#131 – An 8 Figure Amazon Seller Tells Why Virtual Assistants Can Help You Scale Up Your Business

Anyone selling on Amazon, or for that matter, anywhere in eCommerce knows that there are never enough hours in the day to get everything done. Is it time to do a little product research? Build a sales funnel or email sequence? Maybe follow up on an idea for a new targeted keyword campaign?

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton welcomes an 8 figure Amazon seller who has built a company to help deal with that problem.

Derek James says, “If you’re not delegating, you’re leaving money on the table.”  His company specializes in supplying fully trained virtual assistants to assist you in scaling up your Amazon business.

Listen in; because who couldn’t use another extra hand from time to time?

In episode 131 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Derek discuss:

• 01:00 – Flipping Cars on Craigslist
• 02:50 – Leaving the Corporate World
• 04:15 – “I Needed to Get Good at Something”
• 07:15 – A First Product and 7500 Reviews  
• 09:00 – Expanding Hoses on Amazon and a Lesson Learned
• 12:00 – It’s All About Branding
• 13:30 – Rank Strategy and Systems
• 15:15 – Making an Emotional Connection to Buyers  
• 16:50 – What Story am I Telling?
• 18:00 – Onboarding Virtual Assistants
• 20:05 – Identifying Opportunity
• 22:30 – Hedging His Shipping Bets  
• 25:00 – Working with Influencers
• 27:58 – Derek’s 30 Second Tip 
• 28:50 – How to Reach Out to Derek  

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Here’s a story of a guy who built two Amazon businesses to eight figures who says that if you aren’t delegating, you’re leaving money on the table.

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 a BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got a serious seller on the line with me today, Derek. Derek, how’s it going?

Derek James: Good brother. How are you?

Bradley Sutton: I’m doing pretty good. Now, where are you calling from today?

Derek James: We’re in New York. We’re actually are in upstate New York though. We’re right by Saratoga Springs, the racetrack for anybody familiar with that area.

Bradley Sutton: No, I don’t hear a strong accent. Are you from that area or from somewhere else?

Derek James: Yeah, local—born and raised here. Lived in the city for a little while, working at a startup prior to starting Amazon, but New York native.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. When you were growing up there in upstate New York, other than freezing to death, how do you envision your future, like, as far as what you wanted to be when you grew up? Fireman, Amazon seller—what did you dream about when you were younger?

Derek James: It’s funny. As a kid, it’s always the fireman, but it was funny because in college, I was the guy flipping cars on Craigslist. I was that guy always, finding that entrepreneurial bug.

Bradley Sutton: Found that entrepreneurial bug early then?

Derek James: Yeah, very much. Very much.  And getting out of college, jumping right into the corporate world, Oh! Man, it was rough. I did that for a few years, but I did have some experience.

Bradley Sutton: What was your major?

Derek James: Business and marketing.

Bradley Sutton: Business. Okay, you got it right into what you had studied. What didn’t you like about the corporate world?

Derek James: For me, I think there’s a level that you can always peak in each role that you have. You need to promote to this role, but I think about the entrepreneur side of it, you can really set your own pace for where you want to go. I always felt capped at a corporate job, if you kind of get my drift. Capped—you got to answer to this person and can’t really get creative and test this out. The team thinks it’s crazy, but it could work. Right? Stuff like that. And I think that having that entrepreneuring, I think you burn out a little bit doing that for an extended period of time. And we’re always thinking about creating something. I own sommany businesses today, it’s not even funny, but I took those risks to get there, and I think that that’s crucial.

Bradley Sutton: How were you able to get out of the corporate world? I mean, was it just cold turkey or you took steps?

Derek James: Can I give you a quick walkthrough? Great question. I was, at the time, working for a tech startup. I had left the corporate world. Keep this in mind. Then, I went to the startup world, and the company that I worked for was a New York City-based company. They are multichannel e-commerce company. And when I jumped in here, I was selling multichannel software to different e-commerce sellers of which h there were many, many Amazon sellers as well. And basically, the tool allowed you to automate your feed files to multiple channels, adjusted your inventory, pulled your orders in, routed your orders. It did a whole host of cool features. I’m living in Manhattan half the week, living in upstate half the week—going back and forth and still stuck kind of in that thing at a startup with a chunk of equity in this startup. I had Alibaba ready to invest $7 million. That deal kind of went sideways. And there was a point there where I was like, “You know what, I’ve got some ideas. I’m going to jump off on my own and I’m going to go try some stuff.” That’s really how that part started. And that was, it was about three and a half years ago, a little under four years ago.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Not too long ago. Now, how did you go from there to Amazon?

