Online Empire Academy

How to Easily Find Suppliers for Amazon Drop Shipping and Amazon FBA Wholesale

by

You can download the free checklist for finding Amazon suppliers by clicking here:

 

Video Transcript below:
Hey guys, what's up? It's Dean Soto from TheOnlineEmpireAcademy.com, and today we're going to be talking about something super important if you're selling anything on, whether you're selling on Amazon or Ebay and you want to get out of the rut of doing what we call, “Retail arbitrage.” Going and finding stuff physically, and going to thrift stores, and garage sales, and retail places, and spending just hours and hours and hours of doing that, rather than doing that, actually creating a business that's based around suppliers that you can replenish things over and over and over again. I'm going to show you something super simple, but super important that my staff does every single day that they're working in order to make it to where we have replenish-able products whenever we want.

Before we get into that, real quick. I want to kind of stroke the pain point a little bit, like kind of stab the pain point a little bit. I was recently talking with a friend of mine who … actually a couple of people, who recently got suspended from Amazon for selling retail arbitrage. One was doing liquidation sales, they were doing kind of close out sales where they were buying product of just bulk product for a couple of thousand bucks. It was legit product from legit stores, but for some reason some customer said, “Hey, this is inauthentic.” Amazon gave them a warning or whatever. Then it eventually shut em down, the seller down, my friend. Unfortunately my friend did not have the invoices for the things that he was selling, which is a huge, huge problem, right? There's no way for them to prove that this was actually an authentic item bought from an authentic place.

Likewise about a year ago, a year ago today, in fact I was just talking to another friend of mine who a year ago his account, plus all his families account got suspended for inauthentic items as well. They were doing retail arbitrage. That's one of the big problems, right? More importantly, one really important reason why you want to start getting suppliers, or at least have a system for getting suppliers for Amazon wholesale, or what I do, drop shipping. I do drop shipping on Amazon, and on Ebay. The most important reason, aside from not getting suspended of course, is your time, and being able to grow an actual business where you can get products over and over and over again, and grow your business into something where you're not having to do everything all by yourself.

That's why I love drop shipping, that's why I love finding suppliers. Super easy, we're going to go into it right now. Are you ready? Whether you're ready or not, let's do this. Okay, so this is what I tell my guys. First things first, look around you, look around and see what you got near you. We are going to just … the way that we're going to do this, it's pretty much hard to fail in finding suppliers doing it this way. This can be wholesale suppliers, or wholesale drop ship suppliers like I do. Right now I'm looking around, I see baskets, let's just do basket. We're going to type in basket, okay? Into Amazon. I'm on Amazon.com, I'm typing in basket, boom.

Now you're going to be like, “Okay Dean, this is retarded.” Trust me on this, okay? Trust me on this. I'm doing this for a reason. The next thing I'm going t do is I'm actually going to sort by relevance. Obviously there's 900,000 different results for basket. I'm actually going to just … sorry, I'm not going to sort by relevance. I'm going to sort by high to low, okay? I'm a drop shipper, price is really of no importance to me. I'm able to buy thousands of dollars worth of items, and I don't pay up front so it doesn't matter to me. The cool thing is when you start pricing high to low, you get a whole bunch of different things that you never would have thought of. In this case, these are like 19,000, these are basket strainers, these are stuff that's just totally irrelevant. That's what we want, okay?

Baskets kind of hard, just because we don't have the thing on the left hand side here. Let me find something that has a thing on the left hand side here. Let's say, “Basketball.” Oh, do that, basketball. Yes, I did. I want this to go away, I want my departments and stuff. What is going on here? Let's see, basketball hoop. Let's see if that changes things. Oh, hold on. Let me pause this and see what's going on with this. Okay, weird. I just had to hard refresh it. If you ever have to hard refresh something just do shift, and then refresh and it will hard refresh.

Let's actually go back to basket real quick, let's see if that pops up with anything. Okay cool, it does on the side. Now, let's sort in price high to low. It's going to be odd, obviously. We're not going to be doing that. You can actually go down here. Next thing we want to do is we want to do average customer review. You can do either three star or four star, you can even do one star. We just want to know that something's selling. We'll do three stars and up. We're still pretty high, okay? Look, basket. Remember we searched for basket, okay? Now we're finding things that are not basket.

Now you're probably thinking, “Well, who cares? What does that mean?” Well, now we're going into ideas. We have ideas now that are not what we were looking for, so now it's giving us a whole bunch of ideas. We know that these things are selling relatively. Anyone could fake reviews or whatever too, but we know generally that these things are selling. Now since we're going priced high to low, we have this fruit basket, this art gallery fruit basket. We have this basket like baby thing, baby stroller thing. Have this Triaxe fold-able scooter with a basket on it or whatever, these are things that I wouldn't have thought of before. Especially as a drop shipper, I would love to do something … well not necessarily the scooter's, but something like this. This classic pram seat with rain cover, it's kind of cute or whatever. Anyway, let's try and go and find stuff that are a little bit less expensive. I'm going to go down to three over here. Scroll down. Not everyone wants to pay $1,000. Not everyone drop ships, you can wholesale.

I'm going to show you what to do once we have an idea that we're going for. Let me do, see if I can do this based off price down here. Okay, let's do, let's keep it in … let's just, for now we'll do home and kitchen right now, that way I can mess with the price. Okay, so since I chose home and kitchen on this left hand side over here, I can actually go down here and mess with the price. Say we want things that are $100 or less, click go. Now we're doing priced high to low, we don't care about relevancy really. We have these hamper, these hamper storage set. We have Fantasy Fields Sunny Safari Animal thematic Kids Storage Bench, that looks interesting.

For example, say I want to get this storage bench, or maybe I want to go and find the supplier. Not necessarily the supplier, but suppliers in general. I'm going to go to Google. Say I like this idea of a storage bench, and I want to go and get that as a supplier. I'm going to go to Google. Oops, not analytics. I'm going to go to Google, I'm going to type in, “Kids storage bench, quote, become a dealer,” okay? All right, so what did I do here?

I did, “Kids storage bench,” so it's going to show us all results that have kids, that have storage, and that has bench. It could have any of those things, or a combination of those things. But because I'm doing this quote, “Become a dealer,” end quote, it's only … I'm saying, “Google, only show me pages that have the words, become a dealer,” okay? That have the words, “Become a dealer,” on the page.

Right here, Sprout Kids, modern kids furniture wholesale supplier, okay? I go here, right click, open link in new window, all right. We have Sprout, now right here it says, “Modern furniture wholesale supplier. Why work with Sprout?” Has a whole dealer application here that you can fill out. Now I have the potential to become a dealer for Sprout right here. Now the cool thing is, not only do I have one, now since I did one idea, I had one idea with this kids bench thing. I have one, two, three, potentially four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, maybe more, okay? The list goes on as long as I can go to the next page, and the next page, and next page, of wholesale suppliers that I can go, fill out their application, or email them and actually become a dealer to work with them, right? Which is huge.

Out of one idea, now I have 10 dealers. What if I want another idea? What if I want … let's go do another one real quick. Let's say, not basket, so basketball. Let's do basketball like we did that last time. Basketball, sort priced high to low. Oh I'm in home and kitchen, that's why. Let's do any category. Sort high to low, now we have double tennis courts, like an entire court. 41,000, I don't even know if I would want to drop ship that. Full court basketball kit. Okay, so remember, let's do the average customer review, let's do three and up in this particular case so we know that these things are selling.

We actually have Super Shot Deluxe Basketball game, I might even … some of these I would even drop ship, that's interesting. We have trampolines, a trampoline with a basketball hoop. Pretty cool drop shipping stuff. Especially if I'm selling a $2,000 or $1,000 item and I'm making 20% off that, 30%, sometimes 50% depending on what it is, that could be pretty nice. Anyway, let's pick a category real quick so we can do pricing. We can do, should we do toys and games or sports and fitness? Let's do toys and games, let's do toys and games, just to see.

Okay, say we want a wholesale under 100 bucks. We're still high to low, so Dribble Stick Basketball Dribble Trainer. Let's do Basketball Dribble Trainer. Here, I just paste this here. We have, “Basketball Dribble Trainer, become a dealer,” quote, “Become a dealer.” All right, so Coast Athletics here, training equipment and more at Coast Athletics. Let's open that up, see what pops up. Whoops. Okay, so sometimes you have to do search, I'm going to do control F to search. Say, “Dealer.” Let's see, dealer, okay, right there. Become a dealer, right at the very bottom. We go, click, “Become a dealer,” there we go. We have our form that we can fill out to become a dealer with this particular company, whether we're wholesaling or drop shipping.

Now, the cool thing guys, this is what I love most about this too. This is why … you know, there's tons of wholesale directories, and supplier lists, and everything like that. To me, it's never worked for me. I'm sure they work for some people, but it's never worked for me. The thing I love about this, is guess what? If I become a dealer, I have access to every single thing that these guys sale, every single thing on their price list. Just because I was looking for a basketball dribble trainer thing doesn't mean I have to go with that. Now I have their entire price list, I can go and find things that are going to make me money that I never would have thought of now with their price list now.

Now I just fill that out, and hopefully become a dealer with them, right? Then I can go and do that with some of these other ones. This one looks like it doesn't have too many in that case, but it's still pretty cool, still pretty cool how easy it can be. Super easy to do guys. If you're selling on Amazon, if you're selling on Ebay and you're still doing retail arbitrage, and you're stuck in retail arbitrage phase, you don't want to stay in that phase. It can be very risky with your account. Private labels awesome too, but the problem with private label, you're spending months and a lot of money up front.

I highly, highly, highly recommend getting into wholesale. If you really, really want to not have to spend a lot of money up front and want to get things up quick, because … look, if I become a dealer with this Sprouts, or with this Coast Athletics or whatever right now, as soon as I get the price list, guess what? I can start listing stuff if I'm a drop shipper. All I do is go and list, and list, and list, and list, and list, and list the stuff. I can list their entire price list if I wanted to, and start selling those items because I don't have to pay for anything up front, okay?

Wholesaling is great too because you can get started a lot faster than private label as well. I highly recommend if you are still doing retail arbitrage, become a dealer for some of these suppliers. If you want to have in written form … I know that went a little bit fast to try to do it twice, to show you how to go about doing this. If you want my exact method, a very easy three step method to actually being able to do this, it's all written out for you and everything. You can actually go to www.DreamDropShipping.com, DreamDropShipping.com and you'll get my Amazon drop ship supplier checklist. It's three steps to quickly finding profitable Amazon product suppliers.

The cool thing too, is you can use them with Amazon, you can use them with Ebay, I do both. It's very, very easy. It takes you through this entire … it goes step by step in text format through this entire process. Super easy to do, gives you a little written manual on how to do that. It's really, it's like three pages guys. It's so cool. I prepared this for you because this is probably the biggest thing, the biggest hurdle that a lot of people have is finding suppliers when they want to move from retail arbitrage, or if they've never started an Amazon business at all. They don't know how to find these suppliers. Don't go with Wholesale Directory guys, don't go with supplier lists because then everyone's going to have those particular suppliers.

This method makes it so easy, and helps you to find unique products that nobody else is selling. My guys use this everyday, I get about two or three, maybe even four application, dealer applications to sign from my staff doing this. I made it as quick and simple as possible. Three steps to quickly finding profitable amazing product suppliers. Go to DreamDropShipping.com to get that free checklist. Hopefully you'll start getting into the wholesale selling on Amazon, and Ebay guys.

