Josh Hadley 8:01

Well, I think to say the least, you’ve got your hands in many different aspects of the Amazon e-commerce industry here, you have a lot of experience not only as a seller, which as you mentioned, is extremely important. So you know what is actually working, what is actually going on in your businesses, rather than just being a guru, so to speak, and just talking about it, right. Yeah. So I think that’s, that’s fantastic. So Kevin, you’ve got a lot of history. It goes all the way back to 1999. Why don’t you tell people like how did you even get started in the world of Amazon to begin with?

Kevin King 8:37

What actually goes back before then I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life. I’m in my 50s and I my mid 50s. And I last time I got a paycheck, like you said I was 17. I worked at McDonald’s in Lewisville at the corner of I-35 and 1171. It used to be a McDonald’s there. I think there is one now on the opposite side of the street. We used to be one on the same side as the hospital. If you’re from that area, I worked there and then I worked at, delivered pizzas for only if it’s

what’s Jimmy, Jimmy? Jimmy, John’s, Jimmy, sorry, Jimmy. Something pizza you get to pizza order one you get one free. It’s kind of like the little caesars kind of thing with delivery and I did that and Lewisville and fly around for a while and that’s it. That’s the only jobs I’ve ever had. I’ve been an auctioneer the rest of my life the entire rest of my life. So I was doing e-commerce and direct mail I was actually named one of the top 40 marketers under 40 When I was younger by Direct Marketing Magazine, and I was doing direct marketing catalogs print printed catalogs. Bringing in I when I was in college I developed something called like a Sharper Image if you remember the old Sharper Image catalog of like gadgets and stuff Yeah, college kids. Uh huh. And and put put that out with all kinds of dorm room accessories and different things and I had a rent to in college I rented I had one apartment I lived in rented the one below us two storey building and rent apartment directly below us and I I turned that into a fulfillment center. Basically, when I was like 21 years old, I had a stack with boxes of like little neon lamps and, you know, Simpson’s T shirts, and whatever, whatever it was back then. And we had and I had three phone lines in there and I had girls coming in answering the phone, one 800 numbers coming directly into the apartment. And they would they would answer it and take orders and running ads in the back of back then, when you when you would register for classes, this is kind of pre internet, the day with the schools would send out like a booklet, like like a booklet, like a almost like a catalog of here’s the classes that you can take each one I had to code and he had to call an 800 number, and to register and punch in the code of which classes you want to do. And I would advertise the nose for colleges all over all over the place, doing all kinds of stuff like that, so that I was doing a lot of direct marketing and a lot of that. And then I got done. When the internet came along, started shifted a lot of focus to the internet was doing a lot of stuff online with membership based websites with either daily news sites. So we were seeing out at one point, like 250,000 emails a day, come on, and we would aggregate almost like a Drudge Report. But we were for a specific niche. And we would actually take content, I had two guys that would like feed in all these news stories into this database behind the scenes. And every night before midnight, I had to go in and pick the five headlines. Me personally, no matter where I was in the world, and I remember I’d be in Costa Rica and on some ancient dial up connection and a hotel, he knows his back before there was internet everywhere, and trying to get in and it’s like pick these five stories and an email would go out the next day, at different times people would select the hour of the day, they want the email, it wasn’t just okay, in the morning. So we would have 10 15,000 emails going out hourly, depending on how people selected it. And then there were games and puzzles and stuff. And we built that up and then leveraged that audience into buying physical products and digital products. And then did a bunch of that for a while published a magazine got into the calendar business, which I know you have a hand ability to experience in. And yes, I still do that to this day. We do different, I think a little bit different things, but still a little bit just in that counter business. And so that started doing that. And then that evolved. And then around. We were doing a lot of video and stuff online as well. And YouTube kind of killed, we were able to charge for this video content, this teaching content, the videos that they were doing. And YouTube kind of killed that market when they came around in 2007. So we’re able to post post for a while. And then in 20, but 2014 As I you know, I was traveling, like you said I was doing a lot of travel. Pretty much every month I was off somewhere. I had an office here with 16 employees. And I would take a week to 10 days every month and go go somewhere. And sometimes by myself, sometimes with friends or family. I was going to do that for a year. But it turned into like seven years. So that’s where I got a lot of the job when I wasn’t backpacking, but I wasn’t like staying at the Four Seasons. But I was I was doing it doing decently. Yeah. And then money started to run out a little bit. And I was like, What am I gonna do now. So at that time, I was like, Maybe I should do real estate, you know, Austin’s gonna be booming. This is 20 this is before the big bonus, like 2014 is like this guy, it’s coming, maybe I should do real estate because that gives me some freedom, you know, I don’t have to like go to an office or do something like that. I got a real estate license. And then also at the same time, there’s a camera called the Matterport, which is like a 3d camera that you could take in and it makes the 3d renderings of like buildings and stuff. And you ever use one where you just like a little circle in the in the floor, and you put that circle in it like moves you to that circle, and then you can spin around 3d, I played with Yes, try to start a business with that. And then around the same time amazing.com I saw something online. But while they’re a little four part series, they you know, they used to do like a four part Warm Up series, before they do the big pitch for their $5,000 course. And now watch their their four part Warm Up series, which is like every couple of days they release in their little teaser video just to warm you up. And I watched watch that. And then at the end, you know, the last half of the last one I did the big webinar and that, hey, it’s a $5,000 course and like, I don’t need to pay $5,000 to do this. I know I’ve been doing all this stuff from my other businesses importing from Asia, China, or Asia or wherever and selling stuff online. And we sold to comic bookstores, we sold all kinds of stuff. And, and I don’t, I don’t need this. And I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2001 as a third party vendor. So I really understood the basics of Amazon. I just had never done FBA. And I was like this makes sense. You know, I could actually do very well, well with this. And so that’s where in 2015 I actually jumped into FBA and launched five brands all at once in five different categories. And the reason I did that is just to spread the risk, you know, and I had experienced I don’t recommend that for most people, because they need to get their feet wet but I already kind of it was second nature to me. me, it’s like my mom said back then she says, like you’re training your entire life to do this. Because all all the things that you’ve been doing the past came, it came together. And it was just a perfect thing from the direct marketing to the wholesale to the product creation to that whole whole thing. And so still doing it to this day, enjoying it.

