Bradley Sutton 13:11
Well, one of the things I want to start with is something actually probably I didn’t even start talking too much about until maybe late last year, early this year. Um, because it wasn’t as important as before, like, in the old days, as you were talking about, I mean, it was easy to get to page one, you know, you would just run search find buy or two step URLs. And you know, going back farther, you know, you people would do 99% discounts and two step URLs. And that was that was how I got my start, I used to use this company called zon blasts and I was like their, probably their top company or their top user of that where I would just like launch three products a day almost. And without much effort, I would get to page one and like three, three days, like consistently like like 100% success rate because I had the algorithms so like down and you know how to use them and stuff. And then all of a sudden, you know, last year Amazon’s like no more search, find buy no more two step URLs, don’t be doing rebates and stuff like that. So now it’s like, all right, takes a little bit a little bit more. So before I actually get to the launch phase, like things that actually help with launches, actually, even before when I choose my product. Now, what I’m about to say doesn’t necessarily mean that oh, this is the only way to do it. But something that I found helps is looking at something that we call title entity. This is not like an Amazon word we just made up, we have to make up a word. So what we call title density is how many keywords or how many listings on page one of a certain search term results have that exact word in phrase form. And so if you if you have a keyword in your title, or one of the main keywords in a niche, you know whether it’s a brand new niche for you or you’re expanding your brand, if you can find one to build around that right there will almost get you to page one almost from day one. Like let’s say you know, like the bad example would be collagen peptides. If you were to check the title density of collagen peptides is probably like 45 meaning In that out of the 50, organic listings on page one, at any given time 40 In between 40 and 45 of those 50, they all have collagen peptides in it, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get to page one, it just means it’s going to be a lot more expensive, a lot more difficult. Now, now you take something that off the wall, you know, like calm coffee in your bookshelf, or something like that, you know, the title density might be four. Now, that doesn’t mean that this is an amazing opportunity compared to the other one, you know, collagen peptides, obviously, is a much better niche, or much more higher ceiling. But at least as far as when we’re talking about launching a page one, it’s possible that from day one of my listing, I’ll be on page one without anything, I just make a listing. And if I’m the only one with that keyword, the way the Amazon algorithm works, it’s possible I could be on on page one. And if not, like a couple of purchases, you know, like through PPC or something, it’ll it’ll get me to page one. So that’s, that’s one of the things I tell people to look for is, is, hey, if if you want to know how difficult or how expensive it might be to get to page one, look at that title insert even before you hop into the niche, and then and then you know, you can kind of build your Strategy around that. Now. Another another tip that I that I do is, is taking advantage of the of the honeymoon period, you know, like, I call something that I call it having the Maldives honeymoon effect. And that basically means I think we all know for years, there’s this like unofficial honeymoon period actually might be official, some people found like this back end where there’s like some little word about about how, like a status of an Amazon listing, like during the first month or so it’s not all honeymoon or anything, but everybody has seen it where and the beginning, you get more, you get wider reach on your PPC and all of a sudden you get a couple of orders and you skyrocket to page one. Whereas like if you’re listing was like a year or two old, that’s that same activity would not have that same result. So that is what we kind of call the honeymoon period. And then I always try and say okay, how do we get the Maldives home? Like the Maldives honeymoon is like in real life that’s like a honeymoon on steroids. You know, so like, how do we get even more bang for the buck. And, and a couple of the strategies I like to use is, is from as far as on the PPC side is like relating my listing right off the bat with with products outside of my direct competition. Like, of course, you need to optimize your listing for your direct competitors. Like if I’m selling coffin shells, I’m gonna look at the top coffin shells, I got to make sure I have all of their top keywords, you know, whatever is making them sales, hey, that’s gonna make me sales, I gotta have that. But what I think a lot of people don’t do is look at the complementary products. So you could do that just one by one, just looking on all of those top competitors look at you know, physically or just manually look at their frequently bought together and get some ideas, you know, if you were to go to look at the coffin shelf, now, a couple of them might have like coffin letterboard or or some other Gothic, you know, like a gothic skull candleholder or something, you know, not direct competitors. But hey, there’s actually people buying both of these together in the same shopping cart experience, right. So what I do is I just use helium 10 black box, there’s a tab that almost nobody uses is called product targeting. And what what that tab has is it has like the last 30 to 60 days of all the products we’ve detected that have shown up in frequently bought together. And so I’ll use that to kind of get a more holistic view about what’s showing up and frequently bought together. And then I’ll take I’ll take, you know, maybe five or 10 of the top ones that keep showing up for multiple competitors of mine. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to do like a high level keyword research on those products. So let’s say there is a gothic skull candleholder, I’ll go and run Cerebro that but instead of trying to get you know their 30 keywords like Hey, what are their top three keywords like the highest search volume, where they’re ranked between like one and five or one in 10. Or I can see in brand analytics that they’re definitely making sales or something like that. And then I make sure I actually have those keywords in phrase form, like three to five of them in my listing. And then what happens is from day one of mindlessly see, when you have a brand new listing, Amazon’s algorithm doesn’t really have much to go on with what to relate your product to so it’s just gonna go on your listing copy. And so if you’re making your listing to your competitors, well yeah, that’s good. It’s like from day one, you don’t need sales or PPC knows that you’re a coffin shelf because he has that in a title and it sees that your listing optimization is similar maybe to another coffin shelf and so when you run an auto campaigns either on the asin side or on the on the keyword side or broad campaigns, it’s going to probably show you right off the bat for these other coffin shells and coffin shelf related keywords that you’re not indexed for but by taking