I can't tell you how much better it is when you have suppliers. Here's one, this is something that I just sold just recently. It hasn't even shipped yet. This is something that I never have to source again. I don't have to go out and source, this happens over, and over, and over again. This is something I drop ship, I didn't even have to pay for it up front. It works guys. Find suppliers, whether it's wholesale or wholesale drop shipping. It's the best thing you can do for your Amazon business, best thing you can do for your Ebay business. It makes things so much easier, and I just highly recommend it.

If you like what you see, subscribe. If you like the video, don't forget to give it a like. As well as if you have any questions, please leave your questions in the comments. I will get back to you as quickly as feasible, and answer your question. I might even do another video, I might do a video on whatever your question is, if it's a really good question. That being said, take care guys. Appreciate you, go checkout the checklist at DreamDropShipping.com and we'll catch you later.

 

Zapier Amazon FBA / MFN Seller Central Tutorial Part 1: Track Sales with Slack for Your Team

by

Transcript Below:

Dean Soto:
Hey online Empire Academy. This is Dean Soto, the founder of the online Empire Academy and I wanted to welcome you to this part one of how to use Zapier with Amazon Seller Central series, part one of the series. I wanted to do this because one of the main problems that you’ll find, especially if your merchant fulfilled seller, you don’t have to be a merchant fulfilled seller to use a lot of this stuff but one of the problems you’ll find is that there really is no integration with Zapier or other programs like “If this, then that” with Amazon Seller Central.

One of the problems is, especially if you're drop shipping like me, if you're drop shipping on Amazon like I do, you will find that it is a little bit of an annoyance because you need to be able to communicate with your staff. I'm going to show you in this how I communicate via Slack and Asana automatically when there is a new order or when there’s really anything that I want a new customer inquiry or anything like that, how I communicate automatically with my staff to let them know that they need to do something at some point in time.

It’s a little bit of a workaround, but at least you get some automation and it helps out a lot. So this is my Slack, Slack team right here, my Slack channel and as you can see there is an Amazon order bot right here that says, “Hey, there's an order, and here's the order number etc. It's awaiting shipping. Hey, can you go and assign it to yourself.” I also have a customer inquiry bot. I have a couple different things that I created all using Zapier so when you're a merchant fulfilled seller this is extremely, extremely important.

The cool thing is, and I'll probably show you later in other series, even if you’re an Amazon [FDA 00:02:04] seller, you can use this to track your sales, to send sales numbers, etc. over to a spreadsheet where you can then calculate so that you don’t have to spend money on a whole other service. You can do a whole bunch of stuff, but I have this doing tracking orders. I have it going to Asana, etc.

Here’s my Asana right here. It actually creates a new task and then my guys are able to task themselves with that so pretty cool. I love it. It works really, really well and I'm going to show you how I do it. I'm going to show you the simple way in this particular video and in the next video I'll show you the more advanced way. I'll kind of hint at the advanced way.

Let's go into Zapier right now. This is my Zapier. Easy way to do this is you can have the lowest plan, it depends on whatever you need. I personally have the business plan because I use it so much. I'm about 34 zaps right now. Some of those I can actually get rid of but yeah, like I said, there is … if you search for Amazon, boom, boom, boom. Amazon, there is no Amazon, at least at this particular point in time there’s no Amazon [MWS 00:03:19] like as far as being able to do your Amazon Seller Central which kind of sucks.

I’m sure at some point in time they will but right now they don’t so what we need to do is we got to make a Zap. We got to make a Zap. All right, so the first step is choosing the right name. Let's say, dude, this is going to be Amazon, let's say, “Amazon order.” We'll just say, “Amazon order to Slack and Asana.” We'll just say that for now, okay?

Let’s find the first, let's find the app that we're going to want to use. Okay, there’s two ways to do this. One is the email parser which is much more advanced. I'm not going to show you in this particular video but this actually lets you pull data out of emails that come in and you're going to need that because guess what? When you make a sale, that’s where you are going to get your data from, is from this Amazon Seller Central sending you an email so that’s one way to do it.

The other way to do it is through the, just using Gmail. If you use Gmail, I don't know if they have the Yahoo on here. Nope. No Yahoo. No Hotmail? No Hotmail, so hopefully you're using a Gmail account. If you don’t have one, you probably want to set one up but let’s use Gmail. Allright, now, it's going to ask us to actually choose a trigger. Here we are going to do a new email matching search, new email matching search and we're actually going to create a search in just a little bit so let’s do save and continue .

Then we're going to choose your Gmail account and then save and continue. Now we're going to enter the search string. Easy way to do this. Okay, so here I am in my email. Now what we're going to do is we are going to click this. There's a little arrow right here where it says, “Show search options,” we're going to click that. We're going to do “from” this is going to be seller “Seller–notification@Amazon.com.”

Now we are going to have, we're going to make it to where it says, has the words quote “sold,” comma, space, “ship now,” quote. Now, I’m also going to do one more thing in here. I'm going to do, “Doesn’t have,” quote “listing created.” We'll search that. Okay so now I have everything that I need right here. All right, so now we have our search right now. This is the search that we can use.

We're going to actually copy this right here and then we are going to go to Zapier. Do the search string like that, pop that in there, should be all good. Get rid of any spaces or anything like that that's there. Click “continue”. All right, [“fetch 00:06:58] and continue”. All right, test is successful. All right, so now we hit the continue button. We're going to do the actual action and you can do this with Asana, you can do this with Slack.

I'm just going to show you how to do this with Slack but you can generally do it with … I mean, you can do it with anything. I'm just going to show you how I do it with Slack because I have a little test thing set up for it anyway. All right so what we're going to do, with Slack I'm going to actually use a private channel because I have a private channel set up and I'm going to click this “send private channel message” and save and continue.

I have my Slack account, continue. Now the channel, need to go find the channel I had tested. Sandbox, right here and I'm going to just say … So now we can do this message text right here. Say this is a new order. “This is a test new order alert.” I'm going to say, “Please assign this new order to yourself.” Do colon, and click this right here. If you click this button right here, it’ll give you all of the things that you can use for … to actually send.

In this particular case, I'm going to actually use the subject right here. Click that. Okay, so I use that for the subject and right here where it says, “Send as bought,” I do “yes” because I want people to know that this is automatic. Then right here “bought name”, we'll just call it “Amazon test order bought”. You can say, you actually use, if you click this button on anything, it'll use the fields from the previous, the actual trigger and you could even use the fields from the prior action as well if you have multiple, you can actually chain a bunch of different Zapier zaps together.

Then you can do an emoji of choice. I think … If you go to this sheet, cheat sheet of emojis, it will have a link there for that. Let's just use this kissy face, we'll do these heart eyes right there. You click on it, it will copy. It's all loaded and stuff. Click on it. It will say copied and we go back here. Paste that heart eyes. We're good and then …

Oh yeah. This is the other cool thing, with Slack at least, you can do the send @mentions notifications so if you wanted to mention the entire channel you can say, “@channel” like that and it will actually pop up, it will actually notify everybody in that particular channel. I'm going to click “continue” and I'm going to scroll down and create and continue.

Boom. You see right here, new message in test sandbox. If I click into there, there it is right there. This is a new ord- … test new order alert. We have our heart face right there, pretty neat. “Test order alert, please assign this new order to yourself @channel sold, ship now.” It tells what it is, yada, yada, yada. Pretty cool.

That is the easy way to do this. You can, for notifications and things like that. There are, like I said, there is the harder way to do it which would be with the parser which I might do in a later video, which I will do in a later video but hopefully this helps. This helps me to let my guys know, helps me to let my guys know that there is something out there. Plus, I actually just go on, I added, click right here and I add Asana as well and you can actually create a task, etc. etc. and just do the same thing. You can actually create an actual task based off of that and even assign it to specific people if it comes in.

That’s how you get around the fact that there is no Zapier or If This, Then That connection between Seller Central … between Zapier your Seller Central and this really helps out a lot when you are a merchant fulfilled seller especially if you're drop shipping. If you want to find more really cool tips, go and head over to www.theonlineEmpireAcademy.com. Sign up for the newsletter.

As soon as you sign up you get some, right now it’s about four free goodies. Definitely go and check those goodies out in your email right when you sign up, it'll be sent to your email. Get free goodies, a hundred and something page e-book, you get access to my outsourcing course on [inaudible 00:12:33] which is a $200 value and a couple of other awesome, awesome stuff so go and check out that.

Sign up at www.theonlineEmpireAcademy.com. Last but not least, what we're going to do is click this. Zap is on. Actually, I have to do the … If I didn’t do this Asana thing, let’s get rid of this Asana. Delete, boom. Zap is on and we're good, okay? We actually turn it off because I don’t need it but if you like this and you want more, subscribe as well as going, you can go to www.theonlineEmpireAcademy.com and get your free goodies. We have a lot of really cool stuff coming out and I think you're going to love it. All right, have a great one, Academy, and we will see you next time on The Online Empire Academy youTube channel.

 

Keyword Inspector Trends Tool Tutorial Quick Start

by

Transcript below:
Hey guys, it's Dean Soto with The Online Empire Academy. Want to do a quick start tutorial for the Keyword Inspector trends tool. This is a tool that when you first start using it you either think that it's the most amazing tool ever or you are like, what the heck is this? This is just a bunch of weird data and I don't even know what to do with it. I wanted to do just a quick start tutorial, something that would very easily, that you can use right off the bat. The way that I use it, I don't like spending a lot of time doing a lot of research, it's just not the way I am, so I thought that this would be perfect for anyone who just wants to know how to use the tool and not only that, how to use it effectively and quickly. You're going to get a nice little sneak peek at this is what the new user interface looks like. It is still in beta right now, but maybe months after this video is made this will not the beta, this will be the full version, but it looks pretty dang awesome.

In the last video we went over the reverse ASIN keyword tool and now we're going to do the keyword trends tool. Let's do this, let's click this search right here next to keyword trends. All right, so this is the keyword trends tool, the Amazon keyword trends tool from Keyword Inspector. It's absolutely awesome, as I had mentioned before. There is a couple of things that you're going to note in here. One, you have these three things up here, sorry, these four things, but I focus on this. It does have a UK tool add-on if you're in the UK. You have today's new top keywords, this week's top keywords and top trending keywords for this week, okay?

These are newest keywords. This one is the trending keywords for the week, top trending keywords for the week. You can click any one of those and it's going to give you all those things. It's a conglomeration of stuff, it's just a whole smorgasbord of stuff. I don't generally use it. Every now and then I do. You might get some good ideas in there and we can do that at the very end, but I'm not going to do it in this thing.

Second thing you're going to notice if you start scrolling down, there is a lot of stuff. There's everything from using exact match keywords to broad match keywords to the seven day average, thirty day average, things like that. One thing that I like using when I am doing drop shipping, because price isn't really that big of a deal, there is a section here, average price for products on first page, so not only will it give you the keywords, but based off of the keywords it will also give you the average price of all of the products that are on there. If you want something that's over two hundred dollars generally then you can put two hundred here and it would give you the key words that really only have products that are average over two hundred dollars on the first page. Pretty cool. It's actually really, really cool when you use that.

