How Successful Brands Launch, Source, and Dominate on Amazon w/ Casey Gauss

You know, missing a keyword like this could literally cost you thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a month. I cannot express how important a well optimized listing is. If you don't have a well optimized listing, it's going to hurt your ability to rank, to sustain rank, to drive conversions. It's going to be a mess.

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Hey, fastlaners. This is Casey Goss's presentation from the Capitalism Conference. Casey is the CEO of Viral Launch, a popular software and service company that serves brands on the Amazon Marketplace. In this talk, he shares some of his insights he has seen and what has led many successful brands to dominate on Amazon. Enjoy.

All right, what's up guys? I want to just jump in. So I selected a topic that is pretty broad. How to. Or how successful brands source launch and dominate. It's a broad range of topics and so there's quite a few slides in here. I don't go super deep on anything. I try to give some tips kind of on each topic that I am covering. So anyways, yeah, let's just jump in and get going. So to get everybody a little bit excited. One, I can't see if they're in here, but this event, I met two guys, they're 20 years old. One of them is still in college and after one year on Amazon, they did $10 million. Insane. Absolutely insane. These guys are super smart. Like one of them is in Cambridge right now. So really, really smart guys. But I just wanted to show the Amazon is still a gold rush. There's still so much opportunity. One year on Amazon and these guys do $10 million. Absolutely insane. I think they said that it was eight months ago that they really started to take things seriously. So pretty crazy. This graph you can't really see so well. But I just wanted to highlight, here's the E commerce market share in 2016. Amazon 38%. 2017 they're at 43%. So this is significant growth from $149 billion to. To $196 billion. Second place, eBay 6.8%. Tied for third place. Tied for third place, Apple and Walmart with 3.6%. So pretty insane. And then it just gets smaller. Home Depot at 4th or 5th or however you want to refer to it, but 5th place, pretty insane. And this is why we are on Amazon. This is why we're able to build such great businesses. So Quickly and so large from the comfort of our home or our wework or wherever. So quickly because Amazon is so large and there's such a great opportunity here to just continue to expand with Amazon. Amazon is driving you. The traffic, you just have to get in front of it. So yeah, hopefully this is a little bit exciting to qualify me and Viral launch a little bit. So I talk fast, I apologize. I'm going to try to talk a little bit quickly so that I can continue to get through it. But so my name is Casey Goss, I'm the CEO of a company called Viral Launch to qualify me and Viral launch a little bit. So we're, we've worked with a little over 6,500 brands to date. We've run over 27,000 product launches. These brands consist of guys and girls just looking to get into Amazon for the first time, just starting in retail selling products to. Last year our largest private label client did just under 100 million across their four accounts in Amazon US and we're also working with some of the most respected Fortune 5000 as well. So literally the whole gambit where we really get a great perspective of different success tactics for the brand new guys to these major brands. So I think that's probably our biggest competitive advantage is just access to such a large variety and depth of data. And lastly is, you know, we are very data focused. So daily we're tracking tens of millions of products, keywords, brands, categories because we really want to understand what are the forces at play here so that we understand how to help our clients best align for success. So let's jump in. I want to first talk about opportunity costs. So I think that this is like I have a very limited perspective so far. I'm only 24 so I feel like it could potentially my lack of experience potentially blinds me. But the one thing I don't see people talking about is opportunity cost. Well, here's the definition of opportunity cost. It's not the best but according to Google, the loss of potential gain from other alternatives which when one alternative is chosen and essentially what that means is when I choose to do this, I'm giving up the opportunity here. And so essentially if everything were cut and dry, essentially let's say selling on Amazon versus selling on Walmart. So if I decide to sell on Walmart the opportunity cost is extremely high. But if I decide to sell on Amazon, the opportunity cost of selling on Walmart is extremely low. And so at any given point we should be making the decisions that have the highest opportunity cost. So that we are seizing the greatest potential possible, essentially. Basically this is kind of the framework of how we look at making decisions as sellers or making decisions in terms of tactics and what we need to do. Because there's so much opportunity on Amazon like we just talked about. And I want to make sure that you are doing everything that you can to seize that opportunity as quickly as possible. So every decision needs to be focused on maximizing ROI as quickly as possible. So the number one strategy, I originally called this the number one hack on Amazon, but the team didn't like it because I went into all these stipulations because that's how I. But so anyways, this sounds a lot better. The number one Amazon strategy is to focus on the big picture, to do everything extremely well and to move very fast. So really what works on Amazon is this very simple process. It's unsexy, it doesn't sound amazing. All it is, the hack is to do everything really well. So everybody wants to cut the corners. They want to see or they want to know, what's that one tip that's going to double my business? And that tip is to just do everything really well. And that means finding a great product in a great market, having killer product aesthetics. Your label needs to be amazing, your packaging needs to be amazing. Photos that drive clicks and conversions. So great photos, not your Uncle Tim that has a camera that just doesn't work. It may be cheaper for you initially, but it's not going to drive you long term success or not going to help you in the long run. Optimized listing, aggressive launch strategy, email, follow up sequence and that's it. So no hack like you have to do this, you have to do that, you just have to do these things really well. You have to be really aggressive. That's the success tactic. So there's no silver bullet. The hacks are generally like, they're either against Amazon's terms of service, they're distracting to you, they're temporary, they only last for a little bit, Amazon closes them up, they're not sustainable, they provide marginal benefit to your business. Just following this strategy is what really works. So we said that we'll cover source launch and dominate. So let's get into sourcing. I think that this