Rolando Rosas 4:28
Wow man we can learn a thing or two and actually was on the Sirius cellar podcast ng Espanol. So if you want to go check that out, check that over and serious seller podcast Espanol version with Adriana su great host. We talked about a whole bunch so big props to him. All right, so let’s talk about Josh right. In this episode we have the pleasure of speaking with Josh Hadley, founder and CEO of Hadley Designs in eight-figure. E commerce This business Josh has leveraged his skills and passion to build a stationary empire with over 1300 products. Whoa, that’s a lot of products. And as a proponent of keeping manufacturing jobs right here in the USA, Josh is proud to say that all of his products are made domestically. He is also the host of eComm Breakthrough, a podcast dedicated to sharing insights and best practice in E commerce. Let’s welcome Josh Hadley.
Josh Hadley 5:35
Hey, gentlemen. Hey, Josh. Great to be here. Thanks. Thanks for the warm welcome. And I love the special effects. I think I’m gonna need to add them to my
Rolando Rosas 5:45
I’ve only have a handful. Maybe I could put like 500 on there. But I only have a handful because it’s hard to keep track of all of them. The more you add, you’re like, Oh, crap, this one went that one. And so
Dave Kelly 5:57
I think we made the wise decision with only giving one of us control. I’m not too sure what kind of trouble I’d find myself in. But hey, listen, before we get into things, I just want to do a quick read from our sponsor. This podcast
Rolando Rosas 6:11
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Dave Kelly 6:32
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Rolando Rosas 6:51
So let’s jump right into it with Josh. Josh. Got a question for you.
Josh Hadley 6:57
Let’s hear it.
Rolando Rosas 6:59
What are you geeking out on from a tech standpoint right now or nerding? Out on or can’t get enough of at this moment?
Josh Hadley 7:08
Oh, man, who isn’t talking about ChatGPT right now, right? Oh, yeah, my broken record there. I’m not saying anything new. Man, all the new AI tools that are leveraging open AI in the background, we’re just scratching the surface right now. And I’m scrambling to try to keep up with it all. You know, Chad Rubin was on my podcast recently, as well. And we talked about AI and just like the huge impact that it’s going to have in the future and like the first adopters are going to just start crushing everybody else. So that is something on my mind,
Rolando Rosas 7:44
we were just talking internally here a couple of days ago, you remember when you came out of college, or even high school on your resume, you had to had, how many words per minute you typed, then you said these are my internet skills five years later, then that later became you had to have Google Sheets or docs. And now I believe the new thing you must have on your resume, if you’re just looking for a job is got to be that AI capability. I am an expert or I have aI certification. At some point, there’s going to be some type of courses on certifying people for it. Something that says you can leverage that technology and deploy it or use it within an organization just like you used to have to put this is how many words per minute I can type? Yep,
Josh Hadley 8:34
no, I completely agree. Plus, I think that I heard this on another podcast recently, and I’m adopting it as well, is having a chief AI technology officer, right? Like not that will hire that a C level role right now. But hiring a AI officer or director of the business, that their entire job is to learn about all the different AI platforms, and also how to incorporate ChatGPT into our business, because there’s so many processes that we do right now, that could be automated or handled by ChatGPT. So number one, it could reduce workload on our existing staff. And who knows, maybe it saves us from having to make an extra hire here. They’re constantly refining our processes, and looking at what AI is out there that we could implement in the business. So I see that as a role that I would like to hire for this year.
Rolando Rosas 9:30
Do you see from a use case perspective, you know, we’re both in the Amazon space. Have you, as a business have started using it in a way where it’s made tangible results? Are there areas where you say, Boy, this has made a big difference so far?
Josh Hadley 9:46
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think that there are processes that we do when we do like our keyword research, and going through and removing duplicates and things that would normally take maybe 30 minutes to an hour of scraping something or populating something in a spreadsheet and moving stuff around, being able to create a good prompt, which is the key. And then being able to upload, you know, your spreadsheet or information. And being able to have ai do that in 15 seconds rather than the 15 or 30 minutes that it may take a team member. That’s where I’m seeing the biggest impact right now. And I know Brandon Young’s software, he’s coming out with the ability to incorporate AI, so put it
Rolando Rosas 10:33
on LinkedIn that their data died on beta with ChatGPT, which is, I think, the next logical step, somebody’s got to put it in. I don’t know, in this case, I’m surprised that he’s beating, you know, somebody as big as Helium 10 to the punch on this one, because you would think that them or Jungle Scout because they play in this arena, way more, they’d have jumped on the gun, but who knows what will happen here and in the coming months, but he’s certainly out to a fast start on that.
