530: The Must Have Pet Products To Sell Online | A Recap Of The Pet Summit

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 what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now this past week, Toni Urbach gave four separate talks at the Pet Summit Orlando, which is a conference that covers all things related to pet products sold online. So in this episode, she’s going to give us a recap of the event and what’s hot and what’s not in the pet industry.

00:24
But before we begin, want to you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are almost sold out over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, is a curriculum-based event where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods

00:53
and not some high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th May 16th.

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And right now, this is the last chance to get your tickets. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still grab my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book.

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So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now on to the show.

02:03
Welcome back to another episode of the My Wife Put Her Job podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about the Pet Summit. I have no idea what that is, but I just know Tony spoke four times at this event and there’s a lot of influencers and e-commerce folks at this conference. Yes, it was a, you know, I went in there not knowing what to expect at all. We got connected through our friend, Kristin Levine, who is in, I think both the courses doing content and e-commerce with us, but she connected

02:34
myself and Liz with the Pet Summit folks and yeah, we ended up, I ended up filling in for someone at the last minute that got COVID. So my three talks quickly went to four the week of the event. So it was very interesting. I learned a ton about the pet industry, which I will say, you probably teach the opposite of this in profitable online store, but I think there’s still a big opportunity to get into the pet product world after being at this event.

03:02
I don’t, what do mean I teach the opposite? There’s so many students selling pet stuff. It’s super competitive, right? Like there’s, think there’s a lot of sellers. However, after being there and I listened to like state of the pet industry, I don’t know. State of the union for pets. It was given by this guy who’s, you know, on the board, but he’s former like CEO of PetSmart and stuff like that. But he said that the industry this year is projected to do $154 billion.

03:32
And what is that up from the previous year? They’re up 8%, I think. Year over year. And what’s interesting is their whole marketing strategy is to get people to own more pets. That makes sense. Yeah. Which I’m like, Bob Barker had his day. No more spay and neuter. Like, now we want to fill the earth with dogs and cats. But anyway, yeah, so that was.

03:59
the first eye-opening takeaway that I had was listening to that keynote and realizing that in my mind, the pet space was just really saturated, but. I’ve never considered the pet industry saturated, actually. I there’s a lot of sellers, there’s a lot of innovate. Like, there’s a lot of things you can do with it. Yes. So anyway, that was my first thought was like, let’s sell some pet products. Just because the amount and then the amount of money that people spend on their, especially dogs and cats.

04:29
Obviously, the pet industry is much bigger than that with all the reptiles and fish and the little rodent type pets, but the amount of money that people are spending in pet products is ridiculous. And the one area that had like, I think a decent amount of growth was pet food toppings.

04:49
No way. Yes. like I met. So and the thing is, it was at the convention center in Orlando. So like when you have an event at the convention center, when you eat at the restaurants around the convention center, it’s filled with people at the convention. Right. So you’re even if you’re off site, you’re still usually sitting next to someone who’s going to the same event, kind of like the Canton Fair. Right. There’s tons of people in that area at that period of time. And so I met multiple people and I was like, and usually they were on the manufacturer or, you know, product side. And

05:19
One guy was like, I sell gravy. Like their whole industry is like gravy that you put on dog food. Interesting. Yeah. OK. Anyway. Yeah. So I don’t and that’s not even like supplement stuff, right? That’s just like, oh, they can’t just have regular pet food. They have to have pet food enhanced by like when they said pet toppings. All I could think of was like an ice cream sundae.

05:43
We can’t just give our pet regular dog food anymore. In the refrigerated pet food space is also a crazy, where you can get your food custom made for your pet and all that. Anyway, nuts. I have never owned a dog before, but if my dog would not eat food without a topping, I would just starve him for a little bit. You’re going to get hate. Anyway, but it got me thinking about the whole

06:11
It’s not just about the one thing, right? How do you create that additional value add to something to sell, whether it be physical product or digital, but you know, it wasn’t good enough that we just sold pet food, right? Now we sell pet food plus pet food enhancers. Right. So I know. So pets are basically becoming humans. Yes. And I think their goal, I think they said that they wanted, I think right now it’s like 60 % of households own a pet.

06:38
and they wanna try to push it to about 70 because if they can get it to 70, the numbers tip as far as revenue like pretty significantly. I went into this keynote just wanting the lunch, I’m gonna be honest. I was like, oh, free lunch, sign me up. And I actually was just completely captivated by the amount of data revolving, just kind of like, holy cow, this is a huge industry. And I clearly don’t spend any money on my pets. I was like, I feel like a very bad pet parent.

