TAS 292 Ask Scott Session #88 – Your Business and Marketing Questions

What’s the deal with this year? It’s just flown by! Here we are in the 4th quarter, the first part of December 2016 and we’re looking at Christmas coming up. But there is lots to be concerned about that’s much more important than product sales. Yep, you heard that right. You’ve got family at home and kids around and the holidays are almost here. So make sure you take a breath, look around you, and enjoy the moment. That’s the first thing Scott has to say as he starts this “Ask Scott” episode of the podcast and he’s learning it himself as he goes. If you’d like to hear this episode and ask your own question, you can ask Scott yourself. Listen to this Q&A episode to find out how!

I’m doing well with my first private label product but am still on page 8. How can I improve that?

A listener called in to ask how he can improve his product ranking. At this point, he’s consistently on page 8 or page 9 and his niche is a very competitive sub-niche of the sporting goods category. Even though he’s getting a decent amount of sales he’s curious if he’s ranking so low because his seller account is new. He’s also curious what he can do to improve his product rank. Scott’s got one main thought about why his product is ranking so low. Can you guess what it is? You can find out on this episode of The Amazing Seller.

No more discounts in exchange for product reviews. What should you do now?

In case you haven’t heard, Amazon has now changed its policies to forbid private label sellers from offering discounts in exchange for a review. That doesn’t mean you can’t give discounts. It doesn’t mean that you can’t ask for reviews. But it DOES mean that you can't offer the discount only if the purchaser agrees to leave you a product review. The practice of discounts in exchange for reviews used to be one of the most powerful ways to drive product reviews, which in turn helps with social proof, which in turn drives sales. So… since it’s not allowed now, what should you do to get a product going? Scott’s going to tell you how he’s modified his strategy, on this episode.

Can you tell me what the best way is to research great keywords for my products?

A listener called in on this episode and he's a Jr. in college and has already launched 4 products and has two more on order. He’s rocking the Amazon private label sales world already and is eager to find out how he can find the best keywords that his products can best rank for. He knows that getting his products found for the keywords people are actually searching for is what is going to help him get in front of the people who are wanting exactly what he has to offer. If you’d like to hear how Scott recommends all sellers go about finding their best product keywords – including the tools he’d use to find them.

If private label sales are proving to be a challenge, here’s how you can get your questions answered.

The Friday episodes of The Amazing Seller podcast are aimed entirely at answering YOUR Amazon, business, marketing, and private label sales questions. If you are struggling to get your private label questions answered, Scott is the guy. If you want to know how to do better list building and online marketing, Scott’s here to help. Don’t miss these Friday episodes. Not only can you find out how to ask your own questions, you can also hear answers to other sellers’ questions – and that will help you as well!

OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER

[0:03] Scott’s introduction to this Q&A episode of the podcast!
[4:32] QUESTION ONE: Just launched my first PL product and I’m curious if my products isn’t rising in the rankings due to being a new seller?
[17:30] QUESTION TWO: Since there are no longer discounts in exchange for reviews what do we do to get reviews from now on?
[26:39] QUESTION THREE: What is the best way to research the best keywords for my products?

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TRANSCRIPT TAS 292

TAS 292 : Ask Scott Session #88 – Your Business and Marketing Questions

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:03] Scott: Well hey, hey what’s up everyone! Welcome back to another episode of The Amazing Seller Podcast. This is episode number 292 and session number 88 of Ask Scott. This is where I answer your questions here on the podcast and man I cannot believe that we’re at 88 sessions so far, that’s 88 weeks which is just crazy…

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…that we’ve been doing it that long. But it doesn’t get old. I love it, I love doing this and you guys have heard me say probably tired of hearing me say it but I really do love sitting down and having a chat about business and that’s what we do here on the Ask Scott sessions.