Josh Hadley 11:03
Totally agree. All right, cool.
Rolando Rosas 11:05
Let me ask you something else here. I want you to fill in the blank. Amazon sellers should never blank. So let me ask you again, Amazon sellers should never blank when you put in there?
Josh Hadley 11:23
Man, that’s a good question. Amazon sellers should never copy another product, or competitors product. Okay. And I say that with, you’ve got to Amazon as a marketplace back in the day, you could go out and you just need to go slap your brand name on a spatula, right? Yeah, that’s all you needed to do, it could be the exact same spatula as another competitor, you just might have changed the color. Or you might have just put your brand name on the bottom of it instead of the top or something like that, right. But it’s literally the exact same product. I think Long gone are those days on Amazon, you’ve got to be able to build a brand and bring differentiated products to the market. You’ve got to bring fresh new stuff to Amazon. Otherwise, all those people that are pitching the Amazon courses where it’s just like, go to Alibaba, and just tell them you need your name your brand on here, like those people. Yes, they’re gonna lose
Rolando Rosas 12:32
side hustle. Absolutely. I gotta tell you, I don’t throw the word hate around. But I really hate when people do a disservice like that, like just what you’re talking about so many, quote influencers and people trying to pitch a course, that they say yeah, just go to Alibaba, look for the high ranking product in that category. Go ahead and buy it from for 10 cents, and then go throw it on Amazon. There’s so much more today that goes into making that product launch successful. And not just the launch phase, but carrying it through so that it stays relevant on Amazon. Yep. And
Dave Kelly 13:11
percent. And if you’re taking that sort of advice, you’re gonna crash and burn so fast that you won’t be inspired to stay in long enough to actually build a brand. You know. So we’ve been on Amazon since 2013. Josh, what are some of your early successes? So like the story of your brand on Amazon? What were some early successes that you had that inspired you to grow to 1300? Current listings today on Amazon?
Josh Hadley 13:41
Yeah, great, great question. My journey on Amazon was first that I would sell my textbooks from college. But that was my thing. First, that was my first thing on Amazon where I was like, Hey, I could make some extra money. Like for whatever reason, some of these college textbooks would go for $100 more than if I would just go return them back to the bookstore, right. So I would sell them on Amazon. And I was like, Okay, that’s cool. And so that gave me a little taste of Amazon. And then I did whatever buddy did, I purchased one of those courses. It wasn’t ASM. But it was one of somebody else that I had followed. And went through one of the courses actually created a private label product. But I did something that was different so that I never went and found a competitor and was like, Hey, I just need the same thing but put my brand name on it. And I tested out that market was actually like a waiter or waitress pad. So like one of those like portfolio things that they gave you and at a restaurant where the servers are using, I went to restaurants and I asked a bunch of servers like hey, if we were to create something different, what would the ideal waiter pad look like for you? And anyways, the idea was like, I want to be able to customize mine and so we had the idea of portfolios that you would get at school or like a binder It had the clear lamination in front where you could slide something in in the pocket. Yep. Yep. So we basically did that. And that allowed people to like customize their own weight or pads. So it Oh, it did. Okay, it got my feet wet and getting to know that industry. What I didn’t do is I didn’t get a design patent, or copyrights or anything like that. So it was like, probably three to six months later, a bunch of Chinese sellers are knock me off. And it was just done at that point. And I was like, well, Oh, well. The thing that happened?
Rolando Rosas 15:32
No, no. Oh, for sure.
