Ryan Daniel Moran coaches Amazon sellers on launch and scaling strategies. Kurt debates reinvesting $5k on a product hitting $8.67 profit per unit with 20 reviews. James lost ranking after a stockout and faces competitors with 447 and 496 reviews, learning to use price drops and timed blasts to reclaim page-one rank.
Chapters
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Hangout, the first one of 2015. I feel like I need to give a 2014 award to Kurt because, Kurt, I think you've been the only person that has made every single hangout. If my calculations are accurate, I think you're the only person who's been on every single.
Participation here, even after the long break. So kudos to you and Katherine and James. You guys are, I think, close behind if not equaling that. So thanks guys for being here. For those of you who are watching on the chat, welcome to the first hangout of 2015. To be honest with you guys, what we've done up until this point has been we've gone through the entire amazing selling machine training as well as some additional stuff on top of that. And all I really want to do today is make sure that you're in a good spot to be at where you need to be by the time we meet in person in February, by the time that we get to the conference in February. Now the conference in February. A few things to keep in mind are there's high level speakers, but most of them are not necessarily Amazon related. For example, Robert Kiyosaki and Richard Branson aren't necessarily Amazon guys. And a good buddy of mine, a mentor of mine, Todd Herman, who will be there, is a performance coach, but not necessarily an Amazon guy. So the training, as far as having a profitable business up until this point, you basically are armed with everything that you need to know. Especially since you're in the tribe and you have access to things like Zon Blast, you have access to the group to ask questions, you have people who have blazed the trail already and you can see a year out as to what that looks like. The idea of more training, it's kind of just testing and tweaking from this point. If you've completed the course, if you have products on their way to Amazon, if you have your inventory live, if you're taking sales, doing pay per click, it is a matter of getting sales and reviews and then repeating that process and then moving on to stage three, which is things like data acquisition, setting up a website and thinking about exit if that's a place that you want to go. So I want to take this time to answer your questions and make sure that we're on a good pace for the live event. And since the pick ins right now are pretty open as far as spots on the live call, we'll have plenty of time to wrap back and forth. One thing that I do want to address for those of you who are live and those of you who are watching the livestream is the 10 person conference in March is completely sold out. It's sold out in two days. I'm going to be doing this throughout the year though of working with groups of 10 flying into Austin. We'll be sitting down, we'll be going through Mastermind session. We'll also be going through working hands on in your business. We'll be working on what it takes to go from if you're at 10,000amonth to 100,000amonth with the idea of when you leave there, you'll have a plan to go from wherever you are to being 50,000amonth to $100,000 a month. You'll be at that range. You have a blueprint to follow once you leave. I did this for the first time with our buddy Zach, who's in the tribe, came into Austin. We worked with him, myself and my partner Sean and another one of my friends worked on creating a strategy, creating.
A blueprint for him to follow exactly to go from where he was to.
Way, way more. And he went from where he was to well over $100,000 a month within a few months of leaving that room just from us being hands on, on his business, creating an action plan for him. So we're going to be doing that a couple more times throughout the year. I have opened up, I am opening up another date soon. It's going to be end of March, is going to be the next one and then there's going to be one, at least one in April if that's something that you want to be a part of. I'll have dates for you in the tribe hopefully next week. It'll be sometime end of March and there'll be one probably in April as well. But I'm going to be promoting it from stage at the ASM conference. So they'll definitely sell out by the time that we all meet in February. So. So if that's something that you want to be a part of, make sure that you hop on that when the dates are confirmed. It'll probably be that last week in March though. That's all the house cleaning I have for you. I guess a little.
Update on what's going on here. Sean and I are selling the yoga business. We closed January 31st. We have paperwork pretty much done. The buyers are flying into Austin a week from today to go over kind of final details and trademarks and stuff like that. And we are closing at the end of January. So I'll be Able to release more details after we close.
My supplement business took a big jump this week from simply being. I don't know what it took me so long on this business to be aggressive with, but we finally just bullied our way to the top on some aggressive keywords and as a result of that, went from selling 40 a day to more than doubling our sales. So that idea of being aggressive on keywords through Zon Blast, through keywords, through pay per click, through reviews, through optimizing your listing, there's nothing more important than that if you're going to compete in the competitive space that most of us are in. So following those things, James, you're laughing. I don't know if you're laughing at me or something that's going on in your house.
But there's nothing more important than bowling your way to the top on keywords if you're going to have regular consistent sales coming in. And then on my men's fitness company, we are basically, we're trying to tweak for little things. Right now we sell 250,000amonth in sales. We're going, okay, what can we do in the next two weeks to be at 275,000 doll, and what can we do over the next two weeks after that to be at 300? Because our goal is to double that amount by about mid year so that by the end of the year we're doing about a million a month is the goal that we're setting out. We're also building out other channels apart from Amazon. We're building our own funnel. We're looking at retail, we're looking at other places to expand that. But this is all, this is the Future. This is 18 months from where most of you are. All you really need to be focusing on is optimizing the channel that you've currently chosen, which is Amazon. Those are all of my house cleaning issues. So what I'd like to do is just work with you guys one on one to find out where you're at, what we need to do to get you to the next level, and then create a roadmap for you to get there. So whoever would like to go first may go first. As long as you don't mind me eating a quest bar in front of you.
Just want to give a quick shout out to the tiered giveaway that you suggested last time.
Good.