this extra step and optimizing your listing against your your kind of like supplementary product top keywords now all of a sudden you’re like for Exene the your auto campaigns reached you know, depending on how you’re but you know if you have a bigger budget, and so you’re gonna start showing up from day one on these other products pages and these other products keywords and it’s not like a shot in the dark Market? Oh, could I get a sale from here? No. I mean, you already have the data that people literally buy coffee on shelves with these other products. So you have a decent chance that you start showing up on these other products pages as a product targeting an ad or you start showing up on these other keywords randomly, where you know, you have, you’re now increasing your chances to get to get sales. And so that that’s something that originally, I was using that Strategy, maybe like three years ago, mainly in order to just to get ranking for forbidden keywords from day one, you know, I did this speaking of case studies, I used to do this one product called is it was a hempcrete die. And so most of the keywords are not most but half of the keywords that are big money, keywords are actually forbidden than sales. Right? Right. This is a hemp hemp product, right? Like CBD, like like CBD is a forbidden keyword. Yeah. So when I was doing my research on like, what the heck, like we’re launching this new product. I know, I need to rank for CBD, but I can’t even put in my listing, first of all, you know, so like, how am I gonna get indexed for this keyword? How am I going to make sure Amazon shows me in auto? That’s actually the answer, like how you get indexed for forbidding keywords without having them as is, hopefully Amazon shows you an auto abroad campaign, and then you get a couple conversions for it. See, and then now all of a sudden your index now you can do a manual campaign against that. So the way that I was able to always from like, day one or two get indexed for these forbidden keywords is I would look at the very top sellers for you know, CBD pain cream or something like that. And then I would take their top phrases, stick it in my listening, and then cross my fingers. Were they okay, hey, Amazon algorithm, figure it out that my product is similar to this one, go ahead and start showing me for these keywords. And sure enough, it did. And then anyone those old days, it would be easy, because I would just have like a search, find by company say, hey, just give me three orders for this when you see an ad sponsored and then boom, immediately indexed, but then obviously, we can’t do that kind of thing anymore. But the same, the same theory was what what led me to this one where I was like, hey, you know, we definitely can can relate ourselves to other products in complementary niches. And that’s really helped me on launch as well.
Josh Hadley 22:05
That’s brilliant. I love that you’re the first person that I’ve heard talk about that specific Strategy of, you know, and even the tool, I know, we haven’t been using that tool on Helium 10 to go look at, you know, the product targeting. And I mean, what a fantastic tool to go find all the people that have been shown in the frequently bought together, and then to start relating your products to those as a way to get your product distributed out there more effectively. My question to you, Bradley, as you talked about, add some of their top keywords into your listing? Where do you add them into your listing? Because I could foresee an issue of, for example, maybe you’re selling a calendar, right? And a pen, there’s one particular type of pen, or it’s a set of markers or something right, that keeps showing up in the frequently bought together. But those are very kind of two very different products. Right? So how would you go about incorporating the marker top keywords into Calendar type, you know, a calendar type product, and where do you put them, right doesn’t matter as its description back end,
Bradley Sutton 23:16
there’s a couple of different ways. So like, the most ideal way is just to get it as organic and natural as possible, you know, in there. So like, the perfect situation would be, like, for example, it was used that Gothic candle holder, you know, I could like say in one of the bullet points or description, like, you know, hey, you can put a gothic candle holder on top of the coffin shelf, and then you have a real spooky, you know, a family or whatever like that, you know, like something that actually makes sense that not that’s not keyword stuffing. Yeah, you know, sometimes that doesn’t, you know, you’re not able to do that. Most of the time, though, if you really think about it, I mean, if two products are complementary, there’s a way to tie it together. I mean, otherwise, it wouldn’t be complementary with each other. Like, there’s got to be a way. But in the extreme circumstances where there’s not, of course, you’ve got your search terms, your back end search terms, most categories still have hidden the subject matter. Like you can’t do it in your edit listing. But like once you create your listing, if you use like helium 10 listing analyzer, or you or your advanced user of flat files, like helium 10 listing analyzer, we still have the subject matter and the even though you don’t see it there, it still works. Like we can hide in the API and the back end. And then so there’s usually five more lines of 50 characters, so you can put some of these keywords and then another one was very limited, but like if you just can’t put it anywhere, is this this back end feature that categories like Home and Kitchen, um, have that’s called special features. And that doesn’t help for ranking but special features is like the most, it’s a craziest field I have seen in Amazon in years where I could put something there and I’ll get indexed for like, in less than 60 seconds. You know, really, if you change your title or your description, sometimes it takes like up to a day for you to get indexed or for even to show up. You change something in the search terms like it was a meaning that, hey, like, within 15 minutes, you can be indexed. You know, like, in the old days, this one is like less than 60 seconds. And I could prove that two ways, you know, using that special URL, that Ajax URL that that shows what’s in the back end, or by actually just running index checker to show that, hey, this wasn’t indexing than 60 seconds later it is. So it’s it, you have to be careful, you can’t keyword stuff like you can in search term and subject matter. Because the special features, it’s actually this is kind of a positive and a negative. The positive, of course, is that, you know, you can index almost anything at all, even if like sometimes stuff I would put in search terms and subject matter. Just Amazon didn’t like it, I stick it in special features, it’ll be indexed real fast. But the drawback is you have to be careful, because this actually shows up on the front of your listing above the bullet points. Interesting. Oh, yeah. And the home in kitchen category. And like, I think health and household might be another one. I haven’t tested all the categories, it shows up. So you’d like you have to make it in a way that that it almost looks like a rudimentary bullet point. So you just you know, that’s why I say you can’t keyword stuff. So. So those would be the different ways that I would try and weave it into my listing.