Josh Hadley 15:35
But what that transition to so you could see that as like a failure, right? Like I put together I did some online arbitrage and things like that. And it worked to some degree of success, but not like the millions of dollars that people were claiming, right. And eventually, my wife had a custom wedding invitation business that she was running and I had helped her with. And we’re getting to a point where we’re just kind of like tapped out like if we wanted to bring on an additional, like, bride for her to work with it was a six month wait, like my wife was that backlogged. And she was that busy. But as we started our family, we knew that that was not going to be sustainable going forward. So we’re like, how do we create a scalable business with her talents. And so one of the products that people kept asking us about or that they wanted after their wedding, or further bridal showers, was recipe cards of all things, and are like you’re paying $1,000, for us to custom design your wedding invitations. Literally, it’s the exact same type of process to create a recipe card, but you’re not going to be paying 1000 bucks for your recipe cards. And so we would never end up giving these brides these recipe cards, because I’m not spending that much time when I could be working on the new client for 1000 bucks. Okay, so we had the idea of like, hey, let’s create our top wedding invitation designs, and let’s put them on three recipe cards. And so that was our product that we tested out. And we sold out of them within the next I think the first two months, and I was like OMG, we made I think at the time is $16,000, just from selling those three recipe cards. And it was a very saturated market now that I look back on it, right and still did well in that little sliver of a market. And what it did at that point is it inspired me to say, Okay, wait, if we could do that with just three designs, and I, we design them once, and then we had our manufacturer print, and just manufacture ship in the rest of Amazon. Like that’s a scalable business. So the rest is history, we just continue to launch new product after new product after new product. And that is the core of what we do in our business right now is our number one priority in our business is launching new products. So most of our meetings and all of our processes are centered around supporting, bringing up or creating new products and bringing them to the market. And so that’s something that we live and breathe by right now for our business.
Rolando Rosas 18:08
Awesome. And when you when you’re launching products, like a two part question here, what’s that lifecycle like you have a product, you bring it on the market, bringing it to Amazon, it’s there. I don’t know if it stays on the market for a while, and it just has a natural curve of a life? And you’ve got to find another one? Or is the game plan just to keep growing through new products?
Josh Hadley 18:31
Yeah, that’s a good question. So what we plan to do with like our existing product line is hopefully expand into additional distribution channels. So getting into Walmart and things like that our ultimate goal is we’d love to get into retail, we see a lot of our competitors that are on retail store shelves, and are also on Amazon. We’re running circles around them on Amazon. And so our hope is that we can be able to go to these big box retailers and be like so you know, these guys that you have on your store shelf, we’re crushing them on Amazon. How about you replace theirs with ours? Right? Or how about you give us some of that shelf space, because we’ve already proven that our products are selling better than these. So that’s kind of our three to five year game plan right now is moving into retail. But going back to the earlier question is what’s the product lifecycle look like? We still have those three recipe cards. Now they’re not doing the amount of volume that they originally did, but they’re still they’re still there. And so I think everybody refers to the Amazon product lifecycle about three to five years, which I think tends to be true.
Rolando Rosas 19:40
Okay, interesting. And once those products reached maturity, you’re just going to play maintenance on them. Do you pull back on PPC with them, or they’re ranking fairly well, so we don’t have to invest this much. What’s your take on that once the product starts maturing?
Josh Hadley 19:57
Yeah. So once a product have matured, if we’re maintaining good organic rankings on them, then we’re just going to let them ride, we’ll continue to make sure we support them with PPC. And if we notice any downward turn on the organic rankings will boost up some of that PPC and support it. But outside of that, unless we start to see like shifts in the market overall, we’ll let it ride out as long as possible if we’re maintaining our market share. But as soon as we start to see, hey, like, design trends are changing, or the type of products that people are looking for this search term are starting to change over time, that’s when we’ll go back into the product portfolio. And we’ll refresh, right. And so we’ll go in and either create a new type of product, make it better, more different designs, different colors, whatever we feel like the market is demanding. That’s what we’ll go in and do. So we have an optimization team that are managing these products and monitoring. Alright, where’s our ranking? What’s our market share? As we go down, this comes up on our conversation of possibly a product category refresh, and evaluating? Do we go into that? Or do we go into this new product opportunity that is more of a blue ocean for us that we could get into? So we’re always weighing and doing these financial projections of what’s going to provide a better ROI overall?
Dave Kelly 21:23
Well, you know, we look at these podcasts and conversations as an opportunity for us to learn from other sellers. We’re trying to obviously maintain and grow our market. And with with our brand and brand loyalty, you’re trying to build some brand loyalty, using Amazon as a vehicle. So are you able to build a brand loyalty? Do you have returned customers? Is there something unique about your solutions? where that’s the solution? That’s the product and your customer? continues to come back out? What are you doing to build that loyalty towards your products?
Josh Hadley 22:00
Yeah, I think that is the long game plan of Amazon for any Amazon sellers. You need to build a brand and start building your brand off of amazon so that you have your own list of customers that you’re able to target to
Rolando Rosas 22:14
here comes a pro tip. Josh drop some knowledge on what you guys are doing to build off Amazon strategies. Go for it.
