Josh Hadley 6:32
Yeah, it’s so true. Now Dima. Before we dive into everything today, I want to tee this up to say, you know, you are voted as the best speaker at the most recent billion dollar seller summit that was back in Puerto Rico in the summer of 2023. And so you know, your stuff. I think people have already heard your name in many different areas. But I want to tee that up. Because you know, this is going to be an action packed episode, you’re going to have to hit the rewind button a few times. Damon and I offline already talked about numerous items that we’re going to dive in today. And so Dima, with that being said, I want to start by with this question, our listeners are seven figure sellers, they want to scale to eight figures and beyond, you’ve been there and done that. So what is probably the number one strategy that sellers need to implement in their business, if they want to continue to scale their brand, one
Dima Kubrak 7:27
of the biggest parts for you to understand that going, let’s say, from 100,000 cells per month to 500,000 cells per month, or 1 million cells per month, is completely different businesses is not just double or triple your cells, it’s completely different in terms of structure, maybe loans, companies, the teams, the processes, the data analytics, the resources that you acquire, and the amount of money you risk. And as well, as far as I can explain, everything starts from our team and cash flow and finances, you have to you have to understand all your numbers, if you don’t understand your numbers, it’s gonna be a very challenging for you to go to grow, especially if, at the beginning, let’s even you sell 30, 40 $50,000 per month, you can make mistakes of not doing proper accounting. But the moment you go in, above all, like higher and higher and higher, you need to understand how much your team costs, how much services cost, how much PPC agents and your marketing, how much it costs. Of course, a lot of sellers, they understand how much they spend monthly on PPC. But that’s not the only main main expense, a lot of things that comes together. And I was just briefly talking about the Josh previously. And you need to understand how much it cost you in time, money focus, to grow to eight figure or maybe even a nine figure seller eventually. And we usually ask this question how much it costs to become a bestseller. Because to become a bestseller, you will need to invest a lot of how much inventory you need to have enhance. Like, for example, if you sell 1,000 units a month and the best seller sells 10,000 a month, you need to understand that before you double or 10x yourself, you need to buy this inventory. Where are you going to get this money. And I have an amazing example. I sell one of the products called collagen powder. The product, let’s say was making about $40,000 per month. And for me, too, to have enough inventory. To just keep up with the sales I need to have about like 500 $600,000 in inventory. So just to collect this amount of inventory. We need about 15 to 18 months if everything goes fine. No algorithm changes. No PPC changes, no ranking drops just to collect enough money. That’s why sometimes you can see someone doing a lot of money but the actual profits and the actual money You can withdraw from the company is another, a lot of like, challenging process. That’s why the Profit First is one of the books, I admire you to read the process to read, maybe this Profit First for Ecommerce people, I didn’t see this information or articles here to video, but I’m definitely going to dive in.
Josh Hadley 10:19
I love it. So focusing on the fundamentals, which is just understanding your finances. And I think Dima, we see that often with a lot of sellers, right that they some of them were, as I’ve talked to, you know, North bound group and others that help you exit your, your business, right, they say about a third of entrepreneurs that come wanting to exit their business, they come with financials that are not well put together. In fact, the entrepreneur doesn’t even understand the financials very well. And then they’re basically told like, you’re not in a place to be exiting your business at this time, right? And so if that’s a third of sellers, like everybody needs to do an internal check and say, like, am I you know, am I one of those, one of three sellers, that I’m not accurately overseeing my books. And, you know, we also had Nathan Hirsch on the podcast as well. He talked about one of the most important things that you need to be implementing in your business is a monthly financial review, right? And understanding where is money coming in, where’s money coming out, and not only understanding your accrual accounting books, but also understanding your cash basis accounting books, because they’re too, they tell two very different stories. And so if those words that I’m using accrual accounting, cash basis accounting, if those are foreign words to you, I would pause the rest of this podcast, I would go to YouTube, and go watch a five minute YouTube video that tells you the difference of those things. And I would genuinely invest the time to understand your financials, because that is honestly like the fundamental basis in order to scale to eight figure. So Dima, I love that. Josh, you also talked about
Dima Kubrak 12:06
I would add one important part, there’s so many, there’s so many things that you need to do right in your business, a lot of them but not all of them will have a direct impact on your growth, profitability. Whatever you name it, there’s a cool book, it’s called execution. And at the beginning of the book, The guy says, majority of the owners, they don’t understand what exactly making profits in their companies, you need to understand like, okay, running a good accounting is important. But to be honest, if your product going in ranking, dropping in ranking, like a rock from the cliff, of course, understanding accounting and paying service providers for that would be fantastic. But overall, man, you have to, you have to redo your daily schedule and a daily focus and making sure that the most important things taken care of first, and then maybe Of course, you will decide where you’re going to allocate your money for additional services. And that’s, that’s what we’re going to talk about this today about a proper focuses on a daily basis for you and maybe for your team members. That’s why because you need to progress you need to progress year over year. And one of the things I’ve figured out for myself, maybe it’s not going to be for everybody, but I am my catalog of all my products. They focus mainly on consumables, I like consumable products. And if you’re thinking about consumables is like a supplements and the beauty products, there’s a lot of consumables, some people they buy, they buy bags, they buy packaging materials, they buy coffee, they buy a lot of groceries, there’s so many consumables even in in the categories that are not really not very popular. Like think about like Home Depot, go to Home Depot, like if you live in the United States, just go to the regular big store that new specific and and walk in this like my pet products, go to the pet store, and you’re gonna be it’s gonna be it’s gonna blow your mind because when you’re doing a product research in tools like Jungle Scout Helium 10, whatever tool you’re using for the product research, sometimes you’re using these filters, and everybody sees exactly the same results over and over again. That’s why the competition is so tough in specific niches. But if you go to the regular store, you will find out how much like fish food or turtle food is available on the market horse. Himalayan salt brig I’m