sourcing or product selection is the absolute foundation to success on Amazon. Without a great product or with a bad product, having success is so much more difficult. But selecting a great product in a great market, according to you, according to your business goals, we do say that every product is a great product to sell. So Long as it makes sense for you and, and your business goals. And essentially what this means is let's say you have a budget of $3,000, right? So a good product for you is going to look significantly different to the person that has a budget of $3 million. With a budget of $3 million, we can go after the high volume products that are very competitive because you can just outspend your competition versus with a $3,000 budget, you have to be very selective of the markets that you're getting into. And doing so will allow you to drive success, relative success, much easier and allow you to continue to expand on that success. So these are two real examples. It's not completely comparing apples to apples, but basically you set your expectations with a decent product of selling 50 units per day. You launch in June and success is just so much more difficult to achieve. You're spending tens of thousands of dollars and maybe by early December you're hitting 20 to 30 units per day. This is an exact example. I just talked to some guys yesterday. I believe they had the expectation to sell 50 units per day. They launched in early November of this year, spent around, I believe they spent around 5 to 8k and now they're selling 120 units per day because they selected a great product. And so they did the whole process, they went through the whole process, they did everything right and it came out with a great result. So much easier versus even if you source a decent product, even if you are doing everything right, achieving success is so much more difficult. So this is absolutely key. The key to finding a great product is knowing your goals. How much money do you have to invest? How much do I want to make? So if you have the expectation of making a million dollars a month in top line revenue from a product, there's products that do this and you end up selling $50,000 a month. You're not successful by this measure or by your own measure. But if you set out to sell $10,000 a month and now you're selling $50,000 a month, okay, now you're extremely excited. Should I build out a brand? So you really need to understand kind of your long term goals as to what am I hoping to achieve with this private label business or this business of selling on Amazon. And that will really help to inform your product selection decisions. So if you are looking to cash flow as much as possible, there are amazing products that all across the board. So you may sell one product in pets, you may sell one product in lawn and garden, and you may sell One product in beauty. Just because the ROI on these products, the barrier to entry for these products will prove to you or will show out that it's very easy to jump into, you can make a lot of money from them versus if you're building a brand, you're generally a bit more confined to the opportunities that you're able to select when making your product decision. So, you know, generally, let's say I'm selling beauty products even though I see a dog leash that has insane roi, very low barrier to entry, it doesn't really make sense for you to source that. So these are all questions that you need to be asking yourself. So essential number two, discover opportunities. There's so many different ways to discover opportunities. I do much better in Q and A. I have a little bit of a. This is a stipulation for you guys. I do have a little bit of a hard time talking about this because again, because every product is a great product to sell depending on who you are. It's hard for me to say do this, do that, because for some people you're like, oh, he's wrong. This makes sense for me. So bear with me. I try to speak in generalities. There's different things that work for different people. So I'm trying to cover a decent umbrella of things. So for you, you may take this tactic. For someone else, they may take this tactic. So that makes me feel better when I talk about this. Discovering opportunities. Reverse engineer the successful. So one thing I'm really excited about right now is there's brands out there that are absolutely killing it. There's brands out there that are having insane success. And why are they doing this? They're able to achieve this because they're spending the time, the resources maybe they have with the team, maybe they, it doesn't matter, right? But they are able to come up with amazing products that are really helping to fuel their success. They're doing all the groundwork of finding those markets. So one opportunity is to go and see what these guys are selling, observe some of the aspirational brands in your category or brands similar to what you aspire to be and identify those products that are helping them to achieve that success and sell those products or similar products. Or hopefully this helps to inform your next product decision. So next products that are driving growth. So looking for those niches where there's still so many untapped niches, where there's opportunity to find this small market of camping equipment or something like that. There's a whole little wealth of opportunity here where you can just take products A through C and have success with them. So making sure that you're not just looking for a singular product that will be your next great decision. Look for these markets where you can come in and you can find a whole swath of products to take on next. Making sure you're looking for opportunity rich markets, please. I get into this a little bit later, but just looking for products where the barrier to entry is low, which is generally your average review quantity and sales are high. One tactic that I like is using, well, I think everybody should be doing this again, looking at opportunity costs. Depending on where you're at in your business, probably doesn't make sense for you to go and spend hours and hours, days and days, trying to come up with your next product idea, reading every media publication possible, going and scouring Amazon to find your next product idea. You can hire VAS to go amass a collection for you, teach them how to go, validate these product ideas and move on. So use these guys, find some VAs, use them to come to you with the product ideas, then you can make the final decisions and move on. Use your suppliers. So some of my bigger seller friends, one guy in particular, they do just over 20 million a year on Amazon. And the majority of their product selection ideas are coming from their suppliers, who they really kind of had their ear to the ground in the market. And so the supplier is always coming to them saying, hey, this is starting to become hot, or a lot of people are looking for this. So using your suppliers, making sure you have quality suppliers, of course, but they really tend to be on the forefront of trends or they can be on the forefront