#341 – Learning From Other’s Amazon Mistakes

When it comes to education on Amazon selling and E-commerce there are many different ways that we want to learn. Some people like to learn with books, some like buying expensive courses, some get mentors, and some get to learn Amazon FBA from shows like Project X or maybe Freedom Ticket. What we want to do in Helium 10 is always to provide entertaining education and other resources to help Amazon and E-commerce sellers level up their game. That’s the thought process behind these two new shows.

The Total Package is a show where Helium 10’s brand evangelist, Lailama Hasan, shows us, step-by-step, how to optimize your Amazon product listing using the NEW Listing Builder tool and how to optimize your customer experience! 

This show will share new strategies and tips that will help your Amazon product listing to index and rank, and some strategies on how to have happy customers once they have received your product! Lailama will run through examples of good and bad Amazon listings, and go over the components of each listing, using Helium 10’s Listing Analyzer tool, so you know what to include, and not to include in your own Amazon product listing!

Learnin’ from L’s with Lem is Helium 10’s new content series where Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Lem Turner, will discuss mistakes Amazon sellers have made in the past, and explain how you can correct them.

Catch these new shows on Helium 10’s YouTube Channel and don’t forget to subscribe!

In episode 341 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Lailama, and Lem discuss:

• 02:30 – There Are Different Ways That We Want To Learn
• 04:30 – Helium 10’s The Total Package Show With Lailama Hasan
• 06:00 – Lessons From Comparing Amazon Listings
• 11:10 – Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel And Watch The Total Package
• 12:00 – Talking About Lem Turner’s New Show
• 14:30 – Content Examples From Lem’s New YouTube Show
• 18:30 – Watch Learnin’ From L’s With Lem On YouTube
• 19:00 – Amazon FBA Tips From LinkedIn
• 25:40 – Instagram Strategy For Project X Preview
• 27:50 – Follow The Serious Sellers Podcast On Instagram
• 28:15 – How To Navigate Amazon Conferences
• 31:00 – How To Use Helium 10 Tools For Your Amazon Keywords
• 34:20 – Quick Tips In Using Portals And Follow-Up
• 38:00 – Product Photography Tips – Hiring A Studio
• 43:50 – Catch Lem And Lailama On Freedom Ticket Xtra

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’re gonna talk about photography, insert card, review strategies, and more, but also two brand new shows designed to help you level up your Amazon seller game. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

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. We’ve got a guest back here with us today. And we’ve got a couple of guests today that are no strangers to this show, fellow Evangelists here at Helium 10, Lem and Lailama, the double L crew. How’s it going, guys?

Lem:

Doing great.

Bradley Sutton:

Lailama doesn’t wanna reply. She’s just like, I’m phasing you out, Bradley. You doing all right. Lay Lama over there.

Lailama:

I’m doing great. I’m doing great.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Why brought you guys on is because you guys each have a couple of new kind of like, you know, I don’t wanna call it reality TV shows, but like YouTube TV shows that that are gonna help Amazon sellers. So I wanted to talk about that and then just also talk in general about talk shop here about Amazon strategies and different things. And speaking about educational things on Amazon and e-commerce all of us, or many Amazon sellers have different ways that they like to learn. You know, some people like to learn stuff from textbooks. If you look on Amazon, there’s people who buy like how to sell on Amazon books and they literally learn how to sell on Amazon from a book. There’s people who like to buy these expensive three, four, $5,000 courses.

Bradley Sutton:

And Hey, it’s definitely worth it. If you’re gonna be making tons of money on Amazon from that course, then shoot who wouldn’t pay three, four, $5,000 for a course. There’s people who want to get mentors. You know, there’s people who want to get coaches. There’s people who to thousands and thousands of people who learn just from shows like Project X or from freedom ticket. So what we wanna do at Helium 10 is always provide, you know, education for tools in ways that hopefully will reach the, the, the biggest audience. And that means that it’s not just one kind of way of learning. It’s not just freedom ticket or, or the pro training videos that we do inside of Helium 10. We wanna have some entertainment too. And so that was kind of like the thought process behind these two new shows that we have.