Josh Hadley 15:18

I love it. Well, and you’ve got such a breadth of knowledge because you’ve, you’ve done so many different ventures and you’ve been an entrepreneur at heart. You know, from day one, I, you know, myself, I was very similar. Growing up, I always had that entrepreneur inside me, I was like, kid with the candy stand on the corner of the street always busy right now and, you know, figuring out ways to make money. So I love that. And I think a lot entrepreneurs kind of share that similar passion. It’s just something inside of us that’s always call on us to go create something and and bring products to market in the world. So I love that. Now, Kevin, before we jumped on this podcast, we were talking about, you know, what things are on your mind as it relates to Amazon? What what has you excited? What opportunities do you see, he talked a lot about how important brand building is on Amazon. Now, as our audience primarily is established Amazon businesses, they already found success, but they’re looking to go to eight figures and beyond, you know, what do you see going on in the Amazon space right now and some of the the advice and strategies that you would recommend to establish sellers right now?

Kevin King 16:30

Yeah, that’s it’s a tough one, we’ll get someone we’re gonna need to pivot, it’s going to be a little bit of a hard pivot. Because in the past on Amazon, there’s a lot of people that have built successful businesses and even exited successful businesses just basically finding opportunities, sticking a name on it, and a label on it and selling it, then selling that to an aggregator, but that’s those days are pretty much over, I’m not gonna say it doesn’t happen, it could still happen here and there. And then there’s a lot of people as you know, that they may have started with a small amount of money. And that’s way more difficult now, not that you can do it. But you know, I always say always hear stories that people say I started with 500 bucks. And now I got an eight figure business. And I always say BS, you might have started with $500, that that may be true. But two weeks later, your uncle gave you 10 grand, or somebody you got a credit card or you did something, there’s just no way it did that just flat out does not happen. From 500, there was something else along the way, it might not be the money out of your pocket. But there’s something else along the way. And those days are much more difficult now, and that yeah, as Amazon as you know, Amazon’s everything is more towards rewarding brands, you know, the brand registry, the brand analytics, the all the different, the advertising thing, everything is there trying to reward those brands, because they they’re trying to clean it up as well. They don’t want just this hodgepodge flea market on there, they want people that are coming for brands, and a lot of people think they’re a brand. And they’re really not, I say that if you don’t have at least 3000 searches a month on your brand name on Amazon on Amazon, because Amazon so big, you’re not a brand if people are not looking for you buy that, that brand name and typing that and it’s and you can see it in brand analytics, and it’s got like 3000 searches a month or more, then you’re actually not a brand, you’re just a product. And so that’s where a lot of people get confused. And a brand is not a logo, a brand is not a name, that’s part of it. But a brand is what a most is a feeling. It’s an evoction of something that people feel identity towards this or a passion towards this, or it represents something that they believe in, or that they feel. And that’s where a lot of booksellers are making mistakes. You know, when you see all these, these Chinese brands on Amazon, that strange brand names like z, x, y, or whatever, getting pronounced the damn thing. That’s not a brand. I mean, they’re doing that because it’s easy to get a trademark on that they could those things can fly through the trademark process really easy. So they can get the brand registry and all that. But those aren’t aren’t really brand names. So I think you really need to switch more toward brand and you need to switch to it more towards the need. They need to own their customer lists. on Amazon, you don’t get that data anymore used to be able to download that data. And so if you’re selling FBM FBA on Amazon, you don’t get that data if you’re doing FBM, you can still get it right. There used to be a loophole like with TaxJar. Like I think just recently got shut down. A lot of privacy issues there. But you need to figure out ways to actually get that data and whether that’s switching over you know, if you’re selling on Shopify or WooCommerce, start using Amazon Prime, the new ship with Prime whatever is called Shopify drop shipper prime loaded up with prime Yeah, yeah, where the Amazon will fulfill it for you off your Shopify store. So you get that extra customer service level plus you get the customer data, plus anything you’re selling on Amazon. It’s just a huge market. You got to figure out ways to try to get them into your ecosystem with creative inserts and creative marketing stuff. I mean, like one of the things that we do with one of my brands for example, of a pet brand of dog treats and whenever someone buys his dog treats off on Amazon, you know, you spend 30 bucks to buy these dog treats, we will have a really cool, it’s not just like a business card, but like something that really gets their attention into the, in the package and it says, hey, get a sample of all of our treats. And we’ll do a zero plus, free plus shipping offer. So it’s like if we have, for example, if we’re selling bully sticks, and we also have duck, duck feet, and we have antlers, and we have, you know, it’ll be like a little sampler. And we just take all the broken pieces and the leftovers and stuff like that. And we put them in a little bag, little sample bag, and we say it’s free, zero, for free, just pay $7.95 shipping that covers your cost, but it gets that name a qualified name onto our list. And we’re successful with that. And it also gets some sampling out of their products. So hopefully they try it. And we’ll do stuff we’re like, if it’s your dog, it’s like what? Registered, instead of registering your warranty like other people do, we say Register your dog for free gifts, and they’ll go and they’ll give us their dog’s name. dog’s name’s Spot, His birthday is April 11 2017. What kind of dog is it, which that’s some basic questions. And we’ll say if you upload a picture of your dog, you get some, you get a extra entry into our monthly drawing of free treats for a year or something like that. So we get some user generated content, or we’ll ask for video or whatever, maybe I’m eating our treats, and we can use on social media. And then what we do is about a week before the dog’s birthday is we drop a postcard into the mail, and that postcard will be addressed to the parents and they’ll say to