Steven Pope 3:58

It’s a frickin joke. I cannot believe how ridiculous the process is and all that fluff on those Amazon tickets, right? So like, you’re like, Hey, I just need to change my UPC on this one product so I can become compliant like Amazon. On the left hand side. You must change your UPC is GFI GS one and you’re like okay, sure I’ll be compliant. No problem. I go by my my GS one UPC or at least right let me try and upload that into my product. Oh, error message. You cannot change UPC that is against the rules. But you told me I have to change my UPC to be compliant with just one you cannot change UPC so then you file tickets ask for help and then they just give you garbage copy paste, and then they and then my favorite part is the fluff right there seller. We’re so your message is so important to us. Here’s five minutes of copy pasta that nobody needs to read and it’s complete garbage. Oh, by the way, you can’t do this. Right? It’s just it’s just so ridiculous. It’s so true and right now, and nobody at Amazon cares about sellers at all. And like it’s super abundant. Okay, so maybe they don’t suspend you without calling your first now that was nice, thanks Jeff Bezos. Yeah, like the the compliance versus the ability to make control, logical changes to your own product pages. Amazon’s randomly changing your category. So Amazon is seemingly randomly yanking your products and putting up the last dogs of Amazon pages. They frickin love dogs over in Seattle. It’s like a six month waiting period to get your dog on on the photoshoots. Over at Amazon. It’s it’s they’re

Josh Hadley 5:29

obsessed with dogs. I had no idea I had no idea they had a cue for that. So that’s why when

Steven Pope 5:35

your page gets yanked on Amazon, you see the last dog and it’s literally a different dog every single time there’s like 1000s and 1000s of them. So but but really like, okay, Amazon, I get it, you put all this effort into taking pictures of dogs, and all I want is functional Amazon support, just give me a frickin guy who can respond to a logical request and fulfill it. That’s all I need. Just let me change my title. Just Just let me unsuppressed my listing, control 20 of my listings for not having GS one compliance for UPCS but you won’t even tell me you don’t even give me a suppression notice, you don’t give me performance notification. You don’t send me an email. Nope, they’re just gone. Goodbye listings. Oh, that parentage that you had that’s been in place for 17 years? Yeah, that’s gone to you can’t connect blue and red together? That’s against the rules. What do you mean? That’s against the rules? Blue and reds. That’s a color variation. Well, somebody reported you. So we took it down. Yeah. Thank you Chinese sellers. I appreciate that. Thank you so much Chinese sellers, who are going out of their way to ruin my business and just attack me and hijack my listings. Oh, by the way, hey, somebody in Canada loaded your product. And they put cocaine leaves in the keyword. So we’re gonna yank your supplement in the US? Yeah, it’s gone. Sorry, you can’t do that. What do you mean, I can’t do that. I didn’t do that. What are you making my listing? So these are all the problems that Amazon sellers are facing right now. And I could obviously go on for another 20 hours.

Josh Hadley 6:58

I know you could. I know. You see a lot going on. And in fact, I know you help a lot of those brands when they run into issues like that with your agency, My Amazon Guy. So Steven, let’s rewind, you know what led you to get started or even have the idea of coming up with My Amazon Guy. Why don’t we go back to that, that journey.

Steven Pope 7:19

So I was a classic entrepreneur my entire life. First thing I ever sold online was a Magic the Gathering trading card on eBay. As a 12 year old kid, I made $20 Selling a silver queen from the stronghold edition for those super geeky nerds out there. And, and so I was like, This is awesome. You know, during my childhood, I was a chess prodigy. So I taught chess lessons, I sold chess sets, I was buying wholesale for chess sets. I was selling them as hawking them everywhere. I taught in over 75 elementary schools in the state of Utah. And so I was like, Oh, he’s like businesses awesome. I’m gonna pay people to do everything for me for the rest of my life. I’ll never have to change my, my cars oil again. Right? There’s this thing called business. It’s awesome, right? So I was like, Okay, I’m gonna get into this. So I went in, but I was like, Well, I don’t really know what I want to do with my life, which every college age person does. So I went to school for a communications degree and I went into broadcast media and became a TV reporter. My father’s a weatherman in Utah. His name is Dan Pope, for our Utah friends out there who have probably seen him on the weather. And actually, my dad works for me today as one of our account executives. But in any case, I did that for a couple years. And then I was like, man, I was in Wisconsin, during the middle of a blizzard force Blizzard, Wisconsin. And St. tenures was 10 o’clock at night, I’m doing a live weather hit. They told me to go on the air, I can’t even see the camera. And so like I’m blindly looking 30 seconds in the camera live on state television. And this is Madison, Wisconsin. So this is like the biggest market in Wisconsin. And my hair froze over. I felt miserable. Everybody was home in their pajamas like what am I doing with my life. So like every classic entrepreneur ever, I was like this has got to change. So I that was that was my moment. pivotal point in life of career change. So I went back to school picked up an MBA broke into marketing. And I’ve been doing that ever since. And I worked for four failed startups out of five companies in my 10 years. And I helped make companies millions of dollars. And I know this because as one example public example here at apmex.com Number one precious metals dealer online in the world number one seller on eBay in the world, I helped increase their SEO traffic by 10 million unique visitors not visits, visitors, in one year. And I could just say example, after example, but then when my final failed startup failed, I was like, This is stupid. Why am I why am I helping other companies make millions of dollars I’m gonna go into business for myself. And so on a whim in less than 48 hours I created My Amazon Guy, and I’m in the laundry room. So I’m telling my wife about to switch to the global how do people normally introduce you because I’d side hustle consultant for like 25 You know, companies prior to starting the agency, and I’m like, well, nobody really cares who I am. They’re not going to sit down and read my bio, but they’re going to Hey, talk to my Amazon guy, and he’ll help you. And that’s exactly how I created the name of the company. It just stuck, right. And, and so that’s what we’ve been doing ever since within the first 48 hours, I had my first $3,000 a month contracts, and I hired an assistant that first clients five years later is still a client with me today, I did increase their fees. And then I hired my first assistant within four weeks. And within one year, I was at 12 employees. And now I’m at 300 employees today. So it’s just been a nonstop growth, acceleration. And that’s how I got into being an agency guy.