Derek James: Amazon. What I did was I started a digital agency. A lot of people that follow me on Amazon know me as Amazon eight-figure seller. And I always tell the story on there. I felt I needed to get good at something. Why not get good at something and help other people and kind of scale them, learn the ropes, get your bank account right, and then go launch yourself? That was always the strategy.

Bradley Sutton: Take me to the start though. How did you even find out about the Amazon opportunity in the first place?

Derek James: Well, keep in mind, when I was working at that tech startup, it was an e-commerce startup. I knew what Amazon had; I saw what was going on. I didn’t know it the way they knew it at the time, but I saw that hustle and drive in, and Bradley, some of these offices you walk in, there’s three people in an office doing $80 million a year with a very sophisticated infrastructure, which we have today.

Bradley Sutton: Obviously, that piqued your interest, like, “Whoa, what’s going on here? Here are these people who make 80 million.” And then what did you do to learn to kind of shorten that learning curve for you? Did you like start watching videos or take any courses on the side or get your company to pay to get you up to speed or what did you do?

Derek James: I feel unicorn-ish in that respect, only because I’ve never taken a course, never worked with a mentor, and dug my feet in. I sat in a cubicle, two-by-two, for 12 months straight. And in our first year, we did $18 million on Amazon private label, all ASINs built from scratch. No black hat.

Bradley Sutton: Were you doing this just for yourself or for your company and then you start doing on the side?

Derek James: Yeah, I partnered up. I have a business partner, and when we started, we started with one container.

Bradley Sutton: But this was while you were still working for that startup company or did you break ties and just go all in?

Derek James: Yeah, I left the startup company, and this was when I kind of had the agency, and I was basically moving from the agency to becoming a full-time Amazon seller.

Bradley Sutton: And are you still selling your first product that you had ever launched?

Derek James: Yeah, I love that. Our first product that we ever launched, right now, has a little north of 7,500 reviews, and we bounced back and forth from bestseller any given day.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Cool. What do you attribute your early success to? I mean, some people say, “Oh anybody could make $1 million in 2017, 2018 on Amazon, but the fact of the matter is you still needed to somewhat know what you’re doing. What was some of the big factors that really helped you be successful right off the bat where many people maybe fail with their first product?

Derek James: I think it was our attention to detail about what it really took to make it on Amazon. From there, it was just ranking strategies, building everything out properly. It just came down to work. You know what I mean when I say, “work.” We put the work in, the grind was there, the hustle was there. It was myself, one other person at the time. And as we were doing it, we were starting to get really smart as how keywords work, how to properly manage advertising. All these things coupled in, we had a great account manager at Amazon¾they definitely helped us out quite a bit. The first year we were lucky enough to get a deal of the day. I think on that, we’ve done a ton since, but that was our first deal of the day. We did about $740,000 in one day. That obviously helped our rank significantly. We went to number one.

Bradley Sutton: You said your first order, you did a full container?

Derek James: Our first order, we started with the container. That’s correct.

Bradley Sutton: What gave you the confidence to say, “Hey, I’m going all in,” because I’m assuming a container shipping by itself is a couple thousand dollars; a product was tens of thousands if not more. Why were you confident?

Derek James: I think anything in business, not just Amazon, I don’t ever go in thinking I’m going to lose. Do you know what I mean when I say that? When I look at the product that we’re about to sell, I’ve analyzed the market, I’ve analyzed the subcategory, and in six months, I took out a seller with 22,000 reviews from number one. I kept the focus on that. We’re going to win; we’re going to get to the top; we’re going to figure it out.

Bradley Sutton: Now, have you ever tried to launch something that didn’t turn out as well as you expected?

