TAS 380 The Aggressive PPC Launch Strategy + Ranking for Keywords and Random Stuff (Round Table Discussion)

What is it like to have the insight and wisdom of ecommerce industry leaders just a click away? You don’t have to wonder! Join Scott, Chris, and Dom on another special edition of The Amazing Seller for a TAS Power Hour. On this episode you’ll hear the guys address an aggressive PPC launch strategy, how to rank for keywords, and so much more! If you are ready to dive in and learn some great information that will help you zoom past the competition, make sure you take the time to catch this episode!

PPC Strategy

How will you position your Amazon product listing for maximum exposure and ensure it’s on the right path toward robust sales? One of the best methods to achieve this goal is to make sure you have a solid Pay Per Click (PPC) strategy in place. On this episode of The Amazing Seller, you’ll hear from ecommerce expert Dom as he breaks down an aggressive PPC strategy you can implement TODAY that will help you get the results you are looking for. Don’t fumble around in the dark! Learn from guys like Dom who have been around for awhile and have the battle scars to show for it!

Consider it an Investment

Do you consider your efforts to build a thriving ecommerce business selling on Amazon as a get rich quick endeavor or do you see it as a long-term investment plan? If you are looking for quick cash and an easy no hassle way to get it, you might be looking in the wrong place! On this episode of The Amazing Seller, Scott, Chris, and Dom explain why selling on Amazon should be considered with a long view in mind. What are you willing to pay to get this business up and running? You need to make sure you have the right mindset, you will “lose” money in the beginning – but don’t think of it as a loss, consider it an investment. To hear the guys explain this concept even further, make sure to listen to this episode!

Begin with the End in Mind

Wouldn’t it be great to have the personal rundown and launch list of one of the leading ecommerce industry thinkers? Imagine how you could adjust your approach and rely on the wisdom of someone who has been successful and knows the way to get there. On this episode of The Amazing Seller, Dom generously shares how he approaches product research, product launch, and promoting his product listing. If you’ve been waiting for that one KEY insight or lesson that will help you get an edge on your competition, make sure you listen to this episode!

Best Seller Ranking

One of the best ways to make sure your business if off to a great start is to double check your product listing. There are steps you can take to ensure that you have fully optimized your product listing so there is nothing in the listing itself that is causing you to show up at a lower ranking when buyers search for products in your category. On this episode of The Amazing Seller, Scott, Chris, and Dom explain how you can optimize your product listing and make sure you are doing everything you need to show up with a strong Best Seller Ranking (BSR). Don’t leave any stone unturned! Make sure you catch this episode to stay on top of your game!

OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER

• [0:03] Scott’s introduction to this episode of the podcast!
• [5:30] Jump into this TAS Power Hour session.
• [8:00] The guys talks about a good PPC strategy.
• [14:30] What does it take to get a high ranking on search terms?
• [29:00] You will lose money in the beginning – consider it an investment!
• [39:00] Dom talks about his ideal launch strategy.
• [45:00] Be patient with your PPC strategy and how to budget for it.
• [1:01:00] The guys talk about sales and BSR for one of their listings.

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TRANSCRIPT TAS 380

TAS 380: The Aggressive PPC Launch Strategy + Ranking for Keywords and Random Stuff (Round Table Discussion)

[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 380 and today we are going to talk about The aggressive…

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…pay-per-click launch strategy. That sounds pretty cool and then we are also going to talk about ranking for keywords and some other random stuff. The reason why is because it’s one of our TAS power hours. We just got back from Mexico. I did anyway and Dom Sugar and we actually did a Facebook Live in Mexico. If you missed that one you missed out, well you can still watch it. I’ll link it up in the show notes in today’s episode of theamazingseller.com/380. That was pretty awesome, pretty epic being there in Mexico and doing a Facebook Live and connecting with everybody out there and we also had our drink waiter come on over and give a little TAS love so it was pretty cool.

But I have to be honest, coming back man we are starting to feel the effects of not just being tired but got a little bit of a stomach bug going around here which is not pleasant and my wife and I we’ve been there plenty of times so I know it’s not the water. I think we might have had some bad chicken, or something. I don’t know but the whole family is not feeling good coming back but we are getting better now. I’m just about 100%. I’m about 93% right now just a random number I thought I throw out there. It sounds cool but I want to let you guys know, today what I’m going to share with you is a TAS Power Hour that we did once we got back. It was last Friday depending on when you are listening to this.

The reason why I’m going to let you guys listen to this on the podcast is because sometimes you don’t go over there and check out the Facebook Lives but I really believe that this was some really good meaty content and we never know the direction of these TAS Power Hours. We just jump on there and start talking about what’s going on. I actually had Chris Schaffer that is get me caught up on some of the new products we just launched while I was gone and I knew a little bit but I didn’t know all the specifics. So he went ahead and he gave me all those, you guys get to hear those, and we talked about The Aggressive pay-per-click launch strategy.

[00:02:05] Scott: We talked about some key words and all of that fun stuff so you are going to be able to listen to all of that which I think is going to be really a huge amount of value for you guys just to hear the play by play and how things are going down and what we are working on and how those things are working. You’ll also hear how Dom has a very aggressive approach and I’ve got like a medium approach but he’s starting to push me a little bit more aggressively and it all comes down to in the beginning guys. It’s really how much money are you willing to put into this thing in the beginning and not expect a return? A lot of people they get started and they think I have to make that money right back, like instantly I have to make it back.

And that is the wrong mindset whether it’s really, really aggressive or you are willing to lose thousands, I’m not saying that but it could be a few hundred or it could be a thousand or two or it could be even more. I always go back to the guy that I met at Sellers Summit where he told me after I had mentioned about our initial promo whenever we launch a product is really just not even breaking even. I mean if we can that’s great but it’s not even breaking even and I said it’s a lot like a brick and mortar store and he came up to me afterwards and he says, “Scott you are dead on.” He goes, “I’ve opened plenty of brick and mortar stores and we always had a budget of between five and ten grand as a grand opening. The bouncy bounce for the kids, the hotdogs, whatever other activities, the DJ, all that stuff and it adds up.”

It’s like a party so this way you get attention and it’s very similar to what we do here to get attention on Amazon when we are starting to launch products and especially now things are a little bit different. I mean people are taking back, “I can’t do big massive giveaways,” and that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about using Amazon’s tools, using their platform to really help us launch and I’m going to stop talking so you guys can actually listen to everything we talked about and I think you guys are going to get a ton of value. I did want to remind you though again the show notes, theamazingseller.com/380, transcripts, show notes, all that stuff will be there.

[00:04:04] Scott: I’ll also link up the Facebook Live the videos if you want to watch us and listen to some of those shenanigans that are going on over there. There is always something funny going to happen when you have Dom sitting at the table with you and that was proven in Mexico as well. Definitely go check that out and then I’d also like to say that if you have not caught any of our Facebook Lives head over to Facebook and join our amazing group, literally. It is the Amazing Seller Group but it is amazing and yeah, go over there and just join our free Facebook Group, be part of the TAS group over there and you’ll be notified when we do a live and hopefully you can come on a live with us or even just watch the replay but we do them every single Friday at 2pm Eastern Time.

We have a lot of people that show up live and we have a lot of people that view them after the fact. Thousands view them after the fact and we would love for you to be there live with us and interact and ask any question. So those are there to really help you and also let you look behind the scenes a little bit and look over our shoulder as we are discussing this stuff privately in a sense but then you guys get to listen in which is cool. If you want to join the Facebook group head over to theamazingseller.com/fb and you can go ahead and join that amazing group, literally. Alright so guys I’m going to stop talking now so you guys can enjoy this episode so sit back, relax and get ready to laugh a little bit too every now and then. Dom is really good at that so enjoy.