You can do sales per day, different categories, things like that, but guess what, this is a quick start guide, I'm going to show you how to use this quickly. Okay, so now, I drop shop on Amazon, I also do some different merch by Amazon type stuff, and so this is where it really shines. If you're doing wholesale, you don't have to drop ship, I've been drop shipping for a year plus and I love it, but it's generally the same thing as wholesale, so if you're doing wholesale or maybe you're doing merch by Amazon or maybe you're doing some kind of creative thing, this is where it really, really, really, in my opinion, shines. You can use it for a ton of other things, but this is what I use it for, this is where I know that it actually has an amazing benefit.

What I want to do here is, I'll show you how to use it for merch, I'll show you how to use it for wholesale as well. Easy way to do this, because remember, when we're doing wholesale, when we're doing merch, those two things, generally we're looking for niche ideas because then we can go contact vendors or dealers and things like that. We're looking for more of the idea than we are a specific product. When you're using something like, say, another tool that's more of a product research tool, then you are going to end up getting specific products rather than necessarily an idea.

I want to use this with an idea, so let's start with more of the merch by Amazon type stuff, and then we'll go into more how to use it with wholesale. All right, so let's just do the funny niche, okay? I usually like to use this keyword list broad match, funny nursing, funny doctor, funny gardener, or funny gardening. How about funny … What else is there? Sewing. Things like that. Just a couple of things that kind of give a whole broad range of ideas. Now, what am I going to select for all these things down here? What am I going to select for all of these? Nothing. I'm not even going to touch them, because I just want the idea. I'm going to click this search Amazon.com keywords, and sometimes it takes a while so I'm actually going to pause the video and then we'll start up again.

Okay, it finished. Awesome. Just so you know, the UI on this is still kind of beta-ish, so it's going to be weird going through this, but it does have a cool little floating column thing now, which, gosh it's hard on the other UI. Anyway, now look at what we've got here. We have what Keyword Inspector's trends tool feels is the best rank. You have your keyword, you have your current volume, current monthly volume, Amazon results. Amazon results is basically … Well, there it pops up, the number of products that were found when this keyword was searched on Amazon.

First found, when the keyword was first found, which is totally awesome, because, what if you found a keyword yesterday, what if it found a keyword even right here where it says twenty-five days ago, it found a keyword twenty-five days ago, then we don't have as much data to know if this is a seasonal product or if this was … Maybe it could have been a trend, like an actual fashion trend. Think of the Macarena or Gangnam style, not very many people are going to be searching for that anymore, right, but it was huge, those things were huge when they were around. Just because it's a trend now doesn't mean it's going to be a trend later. In fact, it becomes very embarrassing later for the most part, and so most people are not going to buy it. If we find something here, see these graphs right here, and we see that it was first found three hundred and sixty days ago or seven hundred and nineteen days ago, we know, “Okay, this term is a long evergreen term.”

We just have a lot of different data here. Pricing data, average sales rank for first page which tells you how fast it's going generally, those things, and just a ton of data. Sometimes it's overwhelming, sometimes it's not. For me, I like to go with just a current search volume data, so this is volume per month. Right now these aren't very high. I would probably take this with a grain of salt, just because nobody really knows for sure what the actual data is. I've had things where other tools have said that it has very low search and then Keyword Inspector agrees with them and says it has very low search, but then I go run sponsored ads and there's a lot of searching for it, and likewise vice versa with that.

Let's look at this one right here, ‘nurse shirts funny for women'. Now, with the new UI it only has this search on Amazon, but with the older AI you can actually search … This will be on the newer UI as well, you can actually search for Amazon merch only shirts, which is cool, as well as Google trends. Those will show up, and I'll show you how to do that. It's a cool little thing you do. We can click this search on Amazon to see what's actually on there. We see a whole bunch of different nurses' shirts, right? The thing to note is ‘nurse shirts funny for women'. Nobody's really going for that term that I can see. ‘Nurse t-shirt funny profession', ‘nursing requirements', ‘cute enough', but no one's really going for that particular shirt. You look at all these, there's not too many. In fact, there's not even too many, really it looks like the only merch shirt that comes up for this is this one right here. This looks like an Amazon merch shirt. ‘I am a nurse t-shirt funny profession t-shirt.'

Okay, so really no one's going after this specific term. I can then go and say, “Okay, well I'm going to create this nurse t-shirt and go after that specific term.” Hopefully I'd be able to rank off of that, whether it's a t-shirt that I am selling on merch or somehow I'm selling physically as well. Same thing, ‘funny ties for doctors', let's click this Amazon thing. We see right here that this has a nice steady search volume, pretty cool. Click into there. ‘Funny ties for doctors'. You see, kind of cool, because nobody is really going for that term here. Five hundred and two searches per month. I mean, that's not a lot of searches, I mean, it's not, but let's see, if we go look here, it's a steady stream, it's not going that big of a trend anywhere, so it's kind of a steady stream there, but nobody's really going that, ‘funny ties for doctors'. In fact, the first thing that comes up is ‘bow ties are cool', this t-shirt, which tells me there's really nobody going for that particular keyword, so that's pretty cool.

Yeah, you can use this, you can use this as like a keyword research tool to design clothes, things like that, different merchandise, and so on. It's pretty darn cool to do it that way. Let me tell you how to do it with wholesale, okay? I'm going to go back to the keywords trends tool and the UI's going to mess up because it's still in beta and go back to the beginning. Click search. All right. Now, it's a little bit different with wholesale, because I want to do more ideas, okay? Let me think of how I want to do this. Wholesale might be, let's see, generators, and I'm coming at it from a drop ship wholesale generator because price isn't really that big of an issue when you're drop shipping. Say, generator, or how about ‘magic kit musical instrument', let's do that. Or how about, let's think of one more, how about ‘billiard'. Let's do ‘billiard' like that, because the reason why I keep it general like that is because it's going to give me more potential search words which means more potential niches.

Now, for me, as a drop shipper I would probably go and do a higher priced thing so I can say, price for products on the first page minimum of two hundred or whatever. Let's just keep it this way. I'm not going to change any of this other stuff, because I want to see all of the different potential search terms, okay? I click on search Amazon.com. I'm going to pause it and start it up when it's all done. Okay, it's all done. Now what we got here? We have generator, look at the current search volume, much higher than what we were searching for with the nursing and doctor stuff, seven hundred and sixty-eight thousand. We have things like generators and invertors, generators and invertors here, seven hundred and forty-five thousand here.

Look, it first found keyword suggestions in one days. When I see that it's the first keyword that was found, it was like one day ago or two days ago or seven days ago I don't trust this, I don't trust the search volume. I want to have something that's been steady like this, okay. I actually personally don't know what the algorithm does in itself, that's James the developer, the genius behind it, he knows how, but I don't trust that particular thing. Let's look at this invertor generator, it's been around for seven hundred and sixty days. Obviously that's going to be more expensive, average price is around seven hundred and sixty-nine. I'm going to click onto here, right, invertor, generator, I do see a lot of sponsored ads here so I might not go for this particular thing. At least I had an idea of maybe going after and finding a dealer or a supplier for this, but there's a lot of sponsored ads for that invertor generator.

You're going to get a lot of brand names, but you just have to go through them and look through this. Right here, one day's best seller is in musical instruments, I highly doubt that that's two hundred and thirty-five thousand. Portable generator cables, even though it says one day I would think that that actually would come up. I don't see a lot of sponsored ads. The first portable generator cable right here is right, but then you have a generator, you have a bunch of things that are not very relevant, so I would actually probably go and see if I can get my hands as a wholesaler on some generator cables like this. Yes, you have a good amount of competition but nobody's really doing sponsored ads or anything like that. Nobody has portable generator cables in here. Let me see how many came up for this. As far as Amazon results, one thousand seven hundred and fifty-three, because that's going to be broad match. It's not going to have all those averages there.

Here, this is just a hunch for me that this, I don't think it's going to be two hundred and twenty-three thousand, but I think it will be high and it's priced right, if this from a wholesale, if you're able to get this at fifty to sixty percent off, which with cables you probably could get that depending on where you are getting them from. That would be a nice little thing to wholesale there, you know. You might even be able to get them for less, because I can't imagine that these are going to be a high cost of goods, but generally I never would have come up with cables. Generators, I would have, but the cables themselves, it doesn't look like there are a lot of competition here.

This is how you can see how powerful the trends tool is. It's giving you all these awesome ideas, like a general keyword research tool, but at the same time you're able to have all these different ways of looking and seeing, is this going to be a trend or is this going to not. If I went down and I look, I see some ozone generator. Ozone generator, I don't actually know what that is. We see here, now this drop and trend it might be just because Keyword Inspector stopped the algorithm, it's not searching for it or whatever. Let's see, if we click on this ozone generator, I had no idea what that was before, but apparently that's what an ozone generator looks like. Maybe they have ozone generator cables, I don't know, but we can see that that's a steady stream of around a hundred and fifty thousand searches. Pretty cool. Dual field generator. If we look, a PTO generator is probably a brand.

You can see how powerful this can be in getting just amazing ideas off of this and using this for wholesale, using this for things like merch by Amazon and so on. Hopefully that gives you an idea of how to use … This is just a quick start guide, there's so many other things that you can use this for and so many other ways that you can use it, but this is a quick start guide for how to use trends, this is how I use it, I use it as quickly as possible and I trained my guys to use it as quickly as possible. Very, very cool tool, great for product research, great for keyword research, great for any type of merch by Amazon type stuff as well as any other design creative type things like that. It just gives you so much to go off of when doing your niche research. Hopefully that helps. If you have any questions, please let us know. This is Dean Soto with Online Empire Academy for Keyword Inspector. Hope you enjoyed this quick start tutorial on the Amazon keyword trends tool.

 

Amazon Product Ranking and Amazon Keywords Data Analysis

by

 

 

Transcript below:

Josh:
Alrighty, what’s up guys? We’re all here. Super, super excited to be with you. We’re going let people shuffle in just for another minute. Super, super fun. This is going to be a good day. Happy holidays, Merry Christmas to everybody. This is going to be a fantastic webinar and master class rather. Going to get that in the brain.

Dean:
Let’s see who we have real quick.

Josh:
Got double Mikes, what’s up double Mikes? Mike and Mike. Allie, got Allie, Keith, Linda [crosstalk 00:00:34]. I love it, Veronica, Ryan, Matthew, David. Guys, that’s so good. I’m so glad you’re here. Seems like people are starting to pile in. A ton of people here today, so I am very excited and very excited to pick a brain of the master.

Dean:
Sweet. I don’t know if you know that we have James Harbal. Just so you know guys, we had some things come up, we had to change some things up, but we have James Harbal which he outside of actually the people who create the Amazon algorithms, he is probably the only other person I know that understands Amazon like no other. If you want to know how Amazon data works, what’s important data, what’s not, this guy, he is the super genius like Wiley Cayote.

Josh:
I love it.

Dean:
How’s it going Norman, Stuart? Oh, Stuart is in Orange County man.

Josh:
What up Stuart?

Dean:
I’m in Buena Park down here and Josh is over in far-off place called Corona.

Josh:
Corona.

Dean:
[crosstalk 00:02:02] from Minnesota.

Josh:
I’ve heard Minnesota is pretty hot right now. It’s actually hotter in Minnesota than it is Reading from, so crazy day.

James:
It’s been warm, that’s for sure.

Josh:
It’s crazy.

James:
Relatively speaking, I guess.

