0301 | Scaling your Amazon Audience Using Profitable Pineapple PPC Ads with Dr. Travis Zigler

Hi, this is Dr. Travis Zigler from profitablepineapple.com and you're listening to EA interviews.

EA interviews, episode 301, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round seven days a week. Join Mario Faccini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Amazon is a huge force in the industry. Whether your business is on it or not. You've probably heard about it and whether you're starting your own business or, or you're in the prime of your business, you've probably either bought something from Amazon and maybe even sold on it. But have you done paid ads on it? I'm excited to have Dr. Travis Zigler on the show today because he manages millions of dollars in ads and has generated millions in dollars from ads. I'm going to bring them up right after we thank our sponsor. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you, regardless of where you think you're, your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Travis Zigler. Travis, how are you feeling today?

I'm feeling amazing, Mario. Thanks for having me on. And before we start the show, I want to congratulate you for being persistent in the show. It takes, that's my number one piece of business advice to most new entrepreneurs is you have to be persistent and you're doing it well.

I do appreciate that that means a lot because it didn't happen overnight, that's for sure. And I'm thankful for the opportunity because we get to connect and I get to bring great people on like yourself. So with that being said, why should someone choose Amazon ads versus just hoping something happens organically?

Well, Amazon is a behemoth. Like you said in the introduction, Amazon is responsible for half of all online sales, half of all online sales. And we were doing this nice little curve of increased online sales and then all of a sudden Covid hit and the learning curve to order online spiked. We accelerated almost 10 years as a result of COVID And so Amazon is just blowing up. They've been increasing 20 to 30% year over year anyway and I think this past year they increased 60%. And so Amazon is just huge in this space. Online ordering is getting bigger and bigger, especially with a pandemic in place. And so you have to be on Amazon and choose Amazon ads, because people go to Facebook to interrupt their life, and you have to advertise and interrupt them and what they're doing to distract themselves from life. They go to Google to do more research, and. And then they go to Amazon to shop. And so to do Amazon ads, you're getting in front of people that are there to buy, and then all of their information is on the system. Their credit card, their address. So it's simple. One click and they purchase. So that's why you need to be on Amazon.

How often do you think people are shopping on Amazon? I would say a large majority of people are on Amazon, have Prime accounts, whether they're selling or not. But how often do you think they're actually buying stuff?

Well, I can only speak from my experience, but my wife asks me every single day, do you need anything from Amazon? And I literally told her that she needs to pick one day to order everything. And so by the time that day comes around, we have, like, 35 things in our cart. She clicks the button, and it comes on Tuesday. It's actually today is Tuesday. On the time of this recording, there are five big boxes on my porch from our shipment this week. And I live in Austin, Texas. And in this area, there's literally an Amazon truck that never leaves our cul de sac of 10 houses. He literally sits outside and he delivers to every single house, massive boxes. So Austin's in a little bit of a bubble in that sense, but I think that's happening in most cities, and millennials kind of adopted it. And going down, they like the convenience of online shopping. And so I'd say almost half of households are at least on Amazon at least once a week. I don't know the exact statistics, but prime just keeps growing year over year, so it's definitely a place to be.

What do you think really contributed that years ago? Do you think prime and the ease of delivery were. You know, I agree with you. Getting packages 15 times a day, every day, it's like, okay, just send it once, just for organization and efficiency. But at the same token, it is nice if you just literally need one thing. You can get that one thing and not have to shop like we did 20, 30, 40 years ago, where it was like, you had to have this whole big thing before you could even get it. How much? Or do you think prime played a role in making it easy? And, hey, ship whatever you want whenever you want. We don't care if it's one item or 100.

It's massive. In the adoption of what's happened with the E commerce space. Because with prime they developed a whole new category of two day shipping. Two day shipping was there, overnight shipping was there. But FedEx and UPS didn't really love to do it. They charged a ton to do it. I know overnight shipping with FedEx is like 40 to 120 bucks, depending on where it's going. And Amazon adopted it and they did it for free if you're a Prime member. And so you get two day shipping now, one day shipping. And in Austin we get four hour shipping for free. And so I can order something at noon and I can have it by 4pm that day because we have a warehouse just down the street. And so Amazon has really pushed the speed limit when it comes to getting things to your door. And they did that with the Prime. And what they did, and this should be every business owner is they kept the price incredibly low and they took a loss as long as they could in order to get the most of the population on it. And then, then they raised the price. So I think when I first started with prime it was like $60 and now I think I pay like $190. Still not a lot. And they provide a lot of value. They have their streaming services, they have their two day shipping, one day shipping, one hour shipping or four hour shipping.

So.

So they're just continuing to add value to it. And so that's kind of something that any business owner should take note is if you have any kind of membership site, how much more value can you bring? Jeff Bezos brings, or not Jeff Bezos anymore brings an incredible amount of value for $170 a year. And he just keeps packing it on to keep you kind of hooked into it.

What would you say? Have you ever felt like that if something takes two days, it's long now.

Yeah, it's amazing. Like in our website, our Shopify website, when it takes like four days, we start getting complaints. And if it takes, heaven forbid, a week, they want a refund. And so it's made us adapt to faster shipping, faster manufacturing, faster fulfillment times. And our fulfillment center is now open seven days a week in order to process shipments Saturday and Sunday. And now even UPS and FedEx are working more as well to kind of accommodate for that.