Derek James: Yeah, product wise, yeah. A funny story. I was going to Vegas for a trade show. I was able to line up a meeting with Martha Stewart. We were going to work on a licensing deal. It was me, her, and her VP. And we’re talking through the deal, and I’m thinking, “I’ve got this great product, I want to put your face on it. I want to use your branding.” Because she does brand licensing deals, and she loved it, but she had a big contract with Macy’s at the time. It was a very gray area. Long story short with Martha, nothing happened. Now, I’m leaving this trade show. I always keep the mindset if I’m going to a meeting or if I’m going to a show, I want to leave with value. And as I’m leaving, I see a gentleman from Asia in the corner with a booth, and he’s got those expandable hoses. I see these hoses, and I look at Amazon and I go, “Holy smokes, these are selling really well right now.” I look at the competition. I don’t think their marketing is that good. I think I can beat him. We placed our first PO with them. Now, we’ve been selling them for a little while, so we’re making money at this time. I take a quarter million dollars on one PO because I wanted to go hard. I launched three variations, 12 SKUs inside one listing. We get our product; we launched; and 32 days, we’re the number one best seller on Amazon in that category, bouncing back and forth, back and forth. Now, this is a hose, okay? This is the middle of winter. Now, I’m already thinking all three kids are going to Harvard.

Derek James: We got this, because I mean the margins were stupid. What ends up happening is we’re selling so well that all of a sudden we get a case against us, and we come to find that there was a gentleman that had 17 patents on that particular product and didn’t really care too much that I was cleaning the category out. When those things happen, that was one of also the biggest learning experiences for me, because if we are going to launch a new product, we have patent attorneys on retainer now where we will heavily, heavily dig into what it is, because the reality right now is that patent owners are coming out of the woodworks, and they are taking individuals down, and it’s going to happen at scale. You will see this, but it will happen at scale. That’s one that we lost, because we continued to place orders with this manufacturer.

Bradley Sutton: All right. What’s changed from when you first started selling 2017, 2018 to now? I mean, I’m assuming you’re still launching products, but what were the biggest changes for you? Was it like no more incentivized reviews or the way you communicate with customers or launch strategy? What’s the biggest change?

Derek James: Yup. The account that I told you about, I didn’t premise this, but we have three approved Amazon accounts now, multiple different brands. Amazon allowed us to do it. Last year, we decided to do something, and we were very involved with our Instagram with it. We wanted to run a test to see like what you just said, “What did we change since we launched?” We learned a lot since we launched. We had an account that was consistently doing $20 million plus a year. With our second account, we had more knowledge at this time. We knew how to kind of do it. The premise of the thing that we ran on Instagram was $1 million a month in under 12 months, all private label, brand-new ASIN, and we hit it seven days later. It’s on our IG stories, but the reality was we knew how to do it from the beginning. It was a little bit harder. I spent some more money on advertising. I’ve listened to quite a few of your podcasts very transparently yet. I’ve never used the chatbots, ManyChat ranking strategies. I’ve not, one time, send external traffic to Amazon except for a deal of the day. A lot of this comes down to how well you brand yourself. How good are you? I look at Amazon as this: Amazon is a funnel. Okay? Image¾main image as the first piece of my funnel. That’s my clickbait. Can I get you there? You’re here now. Now, you’re on my funnel, right? This is the ask now. How am I going to get you through this funnel to end up purchasing?

Bradley Sutton: You mentioned PPC and then, since the early days you’ve been successful with having low ACoS and still driving a significant part of your orders from PPC. Well, how do you operate it, something that anybody, no matter what level can get an idea about how they should maybe do it that is giving you that success, would you say? Well, what’s your basic strategy? You don’t have to give me all your trade secrets.

Derek James: No, I’ll share some. PPC is just an ever-evolving animal. I don’t believe there’s any quote-unquote right way or wrong way to do it. People have different strategies. If you asked me this question in 2017, it’s a totally different answer than it is today. Basic PPC strategy, a lot of people like to do the auto campaign. They’d like to go in, they’d like to find what does here, blah blah, blah. And they’ll match that with the manuals. We do a lot of that, but we have systems on how we like to try and rank. The way I look at the way I look at the rank strategy for me that Amazon has always liked, and I’ve never had to do any outside stuff, is typically speaking, I launch a new SKU.  I’ll jump in the early reviewer program refined. I know I’m going to get five, six reviews out of it. Okay? That’s going to happen. In addition to that, we’re obviously marketing the product, trying to get it up. When I got about 20 reviews, the strategy that I like to do is now I will start to really do some heavy PPC. I will throw it in a seven-day deal. Let that run. I’m going to grab rank that way. That’s the strategy. Okay, let’s say I’m in the subcategory and now 40 in the subcategory after a best deal. I’m going to wait a little while, and I’m going to pump a Lightning Deal on there, but the second I come out of that best deal, I’m throwing a coupon on it, and I might make the coupon so stupid that you can’t resist. 25% off. “Derek, you’re not making any money.” “No, I’m ranking. That’s what I’m doing right now. I’m ranking.”