Josh:
Yeah. So good. Well, you guys if you have not … We're going to get started first off. Thank you so much for being here all those who have not been to master class, you’re in for a treat. Our number one goal for the master classes is that you absolutely suck all the knowledge that you can out of the master. Today, we have on James Harbal. I’m so excited to have you man. Thank you for being willing to come on.

James:
[crosstalk 00:02:47].

Josh:
Absolutely. For those of you who are in right now, I need you to do one thing and one thing only, well actually two things. Number one, I need you to have a notepad and pen out because we are about to take some notes. I know I have mine ready and the information you guys are getting get today will absolutely blow your mind, so get ready for that. Second, if you have questions, do them as soon as you have the questions, just pop them up there. We’re going to be making sure that everybody gets their question answered, everybody that we can in the time that we have, get them answered because this is really about you guys.

I’m going to try to do my best to ask every question I possibly can that comes in my mind but this is where I need your guys’ help because that’s really where you’re going to get the most value out of this. You have free reign in the chat to ask as many questions as you want. This is what we want and what we want from you.

Again, like Dean said, James is the master at Amazon data, and he knows just as much, if not more, than anyone I have ever met. He knows more than anyone that I have ever met about Amazon data. I wanted to ask this question and I asked some questions about just kind of the world of Amazon and how the heck and why the heck we should be selling private label or more of that range of products because it really is an area that we should be getting into in 2016.

It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or if you’re already doing this private label thing, this is where we want to point our direction in in 2016 because this is how you can control your product to the best of your ability. I mean, we’ve talked all about this. We've talked about Amazon getting shut down. We personally know people have gotten shut down, and it has been a huge deal. We want make sure to drive in the point that this is where we’re going to thrive 2016, this is where we’re directed and we want you to be directed in this area, so hope you guys are excited as I am and Jean from Alpharetta Georgia, that’s where I grew up so thank you so much for supporting the local town.

Dean:
Just so you know guys, private label, unique products, wholesale, those are really our strategy for 2016. Just let you know, our team has done over $1.5 million just off of those types of products, unique products, wholesale, private label, things like that. In fact, one of our products alone just by itself on cyber Monday did $150,000 in revenue. We used to actually have Brett and all our team, we used to actually have a team that just did retail arbitrage and so on that went out and did that. The margins, they were not there and they are so fluctuating that it became really, really hard to sustain a team around it. That’s why we want to focus so heavily on in 2016 on these unique products. It doesn’t have to necessarily just be private label products but products that it's going to be hard for your competition to get into and really the only way to understand that and to do that is to understand how Amazon works and how Amazon data works.

There’s so many tools out there, so many other things out there that give you tons of data but we don’t understand the why behind the data, it becomes really hard to that’s why we brought James Harbal. Before we get into it, would you do me a favor, I’m going to pop up a poll really quick. Oh actually-

James:
I put up one.

Dean:
Oh you did, you punk. Let me see if I have my poll. The poll that James put up, you sneaky little Wiley Coyote said, “Do you sell on Amazon?” Some people said no. Okay cool. Private label, about 15% do private label, 15% do wholesale. The rest do retail arbitrage. People who are doing private label and wholesale, you guys are going to get a lot out of this from what you’re already doing and the people are doing retail arbitrage, this is going to help you to bridge that gap. The people if you’re doing private label right now or wholesale or have a unique product …

Josh:
Uh-oh looks like we lost him.

Dean:
That is now on the chat, you like that rather than retail arbitrage? Or would you prefer to go back to doing reselling and things like that?

Josh:
Okay, there we go. We lost you for a second, but it seems like your point was made clear. I actually got the numbers this morning from our private label products. Two of our private label products have done $1 million in the last 15 days, so this is with our teams and it’s down to our rank is 600 in one of the categories in 41,000 units moved over the past, I think it was either a month or 15 days, I’m not sure.

I actually think it might’ve been longer than that. Super, super exciting guys like private label, we’re super excited about we’re already doing it and like Dean said, we had teams doing retail arbitrage but there’s only so much you can do with that and we really are pushing towards that. Before we hop into it because James, I got questions up the Wazoo for you man. I am so excited about this, to learn more because like you guys, I’m learning and that’s the advantage that I have is I’m still learning this process and learning how to do it.

We talked to James and for your Christmas present for all who have attended, we have an amazing Christmas present for you guys. You can enjoy a free Christmas gift, a Keyword Inspector for the next seven days, it’s Keyword Inspector and KIPRT. If you have not gone and looked at those, absolutely incredible, absolutely wonderful, wonderful, wonderful apps and will change the game forever in how you do this. If you guys want that, the link is up there, totally free. It’s free for seven days I should say. For seven days, you guys gets unlimited searches. Correct?

Dean:
Yeah. Just so you know, no it’s not unlimited searches, but there is a free trial to be able to …

James:
But KIPRT, you can do unlimited like if you’re searching for a product like you can do unlimited searches, but not the keyword tool, we'll go through that.

Dean:
Yeah, and it’s not a big deal. The big thing is that I don’t think, I don’t know of any other place, any other deal where you can get keyword inspector for that free trial, that way, you kind of had to pry that out of your hands.

James:
Yeah, I like to keep it close to the chest.

Dean:
Your cold, dead hands Wiley Coyote. So yeah guys, enjoy that. If you get it, you can very quickly cancel whatever and just try it out, it’s really cool. We’re going to talk about some data stuff which we'll pertain to this to actually make it a lot more useful after this webinar. James, we’re going to be hammering you with some data questions okay. Go ahead Josh if you want to take it.

Josh:
Totally. Obviously, Amazon, a lot of is Amazon is data focused, it’s where we’re getting information from. Why do we need to and it’s a loaded question because we have a lot more based on this, but why the heck do we need to know the data on Amazon?

James:
Well, it’s a search engine. That’s what Amazon is and in order to be found on that search engine, you need to kind of know how it works. To know how it works, you need a lot of data due to proprietary, everything is proprietary on their side so you have to kind of can figure it out mainly through algorithms and stuff. You don’t have to have algorithms and stuff. You can figure out a lot of it out on your own but it’s a huge beast and lots of moving parts and you just got to kind of dive into it I guess.

Josh:
Okay. For the people who just kind of throw products out there, they're like, oh yeah, that barcode works great and they just throw products up there. What are they missing out? Why is it important to look at the data on let’s say there’s three different titanic DVD sets and they just throw it on the one that’s making the most money. Why is it important to look at the different sets to understand which one is the best or the real listing?

James:
You need to be on the real listing because Amazon tries to keep one product to one listing. They don’t like to have multiples for the same exact product. People get away with it for a while, but then, it gets taken down, merged and all that. You definitely need to do your due diligence when you’re in retail … I did retail arbitrage for a while. They definitely have to … We have to kind of figure out which ones, the real listing … In order to do that, there’s a few things you can look at like number of use, how many sellers are on there, you can look up price history like on camelcamelcamel real quick to see how that’s all working.

Usually, when you just scan a barcode, it’ll bring up the right product. For the most part here, it’s pretty simple to do but I’m sure a lot of you retail arbitrageurs know that. If you’re throwing up a private label or a product like that, you don’t have to worry about that I guess but you need to know if that product is going to sell, so that’s where you really need to dig in the data.

Josh:
That’s kind of the perfect question then, is you said kind of the difference between retail arbitrage and then going into private label, why is there importance between products that are private label and then arbitrage? Why should we view, in your opinion, why should we do a private label rather than arbitrage because arbitrage I can go get it at Walmart right now but sometimes private label, I’ve got to wait.

James:
Yeah, they definitely need more patience with private label stuff, but in the long run, it’s going to make you more money. That’s kind of the goal usually, retail arbitrage is a lot more work. I know I did it for a while there like I said. It just was a lot of work at home labeling, and boxing, and shipping, and stuff. Private label, I basically haven’t touched any of my products that are on Amazon for almost a year now. I haven’t had to like touch any of it just using other people to do my dirty work and I'm just sitting back and basically I’ve been so bored that I had to create this keyword inspector tool to kind of keep myself busy.

Josh:
How are you doing, how are you finding products like okay you’re using retail arbitrage, how are you optimizing your listings or obviously we talked a little bit about finding the best listing and finding the correct listings what are the ways that you are focusing your attention if you are at retail arbitrage, how are you without … I got to focus on this question because it’s without things like camelcamelcamel, without any other things, how are you figuring out that a product is ranking well, that a product is going to sell well throughout the year. How are you figuring it out without any apps?

James:
I used the apps, I guess. If you’re not using them, you should be, but the way I do things that I guess is probably different from a lot of people is I try to find those niches that are really are being underserved on Amazon. Usually, I know them just because I’m kind of in the niche, I kind of track it just because it’s like a hobby for me type of niche so I try to stick to those types where I know I’m kind of nerd/geek so [inaudible 00:16:11] types of products and done well in them but that’s one thing you need to kind of know the niche.

Don’t just get into something. You can just get into something or make money with it if you define that goal the nugget but [inaudible 00:16:27] if you’re not good at marketing or something, then you probably do want to do that, get a niche you know so you have that one up on marketing twice, you know the demographics but as far as finding a product so I like to look … What I used to do is we look at online sites that I track by Stephan like thinkgeek.com. I go on there. I get emails from them. That’s an example where I sent out an email about a new product they have and you can just go on their page.

It has Facebook likes on it that has a couple thousand already, then you know it’s a good product. You can source something like that. That’s what I used to do. I don’t do that really anymore because ThinkGeek is kind of against the whole retail arbitrage thing but I follow Kickstarter.

You can find accessories for Kickstarter products. That’s kind of how one of my private label products came into like just, it was a Kickstarter product and I found a good accessory for it that they were selling too but it was more expenses so I just kind of undercut them a little bit. They weren’t on Amazon at all so I got up on Amazon and sold most of it this Christmas so I’m doing well on that, but as far as other tools stuff I’ve been kind of building my own tools to make those listings the way they're supposed to be and those product niches that are kind of underserved I guess not as high competition.

Josh:
I like what you’re saying just about using different sites to your advantage. I don’t know that I thought about I mean, I’ll search things on Amazon obviously you can see which ones are top ranked. If you guys don’t know that, you can search what items are hot right now. It’s an easy search but I love that you use different websites almost against themselves.

They’re promoting this new product, I can go grab that and sell it. I mean it’s the online arbitrage way but it kind of takes to that step further and then you’re digging in a little bit deeper and saying oh it’s almost looking on different channels of like oh it’s on this website but it’s getting 1000 likes on Facebook. I know it’s going to be hot. I think that that’s a fantastic way to do that and a fantastic way to look into it. This kind of leads into the next question is why are customers buying certain products and not others.

James:
Visibility, I guess could be the major thing you need to worry about is can you be found on Amazon or if you have your own e-commerce site, can you be found on Google type of thing, that’s the big what if I guess or can you get found on Amazon if you put up your own product or probably listing or if it’s just retail product, arbitrage product. That’s the big ideas to try to be found in Amazon.

Josh:
Totally. What about like I mean you’ve researched, you have thousands and thousands and thousands of gigabytes and a bunch of terabytes of information based on why people or what they’re buying and your backlogs of it. What are you finding in all of this information of like why are people attracted to certain products and not other products?

James:
I don’t know, I guess I really analyzed it in that specific way as far as I mean, I have the data to do it but I can’t, I haven’t really gotten into it that deep yet. I got a lot of stuff I could still do with all the data I have but I’m just trying to figure it all out.

