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Mastering Amazon FBA: Strategies for Product Selection and Marketing with Neil Twa Ep. 617
00:40:50
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- [00:17]
A
Howdy. Welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Seekers of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. So, as all of you know, my co host Chris has stepped away to do full time supplement longevity marketing. You can go check out Chris's profile and see what he's doing. He started his own podcast book. We've got him on a bunch of podcasts. We're still working together, but you don't see him on the podcast anymore. And since he left, he took a lot of knowledge with him. Now he's still there in the background. And we do have people on our team that are Amazon experts, but I am not a Amazon expert and I don't claim to be. And I thought it would be good since we haven't talked about in a while, to bring on some industry leading Amazon experts, people that do FBA selling people. Kind of in the theme of what our past podcasts have been about, of where you get investment, right? You want, you want a smart partner that not just gives you money, but gives you experience and helps you grow. I know a lot of people listening are trying to grow their business and if they're doing E commerce, I don't talk a lot about it because I'm just not as well educated as Chris was. And so I brought on Neil TWA with Voltage. Neil, thanks for coming on the podcast.
- [01:41]
B
Hey, Matt. It's a blessing to be here, brother.
- [01:44]
A
Awesome. And you know, we were having some conversations about veteran and veteran support prior to this. So that's something we both believe a lot in. I am going to the Wounded warriors event this weekend, really want to support what they're doing. But Neil, I wanted to bring you on, I wanted to be completely transparent, be an open book. I am not the expert in Amazon you are, brother. And I would love to just share some of your knowledge with the audience. I think there is probably people out there that may be struggling and some of the things that you offer I think would be right up their alley. So I wanted to give you an opportunity to educate me and educate them at the same time. Hopefully everybody enjoys the journey of growth that we're doing here on the Unknown Secrets.
- [02:31]
B
So wonderful. Yeah, I fell in love with the Amazon FBA channel over the last 12 years. Have just loved its ability and growth and speed at which it's moving and the amount of products that are flowing through it and just how many are now addicted to it, frankly, buying products and having them delivered two, three, four times a week. Subscribe and save shows up for your favorite products. It's quite an ecosystem. I usually joke that it's a miracle the dang thing even works at the capacity that works now. And so there's a lot of things to love about it. There's a few things to hate about it. Of course, we'll go through all of that. I want to be very practical today, and if anything, you know, if anybody's thinking about it and wants to know, could I get started? There's this big black hole of, you know, what the heck do I sell and how do I go? Or if you've got a product and you're like, could I take advantage of it? Or maybe I'm not taking advantage of it. Or maybe even if you're a local business and want to go, hey, how do I actually get, you know, local delivery, local opportunities with Amazon? Is that even possible? We can cover all that and more, man. So you take me, whatever rabbit hole you want to go down.
- [03:22]
A
Well, you know, the thing that I think most people are thinking about if they haven't gone down that rabbit hole yet, is they look on Amazon and there's a bunch of products that are very similar, right? And you're looking at reviews and you're trying to go, well, this one's more, so it's got to be better, right? And then this one is the same as that one, but it might have a little bit slighter, better reviews. But it looks like in, you know, hint, cheat that it is the same product. There's other sellers that are buying stuff on maybe Alibaba or somewhere else, and then they're reselling them. So can you talk a little bit about that ecosystem? And maybe even if you're building accounts, you know, having a lot of reviews is really quite important. When you have an Amazon seller account, can you just kind of.
- [04:11]
B
Yeah, it can be or it can't be. It just depends upon where you're selling in the platform or who you're targeting as your audience avatar or your profile, who you're actually selling to, what reasons they're buying and what the outcome of that product is they're trying to accomplish with it. Whether they're trying to go faster, cut their hair, get backpacks for kids, do something that's an active, you know, emotional connectivity that that product fulfills and allows them to accomplish emotionally or physically or spiritually or whatever it is. That's really what we're after at the end of the day. Because if you get the hold of that concept in the direct marketing world that we live in, really at the End of day, then you can put anything in a box and sell it to anyone in 30 seconds or less. Amazon is just a facilitation of that transaction. So when they start to look alike, that is because we call those. Me too. Products where we want to operate in innovation, not invention. Because that's like Shark Tank. That's real cool stuff. And I know Kevin Harrington, he wrote the forward for my book and it's a really fun thing to play on. However, it sort of feels exclusionary. Two people who don't have an idea or this unique unicorn product that nobody is necessarily going to know about, or maybe they want to sell or they think, well, that's the only way to make millions of dollars in this world is if I have super unique Elon Musk style products. And that's actually not true. As you see most of those products on Amazon, you're seeing that they're making revenues. The question is, are they making profits? Profits, that's the real question. And at the, you know, bottom line, that's what we focus on first after purpose and value of the customer, intent and avatar, it is profits that we focused on. And with that, I'm going to look for products that are typically 50 to 200 in range and I'm going to look for products that have a specific solution and outcome. That someone knows they can get a 15 one from Walmart, but they also know they may pay 35 for the same thing at Kohl's, but then they might see the 99 version of it on Amazon and go, oh, okay, well that might be the one that I'm looking for. As you said a minute ago, there are levels to every product. There's an avatar for every version. There's someone who wants to buy the thousand dollar product purse and there's someone who will only spend the hundred dollars at Walmart for their purse. So in that.