07:08
There’s someone at ECF who sells iguana equipment or something like that. Yes, the cage people. Cage people, yes. In terraniums, yes, yes. And they’re killing it. Yeah, oh yeah. Not surprising after being at that. So the Pet Summit itself was basically attached to the Global Pet Expo, which that I would say is the Canton Fair for pets, for pet products. okay. So everything from like the…

07:36
You would have appreciated it because it was everything from the very expensive display setups for the big dog food brands and the big cat food brands to the Asian vendors, right, that it looks just like they picked up their booth from the Canton Fair and put it in Orlando to people that had invented pet products. So lot of people that had, there were a lot of inventors there. So the shark tank style stuff to,

08:04
And then like crazy stuff like you can buy hiking pants for your dog. I know, I know, it was crazy. So there were 1,100 vendors at the Global Pet Expo and then the Pet Summit was for pet influencers and pet businesses on the marketing side. So basically two events kind of held simultaneously working together. One was more about walking the floor, making the connections, talking about

08:32
you know, products, what’s coming to the industry. And then the sessions were definitely more business and then the whole influencer track. And it was interesting because the influencer track was all topics geared towards bloggers, right? Or content creators, not really bloggers. But then the bloggers wanted to be on the floor walking the expo to get the free product. You know what I mean? It was just like old school blogging conference. How are the prices? Did you talk to any of the vendors?

09:01
for like the pricing of their products. It’s probably wholesale. We didn’t talk to any, we didn’t talk to anybody. Now, probably wholesale for some of the stuff and you could see they have these little like cubes where they would be in there with like their calculator and their order sheets and stuff. So I think like big companies were actually placing orders. Some people that we met offsite were talking about how they were there. One guy was in London, he’s trying to break into the US as far as bringing his products over here. A lot of people on Amazon.

09:30
So a lot of pet people that typically would sell direct to like a store, like you’re selling at Chewy or PetSmart also are now on Amazon where they weren’t in the past. And I will tell you, most of the pet brands do not know how to do Amazon. That was a big takeaway that I got. So on the expo floor, it wasn’t factories, right? It was more like people’s products.

09:55
Yes, although I think there were definitely a couple of like there was some Canton Fair looking stuff there for sure. OK, yeah. But but it was such a I mean, 1100 vendors. That’s a pretty large expo floor. I don’t think we got I don’t think we walked the entire thing. So these Amazon sellers, if they don’t know what they’re doing, how are they being successful? mean, Amazon these days pretty much requires that you know what you’re doing. Yes. So here’s what they’ve all done. So anyone who’s out there and has like an Amazon business hit these people up.

10:25
They’re like, oh, we have a guy that does our Amazon. Like when we would talk to them about it specifically, it’s like, oh, we have three guys. And I was like, but if you look at your listing, you can see that this is all wrong. We were having like helpful conversations. We weren’t just walking up to brands and going, hey, have you checked your Amazon listing lately? But usually the people at the booth had no idea what was happening on Amazon. I think they feel like, like one people that we, a group that we talked to for a while, they actually sell hay.

10:55
on Amazon. Oh, okay. And so we actually talked to the owner, the owner’s son. We ended up just having a conversation about it. And he’s like, well, I, you know, we’re talking to the youngest son and he said, well, you know, my dad told me that I was in charge of Amazon and we needed to get our products on Amazon. So we pulled up his listing because we were looking at it from the UGC, you talking to him about working with influencers. And so we’re looking at this and Liz has said, you know,

11:23
do you know how much money you’re losing on every sale? And he’s like, what do you mean losing? She’s like, what’s your price point with Amazon fees? They’re in the size of the pack. Like there’s no possible way that you’re making money on these products. And he’s like, yeah, well, there’s some of our best sellers in the store. So we needed them on Amazon. So they just don’t really have a great strategy. And I think a lot of them don’t understand. It’s kind of like they got told to go on Amazon, but then no one has any Amazon experience. Bail ahead has got to be really heavy.

11:52
Yes, this is like chicken hay. So it’s not as big, the package was like a small bag of dog food. So they’re selling this for 10.99 on Amazon. Oh, OK. You’re not making money on that, right? But they did have one product. Well, he’s like, we have one product that’s our hero product on Amazon. And that one did make sense financially.

12:15
So anyway, but a lot of the companies are I think are in that squeeze of you know, we’re going to PetSmart, we’re going to Chewy, we’re in the little tractor supply, whatever. But you know, Amazon is another channel that we’re not utilizing. So they hire someone’s brother to get the listings up. I am curious, you spoke four times. Yes. You want to just tell the audience what your topics were? Yeah. So the first talk that Liz and I gave together was on the Amazon Influencer program.