It seemed to be pretty good. I think I probably did not lose as much money as I would have on it, so I very much appreciate that. And I still gave away my 200.
That I wanted to give away.
So that was slick. So yeah, for anyone who listened last time, it's definitely a pretty sweet idea. I just went like, you know, I've got 100 units. Once they're gone, they're gone. We're going to have to raise the price. And then I sent out this. Guys, you're so amazing. I can't believe we had so much feedback on this. We sold it 100 but because everyone's so mad and people want this deal so bad, we're going to do it for five bucks for the next 50. After that it was the same thing. I can't believe it. This is insane. How could we be so popular with you guys? 50% off until these last 50 units are gone. They all went in like four. I don't know, I guess there's a day in between. I launched on 22nd December which is kind of crap but that was the closest I could get and I wasn't going to wait. So yeah, from the 4 or 5 in the afternoon to like 8 o' clock the next morning, they all sold out. So definitely a sweet strategy.
Great. Well, congratulations on the launch. Why don't you tell us a little bit about how the launch went apart from just the tiered stuff giving away. I mean as far as reviews go, people liking the product. Tell us a little bit more about the launch.
Okay, so I sent an email out. I actually posted this in the Facebook group and I just thought maybe someone get something out of it. So hopefully that's alright. But a little quick rejig is that I sent out a couple emails to my list. One was through the survey I had, one was through the opt ins that I had through the website.
Someone's echoing here.
We're all going to blame Ellie since she just joined.
See I sent out those and I had like a 50% open rate for both the lists and I think like a 30 or 40% click through rate. So pretty much everyone was clicking through the link to get the $1 or $5 or whatever. The one thing I was sort of interested in seeing how many people were going to go like wow, this is just a scam or you know, you're being a jerk. There's only about 10 people and I'm used to that because I do a lot of stuff like political campaigns. So I know that when the angry people are calling there's like you know, a couple of them compared to the thousands who love you. So you know there's 10 people and I Had a huge win, actually. Some guy was like, oh, you're scammer. And you know, I can't believe this. And I was going to buy it, but you just suck. And I can't believe you didn't let everyone get it for a dollar. And so I replied back, I'm like, listen, I know that it sucks, but we've got to do something to make sure we don't just sell out and have no money left. And we really want everyone to have this product, but we have to make it $5 the next little while just because that's what we're doing. And I said, but to show that we're not just marketing robots like this guy insinuated, here's a special $1 coupon for you. Just don't tell anyone about it. Thanks a lot for being so passionate. And the guy replies like, man, I'm not even going to use that. I'm going to buy it for four full price. I love you guys. I'm going to be a customer for life. So a little customer service thing there for everyone. That was pretty sweet. I just got my 20th review this morning. I'm at like 4.8 stars or something. And my two 3 star reviews are basically 5 star reviews. Those random ones. Oh, great product, but 3 stars, everything's good. I put it up on my.
Say that again. Great product, but what but three stars?
You know those reviews you get that are three stars but for some reason they give you like a five star review. So yeah, I'm glad that I have those because I like to bump those up to be my sort of best negative reviews.
So that's pretty good. Yeah, 20 reviews, 4.8 stars now. And I put it up on my affiliate website last night just to see what kind of conversion I get. And I had like 12 reviews at the time and I sold I think 4 units out of 80 clicks or something. So I don't know if that is that like pretty bad in terms of the conversion. Will Amazon go like, wow, this guy's not conversing, burning and kick me down? That's fine?
No, I wouldn't worry about that. I worry about sales, total sales a lot more than I worry about overall conversion rate.
Sweet. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, I threw that up there and made 4 sales off the website and did like 13 units yesterday. I'm not sure how, but it's pretty cool. And now I'm really considering like my next move is I just wait and sell it to these ones, get the capital back and then buy Another inventory blast and then zon blast it. Or do I buy my inventory now Zon blast it and just sort of go recoup the cost as I go? I think I should be aggressive on that. But putting five grand down another 500 units is getting me like, do I or don't I? I can. So should I?
That's a fantastic segue and a great question. First of all, tell us when did launch end and how many days have you had of just surviving on organic sales?
Launch ended December 23rd and I did a like 15 unit mini launch because I had, I forgot to turn off my Facebook ad. So I had like 90 people who signed up otherwise expecting a $1 coupon. So I gave away like 15 free units on like December 31st. So there's now been, I don't know, 10 days between end of launch and now and I've got, you know, two sales a day, four sales a day, yesterday was 13 and I'm still sort of scratching my head, so.
And are you ranking anywhere for keywords?
Yeah, I'm number two for best my product and I'm 30th for my product.
So page three, how competitive is that market overall? If you were to like comparison 1 to 10, how competitive do you think it is?
Probably like a three or a four. And I only say a four because there's so many of them and they're all like just, they're crap. I mean there's like 10 reviews, 2 reviews, 4 reviews. None of them are optimized. Even the number one guy who's getting like 800 reviews and.
I think he's like 50th in beauty overall, he's got no follow up sequence, nothing. So I'm thinking in a couple months I should be that guy. But I've got a follow up sequence and I'm good at this hopefully. So the top guys sell a lot, but they're not very good. So I'm going to say like a three or a four.
Okay, you're in a perfect, perfect market then. And tell me.
Tell me what your profit is per unit if you know it.
$8.67.
Okay, not bad. Are you selling for about 20 bucks then?
$24.99.