Josh Hadley 26:05
Awesome. That’s great feedback and great insight. So Bradley, I think you covered two very important points at the beginning of a launch, right? Number one is looking at that market opportunity. And I love that the keyword or title density, as you referred to it, right, in terms of looking at prime, you know, opportunities for launching new products. I think that I love that Strategy. So now let’s get into the nuts and bolts of what is working, if you’ve got a product, right, you found a good niche. You found related products, you’ve done your keyword research, what are you doing now to try to get that ranked?
Bradley Sutton 26:41
So it depends on everybody’s budget, you know, but in a nutshell, like a Strategy that I’ve been using for this last year, since Amazon made that change is usually I’ll I’ll choose, you know, anywhere between three to 10 keywords that I’m quote, unquote, launching on and, Hey, that’s my focus to try and get to page one for these keywords. And, and the theory behind the Strategy is almost identical to what we used to do when we were using companies like you know, AZ rank and, and rank Bell and different search find by companies like that is, hey, they’re trying to get people to buy, you know, using the search of a certain keyword. And the way that you could do that is by Hey, you’re offering them a rebate, you know, maybe these people didn’t really need these products, you know, but the reason why they were doing it was because hey, it’s gonna be free for me anyway. So I’ll go ahead and search for this keyword and buy it. So that’s actually kind of like what you can do organically now. So what I do is that, let’s say those five or 10 keywords, and then one of my strategies is, it’s not five or 10 standalone keywords like I try and have some of these keywords be roots of the other ones. So like for example, maybe some of my top keywords is egg tray with an egg tray, a tray for kitchen, wooden a tray for kitchen, if I target these for like, I have to do a lot less, because they’re all roots of each other, you know, like like a tray is gonna give me a little bit of juice for wood in a tray tray for kitchen, wouldn’t make tray for kitchen will give me some juice for these other ones where that keyword is built in. And so like I always try and pick, you know, at least a few keywords, keyword families, I guess you can call them. And then I do an exact manual campaign, I could do it all on one campaign, I could do one keyword per, you know, per campaign, people have different strategies that they use, and that I just make sure I do a high enough bid where I am showing up at the top and I’ll throw it into keyword tracker with boost on Helium 10. Right from day one, just so I can make sure I can see in different browsing scenarios, different addresses, you know, every hour, like making sure I’m at the top of, of there and then and then. And then you know, if I’m not, you know, adjusting my bid accordingly, we all know that it’s really hard to just go off of Amazon’s suggested bid on these things. It’s not it’s way off sometimes. So and then. And then I’m going to make a sale price. Like I don’t change the regular price. Because if I start off, like let’s say I have a $30 product, and I started off at like $15 Once I start trying to raise the price, you know, I might lose the buy box or something like that. So I’ll put my regular prices 30 And then I’ll either do like a huge coupon or I’ll do a sale price for a set time. Okay, and then what I’m choosing as the price is I asked myself Alright, for this market, there’s no one answer for everything. It’s like, hey, if what price do I have to put this where if people saw this at the top of the page, even though it has zero reviews, or maybe one review or whatever, and there’s other people who look better? At what price does a buyer have this nice, just sit there and say, You know what, like, I’ve never heard of this product but at this price, I gotta give this a try it because it’s like too good to pass up and there’s no one answer, you know, like for coffin shelves. I think you know if let’s say I was doing a $30 coffin shelf to get there like it was like $15 What was that one you know for a supplement. Maybe people have more reviews and they’re and you know, you might have to go lower than that had a sale price. But the end of the day is you have to answer the question of what at what price I see and you could even use like helium 10 audience or PickFu? Same thing. Yeah. Like where you can do some research on what that price is, if you’re if you’re not sure, but But now, basically what you’re doing is you want people to search fine and buy your product, the regular people, you know, you’re not influencing this in any way. Yeah, you know, like, like old days, but just just people who are we’re searching for that keyword. Obviously, if you’re choosing his keyword as a launches, hopefully it has some kind of search volume there. And then it’s the same as before, like, we have the helium 10 CPR number, which says, like how many, you know, the best chance to get to page one, over eight days, how many people have to do and this is where it gets difficult now. Now, it’s a manual process, you know, before use those other companies, you say, hey, I need five orders a day one, seven orders on dates, you know, like, you can just tell them exactly what you need. And that was what happened. Now, you actually have to sit there and be watching your, your, your pace, you know, somebody in your team to be watching your campaigns in real time to make sure that once you hit that number of orders, or that keyword, you turn off that campaign, because because you know, too much more will will be you know, it’s not, it’s not going to do it’s not going to do good. And so you know, you know what that number is, you pay somebody to be constantly refreshing it, you also got to make sure that things don’t go viral, you know, like, like, let’s say you do have a $10 product or a $30 product, and you’re putting that $10 You know, he could get on slick deals or some crazy thing and go viral. If that happens, you got to turn off your listing, you gotta turn it off, because this is this is this is not this is not good. So this part is a it’s kind of more of a manual process. Me I like almost sometimes launching with my fulfill by merchant listing, I always do a list everything. And so you know, I have an FBA and I have a fulfilled by merchant, if my only inventory at the beginning is fulfilled by merchant, super easy for me to control to make sure some, excuse me to make sure something doesn’t go viral, because I can just put like 20 units of available, right. So even if I miss it, even if I like something happens, I’m away from my computer, it doesn’t matter, because the max that could that could go is 20. But But basically, you’re just monitoring those five to 10 keywords, making sure you get your target number of sales for that day, and then turn it off and then restart at the, you know, the next day. And then you know, every time I’ve done this, you know, I’ll still get to get to page one, you know, just like I did in the old search by by days, and then you know, I can turn off the sale or I could I could take you know, take another set of keywords and try and get to page one. There’s a lot of different options I can do. But that’s pretty much been my go to way now for over a year now for launching products.