12:45
and this was specifically to the influencers. And this was an interesting group of influencers because most of them actually had no website. They were strictly Instagram or TikTok or both, which to me is, it made my heart hurt because, I mean, and these people like just dwarf us, right? They’ve got a million followers on Instagram. Their dogs are famous. People are asking for photos, like legit internet famous people. However,

13:14
As I’m talking to them, I’m like, so how do you get people on your email list? Are you putting this stuff on YouTube? Most people weren’t even doing YouTube. And everybody that when I talked to them, and Liz and I had a lot of conversations, it was, I know I need to be doing YouTube. That was the… We get that a lot. mean, it’s kind of a hurdle to get started. It is, but these people are already creating videos every single day, sometimes five and 10 videos a day. That’s true. So that was…

13:42
That was like, okay, you’ve already done all the hard part. So the interesting thing is there was the one bucket of people that, know, just Instagram or TikTok. And then there was this other bucket of people that I feel like have such a leg up because not only are they on Instagram and TikTok, they have a website, they had courses, they were selling physical products. One of them, one guy that we met, he sells, oh my gosh, what was the name of it? Like puppy aid, it’s like Gatorade for dogs. Oh my God.

14:11
But he knew it, he’s like, yeah, I’ve got 100,000 Instagram people, but I need to make money from them. So he does virtual dog training courses, he’s got a physical product, he’s got brand. So there were some people that clearly understood the benefit of diversifying that revenue. So we went and told him about the Amazon Influencer program, because these people are already making videos about products on Amazon.

14:37
and they have no problem getting accepted to the program. In fact, many of them were already in the program, but were like, I didn’t really know what it was about. So that was a fun talk because everybody in the room was like, oh, I can do this right this minute. Like I can upload videos today. So that was exciting, because it’s always nice when you give a talk and people are like, oh, this is doable. And then what was interesting is there were some brands that came to the talk who immediately came up to us afterwards and were like, how do we work with the influence?

15:06
It’s like, how do we get these on our listings? Which was funny because we’re like, come to the talk at four o’clock or we’ll teach you how to work with influencers and get the content on your listings. So then the next talk we gave was basically the brand side of it. So what is that UGC on Amazon? How does it work? Most brands are very confused because they think it’s people posting on their TikTok or Instagram and driving traffic to Amazon. And that’s not what the Amazon Influencer program is. It’s where the, you know, the UGC from the content creators live on the listings.

15:35
And the big thing for brands, which most people don’t get is in order to be eligible for this, you have to put your own branded video on the listing first. And once the brand uploads their own video, you’ve unlocked that for influencers to then create the content. And so most of these brands had video content that they weren’t utilizing to get that unlocked. So anyway, so that was an interesting talk because the brands had no clue what we were talking about.

16:03
had never even heard of this, didn’t really understand. And then when we started going through people’s listings and they’re like, wait, how could they already, they had a video so they had unlocked that upper carousel video slot. But they’re like, wait, I didn’t tell this person to make a video. And we’re like, well, if you have a top selling product in pets, which is really crazy, and especially for the influencers, pets are really high commission rate. That’s 4 % on Amazon. So if a product is categorized correctly on Amazon, this is

16:32
like one of the sweet spots to make revenue with videos. And the brands are like, but wait, we didn’t tell that person to make a video. What is this? And we’re like, well, this is what happens. And when you have a hot product, influencers are gonna find it and make that content.

16:49
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

17:18
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

17:30
So I’m curious, those influencers that you talked to that didn’t have a website or an audience, how are they making money? Brand deals, all brand deals. Wow. Yeah. Okay. That’s like my least favorite way to make money. I know, brand deals and then some of that is also through like TikTok affiliates. So TikTok affiliates is really big. So any, and I don’t know if we’re even, are we talking about this? We are talking about it at Seller Summit. I think Tiffany’s gonna talk about it. Yeah.

18:00
But TikTok affiliates is actually really lucrative for the affiliates because I didn’t know this. They make 20 % of the sales.

18:10
So yeah, at ECF there was a talk where this woman had very few followers on TikTok, made $80,000 in the span of like a month promoting one product. Cause her TikTok went viral. Yep. And when I was talking, I was actually having this conversation this week about how much affiliates get. I said, so you make 20 % if you promote it on TikTok shop, right? As an affiliate. But if you promote something on Amazon, you get 2%. Yeah. So

18:39
It’s a huge difference. Shoot. Should I be hawking products on TikTok? Yes, you should. Start talking about the hair straightener. So yeah, most of the influencers are making money from brand deals and then some affiliate and then TikTok shop. Although I covered. So then the next talk I did was my fill in talk. And I don’t remember what the lady was supposed to talk about, I just did the diversifying your income talk.