Oh, interesting. Okay, so you've got a higher cost and if you're comfortable sharing this, about how much cash are you comfortable investing more into as your next step?
I've got five grand sort of sitting and waiting, so to speak.
Okay, great. So if you're comfortable putting that to work, this is always the Question that comes up, should I be aggressive or should I bide my time and reinvest the profits? Either one will work, of course. It's just a matter of how fast you want to be at the goal that you've set for yourself and if the goal is faster than alternative, than it is to take that money and go ahead and buy that inventory. Now.
It was with two of my businesses, my supplement company and my yoga company. I have partnerships with people where I'm basically, I'm the bank and I am the advisor and other people run those businesses. Sean runs our yoga company. That's why I say Sean is the genius behind that. I came up with the idea, I put up some money, I made some connections, I met the people that are buying our company. I don't do anything in the business. Same with my supplement company. I am not as actively aggressive in those. I kind of follow their lead on those. With my company that I run, I'm extremely aggressive. And if you look at my income reports, you can tell the difference between the two. You can tell the difference between how fast they were profitable and how big they are now.
The reason I say this is because.
Between my three businesses, there's a nice little smorgasborsh board of how aggressive each one of these experiments are and what the results are. We just decided, my partner and I, I should say just decided to really get aggressive.
In the supplement business on our primary product. And we weren't as aggressive for about a year. We were just kind of biding our time and growing steadily. We got really aggressive with pricing, aggressive with zonblasts, aggressive with our list. So all the assets that we had at our disposal, we tried to maximize for total number of sales. And when you're beginning, you need to maximize for sales and not for profit. How many quantity of sales can I churn through in order to get the rankings that I need in order to be profitable? And when we turned that on, we're now doubling our sales, even though we're back at our previous price and we've stepped off the gas pedal. So we doubled our sales in a couple of weeks just by pushing the gas pedal. And now we're back off because our rankings are up. We're making more sales. We've got a number one best seller tag. So for you in the position that I'm in, I always recommend if you want to be at your goal faster, to be as aggressive as possible. So I would take that fund, I'd put the order in now, especially because it's going to take some time to fulfill once it hits Amazon. I do is on blast and I'd go back to your customer base and say I'm doing a 25% off coupon for seven days or whatever it is a conservative giveaway, if you will. Conservative discount. I would consider for you, if you're not over 25 sales a day, I would consider dropping your price just north of break even in order to get sales coming in steadily or quickly to give it like an artificial spike over the long term and get up for that ranking. So it's a process. Not so much of how do I chase the profit but how do I chase the ranking and the sales until I'm on page one and then I can step off the gas pedal and it's a gravy train from there. That was a very long winded answer, but I hope it gives you the direction that you needed.
Yeah, no, that's perfect. I know the number I need for my goal at the end of the year and I'm going like I can probably get there in a few months. I just don't really know how aggressive I'm going to be. So yeah, I'll put the order in because that's exactly what's going to so.
I try to use this phrase sparingly, but I think that it is necessary or it is appropriate here. Great fucking work. You've done an awesome job at taking action, at following the plan, at launching on time, getting things going. So great work. Tell me what your plan is for reviews because you've got 20 now, which is awesome. You've got a list in place that you can hit for reviews, but let's tweak that because that's going to bring in consistent sales over the long term.
Okay. My follow up is an email when the product is shipped, which is basically hey, you know, it's shipped, blah blah blah. If you want, you can leave feedback for us when you get it. Sort of like here's I don't really want to push feedback feedback as much, but I thought I'd throw that in the first one, my second one right now I just threw up an email because I'm waiting on my caller who's going to be doing the actual review follow up based on your sequence. He's not in until the 8th. I got a buddy who owns a local call center so I'm just sniping one of his guys. So he's now back to the 8th. But until then I've got a second follow up. Here's some FAQs about your product as it's delivered a couple days after delivery. Here's how to use it best. And by the way, can you leave a review? But it's going to be your four yeses and then can I send you a review link as well? So that's going to happen on the 8th, starting on the 8th of January and then the third one is 14 days after delivery or something like that. Are you still enjoying it? Here's a couple more final tidbits about how to get the most out of it. If you haven't already, please leave us a review.
So I use this phrase sparingly. I have nothing to add.
I think that's exactly what you need to be doing for where you're at. So great work. All you need to be doing is worrying about getting as many people into the top of that funnel as possible. And that's going to come. I'll tell you a little case about what Paul and I did on the supplement side of things. While we were at this implementation break over the new year.
We dropped our price about 35%, maybe more, just north of break even. And we did this as an experiment in order to inflate sales because we have just been stubborn at the middle of page two and it was creating about 35 sales, 40 sales a day. But it's been over a year and it's like.