not saying these products to be launched but I’ve just seen this all the time. I don’t have a horse but I’m just saying like there’s a lot of cool products that you can launch and if your product is is good quality. I’m not saying the superior quality. A lot of people they try to improve they try to make product Much better. But sometimes, you need to make product worse, what I’m what I’m saying, I usually have some examples here, but I have, I don’t have it with me, I wouldn’t be able to, you know what I give me just a second, I’m gonna bring something to give an amazing example, it says right here in my other room in my office, and I’m going to show you something. Give me a second. All right, let’s do it. Let me show. Let me show examples. So you don’t have this. You don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, when you make a product worse. Like, for example, this is the DJI Osmo. It’s like has a nice stand is like if you put here is like, follow you follow your face. It’s a fantastic product. It’s like maybe it’s like $200 product, I don’t remember. But I used to be $200. Maybe the price has been dropped on Sunday, like a special connections and battery inside. And then there is another product, it also has a stamp, but it’s just a magnetic clip. And that’s it and this product is like $60 but there’s even you just what I’m trying to say you need to understand what exactly people are gonna buy on the web what exactly they need in, in the product, what’s the —
Josh Hadley 16:14
What’s their pain point that they’re trying to what? This is this?
Dima Kubrak 16:18
Yeah, what is that? What is the coffee mark? Okay, so people when they think about Amazon, they thinking about like, people can when people think about Amazon, they think it’s like endless opportunities or endless keywords amounts, but every product has a limited amount of keywords that people are going to buy with. So, if we want to find a coffee mug or I came across then there is a limited amount of keywords that will be related to this product and some are a little bit higher highly related some products, keywords will be less related, but you need to understand that some some keywords like for example, these types of products they will be find with a completely different search terms, some things will be crossed, but some things will be different and and find in this keyword is a highly related to your product, and ranking these keywords is the one of the most important job for you as an Amazon sellers to be focused on. Another question would be how much is gonna cost you to rank these keywords, let’s say this, let’s say coffee mug maybe has like 17 keywords that are gonna make your money, rest of the keywords probably will not make any sell they they have a search. Search volume, people call the search volume, but we don’t. We don’t estimate our lunches and our product ranking based on search volume, we only look at the amount of sales the keyword can bring when we’re ranked to the one to a third position. And that’s one of the biggest focus you have to have, you have to have okay, if this product can be sold only through 17 highly relevant keywords, how many cells this keywords can bring in position number one, this is the simplest explanation but people missing this bullet point. They go through these difficult Excel files and combine and combinations. But the only what you need to understand is like okay, keyword number one can bring me 20 sales per day keyword number two can bring me 15 sales per day, when you combine them you see, okay, the product can bring me 150 sales per day, What are my chances to rank to the position number one. So this is the second biggest part. You’re not. You’re not competing with the entire Amazon, you compete with top three guys. So those top three guys, they have, they have images, they have reviews, they have price. So you need to understand the key. If you’re going to place yourself next to the guy like the one guy that you build number two, for example, how many people will click on your on your image, like how many chances people will choose you against him. And I can tell you from my personal experience, their review count is not as important as people think. Review velocity is more important than than then review count. Price, important. Coupon is important. But image is the most important part of your journey. Because it’s really responsible for click through rate and will never work on the image. We spent a lot of money before we’re launching the product. We do a lot of tests, we use services like a big Fu. In Tel Aviv, I sell a metric this the services we use for for initial comparison and a B testing. For example, if we want to compete in a coffee mug space, we’ll take our coffee mug and we take our top three competitors we put them on a on an AP test. And we want to and we want to make sure our product is winning for six clicks out of 10 against our competitor products and of course it’s it’s a website that you can choose that Amazon customers have to be in a poll but still even if our product winning the actual results you’re only gonna see through the Amazon A B testing. So we’ll also run a lot of AP testing through Amazon And that’s a very important part. Also on the images, we find out that if you place your box correctly, you’re going to have a better click through rate and conversion rate versus products that don’t have a box on it,
Josh Hadley 20:13
you’re talking about like product packaging on the main image, you think the product, yeah, it doesn’t
Dima Kubrak 20:19
have to do the actual product packaging, your product packaging can be shitty packaging, visually, you can make the package that will attract the person. So and eventually, if you see that people like your packaging more, then you can probably redo your packaging. So before you make an any reduce, or like any mass production packaging, improvements, try to test it first, like try to add like this sign or try to make your product name bigger, or maybe smaller, maybe put like some additional. We’re calling this like Ikea spots, we tried to find them. And like for example, one of the products was fighting with one of our competitors. We’ve been best sellers for like eight years, and our product was red. So everybody was black before. So we did, we did the red design. It stood out like everybody was clicking by and that was why we would be in a bestseller. And then everybody starts to copy us and now everybody becomes red. And we’re like, oh my god. So there’s almost no differentiation. So we make product blue. Now everybody is red, and we are blue. And we are bestseller. And we’ll also add like additional like an eye catching spot later, maybe we can I can show you how it looks like but you can just you can just try to Jace what what’s working the place maybe we can put like American flag or maybe you can just put like, count of pieces inside. Like we have like on this specific product, we’ll put like a yellow, a yellow sign on the packaging, saying it’s like 40 pieces inside. So it really stands out in the search results. If you’re gonna see you like, oh my god, I will definitely click on this product, especially if the product $2 cheaper and so on and so on when because when you are best seller, you’re pretty much selling 30% More than next guy because of the because of the best seller and like a marijuana. And your and your PPC is going to be better like your performance is going to be way, way, way, way better. Also, we start to experiment now, by reducing the amount of PPC we’re spending on product. So like this specific product that I’m talking about BSR we’re cut off PPC by 70%. And we went up. How did you tell PPC?
