465: The Secret Sauce Of Successful Amazon Sellers: How To Rank Your Products In Search With Brandon Young

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I have my friend Brandon Young on the show. And Brandon is one of the most successful private label sellers that I know personally, especially when it comes to Amazon keyword research. So in this episode, we analyze exactly how he picks winning products to sell on Amazon. But before we begin, I want to thank Jeff Oxford of 180marketing.com for sponsoring this episode.

00:28
180marketing.com is an agency that specializes in helping e-commerce stores boost their SEO traffic. And in the past, I used Jeff and his firm managed to grow my search traffic by 4x in just six months. In fact, 180marketing is one of the few SEO agencies that I trust 100%. For more information, go to 180marketing.com or just email jeff at 180marketing.com. I also want to thank Sellerboard for sponsoring this episode. Sellerboard is profit analysis software.

00:56
that helps you figure out exactly how much profit you are making selling on Amazon. Now if you’re an Amazon seller, you’re probably aware that there are many hidden fees in selling on the platform and Sellerboard organizes all that information for you in a clear and concise fashion. Now personally, I recommend Sellerboard because they’re among the least expensive software that I know of that does this, which is one of the main reasons why I like them. So for more info, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash Sellerboard and try them free for 30 days.

01:24
It is literally a no-brainer to sign up. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash S-E-L-L-E-R-B-O-A-R-D. And then finally, I want to mention my other podcast that I run with my partner, Tony. And unlike this one, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app.

01:53
Now on to the show.

02:00
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m happy to have Brandon Young on the show. Now, Brandon is considered by many people, including myself, to be one of the leading experts in Amazon private label, especially when it comes to Amazon SEO. Now, he and his wife are eight figure sellers and he’s also the co-founder of one of the fastest growing Amazon software companies called Data Dive. He’s also speaking at Seller Summit this year. And so if you’d like what he has to say today,

02:29
you can get Brandon in person and live in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 23rd. in this episode, we’re actually going to learn the story about how Brandon became an eight figure seller and the latest strategies regarding Amazon SEO. And with that, welcome to show Brandon, how you doing? Oh, thanks for having me, man. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. The funny thing is

02:53
You were probably maybe the second podcast or third podcast that we ever discovered when we were building our e-commerce brand, my wife and I. And you were by far her favorite host by the in-depth questions you’d asked, the fact that you were practicing what you were preaching, the amount of marketing you were doing. And I think if you remember correctly, the first time that I met you, she was with me and she was starstruck. I told you that you were…

03:22
She was afraid to even talk to you because she’s such an introvert. But we’ve hung out at a bunch of events since and at your event last year. And you know, it is you’re like a celebrity to us. I’m trying to remember when I met you in person. Was it the mini chat event or the mini chat event may have been the first one or it was your event. I came to your event in 2018 maybe. OK, yeah, maybe maybe that was the same year actually. Yeah, yeah.

03:52
Cool, yeah. I managed to get a ticket because you were sold out, you sell out every year. People listening think that that’s sales gimmick, but the reality is once you’re done selling your 200, 250 tickets, you cut it off because you want the event to be small and intimate and the sellers to really get to know each other, which is awesome. But a lot of people will say, oh, only a few more tickets left, and then they just keep opening up and make the room bigger. You don’t do that. So I had found out about your event and I live in South Florida.

04:21
So I wanted to go really badly and I had a friend who couldn’t make it. So I had to get his ticket transferred to me last minute and he had bought a mastermind day and I was in Brad Moss’s room. That was the first time I met Brad Moss. yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah. He’s absolutely brilliant. Former Amazonian, helped create the Amazon seller app. Like the quality of people that I met.

04:45
When i was there for the first time just blew me away and i wasn’t expecting anything less but it was even more than i like it was just incredible So thanks brandon. You’re too kind In other words come hang out come meet, you know Come meet us and and meet all the sellers the high quality sellers and everything. I hope to see you guys all there for sure It’s funny. Uh brandon and I we were just talking about events because brandon just held his event, which was amazing

05:11
And we were just talking about small events don’t really make money. We’re doing it really for the community. The reason why we do these things. Yeah, I actually lost money at my event. It’s not I’m not even doing it to make money. I did not lose money next year. I think I think the the way that we did it was amazing and and intimate. like I got a lot of inspiration for the way from the way that you run yours. So it was fun. Cool.

05:40
Yeah, it’s not very profitable. I’m curious. I’m pretty sure a lot of people don’t know your origin story, at least the listeners in my podcast. Like how did you start selling on Amazon? And did you hit eight figures before you started going to the software and that sort of thing? Yeah, so we did hit eight figures before we started developing the software. But we started in 2015 with Arbitrage. We, we

06:06
We were listening to Scott Volcker’s podcast, like when he was really getting into private label and reselling and we were listening to a couple other people. We had just discovered what FBA was and my background in business, I said, man, FBA makes such an amazing opportunity to make a scalable business because the hardest part of running a business is the overhead and the cost associated with the overhead and they don’t.