of trends. So using them to help you come up with product opportunities, the next thing that is critical is just knowing how to read the market. So you really need to, once you have a product idea, just because the sales volume is high or just because you like the product doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good product. This is where we see a lot of people make bad decisions. And so you need to make sure that you are spending plenty of time and really doing your due diligence in validating these market opportunities. We see so many people make bad product decisions because they thought it was becoming more popular. One example is kind of crazy, but these guys decided to source routers not too long ago because they were IT guys. And more and more people are using the Internet these days and like, you know, this is an absolutely terrible product decision. They were not successful. They ended up closing up their shop because it was such a terrible product decision. Had they looked at the elements of the market, they really would. They wouldn't have jumped into that market and they would hopefully have been successful. So the one thing, the quick calculation that we use to kind of as the proxy for is this a good market or not, at least initially, is what we call the ROI ratio. So looking at the sales to review ratio, so what this is is estimated monthly sales divided by total review quantity. Essentially, you know, it's a barrier of entry. Calculation to calculation is, it's just a division, but anyways, it's a calculation of, you know, what is my revenue potential versus what is the barrier of entry to get there. So as an example, generally we see this all the time. I know that there's plenty of arguments, but we have so much data that shows us this. So let's say on page one, let's say I just want to sell fish oil and everyone on page one has 1000 reviews and my product has 400 reviews. 400 reviews in and of itself sounds like a decent amount of reviews, Right? But relative to everybody else that has 1000 reviews, not so competitive. And so from the consumer's perspective, they're not looking at BSR as some proxy for popularity. Their proxy for popularity is review quantity. So if some product has 10,000 reviews and every other product ranking for this keyword has 100 reviews or 500 reviews, 500 reviews sounds like a lot, but compared to this guy with 10,000, it's not. And so the assumption is that this product is popular for some reason or most popular for some reason. So you're much more likely to get clicks if you are the highest reviewed product. So generally looking at a market, you have to have a relatively competitive number of reviews to sell near market potential. The example is for ROI ratio is, let's say you need 1000 reviews to sell 1000 units a month. This is a ROI ratio of 1 versus you'd much rather get into a market where you need 100 reviews to sell 1000 units, which is an ROI ratio of 10. So if you can go into a market and you can average out the ROI ratio or the sales to review ratio for these markets and see it's at least two to three, that's a decent market. Okay, I want to look into this more. If you could find something that's like 5 to 10, this is a great market. Of course, you still need to look at other things like margin. What are they actually selling? There's a lot more to look at. But the quick and dirty calculation of should I look into this more or not? Is what is the ROI ratio for this market?

Validate opportunities. So we just talked a little bit about that. One thing that we see. This is probably a little more beginner, but I want to touch on it because it's so important. Pay attention to the market. Not a single asin. So we see so many people make this mistake, right? So they see one ASIN is achieving success. So in this example, this person is selling 1,400 units and they have 38 reviews. So what we see so many people doing is they say there's something about this Asin that is driving their success. I need to source a very similar product to this Asin and I will be able to achieve similar results. It's absolutely not true. There's no way. Generally it's not. There's no way for you to understand what is driving this person's success, right? So maybe it's Ezra Firestone killing it with Facebook ads driving those sales. It's not a function of the market. You can't expect those same results unless you're going to use the same tactics as a seller. But you don't know what those tactics are. So what you need to do is you need to look at the market as a whole. So here I would say the barrier to entry is around 1,000 reviews. So you need 1,000 reviews to sell at any kind of volume. Here, this one particular seller, who knows where their sales are coming from. Look at the averages of the market. That's how you should make your decisions. Not on the performance of a single Asin, because you have no idea what's driving their results. Set realistic expectations. So we see so many people make mistakes around. They see one or maybe even two products in a market. Let's say it's fish oil again. So they will look at this market and they will say this product or these two products are selling 10,000 units a month, while everybody else is selling 500 units a month. And they think that they can achieve that 10,000. Again, it's pretty similar to the last example, but again, so they think that they can achieve that $10,000 a month sales volume. But again, what they don't understand is where that sales volume is coming from and why those people are achieving such high rates of success. I would much rather play the safe game and estimate that I'm going to sell around the 500 mark per month. I would aspire to hit well into the thousands. But you don't know what's driving their success. What's driving their sales? Maybe it's a brand name and people are only searching for their brand. They're not searching the main keywords of the market, which is where you will be driving your sales. So look at the averages of the market, but shoot for the top next launching to success. Creatives are crucial. Again, this is where people really try to cut corners and it's super, super important. It's a very subjective matter which makes it kind of difficult, especially when people get emotional about their products. So I have friends that are very emotional about their products and their labels and I think their labels are really, really bad and they're not achieving success. And I think it's because their labels are bad. They're not getting the click through but they are very tied to their labels. And so in a very roundabout, cautious way I try to say maybe we should try looking at updating your labels. Again, it's a very touchy subject, but I think that you should try to get as much as possible some outside professional opinion asking your significant other or your mom or something like that. These are not good indicators of how the market will perceive them. Using professionals is very important or can be very helpful. So product photography is absolutely critical. So some quick tips, multiple studio