Josh Hadley 10:39

Yeah, I love that. I love that experience. I love that, you know, went into business yourself. And most importantly, you’ve, you’ve seen some huge wins. But also you’ve seen some failures as well along the way. And I think that we all learn from you know, those failures the most. So what we want to talk about today, because you have such great experience. And we could go in many different areas here. But we talked about this prior to recording hitting the record button on this podcast, but I want to learn from you and our audience is going to be interested Steven to learn, what would you recommend seven-figure sellers and those that are maybe experienced on Amazon, they have a mature brand, so to speak, what should they be focusing on Amazon, especially knowing where you know kind of the puck is going in the future with Amazon? Where things are going? What strategies would you recommend sellers be implementing right now,

Steven Pope 11:32

Anything that generates traffic and improves conversion rates? Full stop. That’s it. That’s all you got to focus on those two basic parameters. Now I can break those two down one layer deeper. Yep, under traffic, there’s PPC and SEO. And under conversion, there’s merchandising and design. So those four pillars make up ecommerce on Amazon. And so as we continue to go down even a layer further content production is the most underrated, easiest thing to do as an Amazon seller that is being abandoned. Now, obviously, there’s a lot of cardinal rules of Amazon like never go out of stock. That’s cardinal rule number one. And cardinal rule number two is kind of like cardinal rule number one, don’t go out of stock, right. And so like those are important concepts. But when we look down to the very basics of how to sell more products to more people more often for more money, it comes back to those four pillars, SEO, PPC design, and merchandising. And if you were ignoring one or two, maybe even three of those protocols, you’re in a world of hurt right now you are losing to the Chinese who are hacking your accounts and your listings, you are losing to Amazon’s policies, who are clamping down and making it harder to be on the platform, you are losing to your competitors who are in a death spiral with margin problems, but are still lowering their prices because consumer demand is down. And inflation is like 27%. Despite what the government claims, whatever the government says triple it. That’s the true inflation rate. And so people’s margins are shrinking policies are harder. Competition is steeper, let’s throw aggregators into the mix too. They’re buying up all the brands and then you know really messing with the marketplace. And, and so like all of these things, make it so that Amazon is entering the maturity phase. So as a seven-figure, Amazon seller, you need to get back down to the basics. Ignore all of the hacks, do this two step you’ll roll and everything will be fine. Yeah, and then your deindex Hey, do rebates, and then all of a sudden, you’re banned. Right or, or incentivized reviews, and then what happens? Right, all of these things are against policy, and they are black hat tactics. Stick to the basics: SEO, PPC, design, merchandising, if you’re trying to violate the basics by overcoming them with alternative options, you’re going to reap alternative benefits. And those are not good benefits.

Josh Hadley 14:01

That’s a fantastic breakdown. I love that you, you know, gave us a layer deeper there, you know, you have the traffic and then the conversion, then you gave us basically four kinds of areas that seven-figure sellers or anybody in general on Amazon should be focused on. So Steven, I would love for us to dive in to each of these, you know, individually, let’s talk about SEO. What are some quick wins that we could do with SEO, PPC, you know, and then we can really dive into the merchandising and its design, because that’s where I think a lot of that content strategy that you talked about is going to make a big impact. But let’s start at SEO what are some quick wins and things that we should be focused on?