- [06:10]
A
Yeah, no, you threw a lot there. And so to kind of process some of this stuff, one of the things that you said immediately was, well, you're looking for the customer avatar, but also you got to think about who is the seller, right? And so if you're just approaching it from a consumer standpoint, the reason the price may be low is they're trying to build reviews, right? It could be the exact same product or they might be trying to do something different in that. But then as you switch to selling and this is where like I love marketing and branding is, you're, you're, you're trying to speak to those needs of the person or the wants or the desires people act on emotion. You're trying to find that customer avatar. And one of the things that Amazon does really, really well is it's starting to build out an ecosystem to work with influencers, to work with brands to really get that halo effect. So maybe you can kind of speak to that as you were kind of opening it up is okay. You can run ads where certain ads the same product sometimes as we kind of continue on that theme, some of them have videos, right? Some of them have different kind of pictures. Some, some of them speak to a need a little bit better than others. And as you go down that rabbit hole, there's more and more capabilities because it's such a big ecosystem and everybody on Amazon's looking to buy stuff, right? And, and if they're searching for your product, it's kind of like Google on steroids to a degree because everybody there is, it is buyers and it's a, it's a huge place that people are going to look for stuff.
- [07:50]
B
They are buyer intended, they are intentional buyers who came there because they already had the audience conversation in their mind somewhere else. They maybe saw a comparable product on Facebook or Tick Tock or somewhere. They may have seen it out on Google or YouTube or wherever and they thought in their mind or they know somebody who had that product or somewhere, they had a conversation or a girlfriend or you know, cousin or uncle, brother, whatever, and they come to Amazon, they're like, hey, I'm looking for that one. They're there in buying mode. They want to buy, they don't want to be sold. Many of those products that are just going for all the reviews they can get at lower price points to generate revenue are actually coming in at low profit and they're actually just meeting certain demographical needs that don't actually attribute to profit in the business. So when I say tier two and tier three avatar, I don't play with products that are less than $50 unless it is a product that is dropped into a brand for the sole intent of adding value to the primary product and to gain more traction and visibility in the marketplace, which you tied to just a little bit. But it would not be a primary product set because I can drive 1.2, 1.5 million in revenue on Amazon very quickly, but only have two or four dollars in profit per a unit and have the basically business being run upside down. So only Amazon makes the money in the manufacturer. And that's where I hear a lot of people complaining on YouTube and the guru and Hopium Mindset spaces because they all end up in what I call that Amazon mosh pit of products where they're all banging around and beating up, you know, sweaty bikers and all this nonsense. And I prefer to be up in the box looking down. It's not arrogance and pride. It's business. It is profit and demand. And therefore, I can sell $180 product with only five reviews on it at five grand a day, prove the market works, and then work on the processes of moving it into a larger, you know, sales, more SEO, more PPC marketing. Once I've proven that it can work in the market, I'm in line with the market. It is literally a river, okay? It's flowing 24, 7. We kind of know this analogy, right? 8, 600 units a minute. It is a river of data. You can't just throw something into it and expect the river to move to you. You actually have to get in line with that river. And like in the world of SEO and other things, we've got to optimize our way into that river. And once we do, the traffic can go exponential. One of the things we'll do is spend 80% of our time validating the numbers, the data, the competition, the value of that competition, the amount of keywords and traffic volume. We can actually get off of those listings in Amazon through backwards into Google ranking because the domain authority is extremely high across there. And then very quickly translated that into YouTube keyword videos that then create a three tier holistic traffic mechanism, okay? Kind of a pinwheel of traffic that's all revolving around that Amazon listing. It's all highly relevant, it's all targeted keywords, and it is all geared to get the algorithm, okay, this what's called the A9 engine on Amazon, to look at our product and say, well, it must be in more demand. Its data looks better. Oh, and by the way, pro tip, I have more profitability than you. Amazon knows our cost of goods. Don't make no mistake. They've got enough data and analytic engine people think, well, they don't know how much we're making. How would that make any value? Absolutely. The A9 engine values one data set that makes more profitability over another data set. And if you think that's not true, you don't understand business. Not only that, but it literally is written in the code. So if my product and your product, your product has 5,000 reviews, mine has five. Okay? My data set is better than yours, and your data set is older, but I have $10 more in profit per unit and you don't, Amazon's going to rank me and start showing my product more and prove whether or not I'm an interesting product, whether or not I'm in demand, whether or not I might be a social commerce breakout soon. And it wants to make sure that I'm not buried at the bottom of the list. Before, you know, a 10,000, $20,000 product listing, it wants to say, hey, are you something that's in demand? And if you are, then we're going to propagate you across the system more because you're going to make us more profit. It's a win, win, man.