I have to say we are approaching the holidays. We just basically got through Black Friday which was pretty amazing and I have to say one of our students Nick Gamble who is just crushing it. Nick, if you’re listening man kudos to you bro, doing a great job. Patience is really the key here and Nick has been doing this now for over probably a year and a half now I would guess. I met him out in Texas when we had our unofficial meet up, he’s just crushing it. He had a phenomenal Black Friday, phenomenal. The last I checked he was over 1800 units sold in a single day which is just crazy.

Now, I don’t want people to think, “Well, that’s great but that doesn’t happen all the time.” And you’re right, it doesn’t. But you know what, if he didn’t take action if he didn’t get himself put in that spot to get that offer of a lightning deal and a Black Friday at the same time well then, you didn’t take action to get there. You have to actually do something in order to get the opportunities to capitalize on stuff like this and Nick just again thumbs up. You can’t see me right now but right now I’m going to give you a visual, I’m giving you two thumbs up like, way to go man, that was awesome. And thanks for sharing.

[00:01:55] Scott: Again, just want to say Black Friday, that’s past us now. It was awesome for a lot of us. There is a fourth quarter depending on when you’re listening to this. Right now we are in December, we’re approaching the holidays which I’m getting pretty excited about. My daughter, my youngest daughter Kayla who is, the time of the airing of this she will be 9. I’m recording it before her birthday which is the 6th but she’s really excited for the holidays. She just loves, loves Christmas and just loves the holidays and I love her for that because it makes me appreciate the holidays that much more and enjoying that time with your family.

Right now, why don’t you just think about that for a second? If you are busy and you’re just thinking to yourself, “Man, this is just getting crazy.” Slow down, take a deep breath and enjoy the moment, enjoy the moment. Sometimes we get so tied up and so busy in our day to day activities of trying to grow a business or try to get out of a job or whatever, but to take a minute and just slow down. I’ll tell you, I have a 21 old daughter, an 18 year old son and a 9 year old daughter. That 9 year old daughter makes me really, really appreciate the time that we have and these moments that we have. Definitely slow down and take a deep breath and enjoy the time.

It’s exciting for fourth quarter, sales are up, yay, but we want also to appreciate those times. I got to be honest, I’m just enjoying these holidays even more with my 9 year old reminding me of how special it is and just listening to the Christmas songs that she has playing throughout the house. We have surround sound so the whole house is blaring with Christmas songs. I actually did a Snapchat the other day coming around the backend of my house and she had it out on the back deck. It’s just a lot of fun. But anyway, let’s get to it.

[00:03:39] Scott: Before we do jump in… I don’t know how I got off on that little bit of a rant but it’s a good rant. I think you guys got to slow down, we all have to slow down. Take a deep breathe, relax, enjoy, right but be excited as well. I just want to remind you guys the show notes to this episode will be on theamazingseller.com/292 transcripts, show notes, all that stuff will be there and then I also wanted to remind you if you have a question, head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and ask away. Just record a short little message with your name, where you’re tuning in from and your question and I’ll do my best to air it on an upcoming Ask Scott session. What do you say, let’s kick this baby off, let's’ go ahead and listen to today’s first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[Q&A SESSION]

[00:04:38] Nate: Hello Scott? This is Nate from the beautiful state of Idaho, how are you? Love your stuff. I’ve listened and consumed most of your podcasts over the past year and really appreciate all you have. A little about us, we just launched our first private label product on Amazon, roughly one month ago. We’ve seen already great organic sales through pay-per-click. We have already established quite a few great reviews over the past month and really feel good there. Overall we’ve been very pleased with our success and the direction we’re heading with this product.

Our seller account is very new and I feel that, I can sense that that may be holding us back a little bit, rightfully so from Amazon’s perspective. So here’s my question, we rank anywhere from number 25 to number 35 in this very competitive subsection of the sporting goods industry or category I should say and every day we don’t fluctuate much away from that 25 to 35 spot or rank in that category. But the problem is we’re ranking like page 8, 9 and 10, when you actually search for our key term. We know that most of our sales and conversions are coming from that key term yet we’re just not seeing much improvement, it’s not really climbing up the ladder for the keyword term.