the parents of a Spot, don’t forget my birthday is coming up next week on Tuesday. Don’t forget, I really would love some of those bully sticks that you bought me before. Here’s a coupon for 25% discounts or, in some cases, we’ll we’ll do something where if you buy our nutrient will give you this one, the one that they really want for free. And that gets some you know that that surprise and delight, and it gets them they’re like holy cow, they remember my dog’s birthday. So we do things like that really cheap build a list. Now, we do it in a I have another business, for example of, we sell a lot on this business calendars, wall calendars. So it’s a seasonal business for us. These are calendars with pictures, you know, there’s calendars that are like desk pads and stuff that just you know, you write your appointments, these are calendars you hang on the wall with pictures, and what we every year the cover, as people know, if you guys are experienced sellers, you might use PickFu or something like that to test covers that you need to cover, it is all the difference. You know, if we have the right cover, we’ll sell three times the calendars even though it’s the same title, the same everything as as another year. And so sometimes we mess up, you know, calendars are like selling milk, because they expire. And so there’s a window of pretty much September to February for us, where the vast majority I’m selling a lot of times after Christmas, you got to discount them to move them out, even though the year is still a full year ahead. It’s just the psychology of people like because you’re buying some gifts and so that your discount, and you’re trying to get rid of this stuff, because a 2021 calendar is pretty much worthless right now. And so sometimes we mess up and we print in Asia and Korea, because it’s just so much cheaper to do it there, including the shipping and everything. So I’ll order 20,000 of this one. And then we ended up only selling 16,000 or something like that. I’m like, What am I gonna do with these 4000? I can either take them and recycle them, take them to the recycling bin? Or what if I turn them into a loss leader. So what we do is an every single calendar that goes out, we put a four by six card, it says congratulations, you want a free calendar, a free random calendar. From our selection, it’s going to be something that you like as topic that you like, but you don’t get to pick the calendar, but we’re going to send it to you for free. You just pay it used to be $5 shipping hanging out on $10 because the prices have gone up. And I used to be able to ship a media mail and now I can’t ship on medium mail. So yeah, yeah, it so people will actually either go to our website and enter a code because this product doesn’t show up on our website without the code knowing the code, and they’ll pay $10 Or they’ll send the check in or money or through the mail. And so every for every calendar I sell on Amazon, we get about 10%, 10, 15% that actually do this, I get them on my list. And then the next year I have their I have their name, their email and everything. And I can market directly to them. And one of the things that we do is we also carry a lot of other calendars in our subject area. So that are not on Amazon. We import stuff from Germany and from Australia and places so we extend the brand we have ours that we produce and print which are four or five different ones this year. It’s four that we printed in South Korea, and we do a lot of business on Amazon and we sell to calendars.com and some of the other places as well. And and then we we sell direct I have a mailing list of 16,000 or such it’s going out right now as we speak 16,450 I think is what is the NCO after we did the national change of address and everything on it that was born out and these flyers go out and they can either it actually says on the flyer you can buy our calendars it says available on Amazon, if they want to go there and do Prime and not pay shipping, or they can borrow directly from us and they pay shipping, we charge $9.95, shipping for one calendar 1295 For like two up to $24.95 shipping on top of the calendar cost. And a lot of people will send checks and money orders into us, still, in envelopes, and other people will go online ordered on our website. It’s not Shopify sites, an older school website that we’ve just been using forever, and it works, no need to change it. Or they’ll go to Amazon and buy some of them. But we have. So every time one of these people does this, congratulations, you want to freak out because they bought it off Amazon, they get onto that list. And so I’m able to sell them directly, or I’m able to remind them the next year, Hey, make sure you go and get on Amazon. And one of the things we do is when we launched the calendars is we we just you know, we’re recording this in October of 2022. In September of 2022, our calendars came in, and I was like I need to launch them on Amazon. We don’t do any PPC zero, we don’t do any search, find buy or anything, what I do is I send out an email to a section of my list and say, Hey, these are available on Amazon, if you got a prime account, just go bomb over there and get free shipping, and a certain percentage will go and instantly launches the product. And we’re launching and we don’t need a lot of sales, you know, we’ll do $10,000 in sales in a couple of days off of that little promo in September, you know, this is not the buying season, this is way ahead of it. But because we do that we get in the top 100 of calendars on Amazon instantly, because even though we only sold 15 of a title per day, or 10 of the title per day, that’s enough at that point in time to get into that top list and you just ride that wave as more and more people are going on as Prime Day car and you know that new Prime Day came along. And other things come you just ride that wave and then by December when you’re just rockin and rollin and, and just printing money. And so that’s, that’s something that big brands need to be thinking about is is it you got a valuable asset there at least people that are buying on Amazon a super valuable asset, you got to figure out a way to market to them, and to get them to buy again, a lot of people are always worried about that first sale, if that’s not where the money’s at the money’s at the second, third, fourth, fifth sell and reselling it’s on whether it’s maybe it’s not even your product, maybe you don’t have other products to sell. So don’t partner with other other people that are complementary to you. And, and do something with them. You know, if you if you’re selling dog leashes, and dog watering bowls, partner with a company that’s doing running equipment, and say, Hey, ask them to say go out to their audience or you go to their audience and do cross promotions or hey, you runners, if you got a dog with all your runners with a dog, you know, I got the perfect leash for you. Yeah, all you runners.