Dean:
I think there’s a better way of asking it is look, I can go to … This is what I hear all the time when people are trying to do unique products or private label products, I can just go to the bestseller list, this one has great reviews, I can go to Amazon find the bestseller, amazing sales rank, sales rank is great, therefore, it’s going to be a good product right.

James:
Everyone does that.

Dean:
Why doesn’t that work?

James:
Because everyone is doing it and so the market gets flooded right away, that’s the easy pickings. You can make some money through it quick if you can get into it fast enough but I’m trying to bring that kind of data to light here pretty quick, but yeah, if you can get into it real quick, you’re going to be on top of things, you kind of get it on there as fast as possible, do what you got to do like I had a product where I saw it on Dr. Oz. I’m like I got to get that on Amazon because it was really underserved.

I just got it shipped to my house and I packaged it, labeled it. I brought a printer to print out labels. It's sitting on my desk here, not doing anything anymore because I have it all outsourced now from Canada the main product, got the jars and packed it myself, got it sent to Amazon because I did MF, I merchant fulfilled for a while there just because I wanted to get it signed right away.

It did sell it right away but after a while, you got into FBA. After a while, it sold really good really well. I made some money out of it, I’m still making a little bit of money but just people starting to see that and flooded in just like all the products so you got to kind of be on top of the curve in order to get that rank. It’s all about being number one on Amazon as far as your keywords, knowing which keywords to be on. The sooner you get in there, the better your rank stick I guess is the way to put it.

Dean:
Let’s kind of start before we talk into the tool that you developed and the things that you created. We use like literally, someone’s dying back there, it’s one of my kids, sorry. You actually created tools that our business absolutely depend on. We would not be making the money we make right now without your tools at all. You flew out, you’ve talked to Brett. You've seen our operation and everything like that and it’s completely dependent on you James, that’s why I love you, you need anything, just let me know.

James:
I got to take a couple months’ vacation … Can I …

Dean:
Hop on down here anytime. Let’s kind of go into the different data points so I want to talk about … that’s on rank, I want to talk about reviews, I want to talk about promotions, I want to talk about any type of estimated sales, estimated volume, things like that. Starting with sales rank, how is that important building like a portfolio of products or building a product. Is it something that you need to worry about like right now as you’re trying to build a private label product or a unique product?

James:
As far as having a certain sales rank

Dean:
Not your product, not your own-

James:
Yeah. It depends on the category of course. Different categories have different sales volumes for certain specific DSR sales rank. It’s important just so … When you’re looking at Amazon, you’re just seeing that one hour’s data point basically. Every time you look, it’s just how many things have been sold over the past approximately over the past day for the most part and maybe a little bit of the week. That’s all kind of in their equation to create that VSR. It’s important so you kind of have an idea as to how many are selling to kind of add them all up. All the products are the same and see that there’s kind room in there for you.

Dean:
If I were looking at say a product, I’m doing my research and I see a product that sales rank is like just through the roof and I go and say it's 500 in toys or something like that. I’m like, “Hey I want to private label that product or create a unique bundle or something like that with that product because it’s that day, it doesn’t necessarily, it’s not an indicator that it’s always been 500. It doesn't mean that's a bestseller overtime. It could be that they ran a promotion or something like that where they just sold a bunch of them at like two dollars a piece or something like that.

James:
You have to be mindful of that. You have to do it manually. You have to pretty much watch it over time to see how it goes up and down, ebbs and flows to kind of get a gauge on the average of the sales rank just so you know it’s not like a fluke.

Dean:
How about what about … When you’re looking at like a bestseller, I mean really it’s just an indicator as kind of that snapshot in time. When you have your product, your goal shouldn’t be to necessarily get a lower sales rank immediately. It’s not going to do anything via promotions or anything like that for you in general, but your goals should be again as consistently low sales rank like what’s the importance for I guess your own product or your own unique bundle. Is there any importance? Does it even matter? In my mind, it doesn’t seem like it’s that important.

James:
Yeah, sales rank is like it doesn’t cause your products to be found. It’s just I guess the symptom of it so the more you sell, the better your sales rank. Sales rank doesn't really have an effect on your keyword. The sales rank is just indicator of how well you’re doing. You can’t really think of it any more than that I guess.

Dean:
Okay, okay cool so how about reviews? I'm creating my private label product. If I get 100 five-star reviews whether I promoted them are not with a coupon or whatever, I’m going to sell a ton from then on.

James:
Reviews these days, that kind of used to be a couple years ago, but nowadays reviews, they're not as important. You still need a few at least to kind of get started to kind of have that social proof. I guess it depends on the niche. If you’re going to try it again, the niche with most products having thousands of reviews, you’re probably going to need hundred tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousand dollars to get into it to actually beat out those guys or even just carve out a little bit of piece of pie for yourself.

I think Amazon is probably looking at it more and more as trying to weed out the ones that are trying to gain that review system. They’re not taking into account as much anymore. It’s not as important. If you get a few, that’s good. Try to keep getting them through emails is really important just to kind of keep adding more and more per day.

Dean:
It’s more of like a social proof conversion type thing especially [inaudible 00:29:29] or the answer something like that.

James:
Reviews are good for keywords if you can get, try to manipulate the people that buy your products with the emails, try to get them to put in keywords into their reviews. Supposedly I don’t have any hard data on that but I got so much data, I don’t have review data right now but someday, I’ll start … But supposedly, reviews are an indicator to Amazon’s algorithm that your product is relevant to what our keywords are in that review.

Dean:
That’s interesting. It kind of reminds me of how Google, the old search engines used to just look at the keywords on page and then Google was pretty much the first one to look at the off page keywords linking to your site as relevancy so the reviews are kind of independent people using those keywords. It says, “Hey I’ll put more of a weight on it.”

James:
It might be the things that I've seen from people saying that reviews count for keywords might be like an after effect of having those reviews with the keywords. I mean, what I’m saying is like you said Google, they scrape Amazon, your product with those reviews on it then they rank you on their search engine and then if somebody clicks through Amazon from Google, you might get keyword thing because Google thinks it’s relevant so then Amazon probably gets the keyword via that link click.

Dean:
Yet it’s actually interesting. I never even thought that because they can see generally, they’ll be able to see what keyword was used to come to that page. That’s pretty cool.

James:
[crosstalk 00:31:29] after …

Dean:
You guys you heard this first, this is something that I’ve actually never heard before, it makes sense. This is the beauty of these master classes also you’re sitting with someone who is a master in this field. That was actually pretty …

James:
I can’t sleep sometimes, I’m thinking so much.

Dean:
I can’t think sometimes, I’m sleeping so much. Cool, so what about promotions. A lot of people are like, “Hey, we need to run promotions.” We’re going to make it. It’s good to be awesome because will get 1000 people buying and then or rank number one.

James:
Well, Amazon has kind of put the kibosh on that too these days as far as giving away dollar products, their algorithm takes that out of the equation these days as far as like discounted products. I haven’t really done a lot of promotions lately, I’ve been kind of focusing on my tools and stuff so I’m not really up on the latest and greatest. It seems that promotion aren’t as … Discounts and stuff aren’t as a big of a deal as far as trying to rank and stuff but if you can get a ton of traffic with a full price sale somehow via Google Adword or Facebook ads or whatever and try to speed space out those sales for over a week or so, try to build up the sales over that timeframe that the Amazon really likes what they see, with that kind of thing.

Josh:
Something that I’ve kind of wondered myself is a I see ads on Facebook all the time for certain products and stuff. As a seller, is it important to do those kinds of things? Do Google ads or Facebook ads, do you really think it shifts things that much for you?

James:
Yeah, some of the gurus … If you’re into that kind of stuff, if you’re comfortable with it then go right ahead because it definitely will help with your ranking on Amazon, your organic ranking, so yeah go ahead but if you’re not comfortable with that kind of stuff, I’m not very comfortable with that kind of stuff so I don’t really do … I tried to find those products that will do well on Amazon without requiring all that but then it’s more of a long-term play far as getting ranked on Amazon stuff so you had to kind of play by ear as far as what you need to do. It usually depends on the niche. If you’re getting into a highly competitive niche, you’re going to probably need those Amazon ads and stuff to help with your rank.

Dean:
Cool, that’s great. Let’s kind of get into more of the stuff that actually you start kind of needing tools for I mean there are tons of tools out there to find stuff like this. One, how important and how accurate are some of like the estimated search volume. There are tons of tools out there. How do I know via say a listing or a type of product or a particular keyword. Guys, go ahead and keep on asking your questions. Just because we haven’t answered them doesn’t mean we’re not going to.

We’re going to answer them soon. Danny had a really good question as far as finding keywords of your competitors, but how can you start finding … Is this a good market? I know there’s Google keyword planner if you can talk to that and how that relates to Amazon. And then there’s any really kind of a more accurate way of finding keywords and things like that on Amazon for products?

James:
Yeah, there’s lots of tools. Most of them rely on Amazon suggest tool. They also rely on your knowledge. You have to basically seed the keyword or find … It never made sense to me how people find keywords for products. That’s why I built a tool for, but how people do it or how most people do it just because it’s easy and it makes sense to them I guess is that they divine the keyword that they thing is most relevant to that product and most [inaudible 00:36:21] out there with different mentalities, different backgrounds.

They all searched different ways. You’re just 1% of that, those people. Beyond that, you use that keyword that you think you know is right for the product and you search for it so you’re going to find all of these other keywords that have the exact same keyword in there and you’re going to go on from there. You can go to Google keyword planner and find out how people search on Google to find that type of product, but again, Google is a whole different type of search engine. It’s a research engine. It’s not like a to buy engine type of thing where people are typing in buyer keywords like instead of saying what is this, they’re just going to put it … You guys know what that means.

All them tools basically rely on that divine keyword that you kind of popped in your head I guess from whatever you know about the product and you go on your merry way manually, manually finding all these keywords that may or may not work. The volumes that basically is one tool, there used to be one tool. You guys will find out a little bit more about that earlier but the one tool gives you the supposed volume, estimated volumes for Amazon searches. It says I don’t know, it’s merchant word, it says right on their site how they estimate all but it’s kind of like voodoo basically all they do, they grab … Let me kind of look at this again, how we get this data.

They visit pages on Amazon just like Google does and they grab terms from there and they pull the search volume from Google which is inaccurate because people search differently on Google than they do Amazon and with their little algorithm, they kind of put like, they divine basically, they divine the volume. You look on there and a lot of useless [inaudible 00:39:01] have told me they’ve tried to rely on merchant words type of volumes. They kind of lost a lot of money doing that so hope that don't lose you that money too, but yeah, it’s really inaccurate.

They seem to grab keywords from … Beyond that tool so all the tools like they are nice, they give you a list of what you think could be good but they don’t really dive in deep into what is actually, what kind of keywords are actually being used to find those products. They just kind of because they are not based on the products they're based on your divine knowledge of it. I should stop using the word divine.

Josh:
I have a question, I have a question just around that.

James:
I’m kind of running on here, so yeah, go ahead.