[00:06:36] Nate: My question is, is the reason that we’re not climbing up the ladder because of how competitive the market is? Or may it have to do with how new our seller account is and Amazon just not yet putting full trust in us as a new seller? Something is definitely going on because like I said we’re ranking pretty high in the category yet for the search term we’re really not doing, we’re invisible. That’s really my question, trying to figure all this out, it’s been very fun and man I really can’t appreciate or can’t thank you enough and tell you how much I appreciate all your help. If you get to this I really would appreciate it, thanks Scott, see you.

[00:07:42] Scott: Hey Nate thank you so much for the question and thanks for being a listener. I have to I guess go back a little bit to my intro, I didn’t really give us the word of the day or the phrase of the day, right and I really wanted to because it kind of tied into what I was saying about taking a deep breath about and that is patience. Let’s have a little bit more patience. Sometimes it’s hard as being entrepreneurs; we’re always go, go, go.

We got to have some patience and it kind of leads to what I’m going to say here in my response to Nate’s question. Not that patience is going to be the answer to everything but we try things and then we don’t get results and then we just think that it’s not working but it means we might have to keep going at it, we might have to keep pushing or keep driving sales in this case. The big thing here that I’m seeing, there’s a couple of different things but the thing that I’m looking at is your sales are almost a direct response, your sales are a direct indicator of your ranking. Not sure if that even made sense. What I’m trying to say is if you’re not ranking, it’s optimization yes, but it’s also sales. If you don’t have the sales and you’re optimized you’re still not going to be able to rank.

It sounds like you’re in a competitive space, okay, which is going to be harder right off the ground, just starting is going to be harder to rank. So you need to figure out how can you get sales to match first page? And if that is your one keyword which again going back, I don’t think that one keyword is the only keyword that you’re going to be getting sales from. Yes, it might be one of the main drivers but it doesn’t mean that that is the one that’s going to make you successful. I think that you have to look outside of it, you have to start looking at more long tail, meaning 3, 4, 5 keywords in one phrase, that’s a long tail.

[00:09:28] Scott: But yes, you can still start working and keep working and have patience because as you’re working it’s going to take time to push for that one golden keyword that you might be going after, ‘the stainless steel garlic press’, right versus going after ‘the 8 inch stainless steel garlic press’ or maybe ‘the extra-long handle stainless steel garlic press’. See, I’m adding a couple of extra words in there that could be also popular and you won’t know these until you start running that auto pay-per-click because then that’s going to start pulling back some of those keywords that might be getting decent amount of impressions but you’re not driving towards those, you’re not pushing towards those because you’re not focusing on them so you’re not optimizing for them either.

Once you discover the keywords you could be ranking for better then you want to start to inject them into your listing and then start looking at the different key points as far as your title, your bullets, your description, the backend keywords. That’s where you’re going to want to start adding those. Now, if you’re in a highly competitive space and your competition is already on page one, they have a good decent amount of reviews, they’re going to continually get sales because they’re there in front of everyone.

Imagine this for a second, you have a store and it’s on the busy street of your town or your area and they get a lot of traffic so they get a lot of people to come in there and people come in there, they find what they need and they’re going to keep coming back for that thing or those things that they need because they get it every time they go in there, the customer service is good, it’s great. You’re on another side of town that doesn’t get a lot of traffic but you have the same type of product or maybe even a little bit better, maybe a little bit of a better customer service but no one sees you because they don’t drive that way to work every day. They don’t go through that side of town or whatever.

[00:11:28] Scott: But if you could put shop up over there and get in front of those people, there’s a chance you’re going to probably do okay and that’s kind of what we’re talking about here in a certain example. You have to get in front of those people but if you’re already in front of those people and your sales are good, your product is good, people are going to keep coming back. How do you get in front of those people? How do you stake your flag or your business in a highly targeted traffic area? Well, you have to get ranked. Well, how do you get ranked? Sales, so the first thing you need to do is you need to understand what are the sales numbers for page one.