[POWER HOUr]

[00:05:31] Scott: Alright, cool let’s get rocking and rolling Chris. Maybe what we can do is dig into maybe what’s been happening ever since we launched. Maybe even like ranking for these keywords and I just looked at it this morning and we are moving up in the ranks on some of those bigger keywords so what do you want to let us know about that recent launching stuff?

[00:05:53] Chris: Let's dive into that and Ben said, “You guys have been talking about all these products that you’ve been launching.” I think we’ve launched six in the last five, six weeks. It’s a little crazier than we intended it to be but it’s all good because they are all selling. We did product research correctly and we had an idea of what we were doing. He just wanted to know how closely related are all these products. All the ones that we’ve been talking about recently are in the same brand so they are in the same thing, they are all closely related and we are seeing some of those cross sales and up sales.

In fact one of the things that I noticed on the launch of the product that we launched, what was it Scott Wednesday of last week, actually it was Wednesday because we were talking about the first full day of the launch last week on Facebook Live, is we are getting people who bought this also bought this like day one not necessarily the frequently bought together but other products that people who bought this looked at, however that’s phrased at the bottom of Amazo.

Those kinds of things we’re starting to get almost immediately because we are driving our own traffic and so the people who bought one that we have control over, Dom just made a sale. The people who bought one all over we send back and then if they buy something else then we start to get some of those up sales, cross sales which is really the reason that we talk about building a cohesive brand and that’s something I think Dom resonates with as well. When you are talking about building a brand is one of the main reasons you want to do that is to take that average order quantity from one to 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 so they are buying more than one thing in the transaction they’ll count on average and we are starting to see that as well. You and I haven’t really talked today so we are setting up some of the things on 1K Fast Track so where are we ranking on that new stuff?

[00:07:31] Scott: Okay, yeah so just imagine garlic press. Garlic press is like that main keyword that it might take you a long time to rank for the keyword. You may never rank on page one but if you are going for that you are going to start to go after all these long tail as we call them but actually I just checked this morning and we are actually on the bottom of page two for one of the garlic press keywords.

[00:08:00] Chris: Which is for the new product?

[00:08:01] Scott: No, it’s for one of the more seasoned ones, probably about a month to a month and a half and to really let everyone know the entire process behind how we were doing this, and Dom and I had a really long conversation about this, about pay-per-click and Dom is a big, big believer in going out there and putting money on that keyword and then just continually getting impressions and getting sales. Then from there it’s going to start to naturally rank you for that keyword but also a lot of miscellaneous keywords. Now what I did do the other day Chris is I went on our listing and I ran Scope and now I’m able to see how many keywords we are being indexed for and how many we are actually being found for.

And now I’m going to go back and keep doing that from time to time and then that will let me see how many more we are starting to go for because one of the products that I’m going up against and using their data they’ve got thousands of keywords. We may only have a few hundred right now but as we keep doing this and that’s what Dom says, the more that you keep doing this we keep building out our… We go wider now with all of these keywords not just deep. We were banking on one keyword and that’s where it can really start to happen.

Also we are willing to go to in the red right now so because we are willing to go in the red, we are also showing Amazon that we are willing to pay. We can’t say this for sure but Dom’s a big believer that if we go ahead and we show them that we are spending money, we are willing to buy our way to rank, then they are going to remember that and when traffic starts to come in more they are going to also give us a little bit more of an edge if you will. Dom, why don’t you speak into that quickly, that conversation that we had privately in Mexico that late night and maybe just talk about that?

[00:09:54] Dom: Yeah we basically talked about how to overcome your main keywords and how to become the number one seller guy or girl and that’s how you have to sometimes lose your shirt over those keywords maybe ten or twelve of the main ones until you basically set precedence that you are going to be the leader for that. Now what’s going to happen, I always found that we do it this way, we lose a whole load of money at the beginning for those couple of months but then it pays back in the end because they’ve got the other people that are trying to bid high basically back off because they only have one or two ASINs or maybe their first launch. It’s a little more difficult for them to keep up. They just give up because they are spending their whole budget, they are not selling that many and they are using all their money on budget

Yeah it’s a little bit easier because we have lot of products and its cool but you can still do it if you have one or two products. And then what happens is because you are paying Amazon all that money, I feel anyway in the four years that I’ve been using the PPC, again I don’t have any written proof and I’m just going because I check PPC all the time and I have my staff do it, is that the way the algorithm works is that because you are spending money on PPC and you are bidding on those keywords organically Amazon is going to help you in the search a lot easier. You could bid $10 a click and not get one click and have like twenty five impressions and a month from now that keyword could be on the first page, even though you didn’t get any clicks on it. It’s just how it works naturally that’s what I found.

[00:11:20] Scott: I was going to ask you something about that really quickly. I forget who I heard this from but I just recently heard it. Do you think there is anything to, even though you might not convert on that keyword but yet you’ve gotten impressions and then clicks over to your listing, do you think that helps you in rank at all because it shows that it's relevant?

[00:11:40] Dom: Again I guess in theory would work.

[00:11:45] Chris: It’s all relative.

[00:11:46] Dom: It’s all relative I mean if I get impressions I know that whatever they are typing in their keywords is getting to that keyword that I place so that we know for sure.

[00:11:54] Scott: I was just saying because I heard someone say that even if it’s just yourself, if you search your keyword and then you click on your listing once you find it in the ranking that immediately shows that someone searched and someone found you.

[00:12:10] Dom: Yeah you could do that maybe once or twice and then Amazon knows.

[00:12:14] Scott: But I’m saying that’s you but let’s say that you did pay-per-click and you are starting to get impressions then you are starting to get thirty clicks but you didn’t get a sale yet for whatever reason. Does that help you, does it hurt you? I don’t know the answer to that and I’m brainstorming here with you and Chris. Chris what do you think on that?

[00:12:30] Chris: I swear I need a shirt man, I say it depends. It’s all relative in this case and to me the intuitive way that this works is just based on what I know about computer science and algorithms and all that stuff which is probably more than I should but not enough to intelligently speak about how Amazon designs theirs, is it’s going to be relative. Amazon wants the most relevant thing to show up so in a case where you are getting hundreds of sales, that to me would be the highest relevancy in Amazon’s eyes. The second most relevant thing from a logical standpoint would be people visiting that listing. So if I get ten and you get five I’m more relevant than you if sales are equal or conversion rate is equal.

Then beyond that it would be impressions, that’s the highest level and it’s the same way that we look at solving a PPC problem we just do it the opposite way. Do we have impressions? Yes. Do we have clicks? Yes. Do we have sales? No. That’s where the problem is so if we work backwards from that it makes sense that Amazon would look at all three of those things to rank you because that’s how they are going to see it. But if I’m getting hundreds of sales from a keyword and you are just getting traffic I should at least in theory rank higher than you if that keyword is driving those sales for me. Does that make sense? Guys, let us know in the comments if that makes sense or does that just gibberish and it’s over everybody’s head because I have no idea?

[00:14:01] Scott: No I think that that does make sense because again I think it’s like you have the one factor is sales and that’s a true like I search for garlic press I found a listing, I bought it that’s gold but I never really thought about that as much as like even if I don’t convert, if I get the click over it shows that it's relevant. And that could be a good thing for ranking depending on your competition and how they are doing.

