#300 – Maldives Honeymoon Strategies Plus Project X, 5K Case Study Updates – Part 1

In episode number 300, Bradley Sutton is back in the Maldives to share his new updates on the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Method. Like, is there a new way to get good rankings for your product? Does changing your title have a positive or negative impact? Does putting your brand name first in your title affect your ranking? Use Helium 10’s Audience tool for market research and improve your listing’s images. These and more!

Also, in this episode, he shares his regular updates on his Project X and Project 5K case studies.

In episode 300 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 02:06 – Listen To This Part Before Diving Into The Episode
• 04:12 – A Recap On What Is The Maldives Honeymoon Method
• 07:06 – Getting On Top Of Page 1 And Getting More Sales
• 11:00 – Changing Your Title Can Have A Positive Or Negative Impact
• 16:07 – Use The Audience Tool To Test Your Images
• 19:15 – Putting Your Brand Name First In Your Product’s Title
• 21:00 – Project 5K Updates
• 25:27 – Simple Adjustments When You Lose Market Share
• 31:38 – Project X Updates
• 37:39 – Combining 2 Projects X Products Into One

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys, where am I? I’m in the world’s first-ever underwater restaurant here in The Maldives. Yup. It’s episode 300. So time for an update on The Maldives Honeymoon Strategy, along with the update and all my different case studies on Project X and Project 5k. 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. And I am coming at you from the other side of the world. I am nowhere in The Maldives this time, I’m at a different hotel because memory it’s episode 300 always come to The Maldives for these episodes. I am now in the Conrad instead of the Waldorf Astoria, wanting to try out a different place. This place is amazing if you guys are watching this on YouTube here, but anyways we are here to talk about all of what’s been working, what hasn’t been working with, some of The Maldives methods that we’ve been talking about for the last year, and also give you some updates on some of our strategies that we’ve been testing out in both Project X and Project 5k, a lot of stuff that we’ve been working on.

Bradley Sutton:

And this time I’m really going to focus on not just giving you the strategy, but also every time I talk about one of these case studies, I’m going to let you know, Hey, well, what can you do with this information? You know, maybe you’re like, oh, this sounds cool Bradley, but what do I do with this? So that’s what we’re going to focus on today. So here we go. I’m at my makeshift studio here. I don’t know if you guys can see this on YouTube. We got a snorkeling fin as my microphone and camera pad. Anyways, we are here in The Maldives. And let me go ahead and sit down in my studio and let’s knock this episode out.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys. Now, before we get into this episode, I just want to record this little snippet here that I’m inserting right before the meat of this episode. I’m recording this on the weekend, right before we are launching this episode. Now, when I first recorded this episode 300, I was obviously in The Maldives a few weeks ago. And that was before a lot of this drama happened as far as, you know, terms of service changing on November 26th and this and that about search find, buy-in different things like that. Now that being said, I’m not editing this episode. All right? Like I’m not going to just scrap it. Cause remember The Maldives Honeymoon Method is a lot more about more than just the actual launch phase or about using techniques such as a search, find, buy. But I didn’t want you guys thinking like I was just completely ignoring what’s happened here. There’s actually going to be back-to-back episodes today 300 and 301, the 301 I’m actually about to record, right now, because that was going to be part two of this.

Bradley Sutton:

And so I’m going to talk about all of these things that have been going on in the Amazon world and terms of service in that episode. But again, you know, even though we do talk a little bit about search, find, buy, in this episode, don’t just discount it further. Even if you don’t plan to do search, find, buy, cause remember, search, find, buy is also what people organically are doing. Okay. So I am actually going to still do some search, find, buy things, just purely for case studies. You know, I’m not going to, I personally don’t want to break, you know, in terms of servers and things like that, but I want to see what kind of effect people’s organic searching behavior has on Amazon listings. All right. So for research purposes, I absolutely I’m going to do it. And that also goes for the fact that, Hey, don’t discount some of the things I do talk about search, find buy here. Maybe you’re not going to do it for ranking purposes, which you probably shouldn’t anymore, but you maybe you’re wondering, well, how many units does it take to get to page one through PPC or through just organic search find buys that people are doing out there? You know this is still important to know. So this is still vital information. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and get into this episode.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So first of all, if you’re new to this, what is The Maldives Honeymoon Methods is the name that we made up. This is not like some official Amazon term or anything like that, but you know, there is an effect at the beginning of an Amazon listings life, you know, on Amazon, you know, be it four weeks, be it eight weeks, whatever it is, there’s no exact date that people have determined where activity, you get more bang for your buck for almost any kind of activity.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re talking about organic searching activity by customers, perhaps PPC love, you get more bang for your buck during the initial part of a listings life as Amazon figures out, what you’re relevant for, what you’re not relevant for, you know you know, if you’re a hot product or not, et cetera. So, you know, people have called this the Honeymoon Period for a long time. You know, a couple of years ago I started discovering things where it gave like an extra bump, right? It gave him an extra bump, you know, in this first Honeymoon Period. And so that’s why I came up with the term Maldives Honeymoon. So I was like, it’s not just about launch. It’s not just about the beginning, but it’s just my name for like all of these different things about how we can make ranking on Amazon and different things, more effective, more cost-effective.