If it’s 30 sales a day and you’re only getting 5 sales a day well guess what you need 25 sales a day. How do you get 25 sales a day? Well, you can either run pay-per-click and see if that will do it. If that can’t do it then you gotta start doing discounts outside of Amazon. You got to start building your own email list. You got to start reaching out to influencers in your space. Go to Instagram, go to Pinterest, go to YouTube, go to Twitter, go to any place that you think your customers are hanging out or your market is hanging out, go there, offer to buy a sponsored ad on their page, on an Instagram page or on a Pinterest page, whatever and get in front of the people and then drive people there with a 50% off sale, 75% off sale, whatever because the goal here is to get sales and if you get sales, guess what, you can start to rank and then get in front of the people that can then buy your product on a regular everyday basis.

[00:13:14] Scott: That’s how it works. There’s really not secret source there other than you need sales… Well, first off you need a well optimized listing. Here’s the second part because there’s three parts actually. The second part is if you are competing in a competitive space, they’ll probably have a high number of reviews, okay? If you need high reviews, that’s going to be a problem because even if you get on page one and you have a lesser amount of reviews, can’t talk today, I’m so excited, then it’s not going to matter. That’s why we talk a lot about finding products that don’t compete on reviews, that don’t have a high number of reviews but still get good sales.

Again, you have to think about optimization. Then optimization part of that is reviews if your competitors have a lot of reviews so if you’re looking at page one and they have 1,000 reviews and you only have 50, even if you get on page one it’s going to be hard to convert on that, even though you could it’s just is going to be harder. You have to keep at it. You have to keep driving sales, keep getting people to come through your email follow up and you have to keep doing that and then the third part of that is sales. You need sales. You get those optimization points in place, you get sales and then you should be able to start to rank.

That’s how it works but again I go back to what I said in the beginning, I would not focus on just spending all my energy on the one or two keywords. I would start worrying about, not even worrying about, focusing on the keywords that are the longer tail. The ones that can get you a couple of sales a day or maybe a week and you get a bunch of those and then that adds up. Then you’re at more of an advantage I feel because you’re not banking on that one keyword. If you start losing your rank on the one keyword your sales don’t just automatically wipe away so you want to just not focus on that one keyword.

[00:15:10] Scott: The other thing you talked about is the age of your account or the feedback that you have and that can be another part of the algorithm of ranking, you’re absolutely right. There’s really no set way that I can say do this, do this do this and do this and everything is going to be perfect. It just doesn’t work that way but what I can tell you is Amazon bases a lot of their ranking from sales but they can’t rank you for keywords if you’re not optimized. That I can tell you on a common sense level, that’s the way it works.

Your account age and your account score as far as your feedback and your ranking, as far as that goes, that’s kind of like we don’t know. We think that if you have a more seasoned account then you’ll rank easier and I would think that would make sense but there’s no guarantee, there’s just no guarantee for that. Hopefully, this has helped, this little bit of a rant, I don’t want to call it a tangent but I did really dig into all of the different elements that it takes to rank. You have to focus on those things. Right away you can say, “Well, I can see on page one they’re selling 25 a day and I’m only selling 5.” First thing you got to do get 20 extra sales a day. How do you do that? Well, pay-per-click or you run some promotions outside of Amazon, hopefully you’re building your own email list.

This is where an email fist comes I really handy because now you can run… Let’s say you have a list of 2,000/3,000 emails of people that are interested in your product or in your market and then you just send out 300 people an email on Monday and then another 300 on Tuesday and another 300 on Wednesday and you just keep spreading that out. All you want to do is pick up an extra 5 or 10 sales, you just run a coupon or discount or percentage-off or a flash sale, whatever you want to do to boost your sales using that external channel or you go out to Instagram or YouTube.

