Steven is the founder of My Amazon Guy, an agency that manages over $1.2 billion in annual sales across 400+ brands on Amazon. A best-selling author of “Amazon Selling Tips” and former TV reporter, Steven brings over a decade of eCommerce expertise. My Amazon Guy, with a team of 550+ employees, specializes in boosting traffic and sales for Amazon brands. Steven is also the owner of My Refund Guy and several Amazon brands, while his YouTube tutorials, viewed by millions, provide expert insights on navigating Amazon challenges.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Steven Pope, founder of My Amazon Guy, an agency managing over $12 billion in annual sales across 400+ brands on Amazon. The discussion focuses on the evolving landscape of SEO and AI within Amazon. Steven highlights Amazon’s AI initiatives, particularly “Rufus,” and their impact on SEO strategies. He emphasizes the enduring importance of foundational SEO practices, optimizing product listings, and the critical role of high-quality visuals. Steven also shares actionable insights on dynamic pricing, launching new products, and leveraging data analytics for continuous improvement.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

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This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, author of The E-myth and Aaron Cordova’s. Today we’ve got a special returning guest. He is Steven Pope from my Amazon guy, and today we are going to be talking all about SEO and AI, and how the world of Amazon and SEO is changing. Or rather, is it not changing on Amazon, and are the tactics of how we need to write our titles and our bullets? Are they truly changing, or what is it that we need to be doing here? This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerce brands to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious eCommerce entrepreneur looking for a coach or consultant who can help take your business to the next level, I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale and looking for a coach or consultant, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough.

Josh Hadley 00:00:49  Com that’s ecom with two M’s. And let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I am excited to have joining with us again, Steven Pope back on the podcast. Steven is the founder of My Amazon Guy, an agency that manages over 1.2 billion in annual sales across 400 plus brands on Amazon. He is a best selling author of Amazon Selling Tips and a former TV reporter. Steven brings over a decade of e-commerce expertise. My Amazon guy, with a team of over 550 employees, specializes in boosting traffic and sales for Amazon brands. Steven is also the founder and owner of My Refund Guy and several Amazon brands. While his YouTube tutorials, viewed by millions, provide expert insights on navigating Amazon challenges. So with that introduction, welcome back to the show, Steve.

Steven Pope 00:01:29  Thanks for having me on. Josh.

Josh Hadley 00:01:30  Steven, excited to have you back on the show. I think the world of Amazon has changed over the last two years since we originally had you on the show. So my my first question to you, Steven, would be, hey, since the last time we talked, we’ve now got Rufus involved here.

Josh Hadley 00:01:44  Amazon’s incorporating AI into our titles, into our bullets. They’re actually making changes to our listings. Is this a positive thing? What’s going on in the world of SEO on Amazon and how things changed over the last two years?

Steven Pope 00:01:55  So the good news is, if your head is in the ground right now and you’re not paying attention. You’re probably in the same shape you were two years ago. And the reason for that is because not a lot has changed to the algorithm. Now. Everybody in their dogs on social media and your emails are hounding you and saying, I, I, I like the sky is falling chicken Little style and it’s really not. And anything that Rufus claims to have accomplished recently already existed two years ago, and all the basics still work. So you can you can turn off the podcast now. You already accomplished your goal. I you can ignore it, right? Just kidding. There’s a lot more to break down and go through and explain what this means and what to do and what not to do.

Steven Pope 00:02:32  But at the end of the day, you know, there’s a lot of people talking about the new patents for Rufus, and they’ve gone through and psychoanalyze these things, and it’s a waste of time to do that because it’s not implemented yet. What’s in the patent versus what’s in the algorithm do not match today. As one strong case example, Rufus does not read text in a plus contents images, and that would be a huge game changer if that were to happen. Because I’ve been preaching for seven years now, you need to have 500 ish words of crawl text in your A+ content. Why? Because it almost doubles the number of words you index for on your listing. So if you’re looking up your own keyword indexing today and you see, hey, I’ve got 800 SEO keywords. If you don’t have text that is crawling outside of images in your A-plus content today and were to add some hopefully 500 words of copy, you will likely get to 1600 keywords indexed in less than 45 days. That’s pretty significant.

Steven Pope 00:03:21  That’s doubling your SEO keyword numbers. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be at rank one, but it does mean you’re going to show up in the top couple hundred for over thousands of keywords. Now extrapolate that across multiple assigns percentages, variations. Throw in a product grade. We can talk about brand stories and this nice thing called Amazon CTR. And now you have some real traffic generating strategies.

Josh Hadley 00:03:40  So Steven I love I love those aspects that you talked about and how really not a whole lot has changed from the algorithm itself. My question to you would be like, all right, so back in January of this year, Amazon rolled out this new title requirements. You can’t repeat a word more than two times in your title. And guess what? We’re actually going to force feed it to you. We’re going to go ahead and start making title suggestions and actually just changing them on our own. At this point. What are you seeing for from your client side of things, like what happens when Amazon changes it? Do they start indexing or losing organic rank overnight? And once upon a time I mean data dive, right.

Josh Hadley 00:04:14  And what Brandon Young has been teaching has been very focused on keywords. And make sure you have the exact syntax that people are searching those keywords in and just add it into the front first 20 characters of your listing and your title, and you’re going to shoot up to the top of the organic searches. So tell me about what you’re seeing that.

Steven Pope 00:04:30  Yeah, I would endorse that fully. And I’ve been talking about that for seven years. You know, I was one of the first people to talk about how A+ content indexes and some people still don’t understand that fully. And so, you know, if you if you don’t understand what it means for a plus content to be indexed, here’s a little science experiment for you. You can you can switch one of the alt text of the photos. That’s the text that describes what the photo is to the robots. It’s 100 characters. Set one of the photos to all Spanish and you’ll index for some of those Spanish keywords in under 48 hours. So once we’ve established that A+ content indexes, we then establish how important that is as a signal.

Steven Pope 00:05:01  And then we can kind of work our way backwards. But everybody’s always known titles have an influence on SEO and front loading. The title has been a best practice, though Amazon has released publicly that they supposedly equally weight the whole title. They don’t. But that’s the funny thing about, you know, Amazon’s algorithm and SEO. You could ask 100 people at Amazon, you get almost a hundred different answers. Nobody really knows how it actually works. So my favorite way to understand the algorithm is just go test things and see what actually happens. And since I managed over 400 brands on Amazon, we can test quite a few things. So longer titles still be shorter titles. When it comes to indexing, shorter titles have a higher conversion rate. So based on that fact, I would, on the early entrance of a product, have a really long title, the longer and the better the product does, the shorter I would make the title. Yes, I would not repeat words. Yes, I would have exact match on syntax, because we find that having even a singular versus plural in a title makes an incremental difference when when people are searching it.