Steven Pope 14:43

SEO has, in my opinion, a multiple fees approach it’s not SEO is not set it and forget it, as he was not set it and forget it. SEO is in fact the opposite of that. SEO is loving optimize it continuously. Therefore If you buy that paradigm, it’ll shift how you make content. For example, if we went through my four phases of SEO, I would tell you, you need to index the product, you need to incrementally index the product, you then need to rank the products. And then you need to gain market share. Those are my four SEO phases. And, and so today, I’d love to talk about how we go about gaining market share with SEO, and I’ve got a case study and some stuff I can show. So so we could talk about the ICAP marketing funnel, this is what I call it. And it stands for, ICAP: impressions, clicks add to carts, and purchases. ICAP marketing funnel, this data that we’re about to show you is available for free inside of seller central in the search query performance report. And we’re going to live demo it today and go through it. So here’s a case study. This is a keyword called sage candles for cleansing house. And just for some, basically to understand what product we’re looking at here is my product, it is a sage bundle, it’s dried sage sticks, and and leaves and you burn it to clean a house, cleanse it rather. And so I have 1,166 reviews on this listing, it’s it’s coming up on its one year anniversary today, it’s got Amazon’s choice for incense. And when I first launched this project product, it became the number one seller and all of incense for the new release. So it got the new release batch. So it’s a very successful product. So the reason I showcase this is because when you look at the keyword that we’re going to talk about today, sage candles for cleansing house and I go over to Amazon right now and I type that keyword in and you look at the search results. Well, you see my ad come up number one with the sage bundle and all that good stuff, right? Looking good there. But everywhere else you see is a candle. Candle candle candle candle candle candle, you just go down the list, and it’s nothing but candles, essentially. So when this showed up on my my brand, search query analytics performance report, where I call the ICAP marketing funnel, and it was showing up number one on my list. I was really surprised. And so I was like, Well, why is this? Well, when I was looking at this keyword, I saw that my impression share my market share this is of all impressions available on Amazon for this keyword. And this keyword ranges about 3,000 weekly searches. So about 12,000 monthly. And it’s it’s up and down depending on the season. And this this query I own 2.75% of impressions. Now mind you, I’ve never focused on this keyword prior to starting work here. I had no idea this keyword existed, but it showed up on my search query performance report. And I was like interesting, was it number one it was the number one keyword that Amazon said I should focus on was not even on my radar. So my click, my click share was at 7.58%. My add to cart was that 8.9 My purchases that 6.6. And I said to myself, ooh, this is interesting. So as a marketing funnel, normally it’s a tornado where you lose people as they go farther down in the funnel. And I had a pyramid, not a tornado, I had the inverse of a classic marketing funnel, I had more market share, under clicks and I had under impressions. And I said, interesting, why is that and I studied it. And I concluded that this keyword was not only relevant to my listing that I was going to go out and generate additional traffic on this keyword. I said to myself, the search group performance report tells me this is important. So I’m going to use the icap marketing funnel methodology that I teach. And we’re going to go out and we’re going to gain some market share. And within seven weeks, I basically tripled my market share from 3% impressions to 7%. From 8% clicks to 20% from 9% add to carts and 21%. And basically one out of five people now purchase my product off of this keyword one out of five, and this is for a keyword I didn’t even know was important. Now remember, I told you there’s 3,000 weekly impressions 12,000 monthly run the math on that one out of five people who searches for that keyword buys my product. This is one single keyword. And we’re gonna demo the live the search query performance report. Now because I’ve used this case study publicly before, I’m gonna go ahead and do a raw new one. So today we’re gonna look at

Josh Hadley 19:20

Some real value Steven, you’re dropping real value never before seen or heard from Steven Pope. So buckle up everybody.

Steven Pope 19:20

So this brand is called Lily Posh. This is my newest brand launch. It’s a clothing brand. What happened was is my business partner bought this brand and stored about $2 million in merchandise in a warehouse and then forgot about it. True story.

Josh Hadley 19:43

I wish I had like a million dollars to forget about that was that was my business partner.