Josh Hadley 32:26
Yeah, that’s, that’s fascinating. I love how you’re basically doing what had been done in the past, right, but doing it all on Amazon, kind of organically, right, the way that it naturally should be occurring. So my question to you is this, I haven’t heard that approach of, you know, everybody talks about like, we’ll just turn on, you know, exact match campaigns for the keywords. But I haven’t heard the piece you add on you added on was the fact that like you have somebody monitoring that and you know what your daily CPR rate is, and you’re turning that campaign off, as soon as you hit your number. Why? Why is that? Because when it more sales, the better. And I kind of have a two part question here. And then how does that impact overall conversion rate? Right? Because sometimes you can have a high number of clicks, and it can decrease your overall conversion rate. And I hear that that’s part of that ranking Strategy as well. So would you mind kind of shedding some light sure has two questions. Well,
Bradley Sutton 33:25
the main reason is you’re losing money on every order. You know, one of the main reasons is, is you know, if you’re selling a $30 product, your cost is probably are definitely over $15, you know, all in, you know, not even considering the F or you know, your PPC costs and different things. So, you want to minimize the loss and, and you know, in the old days, you you lost money to you would have to rebate the whole order, you know, so like, of course you you’re going to lose money on a launch, that’s the way launches, launches work, you got to you got to it takes money to make money. But at the same at the same time, like if my CPR number is only five for a keyword per day, it theoretically doesn’t do me much better to be getting 20 orders a day for this keyword. And that’s just lost, that’s just money, I’m throwing down the toilet, you know, a lot of times to is your Amazon doesn’t know you’re in a launch, or it’s not trying to accommodate itself to to your campaign Strategy. It could be that only like five of those keywords are getting the most and you’re trying to do 10. So like by turning off one of those campaigns, once it hits it, Amazon will reallocate, you know, some some juice and some impressions to those other keywords that maybe it wasn’t at the beginning of the day. But that’s the first reason why I want to make sure I limit things is I’m not losing money way that would that would have been like, if the CPR number is 10 per day. In the old days, I’m gonna pay one of those search find buy companies do 30 day like it doesn’t make sense, but more than what I need to. And then and then what happens is though, is theoretically you’re not going to get on page one right away of this. So you turn off that campaign. Now I’m not showing up. That’s not really that’s not hurting my conversion rate at all. generates gonna be great because those, you know, the few clicks I’m gonna get probably I’m going to convert them, a lot of them on a on a high percentage. But then once I turn off that campaign now I’m not showing up there at the top. So it’s not like my conversion rate is going to be affected at all. But yeah, that’s kind of like the the logic behind that that Strategy.
Josh Hadley 35:17
That’s really interesting. And so what you’re doing, you have the CPR number, for every single one of those 10 keywords, let’s say you’re starting out that date with those 10 keywords. So if you have, you know, you need five cells per day, right, for each of those keywords, essentially, you’re saying you need 50 cells in total? Yes. And you’re and when you say you’re refreshing the screen, you’re refreshing your advertising dashboard. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Anything. I mean, with that, I know that Amazon’s data isn’t always the fastest, right? There’s a lot of attribution, I think you’ll say, what, 72 hours for your full attribution. Do you see that? You know, do you ever have you had a circumstance where, you know, you weren’t seeing any sales coming through the advertising side on the report itself? But like, you could see in the business reports, you were making sales? Have you had any problems like that? Because I’m trying to understand like, yeah, how big of it? Well, you usually attribution.
