Tribe Meeting 7/12/14

Is that a Joe Jr.

This is Dylan. I'm getting his next product ready. We'll be launching next month.

That's awesome. The newest entrepreneur in the tribe of 25. Absolutely.

Brian, I'd love to hear you. Well, actually, first of all, Joe, introduce us to this guy.

This is Dylan. Say hi. He's going to wave his sock at you.

Ten months old, he has a little, hopefully a little brother on the way. Due in January.

Very cool.

Do you have more children than animals?

No, not yet. And hopefully it stays that way.

We have one dog, three cats.

Kid.

And half a kid on the way. We have a full house, literally.

That's really exciting, Joe. Congratulations, man. Thank you. Hey, by the way, you and I have been talking via email about my girlfriend's giveaway. It's interesting. I've never seen this before. On mobile, she's middle half of page two and on desktop, same spot, middle of page three.

That's weird.

Yeah, at least on my phone anyway. So it's interesting that I've never seen the discrepancy between.

Yeah, it never occurred to me to even check that when I was running my promos.

I wonder if Amazon updates mobile first. I don't know. Not that it matters, but yeah, that.

Would be awesome if that's the case. I mean, just wait for the next update, right?

Yeah. I'd love to hear you talking about your P&LS.

Sorry you cut off there, Ryan. Was that to me?

Yeah.

I'm curious about your reaction to the P&Ls because I'm guessing you saw that you made a loss and you freaked out a bit. Is that the case?

Actually, no. I haven't run a P and L for three months, which is what I was working on this morning, bringing all the transactions in and whatnot, and I haven't finished yet.

I'm sure I made a loss. How much? Don't know yet, but it's part of starting a business.

How does that sit with you when you see that you've made a loss after your first few months? What's your reaction to that?

My reaction is where am I spending money and is it driving long term results? I don't know what my lifetime profitability is for a given customer is yet. I have no idea. It's way too early. But at the end of the day, it's not looking at what an individual transaction is.

Profitable.

One of the cool things is, and I need to get my head around it, specifically what this is, but the number. I've had repeat customers. In other words, I've had customers that bought, used the product, consumed it, come back, rebought, which is really cool. I like that. That's a good thing. I want to kind of quantify exactly how many that is and whatnot and try to get ultimately a feel for lifetime profitability. So, you know, I'm spending money on Facebook ads. I'm doing a lot of the stuff Joe was doing some of it. I've got another thing running this weekend, started it yesterday and given away, essentially giving away product.

Are you making regular sales on a daily basis?

Yes. My trailing seven, which takes out the great weekend I had the last week of June. My trailing seven is around between five and seven a day. So I'm at that point. We're getting ready to get over that hump that you were talking about a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, like five to ten point. You kind of feel stuck there for a while until you hustle through with reviews and advertisements and stuff. Just down to where you rank, where you rank for the gigantic.

That's the really cool thing. And I haven't checked it on mobile and I will. But for my primary keyword on the main product, I am now number nine. So halfway down page one, that is fantastic.

But that product, my unit session percent is around 8%. And on the other product, the secondary product that I'm not even paying attention to other than Amazon pay per click and I need to do some keyword optimization on that that's converting over 12%.

I've got plenty of stuff to do.

Yeah, I like to say that if you can have a year long window into this business that sets you up for success, I think you're in a good spot where you're able to look a year in advance rather than look at the last three months. A year from your first sale is really where things are.

Booming and hustling and growing in my experience.

Yeah, you know, I did 600 bucks in May and I did three grand in June. So, you know.

You surpassed June yet?

No, I've not gone past June yet. I'm about. I am ahead though.

We're a third of the way through the month and I think I'm at about 50% of where I was at June.

Okay, cool.

So I actually have some tips I want to talk to you guys about today. But first, we actually do have a new face in Charlotte. So. Charlotte. Oh, yeah, you. I would like for you to introduce yourself because I don't think we've ever seen you on a hangout before.

No. Can you hear me?

I sure can.

Excellent. I have to put my knitting down as well. I've just been caught knitting. Yeah. I'm in Manchester in the uk and I went live with my product in Amazon last week and I have got about $500 in sales, but that's all kind of friends and family and promotion. I started doing some Facebook promotion yesterday and did 13 SAL.

It's on the up and up. I've been using the tools. I've been battling through Traffic Robot the last few days, and it's just all really starting to come together. Sean is building me a fantastic website and I'm just really excited now. I wanted to get everything ready and up and running before I went to Vegas, and it looks like I'm there, really. So, yeah.

Congratulations on being up and running and making sales.

Thank you.

What could help you get a good foundation by the time we all arrive in Vegas?

Pardon?