Josh Hadley 22:33
How did you cut off PPC like what campaign?
Dima Kubrak 22:36
We’re spending, we’re spending $1,000 a day on PPC on this product 30 grand a month, if we’re gonna calculate the total amount of orders we have in per month. Let’s say we have 1,000 orders. Okay, let’s say we have 10,000 orders. So we’re paying $30,000 for PPC. So these $3 was spent in per each organic and marketing order. Is it sizable, let’s try to drop by $3 Our price and cut PPC by 70% which will be like almost like 20 grand. And you know what we after magically went up in organic positions, because the price also matters on Amazon maybe it’s not gonna work in every every product. But that’s what we was discussing before every category, every product is different. So you have to understand and you have to be strategically testing all the time, like strategically, thinking, looking at reviewing, and since I’m selling almost in every category I sell in beauty I sell supplements and industrial and musical and arts and grocery. I can say that not every strategy works for every product. So if you figure out that this like eye catching spot will work out for you will be more performance. Maybe some categories will not but I didn’t see any categories that were improving my image will not work. It either works 100% of the time. So we’re talking about image improvements 95% of all our calls. It’s its biggest department that you have, I would say if I would choose to focus on the PPC or choose owner designers, I would choose designers versus PPC. I would just fire all the PPC and just focus on the designers. If that would be a question if they will choose needing different departments.
Josh Hadley 24:25
So you heard it right there. Dima just said you know, a graphic designer that’s going to design your main images and even your secondary images is far more important than any PPC strategies that you’re trying to implement.
Dima Kubrak 24:42
Yeah, that’s a first distribution second. So the content has to be an amazing quality amazing not don’t know when I’m when I’m talking tell them about amazing quality. It’s not like it has to be 4k or 8k or it has to be done. In a professional studio. It can be recalled Have it on an iPhone, but it have to relate to the actual customer that you’re trying to match. So the moment the customer sees this, it’s become a like a like a spark in his head, the moment customers crawl in the search results, because he don’t know your product, you don’t care about products on Amazon, to be honest, he just, if you if you guys live in in the United States, and you’re buying products on Amazon, once think how you’ve been buying the product, you just type in coffee mug, you scroll, you choose one or two products, you probably buy two or three, they delivered to you and the rest of you pick one the best and you return the rest. So a lot of people they have this buying behavior. People buy in seconds, they don’t have time to think they just like it so it’s in their subconscious mind. Like if you have a very eye-catching product, you probably will stand out and people will just choose you. They like the click to rate the conversion will be amazing.
Josh Hadley 25:56
So especially on that, on that note, Dima, I want to dive in a little bit more. You’ve tested this numerous times, and you’re as bold to say,This works across all product categories. The number one lever is the main image. So Dima, I would love to hear from you. What are the things that you can do in your main image that you have seen provide better results against the competition? Right? Let’s say you do have a regular iPhone stand kinda like you were showing earlier. You have a regular iPhone stand. And to be honest with you, if it looks the same as many of the others, how would you change that main image? And what are some of those things that you’ve seen proven to make your main image stand out and be different?
Dima Kubrak 26:41
Fantastic question. First of all, then let’s step one step aside, right, once the back to the product selection, I would not launch a product standard look alike like everybody, and probably I would not even try to improve the stand, because they all look alike. I will give you a quick example go right now on Amazon, maybe pause this podcast and type massage massage gang, and you will see every massage gun look alike, you cannot even understand the difference between them, they all black, they all have this all hats and you pretty much you guess what you’re going to buy like the actual customer thing from the customer perspective. They have no preferences, they just buy something maybe. And the price is almost the same, the $5-10 difference is not a big difference for products that cost $60 or $80 in America. So it’s not a determination as well. The product selection makes before we’re doing a product selection that will before we’re launching a product, we’re trying to find out is there any way for us to stand out in the search results and be and look different, doesn’t have to be product have to be different. But a lot of times you will find out that there’s like little things like as I was saying maybe maybe adding a packaging on an image. It happened to me before with one of the guys he posted in some Facebook group. He said, Hey, I launched this like a power connector. They all they all look the same. I go on Amazon, I couldn’t find him. And then I say oh my god, that’s him. And I say like listen, try to add a package. He said my package looks like it’s a Chinese package, it’s not even worse to take a picture of it. I say like, no, no, don’t do the original package, make a lamp blue, beautiful, like black and yellow combination. You could just talk to a good designer, they can come up with something and also go sometimes to the elec stores with the electronics like a Best Buy and see what the packaging is. In other companies look like you will be surprised how beautiful they can be. Maybe don’t try to go after Apple. And we’re going to talk about this because some people they try to copy this like nice, sleek designs. But those guys, they have a powerful brand following for them. It’s completely different how people look at the product. And when we’re talking about my Amazon Marketplace, and only about Amazon Marketplace, you have to understand the rules, they’re a little bit different. Versus if you sell on Shopify versus if you show sell on Facebook landing pages, like Facebook to the landing pages, or maybe if you try to sell on tick tock, it’s completely different fish. And the rules are completely different. So you have to understand fundamentals of Amazon algorithm to make sure you follow this rules. And one of them it’s a visual, so the visual, let’s say and the guy, he plays this nice looking standing box and he said oh my god myself, like went up three times because of the because of the just the image and I say that in the next batch. I’m just going to make this box. And I’m going to show and I can tell maybe.