Bradley Sutton 36:14
Yeah. In those cases, you know, when that attribution window is absolutely a thing, but that’s not going to give you ranking juice anyways. So if somebody clicks on your listing, and if they don’t buy their product, you know, today at 10am, and, and they come back, you know, oh, Saturday at 10pm and buy it, yes, I might get attribution. But that has nothing to do with the ranking anyways. So usually, Amazon will show right away, like, Hey, this is the one now if it if it could work the opposite way. You know, like, if I’ve been running this campaign for, like, 10 days, is it theoretically possible that, you know, one of these new things that comes up in attribution was from like, really three days ago? Yes, that’s possible. But but by that time, you know, usually I’ve gotten enough that I need, and it’s those are not going to be too much. And these are impulse buys, you know, so a lot of them, I don’t have to worry about them, bing, bing, bing, farther along, like if somebody lands and that’s why I said, the conversion rate is really good, is because, you know, if, if you click on it, and as hopefully that you have a good listing, and then people see, it’s like, oh, yeah, this is only this is half the price of everybody else, you’re gonna you’re gonna get that sale you like people don’t really sit on that for for a while, or maybe the ones that do, they’ve already added it to the cart, you know, and then even though they don’t buy, it’s still, you know, that adds a cart, you know, helps you and yeah, and it just complete side note, that just boggles my mind. Once Amazon started coming out with data about add to carts like in what is it like search query performance, and, and some of the product opportunity explore that it just bog boggles my mind, like, like, I think it’s something like in some niches is like five to one. And the reason why boggles my mind is me, as all of us buy on Amazon, I buy maybe one two things a day, if I add something to my cart, I buy it, like, I guess, I guess cannot understand how out of five people, four of them will add something to the cart and not buy it necessarily. But I’ve talked to people, I guess I’m the weird one. Obviously, the data shows I’m the weird one. But yeah, I talk to people, they’re like, Yeah, you know, sometimes I’ll hide like seven things. And then I’ll just whittle it down to the two that I want to buy like, well, that’s just like, I don’t know, what about you? Is that? Do you do that? Do you add things to the cart? And then not buy? Or are you like me, it’s just,
Josh Hadley 38:32
you know, I heard your other podcast where you talked about this. And I was in kind of your same camp or as like, I always am, like, just immediately, like, check out. But right or Christmas shopping this year. That’s where I’ve been more like, oh, just add it to the cart. So I can just like, and I just keep looking for new ideas as I’m looking for gifts for my wife. And so I used it as my shopping basket, so to speak. Okay, I say, All right, let’s come back. And now that I’ve added the wish list, I can go back and whittle it down from there. Yes, I think here’s the other thing that I found, especially for the 2022 holiday season, I know this is backdating this podcast, but for the 2022 holiday season with the amount of like inventory limits and the supply chain issues the Amazon was facing. Like it could say, Hey, this is going to arrive before Christmas. You get to checkout, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, oh, arriving after Christmas. And you’re like, yeah, so that’s kind of another reason why I was doing that. But
Bradley Sutton 39:36
anyways, anyways, like either way, whether they add to cart, it’s not gonna be as powerful as a purchase, but it’ll still it’ll still help you. So that’s why, you know, the Strategy still works.
Josh Hadley 39:46
Interesting. How long does this take right? To get something ranked on the first page, right? If you’re targeting those 10 keywords? Is this a Strategy you have to implement consistently over two weeks? doesn’t one week, what have you seen in the data? Well, the really competitive
Bradley Sutton 40:03
ones, you know, like where the title density is really high. And there’s some pretty pretty hefty activity already on that page by the competition. Yeah, he could take up to two weeks, the ones that are lower in search volume, you like maybe 2000 searches or something, and the title density is really low, like you could get on page one after a day. But I wouldn’t stop it there. Because, you know, if you just, you know, take your foot off the gas, Amazon might correct itself and just say, Okay, this is just a fluke, you know, so I still wouldn’t have a go, Yeah, at least five to seven days. If not eight, you know, the CPR number is designed to go after eight days. And so, but like I said, sometimes it might go farther. But if I know it’s like, super, super not competitive, I might go ahead and stop it at four. If I’ve been at page one already, for like two days or something, I try and want to stay on page one, at least, even after I get there, like at least two or three days afterwards, just to send those additional signals to Amazon. Now. I don’t completely take my foot off the gas, you know, like some people say, just in general, hey, what if I’m already paid for opposition? When do I stop advertising? And my personal philosophy? I know, different people have different opinions on this, my personal philosophy is no, you know, because I still want to be there at the top of the page. Because, you know, the way that Amazon search results are nowadays, like, sometimes the only sponsored results at the top like your your page one position, one organic is like halfway down, halfway down the page. And I want as much real estate there at the top. But at the same time, it’s like when I’m in my launch phase, and I have this 50% off price, like, no, like, maybe I don’t want to necessarily be be pushing, you know, too much. So it’s kind of just like a little game, you got to play, you know, with each situation.
Josh Hadley 41:38
Interesting. So follow up questions on that would be at what point? Do you start raising your price? And how do you do that, right? Is this you know, $1 at a time, over the period of weeks and months? Or is this something you could quickly just jump up to the price that you want to be after you get ranked, it’s going to
Bradley Sutton 41:59
be different for every product, you know, there are some where I just went to regular price, you know, since it was a sale price, I could I could just end the sale, and just go to my regular price of $3. Like if I feel like I’m still competitive, even though I only have zero reviews still, or one review, as long as I’m on page one, and my conversions are going to be okay, I’m gonna just gonna end that sales price after 10 days already have some I might do gradually, you know, some I might not do at all like, if if I get to page one for those first five keywords. And now I’m just going to completely switch to another five keywords why gotta keep that? Yeah, sales, right? Yeah, because now I got to do it, I got to repeat repeat this, for this other so there’s no one size fits all. But it’s just, it depends on what your goals are. But, you know, usually I am not going to have it for like a full month Oh, almost under any circumstance. Because by that point, like I’ve lost, I’ve maybe I’ve lost, you know, too much money. Like if I have to, like if I am launching a collagen peptides, you know, like a super, or garlic press or somebody that’s super, super competitive. You know, I might have to keep that that sales price until I hit that magic number of you know, for different people. It’s like 10 reviews or 20 reviews or, or something like that. So, um, but yeah, like, like, I can’t think of a situation where I’ve gone beyond 25 days at that special price.