[00:14:31] Chris: Exactly, I think everything comes back to that number and it’s a number that we hammer on a lot on the live but don’t tend to talk about a lot outside of that because it’s dependent on everything else.

[00:14:48] Scott: I want to go back to go back to though like we initially started talking about which is how we are ranking and all that stuff. I’m looking at the campaigns that we set up and I worked with Dom a little bit on this I said, “Okay I want to get aggressive, I want to see what it takes to get on page one.” We talk about that, some people say that you can’t even get on page one for results. I’m talking about pay-per-click results, like campaign results so what we did is we went ahead and we just bid $5 and we said, “Let’s see what happens.” Since I’ve done that, it’s been a couple of weeks now since I’ve done that. My impressions went through the roof, my cost-per-click has went from I think the most I paid was maybe $2.25 and that was getting me position two or three.

Now Dom I haven’t told you I’m getting position one and I’m also getting position one for not just one product but two. I’m getting it in the right hand side and I’m getting in the very top for two different products so two of my top…

[00:15:42] Dom: And you want to tell me it’s cheaper too. You’re probably getting that $1.50 that’s what happens so that means your competitors have cut they say, “That’s it we can’t afford to pay $2.25 a click we are going to give up,” and then you just keep sitting there and you just keep sitting there eventually that will be $1. It’s just the way it works.

[00:15:56] Scott: I’m looking right now as we go. It was $1.14 last week though Dom, a $1.14 I got 233,000 impressions and 549 clicks and I spent $125 and my ACOS is 79%. Now people would say, “Scott that’s terrible,” but that’s like a last week result and I got 549 clicks but guess what, for that product I’m ranking on page two about middle of the page for that big, big, massive keyword.

[00:16:35] Dom: Even at the beginning I wouldn’t even worry about conversion.

[00:16:37] Chris: What can we do Scott, for people to understand how massive that keyword is?

[00:16:43] Scott: I would say iPhone case or something.

[00:16:46] Chris: It would be iPhone so what did you say middle of page two?

[00:16:55] Scott: Yeah I’m looking at that for I think it was the second product that launched and that one there I’m looking at that main keyword and literary as I’m talking to you it’s page two, position looks like thirty sixth.

[00:17:10] Chris: So it’s at bottom of page two, bottom half of page two. So guys what we are talking about here is not the long tail term. It’s not necessarily even the terms that people would use to find the thing that have. What we are trying to do is rank next to the iPhone so that when somebody goes to buy the new iPhone on Amazon they see our iPhone case directly underneath that. If only you are number one for almost all of the longer tail…

[00:17:46] Scott: Yeah let me give you that one, I was going to say iPhone accessories we are page one and our position right now today is sixteen so we are at the bottom of the page on one.

[00:18:02] Dom: I mean when your main keyword, anybody that’s out there when your main keyword is relevant to a big brand or even to a mid-sized brand it’s difficult to rank for that word. It’s going to take you a long time. I mean we have the same thing in the open brand. We have two three products that are related to big brands and we got forty thousand impressions a day on those. That’s crazy and that’s only because I tailored them down. At Christmas time we were getting like 150,000 it’s insane. So you’ve got to play with it. If you don’t have the big brand but again to play in that field you’ve got to pay to that and if you can get to page one for a big brand you are doing pretty good.

[00:18:37] Scott: I think we are on our way Dom. I think we are on our way.

[00:18:40] Dom: Yeah because what’s happening is you just keep pushing it and taking the loss and taking the loss and I know you guys were talking about irrelevance and you are talking about conversion. I wouldn’t even worry about that. If you are at 150%, 200% for that keyword just keep pounding it away because you need that keyword. You lose money for ten years on that keyword because you are going to make it out on everything else.

[00:19:03] Chris: Yeah and Dom I’m talking about the listing as a whole. Obviously I don't want to throw hundreds of dollars and never make a sale [inaudible] losing money I’m okay with that even if it’s just [inaudible] for this.

[00:19:10] Dom: My main brand loses money on our main keyword and you guys all know what it is. My main brand for my main keyword it’s a massive keyword and I’m talking 100,000, 200,000, I can have 400,000 a day if I want to and I don’t make any money on that keyword because my ACOS there is so much in that but I make tons of sales on other keywords but I have to be relevant for that keyword. People when they type that keyword they have to find my product and I’m always in the fold. I’m either two, three, one, four for PPC but I’m not making lots of money off that keyword just because it gets hit so much but what happens is that if I stop bidding on that keyword I’m afraid to stop. That’s basically what I’m saying.

Once you are up that high you can’t just stop but you are right you can’t keep doing that for years and not make any money you know what I’m saying but again if that keyword’s ACOS or 80% that’s good you are not trying to make any money.

[00:20:16] Scott: Honestly I just went back and looked at last month which doesn’t have as much data because obviously we started these campaigns a little while ago but last month’s data we had 249,612 impressions on the one campaign. We had 766 clicks at seventy two cents Dom. We’ve had 60 orders so our ACOS is 48.90 okay?

[00:20:46] Dom: It’s great and that’s just starting.

[00:20:48] Scott: I go to the next product which was the one right after that that we launched and that one there at 149,000 impressions, 453 clicks at eighty seven cents but mind you I was still willing to spend more. 31 orders were at 59% ACOS so to me we are doing okay because we know, and a lot of people don’t look at this, they look at ACOS they go, “Oh I lost money.” They don’t look at the organic side of things, what did you also bring in that’s not the 31 sales that came in from this? Because I know we did more than thirty one sales on this one product. I know we did sixty more on the first product so I know that so right away in my head I’m like, “People are buying it, I’m putting it there they are buying it so why not keep going with it and I’m starting to get my cost per click down.”

[00:21:37] Dom: You basically have to do whatever it takes to get to that front page at least halfway to the full. You’ve got to look at everything that we do here is exactly that what retailers and distributors and manufacturers do. When you go into Walmart and Costco they pay for that space. You think Pepsi, Coke want to be five shelves back? They are right in the front? Frito chips, Hostess chips in Canada, they always buy the bulk. Sony at Walmart they buy an end, they buy a whole showcase, they buy POP it’s called presentation. They buy that and they say, “We’ll give you $100,000 for all this month we need to be the front so people can see the Nintendo switch. Tons of presentations at the front, new launch. It’s all part of it. You have to do what you have to do to be relevant.

If you are not page two three for all your keywords you are going to get some sales because of PPC but you are not go through enough organic. Then what happens is once your organic sales kick in and you can get rid of PPC, tone it down like we do and then just rinse and repeat. Again we don’t get too much in depth in it but that’s what basically the strategy is.

[00:22:39] Scott: I like that analogy though Dom it’s like your shelf space, your shelf space…

[00:22:44] Dom: You are buying.

[00:22:45] Scott: Exactly you are buying shelf space. It’s just you are buying the Amazon sponsored ads space. Chris were you going to say something?

[00:22:54] Chris: Yeah and I wanted to say a couple of things. One I want to address Shawn’s question he says, “So you are selling a competing product and you are using other brands keywords?” No, we are selling accessories to the product and we are trying to rank on the first page for the main keyword like iPhone.

There is 13 different iPhone listings, different sizes, different whatever all those are on the first page so what we are trying to do is we are trying to rank some of our accessories for the iPhone on the first page just to see where that takes. But I think the shelf space analogy is perfect with the story that we are talking about here which is you are not going to make money on every one of those keywords.

