#350 – Maldives Honeymoon & Case Study Updates

Guess what, guys? It’s episode 350, and you know what that means. You guessed it right, Bradley is back in the Maldives to record a special episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast. He talks everything about the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy, new updates that you need to hear about, new launch strategies that you can try out, lessons from his tests and experiments, and more to help you crush it on your Amazon business!

Bradley also shares his Project X and Project 5K case studies updates. How well did they perform in Q4 of last year and this year’s Q1? His plans and what to look forward to in episode 400. So make sure to listen to the very end.

In episode 350 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 02:11 – Quick History Of The Maldives Honeymoon Special
• 04:20 – The Maldives Honeymoon Mindset – Setting You Up For Success
• 06:00 – New Required Fields Inside Your Amazon Listing
• 07:00 – No More Backend Search Terms In Some Categories
• 08:00 – How Does This Affect Your Indexing For Keywords?
• 11:00 – Project X and 5K Earnings And Business Updates
• 15:00 – Utilizing The Product Opportunity Explorer
• 21:00 – Bundling A Larger Product To A Small One
• 23:00 – Make Sure Your Alerts Are On
• 24:00- More Tests, Experiments, And Strategies Using This Method
• 32:30 – What To Look Forward To In Episode 400?
• 36:20 – Bradley’s Go-To Service Providers

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Guess what guys? It’s episode 350. So we’re recording this live from the Maldives. Since we’re gonna talk about Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategies, plus all the latest updates with what we’ve been doing in Project X and Project 5k. I’m coming at, you live from a restaurant here in the Waldorf Astoria, that’s on a treetop. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Wanna check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon, or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result have the actual search keyword in the title. You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool, Xray more than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray, h10.me/xray. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon or Walmart world. And as we do every 50 episodes, we record it right here, live in the Maldives. So we can talk about the latest Maldives strategies that’s gonna help you out in your Amazon business. Let’s go ahead and get started.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys. So I couldn’t record this in the tree restaurant that I did the intro in because it was raining and that’s like literally out in the open. So we are back here at my actual room here at the Waldorf Astoria and shout out to them. If you guys didn’t see, I recorded different episodes here in the Maldives, which I call the Maldives Honeymoon episodes and they already know who we are here. So like when I got here, they had prepared these look like pastries, not pastries, but like kind of like chocolates. And they did some design where they actually have the Helium 10 logo in there. I didn’t even tell them. And so that’s just like, you know, shout out to the Waldorf Astoria of all these, this place is amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways guys, if this is the first time you’re listening to one of these Maldives specials, let me give you a quick history we started this back in episode 200 of the podcast, and then we called it the Maldives Honeymoon Special. And at that time it was strictly about this newish kind of launch method that I was talking about. And, you know, it was based on the honeymoon strategy taking advantage of the Amazon Honeymoon kind of period, but then like making it on steroids, like, that’s why I said the Maldives. You know, I Googled like, what is the most incredible honeymoon experience out there, and it was the Maldives. So I was like, let me just call it this, you know, it’s not some official term or anything like that, but every 50 episodes, since then, I’ve been doing updates on it where I also give updates to everything that’s been going on on Project X and Project 5k and what we can learn about it.

Bradley Sutton:

Cause remember guys, you know, I’m selling on Amazon, just like you guys are. Unfortunately, I can only spend like about five hours a week on it, but I gotta keep my knowledge fresh. And I gotta share with you guys everything that I’ve learned from all of my different experiments. So, you know, Maldives methodology is kind of, you know, taken on new meaning. You know, it’s not just about that initial launch, but it’s just about a broader view of it is what are the biggest bang for your buck things that you can do to have a long lasting effect on your listing? You know, it’s kind of like a marriage, you know, like you want to start it off great. You know, you like to have an amazing honeymoon, right. And where’s a better honeymoon than the Maldives? But at the same time, you wanna have a good bang for your buck too.

Bradley Sutton:

And that’s why I actually picked a Waldorf Astoria. This is a $2,500 a night place I’m staying in. I don’t pay it all because I use my points from the Hilton American Express card, which is what I use for all my PPC. So I’m getting some amazing bang for my buck here, regardless if this is a honeymoon or not now we’re not gonna knock other honeymoons out there. You married couples who didn’t get to go to the Maldives. Both times I got married, I did not go on a honeymoon. So, you know, we’re not trying to like take this analogy to the next level in this, everybody who can’t go to the Maldives. But again, the point is that what are some amazing things that you can do to your listing to help you get ahead with a head start or a great restart?

