Weird Ways To Grow Your Amazon Business - Tribe Meeting 6/20/15

Hey tribe, welcome to the hangout. We are a little bit delayed because we have a new requirement that Stephanie apparently didn't get the memo of. You have to have Google effects on.

I guess a baby could qualify as, as a hat and a facial effect. Just put your baby on top of your head and you will thus qualify to have your Google effects on. Also, Sean Coyne is joining us via hologram.

Did anyone else see the article and the YouTube video that went out about how Tony Robbins is doing his new conferences? He's actually now appearing via hologram in them. It's really bizarre. So there was his new one, his business mastery that's going on right now in Australia. He actually beams up and he's there in hologram and really he's in Palm Beach, Florida, standing in a room giving his presentation. But everybody in Australia sees him like he's there. It's really bizarre. So Sean Coyne is joining us via hologram today. And a couple of quick announcements. The most important one is block off. I know, I think I've announced the dates before, but put on your calendar. December 11th, 12th and 13th, there's going to be a big event. Details are coming soon, but Gary Vaynerchuk will be there. I will be there. Grant Cardone will be there. Travis Sega will be there. Jesse Elder will be there.

An individual who runs a 200 million dollar a year company will be there. There will be.

A truly special event happening at the end of December that you will want to be at and details will be coming in about two weeks, so stay tuned for that. Also, the August workshop of the Next level is booking up very quickly. Special public congrats to Ralph who secured a spot this week. And I'm a little bit behind on applications. So I know a couple of you sent in applications but I have not gotten to them yet. But for those of you who are watching on the broadcast, NextLevelVideoSeries.com is a website and when those fill up, we'll open up new spots later in the year. So today we're going to be talking about some.

Strange, unique ways to grow your Amazon business, if you will. Some extra things that nobody else is doing that none of your competition is doing. So you can get a head start on these before everybody else starts doing them. So fill in the blank here. You, you always hear me say you do not have an Amazon business. You have a business that sells on Amazon, right? So Amazon is your channel. Amazon is not your business. So what I like to do, and one of the things we focus on pretty heavily in the next level is we talk about old school marketing strategies that other companies that are not based on Amazon use so that we can copy them and use them to grow our Amazon presence, to grow our total volume of our sales channel. So one of the ways that we've done this on a small scale is Sean and I were really impressed when the company that acquired Zedactive Sports, our yoga company, one of the first things they started doing was looking for.

YouTube channels, blogs and other places with audiences that they could leverage in order to grow their sales presence. So for those of you who are on the call and for those of you in the chat box, have any of you listened to my recent podcast called how to Grow a Profitable Audience? Give me a thumbs up if you've heard it.

Not yet.

A couple of you have, so if you haven't, I recommend you go listen to it. Actually, can we do this? So because I've been on dad leave or was on dad leave for a couple of weeks.

I slipped a bit in the itunes ranking. Can we do a tribe party here? If you are not subscribed to the Freedom Fast Lane.

Show on itunes, let's find the link.

Do me a favor, let's have a tribe party here and give me a little subscribe. It'll bump me back to my pre dad. My pre dad ranking. So I just released an episode. It's called how to build a profitable audience. And when I open with that.

I say something where I say everything comes down to audience building in your business or at the very least leveraging someone else's audience. That's called advertising. Advertising is simply leveraging somebody else's audience. So in your markets, in the markets that you are building.

Who are the.

Thought leaders in your space? Who are the people who have audiences? Who are the people who have itunes followings, podcast followings, YouTube followings, blog followings, Google hangout followings. Any place where they have a large number of subscribers, with a click of a button, you can contact or they can distribute your content, your products out to thousands and thousands of people. On the zen active side of things, there's a yoga instructor in town that will probably end up working with the people who bought the company, are working on that process, but has hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube. It's a fantastic marriage of a yoga products company, a yoga instructor with a large following, and. And they can't work on each other. The yoga instructor can't build a yoga products company. The yoga products company is probably not going to be one of the top yoga channels on YouTube. So they married each other, and as a result, both of those will grow much, much faster. Both of them will be profitable much, much faster. So one of the things that nobody in our little community is doing that I would highly recommend all of you expedite in your process is making lists of people in your market who have audiences that you can leverage. Now at the next level, we dive into this pretty deep. But to get you started, if you want to accelerate this faster than your competition, start going where your competition is not going. And one of the ways you can do this is, is by finding people with audiences. I know some of you use tools like Thomason, some of you use tools like blog networks. My recommendation is to go straight to the audience leaders, the people who are actually creating the content for the audience, and to make connections with those individuals. So I have a podcast called how to Build a Success Network, and it talks about how to strategically position yourself so you can make contact with people who can build your brand, build your success, get you on the path that you want to be on. Those same strategies apply in business when you want to be around people who have audiences that can build your brand in a lot of cases. Look, we all know that on Amazon, it comes down to sales, reviews and conversion rate. That's what this comes down to. Now, if you connect with the right content person or the right audience person who has an audience, an outside audience that's outside of Amazon, and you get the right person to share your product or your message, and you bring that fresh blood to Amazon, you can rank number one for keywords. You can get rabid customers overnight by going after places that your competition is not looking. So one of the things that I want you to do if you want this to be a big business, is to start connecting with people sooner than later in your market. There is lots and lots of fresh blood off of Amazon that your competition does not.

They do not see. Your competition doesn't know it exists. Everybody is going for the same pie on Amazon. I'm interested in going after places that will make the pie bigger and to put my attention there, because that's how you build a company. You can build a presence in a channel by just focusing on Amazon. But after that, where do you go next? The place you go next is you make the pie bigger by going to places that your competition aren't looking. So that's pretty much the focus of an entire day at the next level. But what you can do right now is to start Going to people who have audiences and connecting with those people and create strategic relationships for them. Let me give you an example, actually. So one of the ways that I decided I was going to grow my podcast audience when I first started was I'd build a little inner circle and the inner circle of people. Ooh, that's fun.