If you walk into a convenient store and I know you guys probably don’t drink, well Dom I think you used to drink Red Bull, there is 19 SKUs of Rock Star energy drinks, 20 SKUs of Monster energy drink and 10 brands of Red Bull now.

The honest truth is they don’t actually make money on most of those flavors but the more flavors they launch the more shelf space they can take up at any given store and then if Monster launches additional flavors, Rock Star has fewer slots that they can put their stuff in so they might actually lose money on a bunch of those. Those shelf spaces, those can holders in the convenient store are our keywords. We want to dominate as many of those as we possibly can, not all of them are going to make us money but we obviously want to make money at the end of the day so we have to be profitable someway, we’re not going to make money on every single transaction.

[00:24:23] Dom: No matter what store you go in gum, Trident, chocolate bars, they all pay for that space. They all pay for those toppers that say two for $2. You go into the fridge at your 7/11 you will see Rock Star has got the whole they got four foot top to bottom with two for $4. They buy it and they pay for all of that stuff and you get there. Again the more competitive the space the harder… The space that you guys are in is very competitive, very competitive but again they don’t have lots of all-star guys like you guys working on it and that’s the key there.

You guys can launch six products at a time, we are not saying everyone needs to launch six products within a month because I would never suggest that because you’d have to fund it, have time and do PPC but again before we talk last week before you were like, “Hey Dom I’m spending $45 today on this campaign, what do you think?” And I just said, “You are just wasting, you’ve got to go to $150, $200 a day.” And you say, “Well, I don’t want to lose money” and I say, “Exactly, you know that, that’s part of it. Brick and mortar we talk about it, minimum $5,000 in advertising, radio.” Think about that $150 a day, you are going to give that away in the old days in 100 units a day anyway. That’s the way you’ve got to look at it before you start to give that stuff away and do PPC on top of it. You are actually ahead now you don’t have to really do the reviews any more that much.

[00:25:40] Scott: It was funny. I forget who I was talking to recently but we were talking… Actually I know who it was. I was doing an interview just the other day actually with Kevin who we met at Sellers Summit, the referee Chris? I had Kevin and he actually took his referee money for a whole season and then rolled that into his private label business and now he’s got five SKUs and they are launched in five different marketplaces so he’s doing really good.

[00:26:08] Dom: They are monarchs.

[00:26:16] Scott: They are monarchs. So he came on and we were talking about that and we talked about his first launch and he was talking about the reviews, “I did it the old way, I did it with the reviews,” and I go, “It’s funny because even though I know that that’s the old way we went after I’m going to do a review launch I never looked at it as I was doing it for reviews. I was doing it for the sales. That has not changed for me. The ranking factor was what I was really trying to do. To me the review was the bi-product of that but the big thing here is I wasn’t going for products that have thousands of reviews. That’s a different story. Even like you saying like we are in a competitive space we are but for accessories around the product, they are not crazy reviews. They are under 500.

[00:27:05] Dom: There is a lot of one offs in your model, a lot of one offs. Scott you are going to have 10 to 15 ASINs and SKUs at the end. That’s the difference. Everyone is like an open brand, they are just throwing that product and that product and that product and you could afford to throw the $10 stuff because you have $30, $40 stuff coming. The $10 stuff like we talked before. Again if you are going to a real competitive market this might not work the way we are doing it. You still got to throw even more money at it. We’ve suggested, we never told you that we’ve suggested not to do that, anybody that wants to do that you are in your own field there is nothing really we can tell that’s different. Like you want to start selling selling yoga mats I don’t know there must be, any nutritional type stuff, health care, hair loss, men hair stuff, send some my way I’ll review it for you but I say you are in a world of hurt. Again there is a million products that are out there still, you don’t have to get in those space. Make your life a lot easier.

[00:28:10] Scott: It’s funny because there still is a couple of products that we’ll probably launch in this line just to have them but there is people that are launching them every day now I’m noticing and that price is going to keep dropping and the reason is because they are pretty easy to source and everyone’s doing the same thing. Then all of a sudden they are offering a three pack and all of a sudden they are going to offer a six pack because everybody is trying to add to that thing. The problem with that is there is nothing different, there is nothing unique and then you are going to be going up. With us with what we are doing is we are creating stuff that we feel is different to the market. There is actually one of our products that I think we might even be the only one in that space right now.

There is different ways to do it and we’ve talked about that but going back to doing the launch and in the beginning especially, it kills me when people say, “I’m spending ten dollars a day and I’m losing money.” I’m here to tell you, you have to have a budget for promotions and advertising when you launch.

[00:29:17] Chris: Scott fair question, what should that budget be?

[00:29:19] Scott: I know someone wants to hear me say like 12.5% or something. I’m never going to give you that. What I’m going to say is this, when you are starting depending on how competitive the space is, I would say number one I want to allow a hundred units as a promotion. It depends on the competition though. If your competition is higher and you are ordering… I know some people that say, “I bought 100 units. How many do I allow?” If you are doing 100 units you are doing that just to validate that the product will sell so an easy way to validate that is don’t worry about anything other than just turning on your pay-per-click, seeing if you are going to start getting some sales.

Perfect example, my daughter she was doing RA. They are doing over $10,000 right now. They just passed that they are doing phenomenal they just got over two hundred SKUs RA. They discovered a product through that process which I told everyone that’s what you do. The 1K Fast Track will help you do that. Little shameless plug there for the 1K Fast Track. Basically from there what she did now she basically had 10 of these products that she wants to test. We are going to ship those in, we are going to turn on pay-per-click and we are going to see if we’ll can sell them. If we can guess what, we validated that it will sell, now we go ahead and we try to source the product.

So that’s another way that you can do it. There is not like a cookie cutter way to do it and I also think that a promotion doesn’t have to come in there and say, “I have to allow $1,250 for promotion.” What I would say is you need to allow 100 units to give away as at a discount, not 100% as a giveaway like 100% everything’s got to be free. It could be we’ve done 50%, we haven’t done anything more than 50%.

[00:31:04] Chris: The highest we’ve done in the brand is 50%.

[00:31:06] Scott: Yeah so that’s what I would say. You need to allow for that and then the other thing is again depending on how competitive the space is I would probably allow $1,000 for your ad campaign. That would be me. So if I’ve got $3,000, $1,000 of it has got to go for promotions, the other $2,000 is going to go for sourcing the product and part of that sourcing the product is those 100 units that I’m going to be giving away or 200 units whatever it is. Again it just depends on the budget but I guess the lower budget that you have or the least amount of money that you can probably get into this thing is let’s say that you have $2,000 you want to go in at it then you have to go after a product that’s less competitive, period.

[00:31:50] Dom: What I’ve got to say too Scott was, sorry Chris. We’ve talked about too and we are doing the two launch process. You do it the way you can or you can do like I do. I’ve got seven ASINs that are just landing now as we speak. I think a couple are replenishment to probably brand new. It’s all going to be high PPC with low entry point. It’s just giving away some…

[00:32:07] Scott: What do you mean low entry point just for people that don’t know what that means?

[00:32:13] Dom: Everyone is going to be at $19.99 I’m going to come at $13.99 so it’s going to be $6 until I gain some traction. So just like giving 25% off basically but I don’t have to go through the loop of sending it to review clubs and all that old junk or the other stuff. It seems to work for the open brand. Everything we’ve done I’ve done it that way and it seems good on top of… Again some of the stuff because I’m not building a brand I don’t need the email capture as much because I’m not following them up with something that’s going to be similar like we are doing with your brand.