Steven Pope 00:05:54  Not only does that affect the Amazon autocomplete, but it also affects the words that are bolded in the title when you do the search, which is something that Amazon’s been testing. And so what Amazon preaches and what they say publicly does not usually reflect reality. And so Amazon will make claims about the patent and Rufus and how AI is going to change everything. And this is very problematic because if they are taking over your title and automating some of these things, they’re going to eff it up and you’re going to start seeing the lost dogs of Amazon show up when they’d index and D rank or list your product, because they put in a trademark term into your title and break their own freaking rules. And we’ve seen that happen already. We’ve even seen Amazon get on the stage in Seattle and preach about how cool this is going to be, and then use an example of a trademark infringement in their own damn demo. That’s how incompetent their automations are. And so opt out programs that are brand new are always a bad idea.

Steven Pope 00:06:42  But the reason Amazon’s doing it is they want the data and they think they can get there faster, but the short term chaos that that creates for the consumer will be massive. The headaches it creates for sellers is unfortunate, but as we all know, Amazon is not the most seller centric company. It is the most customer centric company, and they do not see sellers as customers. Which is why I’m wearing a t shirt that says US versus Amazon because it’s all of us. Need you, Josh and everybody listening to this against Amazon. It is us versus Amazon. And we have to, you know, team up and share our information. Because Amazon’s not going to help sellers. They don’t care about sellers. They don’t help us. Their seller supports a joke. How many times how many tickets you have to file just to change your damn title on Amazon. It’s a it’s a total joke. So rant over. But that’s my general assessment of what we’re seeing right now.

Josh Hadley 00:07:24  Yeah, I think I think what you pointed out to it is like when they announce the AI changes and stuff in accelerate last year.

Josh Hadley 00:07:31  Right? And it’s like, yeah, you’re using a branded or trademarked term in somebody’s title now, and guess who’s going to get dinged for it? It’s going to be my account. I do think that is a really important aspect of like, hey, don’t don’t just let Amazon do whatever and think that they’re optimizing it for the algorithm because they’re not optimizing it for the algorithm. It’s just it’s some, you know, I think like you need to see Amazon in the way that it operates. It is such a large corporation that everybody’s almost working in different silos. Right. And in fact, like a good example of this is Amazon advertising is its own business unit, right? It’s got its own kind of like CEO, if you will. Same with Amazon MCF multichannel fulfillment. It’s got its own kind of business unit. And then you’ve got buy with Prime that’s got its own business unit. Like all of these different aspects of Amazon. They’re not necessarily talking to each other right now. They all fall under the big Amazon brand.

Josh Hadley 00:08:14  But I think we need to understand, like whoever’s working on the AI stuff. And Rufus is not the same team that sits and is refining the algorithm that ranks and does the products. Right. so I think that’s an important aspect to know. But Steven, on that aspect of like, hey, opt out of this stuff. So if a brand owner listening to this is like, oh crap, I don’t know if I’ve turned this feature on or off, where do people need to go to turn off this feature so that Amazon is not automatically updating things?

Steven Pope 00:08:39  So there’s quite a few settings that you can go in into Seller Central. So when you log into Seller Central in the top right hit settings. this is something that you should be probably auditing once a quarter at bare minimum. and, and I’ll just throw this in there. But global user permissions are different than regular user permissions. And a lot of people don’t understand that. And so, you know, there was a big story a couple of weeks ago with a baby brand that got their account hacked and their hacker got Ahold of global user permissions.

Steven Pope 00:09:03  And Amazon didn’t figure this out because they’re dumb and the regular user permissions, they kept kicking the hijacker out, but in global they kept regaining access. So when you go into the settings, check global user permissions, check your regular user permissions, check all of the I opt ins and opt outs. You also want to look at your FBA settings. There’s just a lot of settings in there, and so what I’m encouraging people to do is to literally click on every single setting once a quarter and just QA it.

Josh Hadley 00:09:25  Okay. Inside the settings, is there specific features within those settings then that you would say like be on the lookout for?

Steven Pope 00:09:31  Yeah. So my obviously the opt out here is the most important. With I that would be the most important. The second is going to be probably FBA return settings. So if you sell a product that has high returns and then people are damaging the goods and then they get shipped back out, that causes a lot of problems for other customers. Probably my second favorite, and the third is just the global user permissions to understand, like there are different permissions there that override regular user permissions.

Steven Pope 00:09:52  So it’s a totally different UI than it was a couple of years ago. A lot of people don’t know that and haven’t checked it. They don’t understand the difference between the admin super admin login and the regular logins and all all of the different aspects in there. So there’s just a lot of settings that I think are really important for a good health checkup once a quarter.

Josh Hadley 00:10:05  Yeah, definitely. I think that’s super important. Yes. We’ve we’ve heard all of those stories as of late, whether it be somebody that got hacked or whether titles are changing. And so it is important like Amazon moves at the speed of light, so to speak, when they roll stuff out and they’re they’re just going to break stuff if you’re not looking at it. now, Steven, let’s go back to the earlier conversation we were having around SEO. I liked how you talked about how, you know, hey, at the maybe at the beginning of a product launch, you come out with a longer title and then what you said maybe over a period of time, you’re going to shift it to a shortened title, because what you’re saying is it’s helping you increase your conversion rate.

Josh Hadley 00:10:38  So why don’t you walk me through, like, if I’m launching a new product, why don’t you walk me through? Like, what are the life cycles of SEO for that new product launch.

Steven Pope 00:10:46  You bet. So. Every year I come out with what I call SEO factor patch notes. And for those that can see the video you’ll see on the screen here, but I’ll talk through this. So basically we know that the algorithm has certain influencing factors. This is the first year that I didn’t buff click through rate. And I feel like I’ve got it right at 19%. And so every year for the past five years, I’ve buffed CTR and increasingly found it to be incredibly important. But I think I’ve got it right at 19% and static. And that is the most influential thing that somebody needs to focus on to grow sales on Amazon today. And so when you’re launching a product, you need to have a main image that is incredibly crisp to the point, shows all the accessories. If you sell supplements, show me the pill.