The inner circle of people. Yes, perfect. The inner circle of people that I was going to build was.

A group of podcasters who were kind of mid tier podcasters, and we would all connect with one another and we would share each other's podcast episodes, we would share interviews with one another, and as a result of.

Working with one another, we would all rise up higher in the itunes rankings. And it worked really, really well. Now, this comes from the old line of.

Direct marketing where you have a syndication network of people that will share your message on a consistent basis. So.

What'S floating on my head?

I didn't know that was there. So the old method of direct marketing of you've got a list, I've got a list, he's got a list, let's all line up and throw it at whoever has a launch right now. Can you duplicate that on a smaller scale with other channels and thus own the channel? So I did that with podcasting and it worked really well. There's other ways that you can do this with Amazon. You can do this by connecting with bloggers in your space. If you've got a blog, a Facebook page, a podcast following. If you have an audience, you can leverage that audience a way into a syndication group. At the same time, you could do this with other Amazon sellers. One of, I think the most underutilized forms of getting customers and traffic is partnering with other Amazon sellers and saying, how can we work together in order to increase.

Both of those.

Or both of our audiences? Kathryn, was it you that just posted? I'm not sure the mechanics of that.

So. What mechanics? Oh, a Famebit. Sorry, I didn't see Clement's post. Clement, would you share a little bit about Famebit? I actually don't know anything about this.

So I'm not really that familiar with it myself. But I do know that it kind of acts like a. A broker for YouTube bloggers. And many of them, I think you can get the YouTube stars, but you can also get the ones which haven't quite made it yet, so they're a.

Little bit more affordable. And does it broker out advertising? Does it broker out having appearances on each other's YouTube channels? What exactly is the. What's being brokered out.

So they'll review your product. And I understand that there are a few standard type of.

I guess, units that they sell. So for instance, like unveiling, opening up the package, they'll do a number of different products at once, but each one kind of has a standard rate or that the video or the YouTube blogger gives the rate for.

Interesting. Cool. So that's kind of on a smaller scale of getting people with audiences to review your product. If we take it one step further, we actually have real relationships with people with an audience, with a Facebook following, YouTube following, whatever it is. And if you line up all those people and in one fell swoop can have all of them talking about your product or whatever it is, immediately, then you have all of this exposure from all of these new channels. So your assignment on this is to start making. Actually, let's do this. I want you to pick one channel. We'll call it your traffic channel. Amazon is your sales channel. I want you to pick one traffic channel. Podcasts, YouTube, blogs, a place where audiences hang out. So your assignment is to pick one place where audiences hang out.

And to make a list of five to 10 people.

On that place that you would like to have a strategic partnership with. I would recommend going to mid tier people, people on the rise, people that if it's on YouTube, it's not the guy who's getting millions of views, it's the guy who's getting 50 to 100,000 views per video.

If it's podcasting, it's not. The guy in the top 10 for the rankings is a guy in like 25 to 50.

And if it's a blogger, not really sure how to filter that out. But the people with decent sized followings, people with email lists of 5 to 20,000. So go to those people. Actually your assignment this week is just make a list of them. You don't even have to do anything yet, just start making a list of those people. I would recommend you stick to whatever traffic channel you plan on using long term. So if in your business you have or want to have YouTube channel, stick with YouTube. If you plan or do have a podcast, stick with podcast audiences. So again, the perfect example here is the old way of direct marketing where I've got a product, I line up all my buddies to promote my product. That's people with email lists going to other people with email lists. That strategy can be duplicated in any traffic channel. So you've got a YouTube channel. Let's line up all the other people with YouTube channels and let's Blow everybody up. And if you become the pioneer in the middle of this syndicate, you stand in a very, very powerful position. We can go into that further. But right now your assignment is to just make a list of who you would want in that little syndication network.

Oh, I have a question.

Go ahead.

Yes, Ryan? If I interested in partnering with YouTube channel, do I need to have a YouTube video ready? To have partnership with them or not?

Say how to, whatever. Do I have to shoot anything?

It will make things a lot easier. Yes. So if you've got a. In theory, no. Could you just pay these people for advertising? Absolutely. But if you've got a YouTube following, then that makes things a lot easier.

If you've got a place where you do have a following, start there. If it's an email list, go to people with email lists and so on. But if you don't have a following or you don't have YouTube videos or any podcasts, you can always just pay people for advertising. That's called leveraging someone else's audience advertising. But it makes it a lot easier if you have an audience of your own.

Any questions on this process?

Can you see how this is different and unique from what everybody else is trying to do?

Absolutely.

It makes the pie bigger because you're going to places where nobody else is looking. So this is a different outside traffic channel. Then I want you to make a list that you can use.

I'm going to take a moment here. There's a ton of activity in the chat box.

I'm just going to go through them.

I want to give a special shout out to Brian. Brian, I saw your Facebook post today that your product finally went live. Congratulations. Angela asked a question about Facebook. Would it apply to Facebook as well? The answer is yes. If somebody's got a large Facebook following, then yes, it would certainly apply to that.

Angela, thank you for bringing this up, because Sean and I did exactly this. So Sean and I built up a Facebook following when we started our business. That's how we launched. You all know that story. But part of the story that we've never shared is that we did make partnerships with other yoga pages and we shared advertising with them. There was a much larger yoga page that we made a little bit of a partnership with, but they were way bigger than us, so we ended up just paying them for advertising as a result. Our following exploded from that. I mean, just exploded from that partnership, paying them a little bit of money. We had a much, much bigger following. And we used that as, you know, as the leverage point for Our launch. So we did this exactly on Facebook and someone just posted a link of different networks. This is Perfect. Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, blog, Twitter, they all apply. Pick one of them where you want to be. So for a lot of you, if you're in something like baking, kitchen, cooking, that kind of thing, Pinterest might be your place, it might be your traffic channel. So you start building a following there and then you start going to other pages and you start leveraging those audiences. So wherever your audience currently hangs out, that's where you want to be. In the fitness space.