The follow up sequence is not as pertinent so basically I put in if everyone is selling for $24.99 I’m going to come in at $17.99. Again I’m going to be close to my wholesale cost and I’ll do that until a couple of weeks. I’ll say, “Look I need to give 100 units away at this price,” and maybe I’ll sell two or three days and I’ve always said, if you can sell units your first couple of days you are pretty well onto an alright product. That’s basically what validates you.

[00:33:16] Chris: “Oh I just got my product and I just started to sell.” That’s how I discovered Amazon as a thing. We put a product and then we were like, “We sold one.”

[00:33:27] Dom: That’s how I do it. If you do PPC and you don’t have a sale I mean okay I could be wrong, you have to have everything optimized and I’m assuming everybody knows what optimizing…

[00:33:39] Scott: Mexican air got to you.

[00:33:44] Dom: But you guys know what I’m saying. Forget about basic optimiz… Oh jeepers.

[00:33:48] Scott: Optimize, say it with me Dom optimize or this one optimization that’s another good term.

[00:33:52] Dom: Optimization yeah, once you are doing optimization of your listing the collaboration of the focus [inaudible] of the listing itself. The corporation of PPC and amalgamation of the vortex of affiliations that you are doing could financially bring you stardom in all your brands. Is that better?

[00:34:18] Scott: That was awesome.

[00:34:20] Dom: What I’m saying is once you’ve got that done, if you can sell your stuff within a couple of days, I mean the first day, again don’t get excited for the first hour because it’s probably your competitor buying it. I really get irked a little bit, “Oh I sold one or two just now.” Most of the times it’s your competitor finding out, “Okay what’s this guy doing that we are not doing.” They want to see your insert cards, all that stuff. Again I’m not saying it happens every time but it does but if you could sell four five a day within a couple of days you already know you are on to a good product that’s what I think. Now it might be a price point thing but I think exactly that that you’ll do it.

If it takes you two weeks you haven’t sold something either your product is not very good or you did not put it in the right category or your listing isn’t optimized.

[00:35:06] Scott: Say it with me, say it loud, say it proud, optimized!

[00:35:10] Dom: Optimized, anyway that’s my little thing so again we’ve seen that lots of people are proving that, we showed it. We went from $50 $60 a day because you wanted to do it calmly to $150 to $200 a day depending on PPC and you see what has happened. Already your keywords are moving within a week. You are already ranking big for the major ones and you already got a stranglehold on all that. Before remember we were fighting we were, “Okay we are on page three here. We raised it to $2 and you’ve got to pop it up to $5 to $6.” Now you are on page one for those. Again you might not want to say number one because you don’t want to that much but if you can afford to be number one and everyone know, we’ve taught people how to do that.

You bid as high as you can $5 within about three hours you’ll know what you paid for that click. You’ll know what the highest is already because you can just play around you can just keep refreshing, put your keyword in, put your $5 wait an hour, go back. I would say 30 minutes. Take that keyword see where you are in placement. If you are third place and you bid $5 you know then the top guy is bidding at least $6, $7, $9, $10, which is crazy but that’s what happens.

[00:36:12] Scott: What’s crazy right now Dom is I put in our main keyword right now I’ve got both positions at the very top of the page not even on the right sidebar. I’m in it looks like organic it says sponsored at the top but two of them for two different products.

[00:36:27] Dom: And the reason you are getting that Scott is because you are probably in the same main category but you are in different subcategories.

[00:36:34] Chris: It’s actually two different categories, two different subcategories. One is category iPhones the other one is category iPhone accessories.

[00:36:44] Dom: Yeah if you were in the same subcategory and you only rank for one and because you are in two and we use that to our advantage. I tell you that some of our products we are allowed to be in two different categories, not main categories one in this section category and one in that one. What we do is we have listings on both of them so no matter where you type the keyword in we’ll show up in both categories. And then it helps you and again not everyone could do that because you are releasing the first product but again that’s stuff to think about later on. When you’ve got two, three of the four you are well on your way. Now you are going to be paying a lot of money on that but eventually it’s going to pay off especially in fourth quarter Amazon is going to remember that you gave them all that money to be up there and they are going to send as much traffic as they can to you.

[00:37:25] Scott: Yeah I mean I got to be honest like I said my bid has gone down dramatically.

[00:37:33] Dom: Well it always does, it always does…

[00:37:34] Scott: And I’ve got a replacement.

[00:37:37] Dom: What’s happening is because Amazon say, “Okay we knew you were willing to pay $3.50. the other guy is not that high we’ll track it down and then the second guy below you is probably saying I’m tired of paying $2.50 a click. I’ve got to be down to $1.50,” and then Amazon lowers it, now brings it to the threshold. Now what will happen is maybe a month somebody else will come and say, “Hey I want to be leader. I’m going to pay $10 a click.” You are going to lose your clicks or you are going to go out? You are going to sit there and fight that guy off, that person guy or girl so I always say guy but it could be both of them and then you are going to go through the same process again.

It’s a pain in the butt but you’ve got to do it to be relevant especially when you’ve got so much involved in it now. You’ve got four, five, six you are going to be up to ten then eventually it just comes down and you sit there. You reap the benefits, the fruit of all your labor after a while.

[00:38:25] Scott: Okay let’s move on. Chris I know we went on a little bit of a tangent there, a little bit of a rant but it was a good rant. I love it because this stuff worked. You have any question in there and everybody that’s watching on? Everyone that’s watching right now or listening we are going to answer some of those questions but if you have any other questions drop them in there also give us a little love. Share this, like it, do whatever you can to spread the love and we will keep coming back and doing more of these sharing we are doing on a weekly basis because that’s what really we are doing.

We are actually sitting around a table Chris, Dom and myself and having the same conversation that we’d have privately it’s just you guys are listening in so we want to keep doing these. Show us a little love, share it with people, share it, like it all that fun stuff.

[00:39:12] Chris: If it makes sense give us hearts, likes, rainbows, Mr. Yucks, any of those kinds of things that way as we are going through on these rants we know that it makes sense for you guys. The first question I have and Dom it comes back to your launch strategy which was PPC plus the lower prices from Christopher, he says, does coming in low create a race to the bottom that RTB as you refer to it?

[00:39:35] Dom: It will yes at some point and there is two ways that you can do it. One they are not going to fall all the way to the bottom because they’ll say, “This guy is going to burn out.” That’s what the leader is going to say, “This guy let him waste his money,” because they don’t want to kill their margins because they have other stuff. Two, if you come in with here it is, here is the nugget, if you come in with two to three ASINs you are going to lose on the cheapest one. We always order 5,000/6,000 of everything minimum, about 500 to 1,000 used to be for giveaways so now I use those thousands as my entry price point everything else stays at competitive prices.

[00:40:15] Chris: So that’s going to be a one pack when you are actually trying to sell a three pack.

[00:40:22] Dom: That’s correct, you are trying to draw people to the PPC you are going to put up one unit. So if you have a pack of two you are going to put two times this a lot of two, “Oh $8.99 and everyone else is at $15,” they are going to come in, “I’ll buy this, oh wait a minute, he’s got a five pack for $12.95.” That’s how it works, that’s how that strategy works. It works best for variation listings. If you have a one off it's going to be a lot tougher but that’s how it works so we never really discussed that but that’s how I do it. I give away stuff I’ve brought so I never changed the business model I just don’t give them away for free now. I just lower my price which is basically the same.

[00:41:00] Scott: Now someone asked and not here today but before when doing that does that bring it into where it’s an add-on item now if you go too low?