Steven Pope 00:11:23  If you show the quantity of the goods where it’s manufactured, if it’s made in America, throw an American flag on. Show me the ingredients. If you sell a soap, show me some flowers and all the good stuff behind the scenes. And so those are really, really important. this is the first time I’ve buffed organic sales in a while, and it seems like Amazon is increasing the importance of, of an organic sale on the SEO influence. So I put that at 21% and I buff that 3% year over year. Mind you, all of these numbers are made up by Steven Pope. They are not actual data backed numbers. These are just what I’m putting my finger in the air and seeing. And then I update this every year and I have, you know, and you can go back and see how I’ve patched this over the years with different graphics, but 21% for organic sales, 19% for clickthrough. Those are the two biggest categories by a long shot. Conversion rate comes in at 13%, and I actually nerf this slightly down 1% this year.

Steven Pope 00:12:07  And the reason for that is that we’ve consistently seen that Amazon has already solved for conversion rate. And so your ability to influence SEO through conversion has diminished slightly. And it’s still important. It’s still 13%. You got to have a good conversion rate. And most Amazon listings have a conversion rate between 8 to 12%. Unless you’re selling a high ticket item, then your conversion rate might be 3%. That might still be fine, but 8 to 12% is pretty consistent across the category. PPC sales at 12%. I buffer this 3% this year because we’re seeing more and more ad formats come out. We’re seeing if you don’t run ads, then your organic sales go down. And this is something I previously nerfed three years ago, and we saw that Amazon was deprioritized in PPC, and they seem to be prioritizing it more nowadays just around us out here we got 11% for 180 day sales. Nerf that by 3%. Amazon doesn’t seem to care what happened three months ago. They care about what’s happened in the last month.

Steven Pope 00:12:59  And they and it’s very much that tick tock culture aspect. recency is outweighing everything else. And then just around us out here 9% for offsite sales. TikTok’s definitely going to be more important if Amazon buys that or Microsoft buys that. That’ll be interesting and reviews it. 5%. This is the one that most people disagree with. And it’s it’s a good talker. I nerf that another 3% this year. I think I’ve nerfed it three out of the last five years, and I and I don’t think Amazon cares about reviews anymore. They deprioritized the ability to generate them. They made it so you can’t incentivize them. And they just they just seem to be pushing new product over old school 20,000, you know, 20,000 review products by a long shot, 5% for sales internal, 3% for impressions. That means the more agile buy, the more impressions you get. The more times you show up, the better your CTR, the better your SEO ranking. And finally, 2% for seller authority. So, you know, it’s a lot to take in.

Steven Pope 00:13:44  It’s definitely a visual conversation here. But the takeaway is that you really need to be focusing on it is the most underdeveloped aspect of SEO. So when you go to launch a product, absolutely be running some tests on the main image. But but even just following general best practices of understanding, show as much as you can in the main image and slap a keyword on it. And that’s going to have a massive impact on your sales.

Josh Hadley 00:14:05  Yeah man, I love that breakdown. What would you do then in regards to the titles? Is that kind of the process then that you would follow is like, hey, go long long tail keywords to begin with a longer title, then shorten it up over time to influence that, you know, click through rate and conversion rate.

Steven Pope 00:14:20  So titles have a minimal impact on click through. Other than that first eight or so words and most people are getting those intros to titles correct, which is why I don’t preach too much about it. But yes, long title on launch.

Steven Pope 00:14:30  There’s no question about that. It’s the fastest way to index the product. So I run four phases of SEO, and in those four phases, phase one and two are all about indexing or incremental indexing and so long titles are definitely part of that, that exercise. As the product matures, as you hit a thousand keywords Index, you can then accelerate into SEO phase three, which is about strike zone keywords. These are words that are in rank 20 through 50, and they’re going to rework the title. At this point, you’re going to rework the A-plus content, the bullets and the all of the copy, etc.. And the reason for that is because you’ve already indexed for as much as you can. At this point, it’s not going to move much more than 3% with with maximum effort. So you need to start ranking for higher important keywords. And so you’ll redo everything at that point. And then after you’ve got, you know, 50 keywords that you’ve worked the strike zone on. At that point I would go to phase four and SEO phase four is what I call the Icap methodology.

Steven Pope 00:15:17  Impressions, clicks, add to carts and purchases, Icap, Icap. And this is a very awesome piece of data out of Brand Analytics and Seller Central. It’s the most important data out of Solar Central that they’ve released in the last three years. And in there you can see your click through rate down to the keyword. You can see your, your your sales down to the keyword. And by analyzing that it becomes very obvious where you should focus. And there’s there’s a really good ratio I like to preach about to effect SEO. If you have a really high click through rate, but a low conversion on a product at a specific keyword, you know what to do. You go focus on conversion in the inverse. If you have a really low click through but a high conversion, you know what to do. Fix the main image. And often the case, what happens is that a lot of products will have both a high clickthrough and a high conversion, but they just simply have low impressions and those are the easiest ones to fix.

Steven Pope 00:16:02  Just go spend some money on PPC and all of a sudden your sales go up. Additionally, you might throw one of those keywords onto the main image. And so I’ve run some case studies over the years where I did some smudge sticks and I sold my three x, my click through rate and my conversion and sales. By simply changing one thing on my main image, I added a keyword and that made a massive difference for that particular keyword, as well as the cursory secondary indirect keywords and long tail keywords that go along with that. So, so those are the phases that I run. At the end of the day, you have to do PPC. It’s pay the piper to play. But SEO is where you make your profit. And so these are sunk costs. You have to make continual investments on. It’s not set and forget it. It is a continuous optimization. And we’ll rerun SEO phase three and phase four once a quarter on almost every product.

Josh Hadley 00:16:45  Awesome I love that. I think you just gave everybody a fantastic breakdown of what their team needs to be focused on managing their products on a regular cadence, and it really comes down to really basic things.

Josh Hadley 00:16:57  You’re talking about traffic. Do you have enough eyeballs and views and impressions? Number two, do you have the click through rate. Right. And then do you have the conversion rate? So Steven, let me regurgitate everything you said there. If I have a and here’s one of the nice parts I think, that Amazon has given to us over the last little while. Right. You have Amazon brand metrics that we can take a look at. We also have Amazon Scoop data. Okay, Amazon has given us a lot more data where we can kind of gauge, like what’s maybe the click through rate and especially the conversion rate for some of my competitors. Okay. And really what I mean Steven, how do you understand like, oh, I have a high click through rate or a high conversion rate. Are you comparing it to the market average? Yes. That should be my first question to you.

Steven Pope 00:17:34  Yeah. You should be comparing it against your categories averages. And you can ascertain that now through the brain analytics.