- [11:40]
A
Neil, I got a. I didn't have my paper in front of me to take notes. I had a bunch of things that I was going to speak to. You're moving fast. I love it. So one of the things that I want to just highlight is right you're talking about the race to the bottom. Like if you don't create any kind of, if you don't create any kind of value, if you're not building a brand, you know, it's just you're commoditizing a product and it's a race to the bottom.
- [12:06]
B
You can drive a lot of revenue doing that and look like you're really successful and make no profit. I've had a guy come in recently with 3 million in sales, looks really successful at the bottom line. He spend 2 more 2.9 million to get there. So after pre tax he's making around 50k.
- [12:22]
A
So I understanding your business, understanding your cost of goods, soldier cogs and, and you know a lot of these things are really, really important when, when you have such a flywheel that's moving so quickly, you can get upside down really quickly. You were one of the other things that I think you were speaking to a little bit which I've seen when you're building out these funnels is you might have a product that you're hooking people in on or you're breaking even on. Right. Like you're breaking even on a product, if you will. Yeah, A loss leader to basically get them into your funnel, get them buying, crack the wallet and essentially upsell them into higher tiered.
- [13:06]
B
Because the whole system of Amazon is all an upsell. You can't tell me it's not if you've ever been in their ecosystem. Everything about it is to get you to buy more, buy more units, subscribe and save, get more. Here's your frequently bought, here's your email, here's your retargeting here's your coming soon. You know, Cosmo and Rufus are already rolling out, but coming soon, very quickly they're going to be implementing those systems of data and large language models from their system called Cosmo, which will be the replacement to the A9 engine. It's already rolling out and doing very, very well. Think Minority Report for your, you know, devices. It's going to basically go in and while you're watching a documentary on phishing on freebie through Amazon prime, it's going to target with all fishing supplies. It doesn't do that right now, but that's what's coming. So the hyper relevancy intent based customer buying is coming very fast based on these data models. If you understand who your audience and conversation is and you know you're already speaking to them in their language and you're not selling them, you're simply revalidating a checklist they already had in their head. As soon as that checklist ticks off, it may be the $99 version, but they're gonna go, what? I buy it. If it's great, I'll keep it. If I love it, I'm going to review it and if I don't like it, it breaks in five minutes, I'm going to send it back. Yeah, people on Amazon will take those chances on higher priced products. It's simply a limitation or scarcity limiting belief in your mind that thinks it doesn't work. So what else we'll do is we'll take that gear accessory like you said, a lower end product, maybe a 1995 product for the specific intent of getting it into the engine's visibility more. So people come back to our brand or come back to our store in this big economic system of Amazon's engine. And Amazon will simply send, you know, show them more of the other products. It'll do it for us. It does all the upsell cross sell marketing for us.
- [14:43]
A
No, I mean Amazon. I remember the day that when I was telling people about what remarketing was, I would use Amazon as the example of it. And now that they have Amazon prime where they're running ads in there, I mean now the ecosystem is even big.
- [15:01]
B
It'S even larger and in certain accounts that are still in beta, I know they'll be out soon. You can do sponsored brand TV ads now so you can actually run those sponsored videos straight onto all the streaming television vision services. That Amazon has control of that median and marketing means you should understand that if you think or act or want to get involved or you're involved and want to know what you can do to go faster. You need to become a better direct response marketer in the next two years. In 2026, Amazon's own numbers are going to cross in terms of advertising and marketing will out exceed profitability for what is currently AWS's technology platform that makes all their money. It's about, they're about to become a direct response marketing and advertising engine. You need to understand you got two years to learn how this works so that you know how to take advantage of it.