19:09
And I had, basically pulled one of our webinar slides for it. And what Liz and I did was just switch out a lot of the graphics for pet type products, just doesn’t make more sense. And then after the first day, so the first day neither of us spoke, but we met all these people and we came back to the room and literally read it all of our slides because we realized who we were talking to. You know, it was like eye-opening. And what I realized with this group was that

19:36
None of them had that foundational property. None of them had the website. None of them had the e-bills list. Not none. Large percentage of people had no way to capture the customer. And there was a girl who talked the day before who talked about the Google update. Did that go over everyone’s heads? No, she did. gave a great talk on explaining basically why it was so bad.

20:02
But the point of her thing was basically like it decimated her site over the past like three updates. And she positioned it in this, and she blogs about like Docsens, right? So she has a very niche audience. And she basically was like, I had finally reached that six figure, which is sort of the pinnacle of blogging, right? Like content creator making six figures a year.

20:29
That’s when you kind of know like, okay, this isn’t a hobby anymore. This is a real job. And then she got hit with like three Google updates and basically just, her site just crap. Like she doesn’t have hardly any traffic anymore. And she can’t get it back. it’s, you I know of her. you know, I know she’s not doing shady stuff. Like she just got caught, right? Like in the updates and there was probably nothing she could have done. You know, she was doing all the things right when it was right. And then,

20:59
It wasn’t right anymore. I’m curious for all those people who have TikTok accounts in the event that TikTok gets banned in six months. What are they? Did that come up? Yes, people talked about it a lot and nobody really has an answer other than I don’t think it’s going to get banned. I am a little skeptical, too, that it’s going to get banned. think something’s going to happen. I agree, although they just banned it in Florida for 14 and under. Did they really? Yes. Wow. Florida. How about that? Yeah.

21:29
14 and under, it’s banned. All my kids are not 14 anymore, so lucky them. They aged out of the law. Okay. All it takes is a couple states to start that, right? Yes. I don’t necessarily think banning it for kids under 14 is that bad of an idea. Oh, no. I am fully on board with that. I would say 18 until they go to college. Yes. I’m not really for people things getting banned in general. It bothers me when I watch those hearings and like,

21:58
clearly the people in the government have never opened the TikTok app once in their life. It’s embarrassing to me. It’s like, at least know what you’re talking about. I’m not saying TikTok’s great. It’s not all great, but you sound like a fool. Did you watch that hearing with the CEO of TikTok? Lord. I was just embarrassed. I was like, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed that you guys didn’t even like open the app and watch Pookie for like five minutes. Come on. So anyway, yeah, there was a lot of talk of that.

22:26
And so what I ended up changing my talk to was, hey, you’re making really, these people are making really good influencer money, which is hard because I remember when I was making tons of money doing influencer deals and it’s like too good to be true, right? You’re like, this brand wants to pay me $5,000 to do what? know, put my dog in a stroller and walk it around. And so I remember how that felt. And so,

22:51
I tried to craft this balance between, this isn’t a bad thing that you’re doing this. These brand deals, you’ve worked hard to grow your channels, good for you. But every time you take a brand deal, you’re taking a piece of work that takes you time. And these people are creating really great content, so it’s not like they’re just talking with a phone, walking down the street, which is fine too, but these people are doing heavy edits, really nice production value type stuff, and they have to include their pet.

23:21
You know, it’s complicated. sounds like pretty miserable, actually. If your pet’s not cooperative, you can’t put together a good video, right? OK, yes. And can I just tell like a side note story? Sure. the opening night. Well, so pets were allowed to come to this thing. Oh, God. So like there was some some pee and poop places and they had like SPCA there with like baskets of puppies that you could take home. I had to like drag Liz away from a puppy.

23:50
But there were dogs everywhere, not as many cats. But the first night they had this big opening party. They had entertainment and the big entertainment was this border collie group that did tricks in the night before one of the border collies passed away. They had to cancel the performance, which was like this whole huge thing. I mean, they’re telling us and they’re like, the border collies aren’t coming. And I was like, oh no, that’s too bad. And she’s like, one died. And I was like, oh, like, what are you saying?