Josh Hadley 43:13
Interesting. Yeah. Good to know. And then with that, then you’re just rotating the different keywords throughout the time, right? You’re working on.
Bradley Sutton 43:24
And then and then I go into kind of like this maintenance mode, where now I just start my regular PPC campaigns, and maybe I’ll start doing more broad and more auto, you know, more discovery campaigns and, and things like that, because all those are still gonna are still gonna help.
Josh Hadley 43:36
Okay, but the main thing is having the top of search placement, right, so you’re doubling down, you want top of search, you don’t want to be showing up on product pages or rest a search in order
Bradley Sutton 43:46
for those for those target keywords. Yeah, yeah. Because that’s the only thing that’s that’s going to help you get to organically move your rank up faster is just, you want every single eyeball that goes on that keyword to at least have a chance to see your listing and click on it.
Josh Hadley 44:03
Fascinating. I love this. Bradley, you’ve shared so much knowledge, is there anything else that you would add to you know, getting a listing a new product launched on Amazon and maintaining that that we haven’t really covered up to this point? Well, just a
Bradley Sutton 44:17
couple of things. You know, I know this podcast is geared towards bigger seller so so maybe there’s some some helium 10 elite members out there, this is not a sales pitch for helium 10 elite actually, even if you wanted to, you couldn’t join Helium 10 elite right now, like I don’t even think we’re opening it up until like, middle of next year. But for any Helium 10 elite members out there, you guys have some exclusive access to some special tools and one of them that helps with launches is one of my my favorite things that we’ve done is historical cerebro. So like let’s say I’m getting into a niche. If it’s somebody that sells like a garlic press the same all year round. You know, you just use the same old techniques, but like if you’re getting into a niche and you and it’s seasonal in any way or cyclical at all. Well you In the old days, what I would have to do to do my historical keyword research, you know, because if I’m doing research in Cerebro, for right now, it’s showing me what’s going on the last three days. But maybe this product peaked in like, you know, summer or something like that. And I just be guessing on the keywords and guessing on the main one. So what I would do in the old days, the only visibility I had to historical data would be to use brand analytics, I would go into brand analytics, select a timeframe, and that’s but that’s very limited, because it’s only showing me the top three click products. So now what we have is, is for elite numbers, you could actually go in and view Cerebro, as of any month in the last two years. So like, let’s say, you know, Valentine’s Day is coming up, you know, now we’re at the end of the year, beginning of the year, if you were to run Cerebro on top Valentine’s Day products, some of the products, you know, Valentine’s Day products, they only stay in stock in February and March. And so like I couldn’t even run Cerebro on it. Right, what I would do is I will find those top selling ones from last year, either using black box or again, you know, finding a couple from brand analytics. And then I can actually in Cerebro, run Cerebro as of February of last year and the previous year to see all right, what were the top keywords that people were ranking for, as of February 2020, to February 2021. And now I can already you know, even now in January, I can already be all set, you know, and try and maybe even rank for those keywords in January when nobody is really there’s no activity. So super easy to rank for. And then the other thing is, like I just mentioned, um, so So there’s so many sponsored ad placements. Now on page one, different keywords have different ones, you know, you’ll see top from our brands like a new widget that’s kind of like sponsored once. It’s and it’s not just Amazon brands, it’s really weird. Do you think that’s only Amazon promoting these brands, it promotes private little words there too. There’s Amazon’s choice, like not just Amazon’s choice, but like a whole widget that says that it gives you like Amazon’s choice from different from different ones. There’s editorial recommendations, you know that there’s sponsor brand video as a sponsor brand. Header ads, there’s, there’s trending now there’s like a new widget slightly. All of these are all sponsored ads at the end of the day. So in the old days, you could just like say, Alright, who’s ranking organically on page one who’s ranking on sponsored like the traditional sponsored product ads, but those are only two pieces of the pie now. So elite members also have a starting with December of 2022, they’re going to have all historical and, and real time data of like you enter in a product into cerebro. It’s going to tell you all of those places like hey, here’s all the places where you can actually see them. They’re coming up on page one, the editorial recommendations. And so we can just rely on the old strategies because it only tells a piece of the story now like like, somebody, if somebody is dominating like 10 of the main keywords, they’ve got five placements on there, you know, hey, there showed up in the editorial recommendation, they’re showing up in trending now. And they’re showing up in organic and sponsored. And they’ve got a sponsored brand video, and they’ve got a sponsored brand header. Literally, that’s that sounds crazy. But literally there are products doing that, well that you might now change your Strategy, where it’s like, oh, this is not as easy of a keyword like I gotta like, how do I get my listing on all these placements, you know, to match my competitor. So that that’s another thing that’s kind of new, new ish, that we’re that they speak with us as a Strategy.