It'S Instagram. There's just a huge amount of traffic on Instagram. If it's weight loss, if it's Fitness, CrossFit, that is YouTube and Instagram. So it's very obvious. Where your market hangs out is where people are actively talking about your market and consuming your products. Go after those channels and start there.

Sean, would you do me a favor and would you talk a bit about.

How you found and worked with the girl that worked on our YouTube page?

Yeah. So we had a really great video. I guess blogger would be the best way to describe her that I found on Fiverr. And Brian and I were just brainstorming one day and we're like, you know, it'd be cool if we had some videos about yoga because we're not doing it. No one's going to watch us do yoga. That's not what we want. People will never buy our stuff. We found this great woman on Fiverr and I just messaged her. She had a bunch of yoga related stuff, but she didn't have any posts. If you haven't used Fiverr, you can kind of list what type of gigs or projects or whatever you want to call it you're willing to do. Hers were all yoga related, but there wasn't one that said, we will make yoga videos promoting your company and do poses. I messaged her, I'm like, hey, would you make a yoga video doing poses and promoting our company? She was like, heck yeah. Every week for probably an entire year, she would make a yoga video. She would edit it, she'd put our intro, she put it on our blog. It automatically went on our video podcast, it automatically posted on Facebook. And all of that just started by finding someone that was our market. I mean, she was probably like in her 30s, had kids, did yoga for fun all the time. That was her passion. And we just connected with her and we're like, hey, do you want to work with us? And it took off from there.

So I guess kind of thinking out to the point that Ryan's trying to make is don't think that just because Ryan suggested YouTube that's the only way to find someone to make YouTube videos. You know, kind of think outside the box. Where would you find someone that could achieve the results that you want? And Fiverr was the answer for us. But, you know, you could certainly find a blogger that can make videos or a YouTuber that could blog. Just kind of finding that. I don't want to say organic traffic, but natural traffic, like that's what they like to do. That's why they're already doing it. So you might as well bring them with you and kind of build up your team with people that are already passionate about whatever you're passionate about.

And what did it cost? What were the costs for hiring?

It was about $20 a week. So she would make one video, do all the editing, post it, and it was $20 a week. That was great for us and it was great for her. So it was a win win.

And she did a freaking great job.

Yeah, she did an awesome job. There's probably a post out there somewhere if you Google. I don't even know what it would be under. But.

Yeah, her videos were really good.

They were very well done. She really enjoyed doing them. She had multiple camera angles. She came up with the content ideas. We used our audience to drive traffic to them, and it was very affordable for us as a company to have as many of those as possible.

To the point that you made before.

What is beneficial for her? She had a yoga book. So a couple times on our Facebook page, with 20 some odd thousand followers, we gave her a shout out to her yoga book.

That was enough of an incentive for her to continue to work with us.

So I guess finding those mutual relationships.

Was pretty cool and it's definitely would be beneficial for you all.

Go ahead, Ralph.

So I haven't listened to your podcast. I don't know if you covered that same shame. I'm listening to it after this call.

Good man.

I'm trying to think of what the approach is. Let's say I needed to partner with a YouTube. How are the people trying to partner with a YouTuber for. For your yoga mat? Is it that they're paying them money or is there a free partnership thing going on where you both benefit without paying each other any money? Or what's the approach?

So if you've got an asset that you can offer, you lead with that. So in the I keep going back to the class example which is when people have an email list and it's like, let's all promote each other. Hey, I've got a list of 100,000. Would love to share your product with my audience. Tell me a little bit about your affiliate program, and then they reply back. And a business deal happens because everybody's making money together. And it's easy to make money that way with an audience and everybody trying to leverage each other's audience. It's a little bit different if you have an existing relationship with somebody or an introduction that makes a huge, huge difference. But you will lead in the introduction with the asset that you've got. So if the asset you've got is, I have a network of 10,000 buyers that really need a YouTube channel to follow, I'd love to send them to yours. That's a great one. If you have no assets, then it's simply, I'd like to buy advertising to your audience. Can you send me your rates? Because that's all you've got to lead with. So whatever asset you have to lead with, lead with that. If you have no other assets, use money as your lead in. Now, you don't have to end with money as the end all but open up the conversation and do whatever it takes to get a small yes. My buddy Travis Sago likes to say, when you are wrangling partners or you are creating strategic partnerships, the first step is to get the smallest yes possible. That small yes could be as simple as, are you open to the conversation of me paying you for advertising? And getting them to say yes to that question is much, much better than leading with asking for the world. Like, hey, would you be interested in working together and starting a business?

No, Because I get that email 50 times a day from fanboys on YouTube who are like, I got a great idea. How about you train me and I'll give you 50% of the profits? No. But if somebody were to lead in with, can I send you this?

Are you open to the conversation of me paying you for advertising? The smallest yes possible is what you want to go for to open that conversation. Okay.

Any other questions on this process so far?

Sean, we feel really, really weird without you having gear on your face. It's making me.

I don't know why it doesn't work. I keep trying to. I really want the pirate hat, but it's not. It's not working for me. I don't know if it's my background. It doesn't. I can't figure out where my face is.

I'm not sure.

Maybe it doesn't like my face. I don't know.

Well, I feel really uncomfortable. Well, I do too.

I feel very naked without a pirate hat on.

Question from Peter in the chat box. If we already have a business and a product, how do we get to know the market itself better? For example, if we are selling yoga mat and branching out into other yoga products.

How do we get to know our prospects better and figure out who they are? Well, the easy question there is survey them. Ask them. That's how we started doing this process. We went to our Facebook following and our email list and we just asked them. We said, how old are you?