Bradley Sutton:

And we called it The Maldives Honeymoon Strategy. So every 50 episodes, I come here to talk a little bit more about that. So if you haven’t done it yet, pause this and go back to episodes 200 and episodes 250 of the Serious Sellers Podcast on whatever format you’re listening on. And you will be able to get the beginning of what The Maldives Honeymoon Strategy is. Some of the different aspects of this. Again, if you guys just need a refresher, you don’t want to go back and listen to it. You know, it talks about the importance of title in your listing, right? If you have some keywords and phrase, forming your title gives you a huge impact on the Amazon algorithm, way more than it seems like about two or three years ago, plus it’s a special impact. If you are trying to rank for keywords, not many other listings have that same keyword in phrase form in the title.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s about like making sure that you pause your listing or set your listing launch date. Well in the future of when you’re actually going to get your product, you know, don’t do it as soon as you create the ASIN in China. So you can put your FNSKU there. And in two months you just have an ASIN syndrome, make sure that launch dates in the future about when you think you’re going to get the product, or what I do is I actually don’t even create my listing until I’m ready to make sales that first day. All right. Because I actually shipped the product to my warehouse first, and then I put the FNSKU on a little bit later. So that’s another aspect of The Maldives Honeymoon is the other thing we’re going to talk about is my quarterly update that I do on Project X and Project 5k.

Bradley Sutton:

These are two of the main case studies. I also have one, A Hemp Cream case study. I do, I don’t, I didn’t do much in Q3 on it. So we’re not going to talk too much about that. I might just come back at the end of the episode, I’ll give you guys an update on that. But most of my case studies I do is on Project X and Project 5k. So I’m going to give you guys an update on all of what we did. Maldives are not on those two accounts. All right. You guys ready to go? Let’s hop into it. The first thing I wanted to talk about was on Project X our Gui’s Chicken Coop egg tray, right? One of the main keywords, if you guys remember two years ago from Project X was egg tray.

Bradley Sutton:

Now we had fallen off on the rankings. We were like consistently at the bottom of page one and on page two, now egg tray is a keyword that’s in phrase form in the title. All right. So there’s a lot of other listings that have egg tray in phrase form in the title, but still, I want it to go ahead and try and bump that back up on page one. So what I did was, I went ahead and did a search find, buy with AZrank and just so that, you know, egg tray at the time the search volume was 4,000. All right. So this is a keyword that that’s served quite a number of times. I gave away 20 units. All right. I gave away 20 units. When I say giveaway, that means I had easy rank find people who would search, find, and buy this product.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. 20 of them over three days. And I started this in August 9th and I’m looking here and then buy it like August 13, August 14. I was already at the top of page one. All right. Only 20 units got me from the middle around of page two or top of page two to the top of page one, even ranked page one, position one. All right. So again, search, find, buy. Absolutely still does work. And you know, throughout the next week I was still on, on page one, you know, it, wasn’t one of those ones where I get to page one and they immediately drop off. Now, that’s important though, guys, if you get to the top of page one, regardless of how you’re getting to page one, and nobody interacts with your product. Yes. It’ll drop like a rock and it’s not because, oh, Amazon doesn’t like search, find, buy.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, literally, that’s how people find things. They search, they find, they buy it. So it’s not like, oh, Amazon doesn’t like that. All of a sudden. But what happens is if you get to page one and you don’t have good interaction with your customers on this keyword or on this product, yeah. You not going to, you know, stay on page one because Amazon wants to show other products that are going to have a better reaction right now. Another product, this one was product in Project 5K. Now, this is a product let’s just pretend it’s like a coffin. All right. It wasn’t a coffin shelf member. I can’t really give the details on this account. Cause it’s a private account. Not mine to give. But anyways, I noticed the sales just dropped dramatically.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, we were selling like, like of each color. So there’s a brown one and a black one, let’s just say coffin shelf. And we were selling like, you know, five to 10 a day each for one. And I kind of like, let that product go for a while. I really wasn’t paying attention to it. And you know, my time was kind of limited, and the sales like dropped like a rock. All right. So I was like, you know what, I’m going to experiment on a few things here, and let’s just see what we can get going here. So one of them, I noticed that we lost sales to other products that were cheaper right now. The picture in the search results, everything kind of looks the same, but ours is actually twice as big as these other.