Josh Hadley 22:25
Yeah, so we have two ways that we’re building our audience. Number one is we’re redesigning our Amazon storefront and really focusing on like pointing people to that follow Me button, right, because Amazon’s kind of doubling down on giving brands, a voice to their customers, so to speak, there’s that Amazon engagement platform, which you know, has mixed results, we haven’t yet tested it, I’m still waiting to hear what other people are doing with it. But what we do off of Amazon, is that each of our products have on the product packaging has a free gift included. And one thing that we do as a sense of urgency is we say, hey, you need to scan this QR code within 24 hours. Right now, nobody packaging on the packaging, okay? Yep, nobody’s actually monitoring whether they scan it within 24 hours eating it. But the customer thinks that, oh, there’s gotta be something to this, right. And so they’ll scan it, and they end up joining our text list. I know a lot of people talk about, hey, build your email list in man email is, is just so hard to get those open rates. And most people it just goes to spam or junk. And everybody’s so used to just giving like, I have my own spam, you know, promotional email address that I give everybody, it’s okay, you need my email, here you go. And then I never get any of their promotions. Right. So what we’ve doubled down on is we want the text opt ins, okay. So as soon as they scan the QR code, it immediately populates a text message on their phone, and all they have to do is click the Send button. That adds them to our text flow. And then from there, our text open rates are obviously huge, who doesn’t open up a text message, and then the click through rates are much higher, as well. And so the number one, that’s one of our most powerful ways of getting feedback from our customers, okay, and also reaching out to them to know Hey, what type of designs or what type of products do you guys want?
Rolando Rosas 24:34
Um, text, you ask those questions via text? Yep,
Josh Hadley 24:37
through text. And because there’s like a little survey thing that you can add into those texts. The text platform that we use is simple texting, love it. And anyways, that has been how we get traction from our customers. And then when we launch that product, we’ve been building up this hype because the customer in the audience has been participating. In developing the product when we go live,
Rolando Rosas 25:02
what do you what is your take on sending traffic? So you’re getting your gapped up to textless? Are you then inviting those customers to go to a Shopify store? Are you saying go back on Amazon where we got that product?
Josh Hadley 25:15
Yeah, going back on Amazon right now, we’re just we continue to just double down on Amazon, because that’s going to have the greatest flywheel
Rolando Rosas 25:23
and to a listing or to a store. I heard you say, Amazon, sir, is I’m asking because asking sellers like yourself, so we have an Amazon store, too. And we’re trying to figure this thing out, as well as on the store, because you said the Follow button, which is on the store, and there’s some people that say the listings perform well, if you send them there, I tend to think because there’s no competition, no ads on your Amazon store, why not send them to the Amazon store instead?
Josh Hadley 25:48
Yep. So we’re big proponents of the Amazon storefront. For those reasons that you mentioned, it removes all of the competition, right. And in addition to that, you could create your own promotional messaging there. So one of the ideas that we have, as we redesign our storefront right now, is that we’re going to have different promotional messages of, hey, if we want to start tying, I guess, influencing the frequently purchased together section, right for a product. And then what we’re going to do on those new products, is simply say, hey, we feel like one of our existing products is going to be a great companion item, or could be a companion item to this new product, then we’ll go to that store landing page for that companion product will say, hey, check out this new product and get 20% off when you add both to cart. And then likewise, we can have our own messaging, whatever we want, on that storefront page that we can drive traffic from that text list to our own store page. But another reason why we do that is because a lot of our products, there’s a lot of variations. And so if you just send them to one detail page, they might like the pink version, but them to the blue version first, and they’re out. Right. storefront page, if you have variations or anything like that. There’s no other option in my mind than doing the store.
Rolando Rosas 27:12
Oh, awesome. Well, that’s, that’s somewhere we’re definitely going to try to double down on, we’re experimenting ourselves with that creating hero pages. So one huge page with that product, more details, videos, other things, just as if you were building a Shopify store, in essence, and we’re thinking of also supporting that with videos. So we have videos on every product detail page, but how to videos and in condensed form. And again, just looking at this, if we’re building a Shopify store, and so how do you support that rather than just to have a grid of products? But before we jump into more discussion, I want to bring something in because I think you’ve already stumbled on some of this. We’ve got a segment we call best kept secrets.
AI Chatbot 27:59
Well kept secrets, well, secrets. Gotta keep him safe. And sound. Well, let’s see for secrets, artist like Dima.