[00:41:08] Dom: It will show up in the… I don’t know it’s really weird. So we’ve run out of stuff and that was the biggest issue remember we talked about raising your price. What happens is we didn’t raise our price and when it came in stock we raised our price before it would run out and then of course it kills your algorithm and all that stuff but if it’s going to be three months out what’s the difference? What happens is that the stuff would come back into stock and for about four, five days we would have the add on and then all of a sudden it would go away. It started selling, a couple of people would buy it and Amazon said, “Okay let’s put you back to your old algorithm, we’ll get rid of that old tag for you.”

I don’t know how it works, you are right there is a certain threshold at choosing under $10 but you can have some that’s… Like I can sell my mic for $10 but I won’t because it’s still heavier than, right?

[00:41:58] Chris: It has to be small, lightweight and cheap.

[00:42:01] Dom: Exactly. Now the way to get round that you could find out, you could send it to the other warehouse. I’ve never used it before what’s it called the light and small warehouse fulfilment or something. You could do that, it’s a bit of a pain. Again this is how you do it, don’t order 10,000 of them. Order ten and see where you end up. Buy 20 of them for $1 or $2 and test it out if you are not sure. For us, everybody is talking now our panel, what we do a minimum of 500 and for myself or the open brand I already know this stuff sells. Unless I’m getting it on liquidation, we’ll go and buy five thousand right away because we know it’s going to sell.

We are not competitive, sometimes we are the only ones, maybe there is five so really we don’t have to test. I already know that it’s going to sell and that we could improve on the listing and someone else is old school guy. So we never had that issue. If I was launching something new and I was skeptical and I was afraid about the add on thing, first of all Chris and Scott you should be releasing anything that’s $9 or under anyways. So my question should be irrelevant if it’s a single SKU but you are right. You could come into that so maybe you have something that’s $10.99 and everything else is $15 and $19.

[00:43:13] Scott: I guess the question then Dom would be this. Let’s say for example your products is $19.99, what’s your entry point price?

[00:43:22] Dom: Well for $19.99 I still have an entry point of about $11.99. I’d have $20, $16 and then $12 so like $11.99, $14.99, $19.99 maybe I’ll throw a fourth one at $16.99 but then some of the stuff have had to come in at $8, I’ve had stuff at $7.99 for when we first started years ago. Yeah I’d lose money but they were my giveaways. I’d rather give away for $7.99 instead of a $1.99 that’s makes sense right? You are not going to go through as many because you are not giving away but it’s still going to help you rank.

Again you have to test that, I don’t know everything we release now is above that now. I don’t do anything under $10 anymore that market is way too competitive. Again you are right it could happen I don’t mind just don’t go buy 1,000, just test it. That’s all I would do but you are never going to stop the race to the bottom. It happens at retail arb and it happens in private label so that’s the only way you really could… I mean you could tie the person but why would you want to tie the person. What I mean is if they are at $14.99, you put yours at $14.99 the same thing. You’ve got to be lower than that.

A lot of guys will not come down, there will be if there’s five guys in the space maybe one or two will come down and fine, let them come down. You are going to sell more than the other three guys that didn’t come down so you are going to pass them. You might not catch the other two. By the time you get to the other guys then you can put your price up and by then you’ll more ASINs, you’ll have other stuff involved so it’s a process. Maybe you’ll have another two products by the time you catch up to the first two guys so now you have more money coming in so you can spend more PPC. There’s a million factors involved.

[00:45:09] Scott: Alright, let’s move on to another question. What have you got Chris?

[00:45:11] Chris: Leo says, “After seven days of starting my PPC.” He at least it looks like waited unlike most people, “I have thirteen clicks and no sales. Is this enough data to take action? Should I remove that keyword from PPC or keep it running a little bit longer to get more info?” 13 clicks is not enough information in my opinion. Leo the thing that you are probably seeing is you are probably not getting all that many impressions. Now it’s hard to give an average number of impressions you are going to be looking for but we are talking mid hundreds to thousands a day impressions on each of those keywords so 500 is the minimum that you want to see daily.

[00:45:50] Dom: You should have minimum thirty clicks in a day. In a week, again it could be lots of things. It could be you are in the wrong category, you are not spending enough, most of the time it’s because you are at a $25 cap for the day. You are not going to get any impressions for $25.

[00:45: 03] Chris: Bid is the other thing that I see messed up a lot because Amazon has these suggested bids that they put out and I know that they are trying to be helpful but they are terrible.

[00:46:10] Dom: They are better than they used to be though Chris, they are better than they were a year ago. A year ago they were eight cents and ten cents. At least now they are up to $1.12 but they are still off.

[00:46:26] Chris: I tend to bid 50% or more above that suggested bid. Here is the thing guys, just because you are bidding $5 like we were talking about, if we are trying to go aggressive we might bid $5 or $10. You are not necessarily going to pay $5 or $10. If the number one spot is $2 you are going to pay $2 and one cent. You are not going to pay $10 so the reason that we bid higher in the beginning is to get that data as quickly as possible. Then we know that the average cost per click for the number one position the most that we’ve spent all week is $1.48 so guess what we are going to do? We are going to bid $1.50 and then we start to see those clicks come off then we can do that.

[00:47:07] Scott: But Chris let me just say here I did that exact thing. I put our bid at $5 and I haven’t touched it it’s still at $5.

[00:47:15] Chris: Yeah but you don’t have to now. If you are worried about spending that money then back off.

[00:47:24] Dom: Scott in that brand he wants to control that keyword and in order to control that keyword you never touch that $5 bid. He might have to go to $10 if the second guys decides, “I want to take it over.” If you are happy to do that… Now again we have to find out what this guy’s budget was or this girl’s budget.

[00:47:38] Chris: $20 a day.

[00:47:40] Dom: Yeah that’s why, you are not going to get enough impressions at $20 I’m sorry. That person if you want to really find out what it is, put it at $50, put your clicks at $5 and then you’ll be out of that in about three hours, you’ll spend your $5 you’ll know exactly where you are when the top guys are bidding.

[00:47:57] Scott: But the other thing is to consider there is we talked about spending $20. The other thing that you may want to do and this is something we’ve been playing around with again Dom had given this advice, turn on your campaign at 11am Eastern and turn it off, if it still has budget left, turn it off at eleven o’clock at night. The reason why I’ve been doing that is because I found that if you give Amazon two hours without budget it’s going to spend the money and that audience will not be the right… It might not be the right audience so what I found is by turning it on at eleven and turning it off at eleven at night it’s been working really well. I spend my full budget.

[00:48:42] Dom: We could do it from 11pm to 2am it will all be gone that $150, done. Amazon will spend it for you trust us. If you can’t spend your budget it’s because your stuff is a little… But you are right 11am is beautiful. Now you are going to miss some of the western, depends where your product is too like in the winter time if you are selling summer stuff you can still swim in California and Texas so you might want to keep your PPC running a little longer.

[00:49:10] Scott: But Dom also what I base it on is how much of my budget have I gone through. If I only have like $10 left I might just kill it and say, “Wow I got enough for today. I’ve got 35 sales, I’m doing fine,” but if I noticed that I’ve only spent half of my budget I may let it go then through the night.

[00:49:32] Chris: Now he said you might lose some lower price clicks when you turn it off and that’s true because Amazon is going to try to spend the rest of that budget so if you have $2 left when you turn it off you are not going to get that additional clicks but this is $5.