Steven Pope 00:17:40  And the search query performance report is just so amazing to help. And one of my favorite things about this report is it’s pretty sorted based on importance. Now you could almost with no knowledge, just follow Amazon’s recommendations for Focus Point and come out ahead and name another program at Amazon where you can say that like I can’t, that’s how, that’s how good this data is. And people really are sleeping on it and they really need to analyze it. And that’s why I call it the Icap methodology or the Icap marketing Funnel impressions, clicks and purchases Icap. And it’s and it’s an awesome way to focus your team because the math doesn’t lie. It’s good math, it’s good science. And you can make a framework. A lot of times I think the biggest struggle that Amazon sellers have is there’s a thousand things that they can do when they wake up every day. It’s overwhelming. They don’t know how to prioritize, and they just need somebody to tell them what to actually go and do. And this is a report that literally says, here is the very hyper specific things you can do for maximum impact.

Steven Pope 00:18:27  Do these 2 or 3 things and you’re going to have more sales. Every Amazon seller needs to be looking at this report on a weekly basis and following its advice and taking action. And if you want to go higher level, just just go fix your CTR. Because no matter what you’re doing right now, if you spend time on your main image, you’re going to increase sales just bar none.

Josh Hadley 00:18:43  Main image, main image. Main image. Yeah. And it sounds like I mean, you’re your biggest quote unquote hack for the main image is like, hey, work in your most important keyword into that.

Steven Pope 00:18:53  That’s that’s the one that’s least done correctly is adding a keyword. So take a, take a product like the orange cleaner, that Thracian bot, it’s a pet cleaner. And all they did when they bought this product was add a keyword to the packaging, make it gigantic, and water down the product. That was it. Those are the two things that Thracian did. They seven extra sales in 12 months.

Steven Pope 00:19:09  So and by the way, that example is like seven years old. So they were one of the first to do it. And and so I’ve seen it just time and time again, if you add more information to the main image and make it really easy to understand, show and tell both the product. If you sell a pet product, you don’t put a cat on there. Wow, you’re missing out. If you sell a baby product and you can’t get a baby in there, you’re missing out. Like, these are the things that most people don’t understand or don’t realize. If you sell a beauty product and you don’t show the lotion or the cream exiting the cap and doing a splash. You’re missing out. Like show and tell the product as much as possible. And the tell part is the keyword, right? If you have two products on screen and one has the keyword you just search for and the other doesn’t, which you’re going to click on. If all of the things are equal, including price, you’re going to click on the one that has the keyword.

Steven Pope 00:19:48  Just intuitively, your brain just does it. It reads it before you read it. Right. And so that’s why it’s really important. And bonus fact when you increase CTR your cost goes down. And who doesn’t want to spend less on PPC and get more results.

Josh Hadley 00:19:58  Yeah. Love that. Love those ideas. Okay, Steve, another follow up question to this, because you’ve got a vast number of employees working for you. If if a brand owner listening to this is saying, all right, I believe you, but I am not a creative graphic designer who, like, are you recommending reach out to an agency to get this done for you that can think creatively, come out with some main image ideas for you? Or if I want to hire this internally, like what type of person am I looking for? Like if I’m putting a job post out there on LinkedIn, what’s the job post title like? It’s not just graphic designer, right? It’s got to be a little bit more than that, I would assume.

Steven Pope 00:20:32  So in this particular instance, it’s going to be cheaper and faster to hire somebody that already preaches and demonstrates the competency on CTR versus trying to bring it in-house in in-house designer with past experience outside of Amazon or even with Amazon will not adhere to these policies or understand them, let alone understand the color guidelines that work best on Amazon. So if I if I’ve got permission to to pitch myself here, go to my Amazon.com slash IMG promo code CTR for 50% off and we’ll do a main image for $50. Normally a hundred bucks goes down to 50. And think about how that’s going to affect your sales. I could triple your sales to tomorrow like instantaneously. If your image is in a C grade and we take it to an A grade, that’s a very important thing. I don’t make money on doing those main images, by the way. I just do it because I know that once I triple your sales with one interaction, that you’re going to come back for more and it’s a lead magnet if there ever was one.

Steven Pope 00:21:22  And so I do recommend that people seek out somebody that specializes on CTR, even if you have your own current in-house agency doing their own thing, having an extra service on the side to solve this one problem is worth doing. It makes it passes the litmus test for those 2 or 3 actions that a seller should do on a on a daily basis, or focus point until it’s resolved. So I have strong feelings, but I’m also super biased on this question. And I’m a market leader on the CTF question, so.

Josh Hadley 00:21:45  It makes a lot of sense. How do you then test your main image to know, oh, this one definitely is performing better, right? Are you just using Amazon’s a B testing or are you like letting that image run for two weeks and then looking at what brand analytics data, ESP data like, how are you confirming this was definitely better?

Steven Pope 00:22:03  So we know for 100% certainty that adding more things to a main image will increase all aspects in all data. So we don’t need to test something you know, less versus more.

Steven Pope 00:22:11  We know more wins every single time. The things that I would test for would be a variation of the more so. For example, if you’re selling a dog supplement, which dog type is going to perform best? Is it going to be a Labrador or is it going to be a poodle? AB testing that in a tool such as pig foo is a fast way to figure that out. And and you’re looking for a 6040 split at bare minimum to understand that that data is, you know, achievable or accurate. The things that you want to test on Amazon through their own AB testing, could be a radical change versus your status quo. And so if you change the packaging or if you change, you know, the demonstrated, you know, aspects or the feature you’re pushing on the main image, those are the sort of things that I would ab test directly in the Amazon portal, because you’re not going to get as accurate of a data by using a, you know, a pick foo ab test, because you need to have your actual consumer give you the data on that question.

Steven Pope 00:23:01  And then, just as you mentioned, the scope is a great way to monitor the results. so we know that if you add a keyword to the main image, that the CTR for that keyword is going to spike, if you add that keyword in, the CTR doesn’t spike. That’s very odd. Very weird. but we but we’ve seen it just time and time again. When you add a keyword, it increases the CTR. When you increase the CTR, your impressions go up. When you when you increase the traffic to a listing and maintaining the accurate depiction of the product, your conversion also goes up. A lot of people, just by default, think, oh, I can’t be slimy or scummy in my main image, and Amazon’s going to take my product down or consumers will hate it. And reality is completely opposite of that. Amazon is not going to take down a listing when sales go up. It just doesn’t make sense for them to do that, right. Obviously, if you’re making a medical claim that you cure cancer, you’re going to have a problem with stuff like that.

Steven Pope 00:23:42  But in terms of just giving consumers what they want, Amazon loves that. Give consumers what they want. So no matter what an Amazon policy says or your patent says, I usually ignore that information and I just give consumers what they asked for. And I firmly believe that it’s easier to sleep at night just giving consumers what they want, than trying to read 10,000 pages of health files where Amazon violates their own rules anyway.