Josh:
You’re so good. One of the biggest questions that I have and it goes along with that is how do I find if I’m not using a specific product like keyword inspector, how do I find what keywords are going to work and what aren’t. Genuinely, this is my biggest struggle and it’s something me and Dean have talked about 100 times is focusing on keywords and focusing it on the keywords that are going to work. I go brain-dead as soon as that subject comes up because for those of you who aren’t using something like keyword inspector and in any other app that’s out there, what’s the best way that you know of to do that?

James:
I don’t know. You kind of got me on the loss. That’s why I built a tool is because that’s the best way and as far as I can imagine out of find products is keywords for product is to actually run all the 40 million+ keyword searches and find actual products and reverse … that any other good way of doing it, that would actually net you some real hard, factual data that kind of says that this product is being found via this keyword search type of thing. I have used other tools like SpyFu. It’s kind of a roundabout way of doing it, but I had to basically ingest all the data that could get me from via Amazon, search via Amazon, Earls and kind of backtrack that. That’s, again, you can’t really do that on your own type of thing but you can … I don’t know. I mean, I can’t really do it without my tool, I guess.

Josh:
Totally. It’s good to know because I feel like I’m going crazy so many times trying to figure out if I private label a Frisbee, my keyword is going to be Frisbee. It just makes sense but there may be other things that are going to be way better for Frisbee.

James:
Like I said, there’s 1 million different people and they all search differently. There’s all these broad strokes people where they may be 50% of people search one way and 25% search another but we’ve got all these different people from different backgrounds, different languages. You’re not going to know all this stuff. You can’t figure out how somebody is going to … How somebody that only speaks Spanish how they search on Amazon. I know they’re not always do a lot of search on Amazon but when they do, maybe you can maybe know that niche a little bit but you don’t know the exact words people would use to find something. There’s always these … Everybody else is using the merchant work and stuff, they’re using these divine keywords and basically they're always in the exact same keywords to kind of optimize your listing for but when you do that, you’re all hopping on the same keyword and you're not going to get anywhere that way.

You want to try to diversify your keywords and try to find those that people aren’t finding, your competition are finding and optimize for those to grab all that traffic that nobody else is using. That’s what kind of the tool is about I guess.

Josh:
Totally. That was my next question was okay I’m hopping on for the first time. I’ve been on keyword inspector so I understand it a bit but how does a keyword inspector help me develop the best keyword possible. Let’s use Frisbee for example, how would keyword inspector … Do I just type in keyword inspector, do I type in Frisbee and then it comes up with great keywords that go along with that?

James:
Trying to divine the keywords again with the Frisbee. I’m kind of working on a tool that might help you out that way but right now, it doesn’t work that way. Basically what you’re doing is fine, those products are selling well Frisbees that are on Amazon and you use the product and you kind of reverse the search and with the data that I have on the tool, you find all the keywords that people are using to find a product. Then you know exactly what people are using to search for the product because what we do, what I do, we grab keywords only from Amazon suggest thing and from the related searches that they give you. We grab only those keywords.

We don’t try to divine them from every product listing. You can’t really do it that way because that’s not how it works, I guess, so we just reverse that end give you all the keywords. What I used to do up until today was I had this big algorithm that looked at reviews and categories, PSR’s and a little bit of Google volume thrown in there and this algorithm would sort it, I would tell people basically it’s sorted from like most converting to least converting keyword type of thing.

I already love that but I’ve been working on processing like 2 billion rows of data that haven’t been using yet or the past month and half or so, I finally kind of put together a way to kind of get a better, not like a better but a way to actually put a number to the rank that would make more sense to people. In that way, you can actually be able to tell what’s currently the best keyword to use for a product. You still have to kind of take them. What a lot of people do is use PPC to kind of … Amazon PPC to kind of figure out the ones that are actually getting traffic, so yeah.

Josh:
That’s good. What about search volume? How do I understand, what is a good search volume for this? It's something that’s so new to me. Can you explain search volume and then explain how we can use it to the best of our ability.

James:
Most people know search volume as via like Google. A lot of Google data they give you is their ads impressions type of thing. It’s good for Google but it’s not for Amazon. It’s clearly different search engine. I keep telling people this so volume, it’s an indicator of keywords like of what people are using to search for products. You kind of look at the big picture, there’s kind of this one word keywords that people use to kind of just start their search and then they kind of go on this journey through … There’s probably 50% of people that do that where I just throw that number out there.

They just kind of go through this journey. They start at one small keyword and they kind of figure out, “Hey that looks like a good product. I always kind of search for that type of product with a longer keyword type of thing.” You got a kind of … I only have really a tool that will figure that out for you, not yet at least. You can kind of go from the big volume keywords to kind of go down your niche. Even if it has a low-volume, it might have a high conversion rate so you might want to go for that one instead of the one that everybody all the products in Amazon [inaudible 00:48:40] for, type of thing. You can’t really compete with that because if every product has the word ‘the’ in it, you can’t compete for the keyword ‘the’ , it’s just an example but obviously you’re not the go for ‘the’. I don’t think people would search for ‘the’.

Josh:
That’s a great example. What about KIPRT? I mean we recently did a webinar just about this but for those people who are just getting started with maybe private label or trying to figure out how to better rank their products, why should we use KIPRT?

James:
KIPRT is kind of, it kind of can get you into the niches that nobody else can find I guess. The ones that have the opportunity there so what it does is you can filter a whole … I’ve got basically Amazon products list in my database with all the data behind, the sales ranks like an estimated number of sales on it, reviews and all this data you can kind of sift through and find those products that might be underserved via filters I guess.

Then you can kind of look at history instead of getting that one hour of that snapshot that you would just by going on Amazon and looking at their bestseller list, you got all this data behind it on KIPRT where you can look at it like more in a year’s worth of sales estimates, but like reviews in pricing and stuff you can kind of see how that specific niche just kind of going, how it’s waning or … Going up and down but you kind of get that overall view and you can actually kind of instead of divining, I keep using that word but instead of divining how a product is doing, you can actually see the hard data behind it and actually make a decision, more educated decision based on that. That’s what KIPRT solved I guess.

Josh:
Yeah we have two questions about KIPRT. What does it stand for?

James:
It’s just short for keyword inspectors product research tool KIPRT.

Josh:
Perfect. Perfect, perfect. Okay and then my next question and one of the most important to the people who are listening is sourcing. I know there's reverse sourcing techniques. There's all these things. How are you personally finding private label products and pushing those?

James:
Recently, I’ve been trying to stick with USA stuff based. I kind of shy away from China not because I've lost my earning from them. I’ve got stuff from China, but I try and just go on Google and search private label dot, dot, dot, or even wholesale sometimes dot, dot, dot or keyword, keyword. Just search on Google and find it. What are the main ones that I use?

Josh:
I think the easier question would be how do you know okay so you’ve searched for broad … Before you start searching, you’re probably searching for a unique product or a unique niche that you know is going to sell, how do you know what niche is going to sell or how do you know what product to source that's going to sell.

James:
I don’t know, if you’re just starting out, just try to stick to something you know, otherwise, use KIPRT to kind of filter out, try to find those hidden gems where you’re not really being, there’s one or two people are signing a bunch load of products. They don’t have a lot of reviews, they have really high price. You can undercut them a little bit maybe or they have really bad reviews but they are still selling a lot type of thing or they’re selling not on Amazon and like I said with ThinkGeek, you can tell from that type of thing and just kind of find a bunch of products that you think will sell and then try to source them and try to get them at the right price.

If you can get like a few, just throw them up on Amazon and see what sells, try to get some real data based on actual sales that you made. I know that’s really jumping ahead but you just try to find something to sell and see if it sticks. You can throw a bunch of stuff up on there for cheap. You don’t have to buy a cargo load full of products to make it big. For most [inaudible 00:54:07] you don’t have to, I guess.

Josh:
When your private labeling a product, are you ordering multiple SKUs?

James:
Not right away. I mean, you’re going to start with one SKU. If you could start now you’re just going to throw one SKU, one SKU and one niche maybe throw a bunch of niches if you're kind of like me where you can’t focus on one thing. If you can focus on one thing then yeah, go wide or go deep, that’s kind of up to you that both ways work on Amazon, you just have to kind of know how to market it, I guess. There’s benefits to go in deep as far as having all the same types of products or one that kind of play off each other.

There’s if you want to kind of play Amazon, you got to have kind different niches because sometimes one might get taken off Amazon for whatever reason so at least you have that other product to kind of keep going as long as you don’t get suspended or something it’s just the one product. [inaudible 00:55:28] play Amazon as far as their … You don’t want to do stuff that’s black hatch.

There’s always that little bit of a notion that somebody else could be kind of gunning for you and trying to take you off. I don’t mean to scare people. I mean it doesn’t really happen to me at all but there’s always that kind of diversify on Amazon. That’s kind of the way I do it, I guess.

Josh:
No, it’s good. It’s great advice. I know Dean talked about earlier that we’ve done bundles. Just finding one product on a specific website or whatever we can private label and then bundling it with another and ultimately, that gives us the head up. Then using a keyword inspector to blow that off the top of like using awesome keywords that are combining the two different awesome niches. There’s amazing ways you can do it and just some awesome, awesome, awesome tools with KIPRT and keyword inspector that can end up ranking those products. I mean we have one that’s 600 right now. It’s all thanks to using this specific app. I want make sure to hit as many questions as we can so if you’re ready James, we can hop straight into those.

James:
Yeah, see if I can go down the list here.

Josh:
The first one is will there be a replay? Yes, absolutely there will be. Do you offer a one-to-one mentorship?

James:
I don’t have time for that stuff, but I think we’re working on some kind of thing in the future here, not one to one necessarily but maybe like a mastermind group so that’s kind of in the works, I think. What this keyword search terms, there’s no way possible to get those back end keyword search terms from other listings.

Josh:
Let me read the question, that way people can know. What Danny’s question it says, is it possible to find out what five keyword search terms on Amazon listing that you do not own. I’m not sure totally the question, it sounds like you already understand it, Amazon told me that if it is not your listing, you cannot find out what those five terms are. Will you explain the question a little bit for those who don’t understand like me, sorry guys.

James:
When you’re creating a listing, you got the front end, basically there’s two areas, two major areas of where you put keywords. You got your title and your backend, one that nobody else can see that’s when you’re creating the listing, it’s the search terms. There’s like five fields where you can put whatever you want and nobody else can really see it but you. There’s no way to get that data at all. That just gives you an extra area. Some people say it’s mostly for being relevant to your PPC stuff but it does give relevancy just to any keyword search on Amazon too I believe but there’s the way of doing that. We got that.

Josh:
Raymond, he was answering someone’s question and that is RA is so time-consuming to manage hundreds of SKUs. I totally agree. Working with our teams, it’s when we had our teams going out and doing a bunch of RA. It really was hard to keep track of it and then on top of that, try to keep track in on top of all the different changing, the changing numbers and how much the listings were changing. It ended up being a headache

James:
It’s not scalable yeah.

Josh:
Exactly or [inaudible 00:59:54] BSR is a training indicator. Can you shed light to any of that?

James:
It says the trailing indicator so basically if you look at something right now it gives you like a 600 like you have, that’s kind of telling you that over the past day, it might’ve got 100 sales, over the past hour, it might have got 100 sales. Over the past day, it might’ve got 150 sales. In over the past week, it might have got in total maybe 175. It goes back a little like a window and tie in, the closer that window is to the current time, the more effect it has on the rank. That’s all my equations when I’m calculating sales averages on KIPRT but it kind of goes back in time and kind of follows along. You’re only seeing that little bit in time and mostly what you’re seeing is just the past few hours basically. That’s why you can’t really go off of that solely. You can’t really do that anymore these days. That’s why looking at the bestseller list is kind of a bad idea just because of that.