Bradley Sutton:

And so I just wanted to first go over that and then we’ll get into some other general strategies about what’s been going on in the Amazon world. So the first one that was released was– Lailama, you had the first episode already. Now a second episode just came out recently. It’s called The Total Package. Now, this is funny because this is a show that I originally had ideated, like maybe like two years ago, you know, way before you even worked at this company, it was gonna be for somebody else here at this company who was going to do this show, but I always kind of liked the kind of like reality TV shows where they’re actually doing something, you know, in it, not just talking about something, but actually, you know, like extreme makeover or things like that are pimp my ride, like way back in the day for, for people who remember that show from MTV, that was actually the working title. I was like, we’re, we’re obviously not gonna call this pimp my listing, but we even had a Slack channel that was called that because that was how I originally came up with this idea. I was like, remember that pimp my ride show, like what if we could do that to like Amazon listings and it kind of grew from there, but anyways, Lailama talk about like the premise of what this Total Package show is about.

Lailama:

Yeah. So the reason it’s called The Total Package is because we’re not only going over the listings and analyzing these particular listings that we’ve chosen, we’re also going ahead and ordering these products and seeing what these products that experience looks like for a customer when they receive your product. So from the time you, they place an order all the way to they receiving it, and now they’re using that product, how does that feel? And that’s kind of why we named it, The Total Package. And in this show no episode is the same as the other. So we’re going over different aspects of listing optimization in the customer’s experience. This could be maybe listing images, maybe bullet points, you know, just taking a deep dive or sometimes even an overall view of these different aspects of listing optimization. So we wanna go over these strategies in-depth, taking a bigger picture, you know, to show you what it would look like to have a good experience as a customer, and also to come across these listings as a customer and to, you know, be convinced to buy them or not, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s talk about what we learned from that first episode. Cause that was already interesting or is actually kind of like the second episode is really a kind of ask me anything that, that you and I were doing live. But it wasn’t a garlic press. What was the actual product that you had chosen for that second episode?

Lailama:

Yeah, this episode we ordered some potato ricers. Now I didn’t even know what those were. There were two different kinds of rice. There’s a good one and a bad one. We went over the listings and then we ordered them and we took a look at those two different products as well, and as expected. And, you know, it was a bit of shock. There was a huge difference in the quality as well of the listing, as well as the product. And so we really broke it down into each and every step and saw how one listing did such a great job at it, and the other was kind of lackluster. So, you know, comparing the two would, I think really make you understand as a seller, what you’re missing out on or what is not a good way to go about creating your listing or your product or that experience versus seeing that good listing we’re drawing that comparison, that contrast for you to see like, okay, these are the strategies. You should be a plan. So it was kind of like a do’s and don’ts to cut it short, you know?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. And I remember when, when we were first talking about how you were gonna find the product, I was like, you know, of course, it’ll be easy to just find crap listings that aren’t selling at all, because they’re so bad, but I was like, you know what, when you enter Black Box to enter your criteria, I want you to make sure to put a minimum sales amount because I know that there are crap listings out there where they’re still selling and like that bad one, that one that was really bad. I mean, it was actually still, still selling it. And that just goes to show that, Hey, even if you have a terrible listing, you could be selling because you’re doing other things, right. But then how much money are you leaving on the table when your total package, or like your entire customer experience is lacking. So what were some of the other things that like the one product of the potato ricer was like, doing so much, so much better than the other, if you can recall.

Lailama:

Yeah. I think a major aspect of it was I looked at this product and I had so many questions cause I’m like, what is this product used for? Right. so we looked at the bad listing and I was left with so many questions. I’m like, it didn’t answer any of my questions. It didn’t have infographics. It had a very short you know, few bullet points and they didn’t really give me any information. It was talking in very manufacturing like lingo. So like just two images, no bullet points, the title was keyword-stuffed, and the description wasn’t too great either. But then we look at the other listing and it had answered all my questions just by reading the title. You know, taking a look at the main image alone. Like I didn’t even have to look at the infographics. So the images talked about each and everything. And then we went through the bullet points. Those who were very detailed, just talking about those important points that you would get as a buyer.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. And then along the lines of the total package, like even the literal package itself was–, well, what was it for the bad listening? Like they just like threw it in a bag or something like that.

Lailama:

It was a plastic zip lock and inside, like there wasn’t a box and insert nothing to touch base with your custom to ask them about their experience. Right. So that was a big problem as well. Like it came unbranded. I could have just bought an unbranded, no brand name on the product, nothing. The other one was branded, it had its own box. You know, it was packaged really nicely. It came with an insert–,

Bradley Sutton:

But that was something that they did badly. Right. Didn’t they do like the good listing? Yeah. Didn’t they have like a non-compliant insert or something like that?