Josh Hadley 29:48
On that main image. Then Dima, what you’re saying is he created the main image featuring a product package even though his product packaging didn’t look like that yet, right? The package that the customers are receiving, it could just come in a polybag, or whatever it’s coming in currently. But what you’re saying is he first tested it out before he went through the effort of redesigning and putting together a whole new product package first.
Dima Kubrak 30:18
Yeah. But also you have to understand one thing, the product have to meet a customer expectation, a lot of time when you as I’m saying, if you guys live in the United States, and you buy products on Amazon, and let’s say you purchase a coffee mug, you receive the coffee mug, let’s say you let, let me ask you this question. If you’ve been buying products on Amazon, which is 100%. Sure you did. Do you remember any of the packages product came with? Let’s say, if I use in this stamp? I don’t I cannot even recall how the package looked like.
Josh Hadley 30:52
It’s true. Yeah.
Dima Kubrak 30:54
Yeah, just just don’t try to be too crazy. Let’s say if your product comes in a shitty polybag, and you shine like an amazing box, maybe it’s too much. And some people may complain, but you have to put in your title, package may vary. Lesson: That’s the important part. Or maybe somewhere in the listing package may vary. And of course, because you test and overall tried to make sure you improve and you’re not just blindly aligned and trying to pretend like you’re a good guy while you just issued like a 50 cent product.
Josh Hadley 31:29
So on that note, then Dima. So strategy number one to increase the click through rate for your main image would be creating or designing a product packaging that makes you stand out even if that’s not the actual product packaging the product comes in. So that’s strategy number one. What are the other like tips or hacks or strategies that you’ve seen that consistently outperform the competition as it relates to optimizing main images.
Dima Kubrak 32:01
Another bar that I forgot to say, when they just mentioned, if I would choose between PPC team or designers team, I probably would stand with the designers team. Important part is this. Remember one important thing, there’s only two ways to make money on Amazon from different placements. And the placements could be free or paid organic placements, they’re gonna make money to NPPC placements, they can make money to you or wherever you place there by paying for the placement. The biggest part about this, if you’re gonna stop your PPC, pretty much stop paying for the placements, how much money you’re gonna make, stay in organically. That’s, that’s an important part and paying for the placements on Amazon by not making money out of organic placements. You are overpaying for an under-optimized listing, I hope I hope you will understand again, when you’re just spending so much money on PPC. And let’s say not conversion or not not making sales from it or not making profits from it is because you’re not making money from organic cells because your product under improved or people who bind people who tried to reach they have not seen a value in the listing that you created. And the moment you will realize this, you will understand 80% of your focus have to go first to improving the visuals and improving the relevancy between how people typing let’s say coffee mug and what they see in the search results. And if you would be able to really understand like dial in, in the buyers behavior Bible buyer psychology what he will want what he expect, then you will be able to convert and make product like amazingly stands out, it’s important to understand like for example, if we if we see that we want to let’s say we’re what we can sell our product, let’s say a coffee mug and coffee mug coffee cup. It’s two different search terms coffee mug and coffee cup. If you’re trying to rank for a coffee mug, we’re gonna write coffee mug at the beginning of the title and we’re gonna write coffee mug on the image. If we’re trying to rank for the coffee cup. We’re also going to swap the image. And we’re going to add this to make sure that when someone type in coffee cup, they see coffee cup on an image and they see coffee cup on the title. So when you acquire an we’ll call them clusters. When they acquire the clusters, the cluster have to reprint be represented on an image and then you’re just at the end of the test at the end of the year ranking campaigns. You just need to figure out which cluster more relevant to you because the product stays higher in organic and people likes you at the organic searches more than let’s say coffee mug or coffee cup or an extended coffee mug or like I am not selling coffee mugs. That’s why I don’t have that many examples I just come up with the clusters but probably you already understanding what I mean.
Josh Hadley 34:57
Yeah, I love that. All right. So you He talked about product packaging. Any other last tips that you would share for optimizing a main image then?