Josh:
Totally. Merchant words, can you explain that?

James:
Yeah, that’s like the go to keyword tool when you’re kind of divining a keyword. You can just type in a keyword, get supposedly all the keywords that really just have the phrase that you put in there in it. You have to kind of do your own manual searching with that tool and they give you a supposed estimated volume but most people have found it’s not very accurate. That’s can be the old way of doing things.

Josh:
Then Linda, yes, the original plan was to have Ace Inpsector, but we had just different things fell through and we wanted to bring as much value as possible. If you guys have further questions, please let us know but yeah, to that, I apologize again. Question for James, on keyword inspector, when searching a competitor, you get about 500 lines on Excel, how/where do you build these into your listing?

James:
Okay, so keyword inspector has different parts or report. One will just give you a bunch of keywords, no real ranking on them or anything. If you put your own product into there, you can figure out where your keywords are coming from, all your organic, all your traffic is coming from within Amazon but you can also use this other report that will rank it from like I said most converting to least converting.

What you want to do with that list is basically take the top keywords from that list, the one that sorted and you put that, try to get those top ones in your title, in your title and your search term fields, and the backend like we were talking about just a little bit ago. We want to use them, put them in their first and foremost so you got all these other keywords, what do you do with them? You can stick them in your bullet points, those supposedly help you rank for certain things.

I guess starting out usually you don’t really want to stuff everything full 2000 characters and description, 500 characters in each bowl of plate. You don’t want to do that. You want to kind of try and put a few keywords in there and see what happens basically and keep looking at the data as far as like Amazon gives you the session data and stuff kind of see how you’re being found and kind of work from there. It worked from the data you get from Amazon and add the keywords that are seem to be making you money if you can find that, take out the keywords that aren’t really doing anything for you because a little bit of technical on the search engine side. You have kind of not really focusing on one keyword so then Amazon doesn’t make you more relevant for one keyword versus another one.

You kind of want to focus in on a few keywords so that Amazon thinks you're really highly relevant for those keywords so you get ranked better for them starting out type of thing. That’s how most search engines work so the keywords are also good for your PPC. You can use them in your ad words if you want. I don’t really tested it for ad words side but I guess Pinterest people have had luck with using the keywords for Pinterest ads. Now that Pinterest is pretty much opened up everything for business stuff.

Yeah, they’re good for that too so you’re definitely then now we just launched our little volume indicator on the reports like sensitive reports that will give you really a better indicator as which keywords you should probably try to use. You’re probably not going to go for the ones that have a 2 million search volume. You’re going to want to go for the ones that make more sense for your product, longer tailed keywords I guess, the ones with more words in them usually. You want to use them again in your search title, make it relevant, highly relevant for those just a few keywords and go from there.

Josh:
That’s good. Forgive me if you’ve already hit portions of this, but on Amazon, is there anything close to the individual interest and previous purchase history or types of audience that we could be able to generate on Facebook. I think it’s more is there compiled data about specific and please correct me if I’m wrong Frederick, but is there compiled information about individual buyers?

James:
One thing with KIPRT, we have a kind of a reverse search on KIPRT where you do a search so with KIPRT, you could use keywords to find products, basically it searches all the product titles and brings up all those products that are relevant. What we can do is you take all them products that you find with that keyword search and what it’ll do is Amazon gives us the data that gives us the relevant products to all these products, so what I do is reverse it where it gives you all the top relevant products to one product.

From there, you can kind of figure out maybe you want to sell this and this alongside or bundle them together even. You can kind of do that reverse search in KIPRT and figure out maybe products that would kind of work well together because Amazon already deems them relevant or similar to each other. That’s about as far as the kind of data you can get, as far as Facebook, I don’t mess a lot with Facebook so there’s not really much you can do with data from Amazon, Facebook I guess, you kind of figure it out on your own.

Josh:
I think he was just talking about more of the touching on what Amazon or Facebook provides within the specific interest. What is the main way to be selected in the Amazon box so the buy box, what's the best way to rank for that?

James:
Basically. You’re probably talking more about retail arbitrage where you’re kind of competing against other sellers. I haven’t really done a lot with that for the past year or so, so I’m not real up on it. I kind of stay in the groups that talk about retail arbitrage like scan power and stuff. The best way is just try to don’t do the whole price war thing going down to the bottom of the barrel type of thing. Just try to stick to the same price or just a few cents above you, you’re going to get in the … I can't remember what they call it but you’re going to kind of be fed in every once in a while.

You have to be FPA, that gives you a boost on buy box, your sort of seller ratings that kind of gets you in the buy box more or less. You want to be up in that 100% to get the most bang for your buck as far as getting in the buy box. That’s about all you can do really is keep your price at the same. That’s about all I know I can tell you about that I guess.

Josh:
That’s good. James, are you scalping the Amazon data or are you using Amazon API to get to data?

James:
So yeah, Amazon doesn’t give out all the data that I do but they do have their API that I use and some other proprietary stuff that I use and I kind of put on to the big database and kind of figure all out and analyze it and give it to my users and easy to ingest, an easy way to look at it I guess. I can’t really go on the specifics about how I do it but there’s no connect between you the user of Keyword Inspector and Amazon. They can’t really, they don’t know who’s using Keyword Inspector. There’s no liability on your side, there’s not much on my side either, so it’s not really the big worry about that.

Josh:
Tony’s asking how are keywords supposed to be inserted into those fields with commas without commas, with dashes separated them etc., how do you tend to put them in?

James:
No commas, try to keep them in the phrases and keep them in a good order of phrase how you would say it and that’s probably all I can tell you about that. I don’t have any hard data on that, but that’s what most people kind of … Amazon confuses everybody because with their little example, they put the commas in there but I think those commas really are meant for just kind of separate the phrases that you want to put in there. You don’t actually want to put the commas in those fields. That’s kind of my thought on it.

Josh:
Okay. How can I build the 500 lines of Excel data from Keyword Inspector into my listing?

James:
We already kind of went over that and really nothing much to say about that I guess.

Josh:
Cool. What about misspelled words?

James:
That one, I don’t know. I haven’t really found a use for it. It’s kind of cool to know I guess. I kind of just put it on there because I have the data. I figured I just put it there. It’s hard to know what to do with that. You can throw it in your [PIP-C 01:12:36] and see what it does. I analyze that as far as what it’s good for. It’s just kind of nice to know that people are misspelling things and Amazon has seen that and actually given the data for that. I don’t know. It’s just there.

Josh:
I love it.

James:
I don’t know what Dean does with that or if anything or …

Josh:
Yeah, I’m not sure either. It’s a great question. If you guys have any more questions, we'll stay on for a few more minutes. Again you guys have a free 7-day KIPRT and Keyword Inspector deal. It’s up in the chat box if you look at the very top, it says welcome everyone, enjoy your free Christmas gift. This is our Christmas gift to you guys and thank you so much for being on. I so appreciate the knowledge you bring to the table. I mean I feel like my brain hurts with how much is there.

James:
My brain hurts nonstop.

Josh:
I love it. It looks like we’re not having any more questions come in. Any ending words of wisdom about using keyword inspector? Also well there is one, Stacy can you do a screen share? There is a screen share on how to use it on the keywordinspector.com, correct?

James:
Yeah.

Josh:
Okay, perfect, perfect, perfect.

James:
We’re trying to put up more … I’ve been a one-man show since last July, started keyword inspector and not the greatest at marketing stuff. It’s all been word-of-mouth and people really enjoy my tools so I haven’t really had the need to put a lot of education out on it but yeah we’re working on education definitely. We're kind of hard-core at that right now education wise and trying to get that out there so you guys can actually use what you’re getting.

As far as the tool it’s been really kind of steam rolling along as far as putting out new stuff and I've been really hard at work in the behind the scenes, trying to get together all the data I have and trying to kind of make it make sense to you the users so I’ve been working on that. It’s definitely coming to a fresh in here. It’s just a little bit of that, a little bit tip of the iceberg of that. Today we put out the keyword volume indicators data on the extensive report so it’ll help kind of help you kind of see the light through the fog type of thing because I know a lot of people are kind of more analytical and they want to see that kind of number so it’s there now. That’s just definitely the tip of the iceberg. It’s more common in the next month here. Watch for that. It’s going to be mind boggling probably to some.

Josh:
Awesome. Well thank you so much for being on and thank you for all that have listened. If this is again your first master class, thank you so much for being here on the master class. We so appreciate you for coming in and James for teaching us. If you guys want to know more about the Online Empire Academy, we are on YouTube but we have our page the onlineempireacademy.com. You can also find us on Facebook, super active group there guys. We are here for you and want to help you develop and build your business into an empire. Again James, thank you, thank you for everything.

James:
Thanks for having me.

Josh:
Absolutely. Until next time empire, have a fantastic day and we will see you on the next one.

James:
All right, take it easy

 

Keyword Inspector Reverse ASIN Quick Start Tutorial

by

Dean:
Hey this is Dean Sotto and I wanted to do this quick start tutorial for a keyword inspector reverse ASIN. This is the keyword inspector reverse ASIN suite. The cool thing is, you get to have a little sneak peak of what the new UI is going to look like for keyword inspector. If you're just recently watching this, this is not open to the public yet. Compared to the way it used to look, it didn't look quite as good. It looks friggin amazing now, so I wanted to do a reverse ASIN quick start. Because I get a lot of people who ask how can you best utilize reverse ASIN.

I wanted to give my quick take on what to do with reverse ASIN and how to use it in a way that is quick, effective, and you can get started using it … quickly, hence the quick start.

Lets go into this, I am in the new keyword inspector. We are going to be using reverse ASIN. We can see the separate tools that are in keyword inspector now. We have the reverse ASIN keyword tool. We have keyword trend. We have the search term tool, which is free. Then kippert which is the product research tool. I am going to actually go to this reverse ASIN area right here and let just click new.

Reverse ASIN uses credits, and depending on what type of search that you are going to be using, it's going to depend on how many credits you actually use. So you have USA extensive, USA simple, USA reverse ASIN ppc. You have all of this UK stuff as well as simple search for Germany, amazon.de. You have UK, USA, and you have Germany.

Now this is a quick start guide. I am going to show you how to start quickly and what I recommend. I always recommend the USA extensive. if you are in the UK, use the UK extensive. Its going to give you the most data. Simple returns are basically keywords that it has found, it doesn't give any traffic estimations or anything like that.

All of this expires in one month, so once you have used this, that data expires after one month. Why is that? Why can I not just keep the data? Well guess what? It refreshes. Every time you look, even in your search history, it is refreshing. Even though you might not see it and even though you might not think it. If you come back a week later then it is refreshed data. It is almost as if you ran a new campaign.

Okay, quick start guide, let go get an ASIN. Let say we are trying to sell … A perfect example, lets do a knife sharpener … in all departments. We got a lot of different knife sharpeners here. Lets actually go for one of these stones that are up here. Lets do knife sharpener stone actually … What we are going to do is what keyword inspector reverse ASIN does. I'm going to go into this one right here, it looks pretty popular. The more popular that the item is, the better.

