Do you have any idea what that means?

No. Anon6462 auto reacting. Not sure what you're talking about.

Auto reacting from people. I was dead. Oh, you moved it. Where'd it go?

I'm trying to see if there was.

Some context beforehand, but hell yeah, I passed without passing anything. Congrats. Unbelievable.

Yeah, I'm not sure what that means.

Maybe if you read it, it'll be different.

Auto reacting from people. I was dead. Hell yeah, I passed without even passing anything. But I got so many congrats.

Unbelievable.

Maybe. Maybe they're a poet. Maybe they copied and pasted anon642 it's about your past comment.

I don't know what that means. I don't know what my past reveal yourself. Anonymous6462 about your past comment.

Pretty sure it was something that we said and therefore it's not in the chat box.

I don't remember what I said, usually.

Just in general, but I got so many congrats.

Well, and I'm 6462 if you could.

That is how Facebook works. That is how Facebook works.

Probably someone from Google Translate.

I have no idea.

Okay, so that makes sense. 5776 how does it make sense?

Tell us, Sean.

Well, if English is a second language and they're using Google Translate, it might make sense for what they're writing in, but when it gets translated out, it doesn't make sense to us. So now I feel like a jerk. That was not the point. So N9 6462 if that is the case, maybe try using.

LetitPass.

OK, so we're saying drop it for the injured. Sorry about that.

Sorry. Sean's sorry.

I'm sorry. Anyway.

Dan asked what the freight forwarder URL was again. It's in the Freedom Publishing chat box.

John asks email sequences. I haven't had great success getting reviews from them. Do you have any best practices? Well, first of all, great success on email sequence is like 4%. So if you're getting 4 to 5%, you're having great success.

And anything more than that is great, great success. And there's people who have different theories on email sequences. If you can make some sort of an offer in your email sequence, it's tough to do because Amazon watches that stuff, but if there's a way that you can make an offer in that sequence, it can do really well for you if you can put some sort of time deadline on leaving a review. Again, this is a very delicate dance, so I'm not going to go into it deep because it's a very delicate thing. But if you can make some sort of an offer that helps a great deal. But 4% is about what you can expect. For every hundred sales you can expect about four reviews.

Jack asks, why would Amazon remove reviews? Having a number taken off even some of my best. Any insight? Amazon is attempting to clean up their acts. They're attempting to eliminate fraud. They're doing a very bad job of it. They're removing a lot of real reviews and leaving a lot of fraudulent reviews. It's the most bass ackwards process ever. But they're upping the number of reviews that get removed as a result of somebody who bought through a discount and is not disclosing in the review that they bought through discount. They're not doing it well, but they're upping the number that they're removing. They'll also remove reviews if they get a certain amount of legitimate complaints or if there's. If it violates one of their rules. There's a number of reasons why you could get something removed. There's no explanation for why they removed some or the other except that a manual reviewer is going in and making that decision. So why are my reviews getting removed and not my competitors? Because there's someone at Amazon who went eh, this guy's breaking some rules. And delete a bunch of his. Oh, that guy. I didn't know he existed. That's why.

I got lots of congrats. Unbelievable.

Oh yeah, I passed Battery just use.

You don't follow them. Anyway.

John says 2 to 3%. I guess, I guess that's what. Is that what you're getting on your email? If you're getting 2 to 3% reviews on, that's not horrible. You can make a couple of changes and get that up to 4 or 5% but 2, 3%, I mean it's not. You gotta remember before people started trying to market on Amazon, getting 2 to 3% of people to review was like a huge accomplishment. And then us marketers came in and you know, we ruined everything. So our stats are. We figure out how to manipulate channels. That's what we do.

Dan asked about brand registry. I actually still to this day don't know what brand registry is. So no, it's not essential. Tell us what it is, Sean.

So Brand Registry. I don't really know what the benefits are, but we did it because it was easy. So for Brand Registry, all you really need is your website. You might need an invoice of some sort of.

That was probably about it. Maybe took five minutes to apply.

What do you do it for? I don't know.

It was just a thing that could be done. You know, I like to do things.