Bradley Sutton:

So the very first thing was I changed the title to have large in it, all right. At the very beginning. So if the product is a coffin shelf, think instead of like Gothic coffin shelf in the title, I change the title to large coffin shelf. All right. And then the very first thing was the keyword, by the way, wasn’t Gothic, I’m just giving an example. I wanted to see did those keywords that had Gothic in it. Did I lose rank? All right. Remember my suggestion is whenever you’re adjusting your title, never take out a keyword where it is part of phrases that you’re on the top of page one. I just don’t like risking losing that momentum, you know? So this keyword Gothic, it wasn’t really ranking that high for any keywords. However, the keywords that had that Gothic keyword into it, they actually dropped off about a week and a half later. You know, so let’s say it was on page three, they dropped like page four or just completely fell off.

Bradley Sutton:

Now there was another product where I didn’t, you know, I remember I had a brown and a black one, the other product. I didn’t take out that Gothic keyword. And I checked it stayed ranking. All right. So again, that just shows that yes, changing your title can have a positive impact, but yes, at the same time it could have a negative impact. So that’s why I always say before taking anything out of your title, make sure that you are not ranking high or getting conversions from this keyword. All right. Now, like I said, my sales died and I’m like, I got to get sales up. So I saw some other competitors were really ranking high. So what I did was I actually used Brand Analytics. You know, I can see it in Cerebro, but I just want to see Brand Analytics going back in history.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s something I don’t do in Cerebro. Cerebro is a great current look, you know, the last 30 days. But like I said, I let this product go for a few months. So I was like, let me look back to when I started losing market share, let me look back in history and brand analytics where these other coffin shelves started, you know, really increasing their sales. And I noticed that there was a couple of keywords crystals holder. And so what I did was I changed the title on one of them to crystals holder. I put crystals holder in my title. Now I was on like the bottom of page two consistently for this crystals holder keyword, just my, adding it to the title is that Maldives effect, you know, this is not a new lesson. It’s not the Honeymoon. It’s just The Maldives effect.

Bradley Sutton:

It increased overnight by 20 the keyword rank. All right. And just stay there consistently. So it didn’t get me to like the top of page one or everything, but, but just by, by making that change, it got me some rank juice, I guess you could say by adding it to the title. Now, here is what I decided to do. I did those things where I changed the title, got everything ready. This is in August. And I went to AZrank and I wanted to do some tests here. All right. So the first thing for both of them, I did kind of like equal test and I wanted to bump up the brown one. I wanted to bump up the black one. So I just did for some of these keywords. You know, they were ranging from 1000 to about 6,000 search volume.

Bradley Sutton:

But these were the keyboards that I saw my competitor really took over and my ranking was low. All right. So on all of these what happened was I got to page one. All right. So on one of them, I just did six. This was for a keyword that had 1100 search volume, not very much of a keyword, but this is like the main keyword for the product. And we were ranking like at the bottom of page one, all of a sudden, within three days, got to the top of page one with only six search find, buy each, both of them got to page one. Remember I told you how those crystal holder keywords were doing well for this other guy. So I decided to target at the same time, crystal holder and crystal holder for stones. That’s another piece of The Maldives Honeymoon Strategy is when you’re doing campaigns try and do two different phrases, at least that feed off of each other.