Why did you buy our products? What's your feedback? Which products of ours have you tried? Tried to learn just as much as possible and gave them an incentive. I think it was a coupon code for a future purchase or a half off something I forget for filling out the survey. And we got hundreds of responses within days. Gives a much better understanding of our customer.

We also ask them, what products would you like to see come out later?

Would you consider buying one of these products? We always ask our market before we make changes. We always survey our market before we make a major change to our products. Release something new. It's a nice way of teasing future products as well.

Any other questions on this process so far?

Okay, cool. So that's my training for the day. Now I want to turn it over to those of you on the chat. Work with where you are and then clearing up your blocks for moving forward. So we'll just go down the list. Go ahead. You can, whenever you're ready. You can just unmute yourself and share where you're at and then what you're doing next.

And if nobody goes, I start calling you out.

Okay, I'll start. So we finally got our second kind of ASMR type products and it's going to be launched on Monday or Tuesday. But I was going to ask if you have any special strategies for Amazon PPC or. And around that.

Yes. Was the first part that your second product is hitting Amazon?

Yes.

All right.

So how is your first product doing?

We're doing.

It's kind of a bit more of an expensive product.

Product.

So we're doing.

Probably around 5, $5,000 a month. Our pre ASM products are also doing about $5,000 a month.

Okay, cool. Are you ranking for keywords?

Yes.

So we're, I guess for that it's got kind of a unique spin to it. So it's not. I'm not sure it Applies to everything.

I understand. So our PPC plan has always been go really wide with keywords and then pare down from there. There was a tool that was shared last week. Sean, do you happen to remember the name of that?

Yeah, I think it's like Keyword Inspector. Let me Google it real quick to find out.

So. So it will go out and find a bunch of your competitors keywords so you can bid on those as well. But our process has always been go really wide, as many keywords as possible and then pare down from there. Thank you, Sean. Simple keyword inspector.com and can someone copy.

That into the Freedom Fastlane chat? For whatever reason, it won't let me in today. I guess it doesn't like that I don't have a pirate hat on.

I'll put that in there.

And then the process from there.

For us has always been to try to maximize daily spend with minimizing individual clicks. Minimizing individual spend of clicks. So Amazon will reward not they'll reward daily spend more than they will the per click spend. So Amazon in some cases, like I don't know the exact algorithm, so I'm just gonna make up numbers, but somebody who bids $2 a click and spends $10 a day, so a total of five clicks, they will show up less often than somebody who's spending $100 a day, but only bidding 75 cents a click because Amazon wants to maximize that daily spend. So we bid on a daily spend way more than we're going to use. We'll bid $2,000 a day sometimes. Do we spend $2,000 a day? No, but we.

Try to make it as large as possible because in our experience that improves the frequency with which your ads show up.

That's our strategy on ppc.

Good question. Came up.

You know, I think I did make a promise last week that I would talk about consumables. Rachel says, what's the latest with consumable products? Ryan, I remember you mentioning this last week. Yeah, I didn't prep for this. I prepped for what we talked about instead. So if you guys want, let me turn it over to you because I know only some of you talk about or sell consumables. If you want a session all about consumables, we'll do it. We'll do it next week. Thanks, Rachel. I actually forgot about that. So if you want that comment in the chat box, actually just say yes or no in the chat box, the broadcast page. So just say yes or no and we'll do a vote. Because I know not everybody is in consumable. So if you guys vote no, then we won't waste our time. But do me a favor and put yes or no. We'll take, like, consumable products from start to finish next week if you guys want them.

All right, who's next in the chat box or in the on the hangout page?

Emily, you're unmuted. Why don't you go next?

Emily, I'm talking to you.

Emily, I'm looking right at you. And I'm talking to you. You're making me look stupid.

There you are.

You just muted yourself. Really? You're killing me, Godson.

I cannot hear you. All right, we'll skip you for now. Dan, kick us off.

Yep, sure.

Will do.

So my product's still being manufactured, and then it will be hopefully shipped within the next few weeks. So I'm focusing on a Facebook page and my website that I'm building. Now. What I'm trying to decide is actually I'm going to run Facebook campaigns for ads to my page, and then when my product arrives, I'll switch that and run the ads to my website. Or that's the plan. Unless you've got any other tips for whether I maybe should still build up my list on my Facebook page rather than sending them to a squeeze page on my website.

So for us, we always had a hard time getting people to opt in. Before the product was live. We got some, but it was much easier to get a like than an opt in before the product was live. Once the product was live and it was like, you can get this product now. Easy to get opt ins. But when it was opt in for a future launch, that was a really difficult process. So it was much easier to get them to like a community cause or something on Facebook than it was to get them to opt in for it. Because it was like, opt in and we're coming live in four weeks, and then we lost that person within three weeks because we never emailed them about anything. Whereas keeping them engaged on Facebook, which was much easier. So I'm sure some people have gotten it to work, but I recommend just keeping the conversation on Facebook until that product goes live.

Okay, and then how. When my product's live, how would be the best way to structure the ads to the squeeze page?

So remind me what your strategy is. Are you looking for going to your existing audience and sending them to a squeeze page, or are you looking at outside traffic to a squeeze page to promote your product? What's the promotion strategy once your product.

Goes live would be to get outside traffic to a squeeze page so I can send additional traffic.

Okay, so the strategy of sending are you looking to do a giveaway launch or are you looking to sell full price products?

I want to test it. I want to do both, but it's a question of which one I do first. I'm going to have the launch which will be with reviews and a discount. But actually the ads that I want to run will be to a squeeze page for a discount and then later on full price.

Okay, so the discount is easy because.

We'Ve revealed how this works pretty publicly in the the 12 months to 1 million presentation. I'm assuming you've seen that. So all the Facebook ads and stuff in there you could just copy from that presentation. When it comes to full price, though, I unfortunately have never been able to get Facebook to be profitable sending over to a full price purchase. The only way I've been able to get this to work is to write a piece of content on a blog, tie the blog post to the product, and then the posts on Facebook that do really well, we boost those. That's the only way we've been able to get this work. So I'll repeat it again. If we've got a.