Rolando Rosas 28:16
We want to give credit for the composition on that song to ChatGPT. And we call ChatGPT. Around here, Eddie. So we want to credit Eddie for composing that song. And I can’t remember the there was another AI that we use to actually put that those all AI, the music, all of that. So if I were to ask you, Josh, and I think you’ve maybe said some of this already, but I want to put it here and they’re like the top three best kept secrets, so that you can thrive on my Amazon, would you say you are you’re said variations? You’re saying maybe text messages? doubling down on the store? We’ve got three there. Would you say those are the best kept secrets about Amazon? Or would you add some more or some others in that mix?
Josh Hadley 29:06
That’s a great, yes. Let’s go back from the top. So you’ve got the text messaging, right text message. You’ve got this storefront? And what was your other one?
Rolando Rosas 29:20
Store. You mentioned variations variations. I think that when you were going to talk maybe about PPC there was something on PPC that I want to ask you, but we’ve got four we can go as many as you want.
Josh Hadley 29:31
That would be Yeah. So PPC would be my other like best kept secret. And what about it? So the main thing that we do and that a lot of people don’t do in this kind of correlates with variations is advertising your own products on your own detail pages. For a pro tip.
Rolando Rosas 29:55
Josh, what’s going on with PPC?
Josh Hadley 29:57
Yeah, so PPC one. thing that a lot of people steer away from or that they don’t do is advertising their own products on their own detail pages. So we call these our defensive campaigns. And Lego is the best brand to look at that does this, if you go to Lego, it will be very hard to find a another competitor, advertising on their storefront page, they’ve done a fantastic job of any of those related products that you see are the sponsored
Rolando Rosas 30:28
related sponsors a whole roll of them at the bottom of the page, or somewhere in there.
Josh Hadley 30:33
Yeah. And if I’m searching for like an indigo, Lego kit, they’re offering me up some other Ninjago sets as well. But I’m also just seeing a whole other collection of the other types of products that they offer. So I see that as a fantastic way to cross promote, now, they’ve got to be somewhat relevant, right? cross promote relevant products that you feel like somebody would be interested in, right. And it can also influence that frequently purchased together section by doing that, but that in combination with a plus content that allows you to keep all of that traffic going to your brand, rather than clicking off and going to your competitors brand, at which point Good luck getting them back,
Rolando Rosas 31:23
if you wanted to pull that off. And I’ve seen this with a couple of CPG brands. How do you do that? If you were advising a seller that’s listening to us on Amazon or a brand? And they want to go ahead and at the related products? Is that something that you’re doing in sponsored brands and sponsored display? Is it sponsored products? How do you pull that off? Where you’re where you’re defending your page, essentially, with other related items?
Josh Hadley 31:49
Yeah, good question. So we do that in sponsored products, and then sponsored display, both of them. So that’s where we set them up and sponsored display. The bummer part about that is it’s more impressions driven. And then it’s kind of like attributing a lot, sometimes even your organic sales to that. So you’re gonna see a really low, at least we have, when we upload like our defensive product targeting campaigns to sponsored display, our a cost will be like 1%. But that’s because it’s just attributing if anybody saw, let’s say they’re on my detail page, right. And my product showed up as an impression, the customer never clicked it, who knows if they even looked at it, or paid attention to it. But because it showed up on that page, and then the customer ended up converting on that product or another product, it’s showing up as a conversion. So don’t think that you’re just crushing it when you see like a 1% or 5% a cost, because you’re just attributing a lot of like organic data to that. So that’s one thing to be aware about with sponsored display. But we do sponsored products as well, and and each of them will fill up those buckets and those related products down below at different times.
Dave Kelly 33:11
Gotcha. Once we have that once we have that buyers attention on your page, how hard it is to keep them there. And if they happen to venture off. So I’m thinking about what Legos doing and what you’re doing, and how we can apply that. It’s almost like decoys out there. When I’m on listings, I don’t like leaving where I am. And I try not to let these things get my attention. But sometimes it does. And sometimes I’m then last. I don’t click on those things, because I don’t want to leave the something on that main listing that’s grabbing my attention. I’m sold on that brand. I like the information I’m receiving. But I think that approach that you’re taking and that Lego is doing is something to explore. And I think other Amazon sellers should be exploring that as well.
Rolando Rosas 33:55
Yeah, I’ve been hearing this defensive strategy more. And it’s amazing. When you look at different categories, the companies that are usually top five in that category, they tend to deploy this strategy, and you’re confirming kind of something that I’m seeing as well. And, you know, is it worth it, you know, that takes up space, you know, it’s defensive, keeps the competition out. It’s definitely worth looking into in with Amazon really kind of taking a turn. I’m sure you’re seeing this as well, Josh’s is Amazon’s been under pressure, they’ve been cutting back on employees, PPC is becoming more and more of the profit story for the company. Where do you see Amazon? Or if you had a prediction to make about Amazon? Where do you see that they’re headed given all of these headwinds that they’ve had as a company and how those things can translate into what we’re going to see on the platform?