- [15:46]
A
So, so speak to people. And this is something I hear on a number of occasions. We actually have a client right now that is doing direct to consumer. They're doing E commerce on their website and they're really cautious. They don't want to get involved in the Amazon ecosystem.
- [16:07]
B
Sure.
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A
Okay. And could you just kind of talk through the pluses and minuses for both and maybe why that they should consider that. And also Amazon now and you can speak to this better than I could allows you to advertise even if you're not having a product in there or something like that. Right.
- [16:25]
B
I'm very pragmatic about Amazon in terms of what it is. I'm not a fanboy. I prefer what works. And there are value statements to other platforms or systems or marketing or direct response marketing or etc, traffic, you know, direct to customer traffic. It is just a mechanism and a tool by which I can reach sellers. Right, sellers straight into consumers. So if you look at it as a tool, it's like any other tool. I can pick a Dewalt or Milwaukee and have an argument with anybody about which tool is better. At the end of the day they can both build houses or they can cut off fingers if you use them wrong. And so there are cons with Amazon. There are cons in which they do some of their things. There are cons in which some of their business policies float over people on accident. Their AI system will flag you or you'll go through the process of verifying something they asked you to do and then two weeks later they come back and pause your selling because they say you're not verified. And you're like, well I went through, you green lighted me, you said I was good and now you pause my selling. So now I got to go solve that business problem. But make no mistake, unless they shut you down completely for doing something completely violating their terms of service, they are usually going to find a way to work with you. They don't just carte blanche jack you unless you're in messing with terms of service. Can the 1% happen? Absolutely. And with millions of sellers in the marketplace, the 1% is going to feel like a number, number of people and they're going to have a lot of voice. So they're going to feed a lot into the negativity. Right. And there are negative things and dumb stuff that Amazon does that you just have to reconcile. Right. It does not fair, it doesn't work. Their policies aren't great. Oh, and by the way, as a policy of stealing the products, because I know a lot of people think, well, Amazon will steal your products once you get really good at it. No, actually, competition in a free market economy will steal your products. Okay? If you don't indemnify yourself, protect yourself, build your LLC structure correctly, you know, lock your warehousing down, get your IP in on your trademarks, get down to even notice of allowance on design if you can, you're not doing the right processes to protect and indemnify yourself in a free market economy. Therefore, when someone sees an opportunity to come in and sell a product like yours in the marketplace, if you're not in protection mode, you will be taken advantage of. That's okay. You can play the victim card. But if you simply didn't invest in the knowing or you don't know, you could end up being victimized by that. Right? So Amazon has some bad, bad actors. We ran into them before people inside of Amazon who were paid by other sellers and very large companies, you know, five, ten grand to do something to hurt an account. Okay? Bad actors are inside these enterprises. It's not a holistic policy of Amazon to do a number of these things, but they do have bad actors. And certain things that go wrong, even their AI screws up sometimes.
- [18:53]
A
We're seeing that a lot more right now with negative SEO. And there's all kinds of things you can do to not make yourself better, but make other, like drag other people down.
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B
And we're in a, we're in a taboo, you know, free zone now with our culture in the last, I don't know, three, five, ten years where things where people were like, hey, there's business and there's ethics and there's business ethics to be taught in a free market economy of what you do and don't do as a business person. But it seems the wheels of that taboo are coming off. And what some people were deemed, you know, unethical are just now saying, well, that's just a part of business. Yeah, to do that to them, you.
- [19:26]
A
Know, well, if you shoot.
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B
No, I don't agree with that actually.
- [19:29]
A
Yeah, no, I, I feel like you become a shooting star. People just try to fling mud on.
- [19:34]
B
You, sometimes desperately cling on to you and try to drag you under the water the same way, you know, you go save a drowning person and they put your head underwater. Sometimes they're doing it on purpose and sometimes just out of fear and desperation. But you still have to protect yourself in business correctly. And so when you go out and do these and play with Amazon, yeah, there's going to be some concerns and fears about the system itself once you learn how to do it, navigate it and get to a certain point. Amazon actually really wants to help you. We got brand ambassador managers, we've got brand ambassadors, we've got, you know, count reps and managers who try to help us as much as they can in markets and places and controls and even they've helped flesh out bad actors to make sure that we're safe. So really when you're doing the best job you can do, Amazon is there to help you. We 60% of their sales are third party sellers. They can't just destroy that market. They have to correct aspects of it in order to optimize it as profit for a business. If I understand that as a business, then I have to navigate it as a business owner and take all my feelings off the table and I have to navigate that in its best way possible.