Dima Kubrak 35:06
No, no, no, that’s that’s that’s all good. Of course you have you have lots of images, try to add on the images, people, actual people, not not fake people hell holding a cabinet been applied to buy photoshop on Fiverr for $5. Just go on a website, like a join brands, which is like a huge secret. Like, there’s a Gen brands, there’s an incense, there’s trend IO, my my favorite is joined brands, because it’s easy to work easy to set up campaigns, and images for the actual people will go through like 30 bucks dividuals, I think sell for 60 bucks. And you just make sure look, your Amazon listing, it’s an acid, okay? It’s a huge, gigantic acid with lots of small pieces. And it’s not like you doing like one thing, it’s the you do like a million things to make sure your asset is continue improving day after day, year after year. And, and that’s and that’s what you focus in on a lot of time, as I was telling to you like we’ve been selling product for eight years. And we already changes three times. Like, because like, in some categories, we’re changing even often. Like, first of all, we have a beauty company, where I think we change the brand almost every year, we’re just improving and improving and improving because the category is just continuously growing. The new trends, new colors, new lines, new patterns is going on the market. So you have to always be focusing, you cannot stop. It’s It’s It’s empowering, important part. And another another part about your listing optimization, guys, you have to see a lot of sellers, they never seen their product. No, of course they seen their listing, they went on the listing, they check their product, they scroll a little bit, they see different parts. But not many people see them in a search result. Even there are sometimes they see them in searches all day, they see they don’t see them every time they do updates. And another part, sometimes they don’t see them on a mobile, they don’t see them on a tablet, how they look like how they look in the search results, how their actual product look. And when people click on it, how the ads look like how they video ads look like. But the next part, their team members never see their products in the search results in a mobile and an electoral sample. If you don’t know how to use Inspect Elements and the change for the mobile view, there’s a free website. It’s called a web mobile proz.com. It’s a free website, you just put the URL and you’re gonna see how your product looks like in a mobile view.
Josh Hadley 37:29
Yeah, Dima, I love that. Now, one last question I do want to ask you is, you know, Amazon has changed over the last decade. And one thing that you mentioned a lot about is like, you need to compete with the top one to three sellers in your category, right? You need to get those one to three organic rankings. So do you mind my question would be, can you boil down in really simple terms? What is your launch strategy? And how do you get your products launched? Or ranked organically? Because you also mentioned like, Hey, I’m also going to pull back on my PPC spend. So I’m curious in the world we live in today, there’s no more search find by but how are you getting your products ranked?
Dima Kubrak 38:15
It’s a gigantic topic. Let’s say everything, everything comes first from understanding like what exactly want to rank for, let’s say keywords, like what exact keywords because a lot of people they just come up with like this 300 list of keywords, it’s almost impossible. And we call our system it’s called strategic ranking when we work with a team. And let’s say we come up with let’s say, when we launch in the product process, we’re trying to rank only for three to five keywords. Of course, at the beginning, we use PPC extensively, we’re using PPC, we’re also using different email lists and SMS lists that we’ve been collecting for a long time. In different niches we use different system let’s say sometimes we launch products with a variation mode. Sometimes we’re using our luncheon products with the wine reviews, and a combination of this like for me if you want me to dial in and like specific process and variations of lunches because there is about like five different variations of lunches we were implementing during the lunches. And also, it’s not only about it’s not only about basic rules it’s also about how you fix an errors errors along the way because first of all, why we why we launch in first we call this Test listing where we’re launching a test listing first we’re creating the listing and we’ll never use this we just use this for to see if Amazon will request any certificates or if Amazon has any like a stop keywords are also we’re sending Tory Tory units to this listing for to apply for the wine program. The reason why we’re doing this and we’ll never use this listen we just want to we want to I’ve said we don’t use this listing as a main listing for lunches, we just call this test listing. So we send the study units we see people buy, people take our wine products, let’s say we’re receiving 1012 reviews from one campaign like that. And a lot of time, wine customers, they could be very tricky. They’re good, but they could be tricky. Sometimes they don’t leave you good reviews. So if your product organically is not good, another organically, but let’s say in supplements and beauty, a lot of time vine customers is not ideal place to get first initial reviews, as they are very picky, I would say typically, they they don’t understand the product, and they just leave in you like three star four star. And you can adapt it like 2.7 or 3.4 stars at the launch. And imagine if you imagine if you send like 3,000 units, now your launch is done, you pretty much you just killed your life. So you have to remove these 3,000 units, pay a lot of money to Amazon pay a lot of money to a Prep Center to repackage reliable and start brand new product. So sometimes that’s what we do. And we just seen, okay, if the wind program doesn’t impact in a good way, like we’re not getting like 4.5-4.7 stars, on average, from the test listing, we’re not going to use a combined program. But then in the future, let’s say we swap this listing to two pack. And then we can use this as an advantage to launch a main listing with a one pack. And pretty much it’s kind of it’s a very simple strategy, but it doesn’t give you much advantage. But overall, these pre-tests are so important for you before you before we dive in, guys, I what I what I want to tell you, there’s a lot of small little things. And of course, Josh is doing a great job asking the questions. And sometimes the people can ask me like how to properly launch a listing. And I’m saying there’s a lot of small things that is not like a one major thing like click on this button, and everything goes well. Same as a PPC, when we launch it with the PPC will only focus on I would say like three key words, to be honest, just to make sure these keywords are the most relevant, we’ve been creating a product as much as we could to be relevant to the search terms. And we used to try to rank or boost sales for small keywords for us longtail keywords first. And we’re trying to go after big keywords, we realize that going after big keyword is way more profitable. And way more guarantee and way more sustainable than just going from after small keywords and the bigger keywords and like medium and bigger and bigger. So it’s better to create a coffee mug, like white collar coffee mug. And because we do the research and this is let’s assume nobody sells white coffee mugs on the entire planet. And we just come up with this brilliant idea. And that’s what white people are, for example, nobody to sell coffee mug with it with the handle. And we’re just like, oh my god, the handles will change.