Steven Pope 19:47

He lives a very different life than I do. Anyway, and I was like, Well, why don’t we start selling it and so you know, he owned all the rights. So I purchased the trademark and we loaded it onto Amazon. So this brand has been around I don’t know, maybe a month now very, very new. So we’re starting to get some data here. And we’re going to look at the search query performance report brand name called Lilly Posh. So on this report, we have various keywords and we have all of the data and the same methodology that I talked about that icap I-C-A-P, not to confuse with ice up, and the joke you make on the playground, but, but the impressions, clicks, add to carts, and purchases. And so you can see all the data here. This is live data that we’re looking at on screen. And I’m gonna go through and explain each of these. So let’s find a keyword that I have some relevant traffic on. Sherpa pullover woman’s. And by the way, I have no idea what a Sherpa is. But I have a product that’s probably a Sherpa. So there’s this brand has like 1000s and 1000s of skews. Okay, so this is a brand that we’re going shotgun approach, just trying to list it all and see what happens. Get impression share today. 1.4% of all people who search Sherpa pullover womens see my product, I don’t even know which product it is, but they see it. But then when we look at the click through rate, and we see my brand share rate, I have one out of five people who see my impression click on it, that’s an extraordinarily high click through rate. But in terms of brand share, it’s 3.66%. So all of the clicks that that occur on a 1500, weekly search volume, keywords Sherpa pullover, women’s, I’m getting 3.66% of the clicks. So let’s keep going down the funnel here of all of the people that add it to their cart, two people added it to their cart, or 4.2% of all of the brand share for adding it to the cart, right, so you could times that and figure out how many people overall are adding it to in a cart, which is 47. Right there, you can see that. And then let’s go to the far right. And then of all of the people who purchase it, I have a purchase rate of point one one, but a 0% goose egg on the brand share. So I had a high click through rate and then a low conversion rate. So people technically added it to their cart, but they never went back and purchased it during this particular week. Now if we went from a monthly standpoint, which we’ll do real quick, and we’ll go to the month of September to October data hasn’t processed yet. And we’re going to see if we can find an order keyword with Sherpa summit search reporter William drover Yep, yeah. So now on a monthly basis, just under 7000 search volume brand share was lower overall for the month, which means I’m starting to gain market share recently, point 4% Then 1% clicks 1.8% Add to carts and still use eight, six. So nobody has purchased my product off this keyword yet. Which is why we went to the monthly to see for that. Now what we’re going to do is say cool, if we know Sherpa, Sherpa, polar women’s is an opportunity that I’m not converting on, we need to figure out why. So we’re gonna go to my inventory. And we’re gonna type in Sherpa polar a woman’s and see if we can figure out which product this is for. And low and behold, we look for it and we see a bunch of search suppressions and we got red flags here. So so like, Oh, thanks, Amazon, you’re suppressing my crap. So let’s go see why is it suppressed. And this asin is suppressed due to problems with its parent asin please address the issues of the parent and fix it. So we then had to go dive in and start troubleshooting and look at what’s going on with it. And this all started because we went to the search create reports report right now obviously, you can go create alerts and figure out suppression. So what I’m gonna do here, I’m gonna take a nice screenshot, I’m going to circle the search suppressions and I’m going to spout this off to my team over in Slack right now. And I’m going to tell them, Hey, we got to fix some suppressions tag, my merchandiser, fix suppressions, please, right? So that’s going to be done as a side side job here. Alright, so now we’re gonna try and figure out though, how to increase our market share on this and we don’t know which asin it’s for at this point. But we’re gonna see if we can sort this by Amazon, FBA or active FBA. So there’s no active FBA, we only started a merchant fulfilled. And we’re going to use a technique I call onboarding a SKU in mass catalogs. So generally speaking, if you’ve got 1000’s of SKUs, and you’ve and you’re launching on Amazon as an afterthought, you may want to start with FBA inventory, figuring out what sells and then shipping to FBA, because it doesn’t make sense to ship 5000 skews and FBA. It just doesn’t. Right. So we’re using an onboarding strategy. So I’ve got 40 skews with the term Sherpa pullover women’s. And in here, we can figure out which product would be an opportunity to try and chase so my sales rank right now is 268,000, which is low, but it is a clothing item. And we’re going to we’re going to come in and look at one of these. So we’re going to start this by availability. So this particular unit I have 168 products available before we have to reorder. So I’m gonna go to that Listening. And I’m going to take that same keyword and I’m going to Ctrl F do I have an exact match for Sherpa pullover women’s, and I do not know where on the page, I have women Sherpa fleece casual long sleeves button next splice sweater, casual pullover sweatshirt, but I don’t have Sherpa pullover womens. So the first thing that I’m going to do, I’m going to click Edit on the product. And I’m going to go to the bullets. And I’m immediately going to add something into either the title or, you know, we’re going to work it into the title,

my search query performance report. So it’s got to be important. So Sherpa pullover women’s, with the now with

Josh Hadley 25:41

that, Steven, I mean, why don’t we just give the audience a quick rundown is the importance factor for each of the different, you know, the title, how important is that for SEO versus the bullets versus the description versus back end search terms,

Steven Pope 25:56

title is most important. After that, there’s probably some debate of whether those search terms or bullets are next important. And then following that A plus content, which is the most underrated and under done. And then we have alt tags behind the a plus content, the actual crawlable text in the a plus content in the brand story. And then social posts probably next and then following that the q&a and the reviews on the product page. And somebody listening to this right now is is like questioning themselves? Did Steven just say the q&a on a product page indexes? And the answer is yes, it does. And you can go check it yourself. I dare you to go ask a question in Spanish on your own product page, use somebody else’s customer account and then answer it in Spanish in English. And I bet you within 48 hours, it’ll index for a Spanish term in that question that you asked us the second one, put Spanish behind the alt text of one of the photos on a post content and I guarantee you it will index in under 48 hours. So so we know these things index. All right, so I just reworked this I changed it from Lilly Posh fleece Sherpa sweatshirt for women to fleece Sherpa pullover women’s sweatshirt. I made an exact match title change. Yep. The next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to go over to the bullets in the product detail section. And I’m going to add it in there as well. So our Lilly Posh double sided Sherpa fleece pullover sweatshirt for women, right? Which is pretty much a phrase match broad match almost is constructed of so we’re going to figure out, okay, where are we going to put this. So top rate quality, amazing features, complement your style suits, many occasions, quality and reliability. So I’m trying to figure out where it’s going to make the most sense, Lilly posh is registered brand new us. Nobody cares about this. Let’s delete that Sherpa pullover, women’s sweatshirt. Our products are completely sourced from our own warehouse, they’re sourced from our own warehouse. This is really, really, really great content that my team has written. We can do better than that. Obviously, with 1000s of skews, some of this stuff’s gonna happen. And All right, so we got an exact match in there, we’re gonna hit save. Well, first of all, I need to remember which asin we’re on. So let’s grab the aislin because we got lots of products. Yeah, so we’re gonna save this, then we’re gonna go into the a plus content. So we’re gonna go into let’s see, I’m not used to the new UI yet. So under advertising a plus Content Manager. And by the way, what do you see on screen here? Premium A plus content access guest who has premium A plus content access? Do you want premium a PLUS credit? I know you do. I know you do. Well, here’s how you get premium A plus content. First of all, you need to have a brand story on your page. Okay, so let me show you what a brand story can look like. So we’re gonna go back to the smudge sticks. I scroll down. And here is what a brand story can be. And what do you notice about the brand story? It can go horizontally, I can get horizontal real estate on Amazon for the first time. This has never existed before. Somebody out there is like, Why? Why would I care about horizontal inventory? Well, if if consumers are staying on your page longer, are they more likely to purchase thing they did? Yes, they are. So you do want horizontal content. You also want vertical content, which is in the form of April’s content. Look how gigantic this photo is. I mean, it’s it takes two scrolls to see how big this photo is. You cannot get this with regular post content. This is free by the way, all you have to do is submit 15 A plus contents and a brand story and you get access to this. Alright, so the next thing we’re gonna do next thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna go hopefully, I have built a plus concept fairly posh looks like I have so women’s sweater pullover. This is probably the right one. Let’s let’s look at my live listing. Do I have a post content up? I do. I don’t have a brand story yet. On this particular acent I have 5000 ASINs so it’s still kind of a work in progress. So we’re gonna go on my slack channel again here I’m gonna shoot off I’m doing work in real time to show you how authentic