Again I’m kind of repeating myself but it’s that simple as far as going out and finding a way to sell your product even if it’s at a discount so this way here you can get the sales. I’m not saying go out there and do that for reviews right now. That will happen if you have your email sequence in place or you follow up with your customers even if you do it manually, that will start to happen naturally. All right, let’s go ahead and listen to the next question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:17:37] Chris: Hi there Scott? This is Chris from England. Well, I have the question of the century for you today. Amazon yesterday appears to have criminalized, I suppose is the best word, the process of leaving incentivized reviews meaning no longer sellers are allowed to tout for honest reviews by offering their shiny product in exchange for one anymore. I know that sales and PPC affect a product’s rank but reviews have been an integral part of that ecosystem taught by mentors such as yourself for years because those reviews help to give the products initial inertia of social proof to get it going, etc. My question is fairly basic, it’s what now? Are there ways you can see around this and what will you do for your next new product to get reviews? Thanks very much for any insight and love the show.

[00:18:45] Scott: Hey Chris from England, what’s up man, how you doing? I love that you’re calling or you’re tuning in or you’re recording this all the way from England. It’s amazing and I’ve said that before in the podcast but I can’t get over that, it’s just awesome the world that we live in today. This is just great so cheers to you mate, I know that’s Australian, sorry. Just wanted to say I just covered that in that last question a lot about what I’m going to say here but I will focus more on the review side of things right now. We’ve talked about that in past episodes so if you haven’t listened to those, go back, theamazingseller.com, just search the site on reviews or even just look at the most recent ones, maybe the past 10 episodes. I’ll actually link some up in the show notes for this episode where we talk about the most recent change.

For anyone that is listening that’s brand new, that didn’t hear about this change or even if you’re listening to this and you’re a little confused about this, we did a hangout for our class yesterday and we talked a lot about this because there’s a confusing piece here that people are, well, they’re confused. And what that is is the language that they put in their terms of service and what people think they can do and what they can’t do. I’m going to try and make this as clear as possible to my understanding and my opinion this is what I’m doing and this is what I believe is okay.

You can still give your product away at a discount, not even give it away, you can sell your product at a discount and it’s totally cool. They’re fine with that. You can use coupon code, you can use percentage-off, you can use whatever you want to do. You can do that. What you can’t do, pay attention to this right now, what you cannot do is offer to give a discount in exchange for a review. Let me say that one more time, you cannot give a discount in exchange for a review. So I can’t walk up to you or email you and go, “Hey, Bob, would you like to have my product for free or at a discount or 50% off?” And he says, “Yeah.”

I say, “Cool, there’s one thing I need you to do though in order to get this discount and that is I need you to tell me you’re going to leave me a review and I need you to leave me a review on my product, can you do that?” “Yes, I can do that.” “Good, okay, great,” bang. That’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do. That right there is wrong and that is what they are saying, “No, no, we don’t want that. You’re incentivizing the review. We’re not doing that. We do not want to do that, do not do that.” Did I say that enough? Do not do that.

[00:21:43] Scott: Now, what you can do, is you can… I’ll give you an example of something that we’re doing right now. We’re building an email list around a market. Let’s say fly fishermen so people that are into fly fishing we are going to create a contest, we’ve done this, it’s working really good and we are buying the actual product. We’re not even selling the big product, the big thing. The big tackle box, take that back, let’s say it is the tackle box we sell but we’re going to fill it with a whole bunch of lures that we don’t have and we’re going to throw in a fishing pole, we’re going to make it a $250 value, we’re going to raffle that thing off and we’re going to run a contest in that market so now we’re clearly saying, “Raise your hand if you are into fly fishing or if you know someone that is and if you are enter your name and email address and we will allow you to have a chance to win this.” Boom, perfect.