Blog post.

And the blog post calls attention to the product on Amazon and then the post to our Facebook page that promotes the blog, if that does well as far as likes, comments, shares, then boosting that post. Sometimes it takes six or seven posts about a blog post.

Six or seven Facebook posts before you get one that gets a lot of shares and likes. So you boost the one that gets a lot of shares and likes. That's the only way we've been able to get attention around a full price product on Facebook to be profitable. Because you can boost something for 100 bucks and get thousands of visitors and some of them will see your product on Amazon. That's the only way we've been able to get that work, running Facebook ads straight to a product. I personally have never been able to get that to be successful, nor do I know anyone who has been able to make that successful. I'm not saying it's not possible. I just am yet to see anyone get that to be profitable.

Do you think because there's not a big enough incentive for people to click on your ad.

I think it's because it's difficult to turn a Facebook browser into a buyer quickly in as short amount of time as you have on an Amazon page.

Okay.

The process, even if there's a Sales page in the middle, people are on Facebook, don't want to be sold to. So sending.

Unless you have some incredible hook, sending people straight to an Amazon listing is just the numbers don't make sense. Your profit margins, if you are doing an awesome job, if you're doing a gangbusters job, you might make 20 bucks a sale profit on an Amazon product, right? If you're doing awesome, 20 bucks is fantastic. To make profit, that means you've got to acquire a customer for 20 bucks, which is friggin hard when you're looking at cold traffic. Now the people who get Facebook ads to work are the people who have a front end product with an upsell path. So their average customer value is going to be 100 bucks or it's somebody who's getting opt ins when they're doing a launch for a thousand dollar product. Those individuals can make Facebook ads work. But when you're dealing with twelve and fifteen dollar profit margins, you've got very little wriggle room there. Unless you're just simply doing it to get volume. And you don't care about losing money because you're bowling your way to the top, which is completely viable. But straight to an Amazon listing. I just have never been able to get those numbers to work. And Catherine Chung has just teleported to the beach it looked like. And now she's back in China. Now she's on the beach. The beach in China.

Dan, does that process make sense if.

I just go over it again in my head? Just so.

If I set up my first campaign so before my product's live, I can send traffic to my Facebook page to effectively get likes so I can actually build up an audience. Then when it's live, run a promotion via ad straight to a squeeze page on my website as well as linking it from my page on Facebook to my website where people can opt in for a discount. I then capture their details, I can then send them straight to my Amazon listing via that to then start the ball rolling. Does that make sense?

Yes. So that process makes total sense and it will work just fine. Did the other stuff we talked about like the rationale of what works and what doesn't, was that all clear? Yeah, yeah. Did you catch the blog post strategy? Were you all clear on how that flow works?

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Okay, cool. So we did, we did a whole session about it, last round on how it, how it works, but we use that fairly regularly. Once you have an audience that you can.

Put blog posts to and then tie your product into it we use that pretty regularly. It's basically free traffic now.

I also really like the idea that you did with your YouTube girl from Fiverr. I really like the idea of getting out regular content. Just thinking of ways that I could potentially do that with mine. And I really like the idea of especially having regular content as well that I could then link to.

Your audience is the blood of everything. And you build an audience with either content or by leveraging somebody else's content. It's the crux and the foundation of everything.

If you don't do any audience building, then you are constantly at the mercy of other people. You're constantly at the mercy of.

Here's what I was saying to somebody this week. I was doing.

A call with someone who had applied for the next level and I asked a very simple question. I said, if Amazon goes away tomorrow, what happens to your business?

That was a scary question. Well, what if you had a list of 20,000 of your buyers? Or if Amazon kicked you off, you could say, hey, 20,000 buyers go here and get our products instead. And in the click of a button, 20,000 people who have bought your products in the past now know where to get your products. It lessens the blow a whole lot. You're still in business.

It doesn't make the hurt less. But you stay in business because you have your buyers finding you elsewhere. That's the power of having an engaged audience.

Businesses existed before Amazon just by building up audiences in other places. People have launched businesses for decades just by having responsive audiences and sending them to wherever it was that their product was for sale. We're spoiled on Amazon because we get to skip the audience building process because Amazon has all of the eyeballs so we can throw up anything there. And Amazon sends us a bunch of buyers, we're spoiled. But if we add in that piece of building up the audience, Whether it's on YouTube, podcasting, an email list, a blog, Facebook, wherever it is, then we get them both and we beat our competition. And that's how we win this game long term.

I like it.

Let's go to Madavi.

Madavi, I wish that your product was monavie just so we could have a website called Madavi Monavie.

That would be great. I would never have mispronunciations for the rest of my life.

Well, we are at rating for product to arrive. As you know, the we decided just to put a hold on the Facebook campaign where we were trying to get people to opt in for the discounted product without having product. It was just too expensive. And too hard at this time. So we've learned a lot about optimizing and getting our ads ready and primed to do that once we have product arrive. We also tried the Facebook likes campaign and that worked much, much better. But we brought it down to about 40 cents a person per like and felt that it was just time to pause it because we wanted to save our money for once the product was actually there to launch. So we optimized that and got that ready to go for when we. We're just going to hold off on that at this moment.

I think that's a good call. 40 cents is a bit too much.

It is. We felt that way.

Yep. 20 cents is about the upper limit of what I would consider appropriate. And usually when you're over that 20 cent mark, it's one of two things. It's an ad problem or it is a targeting problem. It's one of those two things. Meaning you're not targeting enough people or you're not being specific enough. It could be either one of those or it could just be your ad sucks, but it's usually one of those two things. So when I see that happen, tweak the targeting and throw together a couple additional ads to test against the one that's running right now.

If you decided that you wanted to continue that, I bet if you got that down to 15 cents a person, you might reconsider if it was worth your time. So that's what I would recommend you test if you decided you want to continue that. Okay.