All you dog owners that also like to run or walk the trails, here’s the perfect shoes are the perfect thing for to hold your watch or whatever. So many people don’t do that you got a valuable asset there, it’s the most valuable asset you have is that customer list. And so many people don’t use it, they don’t use it. And they’re afraid that I go, I don’t want to bother them. I don’t want to spam them. I don’t want to go out but you got to that’s where the money’s at. And like this calendar business that we have. It’s on autopilot. We’ve been doing it since 1994. And I have customers since 1994. There’s they haven’t died yet, they’re still buying every year. And it’s it’s on autopilot. I know every year, this is what we’re going to do. And I don’t have to go out and recreate a new list. You know, I got I we instill NCO a at it, which means national change of address. So there’s companies like Melissa Data that you can send your list to, and they update it, you know, when you go to the post office and you fill out a little form says I moved, right, they have all that data. And so they can say if Josh, you moved from the Dallas area to Atlanta, I’m going to get your new address so that I can send it straight to you. Or I’m going to find out that you died. Actually it will tell me that hey, you know, Joshua, unfortunately passed away. Don’t no need to mail him a flyer. So it takes all those people off, you know, does all that kind of cleaning adds the zip plus for and standardizes and everything and that way you get the cheap rates and there’s huge business and that whether you’re driving them to your own website, or you’re driving them to Amazon, or Walmart or Shopify or whatever it may be, and so many people just don’t understand that it’s that they’re just too focused on this one little Amazon piece. And there’s so much more you can do.

Josh Hadley 29:17

No, I completely agree you’ve dropped some wicked smart strategies and tactics. I think the examples you shared, were fantastic. Because what you’ve done Kevin is you’ve taken the idea or the concept that everybody’s preached about, right? Hey, just include an answer in your package and, you know, have people register a warranty with you so you can collect their information. But that’s not a very compelling offer. What I love is that you’ve been creative with your ideas to say, Hey, what is a creative offer that I can give to people such as like the dog right? With your dog treats? Instead of saying register your warranty for this pet toy? Why don’t you register your Dog so that he can claim some free gifts. And then you’re going to be sending out, you know, the birthday postcard, I mean, brilliant strategies. And also great value adds to the customer so that when they receive your product, they not only enjoy the existing product, you’ve obviously create a good product. But then on top of that you’re adding extra value with, Hey, here’s a free sample pack of other treats, just pay shipping. And so I love that all the way around. These are brilliant marketing tactics that I think any seven-figure or any Amazon seller, regardless of what stage you’re at, should be implementing in their business. Kevin, one question I have for you is, what type of tools like software tools are you using to implement some of the strategies and tactics?