It'S one of those things where it's like, what do you do in the case of it's not working, we're not at the level that we thought and some people are going to have that. I have three businesses, one of them is going to hit that point of like, this didn't happen how I wanted it to. What do I do now? And the truth is we weren't being aggressive at all in our marketing. We were doing a lot of things that were nice, that were extra but weren't necessary. I wasn't following my own plan, if you will, on this business. So what we did is we decided, alright, let's go back to the plan, let's forget all these nice things and let's just stick to the plan. So we dropped the price, which violates my thinking long term, but we dropped it in the short term just to see what would happen. And sales skyrocketed. They went from 35 to like 90, sometimes 100 a day as it would. But what. But what we discovered is we actually made more profit when we dropped the price like that than if we had a higher price. Interesting. Now we don't want to keep it there long term. We don't want to be at $12.99, which is what we were for long term. But we dropped it temporarily just to try and see if we could get ourselves over the hump of middle of page two. So we start to climb slowly and reviews start to come in. We've already got almost 400 reviews. We start to pass up other people and we get to like to the top of page two. And then we do a zomblast. We do a zomblast of, I don't know what it was, maybe 250, 300 units at the $5 price point. So we didn't quite break even, but lost very little money. $5 in exchange for something that costs about 10 wasn't too bad to swallow. And that jumped us up to bottom of page one and gave us the number one tag, which spiked our sales more, raised the price back to almost what it was originally to where our profits are, where they need to be. And now we're selling 80 a day or so. So we've more than doubled what we were doing previously. So we have infused energy into our business by putting more people on the top, more people on the top of the funnel who become reviewers, become repeat buyers, who inflate our bsr, who increase our ranking. The snowball starts to go. So now we have, now we're excited again because that business will be at.
50K a month next month, whereas it was just north of 20 last month. So that's the impact. And part of me is embarrassed because I know this stuff. Why couldn't I get out of my own way to encourage my partner to be more aggressive on a business like this? And then part of me just feels the need to share it with you because some of you are going to hit that point where you're like, this didn't go how I thought it would do. I give up. And some people do. Some people give up where other people are like, alright, this is what I have to work with and this is what I'm going to do. And Paul and I did that. And the results have been spectacular and they continue to get better and they increase every week as a result of us maintaining that aggressiveness. If you're not seeing the results that you want, chances are you're probably not being as aggressive as you could be or as you need to be in order to compete in that space. For example, there's people who go into the Garcinia Cambogia space and this would be a mistake now because as we've all gone through Google Trends on these hangouts, we can see that that is a market that's dying. So it's not a market you would want to go into today. But there's people who still go into it. They get stuck at page nine and they go, why the hell am I on page nine and selling for a day? I've followed the plan. The reason is because a very competitive space like that or beauty or forskolin or fish oil or yoga mats are all very competitive spaces. And you need to be. Your aggressiveness needs to match the competitiveness of that space in order for you to have that, to have the market share in order to make sales.
I feel like I preach that every week. But.
My own case study, there was a reminder for me and I wanted to pass that along to you because I know that some of you are going to hit that point.
Let's take somebody else who else made some changes over the implementation break over the new year and would like some help getting to that next level.
Can I, Ryan?
No, everyone but you can go. But not you. Okay.
Go ahead.
We just ordered inventory, we're not yet there to start with selling our products because we had some delay due to customs in China with Catherine and regarding this, we just ordered our first inventory actually and we are in a process of preparing the second and the third product with Katherine and she already received samples from Amazon, competitor samples from Amazon. We will launch tomorrow our webpage which is almost ready to go and we also have almost 1,500 persons in our Facebook group. It's expanding from day to day and the ads are cheaper and cheaper every day. So we increase the budget.
Daily budget actually to get as much likes as possible and we are actually preparing everything else for this launch when we will be able to start selling the first product. So we know that we will be able to give away around 400 units and.
I think that we will take Zone Blast because.
We are not from USA and we are difficult to get.
This huge amount of reviews from the beginning of sales. So.
Where are your likes coming from? Are they US based people on Facebook?
Yes, they're especially US based. We targeted only US based people and.
All the other stuff which are connected with our brand and with our niche. So for this product we didn't create ads just for this product which we are launching right now but we actually prepared.
The persons who are interested in whole our brand because we will add also other products later and it will be helpful for Them to also hear about other products, not just the first one.
Right.
We did.
The whole brand.
Let's talk about Facebook for a second because I'm actually pulling up some stats from some Facebook experiments we did over the break. But I'd like to hear how you are targeting people and if you have any special bidding strategies, what your cost per like is. Let's talk about that for a second then we can create a plan for launch for you.
I just touched that we are in sports and outdoors niche and we touched on some topics of our products which we know will be the second third and so on the way we are going actually with our products, we targeted English language and US people and this is it actually what we did with targeting, the price per click per like is actually around 5 cents euro cents because we are in European Union.
So.
This is it actually.
So just so I understand correctly, you're just targeting English speaking people in the us you're not targeting by category, you're just going really broad.
We're actually targeting with category but this category is for sport and outdoors and outdoor activities and so on. Yes.
5 cents a like is phenomenal in US terms. That's like 7 cents or so. So what's your daily budget right now? Because at $0.07 or $0.05 depending on the currency I'd be buying all the likes I could possibly get. I just turned up the heat on 12 cent likes and I was thrilled. So tell me about your budget and how aggressive you're being there.
My budget is €8 per day.
8 or 8, 088 per day. So your assignment this week is to test what it is at 12 or 15.
Okay.
Because if we. So if we get 50% more at 5 cents alike, you can get more of those. I take them. I would take them. That's a fantastic, fantastic price. Yeah.
I actually tried to create another ad just for test and I actually doubled the.
The budget daily. But I actually little bit changed the targeting and the price was around 20 cents per click. So I went back to my first ad and I just changed the daily budget and I run that ad for page likes because.
It'S giving us the best results till now.
Okay, great. I'd encourage you to test upping that a little bit. If you can maintain that price, continue to up it as long as you're comfortable. If you're not comfortable, obviously don't do it. At what point will your inventory hit Amazon stores? Are we looking at 30 days out, 60 days out?