Bradley Sutton:

So obviously crystal, holder’s a root word and crystal holder for stones. So I figured that I get more bang for the buck. For one of them, I gave away six and the other 20. And again, both of them got to the very top of page one. So a successful case study. Now, how successful was it? Well, , before I did the search, find, buy, alright, this AZrank test. The week before I ordered, or I sold a whopping three units. This is for the brown one. All right. The week after the search, find buy, these are fully organic or PPC orders, 26 sales. I went from 3 to 26 in a week. All right, the other one for the week before I did this search, find, buy and change the titles and optimize them in different things. The week after the first organic week after I did those changes 22 units from 4 to 20.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t know what, you know, 400% increase. I don’t know what the math is there, but Hey, 4 to 22, again, these are not products that are making anybody million dollars, but just think what if you had a product that fell off, but you’re falling off is a lot less. And it was like maybe 20 units a day. All right. Imagine if you multiply your sales by a factor of five or six like I did, you know, that’s a difference I’m selling 20 a day as opposed to selling 100 or 150 a day who wouldn’t like that. Right. So guys against small changes can do this in those changes that I did. I just did a few Maldives search, find, buys right there. Totally. Maybe 25 well, 25, 30 units. And because of that activity, I know more than made up for, with my new organic sales.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now the other thing it went out of stock. I thought it did so well. I went out of stock. So I was out of stock for a few weeks before my new product came in. And then another thing I was just looking at the niche and this has nothing to do with numbers necessarily or ranking. And I was like, you know what, all of these new players in this coffin shelf niche, they all have a different way of doing their images. And it actually kind of looks pretty cool, like before I was the only coffin shelf around there. So I was just getting all the sales, right. But now I’m looking, I’m like, you know what? I have a feeling that customers like the way that these other guys are doing their images, but I never liked to guess, right. So what did I do?

Bradley Sutton:

I use Helium 10 Audience powered by PickFu in order to run a test. Now Helium 10 Audience allows me to pull within like two hours, 50 different Amazon prime members. And then they give me detailed feedback on which image they like. So I showed them my image. And then I took another image. Or I had my kids take another image. My kids are photographers. I had them take another image that mimic, that was my product, but mimic how these new players had their main image. And I said, and I photoshopped it on like search results of Amazon. And I said if you guys search for coffin shelf which one looks better? All right. And guys, I have never done one where it was so one-sided. The other picture, the one that my kids took and the one that mimic what the major players were doing now, it got to 86 out of a 100 score. And the image that I had live on Amazon had a 14 out of a 100 score, 86 to 14.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ve never had one. That’s how bad the image I had for the last few months was. And I didn’t even realize I should have done this way before. I should’ve been checking my competitors. Once I started losing my market share and I didn’t do it. So as soon as I saw those results from audience, I switched the image around. All right, now here’s the thing. This was right when I was coming back from out of stock. So my sales had dropped again and I was like, not ranking and stuff. I just want to just get, before I tried, re-ranking this stuff I wanted to see what was the change? Now in my mind, the change is not necessarily a conversion rate because it’s the number of page views, right?

Bradley Sutton:

The people who actually click on my listing from the search results, and then they view the image. All right, because if don’t have a great image in the search results, you’re not going to get chosen, right? You’re not going to, nobody’s going to click and you’re not going to get that session or page view, right? Check this out. My black coffin shelf. Before I changed the image, I was averaging seven pages or seven pages I was averaging seven views a day. Just by changing the image. I started getting 12 a day. All right, now here’s the thing. Then, the brown one, it was just dead, completely dead. It had decent page ranking, but the previous three days before I changed it, it got zero, zero pages in three days. All right. After I changed image, it was getting seven a day.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s like infinity increase from zero to seven. Again, guys, take a look at your images, maybe you did this image a year and a half ago. And it was great, but buyer behavior, what buyers want to see changes over time. You’ve got to be able to keep testing that if you see other movers and shakers, and they’re doing something different with their images, use Helium 10 Audience in order to like, do a split test to just see which one do people like better. All right. And you could have something that could increase your page views. So that was what I did there now, since it was out of stock and we started doing bad again, I let it go. And now at the beginning of October, what I did was I decided to go ahead and do some more search, find, buy on some of those same keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here’s one thing I want to test. Remember I’m doing both the Maldives and just regular case study testing. I will add a couple of times I was at these conferences that Casey Gauss from Thrasio was speaking at. And he was talking about how they have this cool strategy. I’m not going to give you the full strategy. This is like, kind of like top-secret kind of stuff, but let me just, what can I give up? All right. So let’s just say that they discovered that you could get very similar activity on the keyword if you put the product name or the brand name right before the title. All right. So right before the main keyword. So like, if you were to search for coffin shelf or Manny’s mysterious oddities coffin shelf, the brand name, it would actually get both get some bump.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So I was dressed. I was like, well, that’s kind of interesting. I mean, it makes sense, but I’m just curious how much of a difference is it? And does it, is that true or is Casey just talking? I know Casey just doesn’t talk. I trust Casey, but I was like, I like trying stuff for myself. So on one of them, I did coffin shelf. And then the other one, let’s just say it was Manny’s Mysterious Oddities I did Manny’s Mysterious Oddities coffin shelf search find, buy on both of them. All right. And I gave away the exact same number of units, 10 on one and 10 on the other. So for the one that had the brand name in it, it did move up. I was at number 12 on page one, and it actually moved me to about position three or four.