Josh Hadley 34:53
Yeah, I think that Amazon is just following the playbook of Google and they Acer Swenk To an extent, right? And why do I say that you’re already seeing this transition happen on Amazon. And I did this in a presentation that I did recently on the convert more click Summit. And what I showed is when you search for, you know, the keyword was toothpaste that I used in the example, before you can even scroll down the page, right, and I zoomed out on my screen to like 50%. Right. So I could see like a good number of listings, I think I could see 20 listings on the desktop 60% of what was on the first page of Amazon was all ads, right? Well, there were five, five organic rankings. That was it five organic rankings, that were actually showing up, I can’t remember what the
Rolando Rosas 35:50
and what are those dispersed throughout those five kind of dispersed or were they all clustered in one through five,
Josh Hadley 35:56
they were like clustered in one through five, like one was at the top one was hanging off the edge. And then below that was a row of four. And then outside of that you had video and you had the headline, search ad, then you had sponsored products. Then you also had Amazon’s like, newest thing that they’re always experimenting with used to be featured blog posts or something like that. But now it’s like, hey, products, you know, what is it the highest rated products or something like that, that are sponsored positions as well. And so anyways, so what does the future look like in terms of Amazon and PPC? I wouldn’t be scared to say that 75% of the listings on page one are going to turn into Amazon, or sponsored ad slots,
Rolando Rosas 36:44
period. And that’s the trend Yeah,
Josh Hadley 36:47
you’ve got to get really good at becoming profitable with ad spend, and then using that ad spend to influence your organic rankings. And that’s ultimately what PPC should be used for is to support first and foremost, your organic rankings. So you want another pro tip
Rolando Rosas 37:09
for a pro tip. Go ahead, Josh laid on us. All right.
Josh Hadley 37:16
So here’s the pro tip. One of the things I got the most feedback about when I did the click Summit, when I talked about PPC was our launch strategy, and how we target specific keywords on Amazon. In the past, and a lot of the PPC courses that are even still running today, a lot of people say, Hey, we’ve got to start with your auto and your broad campaigns to begin, you use a low budget, but then you’re just going to be mining for those keywords. You’re going to be mining for Golden keywords or your diamond keywords so to speak, right? So basically, what you’re saying is, I’m too dumb to know what the keywords are that I should be targeting for my product. And Amazon knows better than I do. And I’m just going to spend money and let Amazon tell me what’s working and what’s not.
Rolando Rosas 38:08
All right. Yeah, I’ve heard of this. I’ve heard this kind of philosophy. Yep. It’s a misconception, right. And so then what’s the antidote to that?
Josh Hadley 38:17
So the way you do it is you already are smart enough, you’ve already built your listing centered around those keywords, or at least you should have. And so what we do is we take the keywords, we’ll run them through cerebro. Right, so we’ll take our top 10 competitors, we’ll put them into Cerebro will download all of the keywords that anybody is ranking on page one for right? Sometimes that list is going to be two 3000 keywords long. This is a long list, right? Indeed, what we do is we have a team member and various team members are assigned, they will go through keyword by keyword. I know this sounds tedious, but I promise it’s going to pay off, you will take keyword and you are going to enter that phrase or keyword into Amazon. And then you are going to determine and we’ve got four kind of classifications of keywords, you’ve got to determine first, whether that’s a relevant keyword or not.
Rolando Rosas 39:14
Right. So let’s just assume that are relevant ones and not the ones that are irrelevant out of the picture.
Josh Hadley 39:19
Yep. So first, make sure they’re relevant, then you’ve got four buckets of keywords. Okay. And here’s the criteria that we use, and we have these four buckets are shop keywords, semi shop keywords, third would be browse specific, and then browse general. So those are our four buckets. Okay. So what are these four buckets? A shop keyword is something where the your competitors that you would consider it yeah, this is an identical competitor not like the same product, but this would be an equal substitute for my product, right? If you see on page one, it more than 75 If to 80% of those results are like similar competitors, then you’re you can be confident like this is a shop keyword. When people search this search term, they end up buying these types of products, right? Because Amazon’s not going to rank something that’s not converting on.
Rolando Rosas 40:17
Could I rephrase that almost as if the consumer intent, or the buyer intent is higher with shop versus their lowest one, which is browser General?