What can we all be doing to support you?

I think where I'm kind of. There's certain areas that I'm kind of struggling with, like trying to understand how Amazon ads works. It seems to be some sort of, like, dark art, really. I've set up Amazon ads with the suggested keywords, but I'm thinking maybe I should be doing a lot more keywords than this or maybe I should be spending more. That's a real mystery to me.

What are you spending right now?

What are you spending right now?

At the moment, I think my budget's $35 a day, and I've bidded up to 85 cents a click. And the. I'm really only using the keywords that are suggested and just a couple of really obvious additional ones. But I think. I don't know, I get the feeling that I'm really only scratching the surface, if that makes sense.

It makes sense. But in my mind, I think that's fine. To start, we focus on pretty specific keywords, even though we do hundreds of sales a day. So we focus on those pretty exclusively and just try to blast through our budget as much as possible in order to maximize sales. So I think that approach is fine, especially when starting out okay.

I mean, apart from that, I feel as if I just want to kind of clone myself a few times so I can get through all the little jobs that need to be done, you know, all the different tools. As soon as I get up in.

The morning, notice at the bottom that Joe and I are both smiling at you.

Look on our face, because we know what you mean. Yep.

Well, that's it. It's just like I Just spend like for more than that at the moment it's just press releases, videos, links, getting this out, getting that out. And I just think that what I just need to do is just keep on keeping on with that really, and keep on with the Facebook stuffing stuff that Jo gave us has been really good. So I'm eternally grateful to Jo for that and I just keep rocking it out, really.

In my opinion, things like press releases are a waste of time.

Okay, I'm glad you said that. I hate press releases.

Yeah. In your first three months or so. I don't get it. I don't know why that is so heavily pushed in asm. I don't see it as that valuable.

Right.

I think it can be valuable, the fact that they're like, let's do three press releases a day, day.

Or you could shove an ice pick up your anus. That might be more enjoyable.

No.

I don't get it. I think when you're starting out, you need Amazon ads, you need to do a launch and you need to be very, very focused on reviews and that is about all you need to focus on in your first three months.

Yeah, I mean, I'm doing that an awful lot. I have got 50 units at the house here in the UK and I'm basically hustling all my friends and relatives for reviews.

So I'm going to do it fulfilled by merchants listing and then get all that out to them.

What's the reason that you're doing it fulfilled by merchant?

Just because I'm in the UK and I want to get.

Verified reviews from UK people.

So I can basically hand them it and say, do me a review type thing.

Okay, that's interesting. Are you focusing on Amazon in the UK or are you focusing on the US?

No, I can get them to set up Amazon.com accounts but because they don't have US shipping addresses, it needs to be fulfilled by merchant listing. So I can say I've sent it to their house in.

Kent or, you know, Birmingham or London or wherever.

Okay, very cool. Well, good, good work on getting your first sales right away. That's really exciting. And congratulations on getting the foundation there before we go to Vegas.

Thank you. It's been quite nerve wracking. But you know what, it's exciting. I went out for a run yesterday and I came back to 13 sales and I was like, come on.

Is that from Facebook? From the basic giving?

Yeah. Basically I just put the ad live and they came in.

I'm not even checked today because I like to be surprised by it. So I mean, I am going to start checking a lot more often, but it's almost like waiting to open your presence. So if there's no sales today, I think I will cry, but hopefully not.

Yeah, well, just wait until the bug really bites you and you start refreshing your business reports and you're just sitting there hitting hit and refresh. And then your significant other is like, why are you checking reviews and sales again? It'll be there later. And you're like, I have to check the sales and see if there's reviews.

Oh, great. Like I need another compulsion in my life.

Well, that's coming.

Install the mobile app. You can do it every two minutes.

Don't tell me there's an app for that.

There is.

God.

All right, Tribe, So what I would actually like to do for those of you who are watching, you can post this in the comments. But what I'd like to do is this is our last meeting before Vegas and selfishly, I have a speech to give in five days that I have basically an outline for and that's it. And what I'd like to do is cover the things that have been most impactful for me over.

The last year in business. Year plus in business. And what I could use from all of you is for you to type or say or discuss the things that we've done as a group or the things that individuals have done in the group or the things that we have talked about on Tribe calls that have been the most impactful for you. So if you'd be willing to share with me what are the things over the last eight weeks or 12 weeks or however long we've been doing these every Saturday that have made a big impact for you, that gave you an aha moment that made you relax, that resulted in sales. Would you guys be willing to share that with me? What has happened in the last 12 weeks that you think has made the biggest difference in your businesses?