Bradley Sutton:

Like I said, I’ve been married twice. So like, Hey, what’s a good restart that you can that you could do a second honeymoon as it were. And then also I’ve kind of broadened this to just not just be about like your keyword launch strategy or strategy, but like your mindset, like how do you set yourself up for success in business in general? You know, I call that having the Maldives effect and that’s actually what I’m gonna be talking about at the Sell and Scale Summit. This September it’s gonna be about Maldives Launch Strategy, but it’s also about like the Maldives honeymooning your mindset so that you can be set up for success because so many times people are so data driven, which is important. You have to be data driven in this business, but then they forget about, you know, how to set themselves up for success as far as the mindset goes.

Bradley Sutton:

So I’ll be talking about that on stage at the selling scale summit. If you guys want more information on that, again, make sure to go to h10.me/s3, h10.me/s3. You can get a hundred dollars off to register for that. You know, it’s not just me talking, Kevin King will be there. Gary Vee, Nellie’s gonna be performing. We’re gonna have a whole bunch of amazing speakers there. So if you wanna save a hundred dollars off your ticket to Sell and Scale Summit, make sure to use the code S3BS100, S3BS100. All right, guys, let’s go ahead and talk then about what has been going on. I’m gonna start, start this off with a bang. Give you guys some new information. We talked about this in the Helium 10 Elite Facebook group a few weeks ago.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s where I usually break my discoveries first with that small group of people. I haven’t really seen it talked about much out there. So I just thought I’d go ahead and talk about it here on the podcast. The first thing is there’s new fields in Amazon in many categories that are now required that you fill out and these weren’t required before, and you won’t be able to even edit your listing in Seller Central unless you fill out these fields. You know, some of them have to do with the box quantity, the country of origin, and the fabric type. It’s a whole bunch of like new things that are now required. Like it’s in red. Like you can’t change your images in Seller Central. You can’t change anything unless you fill these categories out. So make sure to fill those categories out.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, if you’re just like, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to do that, but if you’re feeling lazy or you just don’t wanna have to go into Seller Central, but you still wanna make updates to your listing as far as like title bullet points, subscription search terms, things like that. If you’re using Helium 10 Listing Builder, you can still edit your listing there and then sync it without having to change those fields. So we’re kind of like overriding that block that Amazon is putting in listing builders. So there’s just a little bit of information for you guys. If you’re having trouble editing your listing, that might be why you haven’t filled out these new fields. Another thing in many categories, now, like the home and kitchen category search terms are no more the back end search terms. As in like, as far as what it’s called being search terms, it is no longer there what shows up in your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, that whole keyword section, that tab, you know how those different tabs, when you edit your listing, that whole thing is gone. What used to be search terms. And if you had search terms there, it’s now in the details, the product details tab of your listing, and that’s where like your bullet points and description go. Now you’re gonna see something instead of calling it to search terms or backend search terms, it’s now called a Generic Keyword, right? So check your listing out it. A lot of categories, this has happened. There’s some categories where it still hasn’t. I imagine eventually it’s gonna be across the board. Usually, Amazon does these big time listing changes like category by category. The categories I’m seeing it in so far are like the home and kitchen categories. Now, if you are still using Listing Builder and you’re trying to sync it, I mean, by the time you’re listening to this, we might have changed the label.

Bradley Sutton:

But if you see search terms in Listing Builder and you sync your listing, it’ll still go ahead and sync to that generic keyword section. Now here’s something that’s interesting. You know, as of right now, you know, maybe this is just the algorithm trying to refresh itself. Very interesting. Half of the keywords, like in the Project X and Project 5k listings that are in that home and kitchen category, half of the keywords in the search terms are no longer indexed, which is crazy. They used to be all indexed. Half of them are no longer indexed. You know, now why that’s the case? You know, who knows, does this mean that the backend search terms or generic keywords in general are now less kind of impactful on the algorithm? I’m definitely gonna have to do some testing on that. All right. Now one thing you might be wondering is, you know, Subject Matter has been gone for a long time for many, many listings, and now, there’s not even a keyword section in some of these categories.