Yeah, I was with my friends recently and.

They got a package at 1:30 in the morning.

We were, you know, it was on the weekend and we were hanging out and everything and they got a, the security camera showed up on their phone and they were like, oh, someone's at the door. And I thought less about someone showing up to join us to, you know, hang out. I, that didn't even phase me because that's just normal. But when I saw the package that wasn't there the hour before, I was kind of like, really? Amazon, do you know any stats on if they are shipping around the clock now? Because I know they expanded to Sundays, which was different when they first started doing it, but do you, do you know of any statistics of are they doing it literally non stop or do you think that was just a fluke that they were running behind or something?

Yeah. So in last year during COVID it was pretty much all shipping companies, including Amazon, were running pretty much seven days a week. I wouldn't say around the clock, of course, like their processing and sorting centers working around the clock, but I don't think they were delivering around the clock. That was probably just a very behind delivery driver. But in all the whole year of COVID we were operating in fourth quarter. And so with fourth quarter it's usually crazy with shipments and you know, there's boxes everywhere that started in May of last year. And then when fourth quarter actually hit, it was like four times what normal fourth quarter is. And so there are just a massive amount of boxes and shipping packages going through the system. And quite honestly, UPS, FedEx, even Amazon wasn't prepared for it. And you can't prepare for a pandemic. You don't know what's going to happen. Nobody's ever lived through this. And so I had some grace with them, but that's probably what happened there is that they just got really far behind. And Amazon actually employs independent contractors for some of their shipments. And so if you ever see a truck come up that's like an enterprise rent a truck and they're delivering your Amazon package, it's because they employ independent contractors as well as their own fleet to get these out. And so you or I could go start a trucking business and Amazon could be our main service provider. So we provide 10 trucks with 10 drivers and they go pick up Amazon packages and deliver them across the community. And, and they don't have to be in an Amazon branded truck, but now you're starting to see Amazon kind of take that over. And we're seeing, you know, UPS trucks that look like they're Amazon trucks now. And so that's what is literally parked in my cul de sac for like four hours a day delivering packages. So it's just, they were just really behind probably that Day.

What, what are your thoughts on the drone capabilities and having it delivered that way without the trucks?

It's going to be interesting and I think it's very doable. It's just a matter of who owns the sky and how are you going to make sure that they're not going to fly even close to high enough for like intercepting with planes or helicopters or anything like that. But it will be an interesting process because what they can do then with that technology is you're going to be able to click order and you're probably going to be able to watch when your package gets picked up by the drone. And then you're going to be able to watch the drone camera all the way to your house and literally drop it in your hands. And so I think that's what they're going to do with that. So it's going to be pretty neat. It's going to bring even more transparency to the delivery process and you're going to get people even more addicted to the delivery process and getting that hit of dopamine from watching the drone footage versus, like, you know, just getting the, oh, I've got a new package. And so I think it will happen. And here's a fun trademark that are not trademark but patent that Amazon has. Amazon has patented warehouse fulfillment center blimps. And so they want a big blimp in the sky with all the packages and they just dropped drones from it. And that was a patent they filed like I think it was three years ago. Which is just shows you, like, Jeff Bezos is imaginative thinking and like what he thinks is off the wall and he decided to patent it because you just never know.

Yeah, and that wouldn't be horrible for advertising either because, you know, people pay for the planes that have the streamers, Happy birthday, whatever the case is. And you know, that's a giant advertising surface. I remember when, what was it, Jack Ryan came out a few years ago and the boxes were just plastered. They weren't brown. They were just one giant advertisement. And I'm like, nice.

Yeah, that was genius. They do that pretty much for everything. Anything that they have coming out, they just have the tape of that. And it's great advertising.

Yeah, they definitely know what they're doing with that. So with all these different ways and capabilities and Amazon leading the charge with it, is it safe to say every business should be on Amazon 100%.

So if you're building a business off Amazon, especially on your own E commerce site, people are clicking your Facebook ad, going to your website and then as soon as they see what you have to sell, they're going to Amazon to make sure it's not on there first, because they can click one button and order your product. But if you're not on Amazon and they search for your brand name or search for whatever product you're selling, they might buy your competitor as a result of you not being on Amazon. So you have to be on Amazon.

So if you're not on Amazon, so if someone's not on Amazon right now, what is, what would you say are the top five or 10 ways they can get on Amazon to take advantage of this?