Josh Hadley 00:24:00  Yep. Agreed. All right. So we talked about click through rate. And the way that we know we’re maybe not performing well is through the STP data. And we talked about how we could resolve that. Now Steven on the flip side let’s say we have a great click through rate. It’s above kind of that average for those competitors for the keywords. But our conversion rate is low. What are the things that you’re diving into to influence the conversion rate to be improved.

Steven Pope 00:24:23  So secondary main images are going to be the first thing I’m going to look at for conversion elements. So there’s two ways to improve conversion in general.

Steven Pope 00:24:30  The first is through anxiety reduction and the second is through friction reduction. So anxiety reduction is almost entirely solved for by Amazon because they already have the consumer’s credit card. They already have a free returns. All the anxiety stuff is solved by default. So therefore you need to spend all of your time on friction reduction. So how how do you reduce the friction of the consumer. Right. the placement of the buy box button at the top. Right. If you’re not in the buy box, that’s going to cause friction. Your sales are going to go down. That’s an easy example to discuss this, but in your secondary images you need to really demonstrate the product. You should be showing the lifestyle shot with a human, the nano scale, using the product, and ideally looking at the camera with their eyes open. Right? So if I were going to be selling Advil and or imagine this was like a supplement, I might take out one of the supplements, place it onto my tongue and show me using the product.

Steven Pope 00:25:15  What does that do that helps the consumer envision taste in their mouth, and it makes them think about themselves using the product. The customer avatar is the next step. So when you have a new product or a new brand in the first year, you have no idea what your customer avatar is unless you’re the customer avatar already. But if you’re just an investor picking a random product in Alibaba and China and just shipping it and trying to get it going, you don’t know who your customer avatar is. And so often the case, if I ask somebody that sells toothbrushes who’s your customer avatar, they might respond something surface level with anybody with teeth. That is not your customer avatar right now. If you’re selling a unicorn toothbrush, your customer avatar is a five year old girl who you are as a parent trying to convince the brush her teeth and you’re going to sell rainbow toothpaste with your unicorn toothbrush. That is a very, very specific customer avatar. And then when you go to build the listing, you are going to have pictures of the five year old girl using the unicorn toothbrush, standing next to mom because mom is the one buying this product and they want to see their daughter happy, engaged, and doing the right thing for their teeth so they don’t get cavities.

Steven Pope 00:26:15  So in the lifestyle image, we’ll be showcasing that customer avatar on full display. The biggest mistake that I see sellers make in 2025 is not getting specific enough on their customer avatar. Dan Kennedy talked about this for decades. He says, who is the customer avatar for a mail order bride? It’s a ridiculous example. He does that to make it memorable, the answer to which is a three time divorce truck driver. And as people like let that sit in for a moment, they’re like, yeah, okay, that makes sense, right? Instantaneously, you know, that somebody who’s a three time divorce truck driver might have hygiene issues, may not have time to date or nowhere to go, and just needs to get something done fast and easy. And they might have extra expendable cash. So when you understand that about the customer avatar, you instantaneously know how to market to that consumer. You know their top ten problems. You can you can list all this stuff out, right. And so going back to our unicorn toothbrush, we know the number one problem parents have is just to get the kids to put it in their mouth for 60s and swish it around by making the product fun.

Steven Pope 00:27:08  It solves that problem by showcasing the unicorn that solves that problem. So we’re no longer selling toothbrushes. We’re now solving problems, and that’s what a customer avatar does best. It advocates that this product is for you. I’ll give you one more example. If you’re selling a pet supplement or a pet treat, and it’s for both dogs and cats, you should have two listings, one for dogs and one for cats. It will double your sales to do that, first of all. And second of all, if you have them both on the same listing in the main image, no cat owner wants to feed their cat a dog treat. No dog owner wants to feed their dog a cat treat, especially the reverse, right? Like especially nobody wants to do that. And so if you have a main image product with packaging that shows both the cat and the dog, less people are going to click on that when they’re searching for a cat treat, because they’re going to click on the one that just shows cats.

Steven Pope 00:27:48  Less people are going to click on that if they want just a dog treat, cause they’re gonna click on the one that just shows stocks because it’s just man, cat and dog owners. They just don’t get along. Sometimes 90% of them are not going to buy the other type of pet. So as we impact this and we understand these these understandings about customer avatar and you redo your designs for your listings, if you’re showing both old and young people, if you’re showing multiple ethnicities, if you’re showing people like a Wall Street, street guy with a suit, but also showing, you know, a guy that lives in the hood on the same listing, these are very problematic things because the guy that you’re selling to is not both of those dudes. It’s one of those dudes. Pick a lane, go all in on that customer avatar because it’s opposite of politics. In politics, my job as a politician is to cast as wide tent as possible, because many people in my ten as possible, right? I want as many votes as humanly possible.

Steven Pope 00:28:30  But that is a false dichotomy, because in Amazon marketing you should be doing the opposite. You should be narrowing the ten as much as possible, so that when somebody goes to your listing and page, they’re like, oh my gosh, this is the product for me. And what happens is your conversion rate spikes. Amazon shows your product to more people and you end up increasing sales by doing that. So focus on customer avatar and hopefully, hopefully some of those examples are memorable enough that you can translate that to your design team.

Josh Hadley 00:28:51  Yeah man, I love that. So you’re saying secondary images are kind of like the main thing for that conversion rate. How influential are the bullets.

Steven Pope 00:28:59  Minimally for conversion. So text is for robots. Pictures are for people. And once people get behind that then they can understand, oh, it’s okay to keyword stuff my bullets, right? I can’t tell you how resistant most people are just on face value. Like I can’t get keyword stuff. Yes you can. And it’s really not that problematic because if you quiz 100 people, when was the last time you read the bullet points on the listing? I would be surprised if more than seven people raise their hand.

Steven Pope 00:29:20  Like the last purchase, I don’t read the bullet points. I look at the main image, I look at the price. I might scroll down to the reviews or look at the I summary, but I’m not reading the text on that page at all. There’s obviously some minor exceptions to this. Maybe it’s a highly technical product. You have to have the right spec or the skew match or compatibility. And yes, obviously you can read some text for that, but if I’m just buying a random, you know, kitchen gadget, I’m just going to go look at the main image and decide, is that the right product for me? Am I the customer avatar? And chances are if I am, I’m going to I’m going to pull the trigger and execute that. As one example, I bought $100 pizza cutter last week because I didn’t have a pizza cutter in my house. I just just moved homes and I had to cut a pizza with a chef knife. And it was an awful experience. And I’m like, I never want to do that again.