I'll go first, Ryan, since I can't really say anything because I don't have a product yet. I think that it just helps with your confidence level of walking in the footsteps of somebody else that's already been there and kind of knowing where to direct your resources and having confidence in that. Because anytime you're doing something new, you really don't have an overabundance of confidence without doing trial by error of knowing that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. So I think just the element of you saying where to concentrate your efforts and then with other People talking about their products and what success they've had, I mean, that's just tremendous. And I'm so grateful that I found this group outside of ASM to be able to share that, because there's a tremendous amount of value with this.

So do you think the conversations that Charlotte and I just had about the things that she doesn't have to do, that kind of stuff, is helpful?

Oh, yeah, I think the particulars there are very helpful. And then just being able to pick people's brains that have already had the experience of doing something.

Is very beneficial. So for me, it's not one magic bullet. It's just a combination of being able to connect all the dots together.

Okay, cool. Thanks for that, Greg.

What about the rest of you? What things have we talked about that you feel like have been?

I would echo that, particularly your focus on reviews. That kind of put me in the mindset from day one that get 50 reviews or more and focus on nothing else. And my mindset was kind of like, okay, I'm going to spend two months. It didn't take two months, but I'm going to spend two months focusing on reviews. And for what it's worth, Today I hit 100 reviews.

Nice. Congratulations. Thanks.

Yeah, but the laser focus, and I definitely agree with you, like on the press releases and honestly, most of the tools, I think they're more SEO tools than they are.

Real promotion tools. I personally haven't used anything except the alliance tool. I only use that couple of times. But I think focusing and reconciling with the fact that you're probably going to spend a month, two months, maybe three months, just getting those reviews and then everything else kind of follows. I think that's helped a lot instead of distracting all this unnecessary stuff.

Okay, great. That's good feedback. And Joe, is there anything that you would like me to not talk about on the strategy that you and I have both used for giveaways? Is there anything you would like me to hold back in talking about? Because my last speech was all about product launches. I will do an update on what we do now for product launches. Is there anything you'd like me to hold back on?

I don't know what your specific plans are, but don't release the specific style of the squeeze page first.

For your page.

Yeah. Like to say, drive traffic to coupon offer, grab their email, send them directly to Amazon. As opposed to saying, set your page like this and do that.

What I was going to do is just show the pages that I used for Pamela at no Point was I going to use?

Are you comfortable with that? It's just a lead page.

Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah.

I mean, it's on lead pages, right?

Yeah. Cool.

Cool.

And we'll do that. Yeah. At no point would I share yours or the style. I'll do a case study from how we use it if you're okay. I don't think that telling people, I mean, I kind of publicized the idea of doing a big giveaway on Facebook in a different way earlier this year. So I don't think doing a big giveaway is really a secret.

I think it's already out there. I had gotten the idea from other asmers.

Yeah, but your tweak on it was really helpful. Sean and I, when we started ours, we spent a month building up an audience and then launched to it, which has been really helpful for us. You came in and shortcutted the process and you're like, I don't really need to spend this time building up an audience. I can just run a Facebook ad straight to the giveaway, which was an awesome shortcut. And since it was a squeeze page, I don't know why it never occurred to me to send him to a squeeze page. Since it was a squeeze page, you built up the same audience that we would have built, probably even more responsive.

That tweak was immensely helpful.

Cool.

What about Bry Guy? Bry Guy? I mean, you and I have come a long way from hanging out in the Philippines a few months ago.

Still wearing the bracelet. That's hilarious.

Living the dream here, doing what you're doing. So what have been the big takeaways for you? Because when we spoke in the Philippines a few months ago, you knew the market you wanted to get into. We had a few conversations about what to do with it. But now you're selling product regularly. So what have been the big takeaway for you?

Yep, just to recap, I was going to sell my product directly to small business folks rather than on Amazon and do it via my own web shop with a third party logistics company. And I got almost no traction with that. And on a whim in the middle of April, I threw the four products that I have up on Amazon and got a little bit of traction.

What has been so powerful for me and Joe, Greg, I think you know I'm still in the living the corporate life as well.

I work on my stuff from 3am to 7am and then I go work the corporate job from 8am to 5pm What a man. Well, no motivator like the fear of poverty.

What really is inspiring to me, and this is one of the reasons why I went to Tropical Think Tank, why I'm coming to the live event. Being surrounded by entrepreneurs, particularly in a smaller, focused environment, is so motivating. Not only do you find out the specifics of what you should be working on, you find out what Joe had just said about what not to work on, which is maybe even more important, what not to spend your time on, especially if it's limited. And then just.

The inspiring motivation in seeing folks develop. Seeing Joe go from where he was to where he is today, listening to Greg and his challenges and getting inventory in.

When it comes to product development, product packaging, product launch, that's something I know inside and out. I've been doing it for 15 years.