So the simplest way that you can get on, the simplest way is just put your product up there. It takes literally two seconds. And after it's up there, just leave it up there. Because like I said, if somebody searches your brand name, you'll pop up. And then step number two, just make sure you have a simple advertisement for your brand name. So you don't have to have all the fancy advertisement going after search terms and keywords and everything else going after your competitors. That's what we do. And all you have to do is show up for your brand name. Because if you're running Facebook ads, and you're running Facebook ads at scale, people are searching for you on Amazon and I can prove it to you. So shoot me an email and let me know your brand name and I'll tell you how many times you get searched on Amazon. And so those are the two simple steps. I'll shorten it to just two steps. You need to get up there, advertise on your brand name. And it's very simple to do that. After you do that, that's when you can consider things like optimizing your listing, making it look good, making great photos, which you probably already have if you're on Shopify, making sure your copywriting is in place, which you probably already have if you're on Shopify. And then ratings and reviews are key. So if you have an audience already built in from your Shopify sales, getting that audience to buy from Amazon and then leave you a review can be huge because it's social proof. And Amazon is the ultimate social proof platform because you need ratings and reviews in order to make sales. And then after that, your next steps will be, you know, branching out and focusing on your competitors and going after them, focusing on keywords, focusing on search terms and then going after that. But two steps that you need to get started. Get your item up, advertise on your brand name. That's it?

How many reviews would you say is a minimum to have a good listing?

A good listing, you know, you have to start out with at least seven reviews. And we start advertising at seven reviews. That's when we start pushing our ads. But we do so with a big coupon code. And so if our product's $30, we'll do a 50% off coupon code to start getting Velocity until we get to about 100 reviews. We actually did that strategy, a 50% off coupon code for one of our products for two years in order to get to 1500 reviews and to get to 100 sales a day. And so we took a loss on the front end for two years almost as a result of just trying to get velocity. Do you have to be that aggressive? No, but we had the cash to be able to do that. And for those wondering, like, I thought you were an Amazon ad agency. I am, but I also own my own brand too. And that's kind of why we started the ad agency was because of a pain point in my brand. And so in our brand, that's how aggressive we are at launch. We'll wait till we get to that 1500 reviews. And now we're selling that product for $25, no coupon code, and we're making over 100 sales a day with it.

That's fantastic. What if someone doesn't have a product to start with?

So I am not the person to go to when it becomes to be beginners. There's a lot of great programs out there, and I recommend all of those programs. There's Titan Network, there's Amazing.com, there's Helium 10. Those are all three great beginner programs that are going to teach you how to source your product, what you need in place, and then how to launch your product from the get go. What I focus on if somebody comes to me is I teach them how to build a brand and how to build an audience. And when you build that brand and audience, you're pretty much unstoppable. And you can sell pretty much anything that caters to them. And so figure out who you want to serve and who you want to serve and who will it be fun or how will it be fun for you? And as long as it's fun, then it's not really selling. At that point, you're just serving your audience. And they'll buy pretty much whatever you come out with as long as they need it. And so then you can ask your audience what they need. And that's how I recommend it is build your audience. Serve your audience, Ask them what they want, sell it to them.

What would you say if someone's looking to sell their books on Amazon versus a tangible product that actually requires the shipping?

Because I know there's the Kindle version of the book versus the physical version and that kind of has the distribution. But what have you done with books versus physical products in the traditional sense?

Yeah, so we don't focus on books so much in our agency. But I have sold books because I've written a couple books. I actually just wrote a book called the Survival Guide. There's Survival Guide to Amazon Ads actually have it right here. And the nice thing about books is you can do it two different ways. So if you don't want to stock inventory, you don't want to go through a traditional publisher and you want to self publish, you can put it up on Kindle like you just said, and then you can also put it up in their print on demand service. And so if you were to go and type in Survival Guide to Amazon Ads and you found my book, you can purchase it on Kindle and it will come to your Kindle. You can purchase on paperback and it's print on demand. So Amazon will print it and they'll send it to you, which is great because I don't have to stock any inventory. Now, conversely, what you can do is you can come out with your book, your physical book, and you can list it just like any other product. So just like we sell physical products like eyelid sprays and eyelid cleansers, what you can do is you can list your book like a physical product. Same thing applies. You advertise it just like you would a normal product. So we have a dry ibook that we've done that. We stock the inventory, we're 2,000. And we focus on going after keywords like dry eyes and blepharitis and styes. Because I'm an optometrist first, that's by trade. My degree is in optometry. And we focus on dry eyes for our brand and we focus on serving that population. So we wrote that book and so we go after those keywords with the book and it's no different from another physical product. And you can do that even if you work with a publisher. We actually have somebody in our agency that just released her first book and it was with a publisher, but we treated it just like any other product and it took off. And she's selling, man, I think she was selling like 300 a day for like the first two months. It was amazing how well it worked for her.

Wow, that's fantastic news.

So for someone who wants to get started with this, let's say they do have that Shopify store, they do have a couple of products. Why would you say the brand is so important to have on Amazon? Why not just throw the products up there and, you know, just leave it at that?