Steven Pope 00:29:55  And then when I went on there and I was looking at, well, what’s the difference between a $10 pizza cutter and a $100 pizza cutter? And then I was like, well, I just really want to have that really crisp cut, and I never want to have toppings fall off ever again. And for that reason, my pizza experience is it’s worth $100 pizza cutter to me. And when I looked at the customer avatar, I was like, yeah, it’s it’s for guys like me. So I bought.

Josh Hadley 00:30:13  It. I love that. That’s a great mindset shift and I love being able to look at the bullets and be like, yeah, it is a good place to. To keyword stuff there. And it’s not so much a conversion factor. So even let’s talk real quick on price. There is massive margin compression happening right now on Amazon, and it has been happening over the last two years. There is an influx of overseas competitors, and that is not going to change over the next five years.

Josh Hadley 00:30:35  It’s only going to exacerbate and get worse.

Steven Pope 00:30:38  I do think it’s going to change.

Josh Hadley 00:30:39  Do you think it will change? All right. So tell me about price because you’ve got you’ve got these cheap overseas competitors that are charging 499 for something that you’re like, dude, you’re you’re making pennies here. Like, I know you can make a profit, but you’re doing it at pennies. Now, there’s the whole money laundering thing that people have talked about, and they’re using Amazon for the money laundering, getting their money out of their overseas country into the US because the US dollar is that much more valuable. But what do you think Amazon doing in terms of preference? Because what we have personally seen with our brand, if we will reduce the price, Amazon will shoot us up the rankings just by reducing the.

Steven Pope 00:31:11  Price almost every.

Josh Hadley 00:31:12  Time. Like Amazon’s like just give us the lowest cost, lowest cost like we want cheap crap. It almost is like give us cheap, cheap, cheap. But I think like sustainable brands and the ones especially that have pants on their products, things like that.

Josh Hadley 00:31:23  Like you don’t want to play that game of of cheapness, so to speak. So give me your thoughts on how do you manage price. Because I know that’s a massive lever for conversion rate.

Steven Pope 00:31:32  All right. So I’ll give two tips on price. Tip number one start your product at 50% off when you launch it. Day one. No coupons no sales strikethrough price. Just start at 50% off your desired price. And every 50 units and sales that you generate raise the price of 5% until you get to 100% clarity. I have a full guide on that at my Amazon. Com slash price. And the reason for that is because we see this as the fastest way to launch products. It’s cheaper than spending twice as much on PPC just to have a low price. The second tip I’ll give is as you’re raising prices, as you struggle with your BSR going to shit, you need to lower the price on the way up. So I just had a coaching call yesterday with a product that wants to be at $250, and that there are 220.

Steven Pope 00:32:07  Today we went to two, two, 23, 99 about five days ago. And that particular dollar raise cratered the listing. So I said we need to go back down 2 or $3 for ten days, then raise it again $5. And so you can’t just have a linear progression with with optimization on Amazon. Sometimes you got to go down to go up. And, you know, there’s people like Chad Rubin that have an entire product offering on this pricing question. The average day Joe Seller, though, just needs to be creative and and match with price both up and down. The more you mess with price, the faster your sales are going to be. The average Joe seller is probably static on price and hasn’t adjusted their price a single time in the last 90 days, but the reason that they should put this in their quiver of things that they should look at once every quarter, is because it has the fastest impact on sales. With the minimal amount of effort. You don’t even need a designer for a price change.

Steven Pope 00:32:49  You just go in there and click two buttons, hit the save button and you’re done. And all of a sudden sales can go up. I had a mr. and Mrs. tumbler cup that wasn’t selling. I had 500 units at Amazon, and I was paying attention to 17 other things, including running an agency at the time. And I was like, man, I got to move these units. I know I’ll just lower the price 50% and come back to this. Unfortunately for me, I sold all 500 units in less than ten days and I forgot to go back in and raise the price back up. So when I restock the unit, I went back to my full price. I didn’t even do like the tapered price raising. I just went back to full price. Guess what happened? I sold another 500 units in 30 days. And this unit, this product hadn’t sold more than three units the prior 30 days to the price reduction. Moral of the story? Static price bad. Dynamic price. Good.

Steven Pope 00:33:28  And just by simply getting sales, you’ll generate more sales. I’ll say that one more time because sometimes people don’t really catch that. You need sales to get sales on Amazon. The fastest way to get sales is to lower price. Fastest way to get sales is to increase your CTR. Those are the two. Number one, number two. Punch one two over and over that Amazon sellers should be looking at first. Once they master those then focus on the other stuff. Yes, you still need A-plus content. Yes, you need to run PPC and all these other things. But I’m saying master these two over the other areas first because they have such a massive impact. So those are those are my tips.

Josh Hadley 00:33:56  Love it. All right. So you’re saying hey, just reducing your price is going to kind of like spark ideally that that flywheel. Like we said, we’ve seen our products go up and ranking right in a positive way whenever we lower the price. But you’re saying you don’t have to just stick with that lower price.

Josh Hadley 00:34:10  You’re saying it is possible to work back up to your target price, then?

Steven Pope 00:34:13  Yes. So so it’s a it’s a hack in a sense because you still get your sustainability. But it’s a temporary strategy. It’s a pricing strategy. It’s not a discount. It’s not a coupon. It’s not a promotion. It’s a pricing strategy.

Josh Hadley 00:34:24  And so do you almost kind of like in an ideal world let’s say you have 100 SKUs. Are you coming in here in every 90 days. You’re like let’s kind of like rekindle this fire under each of you every 90 days. Drop it by 50%.

Steven Pope 00:34:36  Get not necessarily 50% every single time.

Josh Hadley 00:34:38  Yeah. So tell yeah. Tell me your thoughts. Like I’ve got 100 SKUs. How do I put this into like a repeatable process for my team to go execute for me.

Steven Pope 00:34:44  Dad or new products, 50% products that just need some love could be 20%. Right. And and we see this rotation strategy work consistently. Take Prime Day for example. The reason why people do the 20% rotation is because post Prime Day they see a lift, and that’s how they justify taking the discount.

Steven Pope 00:34:59  It’s the same strategy here, except instead of doing it on a holiday, just do it on a routine basis. And so when you look at your skew portfolio, wherever you have higher stock, reduce the price, right. It’s not a closeout. It’s just to get the stock, you know, moving. Right. And and if you have a power skew, you’re just like, man, I know this product can do better than it is. Lowering the price is just simply the fastest and easiest strategy to test the waters. Because guess what? If you lower the price 50%, it still doesn’t move your boat like you’re done, just absolutely not going to work. That product is over, right? And so wouldn’t you like to know that fast? Like a fast no is way better than a slow no. And so in the name of and a lot of times sellers get super attached to their SKUs. They’re their babies. They don’t want to throw the baby out the bathwater. But when it comes to e-commerce, when it comes to merchandising, you do have to throw the baby out with the bathwater on a frequent basis, and then you move to the next product and you start over.