Josh Hadley 40:29
Yep. Yep, that is thing, you’re completely right. But what you’re doing here is you’re just, you’re going straight to the source, right? Amazon can tell you this information, like when somebody searches, school supplies for kids. Now, that may be a broad keyword, right, at least in my mind, I’m like, wow, that’s a super broad keyword. Good luck, you may be surprised on a lot of these broad keywords that you go in, and you’re like, holy smokes, 50% of the results are all the same type of products, maybe they’re the little like pencil containers or something like that. Because that’s what parents are gravitating towards, for whatever reason, right. And so that’s the importance of going through this. So the next keyword bucket is the semi shop keyword bucket. Right. And so in this bucket, you’re going to be looking the classification is like, at least 50% of the results are for those similar competitors. And then your browser specific, this is where you’ve got about 25% of the competitors showing up on page number one, and then your browse general, that’s something where, okay, one of my competitors ended up getting ranked on page one for this keyword. It makes sense, it’s relevant keyword could be like school supplies for kids. But man, that’s a long shot, there’s only one competitor that actually got ranked here. So the pro tip here is when we launch our products, we only launch our keyword campaigns, using shop in those semi shop keywords only. We don’t turn on any auto campaigns, no broad campaigns, and we have been crushing our product launches 30 to 50%, a cos consistently for brand new products that have never seen the light of day on Amazon. And so for us, like, if that’s the A cos we’re getting to begin with, like, we’re just gonna start crushing the competition. Interesting.
Rolando Rosas 42:21
Wow. That’s it deserves a serious clap. Because one of the things that I think about, you’ve broken it down very nicely, you’re taking an idea that I’ve had and just already started doing it, which is intent. And I’ve been focused on the brand analytics that now are available search query performance, there is a purchase rate that you can get based off of those keywords. There’s obviously the add to cart rate that you can get, as well as the click rate off of all of those keywords. And you can clearly see that some keywords or search terms will drive more purchases, like the rate may be higher, but the rate may be low. And some. Conversely, some people are just browsing. And so I love this concept because now you’ve given this stuff a name to where those keywords it from an intent, perspective, conserve and ROI, the high intent versus the lower intent. Love it. I can even another clap was actually a double clap. Now Dave, we’re gonna roll into Josh with with one more segment. We love to play this with our guests. This is what comes to your mind, word or phrase. We call it the rapid fire saving Dave, you want to take it away? So listen,
Dave Kelly 43:47
what’s the first word that comes to mind? We’re gonna give you a term and you’re gonna give us the first thing that pops into your mind. Okay. All right. All right. I’m up for it. There’s no right answers. Just a lot of judgment. Just exactly.
Josh Hadley 44:03
That’s what that’s what I’m worried about. What is that? All brain going to come up?
Dave Kelly 44:09
All right, so what’s the first word that comes to mind Josh? If FBA
Josh Hadley 44:14
inventory storage limits
Dave Kelly 44:19
Amazon advertising
Josh Hadley 44:21
PPC campaigns using sharp keywords, love it. Love
Dave Kelly 44:26
those keywords. By the way. It’s nice to have definitions. Try Chinese sellers
Josh Hadley 44:33
competition that raises the bar
Dave Kelly 44:39
we have an acronym for this one but I’ll just say Amazon Seller Support.
Josh Hadley 44:44
Not helpful.
Dave Kelly 44:49
One that’s near and dear to our hearts here. Video responses to Amazon questions.
Josh Hadley 44:57
Brilliant
Dave Kelly 44:58
Rolando. I’ll throw out the next Find your way.
Rolando Rosas 45:01
All right, here we go. drone deliveries. Very cool. Walmart versus Amazon, Amazon. Here’s some really interesting ones. Elon
Josh Hadley 45:13
Musk, is let’s say futuristic.
Rolando Rosas 45:17
Okay, that’s leads into the next one, the future of Alexa ChatGPT. Here’s the last one and number 10 Jeff Bezos,
Josh Hadley 45:29
someone that I admire.