Lailama:

Yeah. It was non-compliant but they had it, so they did part of the job right.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So yeah. I mean, and, and then, you know, I remember, you know, as you showed, you know, like they were, they had attention to details. Like if I recall like the good one, they had like a rubber thing on the handle or something. So it was easier on the hand. And that felt, you know, better. So guys, you know, the every little thing by itself is, is not going to, you know, be the difference of you becoming a millionaire are not, but these things add up, you know, when you do these little things on the listing, they all add up and it’s going to help you on your Amazon business. So that was the first episode. Guys, go to YouTube, and look up The Total Package and Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

And then you’ll watch from episode one and see what you can learn from that one. And then the next one that’s coming out in a couple of weeks, we’ll actually be kind of like a little mini-makeover on one of the Project X listing. And like Lailama said, there’s no two episodes that are gonna be the same, you know, you might think like, okay, well, they’re just gonna break down different products every, every week and, and talk about what they would no. Like the episode, three is actually about how to change your images to 3d images, you know, episode four. I’m not even sure if we have that plan yet, but it’s gonna be about something different. So make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you’ll be notified every time that these go live. Now, Lem, we talked about the working title for the Lailama’s show. What was the original working title for your show within slack?

Lem:

It was, oops. I did it again with Lem

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I think it was just, oops, I did it with Lem

Lem:

Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. Oops, I did it with Lem,

Bradley Sutton:

For any Britney Spears fans out there that’s the reference there, but we’re like, you know what, that’s not the best title, but what does oops and stuff like even have to do with it? How does that actually tie into the premise of the show?

Lem:

So how it ties into the premise of the show is the show really sort revolves all around. Learning from missteps that sellers have taken using real-life stories, real-life scenarios that have occurred to sellers, and taking those experiences, convincing it into a story. So that way we can share it with our audience in a way that they can take that information and not make the same mistakes on their own as well. And that’s really where it comes again, comes across of like, there’s so many easy missteps that sellers take. And that often a lot of sellers do the same misstep is that if we can go ahead with this content and help prevent some of those easy mistakes from happening, then we’re gonna go ahead and do that with this show. So that’s really the whole premise of this series. And it’s been good so far.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah. So, guys, that’s important, you know, there’s no perfect Amazon seller, you know, out there who’s never had a misstep. I mean, sometimes you could do everything right. But it’s something happens on Amazon side where you’re gonna take the L you know and so it’s important that we know about it so that we can kind of, you can’t fully take yourself from every single possible bad thing that can happen, but we, we wanna make sure that we’re all transparent here and share our losses together with our wins. And this advice kind of goes out to you guys who post in, in Facebook groups and things like that. Sometimes we have the tendency to only talk about the Ls and then just in a complete negative context, because yeah, when you take a L, it’s like, you, you have a bad feeling, that’s negative vibes there, you know, you wanna complain about it, but what I prefer that you guys do and what this is, what Lem is doing with the show is yes, let’s take these losses and what can we learn from it? How can we put this out there so that somebody else knows, Hey, don’t take this misstep. And, and don’t just tell us about the loss. What, how did you fix it? Or how did you bounce back? Because that’s what differentiates the successful sellers from the unsuccessful sellers. Can you give us an example of one of the Ls that you talk about in the, by the way, the name of his show is Learnin’ From Ls With Lem.

Lem:

Learnin’ From Ls with Lem

Bradley Sutton:

So what’s one of the Ls that you talk about in that first episode that’s out there on YouTube.

Lem:

So one Ls that we talk about is actually, this is a story that was more, that was brought about for myself, of a mistake that I made was when I was originally selling on Amazon, doing a bunch of retail arbitrage, and wholesale. I based my shipping fulfillment cost of like sending it from my warehouse to the fulfillment center, to a fulfillment center that was like, maybe like 15 miles down the road. And consistently I would get sent there. But then as I started to scale and have higher volumes, then Amazon’s algorithm detected that the majority of my customers were really more so based on the west coast. And so that’s what caused the shipping algorithm to then change my fulfillment center to destination from one that was 15 miles away to one in Texas, which was 1200 miles away, which definitely changed the shipping cost of my warehouse to fulfillment center in Texas versus one, right down the street. And I didn’t account for that in my margin. So I had to make up for that somehow. And so that was something that I had to learn the hard way is to always keep stuff like that in mind, because you never know when the algorithm’s gonna switch it upon you and that you have to be aware, especially as you’re scaling of any of the minor things that could change, that can impact the bottom line of your business.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, that can happen to anybody. You know, so especially newer sellers, you know, they don’t understand how the system works. And then sometimes you could be consistently sending to one and then they just decide, you know what, we’re gonna start sending you cross country. The thing that really, really, really sucks for Project X is for whatever reason, the normal warehouse I send my stuff to, which is in California for some of a Project 5k and some of Project X, like the egg tray is in Stockton, California, you know, so that’s like, I could send like 50 egg trays in a box from Project X to the Stockton via ups. And it’s like $6, like maybe less than $6 with the partner shipping rates. But we now have like this large coffin shelf product, like a coffin bookshelf.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s like twice the size of our regular Project X coffin shelf, and the closest warehouse that we send it to is in Texas. And they also have us send it to two warehouses, like on the east coast. And it’s just most annoying thing. But the difference in shipping guys is like night and day, it’s like sometimes more than double. So if you’re not planning something like that out, when, when you’re in the planning process and like, you know, what was the first product that we did guys? It was the egg tray, right? So imagine if I was just, oh yeah, this is just gonna cost me five, $6 to send each case for this coffin shelf. And that was what I was planning for. And now it’s actually like 20, $25 to send it to New Jersey warehouse, you know that would’ve taken my, my entire profitability. So that’s important to know any like little mini preview of, of something from a future episode that you can us you know, don’t tell us the entire story, but do you, I’m sure people have been submitting stuff to you. So like, do you have any that we can look forward to learning from?