Kevin King 30:47

Well, I mean, I have my own database tool that we’ve developed, you know, to store all our customers and relationship management type of stuff. It’s not like a commercial one out there, we just developed it ourselves over over the years in house to manage that. But then, like, you know, the, for Amazon’s statistical tools like Helium 10, I’ve been trying infuse into mastermind, he’s got some pretty cool little tools, I use a lot of the brand we have brand analytics, we actually developed Stephen, our own little tool to actually parse that data and really do that. Those are the main tools. You know, there’s, there’s a handful of others, but I don’t have like a huge tool suite of like, you know, 50 different tools. There’s so many different things out there. It’s so fragmented now with stuff. But that’s, I mean, it’s just old school, and I still do stuff. You know, I’m still old school, like my calendar. My wife’s on me all the time. But I don’t use like Apple calendars or Google calendar, I have like a, it’s like a text document where I just have date by date by date. I’m old school and that way, and it just that system works for me. And yeah, I’m involved in a lot of stuff. But one of the things I like to say is I like I like to work smarter, not harder. So I partner with people on certain things and so like, on on the teaching stuff like Helium 10, you know, I could go out and do that on my own and probably make pretty good money. You know, like what Brandon Young and does with solar systems and some of the other people Yep, but but I didn’t, I would have to be giving affiliate Commission’s to get people to promote it probably given away 50%, I’d have to be hiring a team to manage it and the customer service and who’s going to be editing it versus if I just partnered with him 10. And they do all that for me, they have the traffic, they have the eyeballs, they have all that processing and everything, I don’t have to worry about anything, just show up and do my thing, and collect a bunch of money. And so I do a lot of that type of stuff to to work to work smart. And other thing like we did back on that. On those, I think I didn’t mention on those calendars where I was saying that we make 20,000. But we only sold 16,000 What we do with those other 4000 That’s the ones that we use that excess stock and stuff, recycle them, I use them in those free random calendars, I get literally the product. And basically at the Pan $10 boards, it’s free plus shipping, it’s $10. But only cost me $5.20 to ship it out the counter land is $1.60. So actually take a look and make money on that too. And I’m getting rid of excess inventory because it’s totally random. Another thing we used to do is we used to sell baseball cards. At a company this was a hot thing back in the 90s and early 2000s and had baseball cards or they had like bikini models on them, like Sports Illustrated and, and things like that. And these guys would buy them and what we would do at Christmas time is we would go and we hired an actor that look like Santa Claus and have him we would set this whole scene of like a Christmas scene. And we have some girl on like sexy lingerie or something, you know, common and, and sit on his lap and as tell him what he wants for Christmas and it’d be you know, just it was clean. You know, it’s like Victoria’s Secret dish. Sure, sure. Well, this is not foreign or something like that, but but it was clean and then we would print those and we would if we had 4000 customers I think at the time on our list that were regular buyers, we would number those one of 4000 hand number them to a 4003 or 4000 mount them on another card. Cinnamon on a really nice envelope, like a Christmas you know, like you get a Christmas card and and send that out to them. Totally unexpected. And they would get this and they would just freak because this is something that nobody else could get. It was totally for free. They’re collectors of this of these little baseball cards. So it’s like this is like the perfect thing. And that collection I’ve seen some of those going on eBay for like $400 recently well from like 20 years ago. But so those kinds of things where you while and you surprise them are always remember I used to order when we were doing a lot of TV stuff. We would order beta tapes. This is back before everything was digital and you’d have to get those big tapes and you know that the stick in the video camera. Yeah. And we would order those from a company in Philadelphia and they would always inside the package they would throw two of those little small packages of m&ms You know like you get the Halloween size camera. Yeah, and it just be two of those on top with the with the printed invoice or the packing slip allergies. Remember if I didn’t get those two, I would be like what the hell what am I m&ms? You know, this is something simple. This is like a 25 cent thing. But the and I would order from them sometimes just because I knew Hey When it shows up, I get a little m&m snack. It’s silliest thing. But it’s brilliant marketing that they do. And so if you can do that, in your products, surprise and delight, include something in your package that there is not only one listing that’s not advertised anywhere that has some sort of, it’s a small token, but has some sort of perceived value, or reward to the customer. And just be surprised how many raving fans and how many loyal people you can build off of just just surprising and delighting when they’re not expecting

Josh Hadley 35:25

it. Yeah. I love that, Kevin. And I’m also curious, when you’ve built a brand and as you collect emails, have you ever faced any challenges in terms of not getting the type of engagement you would like? Or quite the opposite? Have you always, you know, had success, like you collect their emails, and then you’re just printing money, whenever you send out an email? Have, you had the opposite, where it’s like, for whatever reason, like this audience, I send stuff out, and it’s just cricket,

Kevin King 35:55

It depends on what you’re sending, as long as you’re sending, I mean, it’s all in the message, that list is the most important part, and then some message that you send to that list. So yeah, there’s times where, you know, we have to test different subject lines, or we get on a RBLS real time blacklist, because we’re sending so many emails, that some of them end up going into spam. Or if you get a couple people that mark this as spam, you know, they report that back. And so you can have deliverability issues. So there’s a there is a battle sometimes there with that. I mean, I even have it with like the billion dollar seller Summit, you know, I will get the replays or the PDFs, and I’ll send out, you know, 200 or something emails or something. And two weeks later, I’ll have like, 10 people say, Hey, I never I never got the replays when you guys send those out, like those went out two weeks ago. I didn’t get it. Like, what can you check your spam, using Gmail or something? check your spam. Oh, there it is. So yeah, you have, there are challenges on that that’s a that’s a constant battle, a stand whitelisted and fight and that that can really mess you up. And, and it’s also, you know, the people don’t want to bug people too much. But you got to stay top of mind. I don’t know how many times you’ve probably gotten an email from somebody, you’re like, oh, man, these guys email me like every three days. And some of them you just get frustrated you unsubscribe, but other ones, that some of the email, you’re like, Okay, what the heck is this? You know, you’re sitting or waiting for the waiting for the Uber? And you’re like, Um, let me actually check and see what the hell these guys keep sending? And then maybe you buy. So you got to balance that as well, the piston pissing people off versus the, you know, trying to get them to converge. And so the engineer Yeah.