24:19
I don’t even know they were, but I was just like, this sounds terrible. So you’re like tripping over dogs. And anyway, it was there’s a lot of dogs in strollers, which I have a whole other opinion. How are you able to even give a talk? Isn’t there like dogs barking in the background? There was actually one of my talks. I think I had more dogs than people in the session. I’m pretty sure it was. I was not prepared. Let’s just say that. So the talk that I gave once I sort of interacted with all these people was like,

24:48
Yeah, that’s great, you’re making $5,000 a deal or $10,000 a deal or whatever and getting free product, it’s great, but it requires you to do a piece of work every time you get that deal. So if you’re not doing deals, you’re not getting paid. You have no residual from this. And not only that, you don’t have the ability to turn on the money spigot, right? So you don’t, you,

25:13
We know all these people that are in either digital or physical products where it’s like, I’m having a low month, let’s run a promotion or let’s do a webinar, right? Or let’s turn on this lever and bring in some revenue. And if the brand deals aren’t there at the moment, then you don’t have any way to make money if this is what you’re relying on. So that’s sort of what I switched my talk up to. And I talked about our five different ways to make money.

25:40
But then I really hit on how do you make that all work together? So yes, get your brand deal. That’s your bread and butter. Do that. But why aren’t you putting all that content on YouTube? And why aren’t you taking your top content and turning it into long form video on YouTube? And then trying to figure out what your niche is going to be on YouTube. And several people there were doing that to the tune of millions of subscribers. Wow.

26:05
And I said, you know, here’s the thing. I said, you can make a lot of money just on ads on YouTube, which is completely passive, and you’ve already made all this content. So you have content sitting over here on Instagram or in your hard drive that you could easily publish on YouTube today and probably within a few weeks hit the monetization level on YouTube based on the fact that they have such huge audiences other places. And this could just be a passive stream of income for you with the content you’re already creating.

26:34
by just putting it in a secondary place. And a lot of people just, was like this mental, it’s like the mental hurdle that we see from everybody. It was just like, oh yeah, I should do YouTube. And I’m like, no, you should do nothing else but that until you do, you know, that like, that should be your next thing. You know what’s low hanging fruit that I’ve seen a lot of TikTok people do now? They just put together like 10 of their TikToks back to back in a YouTube video and that’s a long form video. I watched them actually because

27:04
they’re entertaining these people that I watch, right? And I can sit easily through a long form YouTube video and watch all those clips. Yeah. I think they’re just so, obviously if TikTok’s where your bunny is, then that’s where you’re putting your focus, right? Like that’s how you’re getting your deals. But the fact that they’re, to me, it’s like most people’s hurdle is making the video. So they don’t have that hurdle. Right. That’s the biggest hurdle. Right. And so I was like, if you do nothing else after this talk, please put everything on YouTube.

27:33
And then the next thing I talked to them about was like, how do you grab those email addresses and getting people, I said, even if you just literally put up a landing page on a WordPress site, I was like, you don’t have to design a fancy site, you don’t have to do anything, just literally get one page up with a place for people to opt in for something. Because right now, you have no way to like interact with people except for hoping that they see what you put on social media, which we all know a small fraction of your actual audience sees that content.

28:01
I mean, you don’t even need a WordPress site. No, you could use a ConvertKit landing ConvertKit has a landing page. I mean, it won’t be a nice URL or anything, but at least you I mean, they’re using cloaked links anyway on the… Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah. And I said also, there’s AI now that will take your videos and transcribe them into content. could easily create the content that you’re putting on video into print form just to fill pages up, right? Like you could create a robot…

28:31
bus system without having to redo much work. So that was, you and I felt like I was like- you were like the star of this place, I bet. I was probably like, y’all are sick of seeing me at this point. But it was just, it was interesting because I felt like these people have done, like so many people we know can’t grow their socials, right? They struggle with that. These people have completely figured that out.

29:00
But yet, it’s not like a long-term thing, and it’s funny. So I started my talk, I used a Pat Flynn hack. You know how Pat Flynn starts with the black slide? Like it’s just a dark screen, you don’t see anything. So he gets up there and starts talking, and the screen is dark. And then when he makes his first point, he clicks on that first slide to make the point, and the first slide’s always something like really interesting. So I was like, it’s a great technique to get people, so if you ever have to do public speaking, this is a great technique to like catch your audience’s attention.

29:29
didn’t work as great for the dogs, but people works really well. So I started talking and I got up there and I didn’t introduce myself or anything. I just went right into it and I said, I started talking and then I said, and this is my first website and I put the picture up of my very first website, which as we know is hideous. I mean, to be fair, I didn’t think it was horrific. I mean, obviously, but.