Bradley Sutton:

Now on the other one where I just had the raw keyword coffin shelf. It went to page one position, one from like about 15. All right. So yes. You can get a little bit of residual keyword, rank juice, even if you put your brand name at the beginning. And, but it’s still of course better to do just the raw keyword itself without the brand name, you might be asking why would I want to do the brand name? Well, some of you guys who don’t use services like AZrank, maybe you do your own kind of search, find, buy, and you’re doing like, you know, ManyChat or, or you’ve got a Facebook community or Instagram community. It might be hard for some people to just type in coffin shelf and like scroll to find your product on page six or seven. So it might be easier to say, Hey guys, type in Manny’s Mysterious Oddities coffin shelf and then buy the one that you find, and then it’ll come up kind of like towards the top.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So, that’s kind of the takeaway of what you guys can do there. So far, I hope you guys have been listening to the takeaways at each of these tests that I’ve done, you know, about the images about using search, find, buy about the title, and then about this one, about the brand name. These are all things that maybe you can use, maybe you’re not going to use, but make sure that if it sounds like something that you could use, make sure you guys go ahead and implement this back to Project 5k. I had some straws. Remember how that was my original Project 5k. I had some like really cheap straws and I was out of stock for a while. You gotta get all right. By keeping things in stock was not great this year, thanks to all of these Chinese shipping delays.

Bradley Sutton:

And I wasn’t ranking. So I just did three search, find, buys, you know, using The Maldives methods, only targeting keywords that were in my title, and then having other keywords go off of each other. So I did let’s just say it’s like Halloween Stands supplies, Orange Straws, and Orange Paper Straws. Let’s say those are the key three keywords. All right. So that was a good strategy. I was targeting my main keyword first, which before I used to have Amazon’s choice on, and then the other two keywords were like supplementary keywords that could feed off of each other. So on my main keyword, by the way, that keyword that, you know, let’s just say it’s Halloween Party supplies or Halloween Stand supplies that keyword had 2000 searches. I gave away 15 units, 15 units there, and the other two keywords, only 3 units, one per day, over three days, everything I did for three days.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. And for that stand supplies, keyword, I went from position from 100 to 150, page one position one, and I got Amazon’s choice back within less than a week for the other two, the colored straws keywords. It got me to page one, position one as well for all of those. Now, remember that was three units. Now, granted, those keywords only has about six to 800 search volume, but still, I mean, these are straws that my retail price is $6. All right. Retail price is six to seven. Actually, I take that back. It’s about $7 to $8. All right. If I’m rebating three people to buy them, that’s like 24 bucks plus whatever I have to pay a service, I use, you know, like maybe like 30, 40, 50 bucks total. And now I get to the very top of these keyboards where I can generate at least one or two sales per day. It’s a no-brainer to do this guys. All right. Remember back in the days, even for keywords that only have a thousand or less search volume, you would have had to have been you know, giving away like 20, 30 units, you know, at 90% off, right. It’s not cost-effective to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, another Project 5k product. Now, this product I had done two orders of before as a product I started last year and it’s a product of four variations, all right. Four different variations. I usually don’t like doing variations, but I really want to succeed at one with variations. Now, one of these colors, one of these variations, it was the one that was the top seller. As a matter of fact, it sold double more than any other variation. It’s sold more than the other three variations put together.