So you're just building up an audience right now in preparation for launch.

Right, right. And everything else? Just putting everything else in place, which is like 95% now in place and also working on the second product as well. So no time is wasted, but just waiting.

Now, do you feel confident in a plan that come day one, you're taking sales?

Very confident.

Excellent. Good.

Anything that we can do to make your life easier or increase the speed at which you can take sales once you're in stock?

Nothing that I can think of right now.

Alright, cool.

Okay, Ralph, let's go to you.

All right.

Where are you at and where are you going? How can we help?

Well, I have two products that are live and I have one more coming into Amazon next week.

And as you advised, I'm looking. I already had a list of products.

You know, I did a spreadsheet with future products, so I'm looking at which one is the best bet for me to launch next. So I'm just actually trying the pulse from Zone Blast right now on my second product.

So I'll let you guys know the results in a week.

Cool. As far as additional products, I always recommend whatever your market, whatever your existing buyers will buy, in addition to.

What they bought previously. So what will those buyers also buy that will enhance the experience of the first product?

That's always how we made our decisions on that. If that helps in your spreadsheet.

So my third product is exactly that.

It helps. But.

My third product, I could get different versions of it. Would you recommend launching another version of that product since it's perfectly complementary to the first product, or would you say something different? Not exactly the same.

If you've got an audience, ask them. So ask them via survey if they would buy a variation of that product or a different size or whatever it is.

Our strategy has always been, when starting, like, within that first core, five products.

I take the shotgun approach, which is what will the maximum amount of people buy? With me rolling out one variation, I'll worry about second variations later because variations are only going to tweak my sales. They're not going to explode my sales. So when we surveyed our audience for yoga, we discovered that they wanted their mats a little bit longer than average because they felt that they slipped off the edge. They liked a little bit extra cushion. And black was the most popular color by, like 70%. So it made no sense for us to roll out a blue yoga mat. To start, we would just go after the shotgun approach. Black yoga mat that.

Had a little bit of extra cushion.

Or as I slipped once from stage and said, we found our customers like it long, thick, and black, and then.

Never lived that one down. But that's the approach that we've taken is like, what's the shotgun? Maximum approach that we can hit. And then later on, we'll roll out other variations. Like, once we've got a line of products that's selling regular, that's when we worry about that. Okay.

And.

Stephanie.

Stephanie, you look like a man.

You mean Stephen Oldtimer?

I can't see your name because it's all jumbled.

Interesting. I'll have to look at that.

Yeah.

Hi, Ryan.

What's up?

We have inventory that's on the way. We have a Facebook page. We're paying about $2 per, like, unfortunately. So I need to look at our ad copy to get followers on there. Got about 300. 300 likes so far, and we're still trying to line up the 25 to 50 people to get initial reviews on the inventory once it gets here.

Okay. So let's look at your Facebook targeting. How many people. By the way, your Google effects on your mustache look really, really real. I don't know how you did that.

But I had to download a special plugin.

It looks really good. I would love for you to share that plugin. But on your Facebook targeting, how big is the audience that you're going after?

Let's see.

I know for Amazon how big that audience is. I'm not sure if I know how big it is on Facebook, but I know it's several hundred thousand at least.

Okay. So I would target at least 2 million. So if it's less than that, I would add in some other things that they.

Other descriptors on Facebook so you get a larger audience. I would also drop or change however you're bidding, because two bucks is just way too high. So I don't know how you're bidding, but let Facebook optimize for the most number of likes. If that's what you're doing right now and it's not working, change it up and try a CPM strategy. Cost per thousand. I also roll out at least two new ads because we've got to really shake up whatever you're doing in order to get that cost per like down, because two bucks is way too much.

Agreed.

Remind me where you are on the product side.

On the product side, we have. We have our. We have our first batch of inventory over.

It's just about. They're wrapping up the manufacturing. They'll be sending it to us. Should be here next week.

Okay, cool. Do you feel confident in the strategy that you have? Or day one, you've got inventory, you.

Can make sales other than getting those initial reviews? Yes.

Okay, good. So how big is that audience on Facebook right now?

We're only up to 310 likes.

Okay, that's not terrible. If they're engaged, it's not terrible. But let's get that cost per click or that cost per like down, and then we can really scale that so we have at least 1,000 people that we can launch to.

Okay, cool.

Anything that we can do to clear barriers so that you feel more confident moving forward.

Not you on that one.

Okay, cool. Well, if you come up with anything you need in the next few minutes.

Scream at me before we hop off the call.

All right.

All right. A couple questions that came in from the chat box. This was a good one. Where did it go? It was a question about. Here we go. A question about. Do you post content when somebody else makes it to your own channel? Or leave it on their channel. And somebody answered it really well. And I agree with this sentiment that if the individual that you're getting content from has a large following, have them leave it on their channel. If that person doesn't have a large following and you need your own content, keep it on yours. These are completely different strategies. So we hired someone to make content for us. We paid them $20 a video to make content for us to have to build up our following to build up our content base. Completely different strategy. When we're going for advertising, I would never go over to somebody and ask them to make content for me. If my goal was to build up my audience, I want it to stay on their channel so that they can bring those visitors over to me. So think of like, think of the podcasting world where somebody, I don't go on other people's content, other people's podcasts to build up their following. I'm going there to leverage their audience to bring them over to mine. So if your goal is to build your own content, leave it on yours. But if it's advertising, leave it on their channel so that their audience sees it and you can siphon those visitors off to your own.

Somebody mentioned why not put it on both? If the goal is audience building, I don't care about duplicate content. So if you I'm not using Google for audience building. I'm using channels for audience building. So there's no problem in using both if you want to. If you want to use the same content twice, you can certainly do that. There's just various strategic reasons for doing each. One is to build up our own content base and give us a channel. And the other is to build up an audience. So there's no reason why you couldn't use both, but they're completely different reasons of why you're using each piece of content.