Josh Hadley 42:58
Yeah, I love that. So diIemma real quick on the PPC campaigns when you first launch if you’re focusing on the three most you know, traffic or highest search volume keywords, are you turning on any other ad campaigns? Or are you just starting with three exact match keyword campaign exact match?
Dima Kubrak 43:15
No. Nothing else? That’s it. Nothing I was just and we which I can the conversion? We don’t we don’t it’s not really important for us how much cost the click and how much we’re spending like acres is doesn’t matter. The conversion. We want to see if our product in our eyes because as I told you we artificially place in product to the top result. And we want to see if the customers who actually looking for our type of the product like and what we placed in there. So if we place in there and our product, the conversion have to be at least 20% from our ads. And if conversion is less than let’s say 10%, we have a problem, Houston.
Josh Hadley 43:57
Yeah. Well, and you can compare it to the market average, right using the brand metrics there within Amazon. The PPC SQP.
Dima Kubrak 44:08
Yep. And so look, for example, there’s two main reports that people use nowadays, SPP report, which is third quarter performance report. This report is a bit off, you have to understand the data that in this report is is very purified data, I would say I would say it’s like I’m not gonna go too much into details. I can just tell for sure. In SPP report, the only positive data that you can get is the ratio between traffic clicks Add to Cart and purchases, if you if you keep this ratio when you’re ranking your products or trying to keep this ratio then Amazon likes you the algorithm feeds you and it’s gonna move to push you up and and brand Analytics reports. They are important for you. Let’s say if you’re trying to rank for a keyword coffee mug, and let’s say you you’re asking your audience through email or SMS list, let’s But then you do in that way, then you if you’re not showing up in the brand Analytics reports and like as like the most converting the most clicked asin, the chances for you to go up almost none. So either doing something wrong. Yeah, yeah and brand analytics day that doesn’t include PPC which means it’s only organic from organic placements. Begin is a bit tougher, of course, and you probably going to be expecting product to be a break even in the next like 90 days. Sometimes you can see faster sometimes depends on your line strategy. If you’re launching through the variation or frequently bought together tab, then probably your profitability will be higher, or you will break even faster in like 30 days. But usually we see the product. If it’s a standalone product with its own cluster, you are probably going to see about three months to become break even sustainable with the inventory. Yeah, yeah, and get some like organic production ready.
Josh Hadley 45:59
I love that. Well, Dima, I know we could go on for another hour or two, talking about all of these and all of them are deep topics, as you mentioned, but it was great to see kind of the inside of how you’re working with your brands, and what are you prioritizing and the importance of listing optimization. So Dima, as we wrap up the show, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted Dima, let me know if you think I’m missing something. Action item number one is going to be you need to differentiate your product right? When I asked Dima, the question of you know, what’s the listing image hack that we need to include? Or what’s the list? Or what’s the launch strategy that’s going to help us get ranked? Here’s the secret guys come out with a product that is not a me too product, right? What you need to do is utilize tools such as mid journey or dolly, and maybe go to AI to just brainstorm some new different ways that this product could appear. And then use the different tools that you mentioned, and Tel Aviv, product pinion, or PickFu, to then test out and get people’s feedback to say, you know which which of these images or designs stand out the most to you, which one would you like to click on to learn more about, right, so you can validate your product idea without having to go purchase the product from China or wherever you’re getting it. So start there, first and foremost, come up with a differentiated product. That’s action item number one. Action item number two is going to be focusing on your main image. I have heard this time and time and time again, on this podcast, the biggest lever that you can pull in your business in terms of listing optimization for any of your current products, is the main image. Alright. So with that being said, Dima shared a great idea in terms of create product packaging, even though that product packaging might not be what the customer ultimately received. A, they’re probably going to forget about it by the time they actually get it. But in there, you can, you can really set yourself apart by incorporating product packaging on your main image that just helps you stand out, it catches somebody’s eye, and that is going to increase your click through rate, ultimately your conversion rate. And that’s going to propel your organic ranking further. And then the third action item I’m going to say here is focused more on the creative, such as digital, you know, a graphic designer, the digital creative space in your business, lean into that even more than you are on the PPC and analytics side. Now, everything is important. But what Dima referred to is, I would rather go with a very strong graphic designer that can create amazing main images over somebody that’s wicked smart with PPC. And so start there. If you don’t have a solid team that does your main images, your secondary images right now, that is one of your key hires that you should be focusing on bringing internally to your team or at least having a good contractor that you can go back to over and over again, that understands the importance of setting yourself apart on the Amazon marketplace. So Dima, we talked about so much but those are my three actionable takeaways from this episode. Is there any addition?
Dima Kubrak 49:37
Josh, you missed one all right. Let’s hear it consumable. guys tried to focus on consumables because as a guidance owner of Paul Mitchell, he said we’re not we’re not selling a shampoo we’re saying a subscription consumables is a key for your continuous growth. In the future. If your product is good enough people will continue Fine, and you will just grow year over year over a year. Because the more and more people will use your product, especially if you’re innovative and you continuously improve in the product package and maybe some ingredient, you track the trend.