shots so that you can split test. One of the largest drivers of click through rate is your main image and you should absolutely be shooting main photo variations so that you can split test those to identify which of those are driving more clicks. It's very simple to do. You must have killer lifestyle photos in use photos. The reason being is let's say I'm selling this water bottle through a photo. I can make this water bottle seem very, very large. So there's no context to this water bottle sitting in a white background. But if I were and customers are going to buy it thinking it's large, they get it, it's small, they're unhappy. But with lifestyle photos I can show it with somebody's hand, I can show it with an iPhone. Things that people are familiar with. Show it in context so people have a really good understanding of how large is this product. My favorite thing is when Amazon has those ghosted images where they're holding a product and they're doing this. You don't know how tall that person is. It's terrible. For context, show it in a lifestyle shot. But really at the end of the day, the goal is to show people why your product is so amazing, inspire them to your product and make them feel as though they'll be envied by having this item. And you can really do that with lifestyle shots. Use graphics and text to call out main features. So here's some examples of a cube smoke or something. I don't remember the word, but they're original photos, crudely photoshopped in there. You can't really see what's going on. There's no real context. And then here they have it set next to a piece of meat. So now I can see how long it is, what is the size of it, I can see what is actually the intended uses for it. You get very clear and crisp detail. I mean, which one are you more likely to buy? This guy or this guy? Right? You're sold just from the photos. It's super important and has very significant impacts on conversion rate.

Hey guys, this is Ryan. We're going to take a quick break and we'll return to the show in a second.

Hey guys.

You know that my financial strategy is to build businesses and to invest the profits. And when it comes to investing the profits, I look for cash flow. I look for it to be backed by something real and I look for tax efficiency. It's why when I recently sold a business, I called the good folks over at Four Peaks Capital Partners and today's episode is brought to you by them. You've heard them on the podcast before when I interviewed Mauricio Rauld on the topic of Mailbox money and why investment funds could be a source of passive cash flow for some entrepreneurs. I use investment funds like Four Peaks as part of my long term strategy and I'd encourage you to go listen to the episode called How Rich People Generate Mailbox Money and you might want to check them out if you're looking for opportunities right now with asset prices as high as they are, I am mostly looking at cash flow opportunities, which is why I had them on the podcast. So make sure you check out that episode on Mailbox Money with Mauricio Rabould.

Next up. Well, optimized listing, absolutely, absolutely critical. One thing I really want to get across is that listing optimization is much more a science than it is an artist. So quick example is backing up a little bit. A lot of the time we're almost completely keyword stuffing our titles and our listings. And the reason being is, you know, okay, I do have to say, like, we do make it beautiful, right? Like, so the trick is marrying, you know, great keyword structure with beautiful sales content. But it is very, very keyword heavy. And the reason being is, you know, I would much rather have a 3% lower click through because my title or yeah, my title isn't as beautiful. But having a more keyword rich heavy title allows me to rank for twice as many keywords. I'll drive so much more traffic, so many more sales, which then helped my keyword ranking improve even more. So generally it's all about the keywords. And there's so many nuances to listing optimizations on Amazon. For example, putting a colon after the fifth word in your title helps your Google SEO. One thing that a lot of people do not understand is that you have to use both plural and singular forms of your words in your title. Let's go to a grill brush, right? So let's say I have one grill brush I'm selling. You absolutely, absolutely have to have both brush and brushes in your title because plenty of people are searching grill brushes or brushes for your grill, whatever. But also people are searching the singular form. And Amazon says in their guidelines that they treat both singular and plural forms of words the same. They absolutely, absolutely do not. So one example, we run a launch for let's say it's a grill brush and they have the plural form in their title, grill brushes. And we are targeting the singular form. So what happened with this promotion was they get to top of page two for the singular form, the word that we were targeting, but because they had the plural form in the title, that ended up ranking mid page one. And so having both the singular and plural form, even if it sounds a little bit weird, maybe a little bit confusing that you said brushes, but there's only one brush. Just make sure to clearly detail these things out in your bullet points or your photos. But you absolutely have to have both forms. Missing a keyword like this could literally cost you thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a month. I cannot express how important a well optimized listing is. If you don't have a well optimized listing, it's going to hurt your ability to rank, to sustain rank, to drive conversions. It's going to be a mess. Number two, perfect, your review funnel. So I've had plenty of people where we say, oh, we did this. It improved our review rates on average by 1% or something like that. People are like, oh, okay, 1%, that's nothing. But to me, I think every review matters. I truly, truly believe that every review matters. Again, considering the fact that on average, the barrier to entry for a market is review quantity, every review that you have helps you to get closer to that barrier to entry or increase your barrier to entry from other people. And so there are legitimate review generation strategies. There's other review generation strategies that may not be completely within Amazon's terms of service, depending on how you interpret them. And the completely black hat stuff I advise you absolutely not to do. I know that there are ways or things where it seems near impossible for Amazon to determine the methods or that you are doing this, but me personally, the one thing I fear from Amazon is doing anything that could be interpreted from Amazon as review manipulation. That is like the unforgivable, I don't know. So legitimate review generation strategies at first, I mean, come on, you have to have a great product. I have these guys that are quote unquote gurus and they call me up and they say, hey, we're looking to make a really big push in the Amazon space. But one thing we're trying to figure out is.