Lem:

Yeah, we can. We have actually a story that we got from somebody who came up to us at prosper, which was really cool to get that in that perspective of not necessarily a mistake that was internal, but a mistake of when working with other service providers within the Amazon space, like 3PLs, VAs, things of that nature. And so that was a really interesting story of how to navigate that lesson and how to go about that. But that’s one that you can definitely be on a lookout for in one of the next episodes.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, man, that again, guys is on YouTube. So make sure that your subscribe to YouTube and then have that notifications tab on for when we put new videos where we’re actually trying to put more content and more videos, more interviews and different things like that out there. Now, Lem know, you’ve been active more than usual on LinkedIn lately. Just you just like anything that starts with a letter L I guess. But what are some things that you’ve learned on LinkedIn lately, or from interacting or what’s some Amazon strategies or what’s trending out there what’s on the mind of sellers. What can you tell us?

Lem:

So, one of the biggest strategies that I’ve learned from LinkedIn, and this is why I love LinkedIn is cuz people just love to share. People love, to just give all exposure to things that are working for them and things that aren’t working for them. So that’s why I really love using LinkedIn. And this was one that I implemented into my business a while ago, but I learned directly from LinkedIn was a sort of like blanket strategy when it comes to PPC of everyone advertising on Amazon, you’re typically looking for top of the search. You’re typically trying to be on the first couple pages of Amazon, but nobody ever considers the last like four to eight pages of Amazon, right. Even though there are product placements that you can pay for on Amazon. And even though only like even 0.1% of Amazon customers go to the last page, Amazon’s so big that there’s still substantial enough that doing easy catch-all campaigns of like auto campaigns that you set like 10 cents a bid and doing that for your skews, you’ll spend maybe like a dollar or $2 a day, but you’re getting so much ROI in terms of your RoAS because you’re getting sales just by getting from bidding on placements that cost around 10 cents.

Lem:

And you’re, even though you’re showing up on the last couple pages, sometimes targeting the chromes of Amazon is still really substantial instead of targeting the whole cookie, which is like the front page or top of search. So that was something that was really substantial that I learned from LinkedIn. And I have seen repeatedly being talked about on LinkedIn which I know is something that works and works for me as well.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Thank you guys for joining this episode of learning from LinkedIn with Lem we got all kinds of new shows here. But speaking of LinkedIn guys, I by no means in a LinkedIn subject matter expert, my LinkedIn game is one on a scale of 10. Like I like LinkedIn and I like using it, but I do not want to try and portray myself as, as somebody knowledgeable, but let me just give a warning out there. Like LinkedIn to me seems like it’s becoming kind of like the Facebook for a lot of entrepreneurs and, and business owners and, and people in the industry. And, and they use it more of social media as opposed to just like looking for jobs or things like that. Like, this is how you, you know, you post your daily life and just be careful with how you portray yourself, because I’ll just tell you from personally my perception of some people on LinkedIn, who I knew outside of LinkedIn before has completely turned negative because of how they act on LinkedIn.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s just like, I don’t know what it is, but it’s just like, be careful guys, this is your reputation too. You know, like there’s, people are always complaining or always just like hitting themselves up, like, oh, in this I’m the best person in the history of Amazon. And you know, my company is like the greatest God’s gift to Amazon as a company. And I’m just like, dude, like what’s your deal? You know, like I used to like this person and I’m like, ah, this person’s kind of like Hotty, you know? Like, so just be careful guys. Those using LinkedIn more. If you want LinkedIn advice, there was we had somebody on the podcast a while back. I already forgot her name. I think her last name was Gordon, look up LinkedIn in helium10.com/podcast.