Because I've worked with so many brands that I know it works really well. No, you know, when people come to me, I always get on the phone with them to see if we can help them or not. And the reason I do that is because we've worked with so many brands that what we've discovered is that when you have a brand and you are focused on building that audience, it is so much easier to sell on Amazon because Amazon, it's competitive. There's a lot of products on there. And so if you're coming out with just another omega 3 fish oil, which is the most popular product on Amazon, yes, we have one. And it's so hard to advertise again. So we sell about 10 of those a day, which isn't that much, whereas in the leading seller sells probably 5,000 a day. And it's such a competitive niche that if you don't have a brand following, then you're not going to even put a dent in that space in the Amazon world. Now, if you have a brand, the cool thing about this is you can then come out with whatever product you want that kind of goes along with your audience and goes along with your product line. And as a result of your, you have a really good seller as a result of that really good selling product, you can then come out with other products down that line that are then going to help and they're all going to boost each other. And so as a result of people getting on your first product, they're going to buy your second product and your third and your fourth. And then people that have bought your fourth product will then see, wait, you have these other three products, so they're going to buy all those too. So that's the importance of a brand. And where I see clients fail is when they go off on different tangents. They'll sell camping gear, supplements, towels, and so they just try to find the opportunity versus building something bigger.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it kind of is reminding me of like when authors do us a book series, you, you get them hooked with the first one or a movie series, you go, we, well, we want the Two sequels, at least. You know, they fall in love with the first one. Now they want more. Now they want more versus just every single product is an independent silo that may have no rhyme or reason.

Yeah. Harry Potter would be a good example of that. And you just couldn't wait for the next one to come out. Game of Thrones, another great example. Even though they finished the TV series, they never finished the books. It's because people were demanding for it to end and we wanted to know what was going to happen. And so HBO decided to finish the series on tv even though the books haven't even been written.

Wow. It's so cool what you can do with the business. And like you were talking about with Jeff Bezos, it just all comes from the imagination and the creativity of it.

Yeah. And he's. He is one of the. Him and Elon are kind of the two people that I look up to in that space. They're just very creative. And of course, Steve Jobs, and they just kind of pushed the limits. And they're not known as the nicest guys, but they're known as great visionaries that are very creative and they'll pretty much push you to your limit because they know what you're capable of and they're incredible human beings.

So for someone that wants to be doing the ads, you had already said that. Get your brand up there and take the second step and just get the brand up there and get the store. You're saying create a storefront. Right.

So a storefront on Amazon is. It's a distraction in my mind. They're okay. It makes you look like a bigger brand. Yes. But not as many people as you think visit them. Yeah, they do get visitors. And we can drive traffic to the storefront, but no, just simply driving people to your listing. And so when you search on Amazon, somebody types in your brand name, you'll be those first three products that come up in that search result. And so the storefront's okay, but unless you're driving advertising to the storefront, then you don't really need that. You just need to have a listing up.

So for the people who did did those first couple of steps, what would you say is the next important thing if they wanted to do more with the ads and scale it up.

Yeah. So ratings and reviews. And so you have to have ratings. And so many people come to us and they tell me that PPC doesn't work and Amazon doesn't work. This whole thing's a scam. And I'll look at their listing and they have no reviews and then their price is the same as their competitors and they have no coupons. And I'm like, if I'm looking at your product, what's enticing me to buy your product? When Your competitor has 5,000 reviews, you have no reviews and you're the same price, but there's no differentiating factor. And so make sure your product's differentiated in some way and then make sure you have those ratings and reviews. And if you have a lower amount of ratings and reviews than your competitor, you have to entice them to come over to your product to buy. And so that's where a coupon code comes in or a coupon. And so that's why we did a 50% off coupon, because that's very enticing to come in and buy, because why wouldn't you come buy 50% off to try my product versus buying the one that's twice the price and has more reviews. But hey, this one could be just as good and I'm saving half the money. And there's a lot of people that are on Amazon that are price conscious and they're looking for that deal.

When you ran it for two years, did you have a goal in mind for saturation and what percentage of penetration you wanted to get into the market? I mean, what was your discerning factor of saying I'll do it for six months versus 12 months? 12 months versus two years. And what do you recommend for someone that's just getting into this?

So 100 sales per day was our goal, or a thousand subscribers, whichever we got to first.

Those are our subscribers to your email list.

No, a thousand subscribers to the product. Okay, through Amazon. So their subscribe and save program. And so those are our two factors that we were going after. And it worked because we got to a hundred sales a day in that two year time frame. We have about 500 subscribers on the product. So we're about halfway to our goal there. But every industry, every product is going to be different. And so you have to realize that. And so you have to kind of do a little bit of research just to see what your goals will be. But we just wanted to make, to introduce it to the market and get a lot of people on it because we knew it was a great product and we knew once you tried it, you'd be back for more. So here's the cool part about the coupon. When we do that 50% off coupon, it expires every three months. So when you buy it Today with the coupon and you come back in a month to buy it and then a month later to buy it again. You won't see that coupon in your Amazon account. And so you'll see it the first time when you buy, you won't see it for two more months when you buy, come back the two more times and then that fourth month, hopefully we'll have you on subscription by that point. But the fourth month they will see the coupon code again, but they won't necessarily clip it. And then the fifth and sixth month they won't see it again. So most of our products are 30 day cycles. And so the coupon, even though it's 50% off, only about 30% of our sales are from that coupon. The other 70% are full price purchases.

And the subscription is the continuity.

Oh man, the subscription's where it's at because you're not advertising to that person anymore. And it's a full price purchase. Well, they get a 10% discount through Amazon, but that's nothing compared to having no advertising and it's automatically shipped to their door every single month.

Like you said, you don't have the acquisition cost.

Exactly.

That's exciting. That's very exciting.