06:34
they take care of all that for you. They let you leverage the billion dollars of infrastructure they have. And I don’t have to buy a warehouse. I don’t have to pay for boxes or anything. So I said, all we have to do is find things that sell and just keep sending them in and we can build a really big business. And so my wife and I decided to give that a shot and we, we, it almost seemed too good to be true. So I think we just went to a store. We had found out what app to get to, to scan something and we sent it in and it sold within a two days of checking in. so.

07:03
We looked at each other, said, what else can we sell? And in my background, my family owned a wholesale construction supply business. So I, I reached out to my contacts with DeWalt and Milwaukee, Makita, and we started wholesaling tools. We also found some opportunities with liquidation. So we found pallets of returns from T-Mobile where most of the goods were still brand new in the box. And so we were able to like, you see these giant pallets that would come in with a thousand items on them. And.

07:33
you know, a third would be trash. A third would be used that we could sell on a third, you know, would be brand new and, and sellable. People were actually buying them. And so we were, we were buying these pallets. We were buying tons of tools and we had a couple skews start to get blocked. Kate Spade became a gated brand. yeah. The Waltz became a gated brand and those were huge parts of our business at the time. And so with, with my wife being from China,

08:03
I said, why aren’t we doing private label? We have such a huge advantage here. You speak the language, like you have family there that can help us source. We can, we can figure this out. So in 2016, we hopped on a plane and we went to Canton and we picked a few products that were in the same vein of what we were doing in electronics, which turned out to be a mistake because it ended up being such a competitive niche. But we definitely learned by jumping into the deep end and learned from failures, learned from some successes.

08:33
and built it up. I’d say we did one million, then three million, then six million, 12 million, and then this last year we did 22 million. Nice. You know, it’s funny, you were just talking about overhead, like we just bought our own warehouse. Like, just ended our lease on our warehouse. Oh, did you really? Yeah. Congratulations. I went the other way. I had that option and I was like, renew my lease or just

09:03
Just outsource all the three PLs. I said, I don’t want to travel, come back to a messy warehouse. So it’s funny is I always optimize for low stress. And when I have everything under my own roof and control, that allows me to sleep better at night. Because I’ve had friends who have had nightmares with three PLs. Oh, OK. I find it the opposite because like finding it was was partly from finding like employees that would.

09:28
you know, basically receive the packages, inventory them correctly, quality control them correctly, store them, make sure they were labeled, had a cycle count every month. That’s all I wanted, right? Like just want things being received and put away. And it became overwhelming for the people we had helping us. I didn’t… That was stressful to me. Coming back and seeing a messy warehouse and not knowing what was in it.

09:57
Far more stressful than than than that can be stressful to out of sight out of mind, right? So so what we do is our biggest brand is a toy brand and I found an amazing not for profit that, you know, helps underprivileged families or poor families with underprivileged kids and they receive all of my returns from my toy brand. Give me a ticket for everything and then they quality control.

10:25
take out anything broken, throw it away, whatever. And what I’ve found, not only this is good for business, but it’s also good for them, is that things I would normally throw away, like something that’s open or the packaging is damaged, they’re breaking it apart and the parts become their own little toy that they can give out to little kids. Right? So, like a tool kit, for example, that I might, like I sell, the toy hammer is still good. It’s still a little tool that, like a toy that a kid might want.

10:55
And normally I would just chuck that in the garbage bin, but they’re able to use a lot more of it than I thought they could. And then I don’t have the overhead of having someone quality control it and get less of a write-off also. So it works out so many different ways and we get to help so many families. We ended up helping over 6,000 families last year. That’s amazing. How did you find this, Thrupeel? No, it’s the not-for-profit itself that has a warehouse.

11:21
Oh, got it. Got it. We said everything there and then they scan in the Amazon slip. That’s amazing. That’s it. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I am curious. How many skews do you have? We depending on the holiday, it teeters between 250 and 300. We added about a hundred and 150 products almost last year. Wow. OK. And we’ll probably launch about the same this year.

11:52
So you have SKUs that just kind of come and go. Yeah, we do a lot of seasonal, a lot of holiday because our biggest brand being toys, we don’t want Q4 to be so heavy on us that, you know, everything’s a build up. It’s from a cashflow perspective, a risk perspective. It’s just really difficult. So we’ve added Valentine’s Day, 4th of July, tons of summer stuff, Halloween, you know, so it kind of, it levels out the year with bumps in those holidays.

12:21
It’s a little bit harder from a product development standpoint like our team has to put a lot of these Packages and toys and toy development together, but once we’ve done it a few times. We kind of see what works what doesn’t and it helps So I get a lot of questions from people asking me about what the margins are like on Amazon now So I was just kind of curious what your margins are like and what’s acceptable to you. Oh, it’s it’s it’s low

12:48
No, the reality is I’m one of the few people that’ll tell you the blatant truth about it. Margin compression crushed a lot of us the last couple years, especially when containers went to 20 grand. Well, they’re back to normal now, thank God. Yeah, thankfully, right? Like 2000 is a big, big thing. But the cost of plastic is still up 50 % or whatever, right? That’s correct. you still have some product costs that are higher.