For the corporate job. I just launched eight products last week.

That's not the issues. For me, the issues are all of the SEO stuff. Driving traffic, understanding reviews, focusing on the other aspects of the business, of building the own business, of what's important and what's not important.

It's been a great journey.

Cool. Yeah, it has been fun. I think one of the things I'm going to focus heavily on in this Talk is the 8020 because we spend so much time and when I spoke at the last ASM and basically said, all you need to focus on right now is sales and reviews, everything else is noise. There was like this.

That fell over the crowd of 2,000 people because they've been sitting there doing YouTube videos and press releases and all this shit that they don't need to do. That I started doing when I first started this business because you have this temptation of like, I have to do more, I have to drive something forward. But the best thing you really can do is cut that stuff out and just focus on what is going to produce what's going to produce a result tomorrow. What is going to drive momentum tomorrow? What's the one thing I can focus on that's going to knock a domino over so that it can push the next one over? Rather than spending all your time placing the dominoes perfectly, what can you do to flick one over so that you have more momentum and it changes when you're in phase two? I would consider Joe now in phase two. It might be the fastest person ever to get to phase two. But phase two is where you go, okay, I'm ready now to release a second product. Because I have a customer base, I know how to get reviews and I can easily duplicate the process. That's phase two, where you can Roll out other products. And then if you want to do things like have a fancy website, or if you want to do things like follow up email campaigns to your customers or more marketing.

That'S when you can start doing that thing. And then I'd say phase three is when you pay yourself. That's like months eight to 12 where you finally say, okay, great, I now have a business that has three products driving revenue. Now I can pay myself. I think there's kind of a myth that's pushed. I think it comes from the information products world where you can put up something, sell it tomorrow, and you have no cost of goods sold and you have affiliates mail for it and everybody makes a bunch of money really quickly and then you freak out because you don't know what happens next. There's this idea that you can just be profitable and pay yourself from day one, that doesn't exist Amazon, because you have this thing called cost of goods sold which eats in your profits about 50%. And as a result it takes setting up those consistent sales channels. But those of us who do it for nine months are in that 1% of people that surpass everybody who quits. And that's why it's a sustainable business model. I'm totally ranting and it's totally the coffee, so forgive me, but I think I'm going to hammer on that pretty hard in that talk because I think people have this myth of what to expect when they're coming in. And that's why I try to preach it's one year. You have a year to get all your systems in place before you start taking profits. Rather than this idea of you put it up, it makes money and.

You'Re rich all of a sudden that doesn't exist. Not on Amazon anyway.

I think there's another aspect that would be valuable to drive home and that is the mindset. And I see some of the traffic in the asn, the main Facebook group, about people getting so discouraged and this and that and getting focused on the problems and all this other stuff somehow get it into the frickin brain, you are going to be successful. And if you can really truly hammer that home in your own brain, you will be successful.

There's a guy coming to the speaking at the conference, his name is Todd Herman, who is just a brilliant mindset coach. He's one of the most interesting people that I know is we all like to. He doesn't ever reveal who his clients are, but we all speculate and we think LeBron is one of them, which is Interesting. And.

He has like celebrity mindset clients. And he talks about the why behind what you're doing as told in a story. And what he means by that is.

He says most people will talk about the why. Why are you doing something? He takes it one step further. Whereas most people would say, I want to do this so that I can blank, he adds one more so that to it. So he would say.

I want to be successful on Amazon so that I can have a full time income. And he says, okay, what's after that? What is the result that's still a cause? What's the effect that you want so that I can blank? What is the space you're filling in so that I can spend more time with my wife? Ah, okay, got it. So let's shortcut this and say that you want to be successful so that you can spend more time with your wife. And that eliminates the middle part, which is where all the problems come up. So the problems come up in the like, I want to have a full time income part. But if you can extend the mindset further than that, then your brain automatically looks at the further end result, which makes it not focus on the problems, it focuses on the end, I want to lose weight so that I have a six pack so that I can take my shirt off at the beach and feel confident. Same thing with anything. If you look past that middle ground, you look past the problems. Funny you should bring that up because he'll be there this weekend. He's a fascinating person.

A couple comments on the thread I just closed out. There it is. Karen, this was helpful. I just want to let you know. Thanks for this. Karen says she's in the same spot as Greg where product is arriving. But we just found she just found value in moving forward, especially when we were working with Ken. And that was a really cool breakthrough moment here in the tribe when we were working with Ken past his analysis paralysis and just setting up small things that he could do so that the next week there were specific results that he was getting. We did hammer that home when he was in that analysis paralysis of what do you do so that he's got some momentum. I think that was one of our defining moments. I thought that was pretty cool watching Ken come back and be like, okay, I'm making sales on a regular basis now because I overcame my analysis for Alexis.