To take a step back, we're a four year old company. We know our lifetime value is over $310. So now we can be more aggressive upfront with those coupons as a result of knowing our lifetime value. But you know, three years ago we weren't this aggressive because we didn't know, we knew we had a great product but we needed to see how many people come back to buy. And our repeat purchase rates close to 50 to 60%.

That's fantastic. I want to ask you about your background. How did you get into this?

Yeah, so pain point. So I'm an optometrist by trade, had a practice, worked for somebody else, realized that I was going crazy working for somebody else. So I quit my job, moved from Ohio to South Carolina, started two optometry practices. When you start practices you only see one patient an hour because you just don't have the patient flow. And so I got bored because I went from a practicing five an hour to one an hour. And so I started the online business with my wife and, and we grew that pretty quickly. And in about year three of our practices and our online business, we sold the practices, went all time, full time in this, that was in 2018 and now we've been full time in this for three years now. The agency started as A result of pain points in our online business. We couldn't find somebody that acted like a partner in Amazon. Pbc, yes, there's agencies out there, but an agency is. They're just, they're just not a partner. And so we wanted to create an agency that was more like a partnership with you. We're there for you. We're pretty much internal to your environment. And we wanted to bring you something that made you feel like we were a part of the business and not just an agency that's just kind of like, oh gosh, we got to work with this person again and oh my gosh, we got to do this. That's what I always felt like when I hired agencies. And so I was like, you know what, I'm going to figure this out myself. I brought them my partner. I have two partners in the Amazon PPC agency and they're my best friends from college. I said, let's build something great together. And we took it on and we've now grown pretty, pretty large with the agency. We've already hit our goals for 2021, and it's only April of 2021 by the time you're listening to this, it might be a little further down the road, but we've already hit our goals for this year in the month of March, and so in three months. And so it's growing incredibly fast. But it's because we're partnering with you. We're not just another agency that's just there to do the work. We're actually going to be in there with you. So that's. It came from a pain point. And I heard Rolando Frazier, nobody you've never heard of him, great guy. He said to me once, make every expense in your business a profit center. And so that was kind of my first go at that. So PPC and Amazon ads were my biggest expense in my business. How can I make it a profit center? Make an agency? And so that was kind of step one, one of the things that we did for him.

That's awesome to hear because I felt that way for many things as well, especially with business, book publishing and our author clients. It's like some of the stuff everyone's going, oh, we can help you with xyz. And it's like, okay, cool, give them a shot. Them a shot, them a shot, them a shot. It's like, we could probably do this better on our own if we just gave, you know, tried. And sure enough, that's the case.

Big frustration point for me.

So tell me about your Biggest transformation and success story from one of your clients.

You know, this one came really recently, and we have this customer that came into our world referred to in for us. She has one product, amazing product, 32,000 reviews. And she's been selling it for a while, and she's doing really well. She's selling about 800 of them a day. And so she's doing really well with this product. And she does what most people that are selling on Amazon do. They hire a VA in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, somewhere like that. Very cheap vas. Some of them do great work. I'm not gonna take anything away from that. But they usually just try to get by with, like, very low advertising spend. They don't really push advertising. They're not aggressive. They're not gonna scale your company. And she's like, you know what? I'm gonna take a shot on you guys. Let's do it. We took her from 800 sales a day to 1600 sales a day, and in three weeks, this is a very abnormal case. Not. The results aren't typical, but we saw the opportunity with her, and all we did was use our system to scale her, and it worked incredibly well. And now she's at 1600 sales a day, and now we're trying not to stock her out. So that's the biggest problem that most people have when they join our agency, is we always stock them out. And full disclosure, we're 15 months into using our system in the agency, in my brand. And. And we still stock my own brand out. And so it's not something that we're foolproof from because the system that we use is so incredibly. It works. It works to scale your brand if you're ready to scale your brand. But I will say most people aren't ready to scale their brand until they really start to see it. And then they're like, whoa, I can't do this. Let's pump the brakes a little bit, because it's. It's expensive.

How would you identify? And for anyone who doesn't know what. What does stock stock out mean?

Yeah, stock out just means that you run out of inventory and you can't sell anymore. And so the goal of inventory is to never order too much and never order too little. It's always, you need to have that good in between. But when you put in a new system that scales your sales, that increases your sales, that doubles your sales, then your inventory management's all thrown off, and you may not have inventory coming in in time to fulfill those sales. And then you have to put a bigger order in. And so that's where it becomes expensive. You're profitable, you're more profitable, but your cash gets tied up because you have to order so much more inventory. And so it's a very tricky game you have to play when you're scaling a brand.

Yeah, it sounds like a balancing act, for sure.

Yeah, definitely.

So as far as the products go, is there any specific product or where do these success stories do they fall?

Yeah. So most of the, you know, it's funny because most of our, the clients that we work with are in supplements or in food. And we never really specified that we were going after those, but that's just kind of what fell into our lap. And the system works incredibly well for supplements and food, works incredibly well for anything. And so it's. That's just kind of where we've been. And I forget where I was going with this, but what was the question again?

I was asking about where the products from, the success stories, what. What types of products are they? And you're saying they're supplements and food. I didn't know if one was a refrigerator or couch or something or if they were all in a similar niche.