13:11
there are sellers that are just okay selling at a smaller margin. And what we found is we’re pretty aggressive in that way. Tacos, so to explain tacos really quickly, like your total advertising cost over your total sales, people call that your tacos. So that would be like the percentage of your revenue that you spend on marketing.

13:34
And our tacos went from an average of like 11 % to maybe 16%. So that’s 5 % off the bottom line right there. And then the additional costs that we were talking about. And launching is always more expensive. So to give you an example, last year during March and April, as we were launching a bunch of summer products, we actually lost money.

14:02
And then we had single digit months a couple times throughout the year, single digit margin months, and that’s that’s after everything that’s that’s after like overhead and one time costs that you would normally get added back like from marketing and launches and stuff. But Q4 is where we make it up so we we will purposely stick with a skew that we know is tight throughout the year. You know 1520 % margin.

14:26
because we know that Q4, it’s gonna be 30 % or 35 % and sell five, it’s basically six months and three or six months and two. And so we’ll stick with it. But yeah, for the most part, you have to lower your expectations and make sure you’re getting an accurate landed cost and really, really factoring in the marketing that you’re gonna have to do, not only to launch the product.

14:53
but to maintain the growth and grow it, grow it and then maintain the position that you wanna have, like the market share you want. You have to spend in order to stop someone else from taking that market share. And unfortunately, PPC is the most effective way to do that. So you just have to spend dollars on marketing. That’s why I was just curious. mean, for products that you’ve launched and then you don’t sell anymore, that’s kind of like a hit, right? A lot of this is an investment in the listing, right? Yeah, for sure.

15:21
I’d say that we make money about 70 75 percent of the time on a product Yeah lose money about 25 to 30 percent of the time Maybe that’s up a little bit from where it was two years ago three years ago when the hit rate was better But that that accounts all of the products that you just discontinue and I’d say we used to reorder about half of the products that we launched now It’s probably 40 percent. It’s gone down where just doesn’t make sense doesn’t

15:50
You know, maybe the design wasn’t as good. The conversion rates, not great. We, know, the competition came in too harsh, whatever the reason we, we only reorder maybe a 40%. But the other 40 % that we don’t lose money, it’s because we can get our money out of it, but it’s going to take six months instead of the two or three we were expecting. Yeah. Yeah. That’s actually, was getting at like, how do you see the landscape on Amazon this year and going forward?

16:19
So it really depends what happens with the economy, I think. But I see Amazon continuing to grow overall from a overall revenue perspective and as a percentage of overall retail. So I think that even if the economy tanks, which it looks like we’re going to have a softer landing than people expected, is the talk around from experts that I I listen to simply because of this last jobs report.

16:49
Um, you know, being 500,000 as opposed to the a hundred thousand they expected, uh, they, they feel like, uh, maybe it won’t be as bad, but even if it does pull back, I think that there will be certain niches that you should avoid like travel and luxury goods. Right. But I think that there will be plenty of products that do well and will continue to grow. Uh, and I think Amazon’s just the clear cut favorite for us. Like it’s our main marketplace.

17:19
because of the ease of the logistics and supply chain, because of the leveraging their overhead, and because we’ve really solved their ranking algorithm, we can really do the product research and have a very high success rate.

17:36
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19:10
Well, let’s talk about that. How do you do the research? How do you rank and search? And what I like about you, Brandon, is like you really can dig deep into this stuff. And I want everyone listening to understand everything too. So I will try to explain when Brandon gets too technical or I’ll ask him to explain. Yeah, I’ll do my best to give you a high level overview, but to not hold anything back. Yep.

19:39
So when it comes to evaluating a product, I think that the most important question you need to ask yourself is how are the current sellers making their sales? So that’s the million dollar question in my mind. And so that was a question that I figured out when I was really just thinking deep on a failure we had. And I thought to myself, why did this product fail? And it really was because I didn’t

20:09
And I’ll tell you what it was. It was like a lighted Lego type set, like a brick set with lights in it. And I really was like curious why I couldn’t sell this thing. It was such a cool toy. I enjoyed it. I loved it. The designs were awesome. And like we put a lot of effort into the artwork and like the product kind of sold itself. Like if it was sitting in a store, people would love to buy it, right? And there’s a similar brand out there that people do buy. Like if, but it’s in Barnes and Noble and Toys R at the time and stuff.

20:38
And so was like, OK, well, we could do our own version of that and it should do great. The reality was there weren’t a lot of keywords like lighted bricks is not a keyword. I couldn’t use the brand name of the competitor that was in the space and I definitely couldn’t use Lego. If someone searches for Lego, what I figured out is that they want Lego. They don’t want Brandon’s bricks or whatever, right? And so that what they were called. No, they were not actually called Brandon Bricks, but it was just as an example and.

21:07
So I really thought about it I was like, okay, so the first thing I need to do is figure out how are people buying these products? How are the current sellers getting their sales? And then not only that, the next level question is, can I duplicate that? Can I do a better job than them? Are they all doing a good job? And so once I asked myself those questions, I started to figure out that I needed to put this in some kind of matrix. And so what I would do is at the time I had seller tools and I had viral launch,

21:36
And I would use seller tools for like the, they were the reverse ASIN and then viral launch had search volume that was accurate. And I would kind of V look up and try to figure this out and then put the competitors. And then Cerebro came out with Helium 10 and I could pull like one competitor at a time. And then they opened at the 10. So I could pull 10 at a time. So I’d pull the raw data.