How important is product quality? Does it matter? Do we need to even be getting samples? Or can we just get the product and we push it out and because we're aggressive, the reviews will just, they'll be all right? And no, it's absolutely not true. You have to have a great product. You're inevitably going to get bad reviews. It doesn't matter how good your email follow up is, your customer service, you need to have a great product that people are going to love. With that though, you should not be going generally, you should not be going out of your way to source a higher quality product than everybody else. A lot of people fall into this trap of my fish oil is so much higher quality than everybody else's. Therefore I can charge more money. And so I will be successful because people will see that my fish oil blend is better than everybody else's and I will succeed. Well, the thing is, if you go look on page one for fish oil, everybody for the most part has four four and a half star reviews. And so if you are a better quality, what are you? A 4.6, a 4.7 over the 4.5s? Well, in the average star rating you're going to look the same, right? And so it's very difficult for people to discern if this fish oil over here that isn't as high of quality still has raving reviews because people love it. It's very tough for you to convince your consumers or potential buyers that they need to buy yours because it's higher quality, because everybody else is saying they're higher quality anyways. I'm not saying source bad products at all. I'm just saying we see people go over the top and they put themselves at a price point where they absolutely cannot compete and then they fail. Great product, great customer service. Comment publicly on negative reviews. Those are simple things. Use a tool like amzfire, I believe it works. Even still, Amazon is changing this up to match negative reviews to orders. So then you can message customers, identify or reach out to them, offer them a free product or really kind of solve whatever their problems are. Email follow up sequences Although they're becoming less and less effective. Building an email list whether you maybe you already have your own email list. Amazon Early Reviewer Program I know it's only five reviews, but I care so much about every single review. I think that it's worth the money. You should definitely be spending the money on it. I mean, obviously don't bank on it. Amazon, vine, it's expensive. I care about every single review. Product inserts so these are things that are potentially a little outside of 100% Amazon ToS thing. So I'm not saying to do them. I don't want you to go say yeah, Casey told us to do this. But anyways, I know that people are having success with them. Product inserts what does this look like? So let's say I sell protein powder or something like that, right? So you'll see someone with a card insert in their protein powder. You open up the packaging and there's a card that says, hey, want a free shaker bottle? Go to this website and sign up for our whatever VIP club or our warranty or something. Not a warranty on protein, but whatever. And so then we'll send you a free shaker bottle in return. Boom. Now you have their email. Now you can market to them for other products that you're coming out with. And as long as you're building a relationship with them, they're more likely to leave a review. Presale funnels so if you're generally I'm not a huge advocate of these kinds of things, I think they're outside of the 80, 20 which we'll get to. But pre sale funnels where you are sending them from Facebook to a landing page where you get their email and then send them to Amazon. Yeah, I don't want to go into those anymore. Pre sale funnels Post sale funnels Facebook page audience There's a lot of opportunities. I think you should, for the most part, at least the top part, you should be throwing the kitchen sink at them because again, every single review matters. It's either helping you to overcome somebody else's barrier to entry or it's increasing your barrier to entry driving ranking. So at the end of the day I'm biased in this, of course. Oh yeah. I like to stipulate that some of these things I am biased in because of viral launch and I try very hard to be objective and share just from data and results that we've seen. But also I understand that I'm biased. So just like to stipulate that that makes me feel better. Anyways, at the end of the day, your goal should be to drive as many targeted sales as possible and driving these sales as cost efficiently and time efficiently as as possible. So again, I'm very biased. As long as you know that I'm biased. I would like to share this. So generally my argument against like, oh, we can run outside traffic to our listing to drive keyword ranking. And so you absolutely can. I understand that it works well for people. The downside is that you're spending a lot of time and resources trying to figure out these funnels to get someone from Facebook or wherever to go buy your product with a coupon or not through a targeted URL to drive keyword ranking. The nice thing about bar launch or any service out there like that is that it takes you 10 minutes to go set up and you can drive as much traffic as you want. Very targeted. You can switch out your keywords or whatever. You spend 15 minutes, 20 minutes going and setting this up. And over the next seven days, over the next 30 days, you'll be driving as much traffic as you want to help boost your keyword ranking. So that's an example of cost efficiency and time efficiency. Going back to opportunity cost. There's so much opportunity in this space. You need to be focused on the things that are going to drive the most results or the best results for you and just focus on scaling your business. But at the end of the day, no matter what you're doing, you just need to drive as many targeted sales as possible as efficiently as possible. Be aggressive. You can rank for any keyword in any market, in any position. It's all a function of how aggressive you're going to be and how much money you're