Josh Hadley 50:12
Yeah, Dima, I couldn’t agree with you more on that I would definitely. And that’s even good food for thought for myself, for us to lean more into, like, what are consumable products, right? And I think people need to stop thinking about oh, supplements are the only consumable thing, right? Or just grocery related items, right? There’s a lot of different consumables you talked about, you know, could be packaging, tape, packaging bubbles, or it could be what you just talked about, there could be even like a card that somebody has to send a business, thank you card or something like that, right?
Dima Kubrak 50:51
There are things that people go to stores, like a Home Depot, go to stores like Publix, PetSmart majority of the stores, the local the retail stores, you need, you need to see they focus on products that people repeatedly buy, and it’s not only like one time purchase throughout the life or in three, four years. If you sell coffee mugs, people don’t buy many coffee mugs especially they do maybe buy but and America’s overconsumption country but overall, overall people buy way more. I will give a great example. I just went for some business event in Alabama with the with the Mafia Offer guys. I think you also probably I don’t know. Are you? Are you part of the Mafia Offer?
Josh Hadley 51:39
Shawn Hart. Seth Stevens.
Dima Kubrak 51:41
We went there. And yeah, this year this year, they did like this little meetup and then they it’s like a tourist area. So they don’t have like a great coffee shops, but they just opened a brand new amazing like maybe like two years ago coffee shop, it’s called Happy Pappy. And we went there, the coffee shop is amazing. We’re like that amazing desserts. And I see them guys do so much. They say like, yeah, we do so much as I could, you could just show me and they show me my brand. So and then. So like, yeah, it’s my company. So every time like for example, I go to here in Florida, like see coffee shops carry my green tea. The reason why is because it’s a good quality. People buy this over and over again. And they say like, “Hey, would you like to have a free bag?” I told her that she’s like, “Yeah,” and she’s showing me the history of purchases of this tea. So coffee shop, just keep continue buying your product, the customers keep continue buying your product. It’s consumable. And if your product is meeting a customer’s expectations, then they can be with you forever. I think I was reading about Starbucks. Starbucks has an average order value, like overall, like lifetime value per customer. $1,700. So we were gonna spend $1,700 buying products in Starbucks, maybe more, because it’s average, imagine how much money they can spend on marketing and brand building. And that’s the key that you have to solve and click in your brain. And maybe your cell right now. Stands will not be forever, the standard bit of roof technology improved. Maybe in the future. People don’t need phones, but like I used to sell lavalier microphones, like for iPhones, but audio jack doesn’t not available anymore. But they made $2.5 million out of this product back in the days. So and then pretty much probably right now that because nobody has used an audio jack $3,000 per month. But yeah.
Josh Hadley 53:33
I think it’s important, I think you hit on a key topic there, which is like you constantly need to be innovating. And just because you’d started somewhere doesn’t mean that’s what you need to stay in for the rest of your life. Right? You should always be launching new products. And so I love that, like think of how you can create a consumable product that people will need to come back and purchase over and over again.
Dima Kubrak 53:55
And look, you know the company Segway? It’s like a stand you’re standing like you’re right. And the reason why a company went bankrupt because their product was too good. You have to understand as always, your product have to meet customer expectation doesn’t have to be the best. So and Amazon it’s a mass market. So if you sell in a coffee mug it does that doesn’t have to be made out of gold have to be made out of normal product material that people expect and sometimes can break.
Josh Hadley 54:25
Makes a lot of sense. Dima, as we wrap up this episode, I’m gonna ask the three questions we asked each of our guests and number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?
Dima Kubrak 54:36
I will give you two. Alright, so number one is your personal performance, which is I believe it’s, it’s called Atomic Habits. Probably you’ve heard this. If you already read if you really read Atomic Habits and you like hey, it’s one of my favorite books. Then read the next one that kind of step up in understanding your human behavior. It’s called Willpower Instinct. You go it’s gonna blow your mind how we allowed ourselves to be bad people. Not bad, but I’m saying like, you eat a hamburger, because there’s a salad and a tomato, but you’re not thinking about been fed a piece of meat inside that really actually like exceeding your calories for three days. Are you? Are you writing Tesla to save on gas, but you’re not paying taxes. So you have to labor the taxes. So like, wherever I’m just just giving you an A, and a second book. Second book would be for you guys. It’s how to hire proper people. It’s called Who. The book is just it’s not a it’s not a book just to read. It’s an SOP, it’s a manual. Even in this book, there’s a specific step by step questions that you need to ask the person the scorecard or any of your employees master this book. It’s highly important for you to become a professional corporation owner.
Josh Hadley 55:58
Yeah. I agree. It is a fantastic book, all of those are. So I will double down there with you Dima and recommend those as well.
Dima Kubrak 56:06
She lays it person read another book, it’s called Meetings Suck. It’s the book to read. And you will understand how to run proper meetings, how to not like a lot entrepreneurs. After they grow the company, they grow in their ego inside. So to make sure the ego is under control. You need to understand you are under control as well. And that’s very important.
Josh Hadley 56:32
I agree. I love it. You got four even more than we asked for. I love it. Dima, question number two, what’s your favorite productivity tool or new software tool that you’ve recently discovered that you think is going to be a game changer?