22:03
I’d put in a formula to match, like to count how many of the competitors were ranked for each keyword, which to me is just a simple way of figuring out relevancy. Like the, if I choose the best competitors or best sellers of a niche, the more that are ranked good for a keyword, the more relevant that keyword should be. Just simple logic. And so we did like a count it formula and then we started playing around and sorting with search volume. And, and so this whole process of really digging into a product to

22:32
see what the relevant keywords are, how many, was then, then I was counting how many of those relevant keywords each competitor was ranked well for. Then I was counting, adding up the search volume and adding and figuring out how, what percentage of each, what percentage of search volume each competitor was ranked well for. And I was really getting a good idea of not only what keywords were driving sales, how the current sellers are getting them, but how good they are at Amazon.

23:01
And then I could figure out based on how many keywords there are, what the opportunity is, what the risk is around doing the product. And I really started to figure out this way of formulating through data, how to evaluate a potential product. Let me ask you this, Brandon. I know, cause I run a class myself, sometimes someone will come to me with a product and they’ll be like, Hey, this makes so many sales. And I look at the keywords and

23:29
there’s not enough keyword volume to justify those sales. And it turns out it’s some like TikTok sensation or someone, some blogger wrote about it or something like that. How do you factor that into account in your numbers? So when the, the, amazing part is that the story needs to make sense. And so there’s several things to look at. And by the way, like, like this is all of that manual work is what I taught and did in my own business and then taught my students for years.

23:57
And then until until we kind of create a data dive to make it instead of like that hour long two hour long process of putting that data into a sheet, a master keyword list data dive now does it 90 seconds. But what that also allows you to do is to find the whole like the inconsistencies in the story that you’re talking about. OK, so we have a seller that’s the like the second best seller. Let’s call him the first best seller because they have this big outlier, but they’re only on 60 % of the search volume that drives sales for that product.

24:26
Now we look at outlier keywords and we see, there any branded search terms? Are there any generic search terms that they’re ranked really well for that no one else is ranked for? So maybe, maybe they’re like number three for toys for four year old girls. And that’s 140,000 of searches a month. And no other seller can duplicate that, including you when you want to do it. So that needs to be backed out. And now the story kind of makes sense. But when you have a TikTok sensation,

24:54
What you’re going to generally see is you’re going to see keywords in the outliers that they’re ranked really well for that have decent amount of search volume around their branding and around like just descriptive words around that product that may have been used in the Tik Tok video. And a really good example of that is there’s an aggregator named branded that they’re really good at Tik Tok and they have a garlic press that’s in the shape of a vampire and

25:22
When you do a garlic press dive and you look at the 20 best garlic presses, theirs is one of them, but you see vampire garlic press, you see Dracula garlic press, and then they have like a new, like a branded name for it. Then they have the brand name for it. And all of those have search volume in the thousands. So people are going on TikTok and seeing this product and seeing the ads that they’re running, the viral sensation, and they’re like, oh, I didn’t remember, the brand name’s really hard to remember. It’s not a very good brand name.

25:52
But still, so what they’re doing is then they’re going and they’re searching for vampire garlic press. And so now the story makes sense, because you can see it in the data that somehow they’re still getting those searches. And it makes sense that their sales kind of match to the search volume that they’re ranked well for. What about affiliate links? Yeah, so affiliate links would be difficult to detect because it’s going to be.

26:20
It’s going to be outliers, right? Like so let’s say you’ve got the third and fourth and fifth best sellers and the third best seller is at 800 sales a month. 60 % of the search volume and then the fifth best or the fourth best seller. The next guy is at. You know 400 sales a month, 68 % search volume, so more search volume, less sales. Rank as long as the ranks are similar across the keywords.

26:47
then that would indicate that they’re sending outside traffic to me. That’s like an affiliate link. That’s, uh, that’s some kind of outside campaign where they’re driving traffic from outside of Amazon. And so that’s the missing link is generally when, when the story doesn’t add up, the branded search terms aren’t there. Those, uh, those, those outlier keywords with like generic keywords aren’t there and they just significantly are better with similar keyword ranks than it makes sense. The only place that you’ll see sometimes, uh, where

27:16
one seller will significantly do better with similar search volume is if their keyword ranks are in the top five top three for most of the keywords and the guy next to them with similar search volume are top 10 top 15 top 20 just because the higher up you are on the on the search results you generally will convert better so you’ll make more sales. Right let me just summarize what you told me just for the listeners just in case they’re lost so when you decide something that you want to sell you look at all the top guys

27:46
and then you map out all the keywords that they’re ranking for in a table that you can compare. And you’re looking for outliers and you’re basically just trying to figure out where all the sales are coming from, essentially, right? Yeah, you’re answering the question. It’s like, why is this guy getting 600 sales a month? Well, if you knew all of the keywords that they were ranked on and you knew the search volume of all of those keywords and you know the position of them,

28:11
And then you then you basically lay that out next to the other 19 best sellers. All of a sudden you have a complete picture of the niche. Right. Or 98 or 99 percent of it. Right. So assuming you have all this data in a table, what is your criteria for determining whether you should go into it or not? Yeah. So I look at the competition. I look at the general opportunity. the low hanging fruit is going to be ROI and budget. So.