Bradley Sutton:

And we have somebody who actually is on like myself, an expert on LinkedIn etiquette and different things like that. But LinkedIn is big now guys in the business world. And I need to step on my, my, my game myself, but just be careful how you portray yourself. Or if you’re just trying to like call other people out, you know, like it’s important to correct mistake. Remember, I’ve told people before that, that’s how I got my job at Helium 10 was I was the guy who would go into the Helium 10 Facebook groups. And like, no, you don’t know, you guys dunno what you’re talking about. This is not the way you do launches or don’t tell people that launches are bad. This is how you do it. Right. And this and that, like, yes, I was hauling people out, but, you know, I was just trying to help people, you know, like there’s people who just it seems on LinkedIn and stuff. They just try and call other people out just to like, try and make a name for yourself, but there’s like no desire to help anybody there so we can see through that stuff guys. So just be careful.

Lailama:

You know, that’s kind of what I was recently talking about. Like, it’s important to put your name out there and talk about these things on social media. And I mean, LinkedIn is a great resource for hiring agencies, let’s say, or, you know, getting to know these VAs or whatever, but if you are inauthentic, you know, people can see through that as an audience. So literally just talking about out that yesterday and yeah, just be yourselves.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. Another example, you know, that me off when somebody tries to like call out Helium 10 or something. Now, if you genuinely are concerned about like, oh man, Helium 10 needs to fix this because they have some wrong information or something. Well, what’s the move. Well, the move is you talk to Helium 10 to like, Hey there’s something going on here. It seems like it might be a little bit different. But you know, is this a bug or how can we fix this? And then if like, yeah, if Helium 10 or any tool this goes for any tool company, if they’re like, ah, you know, screw you, we don’t care that we’re giving wrong information. We don’t care about our customer. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. Go ahead and call out that company for trying to screw over their customers or something.

Bradley Sutton:

But it’s obvious that you’re just trying to make a name for yourself. If you’re just trying to like throw some company under the bus, you know, like I saw, a few weeks ago people say, oh yeah, Helium 10 Search Volume sucks. First of all, you’re wrong. It doesn’t suck. All right. You’re just looking at it the wrong way. But guess what, if you would’ve just reached out to Helium 10, with genuine concern that maybe there’s some wrong data. Well, we could have walked you through it, but no, you know, these people are putting messages out there like, oh yeah, look at this Product Opportunity Explorer is completely different than Helium 10. Well, yeah, you’re comparing apples and oranges, but the thing is that people can see through that where it’s just like, you’re just trying to make a name for yourself by throwing somebody else under the bus, be it a company, be it agency or something.

Bradley Sutton:

So just watch, watch your etiquette out there guys. Now back to Lailama, you know, Lailama, you’re kind of like our resident expert on, on all things, photography and listing optimization. Now you’re gonna be starting to get into Walmart and things like that. But the thing I wanted to talk to you about is we, we put you on this other project and I don’t want you to go too much into details here because we’re gonna wait until Celine comes on the episode. But Celine is somebody who’s been on the Serious Sellers Podcast for talking about Instagram strategies. And we’re like, you know what, let’s do this mini project where we, we create like Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, you know, the Project X coffin shelf, like an Instagram account and strategy around this being just like, let’s say, this is a typical Amazon brand, and I want to have an Instagram following and build my audience out there.

Bradley Sutton:

And how would we grow that from zero to hero in other words. And, and I have not honestly myself, I know I’m in these group chats, but I, I just have completely been hands-off. So I haven’t really been paying attention to what’s going on there, but can you give us a little preview? I know we haven’t started the Instagram account yet, but can we give us a preview of what you yourself have learned from learning from Celine’s agency and see about what you’re planning to do with our, with our Instagram account?