Charlotte, what about you? You've been lurking. We call it watching the hangouts. This is your first one, the first one for the event. What kind of things have been really helpful for You?

Yeah. Yes. I'm a lurker generally in life. I'm a member of a lot of forums and stuff and I don't really post much because the whole idea scares me really. But I've taken so much, you know, home from this, both from asm, but also the tribe. You know, like you guys were saying about things, like.

Just kind of keeping that momentum up and stuff. You know, sometimes I've had a frustrating day. I'll come into our Facebook group and I will kind of feed off the positive vibes from other people. That's really been invaluable, really. And.

I just really appreciate having somewhere that you can actually go with like minded people and they can totally give you a different slant on things. It's like I've seen it quite a few times. People are stumped, really struggling and then somebody will say, well, have you tried this? And it's never occurred to them. And suddenly that big bumping the road, it's just gone. And that's been certainly been my experience. I found that a few times when I was struggling to get approval for the health category, there was so many people who came and PM'd me with suggestions and that sort of thing and you just wouldn't get that sort of support. I remember before signing up for asm, load of people in the Warrior forums, like totally dissing the program and saying, oh yeah, where would you want to spend all that money when you could just read this book for $60 or I'll teach you how to private label for $200. And I remember people saying, yeah, but the forums are brilliant and worth that and the groups that you get into and people you meet. And I remember thinking, well, I'm sure there is some value in that. But that wasn't one of the reasons that made me go for it. But I actually think it's one of the most valuable things I found the actual people and also it's just the joining up of the dots. I do a lot of marketing on Facebook for my yarn business. We've got lots of fans in our Facebook group. We do promotions. I don't have sales funnels use squeeze pages. But for Jo to put all that stuff together was great. It's like saying like a light bulb moment. Just like going, oh yeah.

These things that I've been doing separately together in this sequence, that's a really good idea. Basically it's other people have been the real value for myself.

Cool, thanks for that, Charlie.

Sorry, I'm rambling.

I forgive you.

David posted on the forum. The so I can explanation reminds me of what I heard from Tony Robbins saying, people don't want money. They want what money they will provide them. Which is 100% true. You know, this is kind of a side point. Somebody called me out yesterday. We were talking about the. We were talking about some Tony Robbins stuff, and. Whoa. Joe is now on the call twice. Joe, can you actually see yourself in your camera?

I can see myself. I haven't figured out how to replicate my other self. Seems to be unresponsive.

You took Charlotte's problem very specifically and actually duplicated yourself.

I don't know. Maybe you should do this again.

Joe is a leader.

Wow. Okay. That's new.

That's funny.

And I'm still there.

So somebody called me out yesterday, and this is just something I'm working on for myself, where Tony Robbins talked about the six human needs, which are, if you're not familiar, certainty, Variety. Significance. Love, Growth. Contribution. Certainty, meaning I want to feel safe in what I'm doing. Variety, meaning I want to feel that something's different and the two of those actually conflict with each other. Significance, meaning I want to feel important. Love. I connect with other people. Growth. I'm better than I was last week. Contribution. I'm making a difference the world. And they all kind of feed each other. And he argues that most people get stuck in certainty and significance. I want to feel safe, and I want to feel important. And those two things, when they're not managed, actually prevent us from doing anything and make us neglect the other human needs. So I want to feel safe, so I won't go talk to that girl. I want to feel safe, so I won't go start a business. I want to feel safe, so I'm not going to travel. I want to feel important, so I'm going to lash out at people when they don't give me that feeling. And those two things you would argue sabotage or success. Someone called me out because I've heard Tony Robbins talk about this endlessly to the point where I have pretty much made it so that certainty and significance are not important to me. And I have kind of filled the gap with work, with business. So if you look at my wheel at a Tony Robbins conference and you have certainty, financially, I'm very certain.

For my variety. I get that in business. I can start a new project anytime I want. Significance. I feel like I do things like blogging and podcasting in order to. I feel like I'm making a difference for people and getting an audience, which makes me feel Important connecting. I go speak at a conference and everybody says, I'm great. I feel good about myself, growth. My business is better than it was before. Contribution. I create products that make a difference in people's lives. And then he called this friend called me out and he's like, all right, where in any of that explanation is any of that filled up personally? And I was like.

I realized that I had been filling none of those needs up through anything but work. Here I am where I talk about things like.

Having a life outside of work. I feel like I do. But when it comes to those six human needs, they were all empty. Personally. This was just yesterday. That was an interesting moment when somebody really called me out on that. Like, in your personal life, do you have certainty, variety, or significance? I was like.