Bradley Sutton: Now, when you say, “threw a coupon,” you’re talking about the little green ones that come up in the searches. I’ll try it.

Derek James: Yes, the little green ones. The seven-day deal. That’s the end of the deal. You throw a coupon up on that, let that coupon run for a bit, get the thing registered for a Lightning Deal, grabs more velocity, and each time you do this, you’re setting a target rank code to “stick” at. I think, a lot of sellers suffer because you only take the course and they understand it from an intellectual level, but they don’t understand it from the psychological level of the buyer. Bold sellers, they get that. They do very well because they know how to speak to the audience.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Give me an example of that because I teach that a lot. People sometimes worry too much about the metrics. Hey, of course, they do their research in Helium 10 and find what it is they search for a lot. And what’s relevant to the buyers about the end of the day, metrics and how many characters are in your title, the buyer doesn’t care about all that stuff. The buyer needs to have some kind of emotional connection; otherwise, they don’t know your brand from anybody. There has to be something that catches them, that triggers them to get it. How do you tackle the buyer’s psychology in order to maybe put yourself above the other private label sellers who are on equal footing at the beginning with you?

Derek James: Probably first off, it depends on your product, right? But the reason I say that is because with the brand, whether it’s a private label you have or brand that’s on Amazon, you look at a brand, a real brand, what do they have? They have a brand voice. You have to take that approach, right? Is your brand voice going to be fun? Is it very serious? Depending on what the product is, is it a value prop brand voice that you’re just hitting with value, value, value, value? You have to look at that. I have four different private labels right now that we’re currently working on. And I do two brand licensing deals, so the private labels, not the brand licensing deals but the private labels, I have the ability to play with that brand voice.

Derek James: What’s my goal? My goal is, number one, to catch you on that thumbnail that you see with the first five or six keywords that you see in my title. I got to catch you somehow. You need to be interested, right? I need to intrigue you to say, Dopamine spikes slightly. What is that? Let me click it.” Now that I’ve got you there, how am I going to talk to you in my bullets? What’s story are my pictures telling you? And guess what? I got video on every listing, right? Now, you saw the story on the pictures. Let’s watch the video. And then you get in the video.

Bradley Sutton: Now you say you have this goal of building these businesses to be able to make $1 million a month within a year. But what happens after that? Are you just building these to sell the companies or you build them up and you keep them and keep scaling?

Derek James: Yeah, that’s happening. I mean, we’re going to always continue to do our Amazon business. I think I’m one of the few that I see on the web that talks about Amazon, but also has ancillary products related to it, but it’s still doing it consistently at scale. Amazon will always be our bread and butter. We love it.

Bradley Sutton: Take one business that was built to a seven or eight figure. Like what’s the structure? There’s you at the top, maybe you got some project managers, but how many VAs would work on that account and how do you divide the responsibility? Like, do you have a VA who’s kind of a, “Oh, I do everything.” Or you have a PPC VA; you have a keyword VA; you have a listing optimization VA. How does that structure work?

Derek James: Yeah, there are different mindsets for each piece of that. You nailed it. PPC, the way I like to look at this as we do a PPC program as well; it can be a PPC person that’s not a virtual assistant; it’s a different mind. Right? I knew that early on, so as I was building this, I would train the PPC specialists. I would look for a math major, somebody that was good with numbers, analytics, whatever the case may be. They’re like, “I wanted that.” Right? And I realized that the reason most people fail with a virtual assistant is they don’t know how to train and/or onboard them. And there you go with your PPC manager, right? Like you’re looking at those brains and you’re constantly bringing that on. When it comes to a VA, just a traditional VA that you were just talking about there, that would be anything from… I mean there’s a longer list of things that a VA would do. And that’s just a VA out of the box. I mean it would be everything from feed files, customer service messages, support calls, commenting on reviews, coming in negative reviews, getting feedback removed, maintaining the database, audit reports, FBA, inventory management, shipping creation, FBA, creating of a whole line of logistics, all of it. And we built this for years without even knowing it. We didn’t even know what we were building, and we libraried everything. We videoed everything, and then I was like, “Wow, we really have something here.” I could take legit Amazon sellers, and they will explode with something like this. And that’s proved to be true for us. I do bucket those out though. The biggest buckets of what you just said are going to be a VA can handle literally 80% of what you just said. The 20% though, that’s PPC. That’s a different department within the company that we have.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Okay. Now, speaking of PPC, you talked about your PPC strategy, but one thing you talk about when you’re building businesses is you definitely want everything to be private label, brand new ASINs from scratch. What’s your general product research strategy? What signifies opportunity for you? When you have your team go in and go look out to start the next brand or to get a new product on a current brand line, what do you look for in order to say, “Oh, wait a minute here. Yeah, there’s definitely a spot for me to be able to scale pretty rapidly here?”.