[00:49:48] Dom: The only drawback to that is that your competitors might see you as being weak because you turn it off or like, “This guy is running out of budget.” At first I worried about that now we don't even care because you are right I mean sometimes I’ve forgotten to turn it off and I’ll come back in the morning and they already spent $80 and I’ve got two sales. It’s because nobody shops at three in the morning but Amazon is still bumping it so I like that…

[00:50:16] Chris: That’s the thing, the way that your budget runs with Amazon is it runs from midnight and one second to 11:59:59 and if you are running and it hits midnight you are going to reset to the next day and Amazon immediately is going to start spending that next budget not necessarily in the prime buying time. Now, my question for this would be to test it for your product exactly what you were saying Scott and Dom you were agreeing with it as well. If you sell SPAM, you might sell more to Hawaii than you do to Pennsylvania so those hours might shift. Right now and I don’t know of any tool that lets you do that automated, Jeff or Brandon from Seller Labs, if you guys are listening maybe…

[00:51:03] Dom: Another thing too guys is that, a lot of people don’t know this but I’ve talked to Scott a long time ago, that’s actually that’s one of the biggest when I first started talking to Scott about a year and a half ago is also rolling budget guys. What that means is whatever you set before your daily budget or your campaign budget Amazon takes that over a thirty days and divides it. If you‘ve got a $150 budget for a day and you decide to turn off at eleven o’clock it's only $110, they’ll spend $200 of it tomorrow because you average $150 so don’t be, “Oh my god I spent $200 today.” It’s because you told them that… They are banking it for you and that’s the way to do it too guys.

[00:51:44] Scott: But the way to get around that would be to set your overall budget, correct?

[00:51:50] Dom: Still same way works exactly the same way.

[00:51:53] Scott: So if I say I only want to spend $150 today overall on all my campaigns?

[00:51:59] Dom: And you turn it off at $120 they’ll spend that extra $30 tomorrow you’ll at $180 for the day.

[00:52:02] Scott: So what you are saying is by you telling them you are willing to spend $150 they are going to times that by thirty and that’s going to be your monthly budget?

[00:52:12] Chris: From the campaign budget not on the account budget.

[00:52:15] Scott: I’m talking about the account budget.

[00:52:18] Dom: The account budget yeah it stops.

[00:52:19] Scott: And that’s what I was saying.

[00:52:22] Dom: So always set that and sometimes I’ve thrown that up because I get mad because it turns off I’m like, “I don’t want to stop spending money.” It’s too hard to go back and change all your campaigns so I change that to go by the single campaign not by my account. And we did that the other day because we were not… I think you did it too we set a back and forth to test that. So you are right, no matter what, if you set your overall budget for $200 for the whole day no matter if you have $20,000 it will shut off. There is no rolling budget there. It will go $1 sometimes or $3 but never like $30, $40 so you are right. That’s a safeguard guys if you do that.

[00:52:56] Scott: And that’s what I was saying but what you are saying is if you don’t… Forget about that, you are saying that if you say, I want to spend on all my campaigns it totals to $150 a day,” and you only spend $100 today it might spend $200 tomorrow because it’s going to take that $50 but if I say I only want to spend $150 a day on my campaign overall and if I had $200 leftover it will only spend $150.

[00:53:17] Dom: Right, that’s correct and then basically what happens is you’ll never catch up to that campaign. If you only spend $50 and you set your campaign at $60 its ten maybe next you spend $50 now it’s got $20 in the bank by the time you get to the end of the month it might have $500 but you always cap out because your budget’s always set.

[00:53:36] Chris: They was you may catch up Scott let’s say your daily budget is $150 on campaign A and campaign B is $30 and your daily cap is $200. You might spend $150 today but you might not spend any money on campaign B tomorrow because you hit $200 of campaign A, does that make sense? Ad words does the same thing. Michelle is a little confused and I wanted to clarify for her. We are talking about Amazon spending your budget, it’s how we phrased that and she said, “Wait, isn’t it cost per click its pay-per-click aren’t people clicking on this?”

Michelle what we are talking about is if you condense that window down Amazon tends to show you faster because they want you to spend that budget. So you are not necessarily going to spend all of that and it’s not Amazon costing you money its window shoppers are there and when those people are clicking. I hope that makes sense, if it’s not let me know in the comments. Chad wants to know what time does Amazon operating on? To me it’s always been Pacific.

[00:54:40] Dom: It is West Coast I thought midnight to midnight California time, Vancouver time. Pacific yeah always, because they are in Seattle right so midnight to actually three o’clock our time. Actually I don’t know what, Chris is probably different but me and you we are the same.

[00:54:58] Scott: Yeah his is an hour behind.

[00:55:02] Dom: So if you turn it off at 11pm eastern it’s actually at seven o’clock Pacific time but again you can play with that and maybe you stop.

[00:55:10] Scott: It's eight o’clock. This is the same guy with optimize.

[00:55:14] Dom: Optimize so you are to going to up at one o’clock at night turning that stuff off unless Greg Mercer or like you said Jeff Cowen can come up with a ‘can you please stop my campaign feature?’

[00:55:25] Chris: That may be a feature they could come up with I mean. I don’t know why they wouldn’t be able to because all it will have to do is have a pause and enable feature, they may be able to do that so we may want to talk to them about that. Leo says, “Most of my keywords on the $20 campaign,” that we’ve been talking about aren’t getting any impressions I’m already bidding higher than suggested. The suggested might be 70 cents, you might be bidding a $1 make that higher and number two make sure that you are relevant for those keywords so make sure that those keywords are in you listing and your title and your back ends search terms, any of those places.

[00:56:00] Scott: Category two.

[00:56:02] Chris: The other one if you are selling a soccer ball and you are listed in home and kitchen you have to bid a heck of a lot higher than someone who is posted in sports and outdoors because Amazon goes, “This must be like a soccer ball you put on the wall in your house because that’s the only reason it would be in home and kitchen. You have to bid an outsized amount if you are in the wrong category or a different category from your competitors.

[00:56:25] Dom: You don’t want to cross contaminated. Same thing if you have a baseball hat you can put it under clothing hats, outdoor on men’s or you can put it on sporting goods men baseball hats so it depends. Sometimes keywords don’t catch on certain categories and we’ve talked about that before too guys. We’ve had to launch in different categories in order to make out keywords. That’s just the way it works, I don’t know why they do it they just want to make sure you are relevant, your keywords relevant they don’t want to skew that. It’s all a customer thing they are typing a keyword and show everything in automotive when really it’s a home and kitchen product.

I’m going to say that you are bidding seventy cents and your competitor is probably bidding $2, $3 that’s why you are not getting impressions and maybe you didn’t put them in the backend of the seller. Some people forgot that I’ve heard. We talked about it on the trip.

[00:57:13] Scott: We’ve done it.

[00:57:16] Dom: Yeah we’ve done it.

[00:57:18] Scott: Chris, I know we’ve got to wrap up here. I want to get to more questions so let’s just do a little speed round maybe a fire round.

[00:57:22] Chris: What if competitors keep looking at my ads? Amazon is doing a really good job of freezing that wouldn’t worry too much about it.

[00:57:32] Dom: I think you are allowed about two to three. What you’ve got to worry about is I’m going to go with that. I don’t know I mentioned but there are companies, there are people that you could pay to go against credit and it’s such a d-bag move and I hope they get rid of it because it’s just a pain anyways.

[00:57:46] Scott: Okay let’s move on. Dom are you still drinking the Mexican water?