29:54
My point was what I thought I was making was, as we often make when we do this together is you need something. You have to start somewhere. And then the next point I made was I often joke that I’m a dinosaur in the blogging space. I said, but that’s actually not true because dinosaurs are extinct and I’ve managed to find a way to reinvent myself over the last 20 years. And then I found the, what’s it called? The horseshoe shrimp.

30:21
or something like that, which is supposed to be the oldest living animal that’s like prehistoric, it still exists today. And I was like, so instead of a dinosaur, I’m now a shrimp. And I had my big shrimp photo. But the point was like, yeah, you’re doing on, you’re on Instagram, you’re on TikTok, that’s great. When I got started, there was no Instagram, there was no TikTok, there really wasn’t Facebook and Twitter had just started. And it’s like, what you’re doing right now is going to look, there’s none of this is gonna exist in 10 years in the way that it does today.

30:51
And so how do you leverage what you’re creating today so that in 10 years you still have a profitable business? And that’s kind of how I started the talk. Cause it was like, this is all fine and dandy, but this isn’t gonna take you to, this isn’t gonna take you 20 years in the business. No way. And then, you know, talking about email, YouTube, websites, and then how to even leverage more out of what they’re already doing. like, cause I, so this is something that was interesting. I talked about what we share all the time.

31:20
If you have an affiliate that’s performing well, you need to go to that company and ask for a better offer for your audience and a higher commission. Or just private label that product. Well, that was my last. That was my last section. Yeah. Actually, I had a picture of me, you and Jen in China. But I was saying, I said, you know, these rates are all negotiable. You know.

31:44
you think you can only get 4%, not from Amazon, but outside of that, working with other, especially directly with the brand. I’m like, if you’re sending good traffic and conversions, you can get more money. And it was like, it never occurred to them that that was a negotiable thing. I’m like, you’re in the driver’s seat. They want traffic, you’re giving it to them. You’ve gotta negotiate for better rates for yourself. talk through a lot of affiliate hacks and then,

32:13
Finally, I was like, but listen, 10 % is great, but how about 60 %? I was like, you have everything that brands want, data and audience. So how about you just private label the products that sell the best? And like eyes are like, you know, and then I said, and let me tell you something, I put the picture of us up and I was like, if I can go to China and figure this out, anybody in this room can go to China and figure this out. I was like, it’s not rocket science. It’s a formula, right?

32:42
And you also already know what everyone buys, which most people don’t when they get started. And so they were just like completely like, wait, what? And then I showed a picture of my dining room table with all the jewelry and right. Right. I was like, that’s ups and downs. Let me tell you. But, you know, it’s like they had never, you know, the people there, obviously people that are doing that, like the guy who invented the doggy Gatorade. But there were a lot of people that weren’t. And I’m like, you don’t have to invent something.

33:10
you can just sell something that’s already out there that you know your audience likes. And right now when you’re probably have a lot of like kind of free money from brand deals, like this is the time to invest some of that into something that actually can make you like lasting revenue. I want to know, did you go to any sessions? Did you learn anything about how these people are growing their socials? Cause I know if you have a pet that instantly gives you a leg up on the socials. Yes. A hundred percent. Step one, get a dog.

33:40
Um, I’m literally texting my family the whole time, get videos of the pets immediately start making content. Like, um, so anyway, uh, I, so the one session that I wanted to go to so badly, but it conflicted with my session was SEO for Tik TOK and Instagram, which I didn’t get to attend, but that was the one that I was most interested about because I didn’t even know that that was a thing. Maybe for Tik TOK, I didn’t know for Instagram. was a thing. I know it is a thing for Tik TOK.

34:10
Yeah. I attended a couple sessions, mostly I was speaking so I didn’t attend as many. However, I will say, we talked about this, the social content is a grind. These people are creating multiple pieces of content a day. They’re constantly testing, putting stuff up. It does not seem appealing to me because there’s really no…

34:35
I don’t know what the right word is. There’s definitely a way to do it, but it’s like, sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not always clear why something works and why something doesn’t work. There’s just no real formula to it. It’s almost like you just have to see if it’s right time, right place. A lot of people are talking about the trending audio or the trends or even times of day that you’re posting, length of reels, just all these different things that people are trying and testing, but it just seems like it’s a constant.

35:06
cycle of try this, try that, try this, do this, this is working, do this, do this, do this, wait, not working anymore, now do this. I was just like, and I overheard a lot of conversations like that, and I was like, yeah, no, not for me. Yeah, this is why it’s really hard to teach a class in this stuff. Yeah. Because it is, maybe one in 20 is gonna get any traction, right? Yep. And it’s like throwing spaghetti on a wall. Although once you have a formula down, it’ll last for a while. Yeah.