Derek James: I look for velocity. I’m a lot different than others. Everybody looks for what’s the perfect product to sell that I can enter right now. And I look at categories and I say, “Where is their volume?” I already know there’s going to be somebody with 17,000. I don’t care about that. Where is their volume? Let me analyze their listings. Let me look at the cost of goods. What could my potential margin be? Am I going to go high level with this? If the bestsellers at $69. 95, am I going to sell a product to $18.95 and beat him on value? These are all things that we take into consideration and analyze. Realistically speaking, I have never looked at a category and said, “Oh my God, look at all the competition.” I’m going to beat the competition and be smart about it.

Derek James: I’m going to do it with proper branding, good marketing. We’ve never analyzed it that way. We’ve more looked at what’s a methodical product, what can we also produce ourselves?  Because with my partner, we do have facilities in Asia. We do produce 80% of our own products. That’s a big piece of it as well those products that we produce, and my business partner has been producing them for a long time. That played into the role of what we launched with. But since then, we’ve launched many products that we don’t produce ourselves. We take the same approach to it. I will look at a main category in home and kitchen, like, something serious, and I’ll look at it and say, “I bet you I can get to 40, and in that category of 40, that might yield us 200 units a day, and I’m happy with that. And then you grow from there.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Now, you mentioned before that you manufacture a lot in Asia. Now, have you been affected at all by coronavirus delays or since there is only about a three- or four-week delay there, it didn’t really affect you?

Derek James: Well, prior to the tariff stuff happening, I shipped about 18 million to a facility I have here in Omaha. I had about 18 million on the ground. We’re churning through a good chunk of that right now. There is a little bit of impact on a couple of ASINs only because the ports were literally closed. There weren’t any employees to come in and do it. But we saw the writing on the wall years back, and we did move, and this was prior to the presidency because we understood some of the conflict with China. We thought it’d be wise to have some manufacturing of our own in a different country than Asia. It was the biggest hedged bet. It is the best hedge bet that we could have made. We do ship from another country as well where we are not impacted by a tariff, and we kind of split that up. We’re a little different than most too because typically, I won’t hold 18 million on the ground in the States. I wanted to get that over here to kind of beat a tariff and see what we could do. It worked out in our favor. Unfortunately, I hate to say it because of coronavirus, we have good stock here. I wish it wasn’t under those circumstances, but unfortunately it is. There’s that aspect to it, but the way that we try and run the business is I try and ship mixed containers direct to FBA.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, that’s good to know. I’m going to talk a little bit more about the coronavirus a little bit later, but like for 2019, out of all your brands, what was the total gross sales on Amazon?

Derek James: Of course, sales. Yeah, we did $32 and a half million roughly.

Bradley Sutton: Are you selling at all off of Amazon, like on another marketplace or on your own website?

Derek James: Yeah. We’re on Walmart right now, but where we are super excited and investing hundreds of thousands of dollars right now is in Facebook.

Bradley Sutton: Like the Facebook marketplace, and then just selling directly from your Instagram?

Derek James: Exactly. Direct selling from our Shopify site. You know, we funnel a lot of traffic back to it. We’re big on landing pages, because you can create that kind of funnel experience with a landing page. We’re super big on that. It’s been great. You know, it’s been really good. It’s a good learning experience, and we’re learning it just like we learned Amazon, and we haven’t taken a course on it either. I like to get in there and figure it out because the way I look at something might be totally different to the way that you view it, which is the only way that works in your mind.

Bradley Sutton: Now, before you had said you don’t send any outside traffic to Amazon, when you do your landing pages, it’s to kind of build up your social following and your Shopify not to Amazon?