Dima Kubrak 56:45
I will give you to remember for over time, the number one, I think for the productivity for you and for your focus. It’s a free Chrome extension. It’s called One Tab. I don’t know if you heard about this. A lot of people and I’ve seen this, like millions of times they have like, million tabs open. And they need all of them all the time, especially girls because they look like they like to do multitasking. And girls are really good at multitasking. But overall, your focus and your attention have to have to be focused, one table will have the ability to reduce all of it put in a specific organized list. And it’s free to use. So just go to Chrome extension download and thanking me later when we hired people in our company. We have like few tools that we’ve given them for acquire. And one that was one of them to make sure they understand how to keep the proper focus. And the second one, I would say it’s Brain.fm. Brain.fm. When I’m tired, and I feel like hey, I’m already exhausted from overworking or from like continuous work. It just helps you you just sit up like 15 minutes. It’s like a special. It’s like music especially, as oh if you work for yourself in office, you put it on sometimes at the beginning feels distracting. But then you like feel like your focus just dial in. And like special waves that help your brain to to set this up. It works amazing for me. But another the the biggest part that helps me to keep my energy going. It’s my cold plunge that I build in my house. Of course it’s not a two, but you guys may need to consider cold showers. And when I come home I’m tired. I want to maybe like take a nap like a one hour nap. I take two minutes a cold lunch three minutes max. And it’s like an espresso shovel Red Bull shot and you’re like.
Josh Hadley 58:42
You’re ready to go. Dima, I love it. Again, you continue to over deliver there. I love that. Those are three great ideas, productivity tools. Alright, Dima.
Dima Kubrak 58:52
It’s because I hustle every single day. I love you got one last thing guys, I want to tell those of you who are listening already stand for almost an hour on this podcast. Maybe right now you are going through some difficulties or maybe your business is thriving like crazy. And you’re like, Hey, I just want to acquire more and more knowledge. You have to understand none of the good times last forever, but none of the bad times last forever. So you always have to be focused, like my wife asked me hey, Dima, there’s potential economic crisis going on. The economy may collapse, what are we going to do, do we have any plan for it I say like, listen, regardless of the situation, we will keep continue working. If we keep continuing our healthy behavior of being a productive people. There is nothing can stop us. So don’t be afraid of the future. If you create an unconditional yourself to be a performer. There’s nothing that can stop you even if you go through difficult times. continue focusing on you making sure you continue going, if you will know my story how I came to the USA and how many times I lost businesses, you’ll feel like there’s nothing that can stop a person. Just keep continuing going.
Josh Hadley 1:00:09
Yeah, that’s so true. And Dima, I love that. I think that’s, that’s an extra special bonus hack that you just gave us that the mindset is so, so important, you might be on cloud nine right now, you might be raking in the most sales that you’ve ever had. But it’s so important to not get too high and think that you figured it out. Because guess what, there will be a downturn coming, something is going to happen, you’re going to lose a key employee, you’re going to get some type of listing suppression or suspension or, or just random stuff is going to happen to you. The most important thing is to develop really good habits, right? Good habits, and even when the times are tough, keep going back to those good habits that you have in place, keep working with a goal in mind. And ultimately, you will get back, you will get to that mountaintop and be able to look across the vistas and say like okay, these ups and downs were good. They brought me to where I am today. So I love that. Dima, last question here, who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following? And why?
Dima Kubrak 1:01:17
That’s that’s a really good question. I would say. I like Alex Hermozi. That’s guy I just recently discovered this guy. He’s interested in maybe I am not gonna follow every advice he has, but some things are very logical, I would say. I like Grant Cardone as well. He the guy is just like, I listened to his book 10 acts, like so many times. I’m not sure he wrote this book. But overall, maybe he did. And look, I don’t remember which book I was reading. I think it’s called deep work. You need to understand one thing guys, and they wrote this as well. Even if you love like, like some personality or for some person. A lot of times if you will meet them in person and talk to them. You may be disappointed, because you probably fall in person for some specific topic. Maybe he’s like an expert on Amazon. Maybe he’s expert in marketing, or he’s expert in buying and reselling real estate. I’m just talking about Grant Cardone. But overall, you never know who is this person? Maybe, maybe or maybe this person is not very ethical. I’m not talking about Grant Cardone. I’m just saying that this guy’s just completely ethical. I’m just saying sometimes you can be disciplined maybe this person don’t have a healthy routines or have a like broken family representation, something that something that will not, not, not will be aligned with your vision. So just always think like, what exactly you want to acquire from a person someone recommend you, let’s say like Alex or Moses, or Grant Cardone, maybe just take some things, but don’t. Don’t. Don’t create yourself idle. That’s really important. Yeah.
Josh Hadley 1:03:00
I love that. Dima, this has been a fantastic conversation. If people want to learn more about you, they want to follow you. They want to learn more about the software tools that you have available. Where can people follow you and learn more?
Dima Kubrak 1:03:12
Yeah, just follow me on Facebook. I post sometimes content sometimes finding sometimes not. Sometimes I do local meetups, which I believe I like to connect with people. And I work a lot. So sometimes I do like once a month once per two months. I do local meetups if you’re on Amazon in the Amazon space, and if you live in Florida or plan to visit Florida, if you see I’m posting that I have a local meetup, I share a lot of actionable stuff that I cannot share publicly on publicly recorded podcast. So sometimes people ask me like, more like deeper questions, and I tell them exactly how things works. That’s, that’s important. So follow me on Facebook.
Josh Hadley 1:03:55
I love that. Facebook, Instagram, meet him in person in Florida. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Dima, thanks so much for your time today. It was a pleasure having you on the show.
Dima Kubrak 1:04:05
Thank you, Josh. Bye, everybody.
Outro 1:04:08
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