Josh Hadley 37:32

Do you have a recommendation with like, how many times that you found based on your experience? Like, is it three, four times a week that you’re reaching out to your audience? Or is it daily?

Kevin King 37:41

I would go, I used to do the daily one. Remember, we used to do the daily one this is but this was before spam existed. So we would we were sending out 250,000 a day and they weren’t going into spam or RBLS. This was amazing. The I couldn’t do that today, even with full permission base that we would have some sort of issues probably. But yeah, daily was would be ideal, but and I get some daily newsletters, you know that marketing newsletters and stuff like that, that, that I keep up with daily would be ideal, but you got to deliver value can’t be a promotion every day, you know, I get sometimes you sign up for these, you know, you go to macys.com. And, and everyday, you’re getting some emotion after that, that you got to deliver value. And then it’s like a Gary Vaynerchuk says a, what’s a punch, punch, punch, right hook or whatever it is, right? You that’s what you got to deliver value. And that’s what we’re doing when we’re doing those 250,000 a day, as we were delivering value as news it was games. And then there would be like one line in there that’s like, oh, by the way, we have this calendar for sale, or go join this website or whatever. And it works. And we that’s where you got to if you’re doing daily, but if you’re not twice a week, you know, if you’re doing promotional straight up promotional stuff would be probably the most I would do.

Josh Hadley 38:55

Good. That’s good input. And I think another takeaway from what you just talked about is that you got to be willing to test right test different offers. I think now you’ve been able to kind of refine what your offerings are. But I imagine along the way, you probably tested multiple offers of like, what what free insert or what free product is going to get the best take rate right? Or what is going to lead people to actually follow through and correct

Kevin King 39:23

that. Yes, and that depends on whether it’s a cold audience or a warm audience like with our calendars. I don’t need to make a nice HTML email when I go out to my list to my calendars and say hey, they’re available on Amazon right now. I don’t need to make a nice HTML with covers and the calendars and and have all this like fancy like looking. What email with all this explanation, I can do a three line email. This is this because it’s a brand and I can help make sure the email is coming from the brand name so they instantly recognize it. And the email is literally three lines of text a, the 2023 calendars are available. If you’re an Amazon Prime member given with free shipping on Amazon, Click here. That’s it. And it works. I don’t need to spend a lot of time developing fancy emails or hiring copywriters or anything because they know that’s a brand. That’s what the background talking about early. They know this brand. They know what I let Amazon, the listing do the selling, I don’t need to do in an email versus other times if I’m doing cold listing or prospecting or I’m starting. I’m starting a brand new Billion Dollar Seller Summit, for example, is a good example. I don’t when was the first one that you came to?

Josh Hadley 40:28

First one I came to was the virtual summit in 2020. Okay, 2021 Okay, so you 2021 Yeah, so yes, signed up in 2020. But I think that first one was like, what, February 2021? Right?

Kevin King 40:42

Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I started that in 2019. And the first one is May of 2019, though first in person, one in Austin. And I had a little bit of a name, you know, because I’ve been speaking and stuff. So people knew who, who I was, but I was like, How can I get people to come to this event, I want high level people. And I want new people. So I gotta charge a premium amount. And we’re gonna do some cool stuff, you know, VIP parties, and we’re gonna, you know, it cost me several $1,000 per person out of my pocket for the billion dollar source. And it’s not people’s looking at like, Oh, it’s $6,000 ticket, you must just be like, cashing in. Yeah, I make a profit. But there’s some serious expenses to that, you know, a Coke, a Coca Cola and a break during the breaks $7 a can, for account of a 12 ounce can of coke that the hotel is charging us, you know, it’s $30,000, to have the ballroom, you know, it’s $10,000, if you want internet in the room, so people can get on there. There’s some serious expenses that are involved there. So but I was like, I want to do this right. And I need I want an audience that’s high level. So I need to charge an amount that they can afford that the average new person, it’s just way too much money, because I don’t want the new people there. And I want to create this audience. So how can I get people to come? You know, there’s so many other events out there, what can I do? And so I decided, You know what, I’m actually not going to make a fancy website, I’m going to leverage off of my name, I’m gonna deliberately make a signup page, it looks like a 1990s. HTML page. It’s like,

Josh Hadley 42:06

Which I remember when I saw that the first time I was like, What is this? I have not seen anything, like, felt like so retro. And I was like, Is this going to be legit? Like I had? I had questions, Kevin, I was I was quite concerned of your, your aptitude of being able to create websites, but keep going.