Lailama:

Yeah. So this one was particularly tricky because, you know, it’s coffin shelves and like, I don’t know much about the Gothic community or the spooky community, you know, it’s like a, a mix of different niches, so it can get tricky, but I guess at the end of the day, you know, you have to see the strategy and you can kind of apply that those few basic rules to across different products. So I guess what I’ve learned is, you know, the way that they did their hashtags was very interesting. So they took some which had like a very high search volume or tag rate, not sure what the term for that would be. And then they also took some which were a bit smaller. So like, didn’t have as many tags on it. I thought that was really similar to what we do on Amazon, cuz we’re looking at these keywords in Cerebro, which have high volume, but sometimes we’ll also go for ones that are kind of in the middle, you know, so there’s enough search volume there, but also it’s achievable and achievable to target, to the index for that. So that was one of the things that I learned.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s very interesting. You see, there’s another one. Like I said, guys, I don’t know much about LinkedIn. I know how you perceive people on LinkedIn. I don’t know much about Instagram. You know, I built up my Instagram, but it’s definitely not from any knowledge I’m just throwing up episodes anymore. And by the way, I change the name of it to make it mainly podcast related. So if you ever wanna just get the highlights from some episode guys, follow Serious Sellers Podcast on Instagram. That’s why I changed the name. And it just has like some of the top clips from the episodes back to Lem, you’ve now been going to a few Amazon conferences, you know, like the last prosper show, what are some, some takeaways on how best is it to navigate these shows? Obviously, you’re a little bit different because you know, a lot of the time you had to be at the Helium 10 booth and things like that. But for the average person going to shows like this, maybe they’re gonna go to Sell and Scale in September. How can you get the most out of the weekend or the week or either during the show or afterward?

Lem:

I think it’s really coming into it with an open mind of not only cuz of course, when you’re going into some of these events, you’re looking to learn and absorb a lot of information, but also I have an open minded about who you’re talking to and the kind of people you’re talking to. Right? Cause you get to run into so many different types of people that even if it has nothing to specifically do with why the main reason why you’re there it’s still really awesome to be able to meet a bunch of people and you never know who that person also knows. And you know, and so looking from this scope and networking of not just, Hey, what can I gain? But more so of, Hey, who are the people that, or how many people can I talk to and provide value to?

Lem:

And I think looking from just making that minor shift in terms of how you’re networking with people can really have a massive difference in the kind of like the positive karma that will come back to you. People using your name and conversations like, oh yeah, I met this guy, he was talking about this. He was really nice, really helpful. You know, like I think it’s like LinkedIn in person, of course, like when you’re looking at going to events like this and I think it’s just coming with the open mind and being totally open up, not only in type of people you’re talking to, but where they’re coming from and what industries they reside in.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. And then you went to a lot of the after-party events too and things, and I’m sure that was a great way to network and meet with people. Now, what’s the next event that you’ll be attending and speaking at?

Lem:

It’s White Label Expo in Vegas during May 25th and 26th.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. So make sure to bring some eggs, throw it at Lem when he’s on stage there, his stage debut for Helium 10, White Label Expo there in Vegas, it’s actually a very interesting show. It’s very, very different guys than just your typical Amazon like Prosper Show or something like that as a lot of like CBD products and just a lot, it’s a very eclectic group of, in individuals who go to those shows, but there are some e-commerce people there now too. Now Lailama, you’ve been going through you know, trying to look into the way we have our Helium 10 academy, especially in the listing optimization modules and training and things. And so you’ve probably refreshed your knowledge there, but you know, a lot of the old school people who were with Helium 10 had the kind of flow, maybe, Hey, I’m gonna do my keyword research in Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ll just like, copy it to a google doc or something little by little, maybe I’ll go to Frankenstein to whittle some words down. And then I go to Scribbles, write my listing, and then now I copy and paste it, not to seller central, but now, you know, here at Helium 10, we’ve got, you know, different things like, you know, My Keyword List and then we’ve got like Listing Builder and things like that. So what’s, what would you say is like the typical flow that Amazon sellers now make with which tools we use and how we go from like Cerebro, Magnet and then eventually all the way to an Amazon listing.

Lailama:

Yeah, okay. So first I think when I’m, when I was working on revamping the academy, I think what I had in mind was how do you make it smoother for a person to take information from one tool, move it to another and then take it from here and throw it on to another and so on and so forth, cuz that’s kind of how we do it in Helium 10. There’s so many different tools for everything. So one, I would say when we go into Keyword Research, you wanna find your top 10 to 20 keywords which are gonna be your long tail phrase form. You wanna save that into my list and you know, name it as a long tail keyword or whatever ways to differentiate it in with, you know, that this is the phrase form, there’s gonna be other words.