I think that we will be able to. The products will be produced in around 10th of January so they will be shipped by air. So I think they will hit the Amazon around at least by the 20th of January. So.
We will prepare to. We will actually start to warming up our.
Targeting people on Facebook and on the webpage just to be aware that we are preparing something good.
That's your second assignment for this week. As soon as you have a picture of your product and you can start making some lists of features, start making those your posts and boost them so that everybody sees them put 5 or $10 towards the post so that everybody sees them a picture of your product and say hey, just wanted y' all to see the well what we're working on behind the scenes. It's our newest whatever it is and it does this, this and this. The next day you put up a new picture with a feature about it and talk about why you decided to include that feature. Day three, you're repeating that process. You're saying what you're naming a feature and what the benefit of that feature is and you're doing that every day until launch. And then you leak, hey, by the way, we're going to be giving away 100 of these for 50% off until launch day comes. Give away, you know, if you're giving away 100, give away 20. What we did in yoga, we did like 10 a day for 10 days and we dripped it out like that A because we didn't know about spiking the sales all in one time period back then. And also we needed to buy ourselves some time because our inventory was delayed. But we announced when the launch date was so we needed to give ourselves some time. So we spread it out over 10 days instead. We also thought it would keep the audience engaged, so we did that to Keeping the audience engaged is vitally important to your long term success on that page. You're welcome to use that in any capacity that might be helpful to you with obviously you want to front load the spike of the BSR as much as possible. So those are some strategies you can use. But it's important to build up the buzz for it, have a launch day and then be able to maintain that momentum afterwards as well. You could also take a lesson out of Kurt's book where he talked about the tiered launch. You could give away 50 at the $1 price and then start to raise the price slowly after then until it's at its at its optimal level. And you could even keep a public coupon of 10 to 15% off to just the people who like that page, in order to continue the interest in the page.
Great, thank you.
Cool.
Yeah, we are actually, as you did with your yoga, we actually wanted to buy time because we have some delay with sourcing. And regarding this, we set up everything else, webpage and Facebook group and everything else because we didn't want to lose any time regarding our launch and our later phases of business.
Good. Well, congratulations. What you need to be thinking about right now is that Facebook launch, when it hits inventory, do Amazon pay per click. And then you are following the same strategies we just outlined for Kurt of keeping volume high so you rank for certain keywords.
Great, thank you.
Cool. All right, let's keep moving. Let's do a couple more. Let me know where you're at, what you did over the break. You don't need to raise your hand, John. You can just hop on.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm ASM3, currently have one product, currently doing 20 sales a day. I track around 26 keywords now, most of them, I'm on page one. Even my top three, I'm on page two, like position 1918. So I'm at the very top. I'm not sure if I should lower the price how you're saying. So I try and come at the bottom of page one. I'm not sure about that. The thing what I want to ask you is the acos, the advertising cost of sales, the benchmark, what should it be? Because currently I'm trying to lower it down. I started off at 60 and it was too high, so I lowered it down to 30. So if I have, like, if I'm ranked on page number one, shall the PPC be low or shall I still be aggressive?
So just so I understand, you're saying it cost you $30 to acquire a sale via pay per click.
No, no. At the moment, I have most of 90% of my keywords. I'm on page number, page one. Should I still be aggressive with my PPC or shall I lower it?
The short answer is I'm of the opinion that you should continue to be aggressive. But let me ask you the question. I want to focus on this. You mentioned the average cost of sale. Did you say yours was $30?
No, average cost of sale is a percentage. At the moment, I'm 30%.
Ah, okay, cool.
It's the last column.
Right. Okay. So here's your benchmark. What is your profit per sale?
$10.
And what's the cost of the. What's your cost? What does it cost to make a unit and sell a unit?
The Selling price or the cost itself.
Here's what I'm getting at. Forgive me, but what I'm getting at is your average cost of sale. The benchmark is you should match what your profit per sale is. So if you profit. If you have 50% profit margins, you should aim to have an average cost of sale of 50% after calculating in Amazon fees, by the way, after calculating Amazon fees and product cost. Okay, so you have to do this manually. Amazon does not give you this metric. This is something you've got to calculate manually. Okay.
At the moment, it's roughly. I spent $50 on PPC and I'm getting back in. Profit is 150. So it's roughly $100 profit.
Great. So you're doing better than benchmark. I would say you have. What I say about that is you have a room to be more aggressive, if you want to be more aggressive. So I'm going to ask you a couple questions.
Yeah, sure.
What is your price per unit right now?
2195.
2195. And you make 10 from that. Good.
20 sales, right? You're making 20 sales a day right at the moment?
At the moment, yeah.
Okay, cool. What's the best day you've ever had?
It was 34 sales.
That's weird. Somebody I just. Somehow I. Somehow my phone just Googled. That's weird. When I said that's weird. It's funny. Okay, so 34 is. That's good. How long ago was that record?
On the 29th of last 29th of December.
So a few days ago? Yeah. Okay, great. What did it do yesterday?
21 6.
Okay, cool. What was it doing a month ago.
On average?
On average, maybe 12. Between that, on the 19th of last month, I had a Zomblast.
Okay, great. So. And how many reviews do you have?
120.
Beautiful. Is that more or less than the people around you in your ranking?
I consider it. I am one of the low ones.
One of the low ones. Okay, interesting.
And what number in your category are you meaning when you look at your BSR and you look at the subcategory you're in, what's the number you're at on average?