On the backend of that we are building an email list of people that are interested in this market and then what we can do is we can say, “Hey, would you like to receive our tackle box for 50% off? If you do, let us know.” And then they’ll say yes or no or we can just send them a code or we can do a flash sale for them, whatever we want to do. But then we can drive sales over to our listing and then we can get the sales. Through that process we’re also able to then follow up with those people and the people that are buying directly through Amazon all the same. That’s another thing in the terms of service. Everyone needs to be able to have the same messaging, you’re not going to single out people that got a product at a discount or that over here bought it at regular price. You’re not going to single anyone out. It’s going to be the same messaging across the board, nothing changes. It has to be consistent.

[00:23:39] Scott: That doesn’t mean I can’t run a special over here and keep it the same on Amazon, doesn’t mean I… I can do that. It’s my brand, it’s my business, it’s my product. I’m still giving away a product or a discount. What I’m saying here is I did not ever say, “Join my email list or grab this discount and you can get this money off if you leave a review?” I never once said that, I never said it in any of the languaging. That is the future, that is the future, I don’t think that will ever go away. I think building your own email list in a market is the way of the future. I think it’s been that way for a long time we just haven’t used that on Amazon as much because they’ve actually allowed us to go out there and reach these review groups and stuff. We don’t want to do that anymore. We want to control our own traffic.

To answer your question on that and I think I did but I want to recap on that is we are going to be able to still give discounts, that’s what we’re doing and what we’re going to do is we’re still going to follow up those people as we always have. Email number one, making sure that everything arrived okay, they’re happy and we might give them a bonus, maybe a tutorial on how to use the product in a video or maybe a pdf they can download ‘10 recipes to use your new garlic press’ or ‘10 ways to catch your next fish’, whatever, you get the idea.

And then the second email will be more of, “Hey, wanted to make sure you got my last email, want to make sure that everything is cool. You’re enjoying everything and we’re a small local business, we’re a family business.” And then you would say, “If you can do me a quick favor, let us know how we did. Could you head over to Amazon and write us your feedback, let us know.” That’s all you’re doing.

[00:25:40] Scott: It’s really, really low key and it’s not like we’re not saying go over and leave us a 5 star review. We’re not saying, “Hey go over and leave us a positive review.” We’re saying go over there and let us know how we did. Then they’re going to decide what that’s going to be. It could be good, it could be bad but we’re not saying you have to write us a good review. I see a lot of people doing this in either insert cards. They’re like leave us a 5 star review here and if you’re going to leave us a review, anything less than 5 stars, email us, wrong, don’t do it.

Do not do that. That is something that’s a no, no and that’s what I say do not do. Hopefully I’m clear on this. You have to still go out there, you’re still going to be able to give away product on a discount so this way here you can get sales volume and sales velocity and then from there you can still go after getting reviews by doing good old fashioned customer service email support making sure they’re happy. All right, let’s go ahead and listen to one more question and then we’ll wrap this up and we’ll call it a wrap. What do you say?

[00:26:46] Ahad: Hey Scott, it’s Ahad here from Jamaica Queens in New York City. I love the podcast man, I’ve been listening for more than six months now. I’m actually fairly young. I relate to your family a lot, just like your son I love playing basketball, love working out. I’m 20 years old, a junior in college and I started this business about 4 months ago and I have two products in the market right now. I just launched two more so I guess that makes it 4 and I have 2 more products in production so I’ve been going in this thing full force. I actually dropped 2 of my classes because of this business. I was a full time student now a part time student and I work part time as well. Anyways, I had a question for you regarding keywords.

For keywords, when I first started this business, I remember tools like Merchant Words and then Google Keyword planner. I was using those to get the keywords but right now there are so many other tools that are out there. Also Amazon changed their policy as far as how many keywords can go in the backend. I was just wondering your take on this and see what is the best way of getting keywords for the backend specifically because there are tools out there that get keywords for you but they get a lot of irrelevant keywords. For example I search for garlic press for example and they’ll give me a keyword for iPhone 7.