No. And I usually try to stay away from pieces of plastic that are flown in from China. And so we don't really like to work with sellers that are just trying to sell the next widget. And so look, I sell another rubber scraper that is just like everybody else's rubber scraper that has nothing special. We try to stay away from brands.

Like that just because that continuity, like you're saying, with the subscribe and Save.

Yeah. And so subscriptions are huge. And that's been one of our biggest roles and growing other brands is they don't even realize subscribe and Save is on the platform. So just enrolling them in, that has been a huge asset for them.

Yeah. And especially like with the supplements, like you're saying you have that acquisition cost in the initial and how you were saying you took her from 800 to 1600. Do you believe you can go from 16 to 24, 24 to 36 over the next 3, 612 months?

That's a great question. And so we're a month into her, and you know, it's funny because we've been maxing out her budget. She keeps increasing her budget. And we started at $800 a day. We're now at $2,500 a day. And she's sitting here because of inventory issues.

And so that's kind of what it.

Sounded like if she increases that budget even more.

But if you get inventory under control, it sounds like there's still still more room to play in there, even though doubling is awesome.

Yeah, we took a brand from 120,000 to over 1.2 million in about three years. And the reason we couldn't do it faster is because we kept running into stock issues. We kept running out of inventory. And then there was another case that we had. A client of ours, had five products, and we would do $10,000 a month. When we started with them, we got them all the way up to $90,000 a month, and then we dropped back down to ten, then we went up to 30, then we dropped back down to 10, and then up to 60. And it was all because of inventory issues. They didn't have the cash to order the inventory and to keep the advertising alive. And so my brand, we bought them, and so we just acquired them. Because we had the cash available, we bought them. And now with our system in place, with inventory under control, we're now doing about $150,000 a month with this brand. But now we're running into inventory problems at the new level we're at. And so we're still trying to solve inventory problems just at a larger scale.

See, this is interesting because with the supplements, you have to subscribe and save. That, I mean, I think is fantastic. And I get it. I love continuity programs.

But you have that inventory, the physical product like you're talking about, and it had me thinking about the. I mentioned the Kindle books. Once you buy a book, you're not buying it month after month after month.

But you could infinitely scale something that's digital because there's no inventory problems, essentially. But what is that thing that would be digital and continuity?

Yeah, so that's tough. And those are just like membership sites. And so if you have like a course or something or a mastermind, you know, that's your continuity play. I mean, I'm part of a mastermind, and there's, you know, 50 members in there paying 35,000 a year for it. And that's his continuity play, but that's his top level. And then he has the next level down. That's $300 a month. Then he has the next level down, that's $100 a month. And so he has different levels of that continuity program in his mastermind. I'm not a part of that, and I don't charge for it, but I'm a part of his mastermind. And so with him, I started at that $100 a month level, went up to the $300 a month level, and now I'm in the $35,000 a year level. And that's all a result of him providing me more and more value as I climbed his value ladder. And that's how you can do it in the digital marketing space. But it's still work. And where a digital service is a digital service, it's, you know, you can give them a membership site or something like that, but you still have to continue to provide value. You can't just set it and forget it. Some people do, but I believe if you really want to get to that high end client, you just got to continue to serve them even if they're on like a digital plan. Yeah.

And the thing is, things change. You know, there's a whole lot of stuff, for example, with my show, the live streaming, that's changed. I can't even tell you how many times in the last few years alone, let alone the last decade or two. Same thing with podcasting, same thing with video. You know, what'd you do before YouTubers around, then YouTube comes around, YouTube changes their thing. And then self publishing wasn't really available before Amazon. Print on demand. Now it is. So yeah, you got to stay on your toes to keep up with it. Otherwise, you know, maybe it's time to exit. Right?

Yeah. We started our show about five years ago called the Dry Eye show on YouTube and I can't tell you how many softwares we've gone through and we finally settled on one where you streamyard for ours. And it's okay, it's not great, it's not perfect, but it's probably the best one we've tried. And we've tried so many different softwares and yeah, I agree with you 100%.

What I do love about all of this is it makes it easier and easier. I think it does make the barrier to entry lower. You still have to be committed and you know, take it seriously and treat it like a business, invest some serious coin. But, but you know, 20 years ago to live stream something, you not only had the need of the software, which was tens of thousands of dollars, the cameras, equipment and everything, but the bandwidth issues, I mean, you were investing some serious money just to be able to broadcast something like this. And now, you know, I remember when Facebook did Facebook Live in 2016, right after Meerkat, and it was like you could do this from your phone.

That changed the game. And now everyone else is following suit.

Live As a simple reminder of how bad I was when I first started.

You know, I, I did over 3,000 videos combined. Video snippets. And you know, right before Facebook Live, I was just doing something inspirational and put it out there. But I remember I tried downloading my data one day and I saw like 30, 33,033, 35, something like that. I'm like, I have over 3,000 videos I've done. And this was before the show.

So that's the persistence I'm talking about. I mean, as long as you're persistent, you're going to be successful, whether it's.

Amazon or whatever you're saying.

Exactly. Whatever you're doing.

Well, I appreciate that again, and I love what you're sharing here. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you that someone really should know if they're doing Amazon ads or want to.