28:40
Step one would be understand your own business requirements from a risk perspective and from a budget budget perspective. Getting into a product that’s going to require a lot more capital than you have is the fastest way to light your money on fire. If you find a niche and then you evaluate it and you see that, you know, the the third, fourth, fifth, sixth guy, seventh guy, best sellers, right?

29:06
of this product are ranked between 60 and 80 % of the search volume and they’re selling an average between them of 1,000 units a month, so 30 something a day. And it’s a $5 to land product, total landed in, all in. With marketing and enough money to reorder, you’re looking at needing at least five times 30 a day, so that’s 1,000 units.

29:35
So that’s $5,000 times three months is 15,000 for three months of inventory. Then you wanna have double that budget for your next order and for marketing expenses. So you need $30,000 to do that. And what’s interesting, mean, if you take a look at this, I don’t know if I can share really quickly. I know it’s not gonna translate to audio, but I wanna show you so maybe you can explain it in better terms. But before you open that up, those dollar amounts,

30:06
That’s assuming you hit the front page. That’s what you would need to keep up, right? With the sales. So the way that we write our listing and the way that we send signals of traffic, you should be on the first page of, like I said, 60 to 80 % of the surge volume within the first week of launch. So that’s assuming you preserved your honeymoon. You wrote your listing. You want to define all that, first of all, just in case people don’t know what your time is. Can you define the honeymoon period? Oh, yeah, yeah. So.

30:35
When you first launch a product on Amazon, honeymoon periods one of most important things. So when you first launch a product onto Amazon, they have no idea what this product is. And so they’re relying on two things for rank in order to understand honeymoon. You kind of need to know the algorithm. The algorithm relies on performance times relevancy. So the performance piece is going to be your click through rate, your conversion rate and your revenue. And so.

31:02
the day that that product goes live in Amazon’s catalog, just because you created the listing doesn’t mean it’s yours. It’s in Amazon’s catalog. It’s not your product. Even if you have brand registry, you control it. It’s still theirs. And so the day it goes live, it starts to accumulate history. And if you don’t have inventory in stock for three months after launch, it’s accumulated a lot of zeros, right? And so in order to prevent that from happening and to hit the ground running, you want to preserve that honeymoon period, that first 30 to 60 days.

31:32
where Amazon’s kind of figuring out where you belong. And so you want to put the launch and start date into the future, maybe a year out when you create the listing. And so you won’t really populate much into the listing typically, at least we don’t, but you’ll put the bare minimum and then the product will get shipped. It’ll get on its way and on the boat. And then the day before you launch the product, you can populate the rest of the content.

32:01
and you can move that launch and start date to that day that you’re launching and then it will go live in Amazon’s catalog. So in other words, if you had created it and preserved the honeymoon correctly, you click on it in your inventory tab, it’s going to lead to what they call the Amazon dog pages, which is this URL can’t be found. And it shows you a cute dog that someone that works at Amazon owns. Yep. And if, but if you see your listing there with like the bare minimum you would put in, then your honeymoon already started.

32:30
and you’re accumulating negative history. But assuming you hit the ground running, you wrote your listing to maximize rank potential because you wrote the keywords in the right order, in the right format, in the right match type, and in the right spots. And then you turn on the right PPC campaigns for launch, which would be targeting all the highly relevant ones, being very aggressive, sending a lot of signals, traffic signals, add to carts, getting add to carts and conversions and everything.

32:58
that performance piece that Amazon loves to see, then you should rank on the first page for hundreds and hundreds of keywords within the first five to seven days of launch. Very consistent if you do it in the right way. Doesn’t that depend on how competitive it is? So what was your criteria then for figuring out whether you could even do that or whether that was possible? I mean, it’s not always a matter of money, right?

33:22
So typically what you’ll see is like on the first page, what do you have 35 to 45 competitors depending on the layout of the page? Yeah, I’d say even in highly competitive niches like I’m not talking about like vitamin C serum, right? Like that would be like the top. It would be very, very competitive. Not a lot of keywords for it. And people throwing millions of dollars at it, right? Because they’re playing the LTV, the lifetime value game versus the make money on every unit game. So.

33:51
But even in there, the 21st through 35th best sellers are beatable because they’re not gonna be ranked for most of the keywords. They’re not gonna be converting highly. They’re gonna be sending the wrong signals. Their images might not be as good. You should be entering the market with highly converting images because you can test them in advance with PickFu or whatever service you use. could be, you can definitely.

34:19
do the homework in advance to make sure that your design, your product has enough value and is in the right price point to where it should convert. And you should launch at a slightly lower price. That’s our launch strategy. You can use a big coupon instead if you’re gonna run frequent lightning deals or something. But typically you’re just gonna outperform those 20 through 40 anyway most of the time. So when I say jump to the first page, you’re like 15 to 20 for most of those keywords pretty consistently because

34:46
you have a highly converting listing and it’s really strong signals on what you’re selling. So how do you quantify the strength of the listings that you’re going up against? Like what if those in position 20? Yeah. So it’ll be like, do they have infographics? Like are there images really well lined out? So in Data Dive we have a tab called Deep Dive and you can see their sales over the last couple years.