going to spend. So I haven't shared. Our best case study to date is we helped take a brand. They launched in June of 2015. They did 36 million in 2016. These guys are insanely aggressive. They'll come in and at minimum they're giving away hundreds and hundreds of units, sometimes per day. A lot of the time these guys are giving away thousands and thousands of units per month. And it's maybe not the most graceful or efficient, but they understand that being aggressive is going to help them to build a great sales history, to help them drive their keyword ranking, sustain their keyword ranking, drive sales, and over the long term it works out very well for them. So one approach along the lines of being aggressive, generally what we suggest, assuming that you want to win in your market or do really well in your market, just going keyword after keyword after keyword. So let's talk about a fish oil as an example. So let's say I am looking to rank for fish oil. So you'll set up a seven day promotion, ten day promotion. This is assuming you're using viral launcher. Whatever you're using to drive sales, doesn't matter. Let's say you're running this traffic for seven days targeting fish oil. So around day five, day seven, you're on page one for fish oil ranking. Well, so right after that now you move over to omega 3 and then after seven days you're ranking for omega 3 and then I move over five days on omega 3 fish oil and then five days on fish oil supplement and you just go keyword to keyword to keyword to keyword and two months later you're ranking for the majority of your high volume keywords and you're dominating the sales. And so it's the people that are able to set a process up where that allows them to very quickly efficiently target multiple keywords and maximize their keyword ranking across the board that are winning. So if I'm willing to spend the money to outrank you for any keyword, I'm going to win. And that's exactly how these guys are doing it. So the people that are most aggressive, the people that are willing to spend money to make money, the people that are achieving the best success. One myth that we like to Talk about is 90% off promotions still drive ranking. A lot of people say that they don't. I think that there's a lot of, you know, again I'm biased in saying this, but I think that there's a lot of people that there's a lot of scenarios, and we've seen this over the last three years where someone runs a test or they run one promotion, they used a discount code and they didn't get the ranking results that they expected. And so they think that it's because of the fact that they use this discount code. But what they're not paying attention to is how well optimized was their listing, how many sales actually came through compared to your competitors. There's so many factors at play and, and what is so great or what our advantage here at viral launch is, is that we're at one time in November we're running 700 launches a day. I think today it's like five or 600 launches today. And we're just tracking, we chop up these listings to understand their keyword structure. We're tracking multiple keywords throughout the entirety of the campaign to understand, oh, this keyword that they weren't targeting was phrase contained in their title. And this is how the keyword ranking for that phrase responded to the sales that were driven. Anyways, we tried to take a very data heavy approach. A quick example is so we are running these promotions at 90% off for fish oil. What we try to do is we try to estimate per day sales. So the way to understand how many sales do I need to drive for this particular keyword? So let's say for fish oil, for this keyword, the sales are 100 units per day. So in order to rank alongside them, you need to show Amazon that your fish oil is just as relevant for this keyword. The way that you do that is you drive 100 sales per day to that keyword and five days, seven days, sometimes a little bit longer, 10 days, you will be ranking right alongside them because you are sending signals to Amazon showing that you are just as relevant for that term. And so we're doing this with 90% off promotions. These guys who are already ranking for fish oil at 100 units a day are selling 100 units a day at full price organically. And we're able to outrank them with 90% off promotions selling the same estimated number of units. Quick logic there. Make sure that you're in the proper subcategories for your main terms. We see people make these mistakes all the time. And so one example is earrings. There's this very long path of subcategories where when you search earrings on Amazon, when someone goes and searches earrings on Amazon, Amazon automatically filters them down into the browse trees. It's like I don't even know what the path is, but anyways down into this subcategory. If you're not in the subcategory, it doesn't matter, you know how many units you're selling per day, you are not going to show up in the results because Amazon does not perceive your product as being relevant for that keyword in that subcategory because you don't exist in that subcategory. So make sure that you run through, you know what the main subcategories are for the main search terms for your product. Make sure that you're in those, because if you're not, you will not show in the search results, no matter how hard you try. In all departments, you will show generally on the mobile phone. It is filtering in all departments. And so you will show on mobile, but you won't show on desktop, which is still very important. Be willing to temporarily price aggressively. So there's a lot of emotions around brands sometimes and people are not so willing to lower their price or stoop down to a price point for a given period of time. But this can be one of the most effective ways and most efficient ways of driving ranking. So let's say you get to number 10 on page one for fish oil, but you really want to be top five or as high as you can go. So the whole thing is drive as many sales as possible and be aggressive guys. It's the people that are aggressive that