Any other questions on what we've talked about today or.

Leverage points that we can clear in order to make moving forward easier? By the way, I see all of your votes. It looks like the majority of you say yes. You want a session on consumables, so we'll talk about that next week. Remind if I say we're going to talk about something else off topic, remind me that. I promise we'll talk about consumables.

Any questions from those of you on the hangout?

Any final words from our neighborhood friendly Sean Coyne?

Nope, just soaking it all in.

All right, cool. I've got no more questions.

I'll have one if that's all Right, Yeah, please.

Sorry.

It was just about other forms of ads on other platforms. Have you ever experimented with ads on say Twitter or YouTube or anything else that you maybe have some remarks about?

Some of them, yes. YouTube, sure. I love them. Podcasts, I love them. Google, yes, I love them when done strategically. Facebook, yes. I've never done Pinterest, I've never done Twitter. I know nothing about either of those platforms.

I like places that allow me to get right in front of a very targeted, strategic audience. So on YouTube it can go directly to a channel. On podcasts you can go directly to somebody who's leading an audience. If you sponsor private blogs, fantastic way to get very targeted traffic. I like those. I've never played with Pinterest and Twitter.

Google is its own animal. I have only found Google Ads to work when your internal conversion rate is just astronomically high. I put a couple of pointers on the Facebook group for these. But keep your price in your ad.

Bid on secondary keywords and keep a really, really friggin high conversion rate. That's the only formula I've been able to get for Google to work and it still doesn't work every time. But if you get your price in your ad that reduces non converting clicks. High conversion rate Clement over 20%. If you can get over 20% then it's worth testing outside traffic. So I've got one product that Google Ad just crushes it for then about five where it just completely bombs. But the one that does really well has like a 25% conversion rate internal to Amazon. So I can afford to turn on some outside traffic.

Oh, hi Ryan. Yeah, I have a question. Okay, yeah, I might.

By the way, your tiara looks beautiful. Congratulations on being queen of the prom.

Thank you.

My second product is doing very well after the sun blast which blow me away and I running out of inventory very soon. That's why I fly to the factories yesterday hoping to get my product back so soon. So I'm back for them and we got a deal to shorten the lead time from 60 days, 90 days to 30 days. So it's brilliant.

But.

Before that I running out of stock. I'm still thinking about any marketing campaign to help bring outside traffic to my second product which I thinking my second product needs some demonstration or outside people. So I'm thinking about Facebook. But I never done anything things to build the audience. Is it too late to.

Build the audience after you launch your product?

It is never too late. Never ever, ever too late. In fact you have a bit of an incentive it will be easier now for you to build your audience because you've got regular customers. So you can use your existing customers, send them to Facebook, send them to an email page, leverage the customers that you got coming in right now and send them to the places where you want to build up that audience. Start with that, and then you can start adding in ads to build up outside traffic to that audience.

How to send my existing customer to the Facebook?

You can do it through your website, through language, on your boxing or boxes or boxing, or any place that you're having regular communication with your customers. You can have an email signature and all the emails you use to send your customers. You can start going to your existing customers, bring them over to whatever point that you want them to connect with you further, and then turn on outside traffic to continue building that audience.

All right, Good idea. Yes.

It's never too late to start building that audience.

Yep.

Yep.

A couple questions in the chat box. I'll go through quickly.

Product ReviewsUSA.com We've never used them, but I have. We've got one person in the tribe who swears by them. They're kind of like an underground.

Review service. Any outside review service makes me nervous.

Because they can be removed easily and because you never know what they're doing as far as keeping with terms of service. But I do know one person who loves them.

What am I doing with tax? Gosh, I hate commenting on this because I'm not savvy on this. We let our accountant take care of it. How do we contact Sean Coyne? That was one of the questions in the chat box. Sean, how do people contact you?

The best way is probably through email. So if someone could type this in the chat box, because since I don't have a pirate hat, I still can't access it.

Is it Sean? S coinsoeenenterprises.com.org but yeah.

S coinsoineterprises.org okay, and.

So I'll just make it public. Sean gets slammed with emails just like I do. That's why he has coaching students. So.

Don'T expect free coaching from Sean.

And a quick tip, not just for myself, but just in general. If your subject line doesn't explain what it's about, it's probably going to get moved to the archive. So if your subject line says hi, not happening line says something reasonable that, you know, it doesn't have to be interesting, but just at least let me know what the email is about. Hi is not going to cut it.

You want to say hi, Hi, someone asks.

If you're taking clients right now.

Not at the moment. At the end of the month I might have a spot, so shoot me an email and we can chat. But right now my roster is pretty full.

One question about ranking. Somebody saying that they are doing everything it seems to rank for a keyword and they're not ranking.

There's a couple of things. One, it could be your actual listing, but you say here that you've used on Optimize, so they're even better at me at optimizing. So that's probably not your problem. Looks like you're doing. You said you're doing Zon Blast. You're doing pay per click. You're doing everything it seems you're supposed to be doing, but you're not ranking for keywords. So what is the problem? The problem is a lack of aggressiveness, meaning other people are selling more than you. So if Your blasts are 100 units at a time, you're probably in a really competitive space and people are outselling you. Regardless of the fact that you are doing blasts of 100 at a time or however many it is, it almost always comes down to the number of sales and the aggressiveness of those sales, the growth trajectory of those sales. Are you increasing your sales and are you being aggressive with those sales more than the next guy? If what you are doing is not working, then what it means is that there is a lack of aggressiveness in the global sphere of that space. So what will rank in one space is completely different than something else. So a blast of 1,000 units may not rank you in a really, really competitive market, whereas to 100 would do it in a non competitive market. Since you mentioned that you're in supplements, you're probably in one of the more competitive ones and that just requires an added level of aggressiveness. It almost always comes down to that.