Bradley Sutton:

So when I made a replenishment order, I based it off of those kinds of numbers, I based it off of that main one selling about twice as much as any other. Now here’s the thing. I went out of stock on this, on this one, too. I went out of stock. We went back into stock sales were down 50% overall. And that one unit that was doing well, it was not only was it not doing double the next guy, it was actually not even the bestseller anymore. Another one was the bestseller. So now I’m looking at my numbers and everything is out of whack. I’m like, man, this is really gonna mess me up because I put all my money in the inventory of this one variation. And now there’s going to be some things that are going to run out of stock, and I’m not going to be ready to order more because it’s going to be out of order.

Bradley Sutton:

So I was like, all right, the very first thing, let me just do a search, find, buy on the main keyword for one of these products, or like a sub keyword. This was a keyword that didn’t have, you know, much search on like 600 search volume. So I just gave away four units. I give away four units over four days, all right. Four units over four days. And I went from position 60 to page one position one. All right. And I was targeting that unit that I had lots of stocks. So I was like, okay, you know, Maldives Honeymoon Method is still definitely working on this, even though it’s an older product. Great. I can control these keywords. Now, another thing similar to other that coffin shelf kind of product that I was talking about before I lost a lot of market share to another seller.

Bradley Sutton:

And again, it was somebody who had a product. I was probably half my size, but it was a lot cheaper, but in the image, it just looked the same. So like, it just made sense for a lot of customers to buy that cheaper one. Right. Even though it was a lot smaller and people, and they were still getting bad reviews for it. Right. So what I did was I changed the title and I put large. All right. So this is something you guys can do. I put large right there at the beginning, just like I did on that other one and I put the dimensions. All right. I put the dimensions in the title so that people could see it is a large one compared to the other one.

Bradley Sutton:

And now one of those keywords that those other guys were ranking for. Again, I used Cerebro to figure that out. I use Brand Analytics. I figured that out. Let’s just say it’s crystal display and crystal shelf. Let’s just say the keywords were. These two keywords had some significant search volume. So let’s just say if it was crystal display that had 10,000 searches and crystal shelf had 10,000 searches as well at the time. All right. So I did both of those and I only did 15 and 8 giveaways, only 15 and 8, even though these are over 10,000 again, because I had it in the title. Right. I had it in the title and there wasn’t that many people who had those main keywords in the title. So that’s why I was able to get away with a very small amount on one of them. I started at position 100, got to page one position 1, the other one started at position between 25 and 50, and then got to the very top 2 or 3 of page one. But I started fluctuating between positions like 5 and 10.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So still though I was only targeting the black one. Let’s just say that, that was the main one I was trying. And I couldn’t make a budge in getting that one to be the top seller again, like by a large amount. So I just wanted to do an experiment. And this is something that I know a lot of people were wondering about and this one, it didn’t completely, it didn’t really work too much, but this just, you know, just, this will save you guys from doing it too. So I was curious what if I close all of those other colors, those other three variations. What if I close them for a while and only, you know, drive all the sales to that black one, you know, for a week or so, what is going to happen?

Bradley Sutton:

So the very first thing was I was ranking for like, you know, 20, 30 keywords, different variations were ranking for a lot of them, not the black one. Right. And you know, in Helium 10 Keyword Tracker, you just enter in one ASIN you’re tracking all your child ASINs. And it’ll tell you which one has the rank. Remember, you can only rank for one child at a time. In other words, if you have a black, brown, blue, and white, and the keyword is coffin shelf, only one of them at a time is going to show up in the search results. All right. Maybe it’s the black one, but you’re not going to have like, oh, black one is page one, position one, the white one is page one, position three doesn’t work like that. All right. So you have the different ones. So the very first thing was, I was curious if I close all the other ones, am I going to keep my rank?

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Because obviously the rank is now all going to go to that black one, because it’s the only one left, but I will say, I don’t want to lose the rank. And sure enough, I kept the rank, you know, for the most part. All right. I kept the rank for the most part, but there was a couple of them where the rank slipped a little bit. Once I closed those other lists. And I was like, you know what, I’m just going to stick with this. I just want to see if it works. If it works great. If it doesn’t, at least now we know something that you guys don’t have to do.