- [20:31]
A
I think it's probably the most powerful tool like for selling out there. I mean it's the biggest ecosystem. They're all helping, I mean speak speaking to helping you out. One of our clients that sells furniture, I just got contacted, we were talking about this in the pre interview of the local selling program. Yeah. And, and, and also talk about how influencers are doing product reviews as well as building like their own little ecosystem of products they like.
- [21:06]
B
Right.
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A
And they get affiliated for that. So there's a lot of people out there and, and FBA is something that's been talked about a lot but there's so much more that this ecosystem starting to develop into and, and I think that you know, product reviews, I think the, the influencer component, I think some of the businesses like, so if you're selling furniture and you're selling in a dedicated location and you can't just ship around the country, the business models have to start changing. Amazon has like three different customer reps that are helping small businesses through their digital transformation. And I see it being so powerful and if you could just kind of speak to some of the things that Amazon's doing to help small business owners. I think that that would alleviate a lot of fears for people.
- [21:57]
B
Well, I mean, if you're a local business that has product, stock, showroom, you know, and you're looking for more customers and you want to reach a wider audience in your area and you may not know how to do the direct response marketing, you may have been thinking about, you know, the old phone books or, you know, old methods of doing the business, maybe, you know, billboards on the side of the road and all the traditional things, you know, that most businesses are should do or try do and make sure they measure when they do it. But Amazon rolled this out and around October 2021, and this is basically giving a simple ability to do what's called fulfilled by merchant. That means Amazon handles the sell and you handle the delivery. You have to deliver it, track it and then respond to the system. When somebody uses Amazon to buy that product. When you sign up for that as just a regular professional seller account and you apply to become a local, you tell them what zip code you're actually in. And once you get approved, then there's a little button that pops up on the listing that says pick up in store. And the cool part about that is if you're shipping the product, you know, there's a cost and fee if it's a very large product, if it's a 300, 400 pound product, versus having someone buy the product and come down to the store and grab it even that same day. So that benefit of saying, well, I can deliver this product, I've got 10 in stock that can be ordered today, you know, you're basically putting that on a listing with a search engine organic reach for people who are looking for products and it pops up and says, oh, by the way, this one's available in your zip code. You can get it today. That's a huge buying opportunity for people who are on Amazon, within your zip code, within 20 miles, 50 miles of your zip code, who could come down there today and pick it up after buying it on Amazon. So you really need to consider the value of that if you're a local store owner, because you can reach a, you know, huge amount of people in your area buying products that simply didn't see you before, but they were on Amazon and so now you can actually connect to them and through that platform. And for local businesses who have products in showroom in store and want more sales, should definitely check that channel out. It's not complicated to set up and operate. You just have to make sure you understand that when someone orders the product, you've got to get it to them and enter your tracking numbers to be in compliance. If you don't do that, then negative things starts happening with your account. So you got to be Johnny on the spot with that if you're going to do it right. If you're a local service based business, just to tie on to that, if you're a local, you know, plumber, if you're a local electrician, you can actually set up a business account with Amazon in which when someone orders say a faucet that's in your zip code, your business could pop up as a service provider that they can literally click to order. And when that shows up, it sends a notification to you that you need to roll a truck to go install that faucet in the house that just bought that. And you can obviously get the service fee and it's transacted through Amazon so you can access to a whole lot more service clients. I have a friend of ours who did that in the plumbing space and he went from a 5 million dollar a year business in his localized plumbing to a $50 million of business just simply engaging local based purchases on products that aren't even his. But he ran trucks to those products once they got delivered from Amazon.
- [24:52]
A
Thanks for hearing that. That's one of the things we're seeing a lot of growth in on our side of things when we're working with businesses, we're using that talk a little bit about the influencer component.