That has nothing to do with the garlic press so I’m just wondering what tools you use or what exactly you do in order to make sure that you get 10 out of 10 when it comes to the keywords and you don’t miss out on anything. That’s my question, thank you so much man. I hope to get this question answered. I looked into few places, I got two answers. I just wanted to get your take on this. Thank you so much and I hope to get the question answered. Thank you so much man, have a good one.

[00:28:45] Scott: Hey Ahad, thank you so much for the question, hopefully I pronounced your name correctly. Man, I gotta say, I’m impressed, I am really impressed, a guy your age and the amount of motivation and hustle that you have is pretty inspiring myself so great job and just want to give you a little pat on the back and say you’re doing awesome so really, really cool stuff. Being a young guy, you could be doing a lot of other things and trying to build this business for yourself at you age so really respect you for that and it’s pretty awesome.

All right so keywords again. This has been kind of the topic of today, really it’s like optimization and ranking and all that stuff so keyword kind of ties into everything as well. Now, I see some people really focusing on “How do I find all these keywords that are going to bring in all the sales?” It’s really going to come down to, and I know this wasn’t really your question, I need to touch on it, it’s going to come down to finding that handful or couple of handfuls of keywords that’s going to bring in most of the traffic, that’s what it’s about. If you can pick up a few here, a few stragglers that might get you even 2, 3 extra sales a month even a couple of weeks, then cool, you just keep adding to that bucket.

[00:30:05] Scott: I guess in the past when we heard that Amazon was going to allow us to add a ton more characters, we got all excited and we started throwing in keywords. That’s actually been I think a problem for some people and actually did more harm than good than just stuffing irrelevant keywords because if you are starting to rank for keywords that you are not relevant for you’re going to show up but you’re not going to convert which then can hurt you so be careful with that.

As far as tools go, the best tool I think that you’re ever going to be able to use is really Amazon; it’s the pay-per-click. It’s allowing them to tell us what keyword searches are being searched for and we’re getting impression for. So your auto campaign is gold. If you have not expanded your budget like increased your budget on your auto, that’s where I would probably start with anyone because it’s going to open up the floodgates for keywords that you might not even have thought of. Now, there might be some up there that show up to you like naah, I wouldn’t want to show up for that. That will tell you that as well.

That would be the first thing, sometimes we just start with a dollar per click, we go two and then we just get some data and then we’re like, “Cool, now we go right into manual mode.” But the auto, if you up that, even put a cap on it as far as how much you want to spend per day but if you up the budget on that, you’ll start getting even like a wider net of keywords and that there can start sending you down another path because then I would take those keywords and I won’t just use those keywords but then I can use those as a new seed keywords. What I mean by new seed keywords is kind of like the one keyword that or even two keywords that can then open it up to a whole other run of keywords.

[00:32:04] Scott: I would take that and then plug that into the Google Planner, the free tool and then I would also go over to Merchant words. I would check that out and see if anything else comes up. Again, you’re really not looking at the keywords that are technically being used to show up for your competitor. You’re just trying to find random ones hopefully that your competitor isn’t even using right now because then that’s going to allow you to have more visibility. I would say those are the main two tools to discover keywords.

Long Tail Pro, a lot of people don’t talk about that. I’ve used that for years for SEO stuff on my own website, even my photography stuff and it will allow you to find long tail keywords that you might be missing that get Google traffic. Well, if it gets Google traffic it might also get Amazon traffic but you won’t know until you put that into a manual campaign, start throwing some money at it and start to see if you’re getting any searches. It’s one thing to just plug them into the backend and say, “These are all keywords that I think are going to rank or that I’ve gotten few impressions for.” But if you see the data in the backend of your pay-per-click inside of Amazon, that’s really the data that you want. If you see a keyword is getting a lot of searches and it’s really relevant, you need to make sure that that’s in the backend, we want to make sure of that.