Yeah, it's all about persistence. I'm going to just drill that into the listeners and the viewers head today. And no matter what you do, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that have shiny object syndrome. Get good at one to two things. And when you're good at those one to two things, just keep focusing on them. My wife and I and my other business partner, my agency, we're good at Amazon PPC and, and we're good at creating content. Those are the two things we focus on. And then the third thing, we build an audience because of, we're good at those two things. And so with I love which is my brand, like the eyeball. Cause we're eye doctors. And what we did is we create one video a week. We get people on a blog, we try to collect their email address, and then we use Amazon PPC to sell them on Amazon. Those are the things that we do. And so we're really good at that. And that's how simple our business is. So we took that system, we then took it over to the agency and we did the exact same thing. We have a YouTube channel, a Facebook group, and we could do one video a week. We try to get them over to a blog, we try to get their email address. And then once we have their email address, we try to either get them into the agency or to buy our paid course. And so find out what you enjoy doing, not what you think you have to do, because everybody's telling you to do this and that. Find out what you enjoy doing that is going to pay the bills. So, Mario, you obviously enjoy doing this, otherwise you'd hate your job, you'd hate doing this. And so find out what you enjoy doing. Commit a thousand days to it. Do it daily for a thousand days. Whether it be a Facebook live, whether it be writing a blog post, whether it be coming out and learning more on selling on Amazon. Just commit a thousand days to it and I guarantee you will change your life.

Well, I appreciate that and that was a little surreal as well. If you're listening to this or watching, this is why he's the expert in authority. I wrote about this in my book years ago. One of the chapters talks about, can you help? This, this, this, this, this will. I know. And you said it verbatim. Here's how I help. Boom Boom. It's about that focus. And I'm so glad you are hammering it in with the persistence.

I overcomplicated my life and it was probably the most stressful and the least profitable year of my entire life. Our revenue went down, our profit went down, and we about sold our business as a result for nothing. And it was just we were defeated. And I met with my coach and the guy that runs that whole digital thing, the pyramid I went over. Pyramid. That sounds so terrible. The value ladder. And he pretty much said, you're doing too much. Eliminate anything that doesn't make you a lot of money and focus on the two things that make you a lot of money and I guarantee you'll be just fine. So we literally shut down four businesses overnight because we were so shiny object syndrome. And when we did that the next year, we increased 20% in one business and we increased 100% in the other business. But our profit went from 2% to almost 15% in the one business and it was about a 70% margin in the other.

Wow, that's awesome. And inspiring too. Like, congrats, seriously. But for anyone listening, I think there's majority of businesses would love to have a 70% profit margin.

That's an agency.

That's awesome. Well, I have one more question before we thank our sponsor and if I would like to think we're having fun already, but we're gonna have some more.

The Wheel of whatever.

Do you have any clue what I'm gonna ask you?

I have no idea, but that thing's awesome.

Got it on Amazon.

Hypnotizing me right now.

Oh, yeah. Do you want yellow or black?

I'll take black.

Oh, good, good, good, good.

There we go. It's on black. I picked it. Whatever. So my question for you is where was somewhere you would like to travel with your wife that you haven't been and how Long would you stay there?

This is a great question because it depends if you ask my wife or me. But I would do this for my wife. She's always wanted to visit Bora Bora and honestly we'd say there three days because then she would be so bored that we'd probably have to leave because we can't do beach vacations. We're more of a, we're more culture vultures where we like to go experience a lot of things. And so she's always wanted to do that. And I can see us getting there and three days later she'll be like, I'm bored, I want to leave. So Bora Bora, we'd stay there for three days and then we'd go on our worldwide trip to experience all the cultures.

Where would you, where would you start the worldwide trip?

Oh, man, we've, we've already done Europe. So we did a backpacking trip of Europe about 10 years ago and it was great. It was five weeks and we just kind of went to 13 different countries in Europe. Um, we've already done the United States, so we did all around the United States and so. And we don't a little bit of South America. So I think I would have to pick Africa and do a safari, like go to Kenya and do a safari tour and like summit Mount Kilimanjaro. That's probably where we'd start.

Awesome. That is fantastic. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, thank you for sharing that. We are going to thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action run. You've heard me say every business needs a book, including yours. And it's true. And that's why I'm launching my new book@eapublishing method book.com so you can learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. But you know what? Don't take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors like Lori, I went from having.

An idea and a possibility to actually getting my book published.

Or Catherine, thank you for making my.

Mom number one best selling author.

Or Mary Alice, what he got done for me in three days regarding my book launch.

Unmanageable.

John Cody. I've worked with Mario over the phone and online and he's been very helpful in getting me where I needed to go with promoting my books. Rocio.

There's no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else again. I've attempted it in the past. It didn't serve me. As a matter of fact, I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process. Adele, if you're looking for an amazing business coach, I highly recommend Mario Ficcini or Bill Benner. I can't make a higher recommendation.

To work with Mario Ficini. He has been great for me and right now I won't work with anybody else except for Mario.

Hey, their words, not mine. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get your copy and I look forward to hearing your transformation as our next video success story. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com.