- [25:03]
B
So the influencer side really in just simple terms, the ability to influence Amazon's algorithm now has changed in like the last three to five years. We discovered about five years ago it was Twitter at that point and we could send social signals from Twitter to positively influence Amazon. A couple of years later they rolled out the brand referral program which was actually the ability for us to link from those social media accounts. And anybody who purchased through that brand referral link, we would. If it was a 15% Amazon referral fee, it would only cost us 5%. So they give us a 10% kickback on that purchase. So anybody you know who influenced from outside was great. It's very important to understand that two things have to occur. One, you have to be optimized on Amazon's engine first before you attempt to run outside traffic to it. If you do that or you do it incorrectly, it's going to negatively impact your search results on Amazon. So you want to get your search results On Amazon, right? First you want to know that you're gaining organic traction for certain keywords. And the, you know, economic of system of Amazon is rewarding you positively. Before you do any off Amazon marketing, I hear a lot of people say, well, we launched a product and then we ran this off Amazon marketing campaign. It's all going to blow up on Amazon because we're sending all this traffic and clicks back to Amazon. That's not actually going to happen, right? It's going to.
- [26:14]
A
They think it, they think, they think it's very suspicious, right?
- [26:18]
B
All of this very suspicious because you haven't had enough time in market. You haven't been in there for 90 days, you don't have SEO ranking in organic for that. And what it's going to do is negatively impact what's called your IDQ score. You get 100 on your IDQ score when the ASIN is uploaded and it goes down from there. And your job is to keep it as high as possible, right? In that algorithmic system, if you negatively impact that in the first seven, 21 and 30 days, you might as well start over. In some cases, you might as well take the listing down and completely start over again. The algorithm is looking for your determination of truthful organic buyer intent on that listing for its current demand that is already flowing through this little section in the data filing system of Amazon called a node, okay? And every product has to be set in a node in their data segment. And when that traffic is flowing through, it's saying, here are your 40 other competitors, okay? We know that 15 of them have 80% of all the demand in this node, which could be like 17 million searches a year, right? So when you drop into that node and it's now analyzing your data against those other data players in this SEO engine, it's going to find out whether or not you're legitimate and whether or not you have organic interest and intent. If I start sending PPC traffic inside Amazon too soon, I will negatively affect that. If it's not a positive outcome, if I start sending off Amazon influencer marketing or anything else into Amazon, it can also negatively impact that. So I want to ensure I do that work first. And then the second part of that is using brand referral links is required when you are a brand, registered brand on Amazon. You can't do that when you're just a wholesaler. Well, it's very hard to do when you're wholesaler. And if you're a product flipper and retail and arbitrage and all that other Nonsense in the side hustle, hobby business world that I don't play in, you're going to not be able to do this. You'll have to have a business with brand registration on Amazon to get brand referral links. When you get that link, you could take it to X or out to anywhere else and it's going to be a positive impact for sales that come through. You could send a thousand clicks, you can send a million clicks through it and it won't negatively impact the listing, it will only positively impact its social intent. And of course, if you get purchases or add to carts, those three things will really cause the algorithm to love you. So on the influencer side, we will always go to TikTok shop next, right? Because at TikTok shop, the algorithm is loving Amazon. They're playing together. They were playing together and now they've actually had an arrangement in an agreement that just came forward last week in which TikTok and Amazon are not going to work closely together to buy products within the TikTok shop from Amazon directly. So this is going to be a very powerful connection on the demand creation side of influencer marketing. So you get 100 people to take your product on TikTok, one or two of those pops off as a viral video and all of a sudden that traffic is flowing over to Amazon like crazy. Buy TikTok shops, up to 30% of our traffic will flow back to Amazon. If they don't find your product, they're going to buy someone else's and this can happen. I saw this in a forum the other day. It wasn't my controlled case study, so take it for what it is, but I saw a guy go, hey, I'm blowing out of my inventory. I cannot figure out I've never sold this much. I'm now selling 500, 600, 700 a day. It's going crazy. Two weeks later, he finally updated the group and said, oh, I finally figured out what was happening. I thought someone got a code. I thought something negative was happening. I'm blowing through my Amazon inventory, I'm about to run out. Turns out some viral video on TikTok for a product that wasn't even his went viral. So when the 30 something percent of traffic flowed backwards to Amazon, he had his SEO ranking and everything in line. So they found his product and bought it instead.
- [29:43]
A
Man, I have somebody that works at Amazon that I've worked with in the past. They went over to Amazon. People are sleeping on tick tock. Sorry. Yeah, and, and I said, tick tock. Yeah, they're worried about some stuff. But man, that algorithm is so powerful. People really, if you're not on Tick Tock organically, you don't have to have a big following like on Instagram. There's a lot that you can, you can live streams.