Rolando Rosas 45:31
All right. Wow, you go through that really? Well, Josh, you did an excellent job with our rapid fire segment. You know, by the way, on the future of Alexa, I just saw this week, sellers now have a way to respond to Amazon voice queries that come through Alexa. And if that topic is relevant to the things you’re selling, then we’re in the electronic space. So we got five questions that were sent to us. I don’t know the status. Is there still under review? We’ve submitted that and now, you with those responses, you can basically dictate the answer to that question should be, and here’s the best part about it. The response that Alexa is going to give is do you want to go to get more information and that you can choose to take them to your store, you can add in a key word that then Alexa will use or Amazon, I don’t know how that’s gonna work out. But they use that to search within the store. And so when they go to your store, if they were searching for birthday gifts, for example, they go to your store that search birthday gifts gets populated on your Amazon store. And the results will pop up on their desk if on their desktop, or if they’re Alexa, Alexa will read those results. So it’s kind of amazing what’s happening now. So Alexa and store are getting integrated.
Josh Hadley 46:57
Super exciting. Yeah,
Rolando Rosas 46:59
yeah, I’m excited. I don’t know what it’s going to do. We’re just like I said, we just found it this week. So it’ll be interesting to see if some of those results start making its way to our store. And we start seeing some additional new activity as a result of that.
Josh Hadley 47:14
Just gotta keep innovating and testing. That’s what it’s all about. And you’ve got to stay ahead. One of the biggest flaws and biggest myths that I really dislike about all those people pitching courses, at least that I see on my Facebook page. Yeah, is passive income opportunity on Amazon and unlike Amazon can be the least passive thing ever. If you want to die and lose your brand in a year. You’re right. Passive opportunity. So
Rolando Rosas 47:42
no doubt, look, this is a context sport. I played football in college and in high school. And there’s nothing passive any single day on Amazon, just when you think you figured it out. Something happens like this storage thing that started today, the Alexa thing that’s this week, there’s some the changes that you’re talking about with PPC were almost 60% of the page. It wasn’t that way four years ago, three years or even two years ago. So there’s something new there pace of change has increased, you could expect something to change. once a quarter, that’s changed. Now almost like once a week, something major is happening on the platform that you just have to keep your finger on otherwise, you get run over like a Mack truck, a truck like a tiny cell, you get run over like a Chinese seller. Josh, is there anything else that you want to say? Where can people find you? They want to they want to know who you are. They want to talk to you. They want to speak to you. They want you to help them out? Where should they go?
Josh Hadley 48:45
Yeah, the best place I would point people towards would be my podcast. It’s eComm Breakthrough. So it’s eComm With two M’s are on all the traditional podcast platforms. And then we’re at we have a YouTube channel as well. So you could watch the live video if you would like. But what we talked about on that podcast is I’m interviewing people in the E commerce space that have just been crushing it that are sharing actionable action items that you can implement in your own business and the intent in the audience. It’s primarily for established sellers that have an existing seven figure, ecommerce brand, or you’re close to that and you want to scale it to eight figures and beyond. That’s the type of actionable strategies that we’re sharing. We talked about anything from operations to new strategies for product launches, PPC, some of our most recent stuff has been with licensing and how to use licensing to grow your brand and yeah, we’ve had some amazing guests on there. Kevin King’s been on their Howard tie. Steve Simonson Roland Frasier, Ryan Deiss. So people that are making some big waves in the business world and in the E commerce space.
Rolando Rosas 49:58
Those sounds like the big one. salesman you got to go check out Josh Hadley and his podcasts and those whales that go on to show like Kevin King and the rest, because I’ve had Kevin King on our podcast as well. And, boy, it doesn’t matter when you talk to him. There’s something new. He’s got up his sleeve.
Josh Hadley 50:17
So true. Yes, he does. Is that always at the cutting edge?
Rolando Rosas 50:20
Oh, my goodness, I wish I could like download his brain and information and put it into Cerebro or something so we can extract all his knowledge. But But yes, so Josh, thanks for coming on. Today. We’ve been talking to Josh Hadley, a master when it comes to the Amazon world an expert in the E commerce space, you want to check out his podcast. And if you’ve enjoyed this podcast episode, I invite you to go ahead and check out other past guests who were just talking about Kevin King, or Steven Pope from My Amazon Guy. They’re all on our circuitloops.com page, where you’ll find all of those guests as well as past episodes that you can check out. You can also find them wherever you consume your podcasts for the What The Teck? Show. Josh, thank you very much, Dave, anything else?
Dave Kelly 51:11
Thank you, Josh. It was a pleasure to have you. All right.
Rolando Rosas 51:14
Thank you for joining us here and we will see you in those other episodes.
Outro 51:21
Thanks for listening to What The Teck? Be sure to check out our other episodes featuring awesome tech and amazing guests. Find them on circuitloops.com or wherever you consume your favorite podcasts.
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