The particular product? I am, I'm ranked number 13.
Okay.
And my BSR at the moment is 3800. It's very good. Usually it's roughly 6000, 7000.
Okay, cool. So good news is we see a lot of growth here. There's growth happening because a month ago you're doing 12 a day. Today you're doing 20 a day. A few days ago you had 34. So we're having spikes and it's working our way towards growth. Fantastic. I would recommend actually, before I. How long have you been selling? I should ask this question first.
If I'm not mistaken, since.
August.
Okay. So I'd say it's time.
It would be my recommendation to test for the next week, dropping your price to.
14.99, 15.99, as high as $16.99. Just a test, and the only reason here is to see if there's a spike in sales high enough to offset the price drop. So now you're making five, six dollars a unit, and if that's the case, you have to sell twice as many. If you sell more than twice as many, then you're making more money than before, which is great. And you're feeding the algorithm and spiking sales, giving Amazon what it wants, so there's nothing lost there. There's no reason to not do that as long as you're comfortable with it. And.
It'S not going to end up in you running out of stock. If it means you're going to run out of stock. Then we come back and we adjust the price so we slow sales down a little bit because you do not want to run out of stock. But if you've got plenty of inventory, I would test for the next week, dropping sales, just to see what happens. If you don't have an offset in your profit, put it back and just put all that energy into a Zomblast. Put all of that.
Effort and that profit into a Zomblast or into pay per click more aggressively because you're profiting from pay per click, so you have the room to up that. The goal of pay per click, in my opinion, when you're starting out, is not to make a profit. It is to get sales flowing so that you have reviews, so that your BSR is higher, so that Amazon sees you as authoritative. In time, I'm going to recommend that you find a subcategory that you can dominate a little bit more easily. If you contact Amazon, have them add a search node for a less competitive subcategory. You don't lose anything, but it's something that you can show up in the rankings for, which can actually increase sales. If it's important to you right now, go ahead and do that this week, but in time, I'm going to recommend that. I think I would probably increase sales a little bit before we did that, but you can start looking at what might Be an easy subcategory for you to dominate in time for you to get that number one tag. Because that number one tag will add a lot of sales to your bottom line.
Roughly 30%.
I was at least.
At least, to be honest, I found a subcategory that is roughly 4000 BSR to get the best seller ranking. But the thing is, today it's a very good. It's 3,800. Usually it's 6,000. I'm trying to get an average of 4,000. So then I can apply for this subcategory.
Oh, man. Go in there now. I mean, you have it right now, wouldn't you?
At the moment, yes. Today it would be true.
Great. If you drop your price, you'll certainly maintain that. So by all means, go into that subcategory. You don't need to change your subcategory. You just need to add that subcategory by adding the search node.
So by all means. Now there's one thing to pay attention to and that is, contrary to popular belief, not all categories get a number one tag.
So go to that subcategory and click on the person who's number one and see if they've got a tag. If they've got a tag, go into that subcategory. If they don't have a tag, that category is not big enough to have a tag because they actually have a minimum quantity required for a number one seller tag. And it's not quantity of sales. It's the silliest thing in the world. It's quantity of products in the category. It's the silliest thing in the world. Why that matters. But unless there's a certain number of. I think it's a hundred. Unless there's at least 100 products in the category, there's no one seller tag. Why? I don't know. I'm not Amazon. I don't get why they do half the things they do. But that's the rule. So the easiest way to check, just go to the number one guy, click on him. If he's got a number one tag, go into that category. If not, look for a different category.
One last thing. With regards to cutting down the price, I shall be doing it in roughly two, three weeks time because I'm currently limited on stock and my supplier is also out of stock, so I need to slow down. I might also switch off PPC just so I don't end up out of stock. So when I'm fully stocked up, I will try it. I will do the six $16.99 and we'll see from where it takes us.
Good. So I think that's a perfect plan for now. Keep it where it is. Monitor sales over the next two weeks. If you have growth without dropping the price, that's even better. I put all your emphasis on reviews then for the next two weeks once you get more inventory then you can try some price testing and do these experiments that we just laid out for you.
Yeah, roughly. Reviews. I'm getting roughly one every two days. One review every two days. So it's increasing slowly, slowly.
Do you have a follow up sequence like we went over with?
I have three emails sent to them.
And this is a good follow up. I just tweaked it a bit lately. I also had problems with Feedback Genie so I'll be swapping to Wave Review now. I have a call with them next week so hopefully we'll have a smooth transition.
And hope that Wave Review. I heard very good results about it so I chose them over the other competitors.
Yeah, I think that should be your emphasis for the next two weeks is how do I go from 120 reviews to 150?
How many reviews do the top people in your space have?
Number one spot has 360.
How many 360 is that?
You said 360.
Yes. You'll dominate this then. 360 is not. If you get your systems in place now.
In six months you will be destroying the people who are number one, especially at your end of growth.
Just one last point. I don't take all the time. I'm noticing that in the first page all the products have a brand like they have another six products under this brand. I think I'm limiting myself because I only have one product at the moment. Because I noticed that all the products on first page have roughly another six other types of brands. I'm the only one that has only one product. So in the meantime I'm going to launch another product in the same niche. Just maybe get some momentum.
I think you're close to ready. How much cash do you have sitting on the sidelines that you feel comfortable investing right now?
I just invested on units on another 1,000 units. So that will generate some good money with profit. And with that profit, I'll be investing 500 units on a new supplement.