- [30:12]
B
Right now, live streams are the biggest thing you can do. They broke a million in the first live stream ever on TikTok about three months ago. Then they broke two and a half million and they recently broke five million on a live stream. So if you're. It's the new qvc, it's the new online buying show, it's the new opportunity to go live on an account that only has 1,001 followers. Okay. And sell the snot out of your products literally organically. Live stream videos are overtaking uploaded videos right now. That was an inverse last year. But I'm just influencer. Marketing your own videos or getting a brand ambassador or hiring somebody off of Fiverr. Okay. To just go and show your product on a live stream on your account for 20 minutes, going through all the benefits, opportunities. If you don't understand how to format it, go watch a QVC show and then just go on the live stream and do exactly the same thing. You can't like mess this up. If clicks come through there that end up over on Amazon, it's going to be seen positively for your Amazon account. You can imperfectly act this process out and see results occurring.
- [31:10]
A
So what I want people to know and I want to. I want people to know. One don't sleep on Tick tock is what.
- [31:15]
B
I don't sleep on it. Not right now. Don't be worried about it going, shutting down later. Just work that'll cross that bridge when it comes, if it comes.
- [31:21]
A
And think about if you're feeling like you've missed the boat, right? The boat's already left. Like it's too late to get into this. There's always new developments, there's always. On LinkedIn, it was the ultimate scroll for or not ultimate scroll, but the video scroll where you could just scroll and people weren't optimizing those videos. And if you follow what's hot and TikTok going live and all these different platforms have kind of had their growth, evolution or matured in a brand. TikTok's doing it now and they've come out with something completely different where they're matching the intent on who's viewing it, not what your current audience.
- [32:05]
B
And they're boosting those live streams based on the amount of clicks and sales they get, by the way, guys. So the most engagement you get in that first three to five minutes on your live stream is going to determine how, how far TikTok pushes you intentionally out on the live stream. It's not an organic thing completely with TikTok, just be very aware. So if your content's not good, if your hook isn't good, if you're not, if you don't have a value of a product that is in demand with the current trend of the engine, you can't expect the live stream to go viral or you to make $5 million in three hours. But if you get those things right, if you figure out how to communicate that correctly and your product is meeting one of those most recent trends in the market or you've innovated it intentionally to do that, you are going to see a much bigger positive impact because literally the first level of SEO will be yours. The next level is TikTok pushing you out through the live stream.
- [32:51]
A
So there's an audition period and also there is. The companies have like a calendar or trajectory of products they want to push. And so thinking about that and getting in line with that is critically important.
- [33:07]
B
Yep. And you don't need millions of followers to do it.
- [33:09]
A
Yeah. The TikTok store is what's really quite hot right now. Neil, I want to transition into where your bread and butter is and you're working with, you know, 2 to 3 million a year kind of companies. We were talking a little bit about like what you're looking for, some of the biggest pitfalls that you're seeing when you onboard a new business. You also have a component where you'll invest or really heavily partner with some of these businesses to grow. Maybe kind of let's, let's transition into speaking to your, you know, the kind of clients you're working with day to day.
- [33:47]
B
So I am always on the hunt for what I consider to be, you know, up and rising, you know, unicorn operators who could turn into CEOs of these companies. And when we validate, vet them, determine them based on their profile, I'm looking for operators who want to get involved in coaching and mentoring to build an actual business that will exit in three to five years to my company. So we have first rights of refusal when someone works with us that if it's a new brand, we're going to help them start it up, it's 100% theirs, how they deploy the capital, how they work one on one for 12 months with them to build and incubate this through this system. Of technology with specific performance requirements from the system, but also us. I put a little skin in the game to see these things happen because years two and three are where the real growth in scale happens on Amazon. Okay, a lot of influence, SEO time and market will occur in year one and some really cool things can occur in year one. But where the real growth in its own System, it happens two or three years. Two and three. So Amazon will tell, it has told us that 5% of all SKUs launched in 2024. We'll see about, excuse me, 100% of SKUs this year. We'll see 5% of all retail sales in Amazon this year, but that will jump as long as they're in the market, selling profitably and growing to 20% in year two and 40% in year three. So you need to think about this as a minimum three year engagement. If I'm going to get involved in starting one of these, if I'm already In the business 2 to 3 year, 20 to 30 million a year, we work with clients at all levels. Then your goal is to optimize for growth and profitability to build more PPC marketing and stronger into the organic ranking of your product. So you should have 50 to 60% or more of your product ranking organically. If not, you need to get to that position and then engage higher levels of PPC which will respond more positively. And then the third step is brand influencing marketing demand creation off Amazon's platform to tie very specifically to the narrative keywords and connection of that platform. And then a 2 to 3 million brand can become a 3 to 9 million dollar brand or a 10 can be 20. When you simply spend that time in the market and mature through the next 12 months, 18 months, that can happen extremely fast. We've got a case study, two of them actually, if I might say this.