There’s other tools, I mean Keyword Inspector is a great way to do a reverse ASIN search. Again you guys can find all of this stuff on my resources page, theamazingseller.com/resources. Just go there, scroll down a little bit, you’ll start seeing a section there with keyword related stuff. Just check that out. You do get double credits if you go through my link. It is an affiliate link, you will buy me coffee, full disclosure. I have a coffee right now that I actually one of my listeners bought me. Yeah, you get double credits so you have to pay, it’s on a credit system and then you can do a reverse ASIN

[00:34:06] Scott: Now, here’s the deal on that, if you run that reverse ASIN on your competitor’s listing, it’s going to bring back a ton of keywords but it still doesn’t tell you which ones are converting. The only way you’re going to know if it converts is if you run it and if it converts and if you do that on pay-per-click then you can see that it converted. You can see the impression, you can see the click and then you can see it converted. Now if it didn’t convert that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad keyword either, it might just mean you don’t have the optimization for that keyword.

Maybe you don’t have the reviews that you need to convert or maybe you don’t have the image that will convert because it doesn’t convey the message in the image related to that keyword. It’s kind of complicated to explain through audio but you get what I’m saying. You have to be relevant for it but if it’s relevant keyword but yet your picture doesn’t really mention it or express it you need to change that. That might just be a simple tweak that you can do that then convert on that keyword.

I now that wasn’t 100% of your question. You’re just like, “What tools are you using right now?” It’s really the same ones as I’ve used in the past. I don’t believe that there’s anything out there that’s going to find you that magic keyword that’s going to just all of a sudden click. It’s going to take finding a bunch, throwing them in, seeing which ones get impressions, seeing which ones get clicks and see which ones convert, that’s it. So it’s like throwing in a sense mud at the wall and seeing what sticks, it’s that same analogy and then you start to prune and get rid of the bad and keep the good and start expanding on that. But the auto-campaign, raising your budget on something like that right off the bat, that will get you data instantly because then you can see in your customer's’ search report, you can see the actual keyword that was keyed in to find your product and if it converted then you want to know that.

[00:36:02] Scott: Hopefully this helped, I know it was a little long winded but that’s how we roll here and I know that this Ask Scott session has went longer. I’ve said to myself in the past I should probably shorten these. It’s a Friday afternoon, people want to get through it, make them like a 15, 20 minute but I always go over and I’m sorry but I just want to make sure that I cover everything in these questions and today just went a little bit longer than I expected so I apologize for that. But I am going to wrap this up.

I want to remind you guys if you want to ask a question then head over to theamazingseller.com/ask. If you want to check out the show notes to this, the transcripts, head over to theamazingseller.com/292 and you can find everything over there and last thing that I want to mention here, actually two things we talked about it, patience. A lot of times we can make these changes we want results the next day, it takes time. It takes letting it run its course, patience and also slow down. Take a minute, look around, enjoy what’s happening and the opportunity that you have right now to be able to do this and to be able to build something that you can see grow and learn through that process. Have patience, take a deep breath, relax, enjoy, enjoy this time. It is the holidays too so enjoy those.

Last thing is I’ll just remind you guys depending on when you’re listening to this but we may have a replay up right now of our last workshop depending on when you listen to this. If you want to watch that, head over to theamazingseller.com/workshop and also I don’t mention this a lot but we do have our private label classroom which will be closing here on the 14th of December. So if you guys have been to our workshop and you guys have seen the private label classroom and wanted to become a student of that and you haven’t done so, you may want to head over to theamazinseller.com/workshop now so this way here you can see the details on that as well.

We will be closing registration on the 14th. We will be reopening again in 2017, not sure as of when, some changes happening there but definitely would love to have you part of the class if you’re not already and if you’re not that’s cool too. I just want to let you know what’s happening out there in TAS land.

All right, that’s it guys, that’s going to wrap it up, have an amazing weekend and remember, I’m here for you, I believe in you and I’m rooting for you but you have to you have to… Come on say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day, weekend, night, whatever time it is and I’ll see you guys right back here on the next episode.

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