Kevin King 42:25

But know that I do that myself. I mean, that one, I actually just go in there and call it that. And I was like, I’m gonna try to do this differently. And Danny, you make no one on it. So Sessions has done like a whole podcast on how it’s the branding of it. It’s all it’s, it’s like, I’m gonna do a deliver website. And I’m gonna say on the website, look, this is on purpose. We’ve spent the money on the event, we don’t spend it on fancy websites that make it look like it’s cool. If you don’t know who I am, or don’t want to come don’t come it actually weeds out. It’s a it’s a weeding mechanism. Do I hurt myself a little bit on some sales? Probably. But it also does what you said is like, hey, earlier, when we’re talking like everybody in that room was cool, you know, that was a great audience a great everything, it creates that. And so on that event, what actually the first one, you couldn’t even sign up on the website, you had to download a PDF, or download a PDF handwrite it or type it if you want to type it, but most people hand wrote it and take a picture of it and send it back with your credit card information. And one of the reasons I did that was because six months, I was afraid my credit card merchant processor is going to freak out because I’ve been running 2050 $100 calendar orders through this thing for years. And all of a sudden they start doing $6,000 orders, and are they going to freak out and you know, put a hold on the money or something? Whatever. So I want some sort of proof of signature, you know, and everything that took just to have that that’s one reason Plus it was a qualifier. And it’s a hassle and people are like Yeah, screw this. And then once they did that, what I did is to reassure them as I sent them a gift package so everybody on the first one got like a spent about $150 on this each person and they got a gift package from Texas it was like Texas barbecue with some sausage it’s like a nice little box with like some hay and stuff around it like we custom made it wasn’t like something we bought off a promotion site we custom made this thing with stuff from Austin and sent that out to everybody and then that created a viral effect where people started getting a holy shit okay, this actually looks pretty cool. And they were taking pictures of and other people were seeing it like that create a little bit okay, Kevin’s thing must be legit, you know, Isabella Hamilton’s going and she got this picture and this other person did it and then I actually invited about seven or eight people to that advance for free so you don’t have to pay but these are like people that have a strong social presence and social like you guys can come just fight fly yourself there and pay for your hotel but you don’t have to pay and then that created gotta going as well. And then just like this last one that we just did that you were at that I think was probably the best one yet and the buzz from everybody is still says it’s the best one yet from the contents of the fun. And we did a contest on a scavenger hunt thing, and like Amazing Race scavenger hunt wherever they got broken up into teams of four, and it’s for networking and fun stuff, you get to see a part of the city that most people never saw. And part of that was post pictures online. To get extra points, there was more than 3000 pictures that were posted online. Some people deleted them afterwards. But there was like, over 3000 pictures, delete online, the crib is and I still

Josh Hadley 45:21

have, I still have over 200 photos on my phone that I have not deleted because I was I was the one that happened to take the pictures and upload them. It’s still on my to do list. I’m like, I keep going back. And I just laugh, because I’ve got pictures of like Tim Jordan on there, and we’re just, I’m wearing the dress, Tim George wearing the hat. Like it. It’s just classic, like, hilarious stuff. So like, I haven’t deleted them, even though it’s like just 200 pictures of complete randomness, but it created that like experience. So keep going.

Kevin King 45:56

That’s marketing, you know. And that’s, that’s all part of having fun, but also is marketing at the same time. And, and like people like Gracie, I remember she was there. She’s a big social media person. She’s like, I see exactly what you’re doing here. I don’t know if I want to post cuz I charge money for this kind of stuff. But she did. But so that’s what a lot of these brand new, you’re asking earlier. What can these Amazon sellers, and what can they do? You gotta be thinking outside the box, thinking about these screen is these experiences brands, in the past a lot of times has been a passive thing. It’s a name, and it’s like you’re buying the brand, but try to make it more active. It is you can, you can own a Louis Vuitton purse. And that’s a status symbol for a woman. And yes, it’s usually a better quality and it but it’s also a status symbol, it makes them feel like they made it or they belonged or they’re special or whatever. But if you can take that and make it active, you know where it’s Louie Vuitton on events or, or anybody that has a Louis Vuitton purse is actually can come to this special social event only if you have a Louis Vuitton purse or whatever, make it more active. And like we were just talking about with the branding of billion dollar sausage and making it more active, not just passing, I could go and listen to some presentations, and have a VIP dinner, like everybody else does, but actually make it active. And that’s where if you can do that, and your your current products evolve towards that, then you can have a much more active community much more success and much more engagement. And it just goes it’ll spread the word was spread out there about what you’re doing, and more people will want to get involved. And we’re doing that now. I know we don’t have time to talk about it here. But with NF T’s. Yeah. And a lot of people are like, Oh, you NF T is a bunch of JPEGs and monkeys and stupids sounds stupid. But no, there’s the technology behind it. If you understand it is amazing what you can do. And you can qualify people and get them into the community, use those communities to build things and to reward people and to do all kinds of cool stuff. I did a presentation at scale and scale and billion dollar seller Summit. There’s one out there right now, if you want to see about that, once you click Augustus release has a YouTube channel and I just recorded that that for him on YouTube. But talking about how we’re using NF T’s and one of my businesses to actually build a entire brand. And this whole experience this active to passive and this whole rewarding and stuff all around that and physical products to using it to launch and build community and all kinds of cool stuff. And there’s a lot of opportunity out there. And a lot of things that people just need to think differently, you know, sold out Apple slogan, think differently. Yeah. There’s lots of things you can do.