Steven Pope 00:35:43  And it’s it’s challenging to have that mentality, and it’s very difficult, especially if you’re a perfectionist, a high, detailed person letting go of something very, very difficult. But often the case, it is one of the smartest things one can do. And by the way, back to the manufacturing subject real briefly, the reason why I think USA manufacturing is going to see a big boom, obviously Trump tariffs, etc. they’re closing loopholes. You no longer can send your your direct mail and avoid tariffs if it’s under a certain price point. All these things are going to close up. And even on LinkedIn. This morning I just saw a report with somebody showcasing that on Amazon. US manufactured products saw a major boost in the last 12 months over the previous year, and it’s now beating China for the first time in a long time. So it’s already happening. But not a lot of people are talking about it. It’s still more expensive to manufacture in the state. It’s going to take a lot of skilled labor and workforce changes and big plants going up.

Steven Pope 00:36:27  A lot of changes are going to happen. But I’m an optimist, and I do want to see American made have a boon. And I really do think we will see that that change during this current administration.

Josh Hadley 00:36:36  So do you think so on that subject of overseas competitors then do you feel like they just get squeezed out? Is it the tariffs that are going to drive them to a point where it’s not profitable? But because a lot of these guys, I even questioned how they’re making money today and like yet you continue to see more and more pop up every single day. So like what’s your prediction over the next five years on Amazon? Because Amazon’s also courting a lot of overseas sellers like they’re putting they heavily invest in them.

Steven Pope 00:36:59  Let’s be clear Amazon is sucking at the teat of China right now. No question. Why would they do that. Because they make more money over there. Why? Because the average Chinese seller opens up ten accounts, right? The average Chinese seller doesn’t complain. They just go.

Steven Pope 00:37:09  And they don’t have a PR problem over in China. Right? Like the the bribery, the corruption and all the, you know, the the things that we see over there, just totally different cultures. So it’s easier to do business that way in the short term. Long term it’s going to come back to bite Amazon because the consumer experience gets suffers during that. But but as the loopholes close and if the system is completely equitable and fair, the American innovation is just going to beat China. Right. And and China is Pennywise but pound foolish to use a British saying and they they cut too many corners and yes they can win on price in 2025, no question. But as those loopholes go away, as manufacturing comes back to the states, and as those incentives equalize, you will see American innovation crush the competitors. Call me a patriot if you will, but I firmly believe our our innovative culture is superior because we don’t cut corners, because we don’t lead with bribery and corruption. And I think that there is a way to equalize that and to take away the unfairness and tariffs are just simply good practice to equalize between countries that don’t play fairly.

Josh Hadley 00:38:07  So, Steven, I think this is a perfect Segway. into our final topic here, which is going to be about launching products on Amazon. I love that you talked about look, the way that the US based seller stays ahead of all the overseas competitors is you’re able to outinnovate the competition. You’re not going to beat them on price. So don’t play that game right. And I think it is a the best analogy I can use here is kind of like in the auto industry, right? You’ve got you’ve got your Bentleys that are super luxury, you’ve got your BMW and your Mercedes that are more of like a premium option. You’ve got your standard run of the mill kind of average buyer, which is going to be like your Ford, and then you’ve got your cheap stuff, which is going to be Toyota right now with Toyota, if you look at them like they will produce good cars, but guess what they’re doing? Their entire business is focused around every efficient squeezing every efficiency possible out of that.

Josh Hadley 00:38:57  Right. So you as a business owner need to choose like how do you want to operate your business? Are you getting are you looking at every single shipping container and squeezing every little like dime out that you can of savings. And same thing from your manufacturing costs, same thing from your ad campaign, same thing from your internal staff that you hire. Are you squeezing and making every efficiency that you can there? Because that’s what’s required if you want to play the low cost game. Whereas if you want to play, let’s call it the premium game. We’ll not even talk about luxury. Let’s talk about the BMW and the Mercedes, right? If you want to play in the premium game, not, you don’t necessarily need to worry about being super efficient in your supply chain. Yes, there are some cost savings there, but what do they do best? It’s all about the experience, and it’s about what the feel and the look, the appearance. Right. And I think that that’s the advantage that a US based seller has above an overseas competitor.

Josh Hadley 00:39:45  They don’t get it. They don’t get the market. Just like you talked about Steven with like identify your target customer avatar. Right. Like the overseas competitors can’t wrap their head around it because they don’t know the US culture. And so with that being said, I believe that the way that the US sellers stay ahead of the game and still stay relevant over the next 5 to 10 years, is a you create products that are innovative. They’re not made to products, but you’ve got to be innovating and continuously launching. And kind of my final thing that I want to ask your input on here, Steven, is I believe that things are shifting on Amazon to where they’re kind of prioritizing newness that that that moat, that seller that has 20,000 reviews on that one listing. They don’t just get to dominate for the next decade just because they’ve got 20,004.8 star reviews on their listing. I think that Amazon actually is like, hey, we’re going, this is a brand new product within the last 30 days, I’m going to give it some of, let’s send it to the top and let’s see what happens.

Josh Hadley 00:40:40  So are you seeing that same thing? What is your recommendation for sellers as they launch, and is it still viable to continue launching new, new new products on Amazon?

Steven Pope 00:40:49  It’s a must, right? So after you focus and do the things we talk about in today’s podcast with the CR, the main image and the conversion elements in the pricing, the next thing to do is to go launch new products, and you have to do that every single year. And it’s the funnest process, but also the most tedious and monotonous. And so much effort goes into launching a new product. But because Amazon is favoring new products, they’re even giving fee reductions for product launches. The best time to launch a product is in Q4. So, you know, if you have several months between now and Q4, when’s the best time to go select your next product? It’s now and then have it ready to launch going into the Q4 rush, because new products just do really well during Q4 rush or other holidays. If you’re pushing a mother’s day product and launching it May 1st, for example, that’s going to do really well.