Bradley Sutton:

So does that Listing Builder trick still work where you can put subject matter into your listing from Listing Builder and then upload it to Amazon, will you sync it without even having subject matter in the back end of your listing? The answer is yes. I did a test on it where I had some keywords that were not indexed for now. It’s interesting. These are keywords that I had in the search terms. I did this on one of the coffin shelves. These are keywords that were in the search terms. And these are part of those half of the keywords that were not indexed anymore. I took some of those keywords, put it into listing builder into subject matter, uploaded it within five minutes, and boom goes a dynamite. It was indexed. So again, subject matter, it looks like in most categories, you’re still able to use that Listing Builder trick, and it even gets you indexed whereas search terms does not

Bradley Sutton:

Now, in the backend of these home and kitchen categories, there’s some new kind of like categories or fields there that I hadn’t seen before. Maybe they’ve been there. I just hadn’t noticed it before, but some of these are recommended, uses for products. All right. Recommended uses for products. I did some testing in this field. Don’t worry too much about it. As far as indexing goes, the keywords that I stuck in there did not get indexed. However, another new keyword field is called Special Features. I hadn’t seen this before. Maybe you guys did, but I put in more keywords and Special Features from those keywords that were in search terms that didn’t get indexed, put them into this new field called Special Features. And then again, index in five minutes for those keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

So there’s some more real estate that you guys can use to get indexed for more keywords. Should you need it? All right, let’s talk. Before we get into some launch strategy, let’s talk about some of the results from, you know, this has been since November, since we did episode 300, now we’re at three 50. So let me give you an update on Project X and Project 5k for Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year. Now Project 5k Q4, last year, we did $170,000 of growth sales. I have four main private label brands in there. One of them did 60k one did 30k another 20 and another 10k they that 10k are mainly those straws. And those were that, that one. That’s the original Project 5k, how he launched 12 different products for a total of five, $5,000.

Bradley Sutton:

Some birds behind me making a lot of noise anyways here. The rest of it was from wholesale on that account. Now Q1 of this year was only a hundred thousand dollars, right? So sales went way down in Q1 for Project 5k and it was mainly wholesale driving that. The private label brands in Project 5k, they only did 15,000, 17,000, 6,000 and 9,000. So private label on that account was very low. Now, one of the reasons are two of the products were out of stock, for almost the entire Q1, the two main sellers of those private little brands. Maybe you guys had a similar experience, but I just got slammed with the shipping delays, like absolutely slammed. Like there was a PO that I dropped in late November, and I didn’t get it until April. That’s how long it took to ship and how long it took to get ready.

Bradley Sutton:

So those shipping things really, really killed me. Maybe that happened to you guys. I definitely should have planned a little bit better on that. All right. Now, switching over to Project X Q4 last year did $70,000. Obviously, that’s a hundred percent private label. Our two brands Manny’s Mysteries Oddities and Gui’s chicken coop Q1 of this year. Now, this is just an eyeopener guys. Let me just talk about Q1. Last year, we did $66,000 Q1 this year, 20,000. So sales on Project X, like took a nose dive, and it wasn’t even like we were out of stock on that many products or anything like that. Like we were on Project 5k. So especially the coffin shelf, that was the biggest loser in Q1 compared to last year, like, I think we went from selling 1500 units to only 300 units.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, some of it’s due to increased competition, but it’s just, we lost a lot of momentum. And so one of these things I talked about before, you know, that killed momentum is somebody on the Helium 10 team accidentally, I’m assuming accidentally killed our main PPC campaign for like a month. And I didn’t know about it. And so like, after that things were never the same, you know, sales took a nose dive because that PPC campaign was off. But then like, even when I turned it back on or started it again, I never was able to recoup that momentum. So guys, if you’ve got a product again, that is at least two years old, don’t do anything. That’s gonna kill the momentum or take your foot off the gas. You know, if you’ve been doing PPC campaigns, if you’ve been doing outside traffic, don’t just like, stop and think that you’re at the top of the category because there’s something going on with Amazon that I’ve seen.