Josh Hadley 48:26

Yeah, Kevin, you have dropped some amazing knowledge bombs. With all of our listeners here today. I myself have already been taking down notes throughout this entire episode. And so I appreciate all of those insights, to kind of sum things up for our audience, our audience, what I would say are some three actionable takeaways would be number one, you’ve got to build a real brand on Amazon. Long gone are the days of just creating the two products or just

Kevin King 48:55

leaves on it’s not it’s not build a real brand on Amazon, it’s build a real brand. And then Amazon is one of the platform, the marketplaces of choice where they buy it. So it’s not just on Amazon, but your Amazon has to become a marketplace of choice for people, but it needs to be a real brand independent of Amazon as well.

Josh Hadley 49:13

Yeah, thank you for correcting me because that is an important mindset shift, right? Creating a real brand. That is not just I’m just making money on Amazon, it’s I’m creating a real brand and Amazon is one of my distribution channels that I’m

Kevin King 49:28

Maybe your biggest and your most and that’s okay, but you need it needs to be able to stand alone as well.

Josh Hadley 49:32

Very good. Action Item Number two would be creating your own email list creating your own audience, right. So testing out different insert cards, tests, testing out different offers that you can could include with your product so that you obtain customers contact info. And then number three is actually utilizing that audience to further your brand. Not just sending them promotional material to just elevate your sales But providing them actionable and content that can serve that customer. And as you do that, like Kevin has mentioned so much on this podcast, creating experiences, right? How can you create an experience with your customers, as you reach out to your audience, then as you create those experiences, they will more readily receive those future opportunities where you’re promoting a new product that you’re trying to launch. So I think our audience has a lot that they can digest through this episode. But Kevin, one of the final questions I want to ask you is The Billion Dollar Seller Summit, one of the best conferences that I’ve ever been to, in regards to Amazon content and the type of people that are attending that event? So kudos to you there. But I want to hear who would you say are your top three kind of speakers or attendees that have ever been to your Billion Dollar Seller Summit? Who are those people that you know, people should be paying attention to? And maybe I’m putting you on the spot, but I know you give away like best speaker awards as well. So you can also, you know, push it back on to who are some of those people as well?

Kevin King 51:05

Why No, I think in the Amazon space, I think someone that does a really good job as Brandon Young, I know, you know, he’s a guest or maybe a guest or has been a guest on your on your show. But I think that’s someone that does a really good job with his tools that that people should be paying attention to. So he has been to the billion dollar seller Summit. So that would be one of them. You know, Casey Gauss has kind of disappeared a little bit, but he’s a super smart guy, you know, he started Viral Launch and then went to Thrasio and now he’s doing was doing some stuff for is I’m not sure completely carbon six and, and then he’s kind of migrating over to some AI and just dabbling around. But that’s a super smart guy that if you’re able to ever hear him speak, I remember when he first spoke at one of our events in Mexico like 2017. He wasn’t very good. It was one of those first times on stage and he was kind of scatterbrained, but you could just tell this guy’s brilliant, there’s a super smart mind inside there. And he was just a little scattered. But he got better as he presented more and did more things. But that’s someone that if you get a chance that he’s been he’s, he’s won a couple times, at the billion dollar sauce on his best speaker. And that’s someone that’s been there. That’s good. A third one. Man who would be the third one that really would stand out that he should follow. Now, this is guy, Josh Hadley, that one like the best hack contest, you know, I will be if he has a podcast or something like that. I’d be making sure I listened to that, because it’s probably gonna be some amazing value that comes out of that. And I’m sure you know, if you need some help growing your business from seven to eight figures. Yeah, this is a guy that probably has has a clue and actually knows how to get you there pretty quickly and do a good job. So maybe someone like, you know, like, this guy, Josh Hadley, if you never heard of him.

Josh Hadley 52:49

All right, Kevin, your checks in the mail. I love it. Well, Kevin, this has been such a an amazing episode. I really appreciate the insights that you shared with our audience. And if people want to contact you or continue to follow you, where’s the best place for people to go? I know you’ve got a lot going on. But what where would you like to direct people?

Kevin King 53:12

Yeah, if you just probably follow me on Facebook or something, that’d probably be the best place I’m not really I have an Instagram account. I have a LinkedIn account Attica and I checked my LinkedIn in like a year. So I’m not really active on those but Facebook would probably be the best place just to hit a follow there or, or reach out to me on Messenger or something if you want to reach out.

Josh Hadley 53:30

Awesome. All right, Kevin, thanks again for joining the show.

Kevin King 53:33

No problem. Glad to be here, man anytime.

Outro 53:36

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