- [35:53]
A
Yeah, that's it.
- [35:54]
B
My high voltage business builders podcast. You can go check it out. It's on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, etc. Two case studies of this exact example happening in real time are on my podcast from Eric Hudson and David LeBlanc. You guys should go check those out. It explains how they're getting 60, 80, 90 organic traffic. PPC and organic are growing now they're moving off site. And David's case, he's now has a hundred thousand dollar a month Shopify store that he's growing out of that and building a brand and influencer and social media coordinators to take that out. And now Eric, we just launched him a new business alongside of him in a partnership Program called Voltage Product Partners where we are helping with the operations, the control and the launch process. He's funding and helping us at the CEO level of the business in oversight. And with that, you know, he'll have a $3 million brand this time next year. We've already proven it, we've got it to $5,000 a day. We're now revamping and getting ready for a full product launch heading into the holidays and slingshotting through January 2025. It's a minimum 3 million next year at current numbers and at least 5 to 10 million in the next three to five years. So we're very much excited about that brand. You guys are welcome to go check out those case studies to see how we grow and scale and then all of those are exit opportunities. As an incubator, I look for companies. We're looking for companies from 2 to 3 to 5 million in EBITDA right now that we can acquire into our portfolio. They must have Omnichannel, not just Amazon, FBA but omnichannel strategies wholesale, you know, TikTok, Shopify, website, etc, because then we're going to come and expand those channels and then acquire those companies. So we have five on deck. We want to acquire by the end of 2025. The veteran backed company Patriot Growth Capital is our PE group that was funded and built up to work with us on the operation side. So we have a very mission specific purpose in those drives. We got two companies on deck right now that look very promising. Hopefully they'll go to LOI if all the numbers work out correctly and we're going to need three more if they do. So that's kind of where we're operating at the growth and scale and exit stage. We're not at the, we're at the beginning so I can train my operators and my processes and they become partners, they become operators, they become equity owners and businesses we acquire or they want to acquire and operate. So we have a lot more that we do with our operators. I just like to train them in my processes, which is not everybody. Just so we're very clear. It's an invitation only opportunity to join us.
- [38:11]
A
Well, awesome. Well, I know that you also have a substack out there and you also have a book and you know Neil, we're kind of getting to the point of wrapping up so just kind of, if there's any kind of best tips or final tips that you have that you didn't cover as well as maybe share a little bit about your stub stack Your book and how to get in contact with you.
- [38:34]
B
Well, I'd say for anybody who either wants to start or is in the process and is like, how do I, how do I grow to that level of, you know, growth and scale, I will tell you that the, you know, opportunity begins at the end of your excuses. Whether you think you should or shouldn't get on Amazon isn't really the question. The question is, will it benefit your business? Don't make excuses. Look at it pragmatically. Should I get involved in E commerce? Look, man, $21 trillion is coming on the e commerce by 2040. According to Forrester and Bank of America and as well as Department of Commerce. The market is all moving into digital and commerce. The question is, do you want to be a consumer or do you want to be a seller who profits from it? Those are your real questions. If you're already in the sales and growth mode, I would say if you need an additional strategy, if you need to understand what you can do to move profitability forward so you can move marketing and customer intent forward. The book Almost Automated Income with FBA is on my website. It's on Amazon. It is the strategy guide that goes over that. There are 15 experts that I interviewed on my podcast that flow with my product launch playbook. From financing to growth to product to sourcing to capitalization, to Every metric there's 15 chapters, they flow through that strategy. So if you're a reader and you want to consume and understand, that's what the book outlines is that exact strategy on how to move that forward. If you need tactics and implementation, go to voltagedm.com talk with me personally, see how we might help you in one of those areas. Check out the presentation and tools. The Substack is a free newsletter. We publish one industry leading article every week as well as our podcast to that newsletter. It's free to grab that information and learn some more, gain some more information and, you know, hopefully leave you better than I found you.
- [40:08]
A
Awesome. Well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on. I think you shed a lot of light on people and some questions they might be having about Amazon. And if you're already on Amazon and you want to do better and you want to grow and you were looking for a partner or maybe even need some capital, I would say reach out to Neil at Voltage and check it out, see if it's right for you. So Neil, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
- [40:32]
B
Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure. I'm honored.
- [40:35]
A
All right, everybody. Bye bye for now.