Bradley Sutton:

And other people have like Casey Goss have talked about, they call it the Amazon death spiral, where if you take your foot off the gas, sometimes Amazon never gives you your momentum back. All right. In Q4 last year, we actually launched a few products for Project X, a new one, for Gui’s chicken coop. We launched a stackable acre. I wanted to do something. This was something actually I was doing a live demo and we were looking on Etsy. And this, this product seemed to have some momentum on Etsy, or instead of just one egg tray, you have these like, kind of like egg racks, and you can like stack them up as high as you want. They kind of like interlock with each other. So it seemed like it was good on Etsy. So I was like, Hey, this kind of goes along with our brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go ahead and throw this up there. And so we did, and it did pretty well, you know, did pretty well. We actually sold out of it before I could restock it. And so very happy with that launch. Another one I’ve talked about this before, is how we found it. We were looking at the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer. And one thing that I love about the Product Opportunity Explorer and this kind of ties into like Maldives Honeymoon launch, you know, is trying to find keywords that have buyer intent, but obvious signs that people are not finding what they are looking for. So what signifies demand, first of all, for the keyword word search volume, all right. So, you know, we have that in Helium 10, but what Product Opportunity Explorer takes it to our next level?

Bradley Sutton:

It tells you what’s the conversion rate over the last 360 days of a keyword. And so if you look at the coffin shelf niche, a lot of the keywords in there, like coffin shelf and coffin decor and things like that, they had like about a, a three to 6% conversion rate, which is, you know, not that great, but it’s pretty standard for that niche, right? That means let’s add up every hundred searches for coffin shelf. You know, there’s about four people who actually end up buying something immediately after that search. But then we saw this keyword coffin bookshelf, right? And it had a 0.6 conversion rate, 0.6%, meaning out of every 100 searches for this keyboard, not even one person would buy a product. And so to me, that was interesting. I was like, well, what’s going on here that there is not many people finding what they want?

Bradley Sutton:

So I searched for it just physically online. And sure enough, when you typed in coffin bookshelf before there, of course, you know, there’s, there’s 300, you know, listings that show up, but right there on page one, there was not one coffin bookshelf, there’s a whole bunch of coffin shelves, but none of them are big enough to, for a book. So that just like put the light bulbs off and it’s like, ding, ding, ding, ding. All right, well, look at this. First of all, there was a very low title density for that keyword. In other words, there was not one listing on page one that had that keyword in the title, because there were no coffin bookshelves. All right. That’s part of the Maldives Honeymoon strategy is looking for keywords with a low titled density score for page one that has a lot of demand.

Bradley Sutton:

But number two, if you can find listings where there’s no relevant, like literally zero relevant products on page one, that is a great opportunity, if there is searched demand. Now, there was not a lot of searches for large coffin shelf or coffin bookshelf. We’re talking like 1,015 hundred, but still that’s 1500. You know, that’s 1500 searches and we would have been the only one. So we quickly launched a product that was huge, a huge coffin shelf compared to our original one. And we put books in the main image launched that in Q4 sold out even before Christmas. I mean, sold out like in a matter of weeks. So that was kind of like proof of concept there. And that’s should be something that you guys can do when you’re looking for product research, tying in that Maldives methodology with product research, even before the launch, right?

Bradley Sutton:

So that was what we launched there in Project X and unfortunately, we were out of stock of that for like four months after Christmas, because we just could not get it in time now, how did we launch that keyword. All right. So that, or that product, we actually used AZrank. Now you might be wondering, Hey, AZrank, isn’t that like search, find, buy, and that’s not allowed on Amazon. That’s absolutely correct. But AZrank, as soon as Amazon put the kibosh, like, all right, fine, we’re not gonna do a search, find, buy anymore. We’re going turn this into like, kind of like product surveys and giving you actually extra level of looking for what your buyer’s intent and what your buyers are interested in. So AZrank kind of like completely changed their business model over there.

Bradley Sutton:

And so we used this to launch this coffin bookshelf to relaunch this, I should say after the second time, the first time we actually did it the traditional way, cuz that was when search, find, buy was still. Okay. But the second time, remember like I said, we were out of stock for three months. The second time we had to relaunch it, we used AZrank, but their new methodology. So the way that we did it was we gave like users like a list of different keywords that we thought were the most relevant and then asked them, Hey, which keyword would you use? Or maybe it’s not even one of the above keywords, which keyword would you use to find this product? And you showed them the picture of the product and then, you know, you have them pick or they would choose to pick either coffin bookshelf or large coffin shelf, or they would just give you some completely random keyword that, you know, like a few of them said a Gothic bookshelf.