I guess not. This was somebody who was giving me fitness advice. I've known this person for a while. I've been following their protocol for a while. And he said, you are completely dry in your personal life when it comes to significance and certainty. It's why you're not seeing the results that you want. I was like, your mind messing with me right now. It was an absolutely fascinating discussion.

It's just interesting. I only bring this up because Tony Robbins was mentioned.

In the thread here. So that's what's on my mind this morning, is how have I neglected that for so long? Anyway, there's your transparent moment for the day.

But you might not want to tell Pamela you want too much variety in your personal life.

That might not work so well. Just a thought.

More variety and spice.

So I want to briefly go over.

Some of the highlights, what I intend to talk about on Friday when we all meet, which is I'm going to break. I think the topic of my talk is going to be 0 to 100k in 12 months, or the 12 month blueprint to 100k or something like that. Because at every ASM conference, Jason does some rah rah cheer of how many Amazon millionaires are in the audience. Everyone goes yay. But nobody ever has laid out like a blueprint for zero to $100,000 a month or a million dollars a year.

In 12 months. Nobody's ever in. ASM has ruled out that blueprint because they launch every six hours. So it's usually a group of newbies just getting into the business. And so I probably spend the first half of the talk talking about phase one, which is what we have focused very heavily on, which is what I kicked Ken in the butt about, about trying to do everything all at once. And instead of just chunking it down into phase one, which is doing a giveaway in order to launch you up in the rankings, running Amazon PPC.

And hammering everybody you know and their sister to leave a review, if you just did those three things, within three months, you'd have a business with 50 reviews, you'd be converting things on a regular basis through Amazon ppc, and you'd have a list that you could go to anytime you wanted in order to do promotions to give you a boost. Which, by the way, this comes really in handy later when.

You guys know those orange best seller tags.

One of the big aha moments in our business, like eight months ago was when we realized that we could get that best seller tag just by switching categories. So we started looking for categories that would be easy for us to get that tag in, even if they were like slightly related or a little bit outside. And that doubled sales overnight when we had that best seller tag. But the thing that we worried about as a result then was what happens if we lose it and then we lose momentum. Well, that's why if you have a list of buyers or can duplicate a giveaway.

You can manage that. I almost said manipulate, but manage that where if you drop in the rankings and somebody is ranking above you, you just do a giveaway or you launch to the list that you've built from other giveaways and your sales go up, you get the seller tag back, your sales go up, which continues the momentum forward. That's one of the reasons why getting things right in phase one of getting the giveaway process down is so important, because you can duplicate that in order to accelerate your progress. So, like Joe, where you're at now, in phase two, I'd be hunting for that best seller tag from the guy that's above you and probably leaving negative reviews for you. I'd be trying to destroy his best seller tag right now.

Well, I don't want to waste too much time on that guy. My nemesis. My nemesis. But his listing is inactive at the moment. He either took it down or Amazon took it down. The negative review is still there. But on what you said about getting the bestseller tag back.

A couple weeks ago, I discovered the ability to add browse nodes. And I had them. I had them browse, I had them add a few nodes, and I immediately captured the best seller badge in a couple of smaller, less competitive categories. I lost it for a short while because somebody copied off of me and did the same thing. I did a short eight hour promo and I got it back and I've had it most of the time since then.

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't know this term. Browse nodes.

Browse nodes.

Yeah.

I think ASMRs are using it interchangeably. Like people say changing or adding categories such that, like in the product details section, you have have like three or four different categories and it'll say number one and this number three and that. If you just contact seller central, you say, I want to add browse node, this id, that id. They'll do it for you really quickly. But if you say I want to add this category, they might misinterpret it and say, oh, you want to switch a category? You want to switch to something else entirely?

Okay, got it. That actually answers my confusion about that because I didn't know that term. And we've had that problem where they'll switch our category, but when we say we want to add it. So that's interesting. Yeah, you can have up to three, and it used to be two, now it's three. And.

As a result, if you fall out of the rankings for one, you can actually hit it in another category, which is kind of cool. Like in yoga, we just added there's yoga mats and there's exercise mats, and exercise mats is a lot easier than yoga mats. So we just added the category of exercise mats because we'll have an easier time ranking in that category. So that's really. That's Phase one is you get your reviews, you do a launch, you do pay per click, and if you just did those three things, that's your 80 20, because that's what's going to result in you ranking in keywords, ranking for keywords. And if you just did those three things, you'd have a successful business. That's why I don't Recommend Things like.

YouTube and press releases and stuff like this. There's always one guy that's like, I had all this success and then everybody tries to duplicate it and they get frustrated. But.