Josh Hadley 29:57

This is. You are efficient. Steven Nieto write the story

Steven Pope 30:01

on lily posh. And then I’m going to post the ace. Okay, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to go into the post content design. And you see how I haven’t filled a headline at headline in there yet. We’re going to take advantage of that. And let’s go back to the keyword in question, Sherpa pullover women’s. And we’re going to add that into the headline of the a plus concept, Sherpa pullover, women’s. And then to make this make sense, we’re going to type in sweater. Yep. Right. Okay, so then I’m going to do that. That’s cool. We’re pretty light on description and texts. Again, this is a leftover project we’re trying to do from the ground up. So if this was like my only widget, I wouldn’t be having these conversations. So next, you review it, and we submit it. And this is probably going to go through in under 48 hours. It’s simple tax change. So so right now it’s week 40. Is that right? Week 40, inside of the search query performance report, and we just made these changes. In addition to that, I’m next going to go into my advertising. So we’re gonna go to campaign manager. I didn’t add that once my bookmarks, and we’re hit Create campaign. And we’re going to hit Continue on sponsored products. And we’re gonna go Sherpa pull over women’s, and we’re gonna grab the same exact asin that we’ve been working on. And we’re going to add an exact match for this particular product with manual targeting, and our list, Sherpa pullover, women’s. And we’re gonna go for a phrase match pay a little less than exact, and probably want sweatshirt as well. So we’re going to do sweatshirt, and we’re going to go phrase match on that one as well. And nobody’s basically nobody searches that as you can see, there wasn’t a suggested bid. So probably nobody looks at that all we’re going to do, I usually do fixed bids when I first launched a campaign. And we’re going to title this Sherpa puller once launch campaign, I need to set the budget first, of course. So we’ll set the budget to 25 a day. So when I check this in two and four weeks from now, and I go back to the brain analytics, what we’re going to see is this brand share is going to go from one point, some odd percent. Let’s say it was 1.4% Search impressions, and it’s going to go up to like 5%. And this is a 3800 weekly search volume keyword, which when we compare this to the September data right now is the busy season. Yeah, it’s going starting to get cold, right? Everybody’s looking for a Sherpa pull over right now, again, I still have no idea what a Sherpa is. So

Josh Hadley 32:31

you’re saying and Steven, you’re saying that brand shares going to increase just because you’ve created that PPC campaign, you’ve added that keyword exact match into your title and into the a plus content. So you’re just going to correct a little bit more love from Amazon in terms of relevancy,

Steven Pope 32:51

my prediction, two to three times the market share in less than two weeks. With those changes. We just did two to three tests and dating. Yep, yeah. Now with catalogs and in 1000s of SKUs. You can replicate this in mass, right? And so this was just one single keyword we just did this exercise on, we spent 15 minutes on we made these changes and I predict that I will gain two to three times my current market share and start generating sales, which is the most important part. Yeah, right. And, and if you run this play over and over again, your icap is going to increase your market share is going to increase again I kept stands for impressions, clicks, add to carts and purchases, come through your search queries, and work on those. So I know we went pretty deep on SEO today. Now for those that want more information about the icap Marketing methodology, go to my Amazon guy.com/icaap or icap. And you can see the case study we talked about today, as well as additional content on this concept.

Josh Hadley 33:48

I love it. That was a such a great breakdown. Steven, and again, a little treat for our audience seeing that in real time with a brand new product you haven’t you know, this wasn’t staged, you didn’t come prepared with that, and you got to see it in real time. So thanks for sharing that. With us all. Steven,

Steven Pope 34:03

I still don’t know what a Sherpa is. I’m gonna have to wear it right now. We’re

Josh Hadley 34:08

that is good. Hopefully our audience

Steven Pope 34:10

are living on the borders of Nepal. Well, there you have it. Now I know.

Josh Hadley 34:16

Hey, you learn something new every day. Steven, you talked about so we talked a lot about the SEO, we touched on some PPC briefly. In that example, I really want to dive into the merchandising design side of conversion. What do you what is it that you recommend there, right? We just talked about getting that brand share up and we did that with some SEO tactics. But I’m assuming that when it comes to the add to carts, the conversions in that icap formula, that’s where you got to start focusing more on the design the merchandising side of things. Is that right?

Steven Pope 34:51

You’re correct. All right. Are you more of a mega pint guy or a house of dragons tumbler guy?

Josh Hadley 34:56

Oh, man. Let’s go with the mega pint. You You know, I’ve got I’ve got my boy right here, you know?