are so much more successful. The guys that are not aggressive are the ones that take six months to achieve maximum sales potential for a product. Let's say that means you can sell two products a year, or two products, assuming it's single threaded, but you can get two products ranking and achieving maximum sales potential per year versus the guys that are aggressive and they spend two months going after every single keyword, they're ranking for every keyword possible after two months. Now they're onto the next product. Now they're onto the next product. Now they're onto the next product. And those guys that are achieving are grabbing, acquiring as much market opportunity as possible. Amazon every day is becoming more and more competitive as they change up their rules as new competition enters, as bigger brands come in. So more and more of these Fortune 500 brands, these guys with huge budgets, they have brand power, are starting to realize the opportunity on Amazon. They're reaching out to us, we are helping them. And it means that there is, it's going to be that much more expensive for you to achieve success if you have barrier to entry. In these markets we see all the time where these private label brands are able to beat out these big brands because they have the social proof, they have the reviews. And so basically they're building up this barrier to entry. If you're not building up the barrier to entry, if you're not focused on driving as much success as possible now, it's going to be so much harder to achieve that same level of success later. Yeah, and so, sorry, this is what I was talking about one example. So one thing that people like to do is you order 100 test units to test out this product and you do a soft launch. So it takes two months to get the product. It takes two, three months for you to get enough ad spend out to sell through your 100 units. Maybe it only takes 30 days, but still now you have to then place your full order once you see this going through. So six to eight months. Oh, and then you get this product and now you spend 30 days, 60 days getting this first product up and running versus being very confident in your ability to suss out is this a good market to enter or not. And then being very aggressive in the launch. You know, it takes only a few months to achieve market potential. And so by the time this guy who's being guy or girl, being timid, you know, moving through, testing out the market, doing a soft launch versus the guy that's being aggressive, they're achieving maximum sales potential. With three products in the same time, you are achieving one. They're seizing so much more opportunity. Their business is growing like crazy and you're over here just trying to get the scraps, trying to crawl to success. It's just not the best essentials to dominate team process. So oh yeah, one thing about buyer launch is so In May of 2016 we were like a four or five person team. Now we're a 32 person team with creatives developers. I like to brag about our girl Christine. She is former senior director of product at Salesforce. She has her MBA and I think her bachelor's in computer science or mathematics, I don't remember exactly. But we're really trying to build a team because there's so much opportunity here, guys. We want to move as fast as possible. The last thing that I want to do is look back five years from now. I think it should be the same for you. The last thing I want or I want you to do is look back five years from now and say, wow, there was an absolute gold rush and I was too scared to try to go big or I was too lazy to go big. I wanted to hang out on the beaches. Like at least that is not my personality, right? I'm going so hard every day. I am up, I am in the office. 8:30, 9:30, I'm there till 6:30, I come home, eat dinner with my wife for an hour and then I'm back on my laptop until midnight, 1 o', clock, 2 o', clock, sometimes, sometimes later. But I try not to, but anyways, there's so much opportunity, guys, and I just really wanted to inspire you and motivate you to go seize that opportunity. Oh yeah. And building teams. So I see so many people get caught up because it is just them or maybe they have one ba. And guys, there is so much opportunity, especially if you're doing any kind of volume. You know what the process is. You just need to build the process with people, put people in place to do these tasks for you. So one thing that I don't think I included, but I really wanted to include is partnering with your supplier or partnering with a sourcing agency. So building a process around this. So the area that I see some of my friends being so successful in. Oh, so one example, this guy is the top 500 seller on Amazon. I don't know his volume exactly, but anyways, he went out, got a list of $20 million in potential products to sell for 2018. They're all winners in his eyes and he wants to get started with them. All he's doing is sending it to his supplier partner who's going and doing all the sourcing for him. He gets to continue focusing on the success of the products that he has now. And 2018 rolls around, he's ready to launch all of these products. So whether it is a sourcing agency or a supplier that can go and do that sourcing for you, I mean, you really have to be careful and make sure that you have a great relationship with them, that you trust them. You're doing your due diligence, your quality control. But this really outsources that whole part. And I see so many people spending days and weeks trying to find suppliers for their next great product. You have to do your due diligence, but you really need to build a process around it. You really need to build a team, whether it just be VAs that you're paying $5 an hour, but you need to put the systems in place because you doing customer service also trying to validate your next product or finding your next product, making sure that you're ranking where you need to be, making sure you're trying to do so many different things. And we as entrepreneurs have this startup mentality of I can do it or I will just do it. People