I might wait a month or so.
The only reason is because I don't want you to divert your attention from something that's got really good momentum because in a month you're going to have another Thousand units in a month, you're going to probably either do another blast or you're going to have a spike in sales from a product drop. And it's going to require you to probably place another. Another order soon. And I don't want you to be in the spot where it's like, shit, I just ordered this other product and now I got to dip into more savings. And now, if you're comfortable dipping into savings, by all means, or borrowing from your aunt or your neighbor or your cat or whoever, I'm all for that. If you can maintain that aggressiveness. But if that is going to slow down your aggressiveness on your one product, I would hesitate before giving my blessing and rolling out a second product. Okay. When you're comfortably selling 20 to 25 a day at full price so that your profit is coming in, go for it. And with your momentum, it's not going to be long. But.
I would hesitate before jumping the gun on it simply because I don't want you to step off the gas pedal yet when you're in a position to double or triple sales over the next 60 days or so.
Sure, sure. No, I'm expecting a spike with this January season or everyone starting off the health season. So I'm expecting January will be a good month.
Cool. Good.
I'm ready. I'm ready for it. I'm restocking.
Okay. As long as you can maintain the aggressiveness, you have my blessing. But if having to order.
More inventory in your existing product plus buying your second product is going to prevent you from being aggressive, don't do it. If you can maintain the aggressiveness, do it. Okay.
Awesome.
In my first business, I ordered my second product right when I was selling 25 a day on my first product. So you're right in line with where we were. But we were totally comfortable.
Stepping on the gas pedal and continuing to not make a lot of money. We were comfortable being aggressive is what I'm saying. So if you can match that, do it. So 25 a day was our benchmark, too. And I've told the story a thousand times, but I love it so much, I'll tell it again. We thought that we'd have four products each selling 25 a day, but when we rolled out product number two, our sales of product number one doubled. And that was a really, really exciting thing. And so now we roll out products as fast as we can.
True.
Okay.
Thanks, Dragon.
Of course, of course.
Go ahead, James.
All right, so I know everybody. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people are doing A zone blast. So my question for that is, like, how effective? Well, I know they're effective, but over which duration should I expect to see results?
So you want sales as fast as possible. You don't want to spread them out. And when you. So.
If you hit all those sales and they're all gone within an hour, period, which is a perfect scenario, the algorithm will take about 24 hours to adjust your BSR. And then over the next five days or so is when you will start to increase in rank. So, and then after that, five days is when the natural sales will start to pick up. So after about a week after your Zomblast is when you'll see tangible results from that blast. Okay, can I ask why you asked that question?
Okay, so I was out of inventory for over 27 days, so my rankings dropped big time. However, it's been about a week, so they're starting to pick back up. I'm thinking I'm about around 18 sales a day now, which is fine. But what I really want to do, I'm still at the bottom, middle, bottom of page one. So I'm back in the game. But I'm really trying to get back up to the second. The first or second listing on the page now over that month. So basically, I'm trying to take out my competition. So I'm looking. I'm already aggressively doing Amazon ppc, and that's helping out a lot. But I'm trying to get over the hump and get up.
Okay, so when you were at, were you at number one or number two before you ran out of stock?
I was around number four.
Okay, and how many sales a day were you doing at its peak?
Anywhere between 25 to 30.
Okay, good, good. So I would. If you've got the cash for it, I would recommend doing a blast. I'm no longer a fan of the dollar giveaways as much as I was before and now like a higher price just because. And the reason for that is a compliment to Joe because his list is so responsive now that we don't have to settle for dollars. We can go for $5 now, so we mitigate that cost a little bit more. I'd recommend you do that.
You can also experiment with what we've been talking about, dropping the price. Because that quantity of sales will impact your overall ranking if more people are searching for that keyword. My bigger concern with you is actually, well, two things I want to look at with you that will help increase the keyword that you're targeting. If you're in the middle of page one, but only doing 20 or 18 a day or so. I'm slightly concerned. So let me ask you.
Are there other keywords that you found from Pay per Click that have more volume than the primary keyword you're targeting right now?
Yes, there are, but they're less. They have more volume, but they're less targeted.
Are people buying them through that keyword?
Yes, they are. They are buying them through the keyword, but I'm losing money. I see, through the buying process.
Are you ranking for those keywords organically?
You know what? I haven't checked that particular keyword that I'm getting most of the sales, so I'm not sure.
Yeah, definitely check that. Definitely check that. So.
We had a product, my first product was making a lot of sales through a keyword that was not very targeted. And as a result, we were making sales and profit, but people weren't happy with the product. Interesting. So we turned off that keyword, removed it from our listing because we didn't want to rank for it, and then we released a second product that matched that keyword and it sells extremely well through that keyword. So that's one strategy you could copy. Another is if it is targeted enough for your product to meet what they're searching for, by all means, you'll want to put attention on that next. Once you've dominated this one keyword, you'll want to turn your attention towards that keyword and start to rank for that. If you're already ranking for it organically. If you're on page 10, don't worry about it. But if you're already starting to peak up for it might be worth putting some attention towards all of this. To say, I think if I was in your position, I'd be looking at other keywords that might bring in some significant volume. For example, on the supplement company, fish oil and Omega three, people who are shopping for those two keywords are looking for the same thing. They're equally targeted, but they're completely different keywords. Omega 3 is a sub ingredient. Fish oil is what people call it. Completely different keywords, same thing. We realized that there was volume in Omega 3. We started to turn our attention towards Omega 3 in addition to just fish oil. And as a result, we got increased sales 25% or so from a keyword that we weren't previously aware of. So I'd be looking at those types of keywords. I'm also curious about the same thing regarding a number one tag for you, because that will definitely help you take sales away from the top guy and put them towards you. So how close are you to getting number one in the subcategory?