Josh Hadley 48:10
I love that what a great tool. And I know there’s there’s a lot more capabilities that Helium 10 Has that I think people aren’t even scratching the surface on. So, Bradley, is there anything else that we haven’t covered with product launches?
Bradley Sutton 48:25
That’s about it. I mean, there’s there’s tons I mean, we have a seven hour podcast on product. Well, that’s, this covers the main. Yeah, this covers the main stuff here.
Josh Hadley 48:34
I love it. Well, Bradley, this has been super exciting. And you know, very educational I myself have taken away a lot of action items for myself. So before I asked you the final three questions that I like to ask every guest, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here the three takeaways that I noted Bradley, let me know if you think I’m missing something. So number one, as you look to expand your product offerings and coming out with new product ideas, a good opportunity, or, or a tip or Strategy is to look at title keyword density, as Bradley mentioned. So, really, and there’s a feature on the helium 10. You know, Chrome extension that allows you to see that right, you can type in the keyword. So definitely go into whatever niche or product category you’re looking at. And then type in the main keywords and type in maybe some of the medium search volume keywords and seeing if see if there’s some low hanging fruit there because more often than not, there there can be some low hanging fruit. So that’s action. Step number one. You can even do that with existing products. If you have an existing product, go in there and make sure that you have the right keywords there in your title because it will make a huge impact. Action Item number two is when you’re launching. I think the biggest mindset shift that I had today is that You can still implement many of those same strategies that were working before. But you’re doing it all on Amazon’s platform. So still run your CPR number, right? Still calculate everything, but run everything through the Amazon ads, right? So you want to have your top of search placement, run it on a select five to 10 keywords, and focus on the top of search and get your CPR number for the day and turn it off. And then action item number three, I think for people is to understand that and be willing to lose money in those first two to three weeks. Right. As you mentioned, Bradley, that’s why we talked about at what point do you raise the price back up? Because how long can you just continue to lose money on every single sale. And so in order to do that, you are going to need to budget, right. So understand your financials, the only way that you’re able to grow to eight figures and beyond is if you’re practicing good financial business acumen in your business, you can’t just you know, in our our business, we’re launching two new product categories every single month, the only way that we do that is because we know how much it’s going to cost. And we know we have the cash flow in order to do that. Because sellers can really you know, get themselves in a pickle so to speak, if you’re just losing money, and then launch after launch. And really quickly, you could run yourself out of business in a way. So that’d be my third actionable takeaways, like get really good at your numbers. And there’s many different tools out there that that can help you create those budgets. So, Bradley, that’s my three takeaways. Anything else you would add? No,
Bradley Sutton 51:46
that’s pretty good. Like, like when I when I do podcasts, I don’t even remember what we talked about 10 minutes ago, let alone be able to pull out three top things in the whole episode. That’s pretty, that’s pretty impressive. Not only made me step up my game.
Josh Hadley 51:58
Well, awesome. All right, Bradley, the last three questions that I have for you. Number one, is what has been the most influential book that you’ve read, and why
Bradley Sutton 52:09
that would probably I don’t read much books, like at all, but but there was one that really had an impact. And it’s probably it’s probably one of the only books I’ve read lately. Because I’m more of like a, like a YouTube video and, and podcasts, person, but it’s the Four Disciplines of Execution. This is something that we for dx, for sure, but it’s something that we at Helium 10, like, in the early days, when we were really small company, we were in a we work and there was like 15 of us is something that I think helped kind of like catapult us, us, us us to the top was is just a way of like every aspect either of your life or of the business about making it about KPIs and different things but just in a way of goal setting and and really making sure you’re looking at your leading and lagging measures and it was just a different mindset. You know, maybe there’s some people have already been been been doing that on their own. But for me who hadn’t been doing that it was kind of like a complete my mind. Set shift for me personally. And then as a business, I could definitely see how it really helped us when we we kind of like built our our initiatives around this 40x Strategy. So that that’s my that’s probably my favorite business book. I’ve read yours.
Josh Hadley 53:21
I love that I’m gonna have to dive into that book. I’ve heard that one before. So awesome. All right. So next question. Typically, I like to ask people, you know, hidden software tools or new tools that they’ve started using that other people should be using. But I think specifically I want to ask you, Bradley for helium 10 What are some of the most underutilized tools that helium 10 Has that sellers need to be implementing? I think you’ve already shared a few of them on the podcast today. But for seven figure sellers, what are some additional tools that you think people are barely even scratching the surface of using?