Steven Pope 35:03

Okay, so mega pint. This is obviously from the Johnny Depp trial. Okay, so here is my tumblr. It’s a 30 ounce tumbler, I have 342 reviews, you know that the mega pint trial was not even just a couple of months ago with Johnny Depp, right? This is old news. This is a dying product. Now, to be fair, the fact is, I made 1000s of sales on this product by following the cultural phenomenon. And I was so confident this was going to when it started doing well, I was like Frick, everybody’s gonna rip me off and copy it. Now, if you type in Mega Pint into Amazon right now, chances are my product will come up in the top search results for it. If you type in Mega Pint cup, it will be number one for sure. But in any case, I was like everybody’s going to copy me so what did I do? I added a frickin pirate eyepatch. I love it, right. This is merchandising at its core folks, do something that your competitors cannot easily replicate. And so we added a pirate eyepatch to the mega pint tumbler. And when we were transitioning the stock we put the pirate eyepatch on into the stock before we updated the imagery because we had like we didn’t want somebody to be like where’s my pirate eyepatch. And within the first 48 hours of some of that stock hitting and it was so next the inventory, people started posting pictures of them wearing a pirate eyepatch. Right. So let’s go down and click on or showcasing all of the things that we got. So this woman right here, Miss Miss Kimberly, she posted this. You know the eyepatch was a nice touch on June 18. Right, right like that is that’s what we’re talking about. So these sorts of things. And and how many of you guys would like to have pictures of you from your consumers showing use of your product? I didn’t have to ask Kimberly to take that picture. She took it on her own volition because I threw a pirate eyepatch it now. I’ll have to I have to be honest with you. I spent $5,000 on pirate eye patches this year. That was not necessarily predicted to be on my p&l this year. But $5,000 well spent. Yeah, well spent, that we sold 1000s and 1000s of these units. This is my best seller of the year and had lots of fun with it. So when you’re talking about merchandising, that one gimmick adding value, and I don’t know what the cost of a pirate eyepatch is maybe three or five cents apiece. Right? Yeah, you run the math on $5,000 and pirate iPads as you can see how many pirate I thought a lot but All right, so inside of here, here’s my one of my favorite infographics that we’ve made. I’m a really big proponent on

infographics that clash and showcase a lot so like you got this ice and fire shot Okay, right. You got the Song of Fire and Ice which you avoided you went mega pint set of fire and dragons. Alright, Game of Thrones reference for those fans out there. In any case, showcasing how the fact that this can keep liquids cool for 10 hours and keep them hot for four. And by the way double insulated tumblers are are actually legitimate thing let me sell a little bit into this product because I was really surprised that freaking keeps ice like you still have ice after 10 hours like it’s insane. Anyone so good products, cultural norm, right and and we basically just took advantage of the fact that we had the pirate angle and the Johnny Depp every piece of keyword of this title is highly optimized based on what consumers are searching mega pine cup 30 ounce stainless steel wine and beer tumbler double wall insulated tumbler with lid, trial merchandise. Johnny Depp mug for Captain Jack Sparrow fans, bus pirate eyepatch, right, every key word was highly chosen, and used here say brewery, right? Like every flavor opportunity that we had, we went all out on this product. This is how you merchandise a product. We also have a brand story where you can cross promote additional products want to increase your average order value today, here’s your five minute hack, add products to your brand story, I can click into each of these products and cross promote and sell more the a plus content, we have big images, lots of texts. This is regular A plus content set of the premium. So you get kind of a difference on the angle here. The copy that’s inside of the a plus content produces a lot of SEO indexing one exact match keyword in the title, the bullets, the description of the a plus content will index the product frequently then you have to rank it and go through later and try and work on it but merchandising this product and then by the way, want to increase your average order value again, there’s a product grid best best module with a plus contents right here. I can click and cross promote to all of these various different products. You want to go to the man cave. Here’s that product for you click on this right Go there. What products for her mother’s get this product, this particular product here? I sold $144,000. On Mother’s Day of 2021. It only did 67,002 1022 product fell off a cliff. And that’s because gift giving right now sales are way down. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, Thank You Economy and government for quantitative easing and printing out lots of money. appreciate so much. So economically, gift giving, not a great place to be right now. I actually ran a $20 off sale on this fabulous box. I haven’t checked the results yet. So let’s go check it. So let’s see, I haven’t been moving any inventory, I had 1000 of these units. Let’s see how many I was able to move. Not enough. There’s still 150 of them sitting. But I moved 44 units in the last 30 days. So when I lowered the price down, I generated like 40 units in less than three days, which is good. I was trying to figure out how to get this just to recover. So sometimes when you have a problem product, the easiest thing that you can do without spending money is simply lower your price. Interesting, say goodbye to your margins, but it’s cheaper than marketing.