Lailama:

So, you know, just org keeping yourself organized in my list. Now leave that there, go do some other, you know, keyword research, whether that’s against Cerebro, Magnet, Google, wherever, put those keywords again in my list. And you know, identify that folder name, you know, say these are the individual words. So now you’ve got yourself organized from the get go. And let’s say you wanted to come back to this in the future. You already have it organized. You don’t have to like go through or sift through all this information. Now what you’re gonna do is take the my list and take it into My Listing Builder. So you know, both these lists that you’ve created the long tail and the individual words, and then you start working with your listing on Listing Builder, which again is great because like I said, integrating different platforms or different tools was the key idea here. So Listing Builder will allow you to directly you sync into Amazon so you don’t have to copy paste it anymore. And that’s kind of what I was envisioning when I was working on the revamp. So. Okay,

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. You know, so guys make sure you’re using that, you know, it’s definitely better than it was in the old days. You know, the one thing I used to hate is having to, yeah, I love Scribbles, but then I would have to copy every single field line by line. And then don’t forget you get extra bonuses when you use Listing Builder. Not only do you guys get to one button sync, but you can also get the, the added bonus of being able to put in like subject matter et cetera. And, that tool is actually gonna keep getting advances. Now, Lem, your specialties is like Portals and, and Follow-up. So what are some tips, some like, you know, quick hitting tips or strategies that you think are, can be easy wins for Amazon sellers who are already Helium 10 members in using Follow-up or Portals that, you know, maybe a lot of people aren’t using right now.

Lem:

I think when it comes to portals and this kinda goes back to even The Total Package show that Lailama’s doing is the product inserts, not enough people utilize product inserts, which is a feature that you can use in portals and not even utilize the templates that Helium 10 provides, right? It’s like we gave you pretty much all the resources and more, and all you gotta do is just click a couple buttons and you got yourself like a really amazing Product Insert that’s already designed already branded and looks super clean, pristine that now I don’t think in my opinion, enough, people are using or using properly in order to drive reviews, which going back to Follow-up is the main purpose of Follow-up is driving reviews and trying to get that customer engagement, trying to drive that positive brand experience for your product.

Lailama:

I was watching Lem’s pro training videos. And I knew that, you know, in the Product Inserts part of Follow-up, you can, you know, create compliant inserts, but I didn’t know that you could go ahead and design a whole insert, like you can change colors, like patterns and whatnot. And I was like, this is like a camera, but for Product Inserts.

Lem:

Yep.

Bradley Sutton:

And yeah, with the QR codes and like, the thing that I didn’t know is you could actually have like a logo inside of your QR code, but it still works as a QR code. I was like, what? I didn’t even know. There was such thing that,

Lem:

Yeah. And then going with Follow-up, one thing I think people don’t do enough is like, people are always concerned about like what to do, how to drive reviews more so positive reviews, but not even really focusing on the customer experience, which doesn’t necessarily lend directly to, or there’s not. And analytics of like positive customer experience equals positive reviews or whatever. But I think people don’t really necessarily think about the customer experience as a whole of when somebody submits a refund or return, what do you do about it? You know, I think the majority of sellers they just say well, I cut my losses. Like I can’t win ’em all right. But with Follow-up, you can put out automation that trigger automatically whenever a customer requests a refund and return. And then we have Helium 10 has pre-made email templates where all you gotta do is just put in your brand name and your name, and that will send to your customers whenever they request, or we refund and return saying,

Lem:

Hey, we saw that you did this, Is there anything that we can do to help, please just let us know there’s anything that we can do to make this experience better? Like, I think that alone sends such a huge message to your customer that you genuinely care cuz in that message we’re not talking about, please don’t leave this negative view. We’re not saying, Hey, we’ll give you a full refund or anything like that. We’re just saying, what can we do to help? And I think that simple gesture has such a huge ripple effect that I don’t think enough people do. And ultimately does mitigate having one star reviews, cuz that could also cause a one star review that could potentially be left into a three star review, which I will take a three star review over a one star view any day of the week.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Lailama. Back to you now. Maybe some tips on that you’ve, seen just like, looking over the shoulder, I notice sometimes you still use the AMZ One Step office over there and they have their photoshoots. So what do you notice that they’re doing, you know, with their photoshoots or how they set up lifestyle images? They, they just completely redid a lot of the images for the, you know, coffin shelf. We haven’t released these pictures yet, but we gave them all of our coffin shelf products and they did some photoshoots. Like what are some cool things that you noticed that they did with those images. That’s like, you know, not everybody’s gonna use AMZ One Step, but like regardless of what photography studio that an Amazon seller’s using or if they’re just, you know, doing it on their own that you’re like, Hey, these are some good tips that this that this studio was doing.