Bradley Sutton:

And then in addition to that, for the main keywords that we wanted to do research on like coffin, bookshelf, and even coffin shelf. Cause we got sales on that. We have them do market research. So AZrank is using their customer base and they’re asking ’em these questions. All right, look at coffin shelf and tell us what you like about these results and what do you like, you know, is there something an image here that makes you stop your scroll? What about our image compared to others? What about our features? Like it goes way in depth. It’s almost kind of like think like using Helium 10 Audience or PickFu combined with market research and that’s a kind of information we’re getting now with that guys. After six days, we got to top five for coffin shelf keyword, which is the main keyword in the niche.

Bradley Sutton:

We got to page one position one in six days for coffin bookshelf all through this new kind of launching that AZrank had where you’re not just doing a search, find, buy, telling people to search for this keyword and find it, but you’re just letting the customers choose their own adventure as it were like, Hey, how would you find this keyword? And then let us know the market research on this, you know, which is within terms of service. All right. So hats off to AZrank for the kind of like being able to change their business model to keep within terms of service there. Now one thing to note the single large coffin shelf we made, profit is almost breakeven. Like it is just super, super hard. We have that as a price point of I think it’s like $53 and because of the size of it, it’s just really hard to break even because of the shipping cost to get it here.

Bradley Sutton:

And then the FBA fees that Amazon is charging. Interestingly enough, we’re selling also as a variation. This is another thing for you guys out there when you’re launching products. Another away we have a variation of that in the same listing for that large coffin shelf and the small coffin shelf. So what I did was I was like, look at this large coffin shelf. And I was like, let me make the middle shelf removable, hope you guys can picture that. Just think of the coffin shelf in the middle shelf as removable. And then first of all, being removable is cool in itself for people who want to just have like a big coffin shaped box, right? So that’s like cool in itself, a cool feature that the regular coffin shelves didn’t have, but by making it removable, now I could put our regular Project X coffin shelf inside of the big bookshelf, coffin bookshelf, and ship it together in the same exact size box as the large coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

So we are like, let’s go ahead and launch a different SKU of a coffin shelf combo, the large one and the small one, now, it’s the same exact box. And so even though I’m only charging something like $63 for the combo, whereas the by itself, the regular one is, is like 54. We are making 15 about 15% more profit than the single one by itself. All right. So, so there’s a lesson for you guys that of how you can maybe get around some like shipping problems is if you have a larger product, you know, what else can you throw in there? You can increase the price and then the customer is getting more bang for the buck, but you are actually the one who’s making more profit. Another thing we did before was we had launched in the past, pink and purple coffin shelves.

Bradley Sutton:

And back in the day, there was like, no, hardly any coffin shelf. So we actually had them all as standalone listings. And then what we did was we were running traffic to all three of those listings, but now, you know, page one on coffin shelf was so, so kind of saturated, we decided to combine those listings. So, Lem, here at evangelist here at Helium 10, he combined all three of those lessons into a variation. And then actually interestingly enough, the pink and purple sales went up because now they were all getting some visibility from the black coffin shelves you know, search position right there, their keyword rank. Another lesson from Project X is to make sure to have your alerts on and activated and that you’re checking it. The egg tray, the original egg tray from Project X sales were dead and I never even was checking what happened was it got adult product classification, and I didn’t even realize it.

Bradley Sutton:

I looked in alerts sure enough, like two months ago it told me, Hey, this product was marked as adult. I didn’t do anything. I’ve launched two different cases right now with Seller Central. And they still haven’t taken it off, even though they keep saying, they’re gonna take it off the adult product classification. So guys make sure Alerts are turned on all of your products. If you have Helium 10 and then be checking your Alerts. You know, I had it turned on that was the first half, but I wasn’t checking my alerts. So I didn’t even know that we lost sales because we got classified as an adult product, all right, going to Project 5k straws, you know, again, that was the original products line that we had started with this.