can't do it as well as me, but if people can't do it as well as you, then you're doing a bad job of coaching them or, or teaching them how to do it or putting the sops in place for them to do it. And that's what you need to focus on is how can I find people and get those people to be just as effective as I am or better. Christine is going to be so much better than I am at building our product team out and managing product because she has so much experience doing it, she knows all the mistakes that come up from it. And so I'm putting her in place so that someone better than me can handle this piece. And I think you should absolutely be doing the same because again, there's so much opportunity. You just have to be rushing towards that opportunity, removing yourself as a bottleneck. Number two, internationalization. So Amazon EU is just as large as Amazon us, which is pretty insane. And those friends of mine that did 10 million their first year, they actually don't sell in Amazon US at all. They're only selling in Amazon eu. These guys are absolutely killing it. There's so much opportunity in the eu. There's obviously barriers to clear to get over there. There's definitely some negatives. It doesn't work for every market. But basically I look at Amazon EU as Amazon US 2, three years ago, where there's very little competition. It's easy to rank, it's easier to drive success. You don't need insane amount of reviews generally. And by being in these markets, you are essentially putting yourself in a great position for two years down the road. Amazon continues to expand their reach in these markets, then you get to ride that wave up. So they go from, let's just say they're at 50 billion a year right now in Amazon EU. Well, three years from now when it's so much hotter and they're at 150 billion in EU, you got in on the ground floor, you got to continue to build up your barrier to entry for reviews. And now you're the person with 5,000 reviews and everybody else is coming in trying to get your share of the market. So I'm very, very bullish on international Amazon markets. That's pretty much it at a high level. I didn't go super deep into much, but yeah, really focus on getting the processes in place so you can move super quickly. Source launch dominate.

Hey, fastlaners.

We hope you enjoyed this talk from Casey Goss at the Capitalism Conference. If you sell physical products, you won't want to miss our next upcoming event in Austin, Texas, August 24th and 25th, the Brand Builder Summit. Go to brandbuildersummit.com and RSVP today. Tickets are already selling out, so get a seat while you still can and we'll see you there.

If you've been listening to the last few episodes of the the show where we featured entrepreneurs who have crossed the seven figure mark and are on their way to eight figures. Then you undoubtedly have heard us talk about the Backroom. The Backroom is a group mentoring program where we cast the vision for getting to $10 million a year and beyond and being ready to sell your company because ultimately that's where the big payday is going to come from. We also open up investment opportunities so that you can put your profits into places that give you more wealth and potentially more cash flow or even help you save on taxes. We have some pretty cool places where we put cash that give you sometimes all three. Plus you're in a room with people who are the best in the world at what they do. We bring in my team of advisors that help people get into retail. They help people clean up their systems, they help people clean up their books, they even help them reposition their companies so that they can be sold for more money. We also talk about what's working right now on Amazon and on other channels. But the focus of the group is on casting the vision to get to eight figures and beyond and clearing all bottlenecks that stand in your way while also opening up other opportunities for you to enjoy a life of freedom. Because that's what we're after here. We're not just after this to work hard and work 16 hours a day. We're doing this so that we can have freedom and we get freedom by making enough money so that we can invest into places that allow us to never have to work again and then building empires with people that we love doing business with. And that's what we're doing inside of the back room. And I could also tell you that we're looking to buy and buy into some of our students businesses through something else that we're doing pretty cool in the back room. But I will save that for another day because that is still in process. But if you have an idea that you're not sure how to bring to the marketplace, if you've got an audience that you know could be the fertile ground for a really profitable seven figure physical products brand, or if you're selling enough product to be able to say, you know, I could step on the gas here if you've got that million in sight, or you're beyond the million and you know that it's time to accelerate the process to get to that eight figure mark. Because you're playing the review game, you're playing price wars, you're tired of sacrificing profit margins, you're working way too long for too little result and you want to clear those bottlenecks so that you can grow faster and have a sellable company. So one day you can have that ideal freedom lifestyle. We can help you inside of the back room. It's one of the more expensive things that we do. It's also the highest ROI thing that we do. So it is application only. You need to be ready for it and you need to be ready to move when you join. So you can go to freedomfastlane.com, click on backroom and see the application, see all the pricing details from there. Working with me one on one starts at about $100,000. Joining the back room is a little bit less than that. So just know going into it that it's a serious investment and it is only for people who either have funding, have sales and are ready to go once they join. So if that's you, go over to freedomfastlane.com, click on the back room and you'll see the application and full details there.