And we are back with the Imperfect Action round. Travis, are you ready to take Imperfect Action action?

I think so. Let's do it.

I got three questions for you. I know you're gonna love one of them for sure. The other two, we'll see what happens. But 60 second or less answers. The first one is what is the fastest path to the profits?

Fastest path to the profits is focusing on one thing really well and then focusing on making your business profitable first. So if you've never read the book Profit first, it will change your business.

Excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Shiny objects. So they chase a million different Amazon PPC strategies and they listen to a YouTube video or a podcast and they mix and match all these strategies and they don't match well. When you focus on one strategy, whether it's mine or somebody else's, that's the best you can do.

Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Sell consumables. It's the best thing to do. And you know, after you learn how to sell, come out with products two, three and four that complement product number one and so sell consumables, have complementary product lines and that's how you maximize customer lifetime value.

Nice. I was curious what you were going to say for that because I knew that was coming up within the first five minutes and you were already talking about customer lifetime value. I'm like, this is going to go good. What books would you recommend to Expert Authority World?

So I Already recommended the 1. Profit first has been life changing. Michael Michalowicz is the author's name. All of his books are fantastic. But Profit first change. That's how I went from a 2% profit margin in one year to 15% the next year from going down and out about my business, almost selling it for nothing to then Having people reaching out to me to buy my business because we're so profitable, Profit first changed the game for me. So I highly recommend that one. Book number two, if I can. Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. That's two authors with MM as their initials, but Mike McCallowicz. Profit first. Ready, Fire, Aim. Michael Masterson teaches you how to go from 0 to 11 to 1010 to 25 and 25 to 100 million. And so you can focus on whatever part of the book you're a part of or you're in. And if you follow Works crazy. It does.

Well, I appreciate both of those. Did you have a third or more? You're welcome to do it.

Yeah. So I'll go for a third one Scale by Jeff Hoffman. And so another great book. Jeff Hoffman's built multiple billion dollar companies Scale. He's the founder of Priceline, and so that was his biggest exit that he had. But it teaches you how to scale, how to treat your employees, how to do everything. I read those three books in January of every single year.

Excellent, excellent recommendations. Where would you like people to learn more?

Yeah. So profitable pineapple.com so profitable pineapple.com is our ad agency site. We actually have a free course there. And you just put your email address in. You get that free course, and there's no strings attached to that free course. We literally give you our SOP from our agency from 2019. And the reason that we give that away for free is because it's a great course for Those doing under $25,000 a month in in sales on Amazon. If you're doing above $25,000 of sales month either on Amazon or off, that's when you want to take our paid course or you want to think about enrolling in our agency. But that's@profitable pineapple.com.

Fantastic. Thank you for those. Thank you for sharing everything. And I got to ask one more thing. Where's the name from Profitable Pineapple. Yes.

So I love Pineapple, and we do a lot of our mission work in the Caribbean. And so there's lots of pineapples and coconuts down there. And I was at a conference once, and there's 500 booths at this conference. And the only booth I remember is Design Pickle. It's another brand. It's called Design Pickle. And they were passing out pickles. And I was like, this is the best branding I've ever seen in my life. I want a brand like that someday. And so two years after I went to that conference, we came out with profitable pineapple ads. And it's fun because if you look at our YouTube thumbnails, they just have goofy pineapples in them. And so it's different than everybody else in the space that's talking about we're going to scale you and.

Increase ads and, like, all these different things that, like, just talk about, like, scaling your ads. And we just wanted to be goofy in the space and just have fun with it.

I love it. I love it. Were you handing out pineapples or pieces or something?

We've never had a booth. Okay, yeah, we'll definitely do that. We'll be handing out little baby pineapples.

Or something, or those cans of them or whatever the case is.

That's a good idea. The little, like, Del Monte snack packs.

Yeah, Yeah.

I like it.

I like it. I always love the backstories of everything. So thank you for sharing everything again. I know we could talk about more and everyone check them out. You also started a nonprofit, didn't you?

Yeah. So we started a nonprofit called the I Love Cares foundation, where we're helping try to end the 1 billion with a B that are blind due to lack of glasses. That's kind of our mission in life. That's our passion in life. We go on about three mission trips a year where we go and we'll give two to 3,000 eye exams, give them glasses, sunglasses. We also do about 50 surgeries on those mission trips. But the end goal in life is to create sustainability in these regions, especially in the Caribbean. And we want to create a school down there eventually that teaches people how to go out to their community, fit people with glasses. And if they have too many problems that glasses can't solve, they then send them back to a central hub clinic. And that's where we want to have, like, our office headquarters. And that's kind of our end goal in life. We thought we'd get to even starting this in our 60s, but we got to start it at the age of 33, so we're having a blast.

Fantastic. I'm going to make sure that's a specific snippet. Like I said, I know we could talk for hours. But thank you for sharing everything and thank you for your heart and giving back as well.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Mario.

All right, expert authority world. We have another great episode here today.

I'll see you tomorrow.

Have a great day. God bless.

You're already the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you? 24,7 and if so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect Publishing Method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethod book.com to get started. Now. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com hey, thanks for listening to today's episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show. And also be sure to check out eainterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you tomorrow.