Bradley Sutton:

And they started blowing up. We’ve been selling more straws than ever. For example, there was one color of straws. I had a SKU that was a 50 straw SKU. So I was like, you know what? I wanna come out with 150 straws of this same exact SKU right now. Here’s the thing I decide to use a different method of launch for this. I was like, let me take this as a standalone listing first. So I’m not gonna make it a variation. I’m gonna take these 150 straws and I’m gonna make it a standalone listing so I can take advantage of its own Honeymoon period, right? Because if, if it was, if it was on another listing, I’m not gonna get that much of a Honeymoon period. So I started it off by itself. I knew all of the keywords that were driving the most sales for the 50 straw listing.

Bradley Sutton:

So what I did was I created a new Maldives launch method that I talked about in episode 3 0 1 of the podcast where I take the 10 keywords that I think are gonna drive me to sales. And I wanna try and get to page one. And I did a PPC campaign on these 10 keywords that I knew were driving sales to the 50 straw variation. And I put a super high bid to make sure that I was coming up at the top. Now I didn’t get traction on all 10 of those keywords. However, that being said, the number one keyword let’s just say these were purple straws. All right. It’s not purple straws, but let’s just say it was purple straws. Purple straws would’ve been my main keyword right on that. On that one, I got to page one position two.

Bradley Sutton:

And again, part of the Maldives method of launch is your target main, main keyword should be in phrase form in your title, preferably without many other people having your title. You know, if it was a purple straw again, which it’s not that that purple straw keyword was exactly in the title. And sure enough, I got to page one the second keyword, I got page one position eight. Now this also has to do with the Maldives method is when you’re launching on keywords, try and do variations of each other. So let’s say one key. The main keyword is purple straws, which is in the title, but your second keyword, which may be also isn’t the title is purple straws decor or something like that. Well, if I’m sending traffic either via PPC or whatever, to both of those keywords at once, the momentum is feeding off of each other when there’s activity on purple straws and then there’s activity on purple straws decor.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s what I did on this one, that one, I got to the top of page one as well. Another keyword, which is the actual most search volume on this is 10,000. That purple straws keyword is only like 2000 search volume, but there’s this other keyword that I always got a lot of traction for. And you would think it has nothing to do. It has nothing to do with this product. It would be like if it’s purple straws and then the keyword is Barney party decor. I mean, you can kind of think, well, okay, well, I know why purple straws would be relevant to Barney party decor, but that, that Barney party decor obviously means a whole bunch of other things, mainly Barney things and stuff like that. But I, from day one of this listing, I saw another straw getting sales off of this keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s why I’ve always concentrated on it. Well, anyways, that keyword, obviously it’s not gonna be a brand name. I didn’t put Barney in it, cuz this is not purple straws, but just, I’m just using an example here. But that keyword I had in the title. And even though it had 10,000 searches and I only sold five units via PPC, five units via PPC. And I got to page one position one after only five sales, again, combining that Maldives method. And there was a lot of buyer intent for that keyword for my kind of product. Another keyword I only got one sale on PPC. One sale on PPC 7,000 search form took me to page one, position seven. So the Maldives strategies we talked about in 301 guys still working nowadays, what did I do once I got to page one for all these keywords?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, at that point I combined the listings into a variation where now it says 50 straws or 150 straws. And then hoping that my original listing can now take advantage of the bumped-up keyword rank of that original one. And then now the new one that it would keep its momentum going because now it has all of the reviews of that first listing. So again, this was just a strategy values and it worked great. And we’ve been selling hundreds and hundreds of these straws. You know, again, we’re not making a lot of money on, on this, you know, when you’re talking about $7, $8 products, you’re not making much money, but this is just fun for me. It’s just fun for me to work on this kind of products and just see what the algorithm does and show that, Hey, even if you don’t have a lot of money, if you wanna start selling small on Amazon, you absolutely can with products like this one product that I had.

Bradley Sutton:

And one of the accounts, there was a keyword that wasn’t ranking for, and then I put this keyword in the title. I just wanted to see if that part of the Maldives work sure enough within days, page one, position one, right? I’m not trying to say, guys, go changing your title all the time. Amazon doesn’t really like that. This is one I had never changed the title on. And it was a very slight change. You already had the one word, I just added another word after it. And then that newly formed two-word phrase, you got to page one position one right away on that. Another listening I tested, if the canonical still works, as far as that trick that we talk about where you changed the first five words and then put a dash, it still did one of them. It did, it did work well.