[00:57:53] Dom: No I…

[00:58:00] Chris: Sandeep wants to know how we are launching products so the first way would be the low price entry plus PPC. The other way I would go to theamazingseller.com/buildlist and that’s how we’ve been launching the products for this brand as well as some other things that we are trying once we have that audience like just jumping on a Facebook Live with the audience and letting them know that the product is live. And that’s all we did for the last one and Scott do you remember how many units we sold over the three day launch window?

[00:58:25] Scott: The very first one with the email blast?

[00:58:30] Chris: No the most recent one that we did.

[00:58:35] Scott: Oh the most recent one I think was over 150 or 160.

[00:58:37] Chris: Okay, I knew it was over 100.

[00:58:39] Dom: You could do a combination of it too. That’s one thing we haven’t done yet but I know it’s in the works, low entry point giveaways and lots of PPC so we are testing that out.

[00:58:51] Chris: That’s totally what we are now so…

[00:58:53] Dom: And then what I would do or what we could probably do and we’ve talked about this too again when we were on the go is you’re to give away that stuff for 50% off. Once that’s done you are going with a low entry point to keep the wave going as they say. You don’t want to lose that and that’s an easy way to keep it going.

[00:59:10] Scott: Yeah I’m looking right now Chris it’s been 160 units and if I go back to… Do you remember the exact days?

[00:59:17] Chris: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

[00:59:19] Scott: What were the dates on that?

[00:59:20] Chris: 9th, 10th, 11th and I think the promo code was still open till Monday so the 9th to the 12th.

[00:59:31] Scott: And if I go by that right now 138 units.

[00:59:34] Chris: Okay I guess it’s 140 so let’s just call it a 140.

[00:59:42] Dom: And then you average out each day it’s not like you do 140 on the first day and then spiking the algorithm, BSR.

[00:59:52] Scott: Yeah we did, we actually did. I mean I’m looking at the first day on the 9th it was 24 units. If I go to the 10th I can… I’m doing this in Fetcher too by the way. 69 units on day two so we had a big [inaudible].

[01:00:11] Dom: What’s the BSR, are you 20,000 now or?

[01:00:16] Scott: We were really good at that at one point but now Chris I haven’t looked but I can actually look quickly.

[01:00:24] Chris: It’s pretty solid still on that product, it’s still under 10,000.

[01:00:28] Dom: Yeah it’s pretty amazing that’s good I mean usually you go right back up high right after a couple of days if you are not selling them but under 10,000…

[01:00:33] Chris: We used to have about 4,000 since the promo ended but we are still kind of sitting right there.

[01:00:37] Dom: There is nothing wrong with having a 10,000/15,000/20,000 listed BSR product and that’s not going to stay there it’s only because it’s a fresh product.

[01:00:46] Chris: Well it’s under 10,000, it’s like [inaudible] or 8,000.

[01:00:51] Dom: If you’ve got ten products that are under ten thousand BSR you are making some pretty good cash, lots that’s for sure.

[01:01:00] Scott: I’m going to look at it right now, we are 8,900.

[01:01:04] Dom: That’s nice

[01:01:06] Scott: And by the way guys we have one review.

[01:01:09] Dom: That’s it I mean listen, it’s not sexy 800, 1,200 or 400 BSR who cares?

[01:01:18] Chris: I sent you a screenshot Scott it was 800, 900 or something. We were number one, we were actually beating the main product in its own subcategory.

[01:01:32] Dom: So you know what they sell a day now to beat them, you’ll get there.

[01:01:37] Scott: Well and I’m looking at yesterday’s sales though, just to be honest 13 units sold.

[01:01:44] Chris: That’s why I said that number was weird to me because we were having that conversation and I said 12,000 in that category used to be like five or six a day and then we had one day where we sold like eight and we were at 7,000 and I was like, “Must have been a weird slow day on Amazon because we have other products that are well above that, that normally sell 10, 12, 15, 20 a day.”

[01:02:07] Dom: Yeah I mean you are not even two weeks and you are already in the ten, ten, one already.

[01:02:15] Scott: We are averaging right now over ten a day after launch so that’s pretty good and not to mention we are the most expensive. We haven’t even did the low entry point like I’m thinking about probably trying that to actually even increase the velocity but we are actually the most expensive by almost $10.

[01:02:34] Dom: If you go a couple of dollars in the time that you’ll find your sweet spot. Like you don’t want to undercut yourself too much because a lot of time you sell just at 15 just sell as many as 17.

[01:02:45] Scott: Well that’s the case in the other brand which happened to me I actually increase it by $3 and sales actually went up or stayed the same so you’ve got to definitely play around with that. Chris any other quick questions we can bang out here quick?

[01:03:00] Chris: I think that about wraps it up. Guys if you have any questions about PPC my suggestion would be to go through the five hours of content and theamazingseller.com/ppc. Scott, do you know the two episodes off the top of your head that we did recently?

[01:03:19] Scott: I can find them very quickly

[01:03:20] Chris: But just go to theamazingseller.com/ppc all of that stuff is recapped with screenshots and all that stuff for you guys. If you are looking to launch a product theamazingseller.com/buildlist.

[01:03:30] Scott: Alright so there you go, there you have it, another great TAS Power Hour if I don’t say so myself. Honestly, I love sitting around and just talking about this stuff because a lot of good things come of it and it’s funny because when we were in Mexico with myself, Dom and another friend of myself we were sitting around and actually we were waiting for my son, my 19 year old son to get back from the club in Mexico. Obviously I’m a little worried he is out there on his own but I’m trying to be a dad and all that and I said to those guys, “Let’s just in the lobby and wait for him.”

So we waited an hour and then it became two hours and finally he came out but during that time we had some really, really good deep discussions about launching, about product selection, about Amazon itself, about ecommerce, about building your own brand all that stuff. I really wish that I would have recorded it because it was just really raw and good and just great content but it’s a lot like these Facebook Lives that we do with the TAS Power Hour. Again if you guys want to join us on a TAS Power Hour head over to the amazingseller.com/fb and you’ll be notified when we do them.

Alright, the other thing I want to remind you really quickly is the show notes they can be found at theamazingseller.com/380 and you can get all the transcripts and all the links that we talk about there and one of those links that I know that a lot of people have been asking me about really is about Splitly and Splitly I mentioned in this episode and I’m really starting to love, love, love this app. The reason is because it does a lot more than just split testing. It does price testing as well on the fly and it finds that sweet spot and I’ve been running it now for just about four weeks and it’s got some really killer data.

It’s telling me what is this sweet spot, it's adjusting my price automatically. I just give it the lowest and the highest and it does the rest for me and then it spits back all this great information for me to look at and decide what price I want to lock it in at. The other cool thing is is it’s a keyword tracking tool as well. So now I do everything in Splitly including my A/B testing so guys if you want to check it out definitely go do that I believe they still have a thirty day free trial for TASers so head over to theamazingseller.com/splitly and you can start to check that out for yourself and yes I do earn a small commission for that. I am affiliated with Splitly and Greg Mercer and all their awesome tools so I just want to be upfront with that. You will buy me a cup of coffee and I would appreciate that.

Anyway, that’s it guys that’s going to wrap it up have an awesome amazing day. 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 guys and I’ll see you right back here on the next episode.

[END]

Click Here to Download Transcript <<

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• www.theamazingseller.com/fb
• Scope Seller Labs
• www.1kfasttrack.com
• www.theamazingseller.com/buildlist
• www.theamazingseller.com/ppc
• www.theamazingseller.com/splitly

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