35:35
It kind of reminds me of like the fashion industry. Not that I know anything about the fashion industry, right? But you know, it’s constantly changing, right? You have to constantly release new lines. I mean, I’ve spoken to people who sell and you know, the stuff from like last year, you can’t keep it in your store. Right, right. It has to go. It’s got to go and you got to try something new. Yeah. The one overarching theme was consistent content. Usually people are posting multiple times a day. This person I had on the podcast a while back,

36:04
she just made it a habit. Like the first thing she did as soon as she sits at her desk is to film three short form videos before she starts her day. And then that’s how she’s able to be consistent. But she’s also really good. Like she can just pick, you could probably pull this off. I don’t think I could, but she just picks up her phone and just, and then she throws it over and someone else makes it nice. Yeah. mean, these people, these people were good. And they had all the like,

36:33
hot video equipment, all the cool gimbals. None of them really were filming with anything other than a phone though. Oh, that’s good to know. But just the newest ring light that attaches to something. It was just that kind of stuff, right? Where I was like, oh, these are kind of cool gadgets that I definitely don’t need to buy. But yeah, the biggest thing that was overwhelming was just the consistency of content and the frequency of content. Everyone’s posting a ton.

37:02
We do know works, right? Like, I mean, that’s why we’re doing the 30 day challenge, because we know that if you consistently post content, you’re going to grow. But that’s that’s a grind. That is a grind that I don’t. But I mean, everything is a grind. This one’s just grindier. Yeah. In my opinion. So I’m curious, the proportion of YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramers, bloggers. Did you have like a rough idea? No bloggers. No bloggers. I mean, less than 10 percent.

37:32
Wow. Huge skew to Instagram and TikTok. And most people were doing Instagram and TikTok. Like they were basically just reformatting stuff a little bit. But there was a, I would say less than 50 % of people were doing YouTube, which to me is nuts considering they’re making all video content. That’s the part that I couldn’t get over. I got the whole no do a YouTube video. True, true. But these people are putting a lot of effort in already. But it’s more effort to put together a cohesive 10 minute video, right?

38:02
than it is to just pick up your phone and just talk for a minute. Yeah, but even that, not just put it on, you’re still gonna grow on YouTube. You’re talking about shorts. Yeah, I mean, why not just get it out there and then, you know, make one long form video a week? Yeah, no, no, no, I’m not arguing with you. I’m just saying like the hurdle, like for me to put out a short form, scripting that up or deciding what I’m gonna say might take me like a minute. Yeah.

38:30
but a long form takes me like a good two hours to put together something that I want to talk about. speaking for 10 minutes, now I’m used to it, but sometimes I’m recording and I’m like, good Lord, how much more is there? I’m so bored of myself. know, I am. That’s where I felt like there was this huge golden opportunity for people was in YouTube. To me, the contents, the website, to me, that’s just a

39:00
you have to do it, right? You have to get a landing page set up, nothing, don’t worry about anything else, but like, please, please, please do YouTube. You’re already making the video content, you already have all the video equipment, you already have a dog that everybody likes. And it was interesting, because it was people either were like straight up influencers, or they had completely gotten this robust, so they were influencers, plus they had a dog product, and they had courses or memberships, like.

39:26
There was very little people that were like, oh, I’m edging towards that. It was like, I do this or I do that. But there wasn’t many people in the middle. Yeah. mean, long form is where it’s at, right? I think TikTok has realized that they can’t make money off of short form content. Yep. Like outside of TikTok shop. so they’re encouraging people to upload like 10 minute videos now. Yes. I watch them all the time. Mostly true crime. But I do watch them. Do you watch them all the way through? Like I can’t last for more than like two minutes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I need to know what happens.

39:55
And they’re actually encouraging people to upload the horizontal version. So there’s black bars in the top of the box. I know, which I don’t love. But yeah. So then total wrap up. But the last talk I did was the email talk that I a similar talk that I gave at Seller Summit. But what I realized after this is the literally the last talk of the event, not a closing keynote, just the last talk. Four p.m. on a Thursday. I’m like, is anybody awake? There was a guy in the like second row who I’m pretty sure was falling asleep the whole time. I was like, this is really encouraging. I’m killing it.