Josh Hadley 41:13

Yeah. And with that, like do you ever test out using coupons or any of those, you know, extra promotions on Amazon? Have you had success with those

Steven Pope 41:23

all the time. I am not a fan of coupons. I think it’s better just to simply lower the price. I’ve had more effective, opportune opportunities with that. But for those of you who haven’t set up a coupon before, you can easily do that by going to advertising coupons. And you’ll notice I have zero running coupons on the account. I do not like them. But this product we tried lowering the price $20 I moved 40 units. Now the next thing to try and merchandise will be to run a coupon so that’s exactly what I’m going to do. So I’m going to run money off and we’re going to put a $10 coupon on this limit one redemption per customer, and we’re going to put $100 budget on this. Did you know that each coupon redemption cost you 60 cents? So that gives you an idea? Alright, so this is not a day over? Fabulous. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday gift for women. soaps, cup tumbler we’ll call it crumbler loesche. I think it has lotion in it. Yeah, got lotion and it comes with a cart too long. Alright, so extra spacing, no characters, okay, so they’re making it hard on me so bumbler is good now can use commas. You can use commas and a coupon. This is this is getting ridiculous. Woman’s soap tumbler gift box. All right, try that continue, and submit. So we’ll see how that does. Okay, so I’m merchandising live on a podcast guys to see if I can sell more products. And you can see how I troubleshoot try test things out. But I’ve got a great product listing, I got 365 star reviews, I’ve got a good product. We’ve merchandise it. Well, I already ran a beat one thing we haven’t talked about yet, the importance of AV testing photos. So let’s go over to let’s go to my men soap. So I ran seven AB tests on this main photo to land with our current listing and Dr. Squatch soaps, which is the number one seller of men’s soap on Amazon, they own like 75% of the market. It’s it’s egregious, they’re a monopoly. Gotta take the squash guys down. And so I’m trying to figure out how to beat that. So I repackaged my products. I and this is this is the original the repackaging hasn’t come out yet. But showcasing like what matters on a listing here and can be extremely important, right? So like, who here doesn’t want to increase their market share by just changing one photo, right? Something that’s super easy to do, there’s an opportunity to get that done by simply running a PickFu test, or an AB test on your main photo. And what we were able to do is figure out okay, should the soaps be in a square? Should they be stacked? Should I have them diagonally? Should I have them on a plus side? And how do they compare against the competition so we ran all those various different tests. I also adding a big text word on the main image is the number one Amazon hack to growing cells. There is nothing more powerful really.

Josh Hadley 44:22

That’s that’s a great hack just having that so like for you it’s the Age of Sage, the box itself, that’s your big words, I guess on that main image, right? So if

Steven Pope 44:33

So, if you go to Amazon right now and type in the word journal, okay? People that have the word journal as a text on the main image are going to get a higher CTR you could layer this down even further. So I have a friend who I’m helping right now with their with their journal, and I will show you the impact that this has I’m pulling this up live is cool. So give me a second as I pull this up, but but a second Surely, we were able to increase the amount of traffic going to the listing with this one change, which is just an incredible opportunity to do it. Okay, so I’ve almost got this, I was slacking back and forth with my friend quite a bit. So. So here’s here is the image copy image. And I’ll showcase this and I’ll show you the AV test results. So this is what we ended up with on the silver screen right now. So this is the new image nice. And by showcasing the fact that this is for ages six to 12, it made a massive difference. How big of a difference? Well, 45 to five people like this always better. Right? That is a 90% mandate, anything above 60%. I like to call it a mandate. So here is the original image. What’s wrong with this original image? Well, first of all, if you shrink that down to 100 pixels, which is the size of an image on side of Amazon search, you can’t read it, you can’t read any of it, because it’s embossed. It’s nine. It’s not written. So what we did is we photoshopped a new little white banner there and made the kids journal words gigantic.

Josh Hadley 46:11

So this is not you didn’t have to repackage this product. Right? 

Steven Pope 46:15

We didn’t. Not yet. He’s going to after he sees the sales tripled, but like, but right now, just to get on base, we just Photoshop the new main image, we took a picture of one of his best pages inside of the journal and we opened it up. So you can tell Hey, there’s weird drawings of creatures. It looks like a kid’s journal just based on seeing that. And then just to add to this, we added we slapped on age six to 12. Right on top. Yep. So that way, when somebody’s looking for a journal for their six year old kid, whose product are they more likely to click on now? Well, the new photoshop job or the old one,

Josh Hadley 46:49

and I’m assuming, obviously, they’re going to click on the button that says six to 12. But I’m assuming you also did this because there’s some search query performance data, backing up the fact that there are people searching for journals for six year olds, or journals for you know, elementary age, you know,

Steven Pope 47:08

things. That’s exactly what we did, we looked at the search query performance report, we figured out what the highest search volume keyword that was already performing well on this product. And we said, Cool, now let’s go triple our traffic by adding age six to 12. Right there, kids draw right there. And and then if you go look at the content that they left, and by the way, when I ran this AV test, PickFu had the ability to switch my demographics between age five to 10, or five to 12, or something like that. And so I chose this specific demographic to prove a point, people who have kids in this age range are going to click on this product more, this product is meant for kids aged six to 12. Therefore, let’s chase that demographic. Let’s put let’s put it right on the content. Let’s put a write on the main image. And let’s help them out. And if you read through some of these comments, I liked the fact that it shows the appropriate age group for the journal. Right? That’s a great comment. Yep. You know, and she sees an age label, they, you know, age label, because it makes it clear, it’s a kid’s journal is more animated and fun looking, like, on and on and on. All of these contents, say the same thing over and over again. And so convincing my friend that he needed to change his Amazon listing, not hard, not hard at all.

Josh Hadley 48:19

Sure.