Bradley Sutton 54:01
Well, two of them would be our inventory management, you know, like you’d be shocked how many people like him had Helium 10 For years they don’t realize we have full inventory management software that that you know, has advanced algorithms you know, based on forecasting and I can create my POS right from in the software I can create my Amazon shipping transfer shipments right there within the software without without even going to seller central things. So that’s just like one a general use thing, but like kind of like an under the radar. I already mentioned one of those today, which was that black box product targeting tab, but one of the mainstream ones I think people sleep on that really is impactful is alerts. A lot of people already use helium 10 alerts, but they don’t actually pay attention and sometimes I’m one of them, like like there was a case where for the coffin shelf, they they changed like one and a half inches on one side. And and sure enough, the same day that Amazon did that I got alerting me and I just I didn’t even look at it. And then four months later I was trying to do some auditing. And I’m like, I lost $4,000 In the last three months, because it put me to a higher bracket for shipping. And I had no idea and it was four months later, I could only get like three months of the money back. So I did end up getting $3,000 back for like fighting with Amazon for a while. Yeah, but, but if I would have just paid attention to that alert, you know, like, I could have got that straightened away right away and not have to lose $1,000 Or have to go through this long process to to get it fixed. So for anybody who has Helium 10, and this, this goes for platinum Diamond Elite, turn you off, it’s not just automatic from day one, you’ve got to go in and turn on the skews that you want to have alerted. So if you have like 1000 skews, I don’t think it allows you to do 1000 alerts but you usually don’t have 1000 top sellers. So pick your 100 top sellers or your 200 Top Sellers turn alerts on and then make sure you got somebody on your team actually looking at those because that one is the big the dimensions change that can lose you money you know, obviously if Amazon changes your title, if an image gets changed, we get adult suppression I mean all these different things that can happen but I think the most common one that all of us have dealt with is Amazon just randomly changing our dimension. Yep. And that’s not knowing so so guys make sure you have your alerts turned on.
Josh Hadley 56:12
Yeah, that that’s a huge one that’s an easy takeaway for today is if you haven’t done that Amazon we found that in our business Good grief we thought you know, the first time Amazon we ship in the product Alright, dimensions are correct. You look back six months later and you’re like what the FBA fee is double now what happened if you have the dimensions completely wrong? I don’t even want to know how much money we’ve lost in the past, you know, right? For not looking at that but something that we started implementing so good takeaway. All right. Last question that I have here for you Bradley is who is somebody that or who is someone you admire or respect the most in the E commerce space that other people should be following or paying attention to?
Bradley Sutton 56:57
Um, I’m going to give something completely off the wall here. My turn some people off, but I was one of them before but the founder of Helium 10, Manny coats, you know, he since he sold Helium 10. He hasn’t really been in technically like the E commerce space, but but he actually started this NFT project. And for most of us were like sick of cryptocurrency topics, or NF T’s or Hey, aren’t those dead now? And I was totally one of them. I like it was funny, even for a while there was some like big Helium 10 affiliates, where when crypto was like really going high, they were like, You know what, we can’t we’re not gonna promote Amazon anymore. Courses and stuff, because we’re like, all in on the crypto and we saw what happened there. But, you know, Manny Coates is somebody who like basically, he’s like the Midas touch like like he created a billion dollar company, you know, from from a podcast, you know, the am pm podcast, a lot of people don’t realize that was what he started because he was starting selling Amazon and then and then Helium 10 came from the am pm podcast, it was actually just started a couple tools because he wants to promote the ANP of money. That’s more. So he’s like, let me make a couple of these free tools like scribbles. And I think was Frankenstein was the other one interesting. And then it became so popular. He’s like, holy crap, you know, let me focus now on the software side, instead of focusing on the podcast, so like he and his co founder of helium, 10, Guillermo, like pretty much anything that they do. I’m like, okay, like, I gotta, I gotta take a look at this. So I always, you know, pooped on NF T’s and things like that. But then when they started their thing called the bulls and apes project, I was like, this is super interesting. And now I’m, like, totally engrossed in it. And so like, I’m following them and what they’re doing there, and I’m, like, heavily invested in this thing. And then you could, like invest in because of this community, like invest in things like SpaceX and stuff, but just in general, you know, whether you follow him or not, I just think it’s important that as entrepreneurs, we have like hobbies and different things that kind of like take us outside of our regular day to day, and for me, that’s what it is now, like, it’s a game and I play it and I’ve actually, you know, I’d like probably 10x My money already on it. But even if even if I was just breaking even, to me, it’s almost like a hobby that that resets my brain as far as you know, we can get so just engrossed in the Amazon day to day or Walmart, whatever. And then we get burnout and stuff but like 30 minutes a day now I’m like going into my to see how my NF T’s are doing and seeing if I can buy some more and different things. It gives me a nice little reset for my brain to take me out of Amazon and into something completely different. That’s kind of like fun, and gives me some endorphins and stuff. And so So yeah, for me, I follow him and everything that he’s doing in that but I just recommend to anybody fine. Don’t always just follow you know, it’s great to follow the Kevin Kings of the world and Brandon Youngs and, and and Tomer Rabinovich and different people in the industry, you still do that, but find somebody outside of the industry or find some thing that can take your mind off of Amazon just a little bit of weak.
Josh Hadley 59:48
Yeah, I’m a big proponent of that I joined a mastermind group as well, that was not Amazon specific and just meeting other business owners in real estate space or SAS. I mean, just the ideas that come through, you know, can really, really help propel your business forward. So, great, great advice there, Bradley. All right, Bradley, where can people follow you and reach out to you if they want to learn more?
Bradley Sutton 1:00:14
Well, you know, give us a subscription to the Serious Sellers Podcast, you know, whether wherever you’re listening to this on I’m sure it’ll be on that platform, as well. And then, you know, you could see me in the Helium 10 members, Facebook group, and my Instagram, I used to use a Serious Sellers Podcast Instagram, but that’s what I use for my personal too, so you can follow me on there as well.
Josh Hadley 1:00:34
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us, Bradley. Appreciate it.
Outro 1:00:39
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