Bradley Sutton:

For two weeks before I close the listing. All right. The other listings. That main one had 28. It did increase a little bit. Then, the other one had 25 and the 8 and 7. So total, we’re talking about like, you know, 60, 70 sales across the board, the black one was number one, but it was barely a number one. All right. Now, during the time that I only had one listing active, all right. I sold 16 units of that black one. Now that works out to two weeks of 32 units. So sales went down. So this was a negative so far. This is a negative. All right. Sales went down almost by what my weekly sales work because the other one was 50, 60, 70 in two weeks. That means 35 a week. I only had 16 sales.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So sales were cut down in half overall. Now, after I reactivated those other listings after that week of having it closed it went to the main one was 25. The second one was 18, 13, and 10. So it was weird. It kind of distributed the sales a little bit more evenly, but the black one did get a little bit higher sales now. It had more of a solidifying position, but overall, my sales went down just slightly. So what can you take from this? All right. It doesn’t always work to just try and force Amazon to show like a certain color or a certain variation for you. It can actually have negative effects. In this case it did help me a little bit, but I did not recap though, or retake those original numbers. I had months ago where that black one was double anything else.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. And probably, to be honest, I left some sales on the table because that one week that I only had one listing open, for whatever reason, I didn’t get enough sales that I would normally get across the board. All right. So this can just happen, guys. It can just happen where you can have one product be your bestseller in a variation, and then you go out of stock and things get messed up and you never recover that again. So you just gotta be prepared for it.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s switch to Project X. Another case study I did was I launched this product egg shelves. And I think I talked about in the last Project X in Project 5k update of how it was a bomb. Like they screwed up the factory screwed up on this product. They made the holes of the egg too small. So like, you can’t even put two eggs next to each other. Like, what are you guys doing over there at that factory? Right. So I had it up for like two months and it got bad reviews. It was like three and a half stars. And so I could barely sell like, you know, one unit a day, you know, two units or one unit a day. I could barely sell like two units a week or something. So I was like, I’ve got like 150 each of these overall in Amazon. I got to get rid of this so I’m not going to start paying storage. So I use this one hack that we’ve talked about a couple of years ago. I didn’t make it up. Somebody else did. But basically, it’s using the Social Media Influencer Promotion. So you go into Seller Central, you hit advertising and then you want to create a social media coupon code.

Bradley Sutton:

And then if you have brand registry, usually you can hit something that says, show this to the Amazon Influencers, right. And if you have a good enough discount, they’ll show it, they’ll blast it all over the place, all these Amazon Influencers because they get affiliate commissions. So what I did the week before I raised the price, like 30 bucks, I was trying to blow it out like $18. And I wasn’t getting traction, right. That was less than the breakeven. I was going to lose money on this for Project X, but, you know, I just had to get rid of this product. So I raised the price of $30, which is still pretty good. That was probably what I would have normally had the retail price for. And then I created the Social Media Coupon Code 50%. And then I hit the show this to Amazon Influencers.

Bradley Sutton:

And when you know what guys in less than 24 hours, we sold completely out of every single unit out of both colors. We had a total of about 270 units in less than 24 hours sold out everything. All right, again, this is at a loss, but again, this was like better than liquidating it or other means. And it was so funny. Like we got to be the number one BSR in our sub rank of egg baskets. We were the number one bestseller over there, and it was crazy, all these completely sold out. And the interesting thing was it actually increased page rank on some things, you know, there was no search, find, buy here or keywords are two separate roles, but just by that activity, it increased the page rank. Now, what I noticed was, which is interesting it especially increase the page rank on the keywords that I had in the Canonical URL.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. What is the Canonical URL? That’s the five keywords that go in the main URL that Amazon has for a listing, it increase the rank on those. So that was super cool. And it also increased the rank on other keywords that were in the title. All right. So I might try and do some experimentation on that, but even without, you know, some kind of search, find, buy keyword-based thing, I was getting some activity, which was pretty cool. All right. Let’s keep going here. Another product that I launched. Okay. This was on Project X and this was kind of like a tongue-in-cheek cheek product. Just kind of like a shout out to all your Project X fans, you know, there’s the, Manny’s Mysterious Oddities coffin shelf that we had and the Gui’s Chicken Coop egg tray. What would happen if those two got together and had a child?