It's a way to prove to Amazon that you own the brand. So when competitors come in and try to change your copy, you can go back and tell Amazon and.

They'Ll help you, basically, because that happened to me. So I just wrote the competitors and left because they tried to change my title and everything. But since I have proof that I own the brand, I trademarked it.

They will let me have the priority when it comes to editing the listing.

So, Ralph, did you message Amazon and say, hey, change this back? And then they did?

No, not them directly. I called them, but I had already messaged the competitor, but he already left the listing. But that is one advantage of owning or registering your brand is that if there is a problem and the competitor won't leave, you can go to Amazon. And I believe they'll help you if you can. You have already proven that you own it by registering the brand because they ask you to verify a bunch of stuff.

We never utilized that then.

But again, it's not essential, but it just helps.

Yeah.

All right, so let's wrap up for the day. Go ahead, James.

I had a quick question again, because I won't be on a Tribe call for the next couple of weeks, but a.

What?

I'm going to Hawaii.

Okay, so where are you based, James?

I'm in. I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina.

All right, so James is in Raleigh, North Carolina, and where he's going next is Hawaii. That's his Q and A answer for the week. Where are you?

He's going to Hawaii next.

The roadblock is. It's a very long flight.

No, I had a quick question about a content. Do you know much about that or. I'm starting to see a lot of listings that are formatted as such. So how do you get into that type of plan and what's the process?

There's two ways. You can either know someone or they will contact you. How did we get in? We got.

All right, so I'm trying to remember. This is the A process. A content is the result of Amazon selling your own products.

Of Amazon taking over your listing. So if Amazon takes over your listing as the wholesaler, then you get to do the A content. You pay for that. So each little section on the A content is.

I think it's like 300 bucks. So one of those listings ends up being like 900 to 1500 bucks to get all your HTML in there. But when they send you an invite to be in their wholesale.

Then you can create.

Your own A content. Now, there are benefits and there are challenges to having Amazon broker out or be the wholesale supplier for your stuff. We could go into that, but basically your profit margins are down. But Amazon's in control of the process, so you have to think about it less. We found it to be a very slow, slight bump in a content and we have found some loopholes around it, but.

That'S still a bit of a black box that we're experimenting with right now. So you can either message Amazon specifically, somebody in the marketing department and ask, or have your stuff evaluated. We had a direct contact. I honestly don't remember who it was. I wasn't part of that. But if you get somebody in their marketing department or if there's anybody that you know that would have some contacts that could intro you, that's the best way. You can also just send a general inquiry to Amazon, say, how do I have myself evaluated for possible sold by Amazon and A content? And they'll tell you, it doesn't mean you'll get in, it just means that you'll get evaluated. You have to have a certain amount of sales in order to be considered, but I don't think it's that high. James, what I know about your business, I think you'd probably qualify.

Thanks.

Yep. Cool. So let's wrap up for the day. Sean, several people asked in the chat box about if you're taking fines right now.

I'm full at the moment, but if you want to email me s coinenterprises.org.

Did you say that again? Because that was a lot, a lot of syllables.

S, coins, S, C, O, y, n, e. @coynenterprises.org I'll throw the email in the chat box again, but I'm full for the next couple months. But if you want to get in the queue, I'm happy to do so.

You want to put your email into the chat box and then the next level is nextlevelvideoseries.com for those of you who are over 50k, I prefer that you're at 100k. 50k is the minimum. And.

We just got a message from Jenny. Hey, Jenny, thanks for your email.

Watch over. It's hilarious. Do you want to add anything to that?

No, I lost my train of thought.

Okay. So I think next week we're going to have a segment all about consumables, about supplements and beauty products, because a lot of people ask questions about that. So I think we're just going to dedicate an hour to talking about consumables and what that looks like and what the benefits and challenges are, especially with all of. There's a lot of crackdowns happening in those spaces right now because there's been a lot of suppliers getting caught selling.

So we'll talk about all of those things next week. Until then, post your questions on the Facebook group and we'll see you next week, everybody. See you guys. Bye.