Derek James: Yes, exactly. Our landing page is the only thing I’m sending traffic to is paid. if I’m doing paid on Facebook, social, Google, that’s going to my landing page to convert on our Shopify store.

Bradley Sutton: How did you build your audience in the beginning? Did you have like inserts or was it all through organic or through Facebook or how did you build your social media followings?

Derek James: Yeah, we were doing a lot of paid; we were creating really good content. We were doing paid and we were converting because we have a nice site; we have a great landing pages. I think that for us, it was a lot of paid in the beginning. We did a lot of influencer gigs too, which I highly recommend. Super simple to do guys. Like listen, you find an influencer that’s got 15,000 followers, that’s a small-, medium-level influencer. You contact them. A lot of times if you’re willing to send to a product for free, they’re going to give you a great shout out, right? You do enough of those, before you know it, you may have just reached a couple hundred thousand people with the product, and you have some interests on Facebook. After you make about a hundred sales, you’re getting data. You can create audiences now. I really do like Facebook right now. I wish I got on it years ago between me and you. We’ve just been inundated with Amazon, and we never gave it the time of day.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now you’ve been giving us a lot of tips. We’re going to get into our 30-second tip thing that we do here, but before that, we’re going to play the search volume game. I know you use Helium 10, but don’t have it open, don’t be cheating. I’ll be able to hear if you’re typing on the keyboard, but I’m going to give you three keywords kind of related to the coronavirus like I had mentioned before, and I’m going to give you three search volumes, the monthly search volume, and you try and match the keyword to the search volume. Sound fair?

Derek James: Sure.

Bradley Sutton: All right, here we go. The three key words from the shortest to the longest is corona mask, facemask medical, and mask for germ protection. Okay, corona mask, facemask medical, mask for germ protection. And I’m going to give you three different search volumes and you match it. All right. This is going to be from least to most. One of these keywords is searched for 9,000 times a month about. Another one is searched for about 200,000 times. And the one that’s searched for the most is search for almost a million times a month in March. Which keyword goes to which: corona mask, facemask medical, and mask for germ protection?

Derek James: All right, I’m going to go facemask medical for the top search. Did I get that one?

Bradley Sutton: I won’t let you know until you give me all of them.

Derek James: Alright, facemask medical top, and then, we’re going to go corona mask after that and the other mask.

Bradley Sutton: All right, the first one was right. Facemask medical searched for about a million times a month. Absolutely blown up, flying off the shelves. Corona masks, surprisingly, is just the least, only 9,000, but mask for germ protection is about 200,000 searches. All right, now we go to the part of the show, we call it the TST or the TST 30-second tip. Every time, I always let people go overtime on this, but today, I’m going to try and really stopwatch this. Take a little bit if you need to, but think about what you can say that’s kind of like very actionable, very valuable¾maybe you think is unique to you: a certain strategy, a certain tip, a certain trick, a certain hack, whatever you want that you can say in 30 seconds or less that our listeners will get a kick out of.

Derek James: Yeah. Okay. I got it perfectly. When it comes to everything that we’re talking about, you have to try things in a lot of times. What I mean by that is that a lot of times people will create something, and they’ll launch it. Let’s say, it’s a listing and then they just let it sit stagnant and they don’t play with it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve changed the main image on items that are bestsellers. How many times I played with the company. When you continue to do this, you will find your sweet spot, but it takes work. That’s the work, guys. That is the work playing around with what you’re doing.

Bradley Sutton: Boom! Exactly 30 seconds. Okay. All right. That’s a good one. I like that. Some people think Amazon’s about set it and forget it, but that’s not how it works. All right, Derek, I thank you for your time here. If people want to find out more about your journey, to reach out to you or to check in, maybe on how to utilize some of your VA staff, how can they reach you on the interwebs?

Derek James: Yeah, sure. Derek James sells. D, E R E K, James sells [dot] com, and then a lot of people follow me on IG: that’s Amazon eight-figure seller. Amazon, the number eight, figure seller. Give me a follow. I drop content daily. I don’t charge for it. And I just drop gems like this all the time. I think that’s why the audience appreciates me.

Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining us. And in 2021, definitely want to reach out and see how you did with your Facebook and Instagram store launches.

Derek James: All right, thanks Bradley. Appreciate it.

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