Lailama:

I think one of my favorite things was just the fact that the studio is set up in a way where there’s different lifestyle situations set up. So like different lifestyle settings of bed, kitchen, everything. So, you know, when you’re hiring a studio, I think it’s really important to see what kind of setups they have, because then you get a guaranteed good result with that. So I was already aware of, let’s say we were doing the coffin shelf. So, you know, you can either put it in your office, you can put it in your room and like different settings throughout the house. So I was already aware of the kind of setups that they had in the studio. And so I had an idea of what the final product would look like. And if that kind of goes with your brand aesthetic and is in line with the kind of image you wanna portray, then, you know, it’s, it’s always nice to be able to see, okay. I will now visualize my product into this particular setting. Whereas a lot of them will maybe agencies hire you know, or like book Airbnb. So they’re never really sure. And so the results are never consistent if you know what I mean? So that for me was the biggest pro like just getting to see all of these settings beforehand so that I know what the final product’s gonna look like.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. And the other thing I liked is I don’t know. Maybe you gave them a bunch of information yourself, but I didn’t give them any information about how to do the lifestyle, all images of like the coffin shop. But when I look at the images last night, I was just looking at them. They took like a whole bunch of like Gothic looking things and like props and things like that. And another thing is they probably just figured this out on their own, but like, you know, you just look at our two coffin shelves. If you just take a picture of it, you really can’t tell that one is twice as big as the other one. And so I like that they took their model there and they showed like putting it on the wall, you know, like, I think you’re gonna talk about another coffin shelf listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you remember that one that was really photoshopped? And then it really looks like it’s a lot bigger than it is, cuz it was a bad Photoshop. But if you look at that picture where this model is like holding it in her hand and putting it on a wall, you have no doubt how big or small, you know, a coffin shelf is. So I think that’s important too, guys that not enough people are doing is, is I’m not talking about the Photoshop once. You know, you’ve seen it a million times where somebody’s doing a kitchen tool and they just show this stock photography of somebody in the kitchen. They put something in her hand or a guy or woman’s hand. And, and it’s that, that’s not what I’m talking about, where, where it’s like put something in somebody’s hand because that’s fake as it is, but have a real picture of somebody not just holding it too.

Bradley Sutton:

Like there’s pictures, I’ve seen where our coffee are like, oh, here’s my, you know, I’m van and white. This is the wheel of fortune. Here’s my coffin shelf. No, but like somebody putting it on the wall or something in action looks natural. And that would save you bad reviews, you know, like we’ve some of the bad reviews we’ve had on the coffin shelf, you know, knock on wood. There’s not been many, but it’s because, oh man, this was way smaller than I thought it was. And so that will save you. So that’s something I learned from really

Lailama:

That’s a good point too. Like a lot of the times, we will put in dimensions and I don’t know, Bradley, if you remember, our old listing already had dimensions in it, but people were so confused because it’s still hard for us to visualize when we’re seeing like a really zoomed in product and thinking, okay, it’s maybe like this small cuz in the picture, it looks this big. So sorry I’m doing hand gestures. Maybe people watching the visual

Bradley Sutton:

People on YouTube will see it. But guys she’s moving her arms around. If you’re listening to this in your car, that’s what she’s doing.

Lailama:

So, you know, like just dimensions will not do it. You need to have something that acts as a point of reference. And so there was a picture that I showed in the webinar too, where, you know, there was an iPad and you know, there could have been dimensions, but just the fact that it was compared to a pencil makes it so much more easier for me to visualize as a buyer. So yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right. Well guys, thank you for coming on here. Once again, if you wanna see their new shows, Learnin’ From Ls with Lem is once a month on YouTube and also The Total Package with Lailama Hasan is available once a month as well. and that’s both on the Helium 10 YouTube channel. For those who speak Spanish and German, we actually just launched a German and Spanish YouTube. So, so I’m not sure how you would find that, but just like look for Helium 10 and then it might be Auf Deutsch or en Espanol, or that might be the name of it, but you can also find it from the Helium 10 regular YouTube channel. So make sure if you’re a native speaker of one of those languages that you’ll go ahead and join there. So thank you very much for joining this show if you guys ever wanna reach out directly or talk directly to either Lailama or Lem, they’re once a month in our Freedom Ticket Xtra coaching group. So if you guys wanna join that group and be able to talk every week to Kevin King and then once a month to myself and Lem and Lailama and Carrie and Shivali and the rest of our team, make sure to sign up for Freedom Ticket Xtra, and you can do that at heliumten.com/ftx. That’s helium10.com/ftx Lailama and Lem, it was great talking to you and we’ll see you guys later.

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