Steven Pope 00:41:26  And I’ve done exactly that before. I made $144,000 on a mom box, and I launched it in under 30 days going into Mother’s Day, and I didn’t even have a review on the product, and I used the CTR hack to get me there, as well as the price guidelines. Everything we just mentioned I followed and it still works today in 2025. So you know, as a seller, you need some cheerleading. You need to be told this is possible, this can be done. And that’s a fact. Is Amazon passive income? Absolutely not. But there are proven basic framework processes that do work like the ones we talked about today. And if you follow them, your edge is massive because most people don’t listen to the podcast. Most people are following their own internal process that is often corrupted, often to basic or not fully informed. And so these are the steps that that really make a massive difference for a seller in 2025. And it’s going to change next year potentially. But right now Rufus has influenced it at all.

Steven Pope 00:42:13  And that could change next month. It could change in a year from now, but right now it’s pretty static, pretty stable despite all of the noise that we’re hearing.

Josh Hadley 00:42:20  Awesome. Steven, to sum it all up, what’s your predictions happening on Amazon over the next 3 to 5 years? Where do you see the puck going?

Steven Pope 00:42:27  So it’s going to get harder. We’re going to see us manufacturing come back and China get squeezed and shrunk a little bit. And we’re also going to see probably Amazon buy TikTok or something crazy to engage in video content. Video content increasingly more important, over $10 billion a year spent on creative content for the purpose of e-commerce. That’s just a huge, huge opportunity for me to take advantage of.

Josh Hadley 00:42:46  Love it. Love those predictions. All right, Steven, as we wrap things up, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. Steven, you let me know if I’m missing something here. Action item number one is that you need to be measuring and reviewing your data on a weekly, monthly basis for your SKUs.

Josh Hadley 00:43:04  I think there are far too many people that, frankly, don’t even look at the data. Or if they do, they briefly glance at it and don’t do a whole lot with it. One of the key things that we’ve implemented in our business is kind of like that weekly business review, where we will go into each of the products, and we’re looking at what’s happened to the click through rate, what’s happened to the conversion rate, where are things trending for our products, and then being able to create specific action items for each of them. So I think creating a reporting system and then creating a system where you’re actually going to execute on the information, the business intelligence that comes out of those reports is super, super important. So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is to measure like I think it all comes back to one thing. There’s been one consistent theme over the last two and a half years of doing this podcast of, hey, what is the biggest thing that’s going to influence your ranking sales on Amazon? It all comes down to the main image, the main image, the main image, the main image, like the main image, wins everything.

Josh Hadley 00:43:55  And it’s that click through rate that you talked about. You’ve got to stop people in their tracks. And so I would argue one of the most important things that you can do in a business is like work with an agency specifically on those images, or if you’re killing it on Amazon, maybe consider hiring somebody internally where their entire focus is just on the creative from those secondary images, which is influencing the click through rate or the conversion rate to that main image, first and foremost, to make sure like, hey, are we stopping customers in their tracks? Are we separating ourselves out from the competition? I do know that that is something that you can run circles around your overseas competitors on. And then the third and final action item here is to stay relevant to beat the margin compression that is happening is you’ve got to continuously innovate, which also means you’re coming out with new product launches and new product launches are hard. They are time consuming, takes a lot of work. You’ve got to go find possibly new manufacturers, okay.

Josh Hadley 00:44:45  But that is what’s going to sustain you in the long run. Because, Steven, you touched on it briefly. Too many people get married to their products and they don’t want to kill them off. But look, if you’ve dropped the price 50% and it still doesn’t move the needle. It’s best to start saying, hey, how do we just liquidate this product and let’s move on. And so you should always be launching because it’s those new products and Amazon’s going to give you some love. Those new products need to replace and make up more for those sales of those dying products. And that’s how you continue to grow on Amazon year over year. Steven, anything else that you think I missed here?

Steven Pope 00:45:16  I think it’s a great summary. Amazon CTR festive sales at Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:45:19  Love it Steven. three questions to wrap it up here for you. What’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Steven Pope 00:45:25  Transcending the Levels of Consciousness The Stairway to Enlightenment by David R Hawkins. And that dude is, you know, he wrote power versus force.

Steven Pope 00:45:34  I got to tell you when you can put a number to everything. The world just makes a lot more sense to an analytic brain like me.

Josh Hadley 00:45:39  I love that beautiful, great book recommendation. I haven’t heard of that one. Got that one noted here. All right Steven, next question here. What is your favorite AI tool or ChatGPT prompt that you’ve been using?

Steven Pope 00:45:49  So I am using perplexity AI Pro version right now for any sort of research. So, you know, if I wanted to type in Josh Hadley into perplexity right now to understand as much as I could about Josh before I came on the podcast, I could do that. It’s at my fingertips. It’s very, very effective in terms of Amazon use. I do think a cloud or a ChatGPT prompt that sets up alt text. So you take a tool like helium ten or equivalent, dump a keyword list into one of the AI tools, and then and then ask it to separate out 100 characters of alt text in chunks. Makes it really easy for you to go plug and play that.

Steven Pope 00:46:19  So that’s one of my favorite ways to use. I love the way I says you’re a successful entrepreneur and venture mentor and strategist based in Dallas.

Josh Hadley 00:46:26  Man. Well, it’s telling me up way too much.

Steven Pope 00:46:29  University of Utah MBA like they got your whole life on there, man.

Josh Hadley 00:46:33  They’ve got my whole life. My web browsing history, everything. Love it. All right. Final question here, Steven, who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Steven Pope 00:46:43  So I’m going to pick John Aspinall. John Aspinall was homegrown at my Amazon guy. I taught him everything I knew, and now he’s started his own Aspie agency slash consultancy. And he’s he’s he’s taken my CTR thing and really hit it home. So it’s just awesome to see, you know, it’s not me against my now competitor in a way. but like, I, I just like leveling up life to accelerate prosperity to the world. And John Aspinall is one of the best people representations of my commitment and success at doing so.

Steven Pope 00:47:09  So I want to have a thousand year impact on the world. And the only way to do that is to replace myself incessantly and to help other people replicate my process.

Josh Hadley 00:47:16  Love that that great recommendation and love your mission there, Steven. Steven, if people want to learn more about you, my Amazon guy, and reach out to you, where can they do so?

Steven Pope 00:47:24  You can follow me on LinkedIn. I’m an I post on there at least once a day, post a YouTube video every single day, putting out fresh content all the time. And I do respond to my DMs. If you leave me a comment on a LinkedIn post, I will personally respond to it. So look forward to engaging with you guys. Thanks for having me on, Josh. And and if you guys haven’t yet, hit that subscribe button on this podcast because Josh puts out long form good podcast content. Where can you find that these days in 2025? I don’t know where else I can find it. That’s why I like to listen to Josh’s podcast.

Josh Hadley 00:47:48  Awesome. Well, Steven, thank you again for coming on the show. Pleasure having you here again.

Steven Pope 00:47:51  Thanks so much.