It always works to do giveaways and get reviews. Always, always works. So phase two, then is where you say, okay, I have my systems in place, I'm getting sales on a regular basis. So now I'm at the point where I can release a second product or even a third product, and you repeat the process. But now you have more of a launching pad because you have a customer base, you have cash flow coming in, so you're not going into the red anymore. You may not even be super profitable, but you now have the foundation that's making it easier to get that second and third product up. There's a great book called Ready, Fire, Aim and he goes through.

He'S a founder of Agora Publishing and he goes through his three step model from 0 to 100 million and one is identifying your channel. We have it in Amazon and getting good at the channel. We have it through phase one reviews, launches, PPC ads. Then he has, that's his phase one, his phase two that is rolling out as many products as possible through that channel. We do the same thing Amazon. Once we have the customer base, once we have a launch process down, the ability to grow a second product is much, much easier. And now you have a twofer because people who buy one product often buy the other one. You get more seller feedback which helps your ranking in the algorithm. You have people who are buying who are now repeat buyers coming back. So you have that cash flow coming in. You have a base of reviews that you can go to because you can go to people who left reviews on your first product. You have your customer list, you have the list of people that you have from doing your giveaway. So now you can roll out products 2 products, products 3. Phase 3 is twofer. This is where you can think about putting yourself on payroll or paying yourself back for expenses. And not until this point, not until you have reached this point. And second, you can begin to look at other channels. This is when you can do things like.

Sell on your own website and think about E commerce. Last year at ASM there was a lot of confusion because the first speaker was an E commerce speaker and he came in and he through all this data and metrics about everything that was working great in his E commerce stores and everybody was walking around like this because he's talking about phase three and four when most people in the audience were in phase one and it was great information. The people were very frustrated because they felt like they had all the stuff they had to do. That's phase three. If you want to have an E commerce site so you can start to think about having any site, this is where you can start to think about doing things like SEO. This is where you can start to look at other channels like ebay or Overstock, which by the way we've done both and we don't see much of a result from at all. I don't know if we've ever taken that sale from any of those sales from those channels. But we're not managing it like we're managing Amazon either. And that is kind of the 0 to 100? Yeah. 0 to 100,000. Most of the work is done in phase one and two. Phase three is where you can start to think about growing into other things based on everything that we've covered in the however many weeks that we've done in the tribe. Is there anything that you guys think is valuable enough for us to add into the process?

No.

Cool.

Well then thanks for listening to my condensed version of my speech.

We'll probably talk about things like VAs and where they fit into the process, calling people for reviews.

That stuff matters obviously, which by the way, I think we talked about this last week. Sean and I got a new VA about a month and a half ago, maybe less. We saw probably a 300% increase in our reviews just based on the person doing the calls.

We were set. Our yoga mats aren't selling that well. We had to hold back sales in order to get through the oversize limit. Pain in the butt. So we had to hold back sales so our sales are down. Which means like after we sell a few per day we have to raise the price and after we sell fewer, we raise the price again. That's how we're holding them back. But we're still getting reviews every day. Like this girl is getting like 15 to 25% of buyers to leave reviews is getting incredible.

Just changing the person who's making the calls. So we did that just through a craigslist ad, a part time work from home position and got a us based person to make the calls who had experience on the phone making customer service calls. Pay her 10 bucks an hour plus $5 reward for.

Every five or four star review that she gets. Made a huge difference in our review momentum. If you can duplicate that with an overseas Filipino. Awesome. I obviously love Filipinos. I go there once or twice a year. But we had. What's that Brian?

Brian, your mic's not working.

But we were able to see monumental difference in hiring domestic.

Still can't hear you.

We miss you, Brian. We miss you. Sweet smooths.

So anyway, we. Huge, monumental difference in hiring. Now I can hear you.

You can hear me good.

Now.

Yep.

Okay. Sorry. Audio Food paw. Anyway, I was just asking, does she have room for another client?

Sadly no because I have her on my other businesses too. But if you. Another thing that we kind of wondered is.

I actually appreciate your guys feedback on this. Would you rather get a customer service call from a male or a female? Now I hope this conversation doesn't break any laws of not to discriminate by gender.

Or age, but since I err. On the side of women here. I'll probably get away with that. But would you rather get a customer service call from a man or a woman?

I think it would depend on the niche. I think for one of your companies, I think I would probably prefer a man. For everything else I think would probably be more suitable for a woman.

You're referencing the men's fitness company and we thought that too. And our customer service person has done a good job. But we started to wonder. We looked at some of the calls and a lot of them when a guy called, they'd use it as like a fitness consultation. So it's a dude calling and they're like, hey, just want to make sure your product arrived. And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. What style of workouts work best with this product? Product? And he's like, I don't know.