What keyword inspector reverse ASIN does is it has nothing to do with the stuff that is in the actual listing. There are many times when people will say “hey Dean, this isn't working because I have a knife sharpener stone and people are coming for an axe sharpener. I don't have axe anywhere inside this thing.” Well that's the beauty of reverse ASIN. That's the beauty of using keyword inspector reverse ASIN.

Keyword inspector reverse ASIN, what it does is that it is actually looking at what people have typed in to find this. Say if I did axe sharpener stone, and I'm going down going “okay well these look good but I don't know… this looks pretty cool, maybe i'll do this.” And i actually look at it, and I'm like this would be perfect for my axe, even though it says knife sharpener … ill actually do a control F right here. We are going to do control F and type in axe. So axe shows up because that is what I actually looked for. See if its anywhere in the listing … no that's sponsored links. Nothing in the description, nothing in the bullets, nothing. But I stumbled upon this, this is a knife sharpener, but I think it would be perfect for my axe.

That's what is happening with reverse ASIN. It's looking at what people have actually typed in. All you have to do is scroll down, you can either get it from the top, up here, or you can scroll down to where it says ASIN. I usually like going to the top up here because that is usually the child ASIN. If this one doesn't work, just go to the top one up here and it should work. So I am actually going to grab the top one.

Now I am going to go back to keyword inspector and I'm going to pop this in here. I am going to make sure I have USA extensive. Scroll down and click start reverse ASIN search. Says that your ASIN is processing, sweet. Lets click that to see our process reverse ASINs.

So we have this Smith SK stone sharpening kit. I am going to click into that … sometimes it takes a while, so I might have to pause this while it is doing its thing. Now remember the reason why is its always trying to get fresh data if it can.

Here we are, this is a quick start guide, best keyword rank extensive. I ignore this. This is generally just looking at the ranking based off of the estimated search volume. If you don't have a pocket knife sharpener, you probably don't want that. You have to use some human inference, you have to use your head. You have to use your noggin. I usually just say “okay this is the first one, second one, third one, fourth one.' Like they are just numbered, I ignore where it says best keyword rank.

There used to be an algorithm, because there was no estimated search for an algorithm that would go and look and see what potentially could be the best keyword and rank off of that. So you have your keyword, you have your estimated current search volume for that keyword per month. Then you have where this was actually found at the time of search. The larger this number is, the more likely the thing is going to be bumping and jumping around. Right here where you see 17, this might be 17 but it might be 12 the next day. It might not even be on search the next day. It's because Amazon is constantly trying to show relevant stuff. The higher it is, the more relevant Amazon thinks it is for the particular keyword, so it doesn't move around so much.

This is where this was found that the time of search. Lets go and check this out. Lets try this pocket knife sharpener. Lets go up here and type in pocket knife sharpener, to see if we can find this particular one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and there it is, ten. It is ranked ten for pocket knife sharpener, pretty cool. So people found this by typing in pocket knife sharpener even though it does not look like a pocket knife sharpener, but it could be maybe.

Next, word rank. What it's saying is you want [inaudible 00:09:07] in individual words. I completely ignore these generally. Basically this is saying that you want to have these words in your listing somewhere to start ranking for some of these. Here are some common misspellings, sometimes miss spelled words will get you ranked depending on how misspelled they are or how close they are, depending on the algorithm is doing.

If you have a subscription, it will tell you the number of products found to have exact keyword phrases in its title. This particular account I have is not a subscription, so it's not showing up there. The number of results found in amazon extensive, 9,297. That doesn't mean that they are all using this right here. They might be using pocket, they might be using knife, they might be using sharpener. The one here will show the exact keyword phrase and it will tell you what it is.

We can use this and say “okay if I do have a sharpening stone, maybe I want target knife sharpener stone or knife sharpening stone.” I like paid ads, so I am actually going to go to amazon. I am going to see how many people are vying for this keyword, knife sharpener stone. I am going to see who comes up sponsored. So we have one, two, three, four, five, six, lots of sponsors on that one. So I am probably not going to go after that particular one.

What I will do is I will go and check knife sharpening stone. Lets see if that is different … We have one, two sponsor, and now over here we really don't have stones. We have one two here but they aren't really up there. Less competition in my opinion because these two aren't quite as relevant.

Lets try honing stone sharpener stone. Wet stone … Lets try sharpening stone sets real quick … We have two there but then we have this, whenever I see this, it is kind of irrelevant. This one this kind of looks because we have these two right here. That kind of looks like there is going to be some competition, but I do want to find one that is good. Lets try and find one … Blade sharpening stones, lets try that one.

Now it doesn't look like there is many searches but I actually don't go by searches here. It doesn't matter what you are using, any Amazon tool as of this video does not have access to Amazons API. It doesn't matter what tool you are using, it is generally not going to be accurate. The only way to find out 100% for certain how much traffic is going to happen is to run sponsored ads for that particular term.

Here we are doing blade sharpening stone, blade sharpening stone. That's pretty cool, right? We don't have these two up here sponsor wise, so that tells me that the first one up here is irrelevant, so these guys are probably doing a broad match or something like that and Amazon is not thinking it's as relevant. If I did a campaign with blade sharpening stone as an exact match, I would probably be number one. I probably wouldn't have a high cost per click, so I can out-do my competition. Actually, you can see us right here, we are number two already for that, from the product we are using.

How do you use this? You can use this in a couple ways. One, you can use it on your already existing product if its popular enough. You need to have a good amount of sales in order for this to work with your existing product, to see what people are actually searching for to find your product and what you can target. Then you can use it like we are doing now to find what is the competitor doing? This is one of our competitors right here that we are running this on. Now we know that they aren't running sponsored ads over here, for this particular blade sharpening stone. So we can run sponsored ads, get above them and see if we can't convert better and actually rise organically through this. Through using key work inspector reverse ASIN.

That is the quick start guide for how you use keyword inspectors reverse ASIN tool. It is extremely powerful, works really really well, and is by far one of the most beneficial tools for doing sponsored ads or doing any type of paid advertising or even paid organic ranking on Amazon. Simply because the big difference is that it is not looking that the listing here. It's looking at what people are actually wanting to buy. It's the Google back links. The thing that revolutionized Google was not just seeing the keywords that were on the page, but seeing what keywords were back linking to content, and where were those back links coming from. That is what we are doing here. Were not just looking at what is on the page of our competitor. We're looking at what are people actually searching for to find that competitor. Much more powerful.

That is the quick start guide for keyword inspector reverse ASIN. Let me know your questions and I will be doing some videos for the trends tool as well as kippert, in the near future.

 

Five ways to develop an asset-based mindset

by

In this article we're going to be talking about assets and why they are important as an Amazon seller. Many Amazon sellers have spent years and years ignoring the fact that they are not building assets. What happens is they spend day after day, month after month, year after year sourcing products, only to find that in the end, when they can no longer source, their entire business comes crashing down. In this article I want to show you how to grow and create assets that allow for long term financial stability.

1. Understanding what an asset is.

The first thing that we need to do in order to start growing assets is understanding what an asset is in the first place. Without going into a lot of complexities, assets are things that make money without you. An asset can be a fully functional business with employees and processes that runs while you are sleeping, it can be a supplier that is sending in product to Amazon without you having to pack and ship them yourself, it can even be a piece of software that you've created that help Amazon sellers do specific tasks that make them money. No matter what it is, the asset is generating revenue without you having to be directly involved. Of course there is maintenance and you do have to have some kind of involvement and some point in time, but overall your asset is generating revenue without you.

asset based strategy2. Bolt on, instead of bouncing.

One key thing that you have to have in your mind when you're creating an asset is the phrase, “Bolt on, instead of bouncing.” A lot of us entrepreneurs want to bounce from idea to idea, business opportunity to business opportunity, and because we're constantly bouncing around we can never sit down and focus on one thing long enough to where it's actually generating revenue. As Amazon sellers, we are already making money with what we're doing. The last thing that we want to do is focus our intention on something else that's not really going to bring in more revenue. That being said, if we're going to create and grow more assets for our business, we want to make sure that these assets are going to be worth the time they take to focus on.

When you're creating new assets in this way, the thing that you have to keep in mind is that you want these assets to easily bolt onto your business. If you're doing retail arbitrage right now, or online arbitrage, it's not that much of a difference moving to wholesale, and getting a wholesale supplier account for your business. The time that you're taking to find that new supplier, and to contact them, setup the account and listen their products is generally the same amount of time that you would be spending sourcing. The result would be much greater over the long term because you have a supplier who can give you products that are replenish-able and profitable. Remember to bolt on instead of bounce.

3. If your business isn't scalable, it's a job.

Another thing that you need to consider when creating an asset, or at least knowing whether your business is currently an asset or not is that if your business isn't scalable, it's not a job. Is your business able to run without you? If you left for two or three months would your business come crashing down? If so, that means that your business, at least at this point in time is not an asset and is probably not scalable. What I mean by scalability is that you have either software, or people and processes that are in place that run automatically. You can grow your business by either adding more people, adding more software, or adding more processes. If you're a one man show that's selling on Amazon, than more than likely unless you have wholesale accounts, or private label products, or you're drop shipping, you are not a part of a scalable business.

Remember that an asset can also be your business itself, and so you want to make your business as scalable as possible because as you do, you're going to start having a lot more consistency in revenue, and you're going to be able to ultimately sell your business if you wanted to.

4. Focus on systems.

Another thing that you need to keep in mind if you're going to be building out an asset is that you need to focus on systems. Systems allow you to do two things when creating assets. One, they allow you to identify things that could potentially be assets, and they allow you to create and develop your business into an asset itself.

In the first example, let's say you are trying to find products to sell on Amazon for your business. You could go to a local retail store and find products there, but if you were focused on systems, more than likely you would want to find wholesale suppliers, or at least suppliers where you can find replenish-able products that you can then build a system around so that you no longer have to be a part of the sourcing process. How are these two things different? Well, if I'm focusing on a retail store, I either have to do the sourcing myself or I have to hire people to go out for eight hours a day and find product for me. I'm not always sure whether they're going to find product or not.

However, with a wholesale account, or a private label product, I can hire one person who manages multiple accounts, and all they would have to do is send emails, or talk on the phone to their accounts in order to replenish products that are almost about to be sold out. The first allows for a lot of ambiguity, the second allows for consistency. Plus if I'm looking at making my business into a system, it would be much easier for me to create a business with low overhead, and good processes if I had wholesale supplier accounts, rather than having teams go out to garage sales, or local supermarkets trying to find products to sell. It's much easier to forecast financials, and it's easier to write standard operating procedures for staff since those who are going out and physically sourcing run into a multitude of problems, while people who you hire to handle supplier accounts have a small amount of problems that can generally be done by email or phone.

5. Can your business be sold?

The last thing to consider when creating an asset is can your business be sold? Now remember once again that your business itself can be an asset, but if you are the only one sourcing, or you have a very high cost overhead team that goes out and sources for you, it can be very unattractive to anybody who would want to buy your business. However, if you have a small team with low overhead who are managing several replenish-able accounts, and have proven processes that can run without you, it makes it very attractive and appealing to potential investors and buyers who would want to purchase your business at a three to four times annual mark up.

One of the things that you'd need to keep in mind as you're developing your asset mindset is can my business be sold right now? If not, what do I need to do to get it to a point where it can be sold? This question alone will help you to start learning what minor things need to be changed in your business in order to turn it into a money generating asset that works without you.