Bradley Sutton:

What do we have? You get a coffin-shaped egg tray. All right. So that’s what we made. We decided to make a coffin shape egg tray grid. There was no demand for this on Amazon, but we’re like, Hey, well, let’s just have some fun with this and use this as some experiments and that everybody who knows projects would get a kick out of it. All right. So the very first thing was I noticed I wasn’t ranking at all for like some of the main keywords that I wanted and one was like, Gothic kitchen decor. There’s no existing keywords for this niche. It’s not like there was anybody who’s ever made a coffin-shaped egg tray where I can see what keywords that work best for them. So, but I knew that Gothic kitchen decor, which, you know, had like about a 2000 search volume, I was like, Hey, that’s pretty, pretty relevant. Right?

Bradley Sutton:

Somebody who’s interested in Gothic kitchen decor, they would absolutely get a coffin shape egg tray. Because I know that people who are interested in Gothic bedroom decor and Gothic home decor are buying a coffin shelf. Right. So I had that information and I’m using that to launch this other product. Maldives Honeymoon Strategy says in the honeymoon period, if you put something or in the very first, in the very beginning, you put something in your title, instant ranked juice, right. And sure enough, we went from ranked zero just a few hours later, I’ve changed my title. We got to position 130 and then a few hours later than that, position, like about 30, right on page one, just by adding it to the title. So that was some Maldives rank juice right there. Now I had spooky decor in the title that was another keyword in the title.

Bradley Sutton:

Interestingly enough, in the beginning, I was getting like, no kind of love in PPC impressions, which was shocking to me because usually, I get right off the bat, The Maldives kind of method states that you get tons of love from PPC. But then I started thinking about, I was like, you know what? Amazon’s just completely confused me by this product, they have no idea what this is. They have nothing to relate it to. Right. You know, the keyword structure is probably different than most listening. So there weren’t giving me hardly any impressions. Now, one of the only ones I was getting impressions on was a spooky decor. Spooky decor was almost the only one showing up in sponsored ad. And interestingly enough, I had that keyword in the title. So I was like, you know what? I can’t do search, find, buy, right?

Bradley Sutton:

I can’t do search, find, buy because I am not showing up organically for those keywords, for those keywords that I wanted. And the secondary thing was, it wasn’t showing up in a sponsored results. You know, what, if you’re not showing up organically, that’s fine. You can still do the search, my bike, as long as you’re running PPC and people find it in PPC, but I couldn’t get impressions in PPC. So guess what guys, this is where the two-step URLs come in. All right. This is where the two-step URLs come in. So I sent some two-step URLs and then I switched it to search, find buy. As soon as I started getting organic and sponsored rank, I only had to do these two-step euros for like one day almost. And I only gave away eight units each for these two keywords that Gothic, Gothic kitchen, main keyword, and then Gothic kitchen decor.

Bradley Sutton:

And within a couple of days, we were ranking at page one, position one for both of those keywords, with just a couple of units. And remember this was before when we weren’t even ranking organically or in sponsored results. All right. Another thing, Gothic kitchen accessories. It wasn’t index. I couldn’t index it like I had access or I had all those keywords in my listing. Amazon would not index me. Ah, so I added it to the subject matter. Here’s another hack. You guys, I’m not sure if you guys are going to have access to this by the time he listened to this episode, you probably will Listening Builder, brand new tool from Helium 10 takes over Scribbles. And with listing builder, you can actually put something into your subject matter. You can actually put something into your subject matter that you don’t have subject matter.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, if you don’t have subject matter on your regular listing with Listening Builder, you’ll be able to put it into your subject matter. I got indexed immediately. I did a search, find, buy only four units, and I got to page one position, one for Gothic kitchen accessories. Thanks for Listening Builder for getting me index. And then thanks to the AZrank search, find, buy. All right, guys, I’m already looking at the time here. I’ve been at this for over 30 minutes and I have tons, tons, tons more to get to show you guys. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and stop this episode now. And we’re going to go to part two of The Maldives Honeymoon update as well as Project 5k and Project X case study updates in the next episode. So make sure to come back in a few days, check out the next episode.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m going to have to like maybe do some green screen so I can pretend that I’m still in The Maldives here. If I have to film this back in my studio, anyways, I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. And the meantime catch up with episodes 200 and 250. And let me know what you’ve liked about this and what you’re gonna use in this, you know, by hitting me up on Instagram @h10bradley, let me know what you like posting the Helium 10 members Facebook group. I’ll see you guys in the next episode.

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