Actually I already have a number one subcategory tag, so.
Great.
So that seems to help. That seem to help. I got that back. I mean I know the strategy I had already implemented before, so I'm fine there. I think one of my next step as well is dropping the price. The only thing I have with issue that I have with dropping the price is I have an HTML listing that hasn't been messed with and I actually wrote the price in the HTML itself. So I would need to go in and change the HTML support to look at something different.
I don't quite understand.
The system. You're saying you can't edit the listing because of the HTML? Correct.
Well, I can edit. Basically what's going to happen if I edit the listing? It's going to get rid of my HTML description. So I'm going to have to go. I know a way around it. It's just a hassle.
Got it. Okay, I understand.
We had to remove our HTML listing. Didn't see that much of a drop in sales so we were not too concerned about it to be honest with you.
We put a lot of energy into building that HTML but once it was gone didn't affect sales all that much.
Interesting.
Okay, who was it from? Stage at last ASM might have been. Jason.
Said the most important thing on your listing is your images. The second most important is your headline. The third most important is your bullets. The least important is your description. And I have tried descriptions a hundred different ways and it does seem to have very marginal effects. So if it is causing you more stress than it's worried. I wouldn't worry too much about the.
HTML in there. They look great. I mean they look really great. I don't know why Amazon just doesn't let us have them because they look awesome. Haven't found them to affect sales all that much.
Okay.
I'd prefer to have them because they look great and they're great for branding but not a huge impact.
Okay, so.
How many reviews do you have, James?
I have 123 reviews.
And how many do the people who are above you on page one have?
Alright, so that's the interesting piece. So my top two competitors have the 447 and 496 reviews.
Okay.
And then any.
Anybody else? The two people that I started with, we're all in the same. I mean there was, there was about two other Products that started on the same time as I. And we are pretty much neck and neck with reviews.
Okay, and how many. What's their. What's their bsr? The people who are above you. What's their BSR at the top?
The top people are in the hunt in anywhere between 150 to 300.
And what's yours?
Mine is around 1300.
Okay. And.
Price, what's the price of the top people in yours?
The top person has a 1695. No.
Yeah.
16.95. Then it goes from 1895 to 21.99.
I'm 18.95.
And what's your profit? For sale?
About eight bucks.
Okay, try. I want you to experiment with the same thing we've talked about, about dropping the price. And I want, and I would recommend a Zomb last the thing for you. It looks like the thing that's impacted. That's a big jump from 150 to 1300. And for only being a few spots, it's a big, big difference. So I'm in my brain. I'm like, how? Okay, how do I get him there as fast as possible? If I were you, I'd be being aggressive by doing a Zomblast, a price drop, at least temporarily, and putting a lot of attention on reviews. In doing so, you'll take some market share away from the top people while also inflating your own, which will make you look more, at least temporarily, more authoritative in Amazon's eyes than these other people. So price drop is going to take BSR away from them and the Zomblast is going to give it to you and that will help level it out so that you are starting to push your way towards the top and at least get into that top five listing again.
I know this is a good category and I know they're making money, but I just haven't figured out how to get there.
I'm with you. I mean, with our supplement company, we had that issue for a long time until we just bullied our way into that second keyword, the number one tag, the price drop. It's just a matter of there's something in there that is. And every market is different. There's some buying reason why someone is choosing them over you. And you just got to make it look like you're better. Compare your images to theirs, compare your copy to theirs. But most importantly, I'd be looking at how can I take away some sales rank from them? Give it to me at least in the short run so that you can start to be the authoritative person in that space and it's a difficult thing to do. I'm not suggesting it's easy to drop your price and eating your profit margins, but I want you to test it for a week or so and see how it affects your BSR and how it affects their bsr. If I'm wrong, we've lost a week and we know that's not the case. And then we might test upping your price. But we need to start looking at how do we give you the authority and rather than letting these top people have them. And that's what I want you to test this week.
Okay, Good enough.
All right, cool. Okay, tribe. Well, over the next couple weeks, the calls are going to be more like this. It's going to be more us working hands on basically for the level that most of us are at. Unless we're sitting around 10 people at a table at an event in Austin or in my high level mastermind group, this is. We've covered all that we can cover in stage one and two. So it's going to be massaging the process through here until we graduate into ASM here in a couple weeks or if some of you decide to come to Austin sometime this year and work hands on in your business. So this is the format. It's going to be like. So for future calls, bring your questions, bring what you tested, bring what worked and what didn't work and we'll massage it from there. So thank you guys. I'm excited to see you in three weeks. All of you have details for the meeting itself, right? For us meeting in February, the day before, I think it's from 11 to 6 is our meeting. You can come and go as you please. And we have room for a hundred people. So just come on in as you please. It'll be about 100 people and we'll be all meeting in person and then we'll be going to dinner that night. So excited to meet you all. And we'll be doing this kind of style until the live event first week of February. Thanks for coming, guys. And I will see you next week. All right, thanks.
Thank you, guys.
Have a good one.
Bye.