40:25
But what I came to realize is I was basically gonna re-give the seller summit talk, but take out a few things and nobody’s on Klaviyo. And that talk is just all Klaviyo-centric. So I ended up having to redo the slides. So instead of showing like the Klaviyo flows, I would just put the definitions, right? cause when you get in the flows, it gets confusing for people that don’t use, or that aren’t doing it at all, right?

40:54
But that was interesting, because that talk was not well attended, not surprising, because everyone was on an airplane going home. But the people that were in there were frantically taking notes, taking photos. I was like, I’ll send you guys the slides. And I said, I’ll send you the Klaviyo flows, too, if you want them. I just took them out, because I didn’t want to just absolutely bore people to death. But most people that came to the talk were not doing email at all. Well, they don’t even have a website.

41:23
These are the brands. Oh, these are the brands. Got it. Yes. Because there was like a brand track and a creator track. So like when we did the Amazon UGC for brands, that was on the brand track. So was the email one. Although there were a couple of bloggers in there. The handful of bloggers that did have websites were in that talk. But most of them are not doing most of the brands are because I don’t think they’re really D to C for the most part.

41:47
They’re either selling on Amazon or they’re selling wholesale, but they have some small level of DTC that they’re not utilizing. So while I think that talk was really good, it just, there weren’t a lot of people in there and I pitched Seller Summit heavily. I was like, there’s not a lot of people in here. It’s mostly dogs. I can tell everybody to come to Seller Summit and get even a better talk. I was just thinking the whole time you were talking, I would have opened with like this video of someone throwing a ball and then a frisbee.

42:17
You got to get the dog’s attention first, right? Yes. Listen, it was it was definitely out of my comfort zone for sure. Yeah, but it sounds like, you know, you learned a lot also. Yeah, I learned a lot and it was actually really good. So we met several inventors, people. In fact, we met someone who lives in Fort Lauderdale. I think she’ll be coming to Sellers Summit. She invented this dog and cat feeder and.

42:45
She was such a sweet, she came to all of our talks, even though she was a seller, right? And she, it’s been three years in the making, she had molds done, it’s really clever, you don’t know anything about pets, so I won’t go into detail, but it’s way to keep, it’s better for the dog’s back, it keeps bugs out of your dog food, like very cool features on this thing. And she went from idea, mold, manufacturing, got a patent on it, everything, right?

43:14
and she launched in like December and she’s like, I’ve only had like, you know, a handful of sales on Shopify. And I was like, yep. I was like, you’ve done all the really, really hard stuff and now you have to do the hard stuff. It’s like, um, and she just was, you know, she’s like, I feel like I worked so hard on this and then crickets, right? Like this is your, basically gave birth to a, an invention. If her invention is pretty innovative, should be really easy to sell on Facebook.

43:40
Yes. we actually, and we took such a liking to her, we immediately group texted her with Kim Meckwood. We’re like, first of all, because this is a Shark Tank product, 100%. Right. We introduced her to a couple of people that were at the expo that do like brand launches and things like that. Like we hooked her up because I was like, this is a really cool idea and all you need now is an audience. Right. Like you have everything and you’ve made a defendable product, right? Like, cause she has the patent and all this stuff.

44:09
But anyway, was pretty, and it was also reminded me of old e-commerce days. She’s like, I have 4,000 units, know, like was the whole, I was like, oh yeah, I don’t miss that part of it at all. But yeah, so anyway, we met a lot of people like her who had invented really cool products and just now need to get them out in front of people, which obviously is why she was there. But yeah, she was super sweet and she lives in Fort Lauderdale, so you’ll get to meet her in a couple weeks, a couple months.

44:37
This is gonna be a yearly thing for you? I mean, if they have us back, they might be sick of us. Nah, I think they’ll have you back. You did four talks. One note that I learned that I think I’ve never, I don’t know how I’ve never thought of this before, like changing our slides to really talk to the pet audience, because that was like, usually you don’t have such a tight demographic.

45:04
but was really actually really helpful. Like on our intro slides, we put pictures of our dogs, not us. know, like just little things and like for any examples, we always tried to use pet products. It definitely made the presentations better. And it wasn’t that hard to change them out. You know, at first I was like, ugh, I don’t want them to do this. Plus I was also sick going into that week, but it really like, it kept people’s attention because they immediately could relate to what we were talking about because it was something more familiar. And,

45:33
I don’t, I mean, I guess I’ve never talked to an audience that was so niche down before, but that’s definitely, if you ever have to do a presentation, like switching out your images is actually probably a really smart idea.

45:47
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Now, pet products are great products to sell because people always tend to overspend and your customers are generally not price sensitive either. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecluderjob.com slash episode 530. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

46:15
And if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away. Thanks for listening.