Karen asks, I noticed a significant increase in my sales after I turned off Amazon ads, which is weird to me. Doesn't make any sense. Do you have any idea why? The only thing that would explain it to me is an unrelated incident, which would be probably a bump in rankings from something else that you did, or a bump in rankings that Amazon kicked in the algorithm to jump you up for a keyword as a result, probably of you running those ads. So it's probably not related to the fact that you turned off your ads. It's probably related to.

An unrelated incident.

All right gang, good stuff today. Next week we'll talk about consumables and how to leverage those and grow Those.

Any final thoughts from you good looking people, specifically ones who have Google effects? I'm a little disappointed on those of you who don't read Google effects on.

Inventory management. Question, if you don't mind.

Sure.

We ordered about 500 units, 550 units.

For our first order. I know it's going to take a couple of months to.

Get the next shipment across, especially if we go by sea, which would cut down on our shipping costs.

I'm starting to think that maybe I ought to start talking to my supplier about the next order already if we're gonna make sure we don't run out of inventory. Is that a good hunch?

I think that's a fantastic approach when you're shipping from overseas. I recommend having that lined up as soon as possible. The one big roadblock that Sean and I had was that inventory management on the yoga company. Had we solved that earlier, we would have sold for a lot more money and made a lot more money when we had the company.

Because when you run out of stock, you basically got to start all over. So if you can keep a regular consistent flow of inventory, you'll be way ahead of the game, either by ordering way ahead of time or ordering more than necessary and keeping some in a warehouse somewhere so you can quickly get it over to Amazon once you're running low. So your hunch on ordering sooner than later I think is a good one.

All right, thank you, Ralph.

Go ahead. So about inventory also, have you guys ever been able to get a supplier to let you pay maybe 30 days later? Because with three or two products at the moment growing fast, I tend to want to order a whole lot more products. And I know the sales are growing, so I know I will have the cash necessary to pay that amount of inventory in 30 days, let's say. But they want me to pay them on the day it is shipped or when I receive it into Amazon. So I don't always have the cash available for inventory only. So I'm trying to see if I can work out a deal. I don't know if you guys have any experience with that.

Yeah, we've been able to get it. We've done it before on physical products from China. I think the best you're going to get is paying half up front and half when it ships. That's about the best you're going to get on domestic. I've been able to work out other deals. Catherine, have you ever seen an instance in which a supplier gives you different terms than half without paying up front? Have you ever Seen that happen.

Let me correct. The normal practice is you can negotiate for 30% deposit and 70% balance payment. But if you wanted to pay after you got a product, it seems not possible because it means that the factory will take up your own risk. If you pay after 30 days, it it means the factory really takes your risk. Really very, very few factories won't do that except that you are already a very big customer. But we start from smaller and in my case I just visit the factories.

I try to shorten the lead time instead of allow them to have a very long lead time. This is my strategy to go after for some because they're having all the raw materials, it takes 60 days or 90 days. And then I make a deal yesterday, just decide to pay them a very filled deposit so that they buy the raw materials and then ship to get everything done. Faster the shorter the time they do it can complete the order for you. The cash flow will be on your favorable size. So this is how I play. You know, get the deal from the factories. But if you wanted to pay later, it seems it's not feasible.

So 30% up front, 70 when it ships is about the best terms. Unless you've got a huge account. And if you've got a huge account, maybe you could negotiate that. But it's not common.

Yeah, very not common until you got accepted. Exceptional relationship. But I never very few would do that.

I have done it domestically, it's still rare and it's still like a 30 up front 70 when it ships. And then when we get a lot bigger, we might be able to get some net terms. But it's still a pretty rare thing.

Yes.

If I can add, we've gotten for some of our vendors we actually pay at the time, 100% at the time of shipment. But I think for Ralph, given that he already has a pre existing business, he might actually want to explore financing stateside in terms of some of the.

Different.

Online providers like Kabbage or what have you. And some of them are pretty aggressive about offering credit. And because they can see sales off Amazon already, that can provide him the leverage he might need.

Well, and I love that approach. But on top of it, Amazon is doing their own lending now. I don't know if y' all have seen that in your account, but Amazon now is inviting partners into lending programs and they're doing lending for inventory. They extended us, I think a $400,000 line of credit where it gets paid out of your sales. So once you start making sales on Amazon, Amazon will start Fronting the money for your inventory, pretty bonkers. So that I don't know when that becomes an option. But if you have a contact to a rep or if you have an intro to somebody that works at Amazon, sometimes you can get that expedited as an option for your account or at least get a rep to look at you.

To consider you. So if you Google Amazon Lending, that's the name of the program, just Google Amazon Lending, see if you can find a rep and ask for the ask to be considered. And their rates are very favorable. It's like 7% ends up being the rate, which is pretty favorable.

All right, One question that I want to answer before we go.

Ryan. We're stuck in what product to sell. Our market is home and travel fitness. We're stuck between swimming goggles and jump ropes. The reason I want to hit this is because there's a disconnect here. You're saying your market is home and travel fitness, but then you've got two products that are completely different. Goggles and jump Ropes. Swimming goggles. Jump ropes hit completely different markets. There's completely different groups of people. Jump ropes is just so generic of a product that the only way you're not going to make money selling jump ropes. And I would probably say the same with swimming goggles. You're thinking very product centric and not customer centric. So I want you to get much more clear on who it is that you're serving before you start narrowing down to these products. There's not a lot of money in either one of the ones that you listed because they're so generic. The example I like is pens. You have a pen, it stops working, you throw it out, you grab another one. It's hard to differentiate a pen. Some people have done it, but it's by and large difficult to do. It's also difficult to differentiate swimming goggles and jump ropes. So I need you to think much more clear about who it is that you're serving and what that person wants. When you answer that, the.

Products that you give that customer become a lot easier.

Alright gang, thank you for your attention today. Good stuff and we will see you all next week. Thanks, Tribe.

Bye everybody.

Bye.