So we thought that too, but we're wondering if there was a woman in that. We're actually looking to test a woman doing the calls and have him focus on some other things while we're testing a female. Just because.

If it's a woman then it's clear that it's a customer service call and not a business call consultation. It's clear that it's just there to make sure that the product arrived and we're not sure what the results will be. But Yoga's clearly been, she's done a fantastic job. And in my other supplement company it's been, it's been always been a woman. So anyway, that's what we're looking at right now is what's better, a man or a woman. But we think it just comes down at the end of the day. It's really just can the person make the customer feel comfortable? Can they resolve any issues quickly? Can they manage the back end portal so that they can refund anybody who is set on the spot? And that's the subtitle that there's.

Do any of you have VAs making calls right now?

I'm using.

What'S it called? Feedback Fanatic. I had signed up with them because I was not having luck finding a va. They finally, after like a week of getting a script together and going back and forth with that, they finally got it running yesterday and I'm not impressed. Thus far it feels really beta and they actually put two negative responses into my positive autoresponder. I don't know if you guys are familiar with how it works, but basically they have a page that has three opt inside for it. One opt in is for Positive response and a review is to be expected. One is for like, it's too soon, you know, they haven't evaluated the product. And third, of course, is for negative. So I had two negative responses on the phone entered into my positive autoresponder sequence, the first email of which is, hey, please leave a review for us. So I'm not impressed thus far on Data Day one with Feedback Fanatic. And I was intending on going.

Private anyway, not using the service.

Are they related to FeedbackFive?

No, no, no. Feedback Fanatic, that's the ASM. I think that's the name of the ASM.

Offering they put out last month.

Yeah, I have a hard time recommending that just because I think it's better to keep it in house. Yeah, I don't know how the quality.

Of our calls is, but I don't know either. I'd love to know myself.

Yeah, I don't trust somebody else to not violate Amazon terms of service unless we're controlling it. Since we create the scripts and stuff, I know that we're not going to violate any Amazon terms of service. We pass it off to a call center that gives me the EBG fees.

Yeah, I'm probably pulling the plug this weekend. I'll see how they do today. They apparently run from like 9 to 2 today.

Just hatches there.

Are you guys still there? That was weird.

Glitching a matrix.

Glitching the Google Matrix, yeah. Google does a lot of things well. Hangouts. Yeah, not so much. Yeah, well, it's a great service, but they're. They still have some ruffles.

That's about all I know, guys.

I know Joe is gonna miss out on the party this week. What about the rest of the Charlotte? You're gonna be there. Brian, you're gonna be there. Greg, are you gonna be there? I'm in.

Cool.

Cool. Schedule is whenever you arrive, come to a hotel. There'll be in one of the meeting rooms. It'll say the tribe mastermind. Or you can ask the front desk where that's located. And 8 o' clock, we're going across the street to dinner.

Or just walking across the street to a place that hopefully has us down for a reservation. We had some communication problems getting it all set up, but I think down for 40 people.

That'll be a big old dinner.

So spoiler alert that Joe, I do a big announcement on the ASMR of the Year and you're not going to be there to get your virtual trophy, which is. Which is sad. So we'll have to take a selfie and send it to you in your honor. Maybe we'll do a video post for it.

Awesome.

And then the conference starts Friday morning and I speak Friday, I think 2 o', clock, which is the same slot I had last time. We'll have a good time days. Friday and Saturday are where all the action is. Sunday is kind of a wrap up day and at night everybody goes out and it's Vegas. So I have no idea what's going to happen in Austin. It's like, hey, let's go two stepping and drink a beer and Vegas. I have no idea what's going to happen. I can't stand Vegas. I don't know how you guys feel, but I can't. I don't like Vegas at all. So I'll probably go to my hotel and read or something.

That's what the conference looks like.

Brian, when you fly in?

I get In Wednesday night, 5:30, 6:00', clock, something like that.

Yeah, I'm not staying at the Venetian. It's about five, ten minute walk away. It's called the Platinum. It's right off the Strip.

What was the hotel you're staying, it's called the Platinum.

Yeah, it's right behind Bali's Right off the Strip. Yeah, a little cheaper.

Well, I will see a lot of you Thursday afternoon. Looking forward to meeting with you. One of my partners, Paul, is looking like he's gonna fly in. Sean's moving this week so he can't make it. My other partner Matt, who helped out in.

ASM1 is sadly not going to be there because he just moved. So my partner Paul is hopefully flying in Thursday. I'm not sure when he'll arrive, but we all meet him and I'll see you guys Thursday.

Have a good time guys.

We're going to miss you, Joe. Yeah, definitely catch you next year. All right guys, chat with you later. See you.