35:14
the trends, you can see how many variations they have. can actually hide, there’s a button, like a drag down to hide the details. And what it’ll do is it’ll only show you their content. So you can see how good their images are. When you start seeing most of the sellers with multiple variations, they have, their second image is about like the benefits of the buyer. They have infographics, they have good lifestyle images that are clearly not photo, like that don’t look.

35:43
you know, obviously Photoshopped, they have A plus content. That would be a more developed niche from a content perspective. Combine that with analyzing how good they are at the keywords, ranking for the keywords, their price point, and whether that leaves you an ROI if you have to compete on price, then that’s kind of how we would evaluate the niche. Okay. So the strength of the listing is a little bit more subjective, right?

36:12
Yeah, strength of the listing would be subjective based. It’s more of just a checkbox. Are there images good and clean? That’s that’s pretty subjective. But do they have a plus content is like a yes or no? Yeah, do they have? Do they have infographics that’s a yes or no? You know, you’ve seen it many times where there’s certain niches where people just have the same. They have like eight product images just from different angles or whatever.

36:38
And that’s not gonna be very sophisticated or tough to beat. Okay. And this is under the assumption that a lot of those guys aren’t doing a great job with their keywords. Yeah. SEO is where you crush them, right? So that’s the most reliable way to beat them. Okay. I’ve seen it many, many, many times where people have the most gorgeous listings, but they’re just not ranked really well because they didn’t do a good job with the SEO and the launch. And I feel like they could do a better job. Like,

37:08
I would love to hire them as a product development person, but they need that training on the SEO side. Okay, let me ask you this question then. If you just use a reverse ASIN lookup tool of the top best sellers and just added those keywords to your listing, how is that different from what you do? So you need to know which ones to prioritize. So we use a formula.

37:32
We take all of the data based on how many of the competitors are ranked well for those keywords. like that’s the relevancy formula. We factor that in and we factor in the broad search volume of the different root words that are found within that data set. So if I can explain that in another way, it would be like there’s 400 keywords. What are the repeated words and phrases that you can pull out of there? So if I was looking at a diaper bag,

38:02
diaper bag backpack out of 400 keywords might show up 200 times. And baby bag might only show up 34 times with 50,000 search volume. So prioritizing the correct phrases in the right order and the right match type and figuring out what words to put in requires a much deeper look into the data. Okay. So just for the listeners out there, when you create an Amazon listing, there’s only so many characters that you have in the title bullet points. So

38:32
It’s a matter of prioritizing what you put in those to make the maximum use out of those characters that you have. Correct. And not only that, Amazon gives you more credit or less credit depending on where the keyword is and what the match type of that keyword is. So if I wanted to rank what a mistake a lot of people make is that they’ll try to stuff a bunch of words together to make a bunch of different keywords.

38:57
And so they end up with all these broad matches where instead of diaper bag backpack, it was backpack for, you know, diaper bag. And so the words are there, but they’re out of order. You’re only getting 30 % credit towards diaper bag backpack, which is probably the biggest keyword for you. And you didn’t know that you thought you were going to get a hundred percent credit. And so, and, then match type, uh, that’s the match type and then where you put it. the title, the beginning of the title is worth more than the middle of the title.

39:26
The beginning of the title is worth more than the bullets. The bullets are worth more than the backend, some of the fields in the backend. And the backend is worth more than the description. Meaning that when there’s an action, anytime someone clicks on your link, like your product, like there’s an impression, anytime there’s a click, anytime that someone even looks at your bullet, like your reviews, anytime someone adds it to cart and abandons the cart, anytime someone converts, all of those actions will trigger a certain amount of credit

39:56
to all of the keywords that you’re trying to rank for. And the only way that Amazon can distribute that credit is based on, and allow you to tap into it, is based on how you wrote the listing. Because that’s how they establish relevancy. All right, so just to summarize for anyone who’s listening out there, when you’re putting together a high converting listing, there’s like a lot of variables in play. So what Brandon was saying was,

40:24
the phrases that you choose and in what order the words are all matter and it just becomes a prioritization problem. You can’t just stuff all these keywords in there. You have to do them in the right order and you have to put them in the priority that you want because the position those words are in actually matters. Correct. the million dollar question then. So in order to solve how to do that we had to put a quantifiable score to it. Right. And that’s where the ranking juice score that we created comes from. So that when you write your title

40:54
You’ll get a score and we analyze all the competition that you selected too. So we actually tell you their score and then we show you show you what your score is. And then we show you on the data set all the root words and phrases and all the keywords exactly what you have hit and what you’ve missed and in what match type you’ve hit it or missed it. OK, so walk me through data dive now. So data dive is Brandon’s tool.

41:24
that can be used to optimize the listings. So if I pop in my listing, let’s say, and then you’ve already pulled like the top 20 in there, will your tool tell me what I should populate in the title and the bullets and the backend keywords? So that’s the fun part is when you already have a listing that’s selling and you wanna know what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong, so you would do that dive with 19 other best sellers and you.