Steven Pope 48:21

So if you are struggling to convince your team, you’re the smart one at the company. And you’re like, Man, I’m the only reason this brain is surviving. And you can’t win that emotional debate, run an A B test.

Josh Hadley 48:32

I love that. Steven, you’ve dropped some huge knowledge bombs on all of us today. And I think even for myself, I’ve got a great mindset shift in the way that we now look at or the way that we will look at search query performance, and then how that’s going to impact even the main image itself that we just saw the title. And so I’m going to break down, I think, for our audience, three main takeaways, actionable steps that you can make to your business today to increase sales. Take your brand to the next level is number one, Steven showed us a great example. Again, you can watch these videos on YouTube. If you’re just listening to the podcast, go check us out on YouTube. But number one, dive into your search query performance because like Steven mentioned, there was a keyword that he was getting traffic from, but it did not register initially on his keyword, you know, his keyword list when he was initially creating that listing. And like Steven mentioned as well, keywords and SEO should not be a set it and forget it strategy. This should be something that you’re paying attention to seeing what’s working now. And obviously seasonal traffic can bring different keywords at different times of the year. So I think that’s so important, like pay attention to what’s going on and that search query performance. That’s action item number one, number two, is actually taking steps or action on step number one. So identify those keywords, but then start are implementing those changes into your content and your merchandising. So a perfect example is, you know, adding in the age range, if that’s a big keyword for your particular product, adding that to your main image, could be adding those simple keywords into your A plus content, or your title like we showed on that live demo. And then last but not least, is AB testing your product images, and even a plus content, right, especially that main image, that’s where you’re going to get the most clicks to even open up and go check out your detail page. So one of the most important images that everybody should be AB testing is their main image. Steven, I want to ask you one question there on that AB test for the main image. Do you ever use Amazon’s A B testing feature within Amazon? Or do you exclusively use PickFu on its own?

Steven Pope 50:54

I, I have, but it’s just a waste of time, right? In the world of Amazon selling you have days, not weeks to make sales improvements, or your listing is going to die, you cannot afford a six week test, which is what Amazon will do with an AV test. And and think about the lost sales. If you if you know if you have a 60% mandate running a pick through tests, how quickly you’re going to see those sales generate, right? So I did a coaching session with somebody else who also sold a journal. And he came back four weeks later and said, Steven, let me show you this data. It’s insane. He bought a second coaching call, I’m not cheap. And he bought a second coach, he called just to show me because he was so grateful he generated 60,000 weekly extra visitors from one main image change. Wow. That’s huge, insane. It’s insane. So so that’s why I don’t think you can afford waiting for Amazon’s data just just make good decisions based on best practices and use a pic free test to validate if you need to

Josh Hadley 51:55

than that. That’s amazing. I mean, that’s a huge mindset shift even for myself, like how impactful those main images can be. So I hope our audience has taken away some brilliant golden nuggets today. Stephen a couple of last questions that I like to to ask all of the guests that come on the podcast. Number one is what has been your most influential book in your life and why? the road less

Steven Pope 52:18

The Road Less Stupid without a doubt. I like traction. I like Scaling Up I like a bunch of other business books. But Scaling Up as a special place in my heart. His main thesis is take time to think don’t have scheduled thinking time on your calendar, you are going to make piss poor decisions.

Josh Hadley 52:36

I agree with that. That’s a great recommendation. Next question I have for you what’s your favorite productivity tool or resource that you’ve been using?

Steven Pope 52:44

Well, we’re making one right now. We’re gonna release this to our own company. It’s called Hybird. And it’s going to be a tool that will combine all of the great elements to run an entire agency in one spot. Tools like Asana and Time Doctor and invoicing and a bunch of other cool things all in one spot. But if he asked me this question, three years ago, I would have told you Calendly, because nobody was using it back then what you know, basically, somebody can see my availability and hire me for a coaching call, same day appointments available, because of a productivity tool like that. 

Josh Hadley 53:17

Yeah. I love that. I love that. And last thing here, Steven, who is somebody that you like to follow in the e-commerce space that you feel is somebody that people should be paying attention to?

Steven Pope 53:29

I like Harry Joiner. He’s a ecommerce recruiter who has the ability to do two by two on any subject. So what I mean by two by two is you can break any issue down to of quadrant and figure out where to focus. So for example, new to old, old or new, so that means new customers, old customers, new product, old product, who to sell what to who, and selling new to new has always been my quadrant. And so Harry Joiner can just explain how to articulate a marketing strategy and he’s just got a lot of great unique content you won’t see anywhere else. You can find him on LinkedIn. He owns ecommercerecruiter.com as well.

Josh Hadley 54:07

Awesome. Brilliant. Well, Steven, is there any last parting words of wisdom you’d like to share with our audience before we sign off today?

Steven Pope 54:15

Just do it, just take one thing and go do it guys you know, E-4 and most important moving businesses E-4 which is literally take that pawn and move it forward two spaces on the chessboard and just go get it done. I’d love to hear how things work for you guys. If anybody listen to this entire podcast and takes action and has success or maybe failure, tell me about your failures, too. I would love to hear from you guys. Send me an email to Podcast@MyAmazonGuy.com

Josh Hadley 54:37

Awesome. Steven, it’s been a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us. All right. Thanks, Josh.

Outro 54:45

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