Bradley Sutton:

It changed within 24 hours. Another one, it never changed. So I actually opened up a case with Seller Central and said, Hey guys, can you change the Canonical URL or I to this? And they change it for me. So those two things I tested recently and are still working another project or product in 5k. I discontinued it, but I relaunched it. Right. So what happened was it was like a candle and this candle had a lot of wicks. And what happened was the first batch. I didn’t get, I didn’t have it inspected well enough and they were missing a lot of wits. So the original listings got a lot of bad reviews because of that. So instead of relaunching, once I ran out of stock on that same listing, I just started from scratch on a new listing. And it did okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Did much better than if I would’ve tried to launch it on that SKU or relaunched on that SKU that already had only three stars out of five. Another thing there was a product I was out of stock, one of the main products on one of my Project 5k accounts. I was out of stock for four stinking months. All right. So I wanted to relaunch with a bank and I went to AZrank and did that same thing that I did with that coffin bookshelf, where I wanted to do some like heavy market research and just have the people pick what keywords they were going to, they wanted to use to search for this. Sure enough, three of the main keywords that I used, this, this like product or this market research systematology that they have now, every single one page, one position, one for all three of the main keywords on this relaunch.

Bradley Sutton:

So that to me is part of the Maldives strategy, because again, I had these keywords in the title and I was getting some market research out of this. A couple of the products that I relaunched, I could tell at the end of Q4, Hey, shipping prices are going out of control. All right. Out of control. So a lot of these products that have in Project 5k are similar to Project X in that, like the coffin shelves in Project X are kind of bigger. These products were kind of bigger. So what I did was I actually shaved like two, three inches off on each side. And that allowed me to keep the price the same while many sellers were raising their price. And it allowed me to keep the price the same, but I was able to keep my same profit margins, even though the shipping prices went up because I was able to save money, shipping it to the US.

Bradley Sutton:

And I was able to save money in Amazon FBA. Now here’s the thing with Amazon FBA. I launched on the same SKU, so it still had the old dimensions there. So what I had to do was wait till I got like a few weeks of sales and then I submitted to them, Hey, please do you know, a remeasure of these because you guys are charging me the wrong one. So I’m gonna get my money back on that one. So I did that on two different products successfully where I was like, you know, what, if I shave a few inches off here or there, it’s not going to like, mean less sales for me, but it’s gonna mean a lot more profit savings for me.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here’s one thing that I wanted to talk about. That’s, I’m definitely gonna probably have some case study information on for the next episode, maybe episode 400 of the podcast. And this is about a new company called PressX and they’re doing some interesting work. I’m not even sure if it’s gonna be available yet to the public, but PressX Live is the name of the company. And I took a look at some of their case studies that they did. And what it has to do is like these news articles getting out there about a product and you’re getting like all the subscribe and save the activity, and you’re also getting sales increases because you’re just organically. Your keyword ranks are going up just by this outside traffic.

Bradley Sutton:

So one of their case studies is it was in the beauty products niche. And I’m looking here at the information. They did a publication in the Daily Mail and the Daily Mail’s a big online publication and they had a $10,000 budget. Now, hold on, you know, you might be thinking $10,000 budget. That is ridiculous. So now this $10,000 budget was over six months right now. Now it doesn’t sound so much, right. And they got 6,667 clicks out of this. So I mean, that’s not that many cost per click is not that much considering that this is a $10,000 budget and they got almost 7,000 clicks. All right, now here’s some of the results, the BSR went from 2,900 down to 470. And there was even a time when BSR was down to nine in the beauty category.

Bradley Sutton:

So it just went blew up because of these press releases, they got 500 new subscriptions and save orders from this campaign. That is huge. If, if your product is something that can, is replenishable like beauty or grocery or health and household that is huge to get 500 new subscriptions. Sales growth average was 50% up before they were doing a hundred orders a day. So it was already selling pretty well. And then now the sales went to 146 a day. They had one day sale of $60,000. And then again, the organic rank improved significantly. It’s not because they were doing two step URLs or search fund buyers or anything. It’s just organic traction because of this outside traffic that Amazon loves. They did another case study in the beauty category. Also, the publication was a Daily Mail. They only did 8,000 budget spent, and it was about 5,000 clicks and it’s still going on.