41:52
No matter if you’re the 50th bestseller or you’re the 15th bestseller, you want to include your listing and what you’re going to be able to see very quickly is when you prior when you when you sort by search volume or you sort by relevancy, you’re going to see your ranks for all of those keywords and then you’ll start to see patterns in those keywords and so you’ll start to see an example that I use sometimes, which is super fun and obvious, is the garlic press. Everyone’s favorite, right?

42:21
It’s been used a million times. He started that. Yeah. So, uh, it’s so funny. Yeah. He’s the originator. Yep. To this day, Oxo and KitchenAid, $2 billion brands are terrible at Amazon, right? They sell a ton of units, but they’re not good. And so why, how can I dare say that they sell a ton of units? They’re very good, right? Well, the reality is

42:50
If you look at KitchenAid’s listing, you’ll see that they don’t ever write the term garlic mincer into their listing. And so I didn’t know before I did a dive on garlic press, I was like, it should be fun, everyone’s used garlic press, let me just use garlic press to see how it looks. garlic mincer is the second most searched way of finding a garlic press. They call it a garlic crusher, that’s the third best, right?

43:18
Now it’s not, it’s like four to one. It’s like garlic press is by far the best. And then if yours has a slicing feature, there’s garlic slice or two. So it goes down, there’s several roots. We call those root words different ways of calling this product, right? And so we like to find products with a lot of different root words because we have the advantage of being able to find them, right? Whereas most people don’t and they just guess. And so they just call it whatever that is. Whatever they call it is what they assume everyone else calls it.

43:48
If you look at their ranks, KitchenAid is ranked in the top five for almost every single keyword relating to garlic press. But they’re ranked between 25 and 45 for any garlic mincer keyword or any mincer keyword. And the reason is because Amazon’s algorithm is not quite sure if it’s relevant. They’re probably running PPC at garlic mincer and performing okay. They’re probably…

44:17
building up a lot of credit in the bank, but Amazon has them in this maybe zone of 25 to 45. That’s what I call the maybe zone. And if you look at their listing, what they say is crushes, menses and slices garlic or something like that. So a garlic mincer is very different than menses garlic. Very different use of the language, but similar.

44:45
And so that’s enough for Amazon to say, OK, maybe it’s a maybe it’s similar. Maybe it’s a type of product, but I’m not sure. So I can’t rank it in the top of page one because I have to be very sure with my relevancy score in order for Amazon to reward you and say you deserve to be one of the top performers. So those three there’s three garlic mincer keywords with a combined I don’t know, 30 or 40,000 search volume that if they simply rewrote their title, they have they don’t use their whole title either. It’s terrible. But if they just wrote garlic mincer into their title, they would immediately have an uptick of.

45:14
25 to 40 % in sales. Crazy, but that’s the type of incident like that’s the type of insight that we could see by looking at that that matrix because we color code it too. So yellow would be like areas of like low hanging fruit of areas of opportunity and then you know green is you know wide open like there’s something wrong. You’re not ranked at all. You’re not index like you gotta fix something. There’s something major going on. It’s a huge area of opportunity, but the yellow is.

45:43
You know, like you’re almost there and and so what I did is when I sorted by search for him, I saw yellow and I was garlic mincer keyword. It was maybe garlic mincer at the top and then I I saw another yellow and it was a mincer keyword and then I saw another yellow and it was a mincer keyword. But everything else they were ranked top five and I’m like they’re crushing this. You know, no no pun intended. They’re actually like, you know, really good at this niche minus that phrase. They just they didn’t hit it so.

46:13
I don’t know if anyone listening works for KitchenAid, but you guys could do a little bit better. Nice. So this analysis sounds like it takes forever without this tool. Without the tool. Because I’ve seen these spreadsheets that you’ve shown me, right? Yeah. If I were to populate those by hand. Hours. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK. The entire premise was like we do on one end, so we learn from doing ourselves.

46:40
Right? Jennifer and I like to equate our businesses, our three businesses to like a three legged table. You know, we got our brands where we learn and ourselves and we do. And then we have seller systems where we teach what we learn. And then we were lucky enough to have a partner that can automate what we teach into data dive into. And then our team gets to use data dive. So we have a beautiful flywheel where all the tables reliant on each other and.

47:08
It saves you hours per day per employee for sure. So in your method of picking products, Brandon, the number of reviews doesn’t matter. I don’t really care about them as much as the other factors. Okay. Lows people away. Like I think that people cringe when they see a bunch of your views. Yeah. But if everyone’s bad at Amazon, then I’m just going to beat them on SEO. I’m going to be ranked higher than them for more search volume and more keywords. So.

47:36
I will convert higher than them as a whole than they will. What’s interesting about the way you do things is it doesn’t take into account like social proof, right? Like if I see like a thousand reviews, I’m probably gonna buy that one. Or if it has Amazon’s choice, is that all factored in there too? No, not as much like for my decision making process. Yeah.

48:04
So we give a negative score if the top like six or eight of the top 10, you know, have have more than a thousand reviews, right? Because once you hit four digits, it’s much bigger than three digits. It’s psychologically. So. This is your exact line of questioning around how to to how to like figure out whether a product is good or not is why I created a scorecard to give a quantifiable score.

48:34
for a product based on all of these different factors. Because the biggest question that people were asking is exactly like you. They’d say like, all these things look good, but they have all these reviews, right? Like, that’s a bad thing. So how bad is bad and how good is good? And so what I did is I started to put together a scorecard with a quantifiable score between 50 and 250 positive, and between 50 and 250 negative. And like, if everyone has…

49:03
like the top six or eight people have 1000 reviews or more than it’s probably minus 100. That’s not a good thing, but it’s not a deal breaker. So it’s still a negative. So at the end of it, when you count the ROI, you count the, you know, the keywords, the profitability, the opportunity to differentiate the opportunity to add value through smaller packaging to reduce your costs with on fulfillment.

49:29
Like there’s a lot of things that you can maybe add value in that are positives. Once you add up all of those scores, plus or negative, then you’ll have a quantifiable number that will tell you is this product good or bad. And then people are like, well, got this product, got a score of 250, should I do it? And I said, okay, do 30 products and then you tell me if 250 is good enough. And what ends up happening is like the more you look at, the cream rises to the top, the better it’s just gonna get.

49:59
you’ll end up finding something that’s worth getting samples on at least and then maybe move forward with. So everyone listening out there, like go check out Brandon’s tool. Like every single Amazon tool that I’ve ever used, I always ignore that niche score. You know what I’m talking about, right Brandon? Yeah. It’s always completely bogus and yours is the first where the number is actually meaningful because the data, there’s data behind it and the data is visible.

50:28
It’s not just this like magic number that’s displayed in There’s no black box. You have to fill it out. We haven’t automated that part yet. There’s going to be certain things eventually that will start to check some of those boxes for you. But we’re really early. Most people listening don’t know. We launched out of beta less than a year ago. And we’ve got 2,000 paid users and growing. But we’re…

50:51
We have a team of 25 on the programmer side because we just want to keep adding tools and value and making it better every day. But yeah, it’s not automated yet and it’s not a black box tool. You’re going to have to fill it out. But you’ll get a quantifiable niche score. It’ll be a real score based on real information and you’ll be pretty confident when you fill it out whether you should do the product or not, I think. Exactly. That’s what I like about it because

51:18
The fact that it’s not a black box, and there’s always nuances, right, that you need to take into account, which is what real life is like when it comes to deciding what to sell. Brandon, where can people find more about your tool? So datadive.tools, that’s the homepage. You have a Chrome extension, and I’m proud. I waited to get on a call with you, with your good friend. We just had a partnership with Jungle Scout. Nice. With Greg.

51:48
Now you don’t need any other subscription to power it so you can just download it and start using it and I believe you have a Discount code for your listeners as well. Okay. Do you remember what it was? What do you always what is your code usually? Let’s just make it my wife quit my wife, but I’ll have to alright I’ll go back and make sure that that’s in there, but my wife quit would get you $50 off per month so

52:14
Immediately you can start using the tool. There’s some instructional videos. There’s a free master class to look at how we do the product validation on seller-systems.com. Watch that three hour master class. It’s free. It’ll walk you through the data. It’ll walk you through the product validation and how we find and how we validate products and then how the tool works. And if you guys, I have a lot of people in my class who always ask me, hey, should I sell this product? Should I sell this product?

52:43
I usually go in and I don’t have like a super quantifiable method. Like I have like the eyeball test. I look at all the competitors and you know their images. But what would be really nice is to just give a number to it. Yeah, getting a number to it and then pulling all of even, even to use your eyeball test, like to pull all the images into one sheet like we do with deep dive. Yeah. Makes it so much easier just to say, okay, this is a very sophisticated niche.

53:11
These guys are all doing really great content. And then if you go back to the master keyword list and you see most of them are ranked really well for lot of the percentage of search volume, like right there, you’re kind of like, this is a super competitive, higher risk product. Maybe you should move in another direction or spend another week or two finding another 30 or 50 potential products and choose one of the better ones. Cool. Well, hey, Brandon, thanks a lot for this talk today. I hope it didn’t go over anyone’s head and

53:40
It’s pretty straightforward when you think about it, right? There’s all these parameters, all these keywords, and you just gotta put them in the right order and figure out what the low hanging fruit is and whether you even have a chance. And there’s a number that basically gives you peace of mind whether you should consider going through with it or not. Thanks for having me, Steve. It was awesome.

54:03
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now Brandon is really a wealth of knowledge when it comes to Amazon and you should check out his content. For more information, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 465. And once again, I want to thank Sellerboard, which is the Amazon profit software that I recommend for Amazon sellers. By going to mywifequitterjob.com slash Sellerboard, you can get 30 days for free. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash S-E-L-L-E-R-B-O-A-R-D.

54:30
I also want to thank 180Marketing.com for sponsoring this episode. 180Marketing is the agency that I use to grow my search traffic by 4x in just six months. For more information, email jeff at 180Marketing.com. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.