Bradley Sutton:

And the BSR went from 4,600 down to 1800. And they had a 25% sales growth average. It was about 82 sales a day before, and now it’s a hundred sales a day and they even had a $10,000 day. And again, their keyword ranks have increased. So this is like something that I definitely want to keep my eye on because again, for me, the Maldives methodology is not just about using one tactic, but it’s about a whole bunch of things put together. And if I can get a great head start, you know, just like if a marriage can get on a great head, start with an awesome honeymoon, like in the Maldives, well, if I can have done this press release and have that, give me a boost when I’m getting started, or even if I have a mature listing and I can still get another boost almost like renewing your wedding vows, if we’re gonna keep this analogy going well, shoot, this is something I wanna try.

Bradley Sutton:

So guys probably by episode 400 you know, I’ll have done a couple of these, you know, and let’s definitely, you know, see how it’s going. These are long term case studies. It’s not something that, Hey, get to page one and four days you know, as you saw from those, you know, one of them was like three months and one of them was like six months long. But I definitely wanna see how it’s going. Couple other things I did for Project X and Project 5k. I wanted to try different shipping methods. So you guys probably saw in the Seller Solutions Hub, which is our used to be called Trusted Partner Directory in Helium 10. You can find at hub.helium10.com. I used the shipping company Forceget really cool, you know no, no.

Bradley Sutton:

Knock on my, my, my sourcing agent who normally handles my shipments, but I don’t have much visibility on what’s going on. Like I just have to ask her in WeChat, like, Hey, did you ship it yet? Where’s it at? Where’s my shipping? Where is it gonna be with force get, it’s pretty cool because like you can, you know, when they pick it up from the factory, you know, when it gets loaded on a ship, you know, when it leaves China, you know, when it, it hits, you know, the US shores, you know, when it gets unloaded to the warehouse when it’s gonna get to you, it’s really cool? The amount of information you get. I’m gonna do a little mini blog about it, you know, showing you guys screenshots and things, but check them out guys Forceget they’re in hub.helium10.com, just look at the shipping companies, but really happy with the service that they gave.

Bradley Sutton:

I know a lot of you guys are always looking for shipping companies. I did also tried a different inspection too, and this is another one from the Seller Solutions Hub, it’s called Zoom Inspect. They did a great job inspecting one of my shipments really detailed report. So I love trying out and giving props these companies in our Solutions Hub. And so guys, you know, make sure that if you, if you have somebody that you use that you definitely recommend, make sure to recommend them to the Seller Solutions Hub at hub.helium10.com. And then if you see one that you’ve used in there and had a good experience or a bad experience, make sure to leave a review, if you’re a Helium 10 member, you can actually leave verified reviews in our Seller Solutions Hub.

Bradley Sutton:

So to make sure that if there’s like a bad player that got into our hub and a lot of people leave bad reviews because they’re, they’re kind of shady. Well, we wanna know about it. So make sure to leave reviews either positive or negative, just make sure they’re honest reviews obviously of our hub. And if you guys are looking for other, you know, service providers or agencies on things that Helium 10 doesn’t provide, we’ve got it there in that hub. So anyway, guys, that’s it for this episode 350, again, shout out to the Waldorf Astoria here in the Maldives for hosting me again, for now, the third time, the other time I went to the Conrad. But this year is my favorite hotel here in the Maldives. If any of you guys are getting married and wanna have a cool honeymoon, make sure to come out here, this is the best way to do it.

Bradley Sutton:

And again, like I said, guys, Maldives methodology, when it comes to Amazon and stuff that I’ve talked about, it’s about launch it’s about doing things that set you off on the having your best foot forward. It’s about your mentality and getting the best bang for your buck. And it’s about setting yourself up for success. So again, that’s a made up word that we’ve done here, but I wanted to actually eventually have some meaning for you guys. So it’s just something that you can go back to, and then you ask yourself like, Hey, this thing that I’m doing on Amazon, my launch, you know, my keyword research, is it gonna have the Maldives effect? You know, is this really gonna set me off on the best foot forward and make something that’s gonna be memorable for me? You know, is my mindset going to be in a way where it’s gonna set me up for success? That part of things I didn’t talk much about today, but remember, I’m gonna be talking about that at the Sell and Scale Summit in September. Anyways, guys, thank you so much for joining me. It’s amazing that we have been now through 350 episodes. I appreciate every one of you guys. Don’t forget, leave a review on Spotify or on Apple podcast if you haven’